Bastiane's Profile

It’s interesting to see the development of autonomous vehicle from Uber especially because they talked a lot about bringing more opportunities and additional revenue to its drivers. But I think this is the issue that every company or everyone needs to address. We know AI will replace more and more human jobs, even more for white collar workers than blue collar workers. But how are we going to help people develop new skills and move up to more valuable jobs. If we don’t help people with the transition, it’d be difficult to roll out disruptive technologies.

It’s interesting to see retail analytics solution from Euclid. There are a few other companies working on similar solutions including RetailNext and my previous company. I think what they can take a step further is to integrate online and offline data and provide a even better shopping experience through omnichannel marketing. With that said, the challenges to integrate and make sense of all the data still remain huge. It’ll take time and resources to achieve.

It’s interesting that we almost have the same title for our posts about GE and Intel. But I think this highlights the challenges that all these traditional tech giants face now. In my previous company, we always like to quote “If you went to bed last night as an industrial company, you’re going to wake up this morning as a software and analytics company,” what GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt told 100s of customers and analysts attending the third “Minds + Machines” summit. The challenges and opportunities are massive with the emergence of IoT. It’s not surprising that Intel and GE are the 2 most active investors in the segment.

I like the point you made about privacy. I just joined a data security talk in engineering school. It’s scary that a couple of companies now control most of the data and people are not aware of the risk. When we use free resources from the internet, we don’t realize they actually come with a cost. Through these services Facebook and Google they own all the data about us. Using this data, they know about us better than we do. These Internet giants are ‘harvesting’ personal data and making billions of dollars a year, but are not properly regulated.

Agree with your point that they need to act quickly into IoT. I wrote about Intel but I see similar challenges that Cisco, GE, and Intel are all facing now. Everyone knows IoT is the future but it’s very difficult for hardware companies to transform into IoT solution providers (I wrote about more detail reasons in my post). However, I think focus on industrial rather than consumer because, 1st, industrial segment is where Cisco is traditionally strong at. When company is making changes, it’s important to identify and leverage its core competence. Secondly, the potential for industrial segment is actually much bigger. IC Insights predicts revenue from Industrial Internet of Things spending will increase from $6.4B to $12.4B attaining a 17.98% CAGR while the consumer segment is expected to only account for 6.7m.

This is a more and more pressing issue as demand for cloud computing continues to increase. Recently, there were lots of discussions about facebook’s plan to build data center in Taiwan and it’s impact to the environment. However, working for one of the major server manufacturers in the world, I didn’t see much conversation going on about environmental concerns. Customers care more about processing power and price than environment friendness. With that said, I do see a few new initiatives in the industry. There are start-ups working on next generation GPU with higher processing power and less energy consumption. At advantech, we are also trying to reduce heat generation and energy consumption by redesign our server. It’s important that we recognize this issue and continue to work in it collectively.

Air pollution is a very serious and pressing problem in greater China region. Currently many people still choose to work in Beijing for better job opportunities while we don’t really know the real risk of air pollution. There’s still not enough data to conclude how exactly is air pollution going to affect human health over 10, 20, 30 year period of time. It’s interesting to see how US is trying to address the issue and how we can collectly make a change.

Interesting research about Miami Beach. Coming from Taiwan, a small island with frequent climate challenges such as earthquakes, volcano and typhoons, we always think about the rising of sea level. However, most people in Taiwan consider this a future problem and are not taking any action now. The initiatives took by Miami is a good reminder and lesson for Taiwanese government. It’s be worthwhile to come up with more proactive actions, for example, how we can prevent the sea level from rising so rapidly by doing global alliance etc on top of current actions.

Working for a company highly impacted by macro trends such as climate change and digital innovation allow me to consider embedding these trends into our business strategy and come up with mitigation and growth plan. It’s interesting to see big companies such as google to take on initiatives because millions or billions of people’s lives will be changed depending on these companies’ decision. I am especially interested in Google’s future strategy around smart home and autonomous drive vehicle incorporating sustainability strategy

Interesting perspective on what Navy can potentially do to address climate change especially about boiling ocean. It reminds me of a broader perspective about climate change that there are ed other complex and potentially topiocs to take into consideration when we are trying to solve climate change, economic, politics, bargaining power among nations, etc. It’s important that we don’t lose sight of the full picture.

I am following GE Ventures and it’s IoT strategy so find it interesting to see an analysis from climate change perspective, especially about the ecomagination prioritization process.