Masters of the Universe Are Threatened As Goldman Embraces Automation

Description:   At its height back in 2000, the U.S. cash equities trading desk at Goldman Sachs’s New York headquarters employed 600 traders, buying and selling stock on the orders of the investment bank’s large clients. Today there are just two equity traders left.

Source: MIT Technology Review

Date: Feb 7, 2017

The experience of its New York traders is just one early example of a transformation of Goldman Sachs, and increasingly other Wall Street firms, that began with the rise in computerized trading, but has accelerated over the past five years, moving into more fields of finance that humans once dominated. Chavez, who will become chief financial officer in April, says areas of trading like currencies and even parts of business lines like investment banking are moving in the same automated direction that equities have already traveled.

Today, nearly 45 percent of trading is done electronically, according to Coalition, a U.K. firm that tracks the industry. In addition to back-office clerical workers, on Wall Street machines are replacing a lot of highly paid people, too.   READ REST OF STORY

 Questions for discussion:

1. Do you feel that that Computerized trading and AI will make the financial industry almost a employee less industry ?  Why or Why not?

2.  Do you feel that Government industries are susceptible to this sort of computerization and AI to reduces Public service employees in Canada by a significant amount?   explain

Evolution in SEO Industry

Description:    According to Google, a media outlet that has old content is akin to selling out-of-date food at a grocery store. It’s a big no-no and, if caught perpetrating this type of content, it will be punished by receiving a significant drop in search engine visibility – and rightly so.

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Source: Forbes.com

Date: May 31. 2016

While we know Google has been a naysayer about old content for some time and raised the bar on what defines good content by going after content farms, companies with static websites, and even big brands like eBay, this move to strike out at some of the biggest publishing brands in the industry, including Apple, The Washington Post, Time and The New York Times, tells us Google is at it again by making major changes to its algorithm. Some of the bigger hits included a nearly 80% drop in SEO visibility for TheAtlantic.com and a 65% reduction in mobile visibility for Wired.com.  read rest of story

Questions:
1.  Why is the SEO feeling a need to evolve?

2.  Should you manage your SEO within your organization or outsource it to an SEO firm?  Why or Why not?

Talkative homebuyers beware, the seller might be listening

Description: Real estate agent says clients used audio, video surveillance to eavesdrop on potential buyers

Source: CBC.CA

Date: Jan 16, 2019

Homebuyers should watch what they say during home viewings, according to an Ontario real estate agent who says two of her clients recently used cameras and microphones to eavesdrop on potential buyers.

Juliana Webster says the rules should be changed to force sellers to say if homes are under surveillance.

“When you go into a private home you don’t naturally expect [surveillance],” said Webster, who works in Hamilton.

The wrong sort of comment, she warns, “could be used against the buyer, like, if they said, ‘Oh, we would totally pay much more for the house.'”

Webster said she was unaware of the surveillance until her clients mentioned it. One offered to help a potential buyer who had been observed trying to use an appliance in the home. The other heard something that assured them the sale would go through.   READ REST OF STORY

 Questions for discussion:

1) “When you go into a private home you don’t naturally expect [surveillance]”?  is this true? why or why not?

2) Should there be a law to prevent surveillance in your own home during a home buying visit?  Could this not be a problem with any transaction, sellers or buyerse are going to try get an unequal amount of information before making proposals?

Amazon Knows What You Buy And It’s Building a Big Ad Business From It

Description: When a chain of physical therapy centers wanted new patients, it aimed online ads at people near its offices who had bought knee braces recently on Amazon.

Source: NYTimes.com

Date: Jan 20, 2019

When a financial services provider wanted to promote its retirement advisory business, it directed ads to people in their 40s and 50s who had recently ordered a personal finance book from Amazon.

And when a major credit card company wanted new customers, it targeted people who used cards from other banks on the retail site.

The advertisers found those people by using Amazon’s advertising services, which leverage what the company knows better than anyone: consumers’ online buying habits.

“Amazon has really straightforward database — they know what I buy,” said Daniel Knijnik, co-founder of Quartile Digital, an Amazon-focused ad agency that oversaw the ads for the clinics and retirement services. “For an advertiser, that’s a dream.”  READ REST OF STORY

 Questions for discussion:

1. Do you feel that Amazon can out google , Google in its ability to target customers for advertisers?  Why or Why not?

2.  The size, reach, and power of Amazon are immense, do you see any problems with the worlds information being controlled for the most part by  3-5 ver y large tech companies including Google, Amazon & Facebook?  Why or Why not?

Netflix’s Road to Streaming Dominance is Cash-Fueled

Description: The streaming service surprised Wall Street with huge gains in subscribers in the third quarter. The results showed why AT&T and Disney spent big on their latest acquisitions

Source: NYTimes.com

Date: Oct 17. 2018

Netflix’s appetite for content means it has to spend big, resulting in what’s known as “negative free cash flow.” More money is going out the door than coming in, a difference that Netflix covers by borrowing even more.

But Netflix can also show a profit because accounting rules allow entertainment companies to record most of their production or licensing costs later on.

A show like “Stranger Things,” entirely funded and owned by Netflix, costs as much as $8 million per episode. Netflix pays for all of that upfront, but the cost isn’t counted until the show is available on the service, often a year or more after production. The next season is expected to be released in the summer of 2019. read rest of story

Questions:

1.  Analyze NetFlix’s business model?
2. What is NetFlix’s competitive advantage and is it sustainable? Why? or Why not?
3. What is NetFlix’s greatest threat and threat strength and opportunity?

Robotic Milkers and an Automated Greenhouse: Inside a High-Tech Small Farm

Description: About 150 Jersey cows in the rolling terrain at Rivendale Farms in Bulger, some 25 miles west of Pittsburgh, wear Fitbit-like collars that monitor their movement, eating and rumination patterns. They are milked not by humans but by robotic machines.

Source: NYTimes.com

Date: Jan 13, 2019

Robotic milkers have been available for years. But the technology has steadily improved, requiring far less human assistance than a few years ago.

The machines cost about $200,000 each. Without them, and an automated feeding system, the milking barn at Rivendale would require five workers instead of being mainly overseen by one, Ms. Grady said.

The Rivendale robotic milking machines are made by Lely, a Dutch company and a leader in the industry. In some European countries, up to 30 percent of the cows are milked by machine, while in the United States the share is about 2 percent, estimates Mathew Haan, a dairy technology expert at Pennsylvania State University’s agriculture extension program. READ REST OF STORY

 

 Questions for discussion:

1. Do you feel this the future of all agriculture?  Why or Why not?

2.  What are some applications of this IS technology that you would find exciting as a manager of a an Agricultural Business?

For the first time Digital advertising to surpass print and TV

Description: This year, the money spent on digital advertising in the United States will surpass that on traditional ads for the first time, according to forecasts by eMarketer, representing a landmark inversion of how advertisers budget their resources and highlighting the rise of digital media as platforms to seek consumers’ attention.

Source: the star.com

Date: February 22nd, 2019

While Facebook has been rocked by scandals, and is negotiating with the Federal Trade Commission over a multibillion dollar fine tied to its privacy practices, the company’s market share increase will be driven by Instagram, eMarketer said. “There’s strong demand for ads in Instagram Stories, and Instagram still benefits from the perception that it’s less impacted by the challenges core Facebook has faced,” eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson said in a statement.

Amazon, Microsoft and Verizon round out the top five digital advertisers, and the latter two are expected to lose ground in ad spending.

Amazon’s advertising business, the third largest in the United States, is projected to grow by more than 50 per cent in 2019, claiming a total of nearly 9 per cent of the digital ad market.  Read Rest of Story

Source: thestar.com

Date: February 22nd, 2019

 

Discussion

1) What forces are driving this momentum of Digital advertising vs print and TV

2) Will digital marketingtotally dominate print and TV advertising in the future?  Why or Why not?

Stanford & Harvard Want to Address Tech’s Ethical ‘Dark Side’

Description: The medical profession has an ethic: First, do no harm.  Silicon Valley has an ethos: Build it first and ask for forgiveness later.

Source: NYT.com

Date: Feb 12. 2018

Now, in the wake of fake news and other troubles at tech companies, universities that helped produce some of Silicon Valley’s top technologists are hustling to bring a more medicine-like morality to computer science.

This semester, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are jointly offering a new course on the ethics and regulation of artificial intelligence. The University of Texas at Austin just introduced a course titled “Ethical Foundations of Computer Science” — with the idea of eventually requiring it for all computer science majors.    read rest of story

Questions:
1.  What are the two biggest ethical challenges presented by Tech?

2. How should we approach theses ethical challenges as a society?

In Silicon Valley A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge

Description: The people who are closest to a thing are often the most wary of it. Technologists know how phones really work, and many have decided they don’t want their own children anywhere near them.

Source: NYTimes.com

Date: Oct 26. 2018

A wariness that has been slowly brewing is turning into a regionwide consensus: The benefits of screens as a learning tool are overblown, and the risks for addiction and stunting development seem high. The debate in Silicon Valley now is about how much exposure to phones is O.K.

“Doing no screen time is almost easier than doing a little,” said Kristin Stecher, a former social computing researcher married to a Facebook engineer. “If my kids do get it at all, they just want it more.”

Ms. Stecher, 37, and her husband, Rushabh Doshi, researched screen time and came to a simple conclusion: they wanted almost none of it in their house. Their daughters, ages 5 and 3, have no screen time “budget,” no regular hours they are allowed to be on screens. The only time a screen can be used is during the travel portion of a long car ride (the four-hour drive to Tahoe counts) or during a plane trip.

Recently she has softened this approach. Every Friday evening the family watches one movie. read rest of story

Questions:
1.  Will you buying your future children smartphones? Why or why not?

2.  How does this make you feel about your own smart phone usage?

The Rise of the Robot Reporter

 

As reporters and editors find themselves the victims of layoffs at digital publishers and traditional newspaper chains alike, journalism generated by machine is on the rise.

Feb. 5, 2019

 

Roughly a third of the content published by Bloomberg News uses some form of automated technology. The system used by the company, Cyborg, is able to assist reporters in churning out thousands of articles on company earnings reports each quarter.

The program can dissect a financial report the moment it appears and spit out an immediate news story that includes the most pertinent facts and figures. And unlike business reporters, who find working on that kind of thing a snooze, it does so without complaint.

Untiring and accurate, Cyborg helps Bloomberg in its race against Reuters, its main rival in the field of quick-twitch business financial journalism, as well as giving it a fighting chance against a more recent player in the information race, hedge funds, which use artificial intelligence to serve their clients fresh facts.