Stanford CSP BUS 74, Session 2 Quiz 3

Questions

1. Watch the video (8min) and identify 2-3 trade-offs The Three Little Pigs make in the story.
2. Does any of the major technology breakthroughs discussed during Session 2 address one of the trade-offs? Explain your reasoning.

tags: bus74, quiz, video, trade-off, stanford

LunchTalk: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings

At the 37th annual ENCORE Award event on September 23, 2014, Stanford Graduate School of Business honored Netflix, and Netflix Founder and CEO Reed Hastings, MS '88. Reed Hastings speaks on the history of the company, the challenges they faced, and how Netflix became the innovative leader it is today.



tags: internet, media, video, streamternet, source, content

Facebook patents video messaging (again!) US 9,071,725

Facebook continues to mine successfully the AOL patent portfolio the company acquired from Microsoft. On June 30, 2015 the United States Patent Office issued US 9,071,725 titled "Methods and user interfaces for video messaging."

The patent dates back to U.S. provisional application No. 60/220,648, filed Jul. 25, 2000. (15 years in prosecution!). The application has already resulted in two good patents – US 8,087,678 and US 7,984,098. The new Facebook claims cover a concurrent video and text interactions between two computing devices, including mobiles (See claim 7).

This is a broad, strong patent that possibly reads on many existing video systems, including Skype, Google Hangouts, Snapchat, etc.

tags: patent, facebook, mobile, video, social, networking

Social Media vs TV: kill or be killed

Advertisement dominates business models deployed by social media companies, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yelp, and a host of others. Although we think of them as technology growth companies, historically advertising revenues have been flat relative to the GDP *.

Web-based ads — most famously Google AdWords — grew rapidly not because they somehow generated new economic growth in the country, but because they helped TV kill newspapers, Craigslist.com being the early hero.

Now that newspapers are effectively dead, the only way for the ad-supported internet business to grow is to kill TV-based ads. While the TV industry fights it off with YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, we should expect more video ads on our mobile screens. In the meantime, the likes of HBO and Netflix have to put a strong bet on content quality. Such a bet would be independent of the distribution media and would have a good chance for translating video streams and downloads into real growth.

* also see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1399613 
tags: internet, video, data, packaged payload, distribution, content, media,

Lunch Talk: Inventions that shook the world (1910s) - Discovery

Featured Inventions: Parachute, Gas Mask, Toaster, Tommy Gun, Sonar

Lunch Talk: Larry Ellison

This Bloomberg  video is a bit "newsy" but it gives an idea of what it takes personally to play the innovation game on a large scale. http://www.bloomberg.com/video/65006540-bloomberg-game-changers-larry-ellison.html

tags: lunchtalk, innovation, video

Invention of the Day: Taxes.

tags: invention, video, economics, history

Lunch Talk: History of Music in 7 minutes

tags: lunchtalk, art, video

Lunch Talk: (@TED) Teaching surgeons around the world.

Laparoscopic surgery uses minimally invasive incisions -- which means less pain and shorter recovery times for patients. But Steven Schwaitzberg has run into two problems teaching these techniques to surgeons around the world -- language and distance. He shares how a new technology, which combines video conferencing and a real-time universal translator, could help.

Youtube link.

tags: education, lunchtalk, health, system, distribution, video

Lunch Talk: Tomorrow Television, 1945.

A U.S. Armed Forces report about the future of television in 1945.

tags: lunchtalk, history, system, innovation, video

Winner-takes-all market: Internet video.

Pew Research Center released its report on Youtube and news. According to the report, Youtube now dominates Internet news and even beats TV in the current events category.

(July 16, 2012) Seven years after it was developed by three former employees of PayPal, the reach of YouTube is enormous. The video sharing site is now the third most visited destination online, behind only Google (which owns YouTube) and Facebook, based on data compiled by Netcraft, a British research service. According to the company's own statistics, more than 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. The site gets over 4 billion video views a day. Slightly under a third of those, 30%, come from the United States.

Fully 71% of adults have used sites like YouTube or Vimeo at some time, according to a 2011 survey by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. That is up from 66% in 2010. And 28% visit them daily.

Fashion shows are coming online

Everyone wants to watch fashion from the first row. Now, lots of people can, at least with an iPad.

Jan 24, 2012. The Hollywood Reporter -- Unlike livestreamed shows, Digital Fashion Shows is for designers who want to create an experience for press and clients that's as close to a runway show as possible, without having to actually push your way to the coveted front row.

Each runway show will be pretaped without an audience and will be watchable at a specific date and time. Anyone with an official invite can log on to the site at the annointed time for their very own front row seat at the show.

I wonder if fashion shows soon go 3D. It must be a fun experience to see them "live," especially, in a social networking setting.

tags: technology, culture, social, video

Lunch Talk: (TED) How Youtube drives innovation.

TED's Chris Anderson says the rise of web video is driving a worldwide phenomenon he calls Crowd Accelerated Innovation -- a self-fueling cycle of learning that could be as significant as the invention of print. But to tap into its power, organizations will need to embrace radical openness. And for TED, it means the dawn of a whole new chapter ...

link

tags: lunchtalk, video, google, youtube, information, 10X

Amazon joins the UV cloud.

Storing content in the Internet cloud makes a lot of sense both for consumers and service providers because it allows for access to content from any connected device. Of course, the problem is that there's no cloud. That is, there's no ubiquitous content storage available to consumers independently from service providers. Therefore, cloud content is tied to your content provider; switching the provider means losing the content.
UV, a new video and digital rights format proposed by a consortium of IT, CE, movie studios, and service providers, promises to solve the problem. Amazon seems to be joining the group:

January 10, 2012. CNET -- ... today, Bill Carr, Amazon's executive vice president of digital, said during a panel discussion at CES, that the merchant had signed a deal with one of the major film studios to support UV rights.

Why this transition is potentially important?

Video streaming - winner-takes-all market.

Online video streaming is another high-tech winner-takes-all market, with YouTube totally dominating the field.  I'm surprise Facebook is essentially non-existing in this space.

 

Data courtesy Nielsen via VBeat. 

VBeat has a nice infographic (under the cut). They call it Digital Living Room, though online video use has nothing to do with the living room.

Trade-off of the Day: Moneyball.

A great scene from Moneyball (Ratings: 7.9/10 on imdb):

- Okay, good. What's the problem?


- Look, Billy, we all understand what the problem is. We have to...


- Okay, good. What's the problem?


- We have to replace three key players in our lineup.


- Nope. What's the problem?


- We gotta replace these guys with what we have...


- No. What's the problem, Barry?


- We need 38 home runs, 120 RBI's and 47 doubles to replace.


- No. The problem we're trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams, then there's 50 feet of crap, and then there's us. It's an unfair game. And now we've been gutted. We're like organ donors for the rich. Boston's taken our kidneys, Yankees have taken our heart. And you guys sit around talking the same old "good body" nonsense like we're selling jeans.

If you are a problem solver, you recognize the situation immediately. Most of the time people can't solve the problem because they don't know the problem they are trying to solve.

The situation everybody seems to accept is that you can't put together a high-performing baseball team on a low budget. That is, the scouting staff takes for granted the trade-off between team quality and money you have to spend buying the players. The smaller the budget, the worse the team. Having an ok team is the best they can do under the circumstances.

Desperate for success, Billy looks for and finds a way to break the trade-off.

Technology glitches in famous movies. Take 1.

I'll be giving a guest seminar at UMich, Ann Arbor this fall and it's about time to start working on some thought-provoking questions for students. For example,

1. "In this Charlie Chaplin episode, which technology(-ies) that we take for granted today failed to support a business model successfully implemented in the world of Matrix?"

2. "If successfully implemented, which problem, still highly relevant today, would the invention address?"


The questions are probably on the easy side, but should be a good way to engage people in the discussion about tech and biz models.

tags: video, technology, business, model, failure, example

How embodied math shapes us, humans.

Kevin Slavin about the world of algorithms (15 min TED video):

"... these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. ... we are writing code we can't understand, with implications we can't control. ... we are writing what we can't read."



tags: problem, solution, control, 10x, tool, cloud, art, science, deontic, video, social, intelligence, scale, detection, creative crowd

The teacher effect: bad performance on a problem-solving task.

Sheena Iyengar, professor at Columbia Business School, talks about an experiment conducted with Anglo– and Japanese-American children in San Francisco. All kids were asked to solve several anagrams, the only difference being how they chose their task.

The first group got to choose their own anagram set and the marker to write the answers. The second group was told by the teacher, Ms Smith, which anagrams to work on and what marker to use. The third group was told that it was their mother who recommended the anagram set and the marker for writing. Behind the scenes, the experimenters ensured that in all three conditions the kids were involved in the same activity.

The children's performance turned out to be very different. Once clear difference was that both Anglo- and Japanese-American children performed the worst in the teacher condition (the left columns on the chart above). The other one was the contrast in the mother condition: Anglo–American kids performed much worse than Japanese kids (the right columns).

Looks like giving people a choice, even when the choice itself is meaningless, improves their performance, but as the rest of the talk shows, not happiness.

tags: education, control, psychology, performance, book,  video, information

2015 Traffic Report: million minutes of video per second.

Source: Mashable

Growth rates in Latin America look particularly impressive.

tags: video, distribution, infrastructure, tool, system, growth, information