“Managers, hoping to avoid such jolts, spend too much time focusing on short-term performance. ”
“Managers, hoping to avoid such jolts, spend too much time focusing on short-term performance. ”
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Modern life is punctuated by market cycles.
One year the gears of commerce are whirring along. Businesses are hiring and investing. People are buying houses and cars, televisions and computers. Things are going great. Then a year later, the gears screech to halt—sweeping layoffs, plummeting investment, and crashing markets. No one’s buying anything.
Finally, someone is getting the concept about why in tech where you’re producing technologies that ultimately support many areas of the consumer market in the form of bio/ medical, consumer commercial products, art, homes/ buildings, autos, etc. You must be more inclusive in your teams or find your product and services will plataeu as more and more competitors crowd the space over time; something that other industries have learned many many decades ago.
Because most of the quickly growing companies and startups that tend to dominate it emerged from the maker community, the 3D printing industry often seems to find itself a little sequestered from the rest of the tech industry. Part of the reason is that very few of the industry’s largest companies started or are even based in Silicon Valley. While there is more to the tech industry than Northern California, it is often treated like the popular kids’ lunch table: everyone wants to sit there, and those that are tend to ignore those that aren’t. Sure most of the world’s large tech shows and conferences include plenty of 3D printing these days, but there still isn’t as much crossover as you’d expect, and 3D printing is still treated like that weird cousin who you’re not exactly sure is going to amount to anything.
I certainly can’t speak for everyone, but it almost feels as if being off in its own corner has been good for 3D printing. It has allowed a culture that thrives on open source technology and software to take root, and proven that businesses don’t need excessive patents to be successful if they build their companies correctly. In reality, 3D printing, despite being tech- and software-driven, probably has more in common with the manufacturing industry than high tech. However for all of its varied differences, the 3D printing industry does share one thing with most of the big tech companies in the world, it has a bit of a diversity problem.
“With the LinkedIn acquisition, Microsoft snares two prizes: the massive amounts of data contained in LinkedIn’s 433 million member profiles that are kept scrupulously up to date by business professionals and to which competitors have no access and the brainy computer algorithms that crunch that data.” the writeup.
Buying the Facebook of professional networks is perhaps the best illustration yet that the cloud wars are heating up.
Excellent acquisition on multiple fronts. However, I will post the question that will most be definitely on the minds of some folks; “what protections around privacy will MSFT employees and others have with their InMails and communications with recruiters and others who they connect with on LinkedIn?” We have not just MSFT employees, Apple, Google, etc. And, many people have used this site to connect for business and joint ventures, to locate their next opportunity, etc. So, if we look at the larger picture this really must be asked.
This is the email I sent to LinkedIn’s global workforce today. I thought it might be interesting to others, too, so I’ve decided to publish it publicly.
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December 15th, 2008, marked the first day of the best job I’ve ever had. My rationale for joining LinkedIn was simple: The opportunity to work with Reid Hoffman, a founder I greatly admired and respected; to join an extremely talented and dedicated team; and to massively scale LinkedIn’s membership and business, both of which had the potential to fundamentally transform the way the world connects to opportunity. Never in my wildest dreams, could I have imagined what would happen in the next 7½ years. Our team has grown from 338 people to over 10,000, our membership from 32M to over 433M and our revenue from $78M to over $3 billion.
Has anyone ever run the numbers on just how many people hours and $ spent on AI since 1950? Think about it for a minute; and how little we have advance v. the enhancement of people since the 1990 with BMI technology, bionics, etc. and it’s cost. My guess is Mr. Elon Musk understands the ROI extremely well between AI/ Robots v. human enhancement technology especially where there is a larger return and repeat business opportunity.
Computing has been getting much smarter since the idea of artificial intelligent was first thought of 60 years ago. But are computers intelligent?
“What does it mean for a business to get things done? How does it channel the energy and activities of all its knowledge workers as they work?”
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In Bitcoin’s early years computer scientists and early adopters were running the show. Now, a new community of academics, entrepreneurs, and economists, are working with cryptocurrencies and blockchain to bring the technology to a new set of diverse applications.
From building peer-to-peer networks for secure data computation and storage to decentralized content management systems that give patients access to health-care records across hospital databases, blockchain and digital currencies are starting to rewrite the rules of the 21st century transaction.
“That thread comes from a company called Parley for the Oceans, and it’s special, spun from plastic waste and old fishing nets retrieved from the coast of Africa.”