Monthly Archives: August 2018

In a May survey of 3,024 US internet users conducted by Radware, most indicated that they value their personal data more than their wallet, car, phone or house keys. Respondents worried most about their social security number becoming compromised.Now, the data needs to be put in perspective. For one thing, online surveys don’t always generalize to the entire population. Those who agree to complete a survey about personal data are a self-selected group that probably care more about data security than the average person.Even more importantly, it is necessary to note that while consumers regularly express concern about data security and privacy, their actions tend not to reflect that concern.Nonetheless, the Radware data indicates a heightened level of concern. And marketers are not ignoring that.

We live in an era where Netflix is eating the world, where kids and grown-ups alike can disappear down a YouTube rabbit hole for hours on end, where the amount of time we spend watching video on our phones only ever goes up rather than down. In that world, it’s easy to extrapolate to a time where old-fashioned television is dead, killed off by a slew of younger, nimbler disruptors. The reality, however, is that TV’s business model is secure, its revenues are gargantuan, and the barriers to enter its industry have never been higher.Even Katzenberg knows this. A billion dollars is only half of the $2 billion he was originally asking for. And even $2 billion would be small table stakes at this game. After all, Netflix is spending some $12 billion a year in service of disrupting television. (The best articulation of Netflix’s ambitions can be found in this great piece by Matthew Ball.)Netflix has vastly deeper pockets than NewTV. But even Netflix is going to find it incredibly difficult to replace TV altogether, for the simple reason that there’s simply too much money there. TV is, at heart, in the advertising business—advertisers spend some $70 billion a year on TV. While ad dollars have fled print media, the TV ad-revenue stream has stayed astonishingly steady. Yes, all the advertising growth globally is in digital, mostly through Google and Facebook. Digital advertising has, finally, overtaken TV as the largest ad market. But there are good reasons why TV’s central position in America’s households is much more deeply rooted than the would-be digital usurpers like to believe.

B Byrne, a product manager for Coinbase’s Identity team, envisions decentralized identity as part of a more robust blockchain ecosystem that extends beyond cryptocurrencies. The basic premise: Personal data could be verified once by a third-party, like the government agency, and then retained securely by an individual. Rather than sending your Social Security number to a company or service, for example, the Social Security Administration could put an unalterable stamp of approval on the blockchain that can be verified on request. A user could provide proof that they’re a real person without ever revealing the Social Security number itself. Replacing a system where sensitive information is copied into multiple points of weakness—like, say, Equifax’s servers, or even Coinbase, which itself requests Social Security numbers from its users—has obvious appeal in a time where corporate hacks of sensitive data are a constant occurrence.

L'immeuble est encore en travaux que Goldman Sachs le revend déjà. La banque américaine vient d'annoncer avoir conclu une opération de cession-bail  concernant son nouveau QG londonien, dans lequel ses équipes doivent emménager l'année prochaine.Le principe est simple : la banque de Wall Street vend sa propriété pour la reprendre ensuite immédiatement en location. De quoi récupérer de la trésorerie pour la réinvestir dans ses activités principales, une stratégie déjà utilisée par Goldman Sachs sur son ancien QG en 2005.L'heureux acquéreur de « Plumtree Court » - le nom donné à ce bâtiment de 77.000 m2 - est le National Pension Service sud-coréen, troisième fonds de pension public au monde. Selon un communiqué de Goldman Sachs, la transaction valorise cet actif 1,16 milliard de livres, soit 1,3 milliard d'euros.

TO AMERICAN EYES, Germany may look like a public transit paradise. But the country also has a flourishing car culture that began over a hundred years ago and has only grown since then.Behind Japan and the United States, Germany is the third-largest automobile manufacturer in the world—home to BMW, Audi, Mercedes Benz, and Volkswagen. These brands, and the economic prosperity they’ve brought to the country, shape Germany’s cultural and political identities. “There is no other industry as important,” Arndt Ellinghorst, the chief of Global Automotive Research at Evercore, told CNN.A similar phenomenon exists in the United States, where gas-guzzlers symbolize nearly every cliche point of American pride: affluence, capability for individual expression, and personal freedoms. Freedom, in particular, “is not a selling point to be easily dismissed,” Edward Humes wrote in The Atlantic in 2016. “This trusty conveyance, always there, always ready, on no schedule but its owner’s. Buses can’t do that. Trains can’t do that. Even Uber makes riders wait.”It’s this cultural love of cars—and the political influence of the automotive industry—that has so far prevented the public pressure necessary to provoke widespread change in many developed nations. But say those barriers didn’t exist. How could developed countries tweak their automobile policies to solve climate change?For Germany to meet emissions targets, “half of the people who now use their cars alone would have to switch to bicycles, public transport, or ride-sharing,” Heinrich Strößenreuther, a Berlin-based consultant for mobility strategies told YaleEnvironment360's Christian Schwägerl last fall. That would require drastic policies, like having local governments ban high-emitting cars in populated places like cities. (In fact, Germany’s car capital, Stuttgart, is considering it.) It would also require large-scale government investments in public transportation infrastructure: “A new transport system that connects bicycles, buses, trains, and shared cars, all controlled by digital platforms that allow users to move from A to B in the fastest and cheapest way—but without their own car,” Schwägerl said.One could get away with more modest infrastructure investments if governments required carmakers to make their vehicle fleets more fuel-efficient, thereby burning less petroleum. The problem is that most automakers seek to meet those requirements by developing electric cars. If those cars are charged with electricity from a coal-fired power plant, they create “more emissions than a car that burns petrol,” energy storage expert Dénes Csala pointed out last year. “For such a switch to actually reduce net emissions, the electricity that powers those cars must be renewable.”The most effective solution would be to combine these policies. Governments would require drastic improvements in fuel efficiency for gas-powered vehicles, while investing in renewable-powered electric car infrastructure. At the same time, cities would overhaul their public transportation systems, adding more bikes, trains, buses and ride-shares. Fewer people would own cars.At one point, the U.S. was well on its way toward some of these changes. In 2012, President Barack Obama’s administration implemented regulations requiring automakers to nearly double the fuel economy of passenger vehicles by the year 2025. But the Trump administration announced a rollback of those regulations earlier this month. Their intention, they said, is to “Make Cars Great Again.”The modern cars they’re seeking to preserve, and the way we use them, are far from great. Of course, there’s the climate impact—the trillions in expected economic damage from extreme weather and sea-level rise caused in part by our tailpipes. But 53,000 Americans also die prematurely from vehicle pollution each year, and accidents are among the leading causes of death in the United States. “If US roads were a war zone, they would be the most dangerous battlefield the American military has ever encountered,” Humes wrote. It’s getting more dangerous by the day.

Early this year, the attorneys general of 22 states and the District of Columbia filed a suit attempting to block the Federal Communications Commission’s controversial revesal of Obama era net neutrality regulations.The old team is back together, filing a brief that asks  the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to reverse the reversal. Together, the AGs represent states totaling 165 million people — more than half of the U.S. population. The list includes a number of populous states, including California, Illinois, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.New York Attorney General General Barbara Underwood is leading the charge. “A free and open internet is critical to New York – and to our democracy,” Underwood writes in the new filing. “As we detail in our brief filed today, the rollback of net neutrality will have a devastating impact on millions of New Yorkers and Americans across the country, putting them at risk of abusive practices while undermining state and local regulation of the broadband industry.”The Attorneys General are hardly alone on this one. As Reuters notes, Mozilla, Vimeo and Etsy also joined forces today to file a legal challenge, while governors in six states have signed executive orders and three states have passed their own net neutrality laws.

Online grocery categories can be divided into two camps: perishable items like meat, dairy and produce and the so-called center store products—peanut butter, tomato sauce, dishwashing detergent—that have longer shelf lives. While supermarket sites might lump these items together, online retailers often make distinctions a la Amazon Fresh vs. Amazon Prime Pantry and Jet.com and its fresh food subcategory that's available in select ZIP codes. Fresh food often has delivery surcharges because milk and eggs need to arrive same-day and can't be shipped using typical postal channels. Because of this, consumer packaged goods (CPG) are closer to traditional ecommerce products that shoppers are familiar with, so it would stand to reason that online grocery shoppers are more comfortable buying these items compared with perishables. Field Agent surveyed US online grocery shoppers in August 2018 after they made a minimum $30 purchase either for delivery or pickup and found exactly this. Fully 63% had bought center store groceries during that shopping session. Dairy and eggs (38%), meat (29%) and fresh produce (29%) had lower purchase levels. This pattern also held in "The eMarketer Ecommerce Insights Survey" conducted by Bizrate Insights in July 2018. The most commonly bought grocery items purchased online by US internet users were candy and snacks (17.5%) and dry food goods (17.2%). Fresh meat and poultry (9.0%) and seafood and fish (4.1%) were less popular. When asked by Field Agent which categories were easiest to shop for online/in-app, 49% cited center store groceries. Only 5% said meat was easiest to shop for digitally. Center store groceries also had the largest number of shoppers saying that they bought more online than they would have in-store (19%). The top reasons given were because center store groceries are easier to shop for online (58%), they saw items they wouldn't have in-store (23%) and that the prices online were better (19%). But it doesn't appear that center store groceries are being bought online at the same rate as in-store. There was a gap when comparing behavior between online and in-store grocery shoppers. For example, toilet paper was the leading product bought by all shoppers, but there was a 22-percentage-point difference between in-store and online. 

Les grands éditeurs de plates-formes dans le cloud s’adaptent irrésistiblement à l’évolution majeure qu’est l’edge computing dans le domaine de l’Internet des objets. Un paradigme informatique récent que L’Embarqué évoque dans ses colonnes depuis deux ou trois ans et qui consiste à implémenter certains processus décisionnels au plus près des données générées par lesdits objets. C’est-à-dire à l’endroit où ils se connectent au réseau, au niveau de passerelles, de concentrateurs, de microserveurs, voire des systèmes embarqués eux-mêmes pour peu qu’ils disposent de suffisamment de ressources de calcul.Des géants comme Amazon (avec AWS Greengrass) ou Microsoft (avec Azure IoT Edge) ont déjà commencé de décliner leur offre logicielle pour les équipements de bordure de réseau (Edge) afin que ceux-ci puissent exécuter certains types de services cloud (apprentissage automatique, analyse…), traiter les données en quasi-temps réel et communiquer avec les capteurs ou d’autres dispositifs auxquels ils sont reliés, même en cas de connectivité intermittente avec le nuage.Cet été Google les a rejoints en annonçant deux produits, l’un matériel (un circuit intégré spécifique en l’occurrence, dénommé Edge TPU), l’autre logiciel (Cloud IoT Edge). Cette pile logicielle a vocation à étendre les fonctions d’intelligence artificielle du cloud de Google aux passerelles, caméras et autres équipements connectés. Selon Injong Rhee, vice-président IoT pour l’activité Google Cloud, cette offre permet aux utilisateurs de bâtir et d’entraîner les modèles d’apprentissage automatique dans le nuage puis d’exécuter ces modèles sur l’équipement intégrant la pile Cloud IoT Edge tout en bénéficiant des performances de l’accélérateur matériel Edge TPU (ou d’autres types d’accélérateurs de type CPU ou GPU).