Greek Complexity

Big Data and Big Government

The phrase Big Data is trending big on the Ingternecks these days and I predict it will only continue to snowball in the next few years. May become as prevalent, even cliched, as terms like Tipping Point, BRIC and so on.

A piece by the New York Times titled U.S. Intelligence Unit Aims to Build a ‘Data Eye in the Sky’ shows yet another of the possibilities that come with this development:

More than 60 years ago, in his “Foundation” series, the science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov invented a new science — psychohistory — that combined mathematics and psychology to predict the future. Now social scientists are trying to mine the vast resources of the Internet — Web searches and Twitter messages, Facebook and blog posts, the digital location trails generated by billions of cellphones — to do the same thing.

But a perceived hitch along the way:

Advocates of privacy rights worry that public data and the related techniques developed in the new Iarpa project will be adapted for clandestine “total information” operations. [...] The ease of acquiring and manipulating huge data sets charting Internet behavior causes many researchers to warn that the data mining technologies may be quickly outrunning the ability of scientists to think through questions of privacy and ethics.

Alright, but once Pandora's box is opened, how does one put everything back inside and lock it up? Not possible. Even ignoring this practical reality, if one looks only at the moralities and ethics of it, what they appear to be doing is taking information publicly available on the Internet and analysing it, just that this is being done with large-scale automated systems rather than manually. Is that wrong? Isn't this what private corporations already do today for profit?

Olympus provides fodder for schadenfreude (and my Dummies book)

Yet another little anecdote to include in my forthcoming The Dummies Guide to Completely Effing Things Up. After news broke that Olympus had fired its recently appointed CEO, its shares have reportedly dropped about 40% since Friday. That's about a few billion dollars.

An Olympus spokesman on Saturday responded, "The reason for [the board's decision] is the major differences in management style and direction."

via Olympus Conflict Spills Out (WSJ)

I wonder how "major" these differences could be given that Woodford has been with the group since... wait for it... 1981. Surely he knew something of the company's management style. Surely the company knew something of his management style. I seem to recall the WSJ also had a mention, since removed from their website, of Woodford being regarded as new blood. Gah. In fact:

In its official explanation for the firing, Kikukawa said Woodford, who is from the UK, ultimately could not understand Japanese management style or culture -- though that was also one of the reasons the company had promoted him in the first place, hoping he would make decisions and develop strategies that would be difficult for a Japanese executive to accomplish. Olympus had previously lavisted praise on Woodford for his turnaround of the company's European branch.

Another quote from the FT:

Mr Woodford has stressed that he has seen no evidence that Olympus executives benefited personally from the acquisitions, claiming instead “a catalogue of calamitous errors and exceptionally poor judgement” that resulted in inflated pay-outs to others and a sizeable loss of shareholder value.

What, is that all?

Also see this and this, both from the WSJ.

Why am I writing about this? Only because the incompetence, misguided secretiveness, self-serving behaviour and thumbing of noses at fiduciary duties remind me of a couple of other companies I know. Neither Japanese, since you ask.

Best Places to Ride a Bike

Just saw Bicycling.com's list of 50 Rides of a Lifetime. The byline reads:

We asked readers and staff to name their all-time favorite places to pedal. The result (in no particular order): classic destinations, must-do events, and two-wheeled adventures that should be on every cyclist's bucket list.

Some are a little silly like

8. Ride a Bike to Work.

and

20. Rent a Beach Cruiser

Can I visualise myself sitting in a rocking-chair telling anyone who'll listen about that one life-changing ride I did on a trundler on a beach boardwalk? Er, no.

Overall still a nice list to aspire to though very US-focused. I score about 10%. The positive side of that is that it leaves plenty more to do!

Why two wheels are better than four (or more)

Along the lines of "You aren't stuck in traffic. You are traffic." comes this terrific visualisation:

via

Applies to motorised two-wheelers too, of course.

Platformize! Now!

Ya gotta love rants like this: Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

Amazon comes in for a lot of stick, Microsoft gets huge kudos and Google is torn apart. It all feels like an alternative universe, only it's not.

Excerpt:

The Golden Rule of Platforms, "Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as "Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything." You can't just bolt it on later. Certainly not easily at any rate -- ask anyone who worked on platformizing MS Office. Or anyone who worked on platformizing Amazon. If you delay it, it'll be ten times as much work as just doing it correctly up front. You can't cheat. You can't have secret back doors for internal apps to get special priority access, not for ANY reason. You need to solve the hard problems up front.

Google gets credit for letting the writer leave this online. On their own servers. But not much credit for anything else.

First big acquisition in Indian gaming evaluated

Disney India, which already owned more than half of Indiagames, announced plans recently to acquire a further 30% in the company. So how does this measure up?

VCCircle has done an analysis of the likely valuation and returns to shareholders. It certainly bodes well for the Indian entrepreneurship and early-stage investment ecosystem that a long-standing player has gone through an M&A process successfully, achieving a good-sized valuation with a global player as the buyer. Terrific.

However.

Cisco and Adobe, two of the company's investors, doubling their money in over six years? And unrealised at that. That's really not much of a return. It also isn't something for the management team to be particularly proud of. The investment hasn't gone to zero for sure, but it ain't no hit either and shouldn't be pitched as one.

Two caveats. One: I am taking VCCircle's numbers at face value here. Who knows, the investors might get a sweetener or two to up their returns. Even so, I don't expect this can help too much. And two: if we separate the investment returns from the company's own needs, I think this transaction makes eminent sense for the company. No arguments there.

Note that I don't foresee my firm investing in the gaming or content business because we (meaning, I) don't think we have any particular expertise at picking games or other content that will prove to be winners. I'm making a generic observation here about return requirements in the VC business.

Also, VC is certainly a "hit business" as Luke Johnson says, meaning "disproportionate rewards accrue to the most successful participants, while a substantial majority earn peanuts". The ratio of successes to so-so investments and failures is generally highly skewed. One way to mitigate the risk of investing in, er, non-hits is to focus on stuff you know. I certainly am more comfortable assessing technology businesses than I am predicting the tastes of the average gamer.

Why I will never buy an Apple product

I used an Apple Macintosh as a teen and liked it very much so let it not be said that I speak with zero prior knowledge. In more recent years, I have stayed away from Apple products partly because they started out being too-cool-for-you and are now everyone-has-one, and partly because of the closed walled garden ecosystem that they put in place and vigorously enforced. [Update: And they're expensive!] Now we have this more complete description of Apple's (and Steve Jobs's) failings:

In the days after Steve Jobs' death, friends and colleagues have, in customary fashion, been sharing their fondest memories of the Apple co-founder. He's been hailed as "a genius" and "the greatest CEO of his generation" by pundits and tech journalists. But a great man's reputation can withstand a full accounting. And, truth be told, Jobs could be terrible to people, and his impact on the world was not uniformly positive.

via What Everyone Is Too Polite to Say About Steve Jobs

Stuff like this has got to affect the prospects of the company itself at some point, because surely consumers, the media, government, Apple's suppliers and maybe even Wall Street (!) don't only care about the pretty gadgets the company churns out.

The different faces of innovation

Nice piece on innovation by Malcolm Gladwell in his usual breezy, readable style. This bit in particular resonated with me:

“You can be one of the most successful makers of enterprise technology products the world has ever known, but that doesn’t mean your instincts will carry over to the consumer market,” the tech writer Harry McCracken recently wrote. “They’re really different, and few companies have ever been successful in both.”

from Creation Myth: Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation

Nice little ending too. Read all the way through without skipping. Cheating won't be as fun!

This was published a few months ago. Not directly related to Steve Jobs's demise.

Bringing banking to the masses via technology and telecoms

Here's a massive opportunity for technology companies serving the financial services sector: roving bank tellers serve rural India. Has the potential to be a great "Bottom of the Pyramid" success story. Opportunity across several areas including banking software, analytics, security, mobile payments, CRM and so on. I imagine a similar opportunity exists in nearly every emerging market, not just India.

Newsletter troubles

Just a quick admin post to tell my readers (all two of you) that just because someone at Yahoo! couldn't let well enough alone, my article bookmarks don't get inserted into my newsletter any more. If you want to see my daily bookmarked articles, you now need to manually click here every so often instead of having them delivered to your email in the newsletter.