Archive for the 'Technology' Category

AC34: Artemis capsize, a tragic loss of a young sailor’s life on San Francisco Bay today

Published May 10, 2013 Technology 1 Comment
Tags:

NewImage

British double Olympic medallist Andrew Simpson was trapped in the wreckage of the @ArtemisRacing AC72. Adam Fisher at Wired.com has a few details on what happened today. If Fisher is correct, this accident was not a repeat of the Oracle AC72 capsize:

(…) Preliminary reports indicate Artemis’s boat didn’t capsize because the sailors were pushing too hard or made a mistake, as was the case with Team Oracle. The problem was with the boat itself, either faulty engineering or faulty construction. The boat simply broke apart under sail, folded, then flipped. The Artemis boat has had a history of cracking and problems with the carbon fiber used in the twin “beams” — the two girders that lash the two narrow hulls together. The boat had been in and out of the shed numerous times in an attempt to correct those problems. Today, however, the forward beam — the girder in front of the sail — gave way during a practice run. The two hulls, no longer connected, began sailing in slightly different directions. This caused one hull to snap just forward of the aft beam, and the mast, held up by high-tension rigging connected to the front of the hulls, simply fell over. The boat began to cartwheel, ultimately trapping Simpson underneath and drowning him.  

Following the October 2012 Oracle capsize Adam Fisher wrote an after-action report The Boat That Could Sink the America’s Cup, which includes commentary arguing that the AC72 rule is too expensive, the design too dangerous.

(…) It’s a question that the other teams — Luna Rossa, New Zealand, and Artemis — are asking themselves now. Paul Cayard, CEO and tactician of Artemis Racing, has plenty of experience with the tricky conditions in San Francisco Bay. His prediction: At least one of the teams is going to capsize again. “It will be a miracle if we get through the summer without it happening to somebody,” he says. “We’re going to start pushing harder, we are going to race, and those kinds of boats — catamarans — tip over.”

The real unknown, he says, is whether the damage caused by the Oracle crash was, as Coutts argues, an exception, a bad accident compounded by severe tides — or something closer to the norm when an AC72 capsizes in the rough waters of the bay. “The Oracle capsize is a bit of an anomaly,” Cayard says. “But it could happen again.” Oracle and Artemis have a full contingency plan — a second complete boat. New Zealand has just a single complete boat and some spare parts. Prada is the most vulnerable, because it has only one boat. “If Prada did what Oracle did closer to June,” Cayard says, “they’d probably be out of the competition.” A $50 million effort (perhaps more), completely sunk.

 (…) But the most telling thing I heard while visiting the repair shop came from Coutts, the CEO. I asked him what would happen to the radical new wingsail design after the Cup was over. “No matter who wins,” Coutts said, “they are definitely going to make changes: make the boat smaller, bring the team budgets down, stuff like that.” In other words, the CEO of Team Oracle now acknowledges that the AC72 is an overreach. 

Autocracy and Technology

Published April 23, 2013 Development , Technology Closed

Alex Tabarrock

(…)

And don’t think that the data being collected by autocracies is limited to Facebook posts or Twitter comments. The most important data they will collect in the future is biometric information, which can be used to identify individuals through their unique physical and biological attributes. Fingerprints, photographs and DNA testing are all familiar biometric data types today. Indeed, future visitors to repressive countries might be surprised to find that airport security requires not just a customs form and passport check, but also a voice scan. In the future, software for voice and facial recognition will surpass all the current biometric tests in terms of accuracy and ease of use.

 

Ryan Avent: Google’s trust problem

Published March 30, 2013 Technology Closed
Tags: ,

Ryan Avent has a very thoughtful essay on Google's trust problem. How likely are we to adopt new Google services if we are concerned they will go away? Excerpt (emphasis mine):

(…)

But as Ezra Klein notes, Google may face a trust issue. Translated into economese, Google has failed to consider the Lucas Critique: adoption behaviour for newly offered services will change in response to Google's observed penchant for cancelling beloved products.

Google has asked us to build our lives around it: to use its e-mail system (which, for many of us, is truly indispensible), its search engines, its maps, its calendars, its cloud-based apps and storage services, its video- and photo- hosting services, and on and on and on. It hasn't done this because we're its customers, it's worth remembering. We aren't; we're the products Google sells to its customers, the advertisers. Google wants us to use its services in ways that provide it with interesting and valuable information, and eyeballs. If a particular Google experiment isn't cutting it in that category, then Google may feel justified in axing it.

But that makes it increasingly difficult for Google to have success with new services. Why commit to using and coming to rely on something new if it might be yanked away at some future date? This is especially problematic for “social” apps that rely on network effects. Even a crummy social service may thrive if it obtains a critical mass. Yanking away services beloved by early adopters almost guarantees that critical masses can't be obtained: not, at any rate, without the provision of an incentive or commitment mechanism to protect the would-be users from the risk of losing a vital service.

There may be bigger implications still, however. As I said, Google has asked us to build our lives around it, and we have responded. This response entails a powerful self-reinforcement mechanism: both providers and users of information and other services change their behaviour as a result of the availability of a Google product. You can see this on a small scale with Reader. People design their websites and content based on the assumption that others, via an RSS reader, will come across and read that content in a certain way. And readers structure their reading habits, and ultimately their mental models of what information is available and where, based on the existence of this tool. The more people used Reader, the more attractive it was to have an RSS feed and to write posts in feed-friendly ways. And the more people provided RSS content and structured online interactions around the blogs that pass through RSS, the more attractive it became to be a part of that ecosystem. If you then pull away the product at the heart of that system, you end up causing significant disruption, assuming there aren't good alternatives available.

The issue becomes a bit more salient when you think about something like search. Many of us now operate under the assumption that if we want to find something we will be able to do so quickly and easily via Google search. If I want an idea for a unique gift for someone, I can put in related search terms and feel pretty confident that I'll get back store websites and blogs and Pinterest pages and newspaper stories and pictures all providing possible matches. That in hand, I can quickly comparison shop, again via search, and order online. And if I'm a retailer, I can count on precisely the same dynamic and will structure my business accordingly.

If I'm a researcher, I know I can quickly find relevant academic papers, data, newspaper accounts, expert analysis, and who knows what else related to an enormous range of topics, and I know that whatever research product I ultimately produce will be added to this bonanza. Once we all become comfortable with that state of affairs we quickly begin optimising the physical and digital resources around us. Encyclopaedias? Antiques. Book shelves and file cabinets? Who needs them? And once we all become comfortable with that, we begin rearranging our mental architecture. We stop memorising key data points and start learning how to ask the right questions. We begin to think differently. About lots of things. We stop keeping a mental model of the physical geography of the world around us, because why bother? We can call up an incredibly detailed and accurate map of the world, complete with satellite and street-level images, whenever we want. We stop remembering who said what when about what engagement on such-and-such a date, because we have fully archived email and calendar services for all of that. And we instead devote more mental energy to figuring out how to combine the wealth of information now at our hands into interesting things. Those interesting things might be blog posts or cat GIFs or novels or theories of the universe or personal relationships. The bottom line is that the more we all participate in this world, the more we come to depend on it. The more it becomes the world.

(…)

Good points, though I am puzzled by Ryan's “If you then pull away the product at the heart of that system”. I never regarded Reader as anything more than a convenient, widely-adopted sync service. But Ryan obviously read RSS feeds in Reader in a browser.

Personally, I think Reader is a very weak offering compared to the excellent clients available – especially for iOS.

What share of RSS eyeballs did Reader have?

WhatsApp?

Published March 19, 2013 Technology Closed
Tags:

(…) No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they’ll see tomorrow.  –Brian on WhatsApp Blog explaining Why we don’t sell ads.

Eamonn Carey: ”At one point or another, it’s been the number one paid app in 131 markets globally.”

NASA: “Hybrid Wing” Uses Half the Fuel of a Standard Airplane

Published January 28, 2013 Technology , Transportation 5 Comments

NASA has been researching Blended Wing Body (BWB) aircraft, building a series of larger and larger remote controlled experimental planes. NASA has recently announced a carbon-composite based manufacturing process that they think will enable production of sufficiently strong structures for commercial use.

 Wikipedia on BWB: aircraft have a flattened and airfoil shaped body, which produces most of the lift, the wings contributing the balance. The body form is composed of distinct and separate wing structures, though the wings are smoothly blended into the body. By way of contrast, flying wing designs are defined as a tailless fixed-wing aircraft which has no definite fuselage, with most of the crew, payload and equipment being housed inside the main wing structure.

A blended wing body has lift-to-drag ratio 50% greater than a conventional airplane. Thus BWB incorporates design features from both a futuristic fuselage and flying wing design. (…) 

I’ve not yet found any drawings of the proposed composite construction – but Kevin Bullis at MIT Technology Review has this:

The second challenge is building a full-scale version of the aircraft with pressurized cabins that is structurally sound. One reason tubular airplanes have persisted is that it’s relatively easy to build a tube that can withstand the forces acting on it from the outside during flight while maintaining cabin pressure. The hybrid wing design involves a flatter, box-like fuselage that blends with the wings. The flatter structure, which includes some near-right angles, is much more difficult to build in a way that’s strong enough and light enough to be practical.

NASA’s manufacturing process starts with preformed carbon composite rods. The rods are covered with carbon fiber fabric and stitched into place. Fabric is then stitched over foam strips to create cross members. The fabric is impregnated with an epoxy to create a rigid composite structure.

Sections of a fuselage built with the technique were tested and shown to withstand up to the forces that would be applied to a finished aircraft. Tests also showed that when enough pressure was applied to cause the parts to fail, the stitching used to make the structure stopped cracks from spreading—a key to avoiding catastrophic failure in flight.

Facebook is becoming less relevant to active Internet communicators

Published January 1, 2013 Technology 1 Comment

We know that Facebook is loosing participation of the younger cohort that has been the backbone of FB growth. That doesn’t look at all good for Facebook’s future. Our own purely anecdotal evidence is that increasing numbers of researchers are shifting their efforts away from their RSS blogs towards Twitter feeds that reference the same new papers with much lower overhead.

Excerpts from Kevin Kelleher’s article “Facebook’s Growing Silent-Majority Problem”:

(…) In August, according to comScore, the time people spent on Facebook’s website dropped 12 percent from a year earlier. By contrast, time spent on Google grew 11 percent in the same period.

(…) That’s borne out by the data showing that Facebook users between 12 and 17 spent 42 percent less time on its website last month, and those between 18 and 24 spent 25 percent less time.

ecoATM: sell your old devices at an ATM-hosted instant auction?

Published December 29, 2012 Technology Closed

Tyler Cowen posted a brief on a new, very innovative venture. I’ll speculate this is a business model that you have not thought of.

…ecoATM, a firm based in San Diego…has devised and deployed in several American cities a series of ATM-like devices that will automatically analyse your mobile phone, MP3 player or phone charger, and then make you an offer for it. These machines will give you cash in hand or, if you prefer, send the money as a donation to the charity of your choice. The hope is that this hassle-free approach will appeal to people who can’t be bothered to recycle their old phone when buying a new one.

After taking fingerprints and driving-licence details (to discourage crooks from using them to fence stolen goods), ecoATM’s kiosks employ a mixture of computer vision and electronic testing (they will automatically present users with the correct cable and connector) to perform a trick that even the most committed gadget fan might struggle with—telling apart each of the thousands of models of mobile phones, chargers and MP3 players that now exist. They can even make a reasonable guess about how well-used (or damaged) a device is, which can affect its resale value. Any mistakes the machine does make are logged and used to improve accuracy in future.

Once the device on offer has been identified, the kiosk then enters it into an electronic auction. Interested parties bid, and a price is struck in seconds. This auction is the key to ecoATM’s business model, because it means the firm is acting as a broker, rather than carrying a stock of second-hand equipment which it then has to sell. If the owner of the equipment accepts the offer, the kiosk swallows the device and spits out the money.

Really.  The article is here.

it looks to me that ecoATM has a multi-layered moat. The physical ATMs and their locations is obvious. But they are also building an ecosystem around their auctions. If they get enough signups it won’t be easy to copy.

Kevin J. Delaney: Look beyond news for mobile innovation

Published December 28, 2012 Media , Technology Closed

Kevin J. Delaney is editor-in-chief of Quartz, the global business news site launched in September by Atlantic Media. He was previously managing editor of The Wall Street Journal Online. This essay is part of Predictions for Journalism 2013: A Nieman Lab Series.

 

(…) Mobile news will start growing up
The list of breakthrough interfaces for reading news on smartphones is a short one. Instapaper is arguably the pioneer in this area, with its focus on a simple reading experience. Vox Media’s SB Nation iPhone app cleverly grouped news updates about the same topic (Vox tweaked that design in its current web app approach.) But many mobile news apps and sites are little more than re-skinned RSS readers, and surprisingly few publishers even bother to format their email newsletters for easy reading on iPhones and BlackBerries. When we were creating Quartz earlier this year, we needed to look for inspiration to non-news applications, such as the Clear to-do list app — it’s hard to find boldness and creativity in the news industry’s smartphone products.

(…) Clearly, more publishers will reconsider their native app focus in 2013 in favor of HTML5.

(…) Gawker Media’s Nick Denton is among those who have made admirable efforts to improve commenting, and Nick has rightly proclaimed that comments on their own can represent as high-quality content as any article. But most of the best discussion takes place off publishers’ sites, on Twitter, Facebook and in private emails. This is a reality that won’t be fully addressed in 2013, if ever.

AC34: Atemis Racing Navigator Kevin Hall

Published December 24, 2012 Technology Closed
Tags:

Michelle Slade interviews Kevin Hall – the head of the Artemis performance-instrumentation team. This excerpt illuminates some of the complexities and tradeoffs associated with the ongoing hydrofoil experiments. There is no free lunch.

(…) You guys don’t seem to be putting much emphasis on foiling – what’s your thinking on that?
KH: I remember being in one of the very early design team meetings and one of the assignments for the performance team was to make sure we were on top of all the things we would want to measure, maybe occasionally have some sailor input. Adam (May) and I are both Moth sailors. At that meeting, [designer] Juan [Kuoyoumdjian] and his team came in and announced that it was clear that if you could get a boat foiling and going straight and fast, there was a little bit less drag so it went faster. We had that discussion a long time ago, but it’s correct. We’re not pursuing it to the same extent that the other teams have because there’s always been the question of control. It’s one thing to get something to fly in a model and it’s another to get it to fly in the real world. Hats off to ETNZ for doing that – really!

Then there are trade-offs after that. You pay a price for generating the lift to be able to fly—that price is the drag—then you pay another price for generating that lift in a way that also gives not active control like we have in the Moth but a form like that you can control as the height/lift/leeway changes. They’ve done a good job of making that fairly self-regulating. For us, we’re not sure that all those penalties are worth it. So while you’ll probably sure you’ll see our boat out of the water a bit, I’m not sure how much.

There’s rumor that foils may be abandoned because of the size of the course.
KH: Even on a really good day on a Moth, you do have to bear away and get up on the foils before get going fast. For that brief time you’re slower than a boat that’s designed to sail through the water traditionally. They may already have worked out that all those little times where you have to heat up after a jibe or bear away [after a tack], maybe that’s too costly. We can kind of tell a little bit what they’re doing when they’re going straight but it’s very hard to have a feel for all the dynamic stuff from faraway. Certainly they [ETNZ] know that.

So far Oracle, Emirates Team NZ and Prada have all been testing foiling. ETNZ has been testing for some time on the SL33 surrogate cats (very effective for learning!) The SL33 is another Morrelli & Melvin design: 

Horace Dediu: Apple is approaching Samsung capital expenditures

Published December 17, 2012 Apple , Technology Closed

Horace Dediu has been writing an important series on Apple and Samsung capital structure. In his 12 Dec 2012 post Horace compares 2006 – 2012 capital expenditures. 

In the post reviewing Samsung’s Capital Structure I noted that its component divisions have historically taken 90% of capital investments and that the overall capital intensity for Samsung Electronics has increased in proportion to its component revenues.

In another post regarding the capital structures of other technology companies with different business models I noted that Apple has changed its capital structure to a significant degree over the previous three years.

In the following graph I combined these observations to show how capital expenditure patterns may be used to discern the underlying business model.

That’s just a teaser tidbit. So go straight to the source for the Asymco analysis.  There is a lot going on here that is not obvious.

I consider this extraordinary evidence of an extraordinary shift in strategy.

(…) 

So what tale does this capital tell?

 

Twitter

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 192 other followers