“Nanos” for short. From the NYT story:
“People who have as few as 1,000 followers and are willing to advertise products on social media. Their lack of fame is one of the qualities that make them approachable. When they recommend a shampoo or a lotion or a furniture brand, their word seems as genuine as advice from a friend. In exchange for free products or a small commission, nanos typically say whatever companies tell them to.”
“In his book “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order,” Kai-Fu Lee, a well-known artificial-intelligence expert, venture capitalist and former president of Google China, argues that China and Silicon Valley will lead the world in AI. But his highly readable book covers a lot of other ground as well, and among the most interesting insights are his descriptions of the differences between Chinese and Silicon Valley tech culture.” (Washington Post review) Not quite finished but here are some excerpts:
If artificial intelligence is the new electricity, Chinese entrepreneurs will be the tycoons and tinkerers who electrify everything from household appliances to homeowners’ insurance. […] Ambitious mayors across China are scrambling to turn their cities into showcases for new AI applications. They’re plotting driverless trucking routes, installing facial recognition systems on public transportation, and hooking traffic grids into “city brains” that optimize flows.
China’s startup culture is the yin to Silicon Valley’s yang: instead of being mission-driven, Chinese companies are first and foremost market-driven. Their ultimate goal is to make money, and they’re willing to create any product, adopt any model, or go into any business that will accomplish that objective. […] The core motivation for China’s market-driven entrepreneurs is not fame, glory, or changing the world. Those things are all nice side benefits, but the grand prize is getting rich, and it doesn’t matter how you get there.
Adoption of mobile payments happened at lightning speed. By the end of 2016, it was hard to find a shop in a major (Chinese) city that did not accept mobile payments. […] By the end of 2017, 65 percent of China’s over 753 million smartphone users had enabled mobile payments. […] It got to the point where beggars on the streets of Chinese cities began hanging pieces of paper around their necks with printouts of two QR codes, one for Alipay and one for WeChat. […]
For 2017, total transactions on China’s mobile payment platforms reportedly surpassed $ 17 trillion—greater than China’s GDP. […] Data from mobile payments is currently generating the richest maps of consumer activity the world has ever known, far exceeding the data from traditional credit-card purchases or online activity captured by e-commerce players like Amazon or platforms like Google and Yelp. […] Recent estimates have Chinese companies outstripping U.S. competitors ten to one in quantity of food deliveries and fifty to one in spending on mobile payments. China’s e-commerce purchases are roughly double the U.S. totals, and the gap is only growing.
U.S. federal funding for math and computer science research amounts to less than half of Google’s own R& D budget.
Between 2007 and 2017, China went from having zero high-speed rail lines to having more miles of high-speed rail operational than the rest of the world combined.
It no longer makes sense to think of oneself as “going online.” When you order a full meal just by speaking a sentence from your couch, are you online or offline? When your refrigerator at home tells your shopping cart at the store that you’re out of milk, are you moving through a physical world or a digital one?In the United States we build self-driving cars to adapt to our existing roads because we assume the roads can’t change. In China, there’s a sense that everything can change—including current roads. Indeed, local officials are already modifying existing highways, reorganizing freight patterns, and building cities that will be tailor-made for driverless cars.
Much of today’s white-collar workforce is paid to take in and process information, and then make a decision or recommendation based on that information—which is precisely what AI algorithms do best.
Flickr, the photo sharing site, launched in February, 2004. I created my account in May, 2005, and have been a user ever since. I have more than 1,800 photos in my account which isn’t a large number. That’s because I don’t upload every photo I take. I’ve never used Flickr as a “warehouse” for storing photos. I put stuff on Flickr that I want to share, although I tend to use my blog for that these days. My photos have been viewed more than a million times (collectively) but I doubt that’s a big number, comparatively speaking.
For most of its existence, Flickr has been owned by Yahoo! who fucked it up in ways too numerous to mention. Earlier this year Flickr was sold to SmugMug, a paid image sharing, image hosting service, and online video platform. The new owners are making changes and a bunch of the 800,000 Flickr users are freaking out. They’ve been getting unlimited storage for free and in a couple of months that ends. The new limit is 1,000 photos or upgrade to a Pro account for $50 a year. (Which I did back in 2005)
The vast majority of Flickr users are not using the service as a “photo sharing” platform. They’re taking advantage of the free terabyte of storage to warehouse and back-up all of their photos. Fun while it lasted but guess what? Internet companies make changes like this all the time. I think this is a logical move will keep Flickr financially healthy. Others think it will kill the service. Time will tell.
What my Pro account give me under this new plan?
Free is not a business model. And if a dollar a week is too pricey for you… sorry, Charlie. I’m happy to pay for services I like. For those who aren’t, there are free services like Google Photos.
“This flu season, Clorox paid to license information from Kinsa, a tech start-up that sells internet-connected thermometers that are a far cry from the kind once made with mercury and glass. The thermometers sync up with a smartphone app that allows consumers to track their fevers and symptoms, making it especially attractive to parents of young children. The data showed Clorox which ZIP codes around the country had increases in fevers. The company then directed more ads to those areas, assuming that households there may be in the market for products like its disinfecting wipes.” (New York Times)
A week ago Apple started allowing U.S. users to download all of their data from the company, following a GDPR-mandated feature for EU citizens that launched in May. A friend and long-time Apple user took them up on the offer and after almost a week he got it.
They have a lot of info on me. Every item I purchased from Apple since 2003. Every time I called Support. Every time I had something repaired. Every survey I replied to and how I answered. Every app or song I downloaded and the IP address I downloaded it from. Every time they sent me marketing email and if I opened it and what device I looked at it on.
Honestly, I’m not sure I want to know. Same for Amazon.
The most satisfying and fulfilling job I ever had was that of small town radio announcer. About a dozen years from the early 70s to the early 80s. We still played vinyl 45s and LPs on turntables. We recorded on magnetic tape. Nobody much cared (within limits) what we said. Looking back, I can see that I was fortunate to catch the tail end of radio’s best years. From Work+Money:
One in 10 of the nation’s 33,202 radio and television announcers are expected to see their jobs disappear by 2026. Consolidation in the industry, as well as increased use of syndicated content, is fueling the decline. There’s also the explosion of streaming music services. More and more listeners prefer that over their local, drive-time disc jockey.
Party DJs however, are seeing an uptick in business with demand for their services projected to grow about six percent by 2026. And they earn about the same – $32,000 – as their on-air counterparts.
I thought radio was a dying profession twenty years ago. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has some interesting data on the profession but, like the article above, they combine radio and TV announcers. I’d like to know how many of each.
Every minute for three months, GM secretly gathered data on 90,000 drivers’ radio-listening habits and locations. (BoingBoing)
On September 12th, GM’s director of global digital transformation Saejin Park gave a presentation to the Association of National Advertisers in which he described how the company had secretly gathered data on the radio-listening habits of 90,000 GM owners in LA and Chicago for three months in 2017, tracking what stations they listened to and for how long, and where they were at the time; this data was covertly exfiltrated from the cars by means of their built-in wifi.
The company says it never sold this data, but the presentation to the advertising execs was clearly designed to elicit bids for it. Toyota has promised not to gather and sell telematics data, but GM seems poised to create a market in data gathered by your car, which can listen to you, follow you, take pictures of you and your surroundings, and even gather data on which passengers are in the car at different times by tracking Bluetooth beacons from mobile devices.
GM looked at station selection, volume and ZIP codes of vehicle owners. No radio in The Truck. Too noisy to listen if there were.
A friend of mine — a local small businessman — called me yesterday saying he was “taking a poll.”
FRIEND: When was the last time you looked up a phone number in the Yellow Pages?
ME: Uh, at least ten years ago. Everybody uses Google, don’t they? Why are you asking?
FRIEND: I got a call from a sales rep for the Yellow Pages asking me to renew my ad. I told him I didn’t advertise in the Yellow Pages. I was wrong. I’ve been paying a thousand bucks a year for the last ten years. When I asked my wife she said, “We’d always had an ad so…”
A few years ago I was in the front yard when a guy pulled up and tossed a plastic bag on my lawn. It contained copy of the Yellow Pages. I picked it up and took it over to the guy saying I didn’t want it and always just throw them in the trash.
“Yeah, that’s what everybody tells me but I get paid to toss ’em. I can’t take it back so just pitch it,” he explained. I’d love to know how many people with ads in the YP are like my friend.
During my radio days (1970’s) I noticed one of our advertisers had been running the same ad for over a year. I started nagging our sales rep to go see the client and get some fresh copy. We’d produce a new spot, no charge.
“I think we just just let well enough alone. He’d tell us if he wanted to change copy,” whined the sales rep.
I kept after him and one day he stormed into my office. “I hope you’re happy! He cancelled his advertising!” And stormed out. I called the client to ask why.
“We had no idea we were still running that spot — and paying for it. My bookkeeper just wrote the check every month. It slipped through the cracks.”
I’ll bet the Yellow Pages folks have reams of data “proving” who uses the book and how often.
Overheard a woman talking to a friend this morning say something like “I bought it from Amazon.” I’m pretty sure whatever she purchased wasn’t manufactured by Amazon. But the Amazon brand has pretty much gobbled up the branding value from all the stuff they sell. I get as much value from Amazon as from the company that made the whatever. More? Has any company ever owned so much mind-space? Maybe Sears back in the mail order catalog days?