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Hi Bipul,

Regarding the first question – Splunk can ingest data from several sources and then organize it for various use cases.
For the current use case of machine data ingestion and analytics I think Splunk’s value is proven in the market and hence the current model would suffice. However, once Splunk’s instances start getting deployed on the edge a more customized pricing solution directly tied to benefit (which could be cost saving, reduced time of decision making or better experience for the end user – which could be quantified in several ways) might be needed. In that Splunk would have to solve for how to keep the pricing model simple yet accurate.

I agree Meili, developers at the frontier would adopt followed by the mass and Facebook would have to do the initial seeding. The comparison with Snapchat is correct, however I feel that on Snapchat you are clicking and taking some actions and there is some control whereas with mind it can get completely random (too many thoughts cross our mind some intended and some unintended) and for that I feel there would have to be some deletion experience.

Nice post Katarina.
I was reading about VR in healthcare for my post too and am curious to understand what kind of content does Psious develop is it a game or an immersive experience in a random destination or something else?
In addition when going direct to customer did it face any sort of health regulation challenges that it had to overcome or are approvals not required in this case?

Nice post Christy.

Based on your suggestion for a live chat and the feeling of community NextVR may provide authentication via twitter / facebook for its matches and people can watch the games and tweet / chat on fb messenger on the side. In fact with the kind of focus that VR is getting by the social media giants it might even make sense for them to acquire NextVR to provide real time VR content to their audiences and other monetization methods for the same apart from tickets.

Nice post Yezi.

I was curious to know that is there any specific reason as to why the AR offering alongside the IoT suite of products and not as a standalone layer which can be put on top of other IoT products?
Would not it make sense to keep the AR platform separate so that it can grow independently and become a much stronger platform?

Nice post Meili, very informational.

In your opinion can Facebook pull off getting the mind reading technology to be used by other app developers unless it allows people to control “deletion” (both real time and with a lag) of the events Facebook has already read from their minds and also to forget the associated sub-events that Facebook might have created from reading those events?
Do you think app developers would be ready to deploy this into their VR/AR apps?

Nice read Rahul.
One thing I am curious about is that you mentioned about being able to collect data from 3rd party ERP systems – my question is who are these 3rd party ERP players and why would they be inclined to share their data with Graze?
The second thing I would like to know about is are all products essentially crowd sourced or does Graze experiment reasonably with inputs from nutrition scientists / dieticians?

Nice post Felix.
Few questions –
a) “Amino has aggregated over 9 billion insurance claims” – How has Amino achieved this? Have they tried to form arrangements with every insurance provider? As a startup did they not face data privacy concerns in getting this data?

b) Do you visualize a situation in which they would try to make the data entry format consistent and remove the heterogeneity ?

c) How does Amino make money?

Extremely lucid explanation of a very complex topic Bipul, thanks!

1. One thing that I am curious is how can startups today even think of disrupting Microsoft, Google, Amazon etc – essentially the big players in artificial intelligence? Since most AI algorithms require a large amount of data and compute power to improve themselves would not the big players always be the winners in the end?

2. Secondly, during my summer I was interacting with a very senior engineer and he told me that most of the code we write to develop applications today will become a commodity in the next 10-15 years. Computers will be too smart and write their own code using AI. Only very specialized code would be written by human beings. In such a world where AI is so dominant and pervasive how do you see other players apart from a few capturing value?

Nice article Tyler. It is interesting how entrepreneurs in the past have thought of websites for curating itinerary, based on a user’s taste, for travel but as a feature it is still absent on these platforms. Considering the there is not a well known site for recommending travel plans and the fact that these travel portals already have so much users, crowd sourcing recommendations in a seamless way should definitely be a focus area for these portals. It not only will make life easier for the travelers but would also increase the community feeling around the portal among the various stakeholders.

Nice article Cameron and interesting reference to Wikipedia and AirBnB at the end.
My take on that is once you have provided a digital platform for the crowd you must ultimately respect their sentiments otherwise the participation and faith in future such initiatives will decline – in this case not going ahead with the crowd suggestion was entirely wrong. Maybe making the name a bit funny would have got the citizens more interested in research.
(However we do need to be cognizant of, proactive about and prevent the abuse of freedom provided by such initiatives as has been the case with some of the AirBnB house owners.)

Hi Scott, nice article. Interesting how Lego is using digital tools to crowdsource idea generation. A couple of questions / thoughts
1. Do users with more clutch power get a preference in enabling their ideas to be more discoverable or getting some other kind of preferential treatment?
2. I presume that most of the members of the digital community would be adults. Does Lego somehow try to get the voice of children (who are the primary LEGO users) on the designs submitted?

Hi Bipul, thanks. I do not think that being open and democratizing idea generation is damaging. It not only creates engagement among the users which ultimately fosters greater stickiness among the users. Secondly, there would be a logic (based on acuteness of need) on what Salesforce chooses to work on. In case Salesforce does not work on something (because most of the users do not feel that need) and say a competitor works on that feature would users leave Salesforce for that (considering it is a B2B tech product) – i doubt. Now if a competitor repeatedly tries and do that – in my opinion that then Salesforce would ultimately win because the competitor would be having a follower strategy in product roadmap development rather than taking a lead and defining the space.

In addition – Salesforce in the past has always adopted a transparent strategy in dealing with the community for example: https://trust.salesforce.com/en/ is a site they launched longtime back, to give real time performance monitoring for Salesforce users.

Tyler, I agree that there will be big winners but there cannot be multiple big winners. It would be couple of them in each major geography – at this point Uber and Lyft are the ones and if they keep their act together they will win. For example RideAustin and Fasten who operate in Austin were not able to keep up during SXSW event because they never really had that kind of performance testing for peak demand which Uber and Lyft are subjected to in real life scenarios – so one which has more scale, keeps the user focus and keeps its acts together will win.

Hi David,

Thanks. When an idea is pulled by the Salesforce team they change the status as under review / under development etc – if that is the case then the third party teams are free to develop. If an idea gets 250 votes, then it automatically goes for review so third party apps won’t start their work until they see the outcome of Salesforce team members’ review.

Hi James, completely agree.

As far as the algorithms are concerned they will be optimized based on data and Uber will always have more of that. Any other company won’t be able to provide more optimized algorithms (just based on data since they won’t have more data). However, if someone tomorrow comes with an entirely different way of looking at all the aspects which make an on demand car ride possible and makes us think why were things not this way with Uber / Lyft / Fasten – that would be a 10x improvement on algorithm. (Consider Google’s backlinks based pagerank algorithm to Alta Vista’s search algorithm). Till that happens the better algorithm would just be the one which can play with more data – that would be Uber.

In addition, Uber’s approach of looking at the entire transportation industry allows it to collect and act on more data. Secondly it continues to be the first app to be recalled for a vast majority of the population because of its scale and attempts at targeting other aspects of transportation industry.
I am not sure how old, but there is a product Uber Movement (https://movement.uber.com/cities) – which Uber offers for the city planners for better planning of city infrastructure. This is another of the several Uber products showcasing how scale and diversification allows it to become more entrenched in the city’s ecosystems across the world.

Nice post Carolin – I am interested to know that since at scale autonomous driving is still far off – do you think that there might be a new player or a realignment amongst the current players in the market (such as a futuristic scenario where Google Maps and Uber collaborate for autonomous driving) would Here be able to maintain the strong position it has today?

Extremely well written Yezi! One of the finest posts I have read in a long time which explains the technologies around blockchain and their application in the finance world so lucidly.
Since this is a technology where reliability is a major factor, do you think adopting the newest trend is right for ethereum always as it looks to scale always? Won’t it make sense to ensure that someone else tests a new technology since a lot is riding on ensuring reliable service?
The second question I have (and this maybe due to the fact that I have very basic level of understanding of this field) but do you see a future where Visa and MasterCard to develop a blockchain platform of their own?

Great article Erik. I was wondering how do you visualize the entry of behemoths such as Google (with the G suite of apps for business) and Microsoft’s Office 365 impacting Box’s value proposition and future growth? (since Microsoft and Google have the rest of the ecosystem such as e-mails etc figured out for enterprises)

Interesting article Yi, nicely written. I am curious to understand what is stopping Amazon to build the same kind of supply chain management products for its suppliers – based on my understanding I think they already have that built as part of Amazon Marketplace offering. If that is the case do you think if Amazon intensely focuses on furniture Wayfair would be able to still grow? Or is it the case that the pie (furniture market) is big enough for everyone to take a bite?

Thanks Nupur. I agree that this will be scale business requiring a critical mass. But the way I see it – fragmentation is visible today but a decade from now one or max two global scale players would be surviving and thriving. The reason – even though network effects are at play at a local level, a lot of the optimization of algorithms is based on ingestion of more data. The platform which owns more data will have better algorithms leading to a superior experience for every stakeholder – this in turn will lead to attracting better talent and the virtuous cycle will continue. However, if anyone comes with a significantly (10x) better algorithm to do everything – geo locating riders, drivers, other assets; optimizing routes; matching supply and demand; pricing – then they can upset the status quo. But considering Uber’s differentiated mindset of looking at things I will bet Uber will be that company and will upset the status quo by disrupting itself.

Yes, but as long as API entrepreneurs can look after a greater portion of the underlying wiring we would witness more and more creative ideas coming to life at a higher level of abstraction.

Completely agree, API based businesses are transforming the digital landscape and making it significantly simpler to create stuff. For example without Google Maps API it is hard to imagine a number of location based applications.

Nicely summarized the battle between Blockbuster and Netflix Tyler! I agree to your assessment that in today’s dynamic digital age past success is no guarantee for future successes for established companies. Based on the Blockbuster-Netflix saga and other similar happenings in different industries what do you think can the big players do or adopt as a strategy to keep themselves from becoming irrelevant (since the new digital business model seems unlucrative to them in its infancy)?

Mohit – how does BlaBla car ensures the safety of the passengers during the ride or does it absolve itself of any responsibility?

Nice analysis Bipul – with such a phenomenal growth and now being in the unicorn club why do you think OfferUp is not so well know more so when it is in the consumer tech space?