The gender gap in IT will take many years to balance out because the pipeline has to be built through early education but that doesn’t mean that women’s voices can’t be heard until there is parity in numbers, pay and expectations. 

The best way to teach others is by example and there will be plenty of inspirational stories told at the event and plenty of speakers showing that woemn can be successful at large tech companies despite their lack of numbers in the workforce. 

The conference certainly lives up to its title. Top female executives from Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle, Salesforce and American Express, will be joined by peers based in Berlin and Dubai. 

Ulyana Zilbermints, vice president, at conference organizer Avenue Code, said the event will “celebrate the movement of women leadership in technology.”

Zilbermints says she has successfully managed a life as a Silicon Valley executive, a business owner, while being a mother to twins -- now seven years old. She’s mentored many women based on her experiences and the challenges that came at different stages of her life. She says that now she is nearing forty she is able to approach leadership much more authentically. 

Fariba Rawhani, CIO ofTeranet, and one of the conference speakers, said. “It’s very important that we women support one another and send the message that it’s okay to be successful and ambitious; it’s okay to want to expand our horizons and do more. Always remember that women have a sisterhood.”

The conference grew out of a webinar series that interviewed female business leaders from the US, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Mexico, and the Middle East.

The event will have a Startup track where VCs and Angel investors will hear new business ideas. And a track where women can find mentors and advisors. 

The overall goal is to provide opportunities for women to create connections with their peers and with influential executives. It’s the best way to fast-track a career that’s been likely delayed by COVID-19 measures that have resulted in the absence of meetups and conferences -- for more than 20 months -- by the time this December conference arrives in San Francisco. 

There’s a lot of catching up to be done. 

.

Guest post by Carol Strobel, operating partner at Redpoint eventures and a veteran of Brazil's startup ecosystem.

Latin America has been known as an emerging economy for decades. 2021 could be when it hits its stride.

The phrase "emerging markets" was coined by World Bank economist Antoine Van Agtmael to describe certain countries’ economies with significant GDP growth to support a growing middle class, and with stable and sustainable rates of economic growth spanning decades. 

Latin America’s stability and sustainability issues for their economies have repeatedly discouraged investors since the 19th century. But hard times breed tough companies, and Brazilian giants such as AB InBev have emerged that compete on global terms -- not on local regional comparisons. 

The pandemic, even with Brazil being one of the hardest hit countries in the world, has helped startups move ahead and accelerated growth of the digital economy. This will set the stage for clearing major challenges that have kept Brazil from blooming into a more mature and stable economy.

For example, countries like Brazil, Colombia and Mexico have been handicapped in building a mature innovation ecosystem due to very high interest rates and a persistent lack of financial inclusion for many small businesses and their customers. 

These four tech sectors: e-commerce, edutech, fintech, healthtech -- are poised to raise the prospects for Brazil and the rest of Latin America with a potentially significant impact on the region’s global ranking.

The hottest investment sectors in Latin America: 

1. On-demand delivery comes of age -- spurred by Covid-19 necessity

Buoyed by the global pandemic and three converging trends -- “rising smartphone penetration rates, improving internet infrastructure and large youthful populations,” e-commerce has skyrocketed in emerging markets during 2020, according to a recent Nasdaq.com guest post. 

In September, research firm Forrester forecast e-commerce will spike by 15.6 percent in Latin America during 2020, while retail sales in the region will contract by nearly four percent.

As of four years ago, early Latin American e-commerce entrepreneurs such as Buscape co-founder and Redpoint eventures' partner Romero Rodrigues saw a big opportunity for O2O commerce growth due to the continent’s significant experiential differences between online and offline services compared to more mature markets.

“There are numerous daily tasks that can be solved with ease in the U.S. In comparison, the lack of training, standardization and process in Brazil creates chronic inefficiencies in the service sector that push consumers to prefer and use mobile applications that provide everyday services in a standardized manner,” wrote Rodrigues back in June 2016.

Fast-forward four years to the end of 2020, and that forecast has proven true with a quadrupling of e-commerce sales in Latin America from about $22 billion in 2016 to nearly $84 billion in 2020, per eMarketer.

As Brazil and other Latin American countries locked down for most of 2020, food delivery has been a bright spot for on-demand delivery and the sector’s seen some of the region’s largest funding rounds in foodtech/delivery companies from investment giants such as Naspers and SoftBank. 

In its latest earnings report, Naspers reported 141 percent revenue growth in food delivery and a 69 percent boost in retail between March and September.

Prosus, the European tech giant spun off from Naspers last year, had a standout investment performance in Naspers most recent earnings report: iFood, the online food delivery portal and mobile app based in São Paulo, which grew its revenues by “234 percent YoY with KPIs including order frequency and order value hitting record levels.” Prosus is a majority shareholder in iFood.

With such lucrative investor returns, there will be heightened interest in Latin America’s e-commerce markets during the year ahead.

2. Online education is ripe for reinvention and rapid growth

How we convey knowledge and prepare people for the new jobs of the future has been totally upended in 2020 for students of all ages. Edtechs, which have not grown as fast in years past, are now well-positioned for rapid expansion during 2021. No longer a secondary learning option, digital education platforms are now on the front line to broadly educate, inform and retrain workers.

One big driving force behind the shift in edtech moving from a perk to a necessity for adults is the new trend of “reinventing workers” for a post-COVID economy - especially in the service industries where many jobs will not be coming back, at least anytime soon.

Similar to the U.S. where training programs aim to teach new skills for different types of jobs, numerous programs have sprouted up in Brazil and other parts of Latin America to train the workforce of the future.

Some NGOs and private companies have begun innovating new ways of attracting and teaching STEM skills to more diverse groups of people. 

For example, in the wake of government funding cuts to public education scholarships earlier this year, Ester Borges Santos, a 22-year-old from São Paulo, recently co-led the launch of a virtual study group program to create new learning opportunities for young women of color interested in STEM careers after the COVID-19 crisis hit.

Marcelo Sales, one of Latin America’s best known serial entrepreneurs, realized that Brazil was not keeping up in the race for an AI-based economy. His AI startup Cyberlabs partners with university and government-funded AI labs in Brazil to advance research and education.

Such efforts by private companies combined with government reforms have led to a turnaround for Brazil which is emerging as a world-class AI innovation hub.

With the future of high-paying jobs in Latin America hinging on access to more talent with STEM training and skills and so many major challenges that need to be addressed in the region through innovation, online education will continue to grow and show real impact, especially during the continuing lockdown during the first half of 2021 until we all move forward into a new normal.

3. After a five-year boom, fintech is paving the way to financial inclusion

For more than five years, the fintech sector has attracted the most VC dollars in Latin America with more than $220 million invested in Latin American fintech startups last year alone, according to LAVCA. 

Despite the economic crisis created by the global pandemic, fintech investment is still going strong in 2020. In fact, Oyster Financial, a Mexico-based neobank for SMBs, raised the largest seed round in Latin American history in September. In total, Brazilian fintechs have skirted the current crisis and have raised more than $1 billion during 2020.

The open banking movement, which was led by Europe and the U.K. in 2016, was quickly adopted using a similar model in Latin America that has been led by Brazil, Chile and Mexico.

Traditional banks in Latin America have not served the broad population well enough. At the end of 2018, about 70 percent of Latin Americans did not have access to a bank account due to bureaucratic complications.

Also, some banks only let people open an account if they’re in the top 20% income bracket.

While consumer-facing neobanks such as Brazil-based Nubank, the largest in Latin America, have been in the investor and media spotlight for a number of years, the end of 2020 has brought more investment interest in B2B neobanks. In early September, venture capitalists placed a combined $121.8 million in B2B fintech startups - including Anchanto, Deel, Oyster Financial, Salaryo and Thunes - in one week alone.

Without the ability for small and medium-sized companies to access basic financial services such as business accounts, debit and credit cards, or loans, there’s little hope for the economy in Latin America to bounce back after the current economic crisis.

“SMBs in Mexico need a fintech operating system and not another bank,” according to Vilash Poovala, CEO and co-founder of Oyster Financial in a recent interview. “We had to get a debit card by actually creating our own startup. It’s been 20 months, and we tried to get a debit card from some of the largest banks. Five times we went to a particular bank during COVID, and five times they had the debit card attached to the wrong company.”

With so many potential new jobs created and a major contribution to GDPs, fintech innovation promises to transform emerging markets while being a financial force for good that powers the “rise of the rest” through a more level playing field for all, while rewarding investors with returns.

4. Brazil’s healthtech sector continues to be red hot

The healthtech sector in Brazil emerged as an investment hot spot back in 2018. Similar to the fintech sector, the pandemic has accelerated the digitization of healthcare based on necessity. With a need to distance people socially from a safety perspective and a shortage of hospital space, the transition to e-prescriptions, telehealth and remote monitoring has spiked in Brazil.

A new report by think tank Distrito shows that more than $93 million has been invested in Brazilian healthtechs between January and October, which is up by more than 50 percent than in all of 2019. In October alone, there was $25 million invested in four Brazilian healthtechs.

According to a WHO bulletin: “Until the 1970s, Brazilians used to joke that they had to die before the authorities paid any attention to them.” Certainly, under the strain of the pandemic, the lack of broad access to healthcare is no laughing matter. 

For many years in Brazil, there have been massive inequities in access to healthcare services, serious problems with the quality of care, and burdensome bureaucracy and high costs that can be vastly reduced through investments in innovation.

Covid-19 has hit poor communities the hardest and Brazil’s healthcare system is plagued by inequality. An analysis of public data shows that Covid-19 patients in Mare’s favelas are dying at a rate that is three times higher than Rio’s wealthy Leblon district.

Healthtechs have exploded in the region to deliver better options from healthcare on demand, telehealth and mobile apps to digitizing medical records and prescriptions. And the Covid-19 pandemic has presented a grand challenge to healthcare startups to develop truly valuable services.

Looking ahead:

Tackling large social problems like education, finance and healthcare in emerging markets makes a lot of sense because with new technologies there are always opportunities to leapfrog ahead.

Plus: with so much “blue sky” for growth and upside, the potential return on investments is huge. And with dozens of tech "unicorns" valued in the billions of dollars emerging in greater numbers, Brazil and its neighbors are showing they now have a large startup ecosystem and experienced teams that know how to build companies on a global scale.

Investors invest in teams and that explains the rise in global and corporate interest in Latin America. 

With that larger level of investment comes the rare opportunity -- and responsibility -- for Latin American startups to compete globally while acting locally to the benefit of the societies and economies of an entire region and which will be relevant for a long time. 

. . .

Carol Strobel has been a Brazilian tech ecosystem and startup innovator for more than a decade, including years of experience as the legal director of Intel Capital for Latin America. She currently serves as an operating partner at Redpoint eventures, the first Silicon Valley VC fund on the ground in Brazil as of 2012.

Disclosure: Redpoint eventures has invested in CyberLabs and Oyster Financial.

Above: São Paulo business district - AI is predicted to boost the economies of Latin America.

A guest post by Anderson Thees, managing partner at Redpoint eventures 

Several years ago, Marcelo Sales took a year-long sabbatical to help scope out the next big thing. Sales is a prominent entrepreneur in Brazil, who co-founded Movile - which is now one of Latin America's largest tech startups, back in 2008. As he traveled through Asia and Europe, he studied robots and built his own robot, became intrigued with 3D printers and more. Sales realized that AI was something truly powerful that would change the world.

Fast-forward nearly five years to 2020, and we now know that's certainly the case. AI in the form of perceptual smart machines (along with blockchain and IoT) was a key trend Gartner spotted back in April 2016 - calling it "one of the most disruptive technologies over the next 10 years." Even in a challenging year due to the global pandemic, the AI market's worldwide revenues are expected to clock in at about $156.5 billion during 2020 (a 12.3% jump from 2019) and then nearly double in value by 2024, according to IDC.

In Brazil, Latin America's largest economy and most advanced tech startup ecosystem, local AI innovation was still fairly untapped in 2016. When Sales returned from his global travels, excited by the huge AI opportunity, he began asking everyone in his extensive network who was doing cutting-edge AI research in Brazil. There was not much of an ecosystem he could find, except for some brilliant researchers and graduate students scattered throughout Brazil. It was disturbing because it set up Brazil for not competing in what some have predicted to be an AI-led economy in the near future. Since that troubling realization, Brazil has come roaring back from a vacuum and emerged as a "world-class AI innovation hub."

During the annual BayBrazil Conference, which was new-normally virtual this year and spread out over the late summer, Sales and other renowned AI experts gathered online to discuss the tectonic shifts the pandemic has only accelerated tied to AI innovation solving huge challenges in a world that s barely recognizable after the chaos of 2020. And, to debate and predict what would be changing the next as we progress forward in the 2020s.

Now in its tenth year, BayBrazil is a Silicon Valley-based nonprofit organization dedicated to gathering and connecting startup founders, investors and private-sector leaders to engage in dialogues on the roles of Brazil and U.S. entrepreneurs in the global economy.

The conference attracted the likes of Google's Peter Norvig, an industry legend and longtime AI researcher. This year's line-up of AI-focused sessions included senior executives and scientists from Ashoka, Brazil's largest K-12 education group (Grupo SEB), CyberLabs (Sales' latest startup), Pinherio Neto, Pinterest Labs and Stanford University.

Here are three key insights from them about what's next for AI:

It'll "Take a Village" to Add Humanity Back into AI-led Decision Making

The ability for today's smart machines to process massive amounts of data and find patterns or discrepancies that help humans to more rapidly diagnose patients, discover potential life-saving treatments, prevent quite costly money laundering, or unearth the most relevant legal precedents in stacks of law books is impressive. But, while this new wave of intelligent automation promises to displace many people's jobs, the need for humans in this brave new world is not going away.

"Machines are, in some sense, really good at doing pattern recognitions," said Jure Leskovec, chief scientist at Pinterest and Stanford professor, during his BayBrazil Conference fireside chat. "In healthcare, a certain doctor can only examine evidence and make so many diagnoses in his or her lifetime," but Leskovec argued that medical doctors would be part of the diagnoses and suggested treatments for many years to come.

"I think they're very complementary and I see an opportunity for humans who can think much more holistically to contribute, and in the end, make smarter decisions with the help of these machines that can collect, analyze and make sense of very large amounts of data."

Pushed further on that topic, and how to instill a sense of humanity across sectors that are increasingly being impacted by AI technologies, Leskovec said: "What we're realizing, and I think it really brings people from different disciplines together, is AI technology isn't developed and used in isolation or by itself, apart from the society to which it belongs.

This is quite important because it means that there's a lot of collaboration and dialogue needed between technologists and others; say social scientists, public-policy people, even philosophers, ethicists, and so on. These communities need to continue coming together."

AI's Role in Solving Widespread Diversity Issues, Human Bias and Distrust

According to Harvard Business Review last year, "human biases are well-documented, from implicit association tests that demonstrate biases that we may not even be aware of, to field experiments that demonstrate how much these biases can affect outcomes." Many AI pundits, including Bernard Marr, have argued that AI picking up humans' biases - a growing societal concern - is by solving the classic "garbage in, garbage out" scenario in which using high-quality data is absolutely paramount.

One classic example is longtime issues with facial and voice recognition, and its accuracy across various ethnicities. As Steve Lohr wrote in 2018 for The New York Times: "Facial recognition is accurate if you're a white guy." Lohr's story cited research from the M.I.T. Media Lab that found when the person in a photo is a white man, facial-recognition software was 99 percent accurate, but there were an escalating number of errors encountered as skin types grew darker via a study on people of different races and gender.

Sales' engineering team at CyberLabs, in partnership with academic and corporate AI labs in Brazil, set out to solve this problem for Brazilians, specifically. No other organization had aimed at addressing the challenge for Brazil, which is one of the world's most diverse populations.

They started with a major data-collection effort across different data sources for anonymized Brazilian faces. Over three years, the team captured more than 13 million Brazilian faces from different angles in order to feed and train a facial-recognition algorithm created just for Brazil. Now, they're in the midst of wrapping up the analysis and teaching their AI engine the various Brazilian dialects for voice recognition, speech to text and text to speech to invent a voice DNA database that can identify a specific Brazilian's voice in just seconds.

"Brazil has a lot of issues with security and trust," said Sales. "One of the major problems we're attacking now is to create a digital database and algorithm to identify Brazilians in a way that people can trust them to buzz them into building, or to securely purchase products or services online or in stores. Due to widespread fraud and security issues, there's a loss of trust. That's why Brazilians pay a lot for credit and overpriced products."

AI's Future Will Impact Almost Everyone's Jobs and Create New Business Models

In a nutshell, yes, some jobs will definitely be going away as a result of AI's ascension, according to Konstanze Frishchen who heads Ashoka's Global Technology & Humanity work. And, it will cause "tectonic shifts" across all types of industries.

For example, "AI has huge implications on the profession of doctors because you could argue that the machine will know way more than the doctor with their "old AI," their brain, and what they learn in medical school and their own biases, their own set of limitations," said Frischen. "The other interesting thing is that machines may tell us even more about our own body and health in the future" via wearables, predictive medicine and more.

"It's not just the manual or administrative jobs that will go away, but the more complicated and sophisticated jobs will also go away or change - and community will perhaps matter even more instead of less," said Frischen. A good example Frischen cited for this is research underway at Singularity University in collaboration with the Farmers' union in the U.S. that is engaging with farmers to help design and construct better robots that are going to plow the fields and plant seeds.

Frischen and others who participated in the roundtable discussion debated new business models that don't necessarily cut out humans from getting a cut of the action. For example: one in which patients, doctors and nurses partake in training AI to make better medical diagnostics and predictions. Frischen predicted there could be a new Spotify-like model that pays out royalties for these experts participating in the training of AI so they have a stake in it too versus a "winner-takes-it-all" model for AI that rises to the top.

One thing is for sure, the early signs of AI and associated research dates back to 1956, four years before the path towards the internet age began in 1960. Like the internet revolution, AI is now poised to change everything, and its influence is only accelerating faster now.

- - -

Anderson Thees is managing partner of Redpoint eventures, the first Silicon Valley VC fund on the ground in Brazil as of 2012.

Disclosures: Anderson Thees has served as a BayBrazil board member. Redpoint eventures is a CyberLabs' investor.

Tech workers marching at Gay Pride San Francisco 2019

Guest post by Luciana Carvalho, VP of People and Performance at Movile

Surviving in the post-lockdown economy is going to be the most important test that many business leaders have ever faced. It is during such extraordinary times that we will find out if our management best practices are indeed the right practices for these novel circumstances and what needs to be adjusted.

A widely accepted tenet of management teachings is that building a strong company culture is very important because it acts as a strong foundation for the entire organization.

Companies with a strong culture have a competitive advantage. Daniel Coyle in his best-selling book “The Culture Code” makes the case that the secret behind highly successful teams is due to company culture. Coyle offers the example of Overture, which invented pay-per-click advertising. Google ended up acquiring Overture because its company culture allowed its teams to move faster and grow bigger.

We are about to discover if company cultures can keep businesses afloat during times of extreme crisis. Is a company’s culture sufficient to weather the storms? What are the factors for keeping teams motivated during extraordinary times with unpredictable outcomes? What can be done to strengthen company culture? These have become common questions within every type of organization.

I’d like to share some insights from my career, which I think can help strengthen company culture and improve the odds of survival during these harsh times.

Leaders are the example

It may seem obvious that leadership is important in times of crisis but it is doubly important because that’s when people notice it the most.

Gianpiero Petriglieri, a researcher in leadership, recently wrote an article about “toxicity of leaderism and … the harm it causes.” He argues for elevating the role of managers to leaders. It is “what we need most of all and yet continues to elude us. That is, competent managers who are entrusted to lead.”

Whoever does the job of leading will need to do it for the entire organization. They need to set the tone, the energy, and be able to communicate a strategy of moving forward to every part of the organization.

For example, among the CEO’s many leadership duties is being a “Chief Excitement Officer” because motivation cascades down from the top. And the CEO needs to be in touch with everyone: internally with staff and suppliers and externally with customers and investors.

As in wartime, employees instinctively look to their leaders for information, like should they be scared about their jobs or should they be vigilant about competitors? They need real information. It needs to be brutally honest because anything else damages trust.

I’ve seen this type of transparency in information become an important strategy in strengthening company culture during tough times ― and Brazil has had plenty of downturns and political instabilities; many more than in western countries.

Communication with staff can be done through open dialogues with the entire organization, or by adopting new practices that then become a future habit.

The easy accessibility of leaders during critical times is very important because it helps everyone in the organization stay on the same page and it shows we trust our people, which in turn makes them feel more secure.

Here at Movile, we make videos where our leadership openly explains our positions on key matters and is able to preempt certain questions. We share stories of both success and failure because we believe there is as much, if not more, to learn from failures compared to success stories. This transparency strengthens our culture.

Which brings me to my next insight.

Transparency as a strategy

Transparency brings to mind something that is “crystal clear,” but this is rare because in reality, we are always in situations where nothing is very clear. So you must equip your teams with as much information as is possible. Tell them about the strategies, the next steps, and the immediate short-term actions needed.

Transparency in information is an extremely strategic practice especially when it is able to spread out the decision-making within the organization; when it gives team members the confidence that they have the best information to make the right decisions.

Otherwise, during times of crisis and fast-changing events, teams can become paralyzed with indecision. Transparency in information empowers teams because they understand how to move the business ahead.

Management updates should be communicated in an open forum with easy access for employees who are offsite or in overseas offices. This brings me to my next insight about work.

From systems of control to systems of results

The global COVID-19 lockdowns have forced every company to adopt and adapt to remote work because most team members need to remain at home. Not everyone was happy with this new normal because few organizations had the company culture that was comfortable managing remote teams.

A new fact of life is the potential return of lockdowns as future infectious waves emerge. This means every company needs to be super comfortable managing remote teams in their homes, and having work processes in place that support their productivity.

Management needs to recognize the additional pressures faced by their staff who are working from home; especially in households with young children.

Our regular systems of control based on hours does not take full advantage of the flexibility of remote workers. It is best to let them decide on how to organize their work and shift a company’s management priorities towards a system of results.

Jim Ludema and Amber Johnson at the Center for Values-Driven Leadership at Benedictine University, wrote that it is important for leaders to “trust their team members and validate that trust by watching organizational productivity, not hours. This allows them to celebrate their team’s performance without micromanaging the time clock.”

And a system of results helps build a culture of meritocracy where results and not favoritism are rewarded.

Preserve the core and build out the base

These harsh times are the best times to examine your company culture and decide what is core to it. And, how it can be strengthened through new practices.

Here at Movile, we are helping our people adapt to the crisis and deal with the pressures of working from home. This includes advice and warnings about medical issues and recognizing the mental health issues around loneliness and anxiety.

We are also experimenting with various tools and processes because we’ve been forced to move all our office interactions into virtual worlds. We are still trying to figure out how to celebrate our successes with virtual champagne, and how we can virtually recreate those interactions during coffee breaks when we are not in the same building.

Adopt and adapt

The best company culture for these times is one that is highly adaptive and readily able to adopt new ways of working. During times of crisis, every company responds differently. There will be new rites and rituals and new habits established. New ways of winning will be found. And new practices such as transparency in information will bond teams together in spirit and purpose so they can successfully tackle hard challenges.

- - -

Luciana Carvalho is VP of People and Performance at Movile, an investor in an ecosystem of leading technology companies it operates globally from its headquarters in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Carvalho is one of the chief architects of The Movile Way, a methodology taught at Harvard and Stanford universities for building high-performance teams and a culture that is encouraged to take risks, be fearless, and dream big.

The SV Forum Visionary Awards used to be my favorite Silicon Valley summer event. These were small outdoor gatherings maybe 150 to 200 people, and usually held in the substantial backyard of some fabulous Woodside mansion — but always with incredible iconic names standing just a few feet away.

For example, the above photo shows the four (male) Visionary Award winners from eight years ago: Far right is Elon Musk, next top VC Jim Breyer; technology journalist David Kirkpatrick, and educator Salman Khan. The legendary VC Ann Winblad, is far left.

The casual atmosphere of the awards ceremony made for some excellent off-the-record conversations and excellent contact building for future on-the-record news stories.

Strangely, there was always very little press at this exclusive event — which I never understood because the access to key Silicon Valley figures was always off the charts.

And the backyard-casualness of the event was always a welcome break compared with the massive Silicon Valley trade shows and conferences during the rest of the year.

Sales Needs Contacts

Certainly, in the post-COVID world outdoor events will return faster than indoor conferences but both types of gatherings are off-the-table for an unknown length of time. This is very bad news for sales. Silicon Valley depends on shows and conferences for face-to-face meetings and for making new contacts. Enterprise IT sales take 18 months to two years on average to complete. This will be a tough for young companies that need to get their names out and don’t have many contacts of their own.

Silicon Valley Village

The casual nature of the Visionary Awards made it feel that Silicon Valley is really just a small village with a small population but under a global microscope. Here, we quickly get used to seeing people that in the rest of the world are considered unapproachable icons or geniuses — with great influence.

The Silicon Valley region deserves its reputation for innovation and as the home for many visionaries, it is a global engine of innovation. In recent years it’s shifting more into the global engine for scaling a business.

Sprint To Scale

Scaling is becoming the most important Silicon Valley specialty because you companies have a first-to-scale chance to dominate a sector because in online markets there’s usually very little room for large competitors to co-exist.

Bricks and clicks used to be a viable strategy but no longer. Bricks took years to build out a business which meant incumbent companies had time to adjust to any successful competitor and get a strategy.

Clicks allow you to scale in minutes… on demand. Expanding into new regions is easy without bricks and so it means that the best business model wins and wins quickly and dominates a sector. In the bricks world many competitors can co-exist for years even with bad business models.

The COVID-19 crisis has compressed this e-commerce trend as hundreds of millions of new users have flooded into online services of all types. It has had similar effects on the use of other technologies such as video-conferencing. The future is coming at us much faster than in the days pre-COVID-19. But this also means that all the societal problems associated with the future are rushing at us — and we have less time to fix them.

Future Problems Here

We used to think that we would have many years to deal with serious issues such as:

• How do we deal with mass unemployment from tech-related job losses for no fault of the workers?
• What is fair GIG economy legislation?
• How do we deal with rising inequality?
• How do we offer universal healthcare that can stop the spread of virus outbreaks?
• How do we safeguard against fake news and hate speech while preserving fundamental rights?
• How to do we protect democracy from abuses of tageted advertising data?
• How do we pay for professional journalism when ads and subscriptions are not enough?
• What are our privacy rights in contact tracing apps versus community safety? 

And many more questions need to be resolved if we are to transition into what is an inevitable and hopefully enviable future where we all share in the abundance created by our technologies. But we nead a new culture and lexicon because the future will be nothing like the world today. 

Virtual reality pioneer and author Jaron Lanier asked “Who owns the Future?" in his excellent book of the same name. But the way the future will turn out is more about who has a say — not just ownership. I don’t own my apartment but I have a say in how I live in it. We all share the same future. And that means shared responsibility for how we will live in that future.

Rather than getting out of the way of technology so it can find its own level in the economy — as many tech boosters have suggested — we have to make sure everyone shares in the benefits of technology.

There is no good reason for not doing this because fortunately, technology driven markets are deflationary — everything gets cheaper and can be offered at very low costs. (Jeff Booth describes technology’s deflationary effect in his groundbreaking recent book “The Price of Tomorrow” — review coming.)

Who Is Driving?

Our relationship to technology has been skewed by our language and how we write about it. We often describe inanimate technology as “the driver” of a particular trend. But an engine doesn’t drive a car. Humans drive and decide on the destination.

Our technologies are tools that will enable a fabulous future of our own design — as long as we know where we are going — which we don’t just yet.

The extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 crisis are boosting the use of new technologies across every industry and resulting in big organizational changes; all pushing us ever faster into a highly automated future.

Yet we still haven’t figured out how we will live in that future, and the legislation, culture, and economic structures that we will need to prosper. This is going to be a big but necessary discussion.

I wish us all luck in this endeavor because we’ll need it. Our societies change slowly — no matter how fast the world turns.

Here's a guest post by my good buddy Matt Grimshaw, a long standing veteran in PR and marketing industries and lately in video production. You can see his video interview with me here on episode 5 of his lockdown video interview series "the BIG REORG" In having these conversations with people from diverse backgrounds -- Matt is looking for clues on how things will be different in the COVID- 19 society as it opens up to a new normal. Will it be a small or big reorganization?  We know that many things won't ever be the same. - Tom Foremski

Guest post by Matt Grimshaw

For the last three months, like almost everyone else in the world, I've been trying to make sense of the new reality presented to me by a virus that until late 2019, was primarily the concern of scientists, historians and the odd disaster movie. However, unlike most people, I have access to a lot of business leaders, experts and generally 'clever persons’ in a broad array of businesses and scientific fields from a two decade career in science/tech media, so I've been talking to them about the continuing after-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic whilst also trying to work out what to do next myself career-wise.

I've begun producing a lock-down video talk-show, filmed and produced solo from my home in Northern California called "the BIG REORG". It's a way to keep me sane and distracted with what has become a worthwhile project and a potential avenue for commercial projects, following a big reorganization in my work life as client work disappeared back in March. 

With half-a-dozen video interviews completed and more in the can -- I want to share some of the lessons and insights around this project and from the many hours of conversations about the fallout caused by our shared viral nemesis. What should we be thinking about over the next few months and years as we fumble our way towards whatever the world's new reality is going to be -- because if you think we're ever going 'back to normal' I'm here to suggest otherwise.

The lock-down approach taken by the vast majority of the world's governments is essentially a form of economic chemotherapy; the hope is that the local economy can outlast one or two generations of viral transmission and let the virus burn itself out. However, the virus struck when the world's economy was already in the midst of seismic disruptions caused by mass global political upheaval, social media's fake news crisis, the rise of gig economies and the information/automation revolutions that continue to remove value and jobs from the middle sector of many industries.

Consequently the main effect of the pandemic has been to dump petrol on the fire of these changes; segments that were already being disrupted are now minefields of uncertainty and they're the lucky ones. In some cases entire niche industries that cannot keep up with, or which no longer fit within, the new hastily reorganized supply chain are simply being eliminated.

The pre-2020 globalization forces that enabled the consumer technology revolution were built on the back of economic drivers in cheap international transport and labor plus huge tax incentives that in turn created the modern long distance supply chains (see every designed in USA, made in China label) that dominate most manufactured products. Now, that very same supply chain model is broken as it overly relies on the two weakest links in a post-pandemic reality: Humans and travel.

As a short term consequence of this new thinking, everything you buy is likely about to become a tiny bit different and/or more expensive as consumer forces push for an exchange of cheap far flung labor for more controllable local suppliers in order to restock empty shelves.

Every interaction you have is likely to eventually become completely remote if it hasn’t already, from interviews to education, more of our lives will be depressingly via screen. Automation and robotics will explode across the restaurant and food services industries; self driving trucks and no-touch deliveries mean a drone is safer than a human, same for banks too and postal services - physical locations other than for leisure could become a moot point entirely which has untold ripple effects on commercial real estate and town planning.

In essence what this all means is that whatever was dying out before 2020, will continue to do so, except much, much faster. Shopping malls, offices, administration jobs of all kinds, independent media and anything that Google or Facebook can automate or take over is facing a hard future, this is not to mention the obvious casualties of general retail, restaurants and the millions of small businesses that drive local economies.

The push online will echo the manufacturing switch of the 2000's with remote jobs going wherever costs are lowest, the only real face-to-face jobs worth anything will be in real estate or healthcare but again the push to distance us will see more host-free property viewings and less doctors dealing with more patients via 'tele-medicine' - and of course the drug companies will continue to use the blackmail first business model in the US until someone legally tells them it’s a very bad move, however healthcare is also the first area where the pandemic really has shown the cracks in its profit-first thinking. 

Western society, which is already deeply in the grip of a second 'Gilded age', has been virtually printing money for the richest among us since the last financial crisis through increasingly automated manufacturing and infrastructure, legislation enabled tax evasion strategies and monopolies or oligopolies that not only control entire markets unchecked, but whom seem ever more willing to wade into the murky water of politics with very mixed results and leaving everyone else in their wake.

Since the last economic collapse they've been the ones making money hand over fist, and seemingly without gathering too much bad press or infamy as their forebears did a century ago. However, with so many people's lives having been utterly annihilated through no fault of their own and those in charge seemingly only willing to help themselves, opinions are changing very quickly and what once were seen as titans of technology are increasingly seen in the light of robber barons of old.

There's an ever increasing undercurrent of anger across entire populations at the way things have been and are unraveling and an ever decreasing tolerance for the inequality that’s been causing it and it’s hit boiling point. This is seen in the unprecedented global response to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on 26th May.

The video recording showed the world the truth of it, centuries of oppression and systemic racism that's been in desperate need of addressing since at least the end of the American Civil War. The truth is that it's hard to ignore the stunningly silent reaction from mainstream America to almost every other identical death at the hands of the police up until this juncture, with the main glaring difference between then and now being that much of the country has been trapped indoors for months on end simmering about, well, everything really.

In fact interviewing my 4th guest (Govind Ghambir CEO of MyCircle; a PTSD app in development) highlighted many of the mental challenges to come when some kind of open society returns: Children with stunted social development, learning cycles out of sync, mass PTSD in the medical community, waves of public anxiety caused by fear of transmission and a general breakdown of regular human interactions causing mistrust and suspicion of everyone from ‘elsewhere’. That’s all for starters and if there is a 'second wave' of infections which is starting to look like a near certainty now, it’s hard to see how lock-downs will happen unless aggressively enforced with punitive measures and that’s basically like juggling with dynamite whilst smoking in the current climate.

Bright linings can be seen here and there; the huge 'work from home' experiment that the pandemic forced upon the world has proven that we finally have technologies that have removed the need for a lot of the offices and therefore the commutes we take and if we don’t need to go into the office then now is also likely a great time to address another much needed switch away from killing our home planet by burning everything we can find & dig up towards using technologies that are simply better for all concerned and which may address some of the international disasters that continue to plague us from the 20th Century. 

The BIG REORG is not about any one thing, it's about everything because it's all connected, as indeed are we. The pandemic has set the stage for conversations on some of the worlds most controversial topics that have previously found it difficult to gain traction and that's why I've enjoyed making the show so much and to such a degree that I'm trying to find a way to keep it going. I've already committed to finishing the first run of 10 come what may, but another major aspect of this pandemic - unemployment - is something I too am experiencing along with millions of others of you out there. But while I'm looking for "what's next" for my own career I'll strive to bring you a slice of what my guests think is coming until I'm (hopefully) made an offer I can't refuse or someone at Netflix/Amazon/Disney calls and gives me a bigger platform.

Until one of those happenings, you can enjoy the first five discussions covering medical cannabis, whole brain emulation, remote working, mental health in a pandemic and the health of news media, on Youtube right now and I'll be editing and releasing the final five over the coming weeks featuring COVID-19 testing, a talk on life sciences, a small business & disruptive materials expert, plus the founders of a company that's trying to make a computer chip that can sequence DNA (yes and they want to make a SARS COV-2 version) in 60 mins...all are already recorded and waiting on intro’s and editing.

The future which is always uncertain in the best of times has become some kind of twilight zone which, if the apocalypse bingo card of 2020 has shown us anything, it is likely to get worse before it gets better. So I aim to keep talking about it all because really, when you boil it down everyone is talking about the BIG REORG and its effects, every single day in some shape or form. 

So if you’re as curious as I am then come see some alternative perspectives with my guests and I at "the BIG REORG"

Matt Grimshaw aka “The Documattarian” is a freelance storyteller and documentary maker based in Marin Country - www.thedocumattarian.com 

 Without events and conferences -- IT vendors are having to change how they reach potential customers. Above: Crunchies Awards 2013

Guest Post by Alex Shapiro  @AlexShapiroPR

The battle for influence and attention by the big vendors can’t stop just because of a crisis. So how are the big names of tech reaching their audiences in a time of media and industry upheaval?

The fact that you’re even reading this article at such a crazy time, shows how unpredictable the tech media landscape has become since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Having to focus on work, customers and productivity, while being supportive and empathetic to family, friends and our communities has been difficult for everyone.

By this point, everyone has also felt the effects: a lot of the people in the world lucky enough to be working remotely right now are stressed, online and eager to demonstrate value and productive-ness through pushing themselves and each other to do more. "According to Bloomberg and the findings of NordVP, Working From Home Means Working Longer Hours for Many. These added hours also seem to be showing up in the volume of announcements tech vendors are pumping out. 

This has hit the tech media world in a unique way. Many reporters shifted around to covering the endless flood of news breaking in every sector, including many like Frederic Lardinois at TechCrunch, who shifted to covering just Covid news. Though March now seems ages ago, back then, even Larry Dignan, the Editor in Chief of the venerable ZDNet, told Sam Whitmore, of Sam Whitmore Media Survey for his article ZDNet's Larry Dignan on Covid-19's Long-Term Implications, and What to Pitch | Sam Whitmore's Media Survey, "We don't want to become the Coronavirus Channel -- though some days we are... and some days we aren't."

It also seems like every company, think tank, expert, open source project, analyst and influencer has a platform around Right Now, what went wrong and where it's going. 

With everyone online, there’s no shortage of attention for news and views around tech. After all, isn’t there something soothing about the relatively low stakes of clouds and APIs, compared to the very real, real news? Some vendors have even reported huge turnouts at the Virtual Summits.

With more news and fewer writers to report it, vendors are upping their game in tipping the balance of attention in their favor.

As New York Times reported, in The Art of the Pitch in the Midst of a Pandemic - The New York Times, PR folks are also doing anything but leaning back during this noisy time.

So here are some highlights of tech storytellers’ clever tactics to cut through the noise and reach tech decision makers like you!

AWS Flexes its Muscles with AppFlow News

AWS isn’t even known for big splashy announcements. Instead, they typically pull out substantial, technical blogs and keep on rolling to Re:Invent, where Andy Jassy might show off a slide marking the staggering number of these updates, which spawned its own piece of great coverage back when I was in the cloud trenches. For a brand that’s known more for doing than talking, this 2016 vintage visual is a rare demonstration of the giant flexing its muscles (back when physical events were a thing).

Amazon re:Invent/Business Insider

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-amazon-aws-is-unstoppable-2016-11

https://i.insider.com/583f38cdba6eb67d058b6d63?width=1000&format=jpeg&auto=webp

That track-record makes it all the more unusual that AWS seemed to do an old school media push behind the launch of AppFlow, which was announced not just with a very visual blog post, but a combination of explainer video and video demo that made it to the editorial video sections of fine outlets like ZDNet’s. The results were a whole slew of prominent pieces in tech press, beyond usual AWS reporters, which seemed to create a bigger PR spike than the typical AWS product announcement. 

Google Explains AI Tech by Showing Instead of Telling

Google Cloud in the meantime has followed up their massive April push to get their bold multi-cloud Anthos support noticed by every tech trade publication, starting with this fine one, in glowing pieces such as Google Cloud's Anthos for AWS generally available, Microsoft Azure in preview.

A priority so strategic that it took actual robots, powered by AI, to follow that act. AI Algorithms are hard to explain because most people don’t have a PhD in what might as well be science fiction. So, when Google needed to explain ‘Deep Reinforcement Learning with Concurrent Control’ they did it by simplifying the heck out of what it does.with the unveiling of ‘Thinking While Moving’. This is a landing site white-paper that resembles a developer-style Medium post, with illustration, diagrams, animations and video of actual side-by-side robots and all the glorious technical detail that the AI community will need to bring. This announcement exemplifies how showing instead of telling together with demystifying jargon can bring even the most technical topics in the world to life for a broader audience. 

Oracle Shows Off Its Friends and Timeliness

As a popular journalist motto goes, ‘names make news’ and the Oracle Product Team certainly took full advantage of the opportunity to be associated with Zoom as that brand becomes a household name. The announcement that, “When the World turned to Zoom, Zoom turned to Oracle” achieved what few customer-selects-vendor announcements can do, securing prominent media coverage for a story that, by definition doesn’t yet have a middle or an end. Of course, it didn’t hurt the story’s appeal that Larry Ellison himself made maybe a first-ever YouTube appearance promoting the relationship entitled, Larry Ellison: Staying Connected - YouTube. (full disclosure, I’m a proud, Oracle Product PR alumni) 

- - -

Alex Shapiro is an enterprise IT PR and Marketing consultant. 

Photo: Paulista Avenue, São Paulo, Brazil.

Guest post By Eduardo Henriques, Movile Group co-founder and Wavy CEO

In the rainforests of Brazil, the incredible diversity of competing life forms includes the fire ant — a species that has learned to survive the most catastrophic floods by creating waterproof rafts of living ant bodies hooked together to trap air bubbles and keep their queen and larvae dry until a new site for the colony is found. A lone ant would quickly drown, but a community of ants helps each other survive.

This example of fire ants at work in Brazil’s natural ecosystem provides insights into a new model for startups that has worked well around the globe: a tech innovation and VC ecosystem composed of compatible and synergistic startups that are able to help each other survive downturns and setbacks of all kinds - and grow even faster as a collective during boom times.

It’s an approach to investing and new founder services that are being offered by smart VC funds on the ground in Brazil from around the world. It works well during good and bad times. This new approach is helping to establish Brazil as the red-hot forge of Latin America’s booming innovation economy with a dozen Brazilian startups out of 17 in Latin America today. Together, they represent the region’s most valuable companies. And, there are more of them on the way.

Even Mary Meeker, in her annual Internet Trends report, has started to include data on Latin America’s startups and the many market opportunities from a young and very tech-savvy population with a growing middle class that largely lives in massive urban areas such as the Brazilian cities of Florianópolis, São Paulo – or Sampa, as it’s often called, and Rio de Janeiro.

Advice for building fast-growth startups

Back in the early 2000s, Brazil was “unfriendly to technology entrepreneurs,” as my longtime friend and Movile co-founder Fabricio Bloisi describes it: 

“There was an incredible amount of bureaucracy that made starting and operating a business difficult in Brazil. The World Bank ranked Brazil 120 out of 187 countries for ease of doing business and 167 out of 187 for ease of starting a business. It was very difficult to grant stock options to employees and in the early 2000s, there was very little venture funding available for young organizations.” 

Times have improved, despite very tough economic conditions. Brazil’s startups know how to grow during tough downturns, far tougher than in North American and European economies. 

However, startups around the globe - from China to Silicon Valley to Europe - have had little experience with economic downturns; the most recent being about 12 years ago in 2008.

Economic downturns for Brazil's startups have come around more often and they are much deeper. In 2015, a savage, two-year recession cut Brazil’s GDP by a massive seven percent. And signs of an improving economy in 2020 could now be delayed or even completely derailed by the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic and the recent oil crisis.

This type of harsh investing environment requires Brazilian entrepreneurs to be frugal and smart about how to best use their investment capital. 

[Brazil's now vigorous startup sector has produced 12 unicorns out of 17 for the whole of Latin America at end of 2019.]

I remember in the 2008 crisis reading the infamous Sequoia Capital "R.I.P. Good Times" letter. We made a huge restructuring in the company and laid off about 30 percent of our people. It was a tough decision but we learned an important lesson about how to survive in tough times. 

Recently, Sequoia issued a warning to its portfolio startups that the coronavirus is “The Black Swan of 2020”. It looks like tough times for entrepreneurs are ahead but we know what to do. 

Here are some valuable lessons that we “fire ants” have learned from surviving downturns, recessions and other setbacks: 

Success Doesn’t Follow a Straight Path 

Over two decades, we have learned that success does not follow a straight line. Instead, it’s a messy squiggle, with ups and downs, sleepless nights, and a constant rethinking of strategy and planning in order to grow into a unicorn or a global company.

Silicon Valley founders are well versed in the concepts of fast failing and the lean startup methodology. That’s because the culture in Silicon Valley allows a quick recovery from failure.

Culturally, Brazilians are not wired for failure. We hate it. But in Silicon Valley, starting a business is generally a badge of honor -- even if it does not succeed in the end. 

When you’re not afraid to fail fast, you learn important entrepreneurial lessons more quickly, and you can move on to your next venture and apply what you’ve learned. You become successful by using the lessons of your failures. This is what we’ve tried to apply internally in terms of developing new ideas within organizations.

When startups mature and teams become much larger, we call them "cruise ships” or “transatlantic ships.” They are cash cows that demand perfectionism and greater efficiency. The lean startup approach is a smart way to continuously test out a vision, and market test products and services based on whether a sustainable business can be built around them, or not.

We have integrated this approach into a development program called “Jet Skis” - wherein we, as a company, vote on the most important initiatives, and then unleash a small team with cross-functional expertise to focus on that, fully, with a high degree of autonomy. 

If a Jet Ski project shows early success, we turn it into a “Speed Boat” and add more people and resources. If a Jet Ski fails, we lose little money and a little time, and we always learn something from the failure.

Invest In Culture, Dream Big, Control Costs and Be Ready to M&A

We have learned a lot from Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev) the world’s largest brewing company. It was created by Jorge Paulo Lemann, a Swiss Brazilian businessman who now ranks as Forbes’ 35th richest person in the world and is the richest man in Brazil. Lemann merged two Brazilian breweries and added further companies through savvy mergers and acquisitions managed by his private equity firm GP Investimentos.

The lessons from AB InBev are in the disciplined management and control of costs, and the management process it uses to pursue very aggressive goals.

AB InBev invested heavily in building a strong culture described in an AB InBev case study, as “the establishment of an intense meritocracy, and a radical informality and openness symbolized by the smashing down of executives’ office walls to have them work side-by-side at large tables, their metrics posted publicly for all to see.” 

Merging two companies together successfully is very hard to do. Harvard Business Review discovered that most corporate mergers and acquisitions fail (between 70 and 90 percent). 

After making more than 40 acquisitions in 12 years, one of the most important lessons on making a success out of corporate mergers is to focus on the cultural fit between the two companies. It’s important to perform a deep analysis of company cultures as part of due diligence. The ones that have the most alignment are always the ones that work out the best.

-- It’s essential to be very critical and realistic about any synergies and how long it will take. At Movile Group, we call it “facing the brutal facts,” and it’s better to do this early in the evaluation of the merger. 

-- We spend a lot of time on cultural integration and building new traditions and processes together. We always create a detailed 100-day plan for those integrations which helps ensure that everyone is on the same page with that plan. 

-- An ambitious culture is not just about commercial gains — it’s fundamentally about improving the world. The most impactful way to attract the best talent is to have hard problems to solve and ones that could make a positive impact on a massive scale. The startups with the best cultures will always have less trouble recruiting top talent and will have far less staff turnover.

-- Also, we found that we do not need to consider competitors as enemies because they can become important partners allowing faster growth strategies. 

Hopefully, such lessons can help startup founders prepare for, and survive any setbacks during this time of global economic uncertainty in the weeks and months ahead. 

- - -

Eduardo Henrique is CEO of Wavy and co-founder of Movile Group, a leading ecosystem of technology companies in Latin America with a big dream to make life better for more than one billion people through its apps.

Knowledge workers work such short hours on their actual jobs (three--ish hours) that tech has a very narrow window of application in people's day thus limiting the productivity benefits that can be delivered by such short useage. Tech cannot eliminate terrible business processes and pointless meetings.

This might explain the productivity paradox -- it's a work management problem first.

Global spending on IT will pass $5 trillion this year (IDC) yet there’s shockingly little evidence that higher technology spending improves business productivity — it often has the opposite effect and hinders productivity. The reasons for this productivity paradox are not clear and have perplexed economists for decades.

This Stanford University computer science site Productivity Paradox discusses possible reasons for tech's mysterious failing performance in the workplace -- such as difficulties in choosing the right metrics. Unable to find more compliant metrics these experts conclude that they "would like to believe that 'IT does matter””.

The trillions of dollars spent on IT means there’s a lot of believers but why can’t we find the productivity data in this age of Big Data? It’s frustratingly counterintuitive that technology advances over the past two decades have done nothing to budge worker productivity.

The immense irony that our IT productivity technologies hinder workplace productivity is difficult to accept. But there’s some interesting statistics in a recent report commissioned by Workfront, an enterprise software project management platform based in Utah.

The State of Work: 2020 report collected responses from 3,750 knowledge workers across four countries: US (1,500), United Kingdom (1,000), Germany (750) and the Netherlands (500).

They were asked about many different subjects such as their use of technologies, workplace habits and how much time they spent on different activities.

By far the most interesting part of the report was how little time employees said they were able to work on the primary duties. UK workers spent the least time: 40% — three hours out of eight hours doing the job they were hired for — with an average of 43% across all four countries.

It revealed an enormous productivity gap. The respondents blamed too many hours in pointless meetings, answering too many emails and dealing with distractions from constant interruptions at work.

It’s easy to see that certain collaborative technologies can be sources of distraction but this is minor compared to what is by far the biggest reason for the technology productivity paradox: there’s shockingly little time to do primary work.

Technology investments can't compete with what can be gained from simply eliminating inefficient work practices. Tech productivity investments can only be applied during the times people are working on their primary duties — which averages slightly over 3 hours in an eight hour day. It’s essentially a two-day work week.

This nearly 60 percent productivity gap revealed by the Workfront survey cannot be solved by technology. Which is why the productivity paradox persists. Bad workplace practices hold back productivity.

In the global digital transformation of business the competitive battles will be won by the organizations with the most efficient workflows — and that’s when productivity technologies will prove their worth.

In a letter from a group called Oracle Employees for Ethics addressed to "Dear Oracle Leadership," they write that Ellison's support for President Donald Trump is against the core values the company upholds in ethical conduct, diversity, and inclusiveness:

"[It] not only damages our brand perception and misrepresents the diverse views of our company, but it adversely affects the morale of the individuals and communities who comprise Oracle… we refuse to be complacent and complicit in Larry Ellison's support of such a divisive person."

Protests and walk-outs by Silicon Valley's tech workers have become more common over the past two years and have had success at Google, which shut-down a military AI project and pulled out of competing for a multi-billion dollar JEDI cloud computing contract from the Pentagon.

Microsoft won the JEDI contract, which could be worth as much as $10 billion, but legal action from Amazon has frozen the award. Amazon lawyers claim that Trump's enmity for its founder Jeff Bezos influenced the Pentagon's decision. Oracle has also protested the handling of the JEDI procurement and funded lobbyists critical of Amazon.

Over the past 10 years, the US tech industry has increased its lobbying in Washington DC spending nearly half-a-billion dollars, hoping to win big government contracts and to limit any damaging legislation.

The upcoming Trump fundraiser will provide Ellison with an opportunity to continue Oracle's lobbying efforts to win some of the Pentagon JEDI contract. Tickets are between $100,000 and $250,000 to play golf and get a photo with the President.

I came across iFood earlier this year at the well-attended BayBrazil conference in Silicon Valley where Fabricio Bloisi founder and CEO of Movile (photo:below), a Brazilian mobile apps and investment firm, was the keynote speaker. Bloisi is a colorful personality and he’s funny and humble considering all the success he’s had in business. 

Bloisi spoke about coming to Silicon Valley many years ago and the lessons he learned and took back with him to use in his many investments — Movile is one of the biggest shareholders in iFood. He said there were just 30 employees at iFood when Movile first invested. And he helped iFood apply the chief lesson he learned from his time in Silicon Valley: think big and develop a mission to improve the lives of more than a billion people.

Armed with that philosophy iFood has become a giant and the clear market leader in Latin American food delivery with more than 21.5 million monthly orders processed and 116,200 restaurants registered in 822 cities. 

According to a September Frost & Sullivan report on the worldwide online food delivery market, iFood had 86 percent market share in Brazil last year. The global consulting firm forecasts that Brazil will surpass $1.5 billion in online food delivery sales in 2019 and the value of the global market will soon be $200 billion. 

Bloisi predicted that artificial intelligence (AI) technologies will eventually make it possible for iFood-delivered meals to be cheaper than buying and cooking food at home. That’s a great example of setting big ideas — and then developing the innovation needed to get there. 

AI is at the core of iFood but not just in an elite inner-circle group of AI developers — the company this week announced that all employees of iFood and Movile — more than 3,000 — will undergo mandatory training in AI during 2020 beginning with what is AI, how to use it, what to use it for, and progressing to more advanced training. 

“Everyone is either directly or indirectly affected by AI,” said Carlos Moyses, iFood CEO. "If you’re on the sales team, AI is helping direct you to the best prospects. If you’re a member of the customer experience team, AI helps further augment the customer experience.” 

Because of this fundamental reliance on AI, the executive team decided it was "absolutely critical to be the first Brazilian company to help educate all of its employees to be experts in AI."

A newly formed group within the company called the AI Academy (an R&D lab) that was launched in April is now staffed with about 100 data scientists and related experts to develop AI technologies and work closely with various business units to solve the biggest problems and drive more rapid growth and market share. . 

In addition to AI-trained staff, here are several other current and planned innovative initiatives at iFood such as:

— The use of autonomous robots to help with food deliveries within large buildings or large campus-like areas. It’s a partnership with Brazil-based Synkar that will kick off early next year. 

— iFood has created its own digital maps which it uses to determine food-preparation times to improve its delivery predictions and to map out more efficient routes for its delivery partners. .

— It is the first in Latin America to use Amazon’s Alexa to select from menus and order food.

— It is able to monitor delivery partners and reward those that keep to posted speed limits.

— It has plans to use drone delivery but not to displace delivery partners, but to move food from kitchen to iFood hubs that can cut up to 12 minutes off current delivery times.

— It has set up internal, cross-functional teams to quickly find solutions to work-process inefficiencies and to develop new services.

iFood thinks of itself as a tech company: Brazil’s first foodtech giant..

Fabricio Bloisi’s focus on food is a genius move in terms of thinking hugely big. Food is intensely important to every person alive and is needed several times a day.  Food is core to our health and to maintaining the civil functioning of society. And it includes a vast populace of producers and consumers. It’s an opportunity to make an enormous impact in what is the world’s largest target market — the entire population of the world.

Fast growing startups are found in many parts of the world but that doesn’t mean Silicon Valley is going away.. Silicon Valley is where innovation comes to be scaled. It has the capital and it has the people with the right expertise to build startups into global giants. Manny of Silicon Valley's lessons can be applied by anyone anywhere but it's hard to replicate the culture of its venture capital community and its high tolerance for risk.

RTB House is a proud sponsor of the RTB-Warsaw MIMotaurs one of nine teams competing in a unique Artificial Intelligence (AI) competition — autonomous racing drones. And for the team whose AI beats an elite human pilot — there’s fame and fortune.

Guest post by Gary Burtka, VP of U.S. operations for RTB House

Drones promise to revolutionize commerce through the rapid delivery of goods to our doorsteps and lobbies. But the thought of these self-driving robots whizzing around above our heads and homes is a scary one for some people. It evokes images of futuristic movies like “The Fifth Element” and its skyway with vertical lanes full of speeding flying cars, and imagining the fear-inducing chaos if even just one vehicle flies off-course and crashes into others. And what of the people down below?

Safety is why Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Tesla and others have been pouring money into development of advanced machine learning systems for delivery by drones. Another way to push forward the development of AI drone technology is through competition.

World’s first man vs. machine drone racing challenge 

The Drone Racing League (DRL) is trying to build NASCAR-like excitement around the sport of drone racing. Large audiences gather to see elite human pilots racing at high speeds via custom made drones through a variety of courses -- and the audience is in the racing seat.

Last year the DRL announced a new type of drone racing competition: the Artificial Intelligence Racing Circuit (AIRR) — with no human pilots. Teams create virtual pilots — AI systems that race along the same courses used in regular competitions. Will the machines learn to become faster pilots than humans?

Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin has put up millions of dollars in sponsorship and prize money as part of its AlphaPilot Innovation Challenge. Like other prize competitions such as the DARPA Grand Challenge, the AlphaPilot Innovation Challenge has the potential to develop safer and more efficient drone deliveries.

The AIRR competition attracted 430 teams of drone enthusiasts and developers from 81 countries. Now there are just nine teams remaining and this fall their drones will race through a series of complex 3D courses for $2 million in prizes. 

There’s a special $250,000 prize for the team that can beat a human pilot. 

University of Warsaw team is a top contender

One of the frontrunners in remaining AIRR teams is the Poland-based RTB-Warsaw MIMotaurs, from the University of Warsaw, well known for its AI education prowess.

AI has been booming in Poland and Warsaw is home to nearly one-half of the country’s AI startups and R&D divisions for global corporations. The University of Warsaw sits in the center of Poland’s main hub for AI innovation and attracts some of the best minds in the world. 

Karol Pieniący, captain of the RTB-Warsaw MIMotaurs, is determined to be the first AIRR team to beat a human pilot. Speaking at a recent event at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he admitted that it’s a difficult task.

“The DRL human pilots are real pros at what they do, and we think of them as a geekier version of football stars in the drone racing sport that’s quickly moving towards the mainstream,” said Karol Pieniący. 

“Beating them will be extremely difficult, but we’re not giving up. There is a very good chance that our advanced AI will be able to compete with humans and eventually beat them in a head-to-head race.” 

Pieniący noted that they’re getting strong support from AI specialists at the University of Warsaw, in addition to mentors from Lockheed Martin who work with advanced control systems in the space industry. So, when the team asks its mentors for hints on how to solve a problem, they’re getting top-notch thinking for designing solutions that are “literally out of this world.”

So far so good

During preparations for the AIRR competitions, the RTB-Warsaw MIMotaurs were the only team that were able to start their drone engine, a standard configured quad-copter, fly up and make simple maneuvers. It was a magical moment for them plus it gave them an edge on the competition because now they had valuable data on flight-control responses.

Pieniący did not disclose any of the “secret sauce” that’s propelled them to the top of the AIRR finalists, which he says will stay closely guarded. He added that the world will soon find out which team has the most advanced AI.

This machine versus human competition will be a fast action-packed race. It’ll be more watchable than Google DeepMind playing and beating the world’s top player of Go. 

There’s millions of dollars and reputations at stake. And the team that beats a human pilot will not only make history but also get a lot of attention from the world’s largest tech companies.

Ultimately, these types of AI systems will be central to reinventing how we live, work and enjoy our leisure time.

---

You can follow developments and the evolving timeline and locations for the AlphaPilot Innovation Challenge here. To learn more about the RTB-Warsaw MIMotaurs and follow their progress, visit their Facebook page. 

- - -

Gary Burtka is VP of U.S. operations for RTB House, that provides state-of-the-art marketing technologies for top brands worldwide. He is also a champion jet skier. RTB House’s AI platform is powered by deep learning algorithms to make ad campaigns more personalized and efficient. 

Google has been sued by a group of independent video producers for restricting their YouTube channels and not allowing them to buy advertising to promote their LGBTQ related content.

Eight plaintiffs representing the LGBTQ community -- a protected class under California laws -- claim Google is guilty of: "Discrimination, fraud, unfair and deceptive business practices, unlawful restraint of speech and breach of consumer contract."

"We've all tried repeatedly to communicate with Google/YouTube to treat us fairly and work with us to allow our voices to be heard and inspire systemic change," said Celso Dulay, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit and host of GlitterBombTV.

"It's shameful that so many in the LGBTQ+ community on Google/YouTube are restricted, censored or blocked -- yet we're repeatedly being subjected to harassment by homophobic and racist hate-mongers who are free to post vile and obscene content."

Dulay said that he never had trouble buying Google Ads to promote GlitterBombTV until a hidden policy change blocked his ads just days before Christmas Day 2018. Dulay said that he recorded a conversation with a representative of Google Ads who explained there is a company policy against "the gay thing."

Google denies it discriminates against protected classes and says it focuses on limiting hate speech and shocking content and it does not filter out content based on any sexual orientation.

Foremski's Take: 

Four years ago Google quietly dropped its founders' motto: "Don't be evil" as Alphabet, Google's new holding company, adopted "Do the right thing."

How do you do the right thing? The answers are always in the data -- as long as you know where to look -- is the unspoken mantra of a software engineering culture.

But there’s a flaw in this approach and one that cannot be solved by more data or computational brute force.

Google certainly knows how to collect massive amounts of data and analyze it and use it to train its AI systems and algorithms.

By using its software to make key decisions on what to publish Google saves a ton of money compared to using human editors and human creators but more importantly, it is key to its protected legal status as a publishing platform unlike a newspaper which controls what it publishes and carries all responsibilities.

Avoiding using humans is a smart strategy but the trouble is that Google's algorithms are not that smart -- especially when it comes to cultural and political issues where they can't discriminate between legitimate and harmful content. The software has no understanding of what it is viewing.

It's not just LGBTQ content that is a problem for the software. Google cannot tell the difference between a well-researched YouTube history channel about the Second World War and an extreme hate speech channel -- and will demonetize and demonize them equally.

This problem in its operating strategy is ever more evident as Google gets larger: its dumb algorithms are making ever larger dumb decisions affecting more and more people.

It needs to make high-level executive decisions in an area that it knows little about: moral and ethical leadership. It is a minefield that has no machine-ready solution. Where’s the data to train machines about morals and ethics? For example: if you were to train a general AI system based on all human history it would likely conclude that violence, war and genocide are successful strategies.

Morality and ethics cannot be extrapolated from history but must be instructed -- usually by family and community. If you start instructing the software you become an editor and that means Google, Facebook and others could lose their legal protections as a platform and become legally responsible for everything they publish — just like a newspaper or magazine.

A lot of our problems with fake news and hate speech could be solved by using human editors. We didn’t have a problem with traditional media which was very good at keeping the public safe. But with machines we have a big problem. When Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify to Congress in 2018 he said it would be five years before AI was able to filter out fake news and hate speech.

Google's struggle in the coming decade will be about how a software engineering culture that depends on data to inform decisions figures out moral and ethical positions on some of society's most sensitive cultural and political issues.

Good luck with that.

(An earlier version of this column appears on ZDNET: Tom Foremski IMHO.)

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Carlos Brito, CEO of Anheuser-Busch InBev (left), and Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and founder of Khosla Ventures, onstage at the “Brazil at Silicon Valley” event.

Guest Post: By Anderson Thees — Managing partner of Redpoint eventures

If the inaugural edition of the “Brazil at Silicon Valley” conference that took place in early April is anywhere close to a fair barometer, the smart capital of Brazil has now “woke” to the tech potential there in a material fashion. I’ve been a venture capitalist in Brazil since 2003, and it has been a privilege to closely witness the evolution of its entrepreneurial ecosystem. There’s been a beautiful blossoming in the last three years, including a first pack of unicorns running free last year. It should be no surprise to me that investors are paying attention. Still, when I walked into the event held at the Computer History Museum in Menlo Park, I was stunned.

Held over two days on April 8-9 in Mountain View, California, the event was organized by students and volunteers, under the impeccable leadership of Rodrigo Xavier, former CEO of both UBS Pactual and of Bank of America Merrill Lynch in Brazil. The event had an incredible lineup, covering the latest and hottest people and companies in tech investing and entrepreneurship.

Among the well-heeled and highly influential speakers were unicorn jockeys like David Vélez from Nubank and StoneCo Ltd. Chairman André Street. Other notable speakers included Jorge Paulo Lemann, co-founder of 3G, Carlos Brito, CEO of Anheuser-Busch InBev, Fernando Madeira, president of ipsy, Frederico Trajano, CEO of Magazine Luiza - one of Brazil’s largest retailers, and Mike Krieger, a Brazilian co-founder of Instagram, to name just a few.

But what impressed me, and most people there, was the caliber of people sitting in the audience. These were people you’d typically see on stage and then have them vanish from the venue after finishing their gigs. Not this time. Instead, they sat through sessions, took notes, and engaged eagerly in the Q&A sessions. This made the networking breaks as interesting as the content itself. Jokes about the vast wealth represented there were not rare: "We surely have one third of Brazil's GDP in that room.” Rich people were impressed that richer ones were there.

Building a Bridge from Silicon Valley to Brazil

In his opening speech, Hugo Barra, who’s now in charge of VR at Facebook, emphasized the importance of building a bridge between two of the world’s most important entrepreneurial epicenters: Silicon Valley and São Paulo, Brazil’s vibrant financial and tech-innovation center. In 2018, Barra left Xiaomi for Facebook and he previously led Android efforts at Google.

That goal of making key connections between Brazil and Silicon Valley has long been part of our mandate as investors, as well as the mission of BayBrazil, a Silicon Valley-based nonprofit founded in 2010 that serves as a source of information and a catalyst to connect the two regions. The lessons from Silicon Valley have been invaluable in accelerating the growth of Brazil’s tech ecosystem.

For example, the creation of Cubo, now the world’s second largest entrepreneurial hub in São Paulo, was inspired by trying to duplicate the likelihood of serendipitous encounters based on the sheer volume of entrepreneurs located in one place. Without a major hub like Silicon Valley’s Menlo Park, Cubo’s co-founders realized the pace of innovation would be stuck in low gear.

Certainly, the most successful entrepreneurs participating in the first “Brazil at Silicon Valley” are prime examples of promising startups who’ve bridged the two regions and networked with the Brazilian-American tech community.

A prime example is David Vélez, who was one of the featured speakers at the event. Prior to taking the helm of Nubank, which is Brazil’s third unicorn and currently valued at more than $4 billion after Tencent’s $180 million investment, Vélez worked at some of the most prominent investment firms and banks in the U.S. and graduated from Stanford University with an MBA.

Another presenter was Pipefy, a SaaS workflow platform founded by Alessio Alionco that is now used in more than 150 countries by enterprises such Accenture, GE, Visa and Volvo. Founded in Brazil, it now has its global headquarters in San Francisco and a tech development team in Curitiba, Brazil— something we are sure to see more and more of as Brazil-born startups continue to grow and expand internationally.

Mike Krieger, Brazilian co-founder of Instagram, compares the current scenario with Brazil 2010, when the app was released. He believes that, today, it could have been developed in the country.

What a Difference Five Years Makes

About five years ago, I recall a lively debate among VCs actively investing in Brazil at a similar, but much smaller event in Silicon Valley. At the time, the group was wagering whether the tech investing in Brazil had reached a total of a half-billion or a billion U.S. dollars.

Fast forward from five years ago to last fall, and in one of Latin America’s largest deals, Movile raised $400 million for its iFood delivery business. And, then, earlier this year Softbank announced a new U.S.$5 billion Softbank Innovation Fund for Latin American tech companies that it described as “the largest-ever technology fund focused exclusively on the fast-growing Latin American market,” per Crunchbase.

There was a funny moment during “Brazil at Silicon Valley” when Softbank CEO Marcelo Claure was asked how on Earth he could possibly deploy $5 billion in Latin America with the new fund. Claure answered with a chuckle that: “We believe $5 billion is a good start.”

Based on the first edition of McKinsey & Company’s new Brazil Digital Report, published and made available during the “Brazil at Silicon Valley” event, there’s good reason for bullishness.

According to the new report, the Brazilian economy has reached a “tipping point,” consumer and industry confidence are high and inflation and interest rates are at all-decade lows. Brazil’s capital markets are developing and diversifying funding for companies. IPOs have been on the rise. IT investment continues to grow faster than GDP, albeit a slow, steady pace. Pay TV and digital are the fastest-growing channels for media investments. E-commerce is growing. And, Brazil now accounts for 70 percent of the VC, private equity and private investment in LatAm.

One McKinsey & Company chart that really grabbed the audience’s attention, is that seven of the top-10 biggest market cap companies in the U.S. are big tech players including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Facebook. That’s simply not the case in Brazil today, but the opportunity is looming, large and compelling. One of the speakers forecast that in five years, at least half of Brazil’s largest companies will be tech companies.

I believe that this inaugural conference was the biggest gathering of Brazilians traveling to Silicon Valley that I have ever witnessed. The runner-up was a big group of about 250 Brazilian entrepreneurs attending TechCrunch Disrupt back in 2012 at the peak of Brazilian euphoria. But, at the “Brazil at Silicon Valley” event, there were all sorts of ecosystem players in the room. The very cream of the crop of top entrepreneurs, investors and corporations were all there.

During Disrupt 2012, we took the opportunity to launch our firm, throwing a party on the rooftop of the Transamerica Pyramid building were one of our Silicon Valley partners, e.ventures, is located. That party included a few Samba dancers. After Stanford conference, Mathias Schilling, co-founder of e.ventures, came to the important conclusion that next time around we’ll need a couple of floors, and a full Samba school formation during our party at BayBrazil’s annual “Brazil Week” that will take place in San Francisco in August this year.

- - -

Anderson Thees is managing partner of Redpoint eventures, the Brazilian-focused arm of the Silicon Valley venture firms Redpoint Ventures and e.ventures.

Disclosure: Redpoint eventures is an early investor in Pipefy and a co-founder of CUBO. Anderson Thees is currently a board member of BayBrazil

Walking around the giant show floor at RSA I was struck by a thought: what a dismal industry this must be. If you are good at your job, you haven't created any new technology that makes processes more productive, or could be used to create new types of products -- you plug up the holes in the bucket that are known. You cannot reliably stop future attacks -- only the ones that are known. And all that work and cyber crime continues to grow and prosper.  

The cost of cyber crime is the loss itself-- predicted to be $6 trillion a year in 2021 -- plus the cost of buying the cyber security needed to bolt the stable door — plus all the engineers involved in developing the software, and then on the customer side implementing it,  all the sales people, field support staff, marketing,  VCs, etc.

It all seems such a dismal waste of human energies that could be used for other things rather than trying to frustrate computer hackers who seem to have no problem getting around those brilliant defenses and gallant efforts.

SECURING THE NEWS

Leon Panetta, the former Secretary of Defense and former Director of the CIA is an Oracle board member. Speaking at an evening RSA related event he said that attacks by nation state hackers is a huge problem. "Pay attention. National defense is not just the responsibility of government, everyone has a role."

His biggest nightmare is of a computer virus that attacks and disables US infrastructure. He estimates that such an attack could result in millions of lost lives -- it would be a digital Pearl Harbor.  

He warned that Russian and Chinese state financed hackers are starting to work together and share technologies to produce sophisticated cyber weapons.

Panetta also warned about attempts to divide US society -- a reference to fake news in elections. But fake news is in the realm of cultural hacking.  A meme acts like a computer virus but it cannot be stopped with the same cybersecurity tools. I asked him if there were any defenses developed by US agencies against fake news but he shook his head saying it was a different class of problem.

CYBERCURRENCY BOOSTS CRIME

Oded Vanunu runs a team of more than 200 people researching product vulnerabilities for Checkpoint. He says that nation states are well ahead of the cybersecurity industry in terms of discovering new vulnerabilities. There's no talent shortage here. He says the governments pay well for the best talent and they have developed very sophisticated attack technologies. He believes that malware might already be implanted in many different places and could be triggered by a code. 

"There are also many online markets that will pay people huge sums of money if they discover a vulnerability. Plus the rise of cyber-currencies makes it easy for criminals to hide their money," are fueling cybersecurity losses. Vanunu says the industry is behind and needs to catch up. 

JOBS FOR LIFE

John Chambers, the former CEO of Cisco is now a venture capitalist. He said computer security professionals had nothing to worry about from job losses due to AI and other technologies. He predicted that at least 30 million jobs would be lost over the next ten years. He said the problem with cybersecurity is that CEOs don't know if they have spent enough money on protection and they don't know how much protection they have bought. One of his startups is helping companies figure out this question.

CLOUDY SECURITY ISSUES...

Oracle and KPMG released their "Cloud Threat Report 2019" and one of the many interesting discoveries was that cloud users seem to misunderstand their security risk.

The use of cloud-based IT has been boosted by the complexity of the security architectures and the difficulties in keeping up with the fast patching pace of new vulnerabilities. The report found that 73% believe the cloud offers better security than they can provide in-house.

But cloud users need to read the fine print because according to the report they don't all understand that security is a shared responsibility. 

"Confusion around the shared responsibility security model has resulted in cybersecurity incidents. A lack of clarity on this foundational cloud security construct has had real consequences for many enterprises, including the introduction of malware and loss of data."

K2 is able to create an execution map for each application and is able to stop it if it is hijacked by malware.

“This hasn’t been done before,” says Pravin Madhani, CEO and co-founder of K2. “Because it is very difficult to do. We are able to create an execution map for each application in minutes and then monitor it in real-time. There are no false positives.”

Zero Day attacks exploit an unknown weakness in enterprise systems which makes them very difficult to prevent and can generate many false alerts. K2’s approach means that any zero day attack can be stopped because it would generate a signal outside of the app’s execution map.

Known as optimized Control Flow Integrity (CFI) K2 is able to exert operational controls to prevent malware from changing the execution of an app and this also applies to micro-services used in public and private clouds in the enterprise.

Madhani says that this deterministic approach is unique in the industry and the K2 has filed for seven patents to protect its IP.

Traditional approaches to CFI have relied on pinpointing potential malicious actions — which can be nearly infinite in combination — making detection hit and miss. They also impose significant overhead on IT performance and can require extra hardware. K2’s approach is to focus on monitoring only the execution of the application as it was designed and validating the actions based on its one-time analysis of the app.

K2 offers two modules, its Prevent module offers real-time detection of zero day attacks. K2’s Segment module isolates workloads in the cloud and assigns unique cryptographic identities before they are allowed to communicate. This prevents lateral movement of malware in hybrid-cloud IT environments.

Zero-day attacks and unpatched systems are vulnerabilities that have been exploited many times by hackers. They are difficult to guard against and current cyber security systems rely on spotting the behavior or signatures of the malware but this generates large numbers of false alerts — keeping security teams tied up with investigating too many incidents.

K2 claims it has “the first true solution for zero-day attack detection.” And that it does not produce any false positives, it prevents attacks in real-time on unpatched software, web apps, and apps running on virtualized machines, containers or bare metal.

K2 also claims that its approach is future-proof. “An attacker cannot circumvent detection even with new and enhanced attack techniques."

Medhani says that K2’s technology might also find a use in helping developers create highly secure apps by using the execution map to plug any potential problems in software’s performance.

K2 was founded in 2017 and raised $6m in seed funding earlier this year.

There's many more services that Google closed after investing a lot of engineering work such as: Google Wave, Google Gears, Google Talk, Picasa, iGoogle, Google Reader, Code Search, etc. Some of the services have been combined and integrated and other products and are not completely lost but many are not.

These services might easily have several million users when Google shuts them down but for some reason they don't have any momentum in them and Google loses interest.

The failure rate is even higher if you count Google's SpaceX projects which haven been shunted off to a separate division under parent company Alphabet.

Why is Google so bad at successfully innovating new products and services? How will it be being able to diversify from its core advertising and search business?

GOOGLE HATES MARKETING

Google hates marketing and it doesn't understand the role of marketing in building a successful business.

Google is really bad at marketing because of its engineering culture which hates marketing and is based on a belief of "Build it and they will come." Design and build a great product and the world will come to you.

It's what worked for Google. I remember meetings with the Google founders in their very early days when I worked at the Financial Times . They were very proud that they became the number one search engine without any marketing effort at all.

Take a look at Google's senior executives and try and find a cheif marketing exec.

Google hates marketing. It hates anything you do to promote your online business -- outside of running Google ads.

You might call it Search Engine Optimization but Google calls it gaming the system -- it is a blatant attempt to manipulate its search technology. It will penalize any web site that goes beyond the basic SEO rules laid out in its webmaster notes.

Google's search technology wants the natural signals of popularity for a web page and if it detects you've tried to improve your business's pagerank by any other means it will flag the business for future investigation and the pagerank will be made to fluctuate randomly for a couple of weeks to confuse any SEO metrics.

Build it and they will come. No marketing should be necessary. It once worked for Google when there was no Google. But these are different times.

Diane Wilsey President and Thomas Campbell CEO of Fine Arts Museum - Photo courtesy of Chris Knight with LeftCoastScenes.com 

Calling it a “gift of love to the city” the curators of Monet - The Late Years introduced the new exhibit at the De Young Fine Arts museum in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco — on the eve of Valentine’s Day.

It’s a fabulous collection of Claude Monet’s later works from 1909 to 1926 in collaboration with the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. By tyhis stage in his life Monet was wealthy enough not to have to paint and sell art works —which he found very liberating. He used his money to buy a country house and remodel its gardens and ponds.

“When I have no longer need to sell, I have managed to work; now, I think I am as hard on myself as it’s possible to be.”

Over this period he suffered several personal tragedies such as the death of his wife and oldest son plus the constant reminder of the horrors of the first World War that were everywhere in France.

He shut himself off in his ideal gardens and shut himself off from the need to sell paintings. Instead, he found an endless exploration in his water lilies (and weeping willows).

Monet shut the world out — and the world shut him out. There was little interest in his later works even though his earlier paintings remained popular. When he died in 1926 there were more than two dozen unsold paintings.

His later paintings seem like scribbles of familiar shapes — they either reflect what he was seeing because of his failing eyesight or perhaps they reflect a fundamental insight from decades of artistic discipline.

The violet colors of his water lilies are said to reflect a condition of Monet’s failing eyesight which allowed him to see into the ultraviolet spectrum and see colors that would normally be filtered out by normal eyes.

Close-up — you can see the energy of his brushwork and you can easily imagine his hand moving and dabbing across the canvas right there in front of you.

It’s a great exhibition that brings together the best of Texas and California art lovers— and the wealthy private owners that loaned their Monets to the exhibit. It’s at the De Young for the next three months till May 27.

https://deyoung.famsf.org/

I'm a huge fan of Joe Rogan because he is the only mainstream interviewer that can attract so many different people, across spectrums in politics, science, cosmology, archeology. There are doctors studying nutrition, fighters, top athletes... I've learned a tremendous amount about many different subjects with Joe Rogan -- and I'm a fairly new fan -- less than a year.

It's Rogan's respect for his guests that I find so very compelling. He listens. And that creates space for great conversations that can go on for more than three hours. And there's no commercial interruption, there's no over-talkative host that constantly talks over their guests.

But Rogan won't listen to BS -- he's always ready to call out irrational thinking and erroneous claims. Jamie, his ever vigilant and invisible personal assistant quickly checks any factious claims for fiction. Stopping fake facts right there and then at the point of broadcast is brilliant and it's a key responsibility that Rogan recognizes because of his huge audiences.

In this episode we see Rogan's bromance with his pal Sam Harris -- who is an excellent polemicist. There's a very good discussion of podcast media business models and why advertising or subscription models will suit different types of content.

Around 1hr 17 minutes and 45 seconds Sam Harris tells a story of a CEO of a large tech company complaining at dinner that an employee filed a complaint with HR that the restrooms had no litter boxes which violated his rights as a "furry" and self-identifying as a cat.

Irrational Medication...

There's excellent discussion about online toxic cultures. And Sam Harris believes there will be a pill that will cure people of violently responding to other people's beliefs. The pill will calm rage and curb people's irrational thinking. They will remark, "I can't believe I was so upset about this thing." 

I can't see a pill like that succeeding. Irrational righteous rage is an incredible drug, it's an incredibly powerful feeling. We see it practiced in what Rogan calls "recreational outrage." And there's no cure -- yet and it won't be medical. Cutural shift doesn't come in a pill. 

[Please see: Employees tell Google not to be complicit in Chinese oppression and human rights abuse]

Their activism has been encouraged by the success earlier this year in stopping the company bidding on a multi-billion AI military project. 

[Please see: The rise of tech worker power in Silicon Valley -- self-organizing and winning]

In this and other protests at Google such as over sexual harassment - workers are taking on the moral and ethical responsibilities which their leaders aren't providing. They want a say in how the business is run and who to do business with. They want a seat on the board.

Yet Google doesn't share power. Google doesn't like to share power with shareholders and certainly not with its workers.

Google's IPO in 2004 created two classes of shares - the founders and insiders received Class B shares with ten times the votes of ordinary Class A shares to ensure no dilution of control over company affairs.

In 2014 this control was further tightened with the creation of Class C shares -- with no voting rights. These are for employee ownership. Google clearly doesn't want its staff to have even the slightest influence on its decisions even as common shareholders.  

It certainly won't be buying a new chair for the boardroom.

Earlier this month Sundar Pichai, CEO told a news conference,

...that he's in charge and won't be constantly swayed by staff uprisings. "We don't run the company by referendum," Pichai said.

The scene is set for an inevitable power clash between Google's workers and their employer. They have the power to leave work and go on strike, or leave and work somewhere else.

There have been anecdotal reports of Google engineers leaving on moral grounds, but others want to stay within and some are already preparing for a strike. CNBC reports that a strike fund has been started.

Google employees are so angry about how Google handled plans for a censored Chinese search engine, some are talking about a strike

A strike within Google however, likely won't work without broad support within and outside the company. Fortune reports that Google now employs more contract workers than regular staff. Those could be easily ramped up and used as strike breakers.

Ghost in the boardroom...

Google's leadership doesn't want to share the boardroom but there is no way it can ignore its workers' ghostly presence lurking in the background of every major decision. What will the workers think if we do this? 

And outside the company their presence is formidable. Who would trust Google with military work with such an activist workforce? 

The company dropped its "Don't be Evil" motto earlier this year but its workers picked up the ethical and moral responsibilities that its leadership discarded. And now a clash of values is inevitable.

http://fortune.com/2018/07/25/google-contract-work...

More than 91 percent of senior executives polled understood that AI and machine learning were important but only 56 percent were using them and 18 percent could not say how the technologies were being used in their business.

RELX says the gap in adoption is due to senior leadership not being able to communicate the benefits of the technologies to employees and how or why they are being used.

"While awareness of these technologies and their benefits is higher than ever before, endorsement from key decision makers has not been enough to spark matching levels of adoption." said Kumsal Bayazit, Chair of RELX Group's Technology Forum.

"Acknowledging that the world is changing needs to be coupled with significant investment and focus on these emerging technologies to stay competitive in today's business landscape."

The top uses for these technologies is to improve worker productivity (51 percent), to make better business decisions (41%), and to streamline business processes (39 percent).

Additional findings: Companies are saving money by automating decisions (40 percent), retaining customers longer (36 percent) and easier detection of fraud and waste (33 percent).

RELX recently opened an AI Lab in Amsterdam so that it's scientists can work with Dutch universities to combine developments in academia and from the industry. It recently published open access research on AI and machine learning as part of its free Artificial intelligence Resource Center.

RELX Group has a valuation of $41 billion. It used to be a major media company with hundreds of magazines and newspapers and was better known as Reed-Elsevier. It has successfully transitioned into an information and data company selling a variety of services to businesses and at a far higher valuation than if it had remained a media publisher.

The Orkus Access Governance Platform was launched at the AWS re:Invent show in Las Vegas to demonstrate how it works to secure enterprise data in public cloud deployments such as Amazon Web Services.

“The cloud allows companies to easily spin up databases and create millions of new data objects — this was hard to do with legacy systems. Keeping track of who has access to which data becomes a huge problem and it needs new tools,” said Manish Kalia, co-founder and CEO of Orkus.

“Another issue is scale. As the cloud becomes more important there will be even more things to track — you cannot use a manual process — that’s why you need techniques such as machine learning to understand and govern the relationships between users and the data they are accessing.”

The Orkus platform focuses on authorization as the key to securing enterprise data in real-time. It scans the enterprise network and learns user habits and data access patterns while flagging possible security problems and preventing unauthorized data access.

Orkus can also limit data access based on government regulations such as healthcare data, or European data restricted by the European Union General Data Protection Regulation.

Orkus is able to create automatic audits of data access across a company’s cloud infrastructure over any period of time. This eliminates quarterly manual audits and also aids in forensic investigations.

The complexity of the cloud is contributing to delays and higher costs for many enterprise IT projects. A recent survey by Softchoice found a serious skills gap reported by 96% of 250 companies surveyed. Most had exceeded their cloud IT budgets and this was contributing to problems achieving business goals.

Orkus and other services aimed at easing cloud deployments by automating key tasks will be key to successful cloud IT deployments and the business agility they can provide.

The company was founded in 2017 by veterans of cloud and cybersecurity companies and has raised a seed round of $3.2 million.

From the cover of Wired Magazine -- Mark Zuckerberg blamed for society's problems.

Frontline, the PBS news program, released a two-part investigation into the history of Facebook and it's evolution from a dorm-room project -- to ask if it has made changes ahead of the midterm US elections and avoid the problems of election meddling..

Titled "The Facebook Dilemma," the lengthy video report.contains little new information. It makes very heavy use of Kara Swisher from Recode -- who does a great job, and Roger McNamee from Silverlake Partners, playing the role of a Mark Zuckerberg insider.

One question at the end of Part 1 was: What exactly is Facebook's dilemma? It's never discussed or explained.

I'd like to know why Frontline expected a 34 year-old software engineer to come up with solutions to really tough societal problems such as fake news and political manipulation of consumers.

Zuckerberg knows Javascript -- why does Frontline (and society) expect him to have special abilities to solve these problems?

The dilemma lies squarely with our legislators -- allow Zuckerberg to continue with an unmanageable media platform -- or demand that he control these issues.

After all, the old media -- newspapers, magazines, radio and TV -- managed to control fake news and hate speech and keep it out of daily view. Why is Zuckerberg allowed to reject this social responsibility that the old media handled so successfully? We already have a solution -- it is called editors.

Yet Zuckerberg doesn't even realize that Facebook is a media company so how can he even begin to effectively address such issues?

Frontline's deep voiced narration asks serious questions and takes Zuckerberg to task -- time and again on the many mistakes he has made along the way.

But he's a software engineer -- he's not supposed to have the solutions! At times this Frontline report sounds like a ponderous parody of itself.

Zuckerberg doesn't share...

There was nothing said about the fact that Zuckerberg doesn't share power. He is is the majority shareholder and controls the most votes and he doesn't have to answer to shareholders. He could single-handedly pivot Facebook in a completely new direction. He could decide to change the business model without requiring any official approval from anyone.

So far, Facebook has sided with advertisers -- an adversarial position towards its users in that requires it to collect ever more personal data. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Zuckerberg is a young man and he wants to be seen as doing something good on a global scale -- which requires a different kind of Facebook than the one we see today that sells out its users to third parties at every opportunity.

But it's clear that Zuckerberg needs help and guidance on what to do.

Frontline had an opportunity to take the Facebook discussion further than the familiar and at times tedious roundup of what's wrong with the social media platform.

The viewer's dilemma is deciding if their time is better spent watching something else. I can recommend Frontline's excellent The House of Saud.

The BBC reports, Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests

The district has long been known for radical and underground culture. Google spokesman Ralf Bremer told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper that the company "does not allow protests to dictate our actions."

He said discussions with local humanitarian groups had instead led the firm to conclude that giving them the space would be the best solution for the area.

CNN reported that protests against the 3,000 square meter (32,291sq.ft) Google campus had been ongoing since 2016.

"Being confronted with the stress of permanent protest is clearly not the atmosphere in which people want to network and discuss ideas," [...said activist Konstantin Sergiou from the organization Bizim Kiez, part of the No Google Campus Alliance group.]

Google abandons Berlin campus plans after local protests - CNN

Google Campus in Warsaw at a weekend cultural event.

Foremski's Take: The Google Campuses are places where the tech giant can offer a friendly event space for local startups to use. It's great for building goodwill in key tech communities and they are vital to the lifeblood of the company: recruiting great engineers.

A writer writes a book, a filmmaker makes a film, an insurance sales sells a policy, a lawyer prepares a contract -- the output of an engineer is far different to that of most jobs. Because the work of a software engineer can be scaled across massive areas of the Internet -- and continue to work at an ever growing pace. The best engineers are hugely valuable.

Berlin, however, is not going to be a great recruitment center for Google. In trying to ignore the many months of protests in Berlin's trend-setting Kreuzberg district it shows that the company is out of touch with this community. It's not going to be cool to say that you are a Google engineer. But that's not true everywhere.

I recently visited the Warsaw Google campus which is part of a renovated former vodka factory and part of an arts and retail complex, a museum and a large conference and exhibition space which hosts cultural events as well as tech events and educational workshops.

The Warsaw Campus is situated in Praga which was a very poor district of Warsaw but rapid gentrification has changed the neighborhood greatly -- in many positive ways. And there seems to be a positive attitude towards the Google Campus from the locals.

In September I attended a two-day music and arts event at the campus that attracted a lot of people, and there were many other events scheduled. A positive sentiment towards Google seems popular with the locals.

Google recruitment in Poland will do better than in Berlin and that's true country by country. But for how long?

Google's lack of a moral or ethical leadership is going to be a big problem and the Berlin protests won't be an outlier data point. It proudly states its rights to pay as little tax as possible and to use every accounting measure known to Google to avoid taxes in the countries where it does business. Then there is its amorality when it comes to explaining its work on military projects and its plans for a clever way of getting back into the Chinese market.

Earlier this year Google dropped "Don't be evil" maybe because parent company Alphabet adopted "Do the right thing." This seems to suit its leadership.

Google's amorality in the decisions by its leadership will get it into trouble and that will make it harder to recruit the best engineers. It's because engineers share a common social culture of decency and justice and this doesn't line up with a leadership that's unaware of such qualities.

For Google's leaders amorality is a lack of data -- it's as if Google's leadership don't know what the right thing to do should be.

I offer some data to guide Google in making the right ethical decisions. In 2005 Yahoo was named by Reporters Without Borders as a police informant to the Chinese authorities resulting in ten-year hard labor sentences for dissidents fingered by Yahoo. Company morale sank like a stone and I tracked the start of the company's decline to this event.

Take a look: Yahoo's China "police informant" role sparked a $47.5 billion slide in market value | ZDNet

IT organizations plan for their cloud migration and hope for cost savings and greater business agility, but once in the cloud, the majority exceed their budgets and discover a serious skill gap, according to a recent survey commissioned by IT services firm Softchoice.

A survey of 250 North American companies found that, after completing cloud migration, 57 percent exceeded their IT budgets and almost 20 percent exceeded their budgets by between 21 percent to 50 percent.

The results show that expectations for cloud IT are not being reached by IT planners and that they do not understand the ongoing cloud IT costs involved. About 43 percent admitted to having trouble with their cloud management strategy.

Nearly all, 96 percent said they had a skills gap in their organizations regarding cloud IT.

The survey discovered a serious gap in awareness about the shortcomings within their IT organizations, with 61 percent of vice-president and C-level executives believing their move to the cloud has allowed them to achieve their business goals, while 41 percent of lower-level IT execs agreeing the same.

Larger organizations admitted to having the most difficulty in using cloud IT to achieve business goals, while smaller organizations with less than 500 employees reported one-third higher satisfaction with the cloud.

The top five reasons for moving to the cloud were: 78 percent want higher performance from their IT; 67 percent want business agility; 64 percent expect cost savings; 52 percent believe employee productivity will increase; and 49 percent want scalability.

More than half -- 53 percent -- said they are monitoring application performance. Thirty-six percent have adopted DevOps principles. Thirty-three percent are utilizing machine learning for predictive analytics. Twenty-eight percent have adopted micro services architectures, and 25 percent are using containers.

Human errors (such as not understanding the costs involved in cloud IT) were reported by 25 percent, and 34 percent said they lacked skilled employees. More than 86 percent said they pay a premium for skilled workers, with 37 percent percent paying 20 percent to 50 percent more in wages.

IT organizations plan for their cloud migration and hope for cost savings and greater business agility, but once in the cloud, the majority exceed their budgets and discover a serious skill gap, according to a recent survey commissioned by IT services firm Softchoice.

A survey of 250 North American companies found that, after completing cloud migration, 57 percent exceeded their IT budgets and almost 20 percent exceeded their budgets by between 21 percent to 50 percent.

Also: Cloud computing is eating the world: Should we be worried?

The results show that expectations for cloud IT are not being reached by IT planners and that they do not understand the ongoing cloud IT costs involved. About 43 percent admitted to having trouble with their cloud management strategy.

Nearly all, 96 percent said they had a skills gap in their organizations regarding cloud IT.

The survey discovered a serious gap in awareness about the shortcomings within their IT organizations, with 61 percent of vice-president and C-level executives believing their move to the cloud has allowed them to achieve their business goals, while 41 percent of lower-level IT execs agreeing the same.

Larger organizations admitted to having the most difficulty in using cloud IT to achieve business goals, while smaller organizations with less than 500 employees reported one-third higher satisfaction with the cloud.

The top five reasons for moving to the cloud were: 78 percent want higher performance from their IT; 67 percent want business agility; 64 percent expect cost savings; 52 percent believe employee productivity will increase; and 49 percent want scalability.

Also: Cloud computing: Five ways to make the most of the move

More than half -- 53 percent -- said they are monitoring application performance. Thirty-six percent have adopted DevOps principles. Thirty-three percent are utilizing machine learning for predictive analytics. Twenty-eight percent have adopted micro services architectures, and 25 percent are using containers.

Human errors (such as not understanding the costs involved in cloud IT) were reported by 25 percent, and 34 percent said they lacked skilled employees. More than 86 percent said they pay a premium for skilled workers, with 37 percent percent paying 20 percent to 50 percent more in wages.

Additional findings from the Softchoice survey can be seen here.