WhatsTheBigData

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ8Hiss2EkE?list=PL6RKqpezpCYp5-XtFje-AeT4XHOs0X4ZK]
Satya Nadella on the Microsoft Blog:

On Tuesday at LeWeb’13 in Paris, I joined Om Malik on stage to talk with thousands of entrepreneurs, startups and large companies about technology and where we’re headed as an industry. The theme of this year’s conference is The Next 10 Years, and we spent our time talking about the new ideas we see from startups around the world and how their work is shaping the future.

Today software intermediates — and digitizes — many of the things we do in business, life and our world. New technologies help businesses engage with customers in more meaningful ways, connect us to our friends and families, and allow us to see, interact with and share our world in ways never before possible. But we’re only at the beginning.

Over the next 10 years we will reach a point where nearly everything will become digitized. This will be made possible by an ever-growing network of connected devices, incredible computing capacity from the cloud, insights from big data and intelligence from machine learning. Developers, with access to these technologies and simplified development frameworks, will create new applications and services that help us transform what we do at work, and life, into digital equivalents.

Historically, there’s been a lot of attention focused on the digitization happening in Silicon Valley, but what’s even more interesting to me is what’s happening around the world. In every corner of the globe, new innovations are bringing this digitization of everything one step closer, and that’s incredibly important as this transformation should be — it must be — a global phenomenon for it to reflect the needs of our distributed and diverse world. And below are some great examples of the work that is already underway:

In Israel, AKOL is taking a digital approach to modern food agriculture. Through its new platform, AKOLogic, it will enable local officials to monitor fruit, vegetable, dairy and poultry production in real time. This will increase public safety by allowing for faster identification of the source for spoiled food, significantly increase awareness lead time of potential food supply issues, and allow third-world farmers to cost effectively comply with first-world standards and regulations, thereby helping them gain access to new markets.

In China, Beijing Rendering Company used the cloud to create a new digital world for its action movie, “Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon.” With no real-world outdoor or underwater filming, the company saved an estimated 90 percent in production costs and brought in more than $100 million at the box office.

In Paris, Kompass recently moved its worldwide contact database to the cloud. As a result it was able to launch in 69 countries simultaneously, stay focused on user experience and service development, and keep resources flat. Now it’s gaining new insights and value due to an increased ability to segment, analyze, update, maintain and visualize its databases.

Temenos and 91JinRong are changing the face of finance in Africa and China by moving in-person financial options online to improve service, gain access to more customers and enter new markets. Sparsha Learning Technologies is creating customized interactive online solutions for K–12 and higher education that help educators reduce cost, connect with more students and extend their programs globally. askem is turning real-world Q&As into digital pictures. And startups like SkyGiraffe, qunb, SmartNotify, Lokad and Buddy are building new services to help businesses build enterprise mobile apps, create better data visualizations, connect people with the right message at the right time, improve commerce through big data, and provide easy-to-use back-end services for developers.

Ushered in by innovations from startups and investment from the enterprise in this new era, every business will be a digital business, everyone can be a developer and nearly everything analog will be digitized. We’re investing in this new era through programs like Microsoft BizSpark and Microsoft Ventures, and we’re committed to helping our customers get there with our enterprise cloud products and services. Whether you’re just getting started or further along your journey, Microsoft will be here to help.

To: Mr C.Grant Your @amazon order has been dispatched. pic.twitter.com/jg1eMmQMYj

— Jingle Boles (@GeneralBoles) December 2, 2013

My post on Inside Tech Talk:

The only bit of news—and a lot of buzz—that came out of Jeff Bezos’ interview with Charlie Rose on CBS’ 60 Minutes last Sunday was the unveiling of Prime Air. It’s an Amazon “R&D project” that is investigating the delivery of packages (up to five pounds) by aerial drones, getting them to the customer’s door in 30 minutes or less.

On its website, Amazon says that “We hope the FAA’s rules will be in place as early as sometime in 2015. We will be ready at that time.” Indeed, the FAA promises to be ready by 2015 according to its “roadmap for integration of civil unmanned aircraft systems.” But in the interview, Bezos refused to commit to a specific date, talking about the work they still need to do to ensure reliability and redundancy.

Reliability is a great challenge today for octocopters (the type of drones Amazon will use) as can be seen in this YouTube video. And even if Amazon finds out how to reduce the risk to a minimum, it will always be there, to say nothing about the opposition from privacy advocates, noise complainers, and others. So why is Bezos investing in the future (or fiction) of delivery?

Some explain it as a gimmick aimed to distract investors’ attention from Amazon’s latest financial report, as if the lack of profits is anything new to Amazon’s investors. Others may see it as Google-envy, one-upping its rival by adding “flying” to “autonomous vehicles,” as if Bezos has suddenly metamorphosed into a Brin.

I see it as a logical extension of the focus on the speed of delivery that has been driving Bezos and Amazon for eighteen years. As Bezos explained to Wired’s Steven Levy when he was asked about the link between retail and Amazon’s new thrust into consumer electronics: “…we’ve always focused on reducing the time between order and delivery. In hardware, it’s the same principle. An example is the time between when we take delivery on a processor to when it’s being used in a device by a customer.”

Bezos is bothered by waste and inefficiency the same way Steve Jobs was bothered by lack of imagination or bad aesthetics.

Product design was the core of Steve Jobs’ strategy to ride the digitization of everything. The speed of delivery is the core of Bezos’. With drone delivery, he is trying to eliminate the wasteful irritation of the last mile. No matter how close to where his customers live he is going to build Amazon’s warehouses (36 and counting), the most he can promise is same-day delivery. So he is going to circumvent and disrupt UPS and FedEx, the delivery partners that have been helped so much by Amazon’s success over the last decade. In the future, he may even disrupt his own drone delivery, by completely digitizing the last mile, through 3D printing in the customer’s house.

In the 60 Minutes interview, Bezos explained everything he does by fear of disruption. He believes that Amazon, like so many other companies in the past, will be disrupted one day and will simply disappear. He just hopes that will happen after he dies. In the meantime, he rides the digitization of everything with a maniacal focus on the speed of delivery.

Update: See here for Fred Smith of FedEx talking in 2009 (!) about their desire to use drones. HT @daviottenheimer