New Florence. New Renaissance.

The New Generation Y - the "Yold"

One might therefore expect peak retirement for baby-boomers in the coming years—except that they are not retiring. By continuing to work, and staying socially engaged, the boomers, in their new guise as the young old, will change the world, as they have done several times before at different stages of their lives.

The yold are more numerous, healthier and wealthier than previous generations of seniors. There will be 134m 65- to 74-year-olds in rich countries in 2020 (11% of the population), up from 99m (8%) in 2000. That is the fastest rate of growth of any large age group. Health worsens with age, but the yold are resisting the decline better than most: of the 3.7 years of increased life expectancy in rich countries between 2000 and 2015, says the World Health Organisation, 3.2 years were enjoyed in good health. The yold are also better off: between 1989 and 2013, the median wealth of families headed by someone over 62 in America rose by 40% to $210,000, while the wealth of all other age groups declined.

The Economist

An interesting documentary on the aging population in Japan which has encountered the "yold" phenomenon earlier than many other societies.

CES: Where are the tech companies?

In The New Technology Elite I wrote

"At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in early 2011, I got a clear answer to the first question. While the big excitement during the show was around the tens of new tablets expected to be rolled out later in the year, I observed companies from just about every industry – from Walgreens, the pharmacy chain to Nike, the shoe company to Ford, the auto company all were showing off technology enabled “smart” products for the new tech savvy consumer.

It is a really exciting time for many of these companies. For too long IT has been an expensive and low payback back office investment. Now technology in their products is allowing them to generate revenue and growth. Technology is fun - and profitable again."

We have gone much further in the decade since

MarketWatch writes about CES which starts today in Las Vegas

"This change has been happening for years — the name was changed from the Consumer Electronics Show to just CES in 2016 — but for an indication of how much has changed in just the past year, look at the keynote lineup. In 2019, executives from blue-chip tech giant International Business Machines Corp. IBM and chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. AMDdelivered the top keynote speeches. In their place this year are Delta Air Lines Inc. DAL, Daimler-Benz, Unilever ULVR, and startups like Impossible Foods and Quibi."

Of course there will be plenty from tech vendors - here are some in video below

2020: Megatends for the decade

From the always positive futurist Peter Diamandis

In the decade ahead, waves of exponential technological advancements are stacking atop one another, eclipsing decades of breakthroughs in scale and impact.

Emerging from these waves are 20 “Metatrends,” likely to revolutionize entire industries (old and new), redefine tomorrow's generation of businesses and contemporary challenges, and transform our livelihoods from the bottom-up.

Among these metatrends are augmented human longevity, the surging smart economy, AI-human collaboration, urbanized cellular agriculture, and high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces, just to name a few.

It is here that master entrepreneurs and their teams must see beyond the immediate implications of a given technology, capturing second-order, Google-sized business opportunities on the horizon.

Welcome to a new decade of runaway technological booms, historic watershed moments, and extraordinary abundance.

2020: Life in 2030

Frank Chen is partner at Andreessen Horowitz. In a recent post he describes what life may look like in 2030 using his daughter as the use case.

"My day job is to think about the future, so I’ve been thinking a lot about what life will look like in the 2030s. What do we need to build? What social acceptance do we need? What business models do we need?"

This video brings his scenarios to life even more vividly

 

 

2020: what to expect at CES

Amongst keynote announcements from the likes of Amazon, LG, and Toyota, as well as thousands of other exhibitors, the first CES of the 2020s will offer a glimpse into how we will be spending our spare and leisure time over the next decade. Trends which will be at the forefront are intelligent vehicles, health and fitness technology, 5G networks as well as anything involving data and analytics.

Forbes

another perspective below from Steve Koenig of the CTA

2019 in review: Scientific American Top Emerging Technologies

One day soon an emerging technology highlighted in this report will allow you to virtually teleport to a distant site and actually feel the handshakes and hugs of fellow cyber travelers. Also close to becoming commonplace: humanoid (and animaloid) robots designed to socialize with people; a system for pinpointing the source of a food-poisoning outbreak in just seconds; minuscule lenses that will pave the way for diminutive cameras and other devices; strong, biodegradable plastics that can be fashioned from otherwise useless plant wastes; DNA-based data-storage systems that will reliably stow ginormous amounts of information; and more.

Scientific American

Here's more on DNA-based storage

 

The Saudi oil bounceback

From Fortune

In the wee hours of a sweltering Saturday in September, a volley of missiles and aerial explosives pierced the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry. The attacks knocked out about 5% of global oil production almost immediately, yet one month later, they might as well never have happened.

Saudi Aramco says it’s currently pumping 9.9 million barrels a day, the same as before the Sept. 14 surprise attacks at Abqaiq, the world’s biggest oil-processing facility, and the field at Khurais. While the attacks laid bare Saudi Arabia’s vulnerability to major disruptions, Brent crude has slid below where it was beforehand, trading Monday at less than $60 a barrel."

Here's how:

* Using crude in storage to meet customer contracts

* Swapping some cargoes of light grades with medium or heavy barrels

* Cutting domestic refinery runs and buying fuel abroad

* Contractors worked non-stop to repair units

* Spare and redundant capacity allowed Aramco to rely on processing units that weren’t running at the time of the attacks

 

 

 

Innovating for the 20s - don't forget to look back

As I was filing our quarterly Form 941 last week, it hit me that we have entered the last quarter of this decade. As I flew into LaGuardia on Monday, it took me back two decades to my time at Gartner. In October 1999, there was nervousness about the damage Y2K could cause, but also euphoria at the phenomenal few years many tech vendors had enjoyed. The introduction of the euro promised another bonanza for the near future. Enterprise vendors, particularly two sectors that I followed - enterprise applications and service providers - had reason to feel very good about themselves.

In New York I heard an optimistic Mike Salvino , the new President and CEO of DXC, at a HfS event. I heard similarly optimistic (for different reasons) Cognizant executives at one of their events the day before - they also have a new CEO. I also kept up with the celebratory mood at HRTech in Vegas virtually.

At Gartner, I had followed SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and their SI partners. CSC, EDS and HP Services were players back then.  They continue to live on in the form of DXC, founded a couple of years ago. Cognizant had revenues of less than $ 100 million in 1999. It has grown like a rocket with over $16 billion in revenues now. HRTech was only 2 years old in 1999. But the backwaters of the HR function had led the client/server applications market. This time around, it has similarly led the cloud applications market.  

There is lots to appreciate and applaud.

However, the even bigger lesson of the last couple of decades is the many missed opportunities. Outsourcers missed out on the cloud infrastructure market. It was theirs to lose and so far, players from left field like Amazon and Microsoft have benefited. After 20 years of cloud applications (Salesforce was born in 1999), application vendors can barely cover 20% of the country/industry grid. At the HfS event last week, the biggest attention was on robotic process automation (RPA). Hardly any talk of Amazon's Kiva warehouse robots, or UPS's drones or other operational automation. Or automating the labor intensive outsourcing space. CRM vendors completely missed out on the digital advertising market. Google, Facebook, and digital agencies have made out like bandits in the vacuum. SaaS vendors had an amazing business model which bundled multiple contracts - the license, the maintenance, the hosting, the application management - into one. Then they got greedy like their on-premise competitors. I saw Bruce Rogow, my former Gartner colleague in New York and he told me he sees how in his travels he see CIOs struggle with new opex/capex funding paradigms. Instead of delivering a knock out punch, SaaS vendors mostly co-exist with their on-prem competitors. Outsourcers saw every one of their clients develop smart products and let contractor manufacturers like Foxconn and Flex dominate that market. They have let GE, ABB and others generate excitement about the IoT space.

Vendors ask me, what's next? Blockchain, machine learning, quantum computing, sure. But much bigger opportunities will persist from those missed in the last two decades. A new generation of vendors will move in. Vendors will cannibalize each other. And here is the most important nugget. Customers learn from their mistakes - I am seeing that in the new wave of SAP related services. In writing my recent book, I saw much more caution about using SIs as they implement S/4HANA. There is a "fool me twice, shame on me" vibe.

So, forget about doing business as usual. The best thing every vendor can do as we enter a new decade is to be introspective, even if Wall Street is pleased with your performance. Ask the tough questions - how the hell did we miss as many markets as we did? And how do we re-organize to make sure and not miss so many markets again? 

Exciting times ahead.

Image credit

Back to radio roots - podcasts

If you own a radio network, how do you promote your podcasts? By calling back to the roots of podcass and airing them on the radio, of course.iHeartMedia has unveiled a Sunday Night Podcasts initiative that will air podcasts on 270 of its radio stations at the end of each week, starting with The Ron Burgundy Podcast on August 11th. You can also expect series like Stuff You Should Know, TechStuff and The Ben and Ashley I. Almost Famous Podcast, although just what you'll get and when will vary. It's up to the stations to choose the podcasts and time slots that fit.

Engadget

Out There

Great PopSci issue which looks at the edge of everything - in space, under our oceans, the poles of our planet and elsewhere.

We know so little - so much more to explore