Monthly Archives: February 2015

On Leadership and Management

Amorphous Business

In a recent interview with WSJ, the well-known former GE CEO Jack Welch and his wife Suzy Welch mentioned that the internet has made today’s business amorphous and more competitive than ever. “Now everyone knows everything”. And in fact everyone can compete on almost everything.

It is definitely a fact that there are no longer protected territories in today’s business environment. With the right ideas, all businesses, no matter small or large, can penetrate into each other’s territories and penetrate into once drastically different industries with unprecedented ease enabled by the unprecedented speed in technology innovations.

Such examples are plenty today:

– Telecommunication once had been a long-standing industry with a few larger players. However, Google has started laying out Fiber Optic cables in cities and offering internet services directly to customers.

– Auto industry was straightly a territory for “Big Three” in the US for decades. However a few years after the dust of “the Rusty Belt” has settled, technology firms Google and Apple are now rolling up sleeves to build a future technology-driven automobile industry.

– Since the major consolidation from 50+ companies in 1980s, about 90% of the American media services (news, newspapers and TV programs, etc) have been controlled by 6 large corporations such as News Corp, Disney, Time Warner, GE, etc.. Yet today, numerous startups are entering into the online “social media” arena, which has forced these large media giants to spend millions on acquisitions to stay current. For example, News Corp spent $25 million in 2013 for Storyful, a Dublin-based “social news” startup. Moreover, Netflix or even Amazon are also becoming TV content providers which are directly competing with them.

– The very ancient businesses of money transfers, currency exchanges or loan-making are no longer banks’ protected space today. Growing numbers of tech startups are now offering global money transfer, peer-to-peer lending or digital currencies such as Bitcoin.

These stories are everywhere. Almost no traditional industry has escaped the current waves of threats. Welcome to the age of disruptive innovations!

With the right innovative ideas, technologies can enable everyone to get into everyone else’s business, by new products, services or unique business models. The business competitions are no longer limited to a particular industry, territory or country, but can appear in every corner on the globe. With the transparent and amorphous nature of the business of this age, the challenges are increasingly daunting for today’s business leaders. While businesses with legacies face huge changes and transformations, however new businesses demand broad mindsets and bold innovations, they also require focus and sustainable growth. We will likely expect many more business lessons along with exciting growth or survival stories, as if everyone is learning on the same page.

Trend of Technology

The Future of Personal Vehicles

Americans’ love of automobiles has always been legendary. A personal vehicle is not only a personal transportation means, but also a symbol of freedom and (almost) personality. After all, a car is usually the second largest purchase we make in life, right behind buying a house, and we are at its close company every day.

A car is also a complex technology ensemble. Unsurprisingly, with the backdrop of today’s exciting technology developments on all fronts, so many new innovations can be assembled and reflected in the making of a car. If one looks at 2015 new models of cars or trucks, technology connectedness has already become a common theme with most of the vehicles equipped with touch-screen GPS and mobile connections. Navigation, communication and digital media services are easily present.

Auto industry is due for some truly exciting changes. Google’s driverless cars are already a reality although yet to be commercialized. In progress today there are new design ideas with augmented-reality technologies which can turn a windshield into a 3D computer-graphic display of navigation and other key information. Apple, known for its revolutionary innovations on personal devices from its recent past, is now gearing up to make the next revolution in automobiles. A recently disclosed project called “Titan” piqued interests of many on what Apple may come up – an electric car competing with Tesla or a whole new level of technology experiences in a personal vehicle?

Many modern-day thinkers and leaders have already given plenty of thoughts on the future of transportation. Rapid changes of the world and societies will push for drastic departure from the traditional business models and vehicle designs in both automobile and transportation industries. Bill Ford pointed out the future need of a transportation ecosystem and a personal vehicle as a component of mobility and connectedness. Elon Mask went further and released a design of a super-fast hyperloop as a future mass transportation channel (See pic), which is targeted to solve many of today’s transportation challenges in highly congested areas.

Elon Mask's proposed Hyperloop
Elon Mask’s proposed Hyperloop

Technology will only enhance future individual freedom and mobility. Driverless cars will have their own usefulness and super-fast mass transit will surely be in the picture of future transportation, but people’s love of the freedom of driving is not going to wane. In fact the true revolutions in personal vehicles are indeed coming with the concept of “driving” redefined. Having appeared in the sci-fi movies multiple times, flying cars have long been dreamed of and imagined for decades in the past. Today many attempts are well on the way for these personal aerial vehicles (PAVs, see pic). With FAA’s quick catch-up proposals on drones these days, it’s reasonable to assume that regulatory limitations on many future unthinkable will not be too daunting after all in a changing world.

EU Project MyCopter Flying Car
EU Project MyCopter Flying Car
Bearing the speed and boldness of the current age, the début of flying cars in reality is within sight. Some news even said that the first one may be on sale as early as this year of 2015!

Global Business Environment

Will Africa Be the Next Frontier for Internet Innovations?

The disruptive nature of the Internet and the innovations sprung from its fertile ground have been the dominating theme of the 21st century so far. The trend will likely continue in the years to come. Today globally there are about 3 billion internet users (half from China with its population size), but the number could easily double in a couple of years, counting in mobile populations. Underdeveloped areas with large population concentration are expected to have the fastest growth.

Looking back, the internet market in China truly started booming with innovations only after Year 2000, when the Trans-Pacific Fiber Optic Cable Network was built and put into service (See TriStrategist’s 2013 blog on China’s Internet and Mobile Market). Before that, the networks and servers there were so slow to the outsiders that few from the West ever heard of any internet startup from China. Among the early innovators, Alibaba was founded in 1999 and Baidu was founded in 2000. Good timing seemed to have definitely played some roles in the success of these Chinese internet companies. Since then, the internet and mobile infrastructure in China have leapfrogged many of the western countries and enabled many more innovative startup companies, such as TenCent (the developer of WeChat) and Xiaomi (today’s largest smartphone maker in China), to mushroom and blossom onto the global stage of internet and mobile competitions in a few short years. As we know today Alibaba is now a $150 billion company and Xiaomi valued at $45 billion.

Looking at the remaining continents in the global village, Africa has long been neglected as the poor and unstable backcountry. Yet things are quietly changing. With 16% of its one billion population online, it already has the fastest growth of new mobile subscribers in 2014, surpassing even China and India. Companies like Huawei have long been working there to build telecommunication infrastructure and sell low-cost mobile phones. In recent years, Google has made huge investments with Google Blimps, satellites and fiber optic cable network to link Africa to its global internet expansion plan (Also see earlier blog on Google’s Disruptive Innovations). Late 2014, Google announced another $60 million investment for a new undersea fiber optic cable network from U.S. to Brazil, allowing data transfer speed up to 64 terabits per second. By its completion in 2016, it will ensure Google’s internet services to run smoothly all the way to the southern end of the African continent. Its Brazilian partner plans to directly connect Brazil to Africa via undersea fiber cable network at the same timeframe. With these factors and the attentions nowadays from big global companies and investors to the untapped markets, Africa is definitely posing as the next exciting frontier for many internet innovations in the coming years.

Although the current internet-enabled GDP is still very low in most of the African countries, timing seems to start favoring Africa. Following China’s internet growth model, African continent will benefit from the leapfrog in infrastructure building with even newer technologies and faster networks. Its huge young populations and growing middle-class are ripe for mobile innovations which can bypass the earlier web-based internet models. The disruptions have already been happening in finance, education, health, agriculture and many other areas. The economies are growing more rapidly with internet and mobile services in many countries there. The stability of the political situations is also improving with the information access getting more easily and freely, and the education level edging up.

We should be very optimistic that the world is evidently becoming a better place with internet and technology innovations.

Trend of Technology

Statistical Computing Language R and Its Potential Disruptions

In business environment, we are used to see Excel pivot tables, dashboard applications and data-and-chart loaded PowerPoint presentations for mission-critical reporting. Today, R language and extended tools have the potential of combining all of these functionalities, especially for statistical data analysis and data-driven graphical presentations into one dynamic workflow.

R is an open-source programming language for statistical computing. It has gained much popularity among data analysts and data scientists today. R objects and libraries support a wide range of statistical tools and graphical techniques. Its object-oriented programming model allows easy extension of R among other software programming languages. For example, it can combine C/C++, Fortran to handle heavy computational tasks and at the same time be called within JAVA, .NET or Python for business applications. It also supports a LaTeX-like documentation format.

The extended family tools of R are booming in open source world. RStudio, an open source startup, offers R Shiny Server, a web application framework based on R to produce interactive web applications and visualizations. R Shiny Server supports many data-binding widgets that can be easily dragged into web UI. Along with more sophisticated graphic tools such as Google Charts (with googleVis package, an interface of R and Google Charts APIs), many interactive pivots or dashboards can be built on the fly and displayed dynamically. With the ability to combine coding on the same page of the presentation, it offers greater capabilities in allowing dynamic contents online. One of the typical example is a Motion Chart (see pic), used for finance, traffic, voting, and many other areas that requires instant statistical handling of large amount of dynamic data and fast visual displays. These charts automatically bind data point-by-point on UI by design.

A Motion Chart Example
A Motion Chart Example

For enterprise users, the power of full automation on many data-driven business reporting is within reach. To use R-series tools, a backend data pipeline still needs to be built but not complicated. Today data analysts in many companies are exploring these tools to gain instant business values and visibility out of the typically tedious and often offline data analysis work. For example, eBay has been using R Shiny Server for reporting eBay Partner Network analytics.

Would R and its family tools be a disruptive solution to Excel pivots and PowerPoint for data presentations? Maybe. Only time will tell.