@techvitamin - Page 2 of 2 -

I think a lot of people are pretty jaded about Apple keynotes now. For years we’ve seen Jony Ive videos with the requisite “Aluminium” voiceover, the device machining porn, and amazingly skilled close-up photography.

We’ve repeatedly heard them claim that “this is the best X we’ve ever created” — with zero press saying “you should f**ing hope so.”

All worth listening to and watching, if for no other reason than to delight in the balls it takes to completely ignore innovation happening elsewhere. Apple’s been so blatantly and shamelessly copied in so many ways for so many years, I don’t begrudge them this. But nerve they have.

So some thoughts on this last keynote:

Love the sprinkling in of the term “machine learning” in different places. Apple PR has been working overtime to burnish the company’s anemic rep here.
I love watches and have paid a lot of attention to Apple Watch. Their next gen — “Series 2” — fills some big gaps that make it more viable in the category’s sweet spot: fitness. They now have on board GPS and better, swimproof water fastness. A ton of engineering was required to get to these things — in particular power management — but they likely won’t get much breakthrough credit. The device ID is little changed, but coupled with a much better WatchOS, Series 2 looks solid.
Headphone jack gone. Fine because they’re giving away an adapter/dongle which will keep usable any quality gear you’re currently using. Not fine because you won’t be able to listen to your old headsets and charge the phone at the same time (w/o some kind of new accessory which will not be free). Feels like a new normal kind of thing that we’ll be acclimated to very quickly.
AirPods. Probably a stand-alone $1-2B business in short order. Bigger than that longer term. Glossy intro, complete with Jony Ive-narrated video. Love the vision. Potential big hole for version 1.0: active noise cancellation which was not mentioned, and is a little weird not to have on such a cutting edge device. Do I need to bring another headset for flights? If these passively block noise to the same extent as the corded earphones from Apple, then they won’t really work well on planes. When I lose one, do I need to replace both? Can I buy extra charger packs, or is that another thing to schlep around? They don’t look like they’ll stay in your ears with any kind of heart rate increasing activity. Is their sound quality good? Apple’s shamelessly claimed their headsets have sounded good for years when they haven’t — yielding an enormous headset aftermarket. These look like they are optimized for driving (hands-free), but will be less good for 1) exercise (staying in ear), 2) workstations (noise reduction), 3) high-end music enjoyment (fidelity). Good thing they’ll be able to cross sell Beats headphones …
Storage on iPhone 7: at least the base configuration is up to 32GB. Given how easy it is to shoot high quality video, that’ll be barely adequate.
Pulled the plug on Gold Apple Watch: it was always a bit weird, Apple selling a $10K+ bauble (the Oligarch Edition) that would be obsolete in a few years. It’s one thing to demand premium prices for well designed and high performing tech gear. It’s another to openly go into luxury categories where there is zero performance increase. I’m glad they’ve reeled this back in.
iPhone 7 camera improvements: Apple will breathlessly claim a design breakthrough for the device, but it really seems like the major improvement in this phone generation is the camera hardware and the supporting system. The iPhone 7 Plus has the dual cameras (that other phones have been sporting for awhile). It’s Apple’s hardware/software integration that’ll make this the best smartphone camera on the market.
They spent some serious presentation time on Pokemon Go for the Apple Watch. Data point revealed: 500 Million downloads of Pokemon Go…I’m not sure having an Apple Watch version is really going to boost momentum here or ease usage pain points. Weird that they gave this so much time.

For the two big volume devices — Watch and iPhone — it felt like gap filling and incrementalism respectively.

June 28, 2016

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@techvitamin 1.8: James Siminoff, CEO/Founder of Ring.com

James Siminoff

When Shree and I first met Jamie Siminoff, he was the Founding CEO of a cool little company called Simulscribe, which turned voicemail audio into text.

He was a tough competitor with a great sense of humor, and had enough perspective to know that startups are hard, and that a few shared beers and laughs break up the insanity very nicely. We also had a common competitor that provided no end of hilarious material: the overfunded, infamous, and batshit-crazy Spinvox.

Jamie’s latest venture — Ring — is also his most colorful and successful, now with 400+ employees, world wide offices, and nicely growing sales.

Never one to be conventional, he had a company-saving appearance on Shark Tank (see below). Running on fumes at the time of the taping, he didn’t get a take-able offer, but got enough publicity from the episode to generate millions in revenue, and get the company — then known as Doorbot — over the hump.

Jamie Siminoff on Shark Tank

Ring is conceptually simple: it’s a video doorbell that records and sends video of what’s going on by your front door to wherever you are. Designed to thwart bad guys, a Ring sometimes picks up other critters:

Of course, there’s nothing simple about startups, especially hardware. We talk about his growth, the tradeoffs he makes, how he continues to let his mission shape very basic decisions in the company. Jamie is the middle of the IoT battle, and has super well informed opinions about home hubs, Alexa v. everybody, and much more.

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May 28, 2016

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@techvitamin 1.7: Ed Lazowska, Bill and Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science

Ed Lazowska, Bill and Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering

Are our Tesla’s going to band together in the Costco lot and attack us? Find out.

In this episode Ed Lazowska (@lazowska), the eminent and long-time member of UW’s Computer Science faculty joins Facebook’s Michael Cohen and I to discuss everything from big data, deep learning to how Universities are responding to the massive demand for computer savvy graduates. Ed’s brilliant yes, but also a very animated and entertaining story teller.

If you have children, you’ll want to listen because UW (and NYU and Berkeley and others) are doing cool things to bring computational/data fluency to programs far beyond STEM.

Other topics: the difference between knowledge and understanding in AI, and whether programmers even understand the decisions their creations are making. Crazy stuff to contemplate, and Michael and Ed are in the center of it.

A bit shorter because Comcast melted down about 2/3rds of the way in, and we lost a bit of good audio…

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Uber is doing awesome things all over the world, and tech hub Seattle has been a great test bed for the company's new service offerings. But it hasn't been easy. Brooke Steger, Uber's GM for six states in the Pacific Northwest has in just under four years worked through controversy over business models, regulation, safety, aggressive driver recruiting tactics, bad press for their Founder, and more. She's also helped introduce her region to UberEats, UberPool, UberHop (yeah I know, what's that?!), scholarships for drivers, and more.

May 15, 2016

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@techvitamin 1.6: Brooke Steger, GM of Uber

Brooke Steger, GM of Uber

Is your UberX car going to smell like the last Chicken Tikka delivery it just made for UberEats?

Do I now have to tip? That was a key part of the magic.

Uber is doing awesome things all over the world, and tech hub Seattle has been a great test bed for the company’s new service offerings.

But it hasn’t been easy. Brooke Steger, Uber’s GM for six states in the Pacific Northwest has in just under four years worked through controversy over business models, regulation, safety, aggressive driver recruiting tactics, bad press for their Founder, and more. She’s also helped introduce her region to UberEats, UberPool, UberHop (yeah I know, what’s that?!), scholarships for drivers, and more.

We dive into Uber topics both globally, and some Northwest specific things. Ever wonder where all those black cars were hiding before Uber, or how much a driver can make in an evening? How is Uber partnering with Seattle Metro transit to reduce commute transit times.

How should Uber’s entrance into Seattle been handled differently (if it should have been)?

Brooke’s story is compelling. A UW grad, she took some time to teach Physics and Computer Science to kids in Mexico, she jumped into tech via a Craigslist ad and has never looked back.

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When Lisa Brummel joined Microsoft as a Product Manager in 1989, the company had roughly 4,000 employees. In 2005, when Steve Ballmer asked her to take over HR, and leave her job running a $1 Billion software division — with $400 Million in profit — the company had grown to 50,000 employees. When she retired ten years later, she’d been Chief People Offer through the CEO transitions of BillG to Steve to Satya, massive acquisitions, the leveling out of stock growth, and the tectonic shifts to software as a service and (non-Microsoft) smartphone platforms.

April 24, 2016

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@techvitamin 1.5: Lisa Brummel, ex-Microsoft Chief People Officer and now Co-Owner of the Seattle Storm

Lisa Brummel (Photo credit: Bettina Hansen)

When Lisa Brummel joined Microsoft as a Product Manager in 1989, the company had roughly 4,000 employees. In 2005, when Steve Ballmer asked her to take over HR, and leave her job running a $1 Billion software division — with $400 Million in profit — the company had grown to 50,000 employees. When she retired ten years later, she’d been Chief People Offer through the CEO transitions of BillG to Steve to Satya, massive acquisitions, the leveling out of stock growth, and the tectonic shifts to software as a service and (non-Microsoft) smartphone platforms.

The people issues of a 125,000 person company are many, and most don’t lend themselves to simple solutions. Are the same people who performed well during explosive growth the right ones for maturity?

In this episode, we talk frankly about these difficult shifts, the perception of management being out of touch, and the extent to which transparency in formulating policies at such massive scale is practical. She has kind words for the blog phenom mini-microsoft, the anonymous blogger who was often quite thoughtful about how to improve things.

Why was Microsoft so prescient — yet ultimately unsuccessful — in so many areas (smart set top boxes and streaming video, demand-side management of power, web-based productivity apps, smartphones, tablets, mapping, natural language input, smart cars, web real estate, payments/banking, ebooks, etc.)? I was startled at Lisa’s clarity on this. These misses have many fathers, but she points to a significant central cause.

Lisa Brummel, Ginny Gilder and Dawn Trudeau, Co-Owners of the Seattle Storm (Photo Credit: Bettina Hansen/The Seattle Times)

It’s no wonder she spends her time on sports entertainment now. The Storm are not only a WNBA champion, but they’re a great asset to the greater Seattle community. We talk a bit about the team, how she (and her partners Ginny Gilder and Dawn Trudeau) came to acquire the team from Oklahoma villain Clay Bennett, and the impact of technology on sports. Highly recommended article by Bettina Hansen here.

Probably less well known is that Lisa was a tremendous athlete back in the day. She’s been inducted into the Connecticut Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, was all-Ivy League for four years at Yale, and was the Ivy MVP. She also won national and world fast pitch softball titles as catcher for the Raybestos Brakettes, a legendary — and awesomely named — team from Stratford.

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April 17, 2016

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@techvitamin 1.4: Ford Davidson, Founder/CEO of Coolr and Dashwire

Ford Davidson, Entrepreneur

Shree joins me as guest host for this episode with Ford Davidson, a born entrepreneur who in the little more than a decade since he’s been out of college, has been a fast tracked Product Manager at Microsoft, founded and sold Dashwire to HTC, worked his earn out by building a global product organization, and started another company, Coolr…which he got funded, but has recently wound down. Ford has a badass twitter handle too: @blackball.

Ford is a creative force, and easily one of the most enthusiastic product people I know. His trademark “sweeet!” is generously given to other people’s ideas and product, and he remains one of the more humble home-run hitters out there.

Failures can be powerful growth experiences, and I’m sure Ford will benefit from having stepped up to the plate again. Coolr was inspired by the idea that organizations operate better when employees know what’s going on, and when managers connect with their teams. Ford gives a candid assessment of what they did well and didn’t, the role that investors played in timing and roadmaps, and what they’d do differently.

We contrast Coolr with Slack’s funding and development path — $10M of investment, zero revenues, and a huge pivot, before the current, glorious product emerged.

But we also talk about best practices org info flow at Google, Amazon and Microsoft, “holocracies”, why apps like TinyPulse work and sometimes don’t, and more. If you want to be a manager today, you’d better be ready for more transparency — and more data driven assessment of your performance — than ever before.

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April 10, 2016

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@techvitamin 1.3: Kristen Hamilton, Founder/CEO of KORU on talent, women in tech, and making the leap

Kristen Hamilton, Founder/CEO of KORU

If you’ve thought at all about what you’re buying your kids in a college education, or how the job market is going to evolve, or why companies like Google are looking far beyond the Ivy League for talent, or why female HR execs don’t magically fix pay gaps, or why companies are beginning to split strategic talent management and HR into separate functions, or, or… this episode is a great listen.

Is it time to “Disrupt the degree”? Is free college attendance a good idea if the system doesn’t change. Do you want to put your federal tax dollars to work on a system that can’t seem to control its costs? Should so many people go to college, or should we be thinking more about training people for jobs that don’t necessarily require a college degree, as explored in this NYT piece.

I’ve known Kristen Hamilton for over ten years, and she’s always been wicked smart, refreshingly pragmatic, and full of insights and turns of phrase that make the time fly. Happily, in this episode I talk very little, because you’ll hear very quickly that what Kristen says is information rich, fascinating, and truly strategic.

I didn’t know what it was called officially, but in talking with Kristen, I discovered the term “Entrepreneur Imposter Syndrome” (thank you Dan Shapiro) … the gut feeling that you don’t know what you’re doing and everybody’s about to find out? Ever experienced that? I certainly have.

We talk a lot about the “KORU 7”: not a TV station, but the success traits they’ve discovered at KORU — the company she founded in Seattle — which is trying to give recent college grads essential job skills. Kristen’s of course not new to the startup game, but KORU has raised more than $13M from top tier VCs like Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures and Seattle heavyweights Maveron and Trilogy. We go into depth on what KORU’s up to, how they’re doing, and I think you’ll find it inspiring.

Note: we had some bandwidth issues, especially late in the recording, so there are some places where the sound isn’t stellar, and where bizarre Skype noises have been cut out. Apologies.

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April 10, 2016

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@techvitamin 1.2: Former Swype CEO Mike McSherry and Sundar Balasubramanian on Healthcare Tech

Mike McSherry, Entrepreneur

This episode ranges pretty far afield. It’s mostly about healthcare tech of course — because that’s what Mike and Sundar are spending their time on right now. But they are serial — and very successful — entrepreneurs and have a unique perspective on tech, entrepreneurialism, and what might work. They’re pretty fearless.

Mike in particular has picked and created winners in radically different domains: he’s founded phone companies (yes, plural), and a company that sells embedded device software. Shree, who joins the episode as a guest host, has long had an interest in healthcare tech.

After having sold their startup Swype to Nuance for $100M, Mike, Sundar and Aaron Sheedy eventually moved on to figure out the next thing. The first post-Nuance project involved rocket propelled drills. This is discussed in the podcast, and happily, they didn’t incinerate themselves in the basement of a UW building.

They are now EIRs at Providence Health and they can pretty much explore whatever they want. Devices. Services. Prevention. Tech to reduce readmit rates. I don’t think they are developing new drugs, but they have a pretty broad scope.

In this episode we talk extensively about what they’re seeing, including new exciting new areas of innovation, things that are harder than they expected, and areas that’ve surprised them. We talk about Shree’s tow truck metaphor (which really is perfect).

One topic that I haven’t seen discussed before — though I’m sure it has been — is whether this incredible innovation will really serve those who are most sick, or those who are collectively costing the system the most. It’s one thing to be rich and have a drug cocktail customized to your genome, and another thing to be poor and sick. Is the life expectancy gap between rich and poor going to expand at a more rapid rate? Does drug innovation target the most broad causes of illnesses, or ones that have a good chance of getting paid for?

Based on what these guys are seeing, one thing seems really clear: being paid a fixed, and ever lower, amount for certain procedures is providing massive motivation for the providers to innovate cost out of the system. God bless America.

Sundar is currently an EIR at Providence Healthcare. Prior to Providence, Sundar ran product management at Swype which was his second adventure with Mike McSherry. Before that Sundar worked for Mike at Amp’d Mobile as well. Sundar has also held multiple product management roles at Qualcomm working on mobile OS’s, emerging market smartphone strategy, and mobile commerce. Sundar is a Seattle transplant, originally from California. He graduated from U.C Berkeley and has a background in Computer Engineering. He’s a backpacker, hiker, technologist, and dog-owner.

Sundar Balasubramanian

We touch on Amazon’s Echo a bit too. All of us have been involved in Speech and Natural Language processing, and this device, which is a far more disruptive factor in the market than most people know, may come to be the most surprising application of these technologies. Amazon is doubling down in a big way — as they should.

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Blaise leads a team at Google focusing on Machine Intelligence for mobile devices—including both basic research and new products. His group works extensively with deep neural nets for machine perception, distributed learning, and agents, as well as collaborating with academic institutions on connectomics research. Until 2014 he was a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft

April 10, 2016

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@techvitamin 1.1: Google’s Blaise Aguera y Arcas on Machine Intelligence

Blaise Aguera y Arcas talks Machine Intelligence and inventor of Photosynth

Blaise Aguera y Arcas (@blaiseaguera)

In this first episode of @techvitamin, Blaise Aguera y Arcas (Google) and Michael Cohen (Facebook) join us to discuss Machine Intelligence (MI) across a broad range of subjects, including it’s impact on art (and the impact of technology in general on art), how MI research should be funded, the collaboration between Academia, Business and Government, and much more.

Can machines now create art, independently of humans? Blaise and Michael talk a bit about DeepDream, and the resulting images’ similarity to those conjured by the human brain (perhaps just a tad under the influence). Here’s one:

Animated DeepDream image courtesy of @samim and Github, from Blaise Aguera y Arcas talks machine intelligence

Courtesy GitHub/@samim

We touch on the recent defeat of a Go world champion by Google artificial intelligence: “…the last nail in the coffin of games being an indicator of human intelligence.”

Blaise leads a team at Google focusing on MI for mobile devices—including both basic research and new products. His group works extensively with deep neural nets for machine perception, distributed learning, and agents. Blaise is a well-known speaker on subjects ranging from digital photography to mapping. He’s given three TED talks: on Seadragon (a company he sold to Microsoft in 2006); on Photosynth, which he invented at Microsoft, and Bing Maps. He’s gave a talk at WIRED2014 entitled “The next big frontier is the mind and the brain.”

Before Google, Blaise was a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, where he worked with Michael, who is one of our group of rotating @techvitamin co-hosts. Before his current gig as image and video guru at Facebook, Michael spent 21 years in Microsoft Research, and is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on computational photography (aka, getting photons turned into bits). Both Michael and Blaise were at Princeton (as faculty and grad student, respectively).

We’re always looking for community feedback, so feel free to comment below (or on Twitter, FB, or your preferred vehicle). And please, LIke/Share/(re)Tweet to your heart’s content. We’ll steadily improve the audio (all participants are remote from each other, so we’re a little dependent on mic quality, Skype clarity, etc.). We have a good outtake of Blaise scrambling to find another room at Google HQ after getting kicked out of the one he was in. And, we’ll tweak the show — to a depth and length that makes sense. For instance in this episode, we probably could have talked for much longer, but chose to cut things off to keep it under an hour. Might make sense to keep it going. We’ll get better.

1Blaise mentions a study about government research dollars seeding much of the technology in the iPhone. He was thinking of work by Mariana Mazzucato.

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