WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

WHY IT MATTERS: I reported in 2015 that Netflix + YouTube accounted for 55% of web traffic. Their share is down only because the other streaming video services are growing. Also interesting from this chart that HTTP (good old web browsing), now only accounts for less than 10%. This means video is the medium of choice, cable TV is on it's way out (so expect more growth) and 5G mobile coverage will be in high demand when it becomes available soon...

2015 reference is here: http://fmcs.digital/blog/netflix-youtube-55-of-internet-traffic/ 

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

In today's eCommerce world, winners do not limit themselves to building great catalogs and payment processing experience. They actively analyze data to understand customer behaviour, to provide them with exceptional information to speed-up their shopping experience, but also maybe make them buy more or more expensive products. This is a great example of such a data analysis by grocery shopping leader instacart. It provides amazing insights into grocery shopping but also has open sourced the data for others to benefit.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Pretty much your whole life is online and digitize today. Your only protection from crooks is strong passwords that you never reuse. This article provides in depth discussion on the millions of passwords that are being sold for few dollars on the dark web. It should help you understand why this is important and what to do to be more secure.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Big brother is watching and when it does you can gain tremendous insights into the behaviour of humans. I zoomed in on Montreal and the diagram is very clear about which run trails are most popular on the Mount Royal. On the dark side, of course, this means Strava performs some high level surveillance on us as we share our bike and run rides with their software.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Training artificial intelligence systems using deep learning algorithms requires large datasets where the elements you want to recognize - cats, planes umbrellas - are already identified.

This dataset from YouTube contains 380000 videos with over 10.5M annotations to help train systems of the future. We have to remember that the more data is available for training the better the system will perform. Nevertheless, this is interesting as is shows a little bit of the behind the scene in AI and helps understand a bit more how good AI systems will be - or when they may fail.

Additional datasets are available from google here: https://research.google.com/research-outreach.html#/research-outreach/research-datasets 

Recently, Google announced an 8M YouTube video dataset to help spark research: https://research.google.com/youtube8m/ 

Simple. Easy. Efficient. Wow.

Just follow the link to the 2012 report and find out what it means to cross reference different digital databases.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Our lives are digital and we leave digital exhaust behind us everywhere we go. This paper shows what the US government uses to put together a composite picture of your digital twin. For now, they plan to use this for border crossing but in the future - 10 or 20 years down the road - what will this info be used for? Also, knowing that military and very advanced technology always makes it into the corporate world, how will this be used by corporations? 

Moving large amounts of data to the cloud - petabytes and exabytes - would take years to do if transferred using networks and the Internet. Amazon provides its customers with dedicated and secure hard drives - they call snowballs - and truck - they call snowmobiles - to move the data from one data center to the next.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

There are limits to our network infrastructures and physical solutions often are required to migrate data to the cloud or digitize products. For example scanning paper files or converting books to digital ones often require specialized equipments in order to perform the work rapidly and cost effectively. Google had patented a book scanning equipment in order to create its Google books project in the past. I assume this same kind of innovation will start to happen in other fields as well.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/13/3639016/google-books-scanner-vacuum-diy 

https://books.google.com/googlebooks/about/ 

More on this here: http://uk.businessinsider.com/amazon-snowmobile-truck-is-a-funny-for-real-product-2016-11 

An interactive chart that graphs 800 different jobs along with their automation potential - as estimated by McKinsey.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

If you are in school or just out of school, this chart should be of particular interest. For all the others, this is essential must read tooling when preparing strategy and planning for the future of your business unit, organization - large or startup.

Jobs with highest potential for automation represent opportunities for cost reduction, process improvements to reduce lead times, or creation of the automated tools and software that will replace them. For example:

• medical appliance technicians: 100% automation potential. If you are in this field your business plan should include major shift from human workers to robots. If employees are unionized, look at contract negotiation and employee retraining. If you build medical appliance, ensure your hard-software appliance includes the necessary components to make this automation simple and effective.
• sewing machine operators: 100% automation potential, 143K workers in the US. Replacing human by robot sewing machine is efficient but will require capital expenditures: has it been forecasted in your budgets? If that throws your business model out of whack, you have to think like a startup and "pivot" your company to a different yet adjacent space such as custom apparel design and fabrication.

And 798 other sources of inspiration.