The “business in a box” model allows for significant de-risking of product-market fit (which is very hard to achieve!) by providing a proven product to sell. Nearly 55% of small businesses in the U.S. fail within the first two years, and 40% of these failures are due to the fact that there’s no market for the product or service. A “business in a box” removes the “idea risk” from a venture, leaving the entrepreneur with geographic and operating risk.

If executed well, these models can be value accretive for both the parent company and the individual operators. The parent company benefits from faster and more capital-efficient geographic growth (no need for market launch or operations teams in each city), lower real estate and inventory risk, and better local execution. The entrepreneur benefits from the ability to be his or her own boss (the American dream!) without having to develop an innovative product and establish a standalone company.

Consider a credit card company that wants to update its mobile app so customers can easily check and redeem their reward points. The company creates an agile team of developers, designers, and an initiative owner who understands customer behavior and can make decisions about focus and priorities. This team updates the app in a few weeks, but it takes months for another part of the organization to provide the data feeds from the rewards system, and longer still for another part to integrate these changes into the app, delaying the rollout of the new functionality.

Customers like the new feature, but now they also want to see recent points activity when they log in. The members of the original agile team have moved on, and since everyone is busy, it takes a few months to pull together a new team. This team makes the changes but overlooks a defect that causes the update to fail vulnerability testing. Once fixed, the operations team refuses to release the code to customers without more thorough testing. Disagreements between the development and operations teams about the extent of that testing further delay the new update.

As the rate of change increases, predicting the future state of software or the future needs of your customers becomes much more difficult. This means building foundational code that will always work for some future state is often a fruitless exercise. We’ve seen how little code reuse really happens in most companies, and how commitment to aging platforms stymies progress.

The traditional pattern is that an old system is maintained and developed as far as possible, until maintenance consumes almost all development effort, and the company eventually starts afresh with a new system heralded not to repeat the failures of the old. When the new system is eventually strangled by the three factors, the technological forest fire comes and we start over again.

Our obsession with the symptoms of systems complexity explains why so many paradigms come and go without making any significant dent in product management. Serverless allows product teams to minimize the complexity added and continue delivering value at a fairly constant rate without falling into the classic traps that have plagued software for decades.

...when buyers order something, they can wait multiple days or even weeks to get their products delivered. Worse, they often abandon carts when they discover how much shipping costs. All of this leads to lost sales and a bad customer experience. The experience is not much better for merchants either.

In short, shipping is as much of a pain for merchants as it is for buyers, and we want to improve the shipping experience for everyone.

Announcing Shopify Fulfillment Network—a geographically dispersed network of fulfillment centers with smart inventory-allocation technology, powered by machine learning that predicts the closest fulfillment centers and optimal inventory quantities per location to ensure fast, low-cost delivery.

Like many Americans, Paquin thinks about the importance of saving more often than she actually saves. In a 2015 Federal Reserve Board survey, 46 percent of respondents reported that they would have trouble coming up with $400 in an emergency; living paycheck to paycheck is now a commonplace middle-class experience. So while Paquin noticed that her Walmart MoneyCard app asked her from time to time whether she wanted to “stash” some money, she didn’t bother to figure out what that actually meant, let alone respond.

Then, late last year, she got an email saying that a “prize savings” feature had been added to her card. If she kept some of her balance in a virtual “vault,” meaning that it would not show up in her available funds, she would be eligible to win a cash prize in a monthly drawing—up to $1,000. Every dollar in the MoneyCard Vault would equal an entry in that month’s drawing. This caught her interest. A prize would go a long way toward her being able to buy a car. It also made her focus on what all those “stash” requests were about. “Oh, cool, this can work as a savings account, too,” she remembers realizing. So when she got paid, she started setting aside “10 bucks, 20 bucks, whatever I could.”

With the growing recognition that “Agile is eating the world,” surveys by Deloitte and McKinsey show that more than 90% of senior executives give high priority to becoming agile, while less than 10% see their firm as currently highly agile. The gap between aspiration and reality has led to a vast number of managers, consultants, and coaches claiming to be agile and offering to help firms become agile. Quite a few firms also have CEOs who are asking, “Why aren’t we agile?”

As a result, the term “agile” is often thrown around without any agreement as to its meaning. It is often applied to firms, or parts of firms, that have no substantive claim to any kind of agility. In part, as a result, firms that are in fact very agile often shy away from the label, “agile” and use their own home-grown vocabulary which feels more authentic.

You go to Target or Costco, just to buy a couple of things. Some shampoo. Bananas if they’re ripe. Then you go to check out and somehow you’ve spent $180. You stare at the receipt. It adds up–but where did your money go? If only the receipt itself visualized our spending better than listing numbers alone!

The network is built on collaboration between banks, telecom firms and credit agencies, and SecureKey Chief Executive Officer Greg Wolfond said he expects Verified.Me to be used by consumers to prove their identities to access health records, open accounts at banks and telephone companies, and get government services by the end of this year.

“Everything from being able to see your health records in a secure way, being able to open a new bank account, being able to get a new phone -- all this stuff that’s so time-consuming and painful is going to get easier for consumers,” Wolfond said in an interview. “They’re going to be able to share their data in a secure and trusted way, which they never really could before.”

As AI capabilities improve, it’s possible­—probable even—that the songs will become good enough that we’d opt to listen to them, for instance, while working or driving. The economics are enticing for streaming services.

Imagine Spotify self­-generating thousands of hours of chill-out ambient tracks with no need to pay human composers a dime. […]“They won’t be able to bring any emotion, any life experiences, into it. They won’t be able to cross-pollinate ideas from other fields.” As Adam Hibble, creator of Popgun’s music-writing tool, puts it, “This AI has no idea what’s culturally relevant or what is politically relevant or whatever it is that is currently important in the zeitgeist. It’s a mindless but very intelligent music creation system.” […]Yet in one sense, the neural nets are mere­ly mimicking the way humans compose. We, too, consume hundreds or thousands of songs over a lifetime, intuit patterns, and recombine our knowledge into something new. We sample, we steal, and we transmogrify. Our creativity, too, is built on the creativity of those who came before. But when a machine does this, it can feel like an impersonal, even vampiric act. […]

Slaughter showed me a prototype of a robotic weeding machine in the engineering department’s lab. His students built it and trained it to weed a field of tomato plants, each of which has its own G.P.S. coördinates. Because the robot knows exactly where the tomato plants are and has the machine vision and intelligence to know the difference between a tomato plant and a weed, it can navigate around the tomatoes and kill the weeds either with a miniature hoe or with a micro-jet of herbicide, which Slaughter described as “an inkjet printer for agriculture.” The farmer saves the cost of weeding the field by hand, and spares it a coating of herbicide that many of the tomato plants might not need. It was the nearest thing I saw in what venture capitalists call “digital agriculture” to a Roomba, the indoor robotic vacuum cleaner—a Farmba, maybe?

Summarizing the potential, Slaughter said, “For the first time, farmers can know what’s going on in their fields on the level of the individual plant. The idea is that you can run a farm with the same intimate care you would use on a back-yard garden, where you know each plant individually.” Farmers could irrigate and fertilize only those plants that needed it, and not waste resources on the current one-size-fits-all approach. Agriculture accounts for seventy per cent of fresh-water consumption worldwide, and, in the U.S. alone, farms use more than a billion pounds of pesticide each year; strawberry farms are especially heavy users. “Precision agriculture,” the name given to this slowly unfolding revolution, could dramatically reduce such wasteful and chemical-dependent practices.

Software and web services are built by developers. There are millions of highly skilled developers in the world. Only a small fraction work at large technology companies, and only a small fraction of those work on new product development. Many of the most important software projects in history were created by startups or by communities of independent developers.

Decentralized networks can win the third era of the internet for the same reason they won the first era: by winning the hearts and minds of entrepreneurs and developers.

The lesson is that when you compare centralized and decentralized systems you need to consider them dynamically, as processes, instead of statically, as rigid products. Centralized systems often start out fully baked, but only get better at the rate at which employees at the sponsoring company improve them. Decentralized systems start out half-baked but, under the right conditions, grow exponentially as they attract new contributors.

Interac has released its stats for 2018, its findings show a 54 percent increase in transactions from 2017. Between consumers and businesses, more than 371 million Interac e-Transfer transactions occurred in Canada last year.

…

The vast majority of those transactions are deposited on a mobile device. About three in four consumers deposit transactions using their phone. In addition, over half of transactions are under $200, with the average size for e-Transfers being $357. These stats are similar to those from 2017.

In February 2019, in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the development of WorldWideWeb, a group of developers and designers convened at CERN to rebuild the original browser within a contemporary browser, allowing users around the world to experience the rather humble origins of this transformative technology.

Ready to browse the World Wide Web using WorldWideWeb?

Launch the WorldWideWeb browser.
Select "Document" from the menu on the side.
Select "Open from full document reference".
Type a URL into the "reference" field.
Click "Open".

Numerous researchers have discovered that optimal speed for interface animation is between 200 and 500 ms. These figures are based on the particular qualities of the human brain. Any animation shorter than 100 ms is instantaneous and won’t be recognized at all, whereas the animation longer than 1 second would convey a sense of delay and thus be boring for the user.

Video has become an increasingly crucial tool for law enforcement, whether it comes from security cameras, police-worn body cameras, a bystander's smartphone, or another source. But a combination of "deepfake" video manipulation technology and security issues that plague so many connected devices has made it difficult to confirm the integrity of that footage. A new project suggests the answer lies in cryptographic authentication.

Called Amber Authenticate, the tool is meant to run in the background on a device as it captures video. At regular, user-determined intervals, the platform generates "hashes"—cryptographically scrambled representations of the data—that then get indelibly recorded on a public blockchain. If you run that same snippet of video footage through the algorithm again, the hashes will be different if anything has changed in the file's audio or video data—tipping you off to possible manipulation.

Despite high-profile deals in the sector, the industrial meat industry faces a rising tide of challenges, in the form of interrelated business, ethical, and environmental concerns. Today, they also face a unique political situation — since the US and China entered into their trade conflict, shares of WH Group have dropped nearly 50%.

Meanwhile, startups using technology to engineer meat in labs or manufacture it from plant-based products are rising in popularity. Meatless food products from beef-free burgers to pea-based shrimp threaten the future of the meat giants.

In addition to offering new products, these startups have the potential to upend all parts of the meat production process.

Going forward, the meat value chain could be simplified dramatically, as the “clean meat” lab or factory could take the place of farms, feed lots, and slaughterhouses.

However, since the keyboard has a localhost REST API and so does my blood sugar [monitor], I busted out this silly little shell script. Add a cron job and my keyboard can turn from orange (low), to green, yellow, red (high) as my sugar changes. That provides a nice ambient notifier of how my sugars are doing. Someone on Twitter said "who looks at their keyboard?" I mean, OK, that's just silly. If my entire keyboard turns red I will notice it.

Without Fail
A new podcast from the folks at Gimlet Media, Without Fail is an interview podcast where host Alex Blumberg interviews people from the worlds of business, sport and culture. As the name suggests, it has a particular focus on how they failed and what they learned while doing it. The opening two episodes are a fascinating conversation with Andrew Mason who founded, and was then fired from, Groupon.

People have a misconception about WebAssembly. They think that the WebAssembly that landed in browsers back in 2017—which we called the minimum viable product (or MVP) of WebAssembly—is the final version of WebAssembly.

I can understand where that misconception comes from. The WebAssembly community group is really committed to backwards compatibility. This means that the WebAssembly that you create today will continue working on browsers into the future.

But that doesn’t mean that WebAssembly is feature complete.

B2G source code has found its way into a surprising number of commercial products. In fact since Mozilla moved on from Firefox OS, its derivatives have shipped on an order of magnitude more devices than during its entire time under Mozilla’s leadership and it has gone on to form the basis of the third largest and fastest growing mobile operating system in the world.

The forecast of an America where robots do all the work while humans live off some yet-to-be-invented welfare program may be a Silicon Valley pipe dream. But automation is changing the nature of work, flushing workers without a college degree out of productive industries, like manufacturing and high-tech services, and into tasks with meager wages and no prospect for advancement.

Automation is splitting the American labor force into two worlds. There is a small island of highly educated professionals making good wages at corporations like Intel or Boeing, which reap hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit per employee. That island sits in the middle of a sea of less educated workers who are stuck at businesses like hotels, restaurants and nursing homes that generate much smaller profits per employee and stay viable primarily by keeping wages low.

Chart: The New York Times | Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics; Brookings (productivity)

Google Fonts is hardly an insubstantial product, but relative to its other pursuits, it barely seems like it takes much effort from the company. And yet in less than a decade it has turned into one of the most important providers of type in the world. The fact that the company has operated the service with a relatively neutral hand is commendable, but who’s to say how long that will last? The implications for the design world are far reaching if Google ever decides to turn its Fonts service into a revenue bearing business.

The algorithm can learn both a specific task like face detection, as well as the underlying structure of the training data, which allows it to identify and minimize any hidden biases. In tests the algorithm decreased "categorical bias" by over 60 percent compared to state-of-the-art facial detection models—while simultaneously maintaining the overall precision of these systems.

This class builds upon the success of our inaugural class in 2018 from which 10 fast-growing technology companies were launched across several verticals including AI, food technology, virtual reality, financial services, construction tech, enterprise SaaS, and more. These companies were successful in raising well over $10M of follow-on capital collectively immediately upon graduation and, of greater significance, growing their businesses into viable disruptive tech companies.

We needed to build the foundation to engage a new generation without alienating current fans. From logo to uniforms to communications and events, we have supported the organization in creating a new brand experience through more than a hundred touch points for players, employees, fans and the community.

1. Algorithms are often implemented without ways to address mistakes.

2. AI makes it easier to not feel responsible.

3. AI encodes & magnifies bias.

4. Optimizing metrics above all else leads to negative outcomes.

5. There is no accountability for big tech companies.

Key flags that a project is not really agile:

- Nobody on the software development team is talking with and observing the users of the software in action; we mean the actual users of the actual code. (The Program Executive Office (PEO) does not count as an actual user, nor does the commanding officer, unless she uses the code.)

- Continuous feedback from users to the development team (bug reports, users assessments) is not available. Talking once at the beginning of a program to verify requirements doesn’t count!

- Meeting requirements is treated as more important than getting something useful into the field as quickly as possible.

We’re proud of everything we accomplished here at Helpful, and we wanted to say thank you to all of our customers. We learned so much working with you and we are indebted to you for your support and partnership. But all good things must end, and over the next two weeks we’ll be shutting down Helpful Video and we’ll reach out to help you transition to new software. Stay tuned for more updates on the future of Dialog.

Every ending is also a new beginning. That’s why we’re excited to announce that we will now be joining the amazing team at Shopify to help them make commerce better for everyone.

We launched HackerRank in late 2012 with the goal of matching every developer to the right job. And the growth has been amazing — we reached 3.2M developers in the community and powered 2% of all developer hires last year.

For the first time, we surveyed the HackerRank community to get a pulse on developer skills (when did they push code for the first time, how do they learn coding, what are the favorite languages and frameworks, what do they want in a job, what hiring managers want in a candidate, and more). There are some great insights, from 39,441 responses, that we are happy to share with you today. Did you know that 1 in 4 developers learned to code before they could drive?

Government policy—rather than market economics—created the electric car craze there. For nearly a decade, China’s government has poured money into the EV industry, offering generous tax incentives and subsidies for car makers and consumers, building charging infrastructures across the country, and placing restrictions on the sales and use of gasoline cars.

As a result, electric vehicles have become a large part of Chinese people’s daily lives in a way that hasn’t happened in countries like the US. And there’s no better place to see that than in Shenzhen, one of China’s tech hubs in the southern part of the country.

Shenzhen is the world’s only city to have 100% electric buses. It’s also one of the first Chinese cities to set a goal to replace all gasoline-run taxis with new electric vehicles, which includes pure battery vehicles and plug-in hybrids. And that’s not a coincidence. Shenzhen is home to BYD, the world’s second largest EV maker after Tesla.

The documentary, which will screen nationwide Dec. 17 and Dec. 27, concentrates on the experiences of British soldiers as revealed in footage from the archives of the Imperial War Museum. Jackson and his team have digitally restored the footage, adjusted its frame rate, colorized it and converted it to 3-D. They chose not to add a host or title cards. Instead, veterans of the war “narrate” — that is, the filmmakers culled their commentary from hundreds of hours of BBC interviews recorded in the 1960s and ’70s.

The result is a transformation that is nothing less than visually astonishing.

In fact, Zymgergen cofounder and CEO Joshua Hoffman says one of the biggest opportunities before his now 600-person company is to produce entirely new products that are untethered to traditional petroleum-based manufacturing, which currently underpins nearly everything we use and own, from gas to golf bags, from dishwasher parts to dresses.

As it relates to OLEDs, for example, Hoffman notes that “current petrochemical-derived films don’t work as well as they should. They’re too blue, or they scratch, or they de-laminate and the screen comes apart. The problems are rooted in their core chemistry. But biology gives you whole palette with which to create films, adhesives, and coatings.”

Jump forward a few years, though, to the day when computers take the wheel: Suddenly this sort of campaign becomes less gimmicky and much more pervasive.

You get a hankering for fast food, call up a robocar, and enter McDonald’s as your destination. Burger King has paid extra to reach McDonald’s-bound riders. So as the car gets going, you get this message on one of the many interior screens: Special offer! Head to Burger King right now and get a free order of Cheesy Tots™ with your order of any burger! Touch here to accept a rerouting. This will add three minutes to your trip time. You hit the button and the car takes you to the Land of Whoppers.

SpaceX plans initially to launch 4,425 Starlink satellites into a low-Earth orbit followed by an additional 7,518 satellite at an even lower orbit. The first group of satellites will operate at an altitude of 1,110km to 1,325km and will form the backbone of the company’s Starlink broadband service. The additional satellites will circle the Earth at altitudes from 335km to 346km and will boost capacity and lower latency, especially in densely populated areas. Because of these low orbits, SpaceX says its planned Starlink broadband network will have latencies as low as 25ms and gigabit speeds that will rival existing cable or fiber optic systems. Not only will it be fast, but the Starlink network also will reach those areas that have poor or no internet connectivity.

“We have enormous respect for what the BlockEQ team brings to Coinsquare.” said Cole Diamond, CEO of Coinsquare. “They are one of Canada’s best tech teams, and the product they’ve built is immensely valuable. That combination in partnership with Coinsquare’s technology means that we have the opportunity to build amazing things for the cryptocurrency community in Canada and far beyond."

Open Banking regulations require big banks to permit their customers to share their own transaction data with third parties, which is made possible through application programming interfaces or APIs. These APIs allow software at one company to have access to information from another. In order to make use of bank APIs, companies are required to have authorization from the UK regulator as Account Information Service Providers (AISPs), proving compliance with regulations including keeping data secure and only using access to provide their stated service.