Hacker George Hotz is mobbed after telling SXSW he's coming for Tesla, GM, and Google.
The legendary hacker George Hotz, known by his nom de guerre “geohot,” who first came to public attention by hacking Apple’s (AAPL) first iPhone, spoke this morning at the South by Southwest conference about taking on Tesla’s (TSLA) self-driving car initiatives with his own garage efforts, a talk titled “I built a better self-driving car than Tesla.”By the end of the talk, it was clear he had numerous targets, including Alphabet’s (GOOGL) self-driving car efforts, despite mighty respect for the search giant.Hotz’s achievement, rigging up home made parts to an Acura ILX to make it self-driving, first came to prominence with an article in mid-December by Bloomberg’s Ashlee Vance. Judging by the thunderous applause at the end of the session, and the gaggle of those crowding Hotz to ask questions, Hotz made some converts and fans.
Amazon is building a lot of businesses that look like AWS: taxes on major industries that work to everyone’s benefit. The reason, though, is that AWS is a lot like Amazon itself.
Today I am super excited to have received this note.
“We are thrilled to offer you acceptance to Harvard Business School’s Disruptive Strategy program. We are looking forward to having you join our community of learners who are seeking an immersive and rigorous experience.
Disruptive Strategy will be as rewarding as it is rigorous. We look forward to not only having you dig-in and learn in our environment, but also actively engage and share unique ideas and experiences with your peers.”
Tech product cycles are mutually reinforcing interactions between platforms and applications. New platforms enable new applications, which in turn make the new platforms more valuable, creating a positive feedback loop… We can try to understand and predict the product cycle by studying the past and extrapolating into the future.
Unified Commerce [formerly known as Omnichannel] is no longer a nice to have, it is a foundational imperative…but why? Some may say Unified Commerce will provide differentiation and help a retailer meet customer needs and expectations; I believe there is something much greater happening, and if retailers do not take notice their firms could lose complete relevancy in the coming years.
With the advancements being made in artificial intelligence, shoppers will be less and less likely the “buyer.” Virtual private assistants will take over more and more of the routine purchasing decisions. I call this “Programmatic Commerce.” During this session, we will discuss this concept and how it fits into the near term achievement of Unified Commerce. Unified Commerce is just a milestone, not the end game.
Artificial intelligence experts predict that intelligent and semi-intelligent autonomous systems — such as self-driving cars and autonomous drones — “will march into our society” in the next two to three years, with driving expected to be fully automated in 25 years, a panel of experts said at a 13 February news briefing at the 2016 AAAS Annual Meeting.
No company is immune to competition.
