Why Apps Won't Matter in the Future: Aggregators

... and smart bots and personal assistants:



Oh, and streaming. As technologies quickly change and evolve, so will the many ways we use them. Today's solution is tomorrow's history. The video also points out why these developments and trends are both exciting and scary.

     

The Business and Political Elite at Davos

Their opinions about high tech changes, and what they mean:

Internet will 'disappear', Google boss tells Davos

Google boss Eric Schmidt predicted on Thursday that the Internet will soon be so pervasive in every facet of our lives that it will effectively "disappear" into the background. Speaking to the business and political elite at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Schmidt said: "There will be so many sensors, so many devices, that you won't even sense it, it will be all around you."

"It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room and... you are interacting with all the things going on in that room." "A highly personalized, highly interactive and very interesting world emerges." On the sort of high-level panel only found among the ski slopes of Davos, a panel bringing together the heads of Google, Facebook and Microsoft and Vodafone sought to allay fears that the rapid pace of technological advance was killing jobs.

"Everyone's worried about jobs," admitted Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook. With so many changes in the technology world, "the transformation is happening faster than ever before," she acknowledged. "But tech creates jobs not only in the tech space but outside," she insisted. Schmidt quoted statistics he said showed that every tech job created between five and seven jobs in a different area of the economy. "If there were a single digital market in Europe, 400 million new and important new jobs would be created in Europe," which is suffering from stubbornly high levels of unemployment. The debate about whether technology is destroying jobs "has been around for hundreds of years," said the Google boss. What is different is the speed of change.

"It's the same that happened to the people who lost their farming jobs when the tractor came... but ultimately a globalised solution means more equality for everyone." With one of the main topics at this year's World Economic Forum being how to share out the fruits of global growth, the tech barons stressed that the greater connectivity offered by their companies ultimately helps reduce inequalities. "Are the spoils of tech being evenly spread? That is an issue that we have to tackle head on," said Satya Nadella, chief executive of Microsoft. [...]

They are entitled to their opinions as anyone else. But I don't necessarily believe them. The problem with "Elites" is, they don't live in the same world as the rest of us. They can think whatever they like, but it doesn't necessarily make it so. And some of their ideas are downright creepy. Is their vision the Brave New World we are headed for? Because if that is what they are aiming for, I would guess that there will be unintended and unforeseen consequences that they have not anticipated.


More fun from the Davos Elites:

You’ve entered The Hypocrisy Zone: Billionaire Democrat wants YOU to downsize your lifestyle
     

Russian Economics in the Global Economy

It what's bad for Russia, bad for us too? In our global economy, we're all connected:

The ruble's collapse is disastrous for Putin - and bad for you too

[...] Given President Vladimir Putin’s status as the West’s new bogeyman, the temptation to rejoice in the abrupt collapse of his regime’s economic clout is acute. Many will want to congratulate themselves at the success of economic sanctions, the aim of which was to punish Putin for his annexation of Crimea and its covert sponsorship of a civil war there.

They shouldn’t get carried away.

For one thing, it doesn’t make Russian concessions on Ukraine any more likely: the worse the economic pressure, the more the Kremlin’s propaganda will drum home the message that it is the Evil West, denying Russia its holy Crimean birthright, that is to blame. Opinion polls suggest that the vast majority of Russians still accept this version of events.

As such, Ukraine will remain a running sore, infecting both the European economy and, through it, the world’s. Moreover, Ukraine itself is on the verge of a default that will send shock waves through European and global financial markets, amplifying the effect.

A financial crisis in Russia would have much larger negative consequences than a Ukrainian one: western banks (mainly European ones) will have to write off more loans, western companies will have to write off investments. And that’s even if contagion doesn’t spread to other vulnerable emerging markets such as Indonesia or Brazil, both big recipients of western investment.

For the moment, the signs are that Putin is gambling on the oil market turning round, trusting to the legendary endurance of the people while his government keeps the plates spinning as long as it can.

In the meantime, the loyal will be taken care of. Covert bailouts to the country’s biggest banks from the country’s rainy-day fund are already getting more frequent. VTB and Gazprombank, two lenders that are “too-big-to-fail”, have already had their capital levels topped up.

But that is nothing compared to the egregious piece of money-printing that was agreed last week, when the central bank agreed to lend money against 625 billion rubles (still over $10 billion, even after Monday’s mayhem) of bonds freshly printed by Rosneft, the oil company headed by Putin confidant Igor Sechin. The aim is to let Rosneft hoard its export dollars and meet a $10 billion loan repayment later this month (and another $4 billion in February).

The realization that Rosneft, one of the biggest players on the foreign exchange market, would be buying far fewer rubles with its export dollars appears to have been one of the reasons for the ruble’s drop Monday (the failure of the central bank’s half-hearted rate hike and intervention last week also being partly responsible).

If the central bank shows anything like the same generosity to other companies, then the ruble’s debasement will be complete. The central bank now estimates that the economy will shrink 4.5% next year if oil stays at $60/barrel, and that is something that would certainly trigger a wave of corporate defaults.

Unless the ruble bounces back sharply, inflation is heading much, much higher than the 10% the CBR is already forecasting. Specifically, food, which makes up over 30% of Russian disposable income, is going to get more expensive (Russia imports over 40% of its food and has made a rod for its own back by banning relatively cheap produce from the E.U.).

Moreover, since over 80% of retail deposits are now held in rubles, devaluation means that the savings that Putin’s voters have accumulated as they came to trust their own currency over the last 14 years will be devastated. Already Monday, the yield on the 10-year bonds of a government that hasn’t run a deficit in 14 years hit 13%–anything but an expression of trust.

This is a recipe for social instability far greater than the tame, middle-class, metropolitan protests at Putin’s tainted election victory in 2012.

But what does an authoritarian leader do in such a situation? Back down or crack down? There is no evidence from this year to suggest Putin has suddenly become the backing-down kind. Repression seems the likelier option. If that doesn’t work, then doubling-down with another foreign policy adventure to distract from domestic problems hardly seems fanciful any more: in the summer, Putin cast doubt on the statehood of neighboring Kazakhstan, which doesn’t have the NATO guarantee that the Baltic States enjoy.

Either way, the consequences are too miserable to contemplate, both for Russia and for the world in general. [...]

Something to look forward to in the New Year? See the original article for embedded links and more.

     

The Weak Spots in the Global Economy

Ten Things That Could Still Go Wrong with the Economy

From The Business Insider, June 11, 2009:

The recent buoyancy of the financial markets has created a sense of calm about the economy. The overall sense of panic has gone.

But there's still a wariness in the air, a feeling that the fragile "green shoots" of the recovery might be stomped out by some new crisis. People are waiting for the next shoe to drop.

Here we suggest 10 things that might stymie our recovery. Some are purely financial events. Others are geopolitical. [...]

In our increasingly interconnected global economy, the weakspots are also interconnected. This list of ten things are ten things to watch closely.
     

Hawaii or Alaska? Why not Hawaii AND Alaska?

I read an essay recently about someone's chance encounter with Obama in Hawaii, before he anounced he was running for POTUS. I got the gist of it just fine, but the conclusion, to me, was a bit off.

My Chance Encounter with Obama in Hawaii

It was three days before the New Year in late 2006, and I was eating a burger with the traveler and writer Paul Theroux on Oahu's North Shore. Beside us in the rickety little shack was a quintessentially Hawaiian group of Chinese Americans, African Americans, semi–Southeast Asians and kids who could have been any or all of the above, waiting for the dad in the group to bring over their avocado burgers from the counter. It took Paul and me a few seconds to realize that the dad in question — who looked like a skinny teenager — was, in fact, the freshman Senator from Illinois, who was expected to enter the presidential race in the next week or two.

We couldn't help breaking in on his private moment to say hello, and Barack Obama, intruded upon in a place he'd probably come to get away from people like us, could not have been more friendly and engaged; we felt we could have talked burgers — and places and books — with him all day. But you expect that of a politician, whose livelihood depends on winning hearts. The more remarkable thing, we both felt, was that this sparkling stranger was so much like the kind of people we meet in Paris, in Hong Kong, in the Middle East: difficult to place and connected to everywhere. Like the air of his home island (not really Eastern or Western, but a vibrant mingling of the two), he spoke for the dawning global melting pot of today. [...]

The article then goes on about how last century was the "American" century, but the 21st century is the "Global" century, and America, just like it's enemies, is refusing to climb aboard the fast moving train of what the rest of the world is doing. The rest of the world, which relates to images more than ideas, is unhappy with America. Obama is the answer to this "problem".

The Author compares Alaska to Hawaii. Hawaii is the melting pot, the future. Alaska is the America of his childhood; beautiful, but too self-reliant and fortune-seeking.

[...] Barack Obama the man is sure to disappoint some of the expectations his fans have; any man would, especially in the age of the 24/7 news cycle. But the past and the future that he speaks for are precisely the ones that belong so uniquely to the new century and the 95% of humans who are our neighbors at the global burger table. It's more than possible to make your fortune in Alaska — but I'd much rather find the future in Hawaii.

Now you can read the whole thing, there are a few good phrases in there ("...a world where people communicate more with images than ideas and assumptions travel faster than truths"). Yes, I get it. But I did find it had a tone that was somewhat irritating. The implication would seem to be that we should be less self-reliant and more conformist to what the rest of the world wants.

The global burger table thing is fine. Obviously that is happening. Obama as an image, the multicultural melting pot thing, fine. But the conclusion, that we have to choose the "future" - Hawaii, not the fortune seeking past, as represented by Alaska, doesn't cut if for me.

We are clearly moving into the future; we can only go forward. And as we go forward, change will come. Globalization is coming, and it's more a question of how and when, than if. But as we move forward, and as American changes, as it inevitably will, it is my hope we build on the firm foundation of what is the best from our past and present.

I don't think American exceptionalism is something to be ashamed of, just because some folks around the globe think we need to become more like them. My voting Republican in this last election wasn't about "fortune seeking", or living in the past. It was about insuring a future that will value and bring forward the best America has to offer, not only for ourselves, but for the global burger crowd too, which we are also a part of.

Those kids around the global burger table may find themselves in need of Alaskan oil one day. Self-reliance is not a bad thing, but even Alaskans know the value of neighbors they can rely on. None of us live in a vacuum. And Alaskans, I'm told, often spend their winters in beautiful Hawaii. Hawaii and Alaska both have much to offer.

The "either-or" analogy does not ring true for me, it's too restrictive. We need the best of both worlds, or should I say, the best of all worlds. Globalization will require some conformity, some compromise, by everyone. Yet as America does it's part and conforms with it, we need to be sure we don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Having a seat at the global burger table and helping pay the bill doesn't mean we need to forget who we are or where we came from, or where we would like to go from here.