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Category Archives: Internet of Things

New “Alphabet” Name Shows How Presumptive (And Good) Google Might Be

Attribution and All Photo Illustration Credits: The Guardian

“Alphabet” Presumes A Lot
It’s hard to imagine naming your company “Planet Earth”, or “Universe” or “Everything Under The Sun”, but Google comes pretty close. In recent corporate re-structuring hailed (temporarily) by Wall Street, Google restructured and re-named itself “Alphabet” to bring all its disparate companies under one roof. From its core search and advertising business that underwrites it all, to energy, to curing cancer, to driver-less cars, to web-enabled eyeglasses, Alphabet now enlists “moonshot” projects along with what everybody knows Google best for: search.

Laudable Missions
Google’s missions are laudable and reflect worthy passions among its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brinn. After all, besides moonshot pioneer Elan Musk, few executives of publicly held web companies do not often stray too far from stockholders’ collective wishes: core business.

“Banal Search”
According to The Guardian’s Evgeny Morozov, in his August 16, 2015 piece, “Google may have changed its name but the game remains the same”, the company is simply temporarily righting its troubles with investors. Morozov writes that Page and Brinn aspire well beyond “banal search” and the advertising that supports it.

“Alphabet – a nice example of corporate plastic surgery at work – makes explicit what everybody has known for a while,” Morozov writes. “Google’s founders are tired of and deeply embarrassed by the company’s core business. Selling ads, after all, is not a business that requires a PhD from Stanford or MIT – in fact, it’s so mind-numbingly banal and inelegant that all those brainy scientists on Google’s payroll must have an identity crisis every time they realise how their moonshot projects are actually financed.”

Google/Alphabet Does Good Work, No Matter What
Page and Brynn revolutionized search and have established Google — that is, Alphabet — as the undisputed data Goliath of our digital times. The very verb “to Google,” now means “to search” for mostly all of us. And the business pair are serial (and I would argue “benevolent”) entrepreneurs at the highest levels with their work outside search. So even if Morozov and others consider the re-naming of Google a deft attempt to boost Wall Street stock, so be it.

Greg Goaley, President of WinCommunications in Des Moines, Iowa, is a former copywriter and creative editor, and a 25-year digital content strategist and provider. Kathryn Towner is President of WinM@il USA, a former 15-year sales rep for Random House/McGraw-Hill, and a 20-year permission-based email publications consultant and provider.

Cable Unbundling Thankfully Continues, As Do Pitfalls

Attribution and All Photo Credits: Gannett Corporation

More on ESPN’s Woes Due To Cable Unbundling: Andrew Logue’s August 12, 2015 Des Moines Register Piece, “Cable unbundling makes college power brokers uneasy”.

ESPN Still Widely Watched & Loved
Like tens or even hundreds of millions of viewers in this country and around the world, I love ESPN and always have. The network has covered historic games and matches; has uncovered countless numbers of stories, athletes and teams around the country since the early 1980s; and has driven greater sports media from other providers, while introducing us to great American sports communities like no media before.

Ways of Watching ESPN Evolving
ESPN came to us only through cable television for its first 25 years or so, but with the advent of web streaming for at least a decade, viewers have subscribed to EPSN’s wide variety of sports web channels, or have simply put up with cable costs sometimes five times the cost to subscribe to widening digital ESPN and many other web streaming choices, what the industry calls “over the top” services, like Netflix, Hulu and HBO.

Why Is ESPN So Important?
As viewers flocked to ESPN over the years, cable companies used the very popular ESPN as a battering ram to gain and retain viewers to continue paying the cable monster. Cable companies — awash for decades in subscriber money while still enjoying revenues from commercials, which subscribers are forced to watch, although we already pay for cable! — provided some other popular content (examples include Comedy Central, Disney and Fox channels among them). But beyond these rare good channels, the rest have been what many Americans might politely describe as crap. Thus, the flood to find cheaper and better web streaming alternatives.

Current Cable Unbundling Trends Put ESPN At Risk
ESPN has reportedly lost more than three million cable subscribers in a little over a year, and its parent company Disney has demanded deep cuts into ESPN’s budget for 2016 and 2017. Current web streaming is gutting the cable industry, the same industry that brought ESPN to all of us many years ago. And given ever-widening digital alternatives, no signs indicate this trend will change.

Media, Thy Name Is “Acquisition”

Need The Talent? Buy The Company!

As heads swirl over the growing number of media acquisitions in 2015, last year’s predictions for these trends have proven true and then some. Although federal regulators rejected Comcast’s recent bid to acquire Time-Warner, now Charter wants Time-Warner, — and will likely get it.

I’ve found VentureBeat’s acquisition page with clearly marked abstracts topped with headline links pretty well sums up a media buying trend that has not happened since the last months of the Clinton administration. We all hope innovation drives this trend, and not “buy this week and sell the next” approach among those who stand to make solid dough, especially paper dough.

Not Just Tech Is Buying Up Tech
Not only have tech companies come after boutique media companies in droves not seen since 2000, traditional companies are continuing to beef up media talent they don’t have internally, and simply buying companies that do have the talent. Call this latter trend of “tiny tech acquisition” ongoing preparation for The Internet of Things.

According to Jacob Mullins of Exitround, today we continually have big, strong companies clamoring for relatively small buys (under $100 million):

Do You Take Your Yogurt With New Media?
“UnderArmour acquired MapMyFitness. Hearst acquired BranchOut. Capital One acquired Adaptive Path. Walmart acquired over 15 tech companies in the past four years. There are more corporate buyers in the market than ever, and as detailed by The Economist, “25 of the 30 firms that comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average” which include everything from The Coca Cola Co. to Caterpiller Inc. have a corporate-venture unit. Even Chobani, the Greek yogurt company, has a tech incubator. These are all attempts to assimilate technology into the businesses of large companies whose core business or focus is not technology.”

But we still have large tech and media companies going hard after smaller tech companies, again according to Mullins of Exitround:

“This year we’ve seen an inordinate number of billion dollar venture-backed exits such as Nest (acquired for $3.2B by Google), Beats (acquired for $3B by Apple), Minecraft (acquired for $2.5B by Microsoft), Oculus VR (acquired for $2B by Facebook), Twitch (acquired for $970M by Amazon) and of course the largest venture-backed exit of all time with Facebook’s $19B acquisition of WhatsApp.”

Four Additional Top Headlines During This Age Of Tech Media Acquisitions & Mergers

“Amazon Trumps Apple’s Beats Acquisition With Music Streaming”

“Three Strong Reasons Why Regulators Will Let Charter Buy Time Warner Cable”

“2015 Will Be The Year Of The Tiny Tech Acquisition”

“AT&T still throttles unlimited data, and FCC isn’t promising to stop it”

“Rise of The Hackers”: PBS’s “Nova” Reveals Digital Security Wars Among Teens, Criminals & Nations

Photo Source & Complete Documentary: PBS – “Rise Of The Hackers”

“Rise of the Hackers” appeared in November 2014, but the digital security challenges explored in this exceptional documentary merit full mention here. Click Rise for the full piece, and rewind to explore concepts such as “ultra-paranoid” computing; the Stuxnet worm that hacked Iranian nuclear plants, and was launched by the United States and Israel in 2010, according to the piece; quantum machines cracking code in temperatures colder than deep space; and subconscious passwords, through muscle memory, specific to each user. Remember prime and subprime numbers? They are so yesterday, but still so today: Prime and subprime numbers, or RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) encryption, still represent the foundation of our current Internet and our exponential faith in it. According to the computer scientists in this documentary, RSA is at risk of being cracked, which could bring down the Internet as we know it if we do not enlist more powerful systems like quantum computing and smarter passwording.

Digital Wars Are The New Landscape
Except for the threats of nuclear war, which have hung darkly over humankind since the 1940s through today, the never-ending battles to secure and steal information represent the very present and future of sustained warfare — more precisely, digital information for power grids, water plants and other vital societal systems — that is begged, borrowed or most likely stolen.

The revealing and frightening “Rise of The Hackers”, PBS’s Nova documentary from 2014 and re-broadcast in May 2015, informs us that keyboards, not bombs, are what should keep us awake at night. The well-known Target and Bank of America cyber-hacks represent proverbial tips of digital glaciers. Hacking: Teens do it; terrorists and criminals do it; banks, financial lenders and borrowers do it; large nonprofits, international causes and charities do it; and nations, governments of all kinds, good ones and bad ones, do it. Many say the worldwide Anonymous “hacktivist” group is good, but others argue it is bad. Hackers are used for good purposes, for example to fight terrorism, crime and underworld activity, although one must think most hackers are criminals bent on theft, harassment or even simple DOS (Denial of Service) attacks on individuals, companies and countries.

Being Ever-Social Nourishes Us, But Can Harm Us
Our quests to be social and reach out to people and institutions next door and around the globe, combined with our perceived and (created?) demands for the conveniences of living digital lives, put us in peril. But great minds are working to heighten security through ever-strengthened encryption, subliminal passwords, ultra-paranoid computing and quantum computers, according to “Rise”.

So we all hope. Read “The Rise of the Ethical Hacktivist”, from Linux Insider Reporter Katherine Noyes, who quotes cybercrime analyst and author Pierluigi Paganini:

“Just one tweet, a picture, can blow the wind into a revolution.”

Verizon Purchase Of AOL Shows That Mobile Marches On — And On, And On

Photo Credit: The New York Times

“…the switch from the web to our phones is happening even faster than the transition away from physical media, and in many ways it is more profound.”
–Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times, “For Verizon and AOL, Mobile Is a Magic Word”, May 14, 2015

In a twist from the past, 2015 cellphone giant Verizon is buying 1990s “World Wide Web” America Online for $4.4 billion, in an additional sign that big telecoms don’t want to be known simply as “dumb pipes” to customers.

Who knew that “You’ve Got Mail!” and a nearly 30-year-old dialup provider would still appeal? (Amazingly, AOL once purchased AOL-Time Warner for $162 billion during clownish times at the peak of the dotcom bubble in 2000, so the new $4.4 billion figure is trump change, but perhaps a more accurate figure.)

The reasons for acquiring AOL are all too clear: As Facebook and Google claims more than half of the $42 billion online ad marketplace, Verizon wants more mobile content and advertising, along with video ads tailored to users through demographics and data mining of cellphone customers.

AOL owns all brands of media, including the Huffington Post and game applications that produce mountains of personal data for advertising and message construction.

Our smartphone consumption, at its peak right now in terms of sales and usage, is more than three times higher than that our use of personal computers during its heyday.

“Mobile, mobile, mobile,” is what the market is saying. As when television merged the technology of moving images and radio sound into relatively small boxes — called TVs — all things media are in constant states of flux. Continual digital media mergers, both of companies and of technologies, surely represent our constant, collective paths.

Singularity, anyone?

Amazon’s Dash Button: Easiest & Wildest Way Yet To Buy Family Products

Amazon might convince all of us how easy this “Internet of Things” might get — and potentially, how ubiquitous.

Never mind, if possible, concerns and promises over Amazon’s controversial delivery drones, otherwise unmanned, small, whirling, low-altitude flying machines (with live-feed cameras) delivering products to our homes. Also never mind, if you can, concerns over all those potential additional connectivity needs foreseen to be required inside our homes. (More on that in a minute.)

It’s just too darn easy to use Amazon’s new Wi-Fi Dash Button (introduced the day before April Fools Day, 2015). All Amazon requires to buy products is pre-enabling your phone, and pushing a separate “dash button” that you can place almost anywhere in your home. Welcome to Amazon on your fridge, on your coffee maker, on your kitchen sink, on your washer and drier, in your bathroom medicine chest.

Or stuck, of course, to your tissue and toilet paper holders.

And stuck on your hallway walls. In your cabinets. On your stairwell. In your closets. And stuck on your home office desk. Anywhere and everywhere in your home are good by Amazon.

Running out of Tide? Push Amazon’s “Tide” Dash Button. Low on Gillette disposable razors? Push Amazon’s Gillette Dash Button. Jonesing for some good, old-fashioned Maxwell House? Push Amazon’s Maxwell House Dash Button.

In fact, avoid shopping altogether and push your Cottonelle, Bounty and Smart Water Amazon Dash buttons, along with your Olay, Glad, Gerber Amazon Dash buttons, and increasingly those of other international brands.

While most of us can still marvel at the sheer technology of easily pushing a button — while Amazon of course repeatedly dings our credit cards along the way — and have products delivered to our doors, what are the possible societal effects if Amazon and other in-home Wi-Fi ordering systems become widely adopted?

Delivery logistics technology and low-skill manual labor to ship products will surely rise, but getting out of our homes might become less necessary. Grocery stores and large box stores as we know them will surely lose customers, but cheaper prices for packaged goods might benefit customers, at least in the beginning. To be sure: Amazon and their partners will undoubtedly learn a lot more about us, while we sate ourselves with oodles of Cottonelle, Tide and Bounty.

In fact, these dash buttons are just the beginning, says the Wall Street Journal: The truer order of the Internet of Things is that our home, personal and business devices will do our ordering FOR us. Won’t we all be happier if systems charge our credit cards or online accounts, and simply order things and deliver them to us? Surely, we are told, we will.

Here is a piece on Amazon’s most recent home-ordering product from The Wall Street Journal’s Nathan Olivarez-Giles: “Amazon’s Dash Button Is Not a Hoax, It’s Phase One”

Finally, here is Ian Crouch’s take from the April 2, 2015, edition of The New Yorker: “The Horror of Amazon’s New Dash Buttons”

MOOCs, “The End of College” & “The University of Everywhere”

It is clear that education is changing, as it always has and will. But few would argue against thinking that the Internet has changed education most quickly. Massive Open Online Courses, or “MOOCs,” have been around for at least a decade, perhaps made “institutional” by “edX”, the free online college course web site mutually created and managed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and California-Berkley.

But now comes “The End of College,” a book by Kevin Carry, an American higher education writer and policy analyst. Many are describing the book as utopian, because Carry envisions free education societies where people of all varieties worldwide gather, most often online and in-person considerably less. Carry argues this “University of Everywhere,” will replace the traditional college experience of living and attending class on campus.

Economics will push many students away from traditional college and toward online courses, as average national student and graduate debt tops more than $30,000. As much as education has changed and continues to, it’s difficult to imagine a world without traditional universities and colleges, which run deeply with the American mindset of families “raising themselves up,” and companies and institutions which still place high stock in college graduates. (Plus: College football still needs a home, right?)

Never Mind “The Internet of Things” – Try “The Internet of Us”

A Man With An Internet Pacemaker Walks Into A Bar…

The device in that man’s chest, a life-giving second or third chance at life, might be connected as an Internet Protocol (IP) address to the Internet. Increasingly, pacemakers ARE connected to the web and enable doctors to monitor heart health and other physical attributes of patients. A positive thing? Many if not most patients would think so. But what if that IP address is hacked by someone living in Kiev, Tehran or maybe Peoria? That someone, that hacker, might be able to jolt that man’s heart, causing pain, suffering or even death.

This is NOT fiction, according to Mark Goodman, a longtime security and anti-terrorism advisor, and author of “Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It”.

Although Goodman breezily takes readers through numerous pitfalls of our increasingly connected age — terrorist war rooms, networks and entire cities — he proposes measures to protect ourselves against hacktivists (at least the bad ones), and challenges governments and companies to create another Manhattan Project, but this time for widespread cyber-security.

Goodman excoriates politicians and CEOs alike for not speaking about threats these people well know. According to Goodman, it takes the average company 211 days AFTER cyber-security threats have already occurred to be aware of any system hacking. Consider only recent major hacks of Sony, Target, AOL and JP Morgan Chase, and you get an idea of the scope — now and in the future — of the problem.

If our cyber-security problems are as small as a golf ball right now, Goodman says consider the Sun as our comparative obstacle in the future. Stay vigilant, take charge and, Goodman advises, “get intentional” about the security of the Internet of Things — and of People.

On Singularity, “How To Live Forever” & Uploading Your Mind

The great Tim Wu, professor of law and journalism at Columbia University, has been perhaps chief among pioneers of the open Internet. He coined the phrase, “Net Neutrality,” which heads of state, governments, universities and the media now commonly refer to when talking about keeping the Internet open and for ISPs to provide generally equitable speeds and services to all its customers. Net Neutrality also covers the argument that large telecoms like Comcast, Verizon and At&T would like to create fast lanes on the Internet for those who can pay, and slow lanes for regular users, mom-and-pop shops, and even large companies who cannot or will not pay higher rates for faster digital content speeds than the average user.

Opponents say Net Neutrality will stifle innovation, for example, in the delivery of current and yet created applications that will require large bandwidth for delivery. They say the government should not get involved with cost-fixing and who pays what for digital delivery. Proponents of Net Neutrality (such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter) say publicly elected government officials appoint members of the FCC, which regulates the Internet — funded by public dollars for decades — with phone and cable laws passed in the 1990s and earlier; allowing different costs for Internet access, proponents say, is a form of permitting those with the biggest wallets disproportionately faster and better access to content on which informed democracy relies.

The FCC will announce new rules on the issue Thursday, February 26.

Wu sometimes departs from his adoptive role as Internet champion, and imparts his views on the extraordinary work and passions of those who see beyond digital networks, and look forward to the possibilities afforded by the Internet that might benefit humankind, perhaps even “living forever” — but in one form or another.

“It’s theoretically possible to copy the brain onto a computer, and so provide a form of life after death.” More Here
–Steven Hawking, 2014

Read Tim Wu’s Feb. 22, 2015, short piece in the New Yorker, “How To Live Forever”.

Meet Bina48, The World’s Most Advanced Humanoid Robot

She’s Not Rutger Hauer – Otherwise, “Roy,” The Greatest Replicant in Ridley Scott’s Legendary “Blade Runner” – But Rutger is Human, Which Is Cheating

Bina48 Is Practicing The Lengths of Current Artificial Intelligence – But “We,” That Is, “We Human Replicants” – Have A Long Way To Go

Greg Goaley, President of WinCommunications in Des Moines, Iowa, is a digital content strategist and provider, and Kathryn Towner is President of WinM@il USA, a 20-year permission-based email publications consultant and provider.