Category Archives: Business

Too Big To Fail – A Rule of Thirds

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A recent tech outage – Crowdstrike bringing down Windows systems – showed us yet again how fragile we are with important infrastructure. Because of just-in-time processes and finely optimised systems, some failure that is truly tragic will only be noticed afterwards. To mitigate this, and improve redundancy greatly, and save society from monopolies and provide jobs and lessen inequality… we only need one rule.

In nominated critical industries (there will be many), no business and no system can have more than one-third market share.

An easy example is computer operating systems. They need to make sure they never have more than 33% share in any industry, for example airline booking systems. Neither can computer manufacturers, RAM makers, microchip makers, hard drive makers. At least 3 software companies must make the booking systems, and they cannot share code.

Bananas are mostly Cavendish in Australia – that needs to change.

Achieving this rule is actually very easy. Dominant players charge more, degrade quality or remove features until they lose appeal enough for some other to have inroads.

The problem we have today is industries are like a game of chicken, and the less resilient you are, the more potential upsides and downsides. It is risk for profits, and sometimes a race to the bottom. Recently some emerging car companies failed because interest rates went up. They were too finely leveraged.

There are industries controlled by a few (meat-packers in the US, supermarkets in Australia) which only has one advantage – market efficiency to enrich their owners. Every else about their duopolies (or whatever three players is called) is a negative to the rest of society.

With the rise of the machines/AI, we will need more jobs, and some inefficiencies will be good for us.

Back to the computer example – we can easily have Windows/Mac/Linux. Having multiple sources of microprocessors would be great! Instead of 90% coming from Taiwan. Having spaceships going to the space station using different computer systems will mean those astronauts have two ways to get home. When the airline booking systems go down, it only affects a third of airlines (per country). Or supermarket checkouts.

We could even perhaps extend it to money – as in state currencies cost enough of a premium that crypto alternatives become appealing.

5figz – Amazon Bestsellers Go Rogue

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Every merchant wants to go off on Amazon. But when they do, Amazon probably makes more profit from the success than they do.

I’m imagining a platform where you can buy the verified hits of Amazon – products that have sold 10K+

  • Amazon hits are rarely rip-offs, the review system (mostly) looks after that.
  • People trust a successful Amazon product
  • Amazon cannot stop you stating a fact about your success on their platform

While Amazon has put superhuman effort into getting products to people quicker, price tends to trump speed. So the 5figz fulfilment system doesn’t need absolute speed. However, the nature of the products – high-volume – lends itself to efficiency.

I figure that the game plan is to out-Amazon Amazon. Run at a loss with their most successful products, until the public learn that 5figz is where to get the best products without Amazon taking a crazy cut of proceeds.

And it scales scarily well. Start with the most expensive products with 10K sales. And as the business grows, fold in lower price items. Obviously selling 10K execycles is better all round than selling 10K hairbands.

Drone drug delivery

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Illicit drugs are physical and require delivery, so al sorts of means have been deployed over the years. Most recently tunnels, submarines and drones.

Getting 1kg across the border in a retail drone is quite easy, and presumably it is done a lot.

But what about the last mile? How long before the end user gets their delivery by drone? We all know that drugs are often sold by the ounce, and a drone that can carry an ounce might be too small to notice.

A network of such drones could network drug delivery across a city. The transfer of the payload is what is needed, automation, no humans.

And less likely to get caught by the feds, if you start each drone journey and end it at a random place.

Dear Everyone

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Advice app. Primarily romantic and social issues

Maximum 10 questions per day are sent out. Randomly chosen. Vetted by the developers..

Submitted question expires after 1 week if not chosen. Prompted to resubmit if still relevant. Max 1 question per month for anyone

Get points for giving advice. Points increase your chance of being chosen.

Questions have up to five answers, multiple can be selected

Questioner selects the advice they have taken.

Questioner is prompted to let the result be known, happy or otherwise. With commentary. Bonus points for those whose advice helped. Negative for bad advice that was taken.

Comments allowed but heavily vetted. Comments cost points.

The best questions/ results can appear on a chat video to promote the app.

Monetized later >>> One of the questions is a short 2 min survey. Many Points for answering.

Can a Business Be a Country?

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Tuvalu is shifting online, because their physical country is predicted to sink beneath the waves of climate change.

“…ensures that the government can continue to function, coordinate itself and the people, manage our resources, our tuna industry, and our domain name”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-27/tuvalus-plan-to-create-digital-twin-metaverse-climate-change/102223008

Because the income from tuna and the .tv domain name will continue, regardless, they need a way of giving some income to their citizens. In other words, without the land they become less of a country and more of a business.

Tuvalu will become a business, but retain many aspects of being a country, like having citizens.

So I am thinking that businesses can be set up to imitate a “country that becomes a business”.

That means that the business is owned by people, but every owner has an equal share.
That means being democratic.
That means ownership requires no effort or input from the owners.

So, how to decide ownership? It won’t be the workers who own it, any more than the tuna fishermen of Tuvalu own their country.

The Tuvalu people belong together by existing physically on the same islands. That is their commonality.

For a business, the closest to that is the fans and supporters of the business – their customers. Customers contribute to the well-being of a business, and they care about the success of the business. Customers can be big or small, but how much they spend doesn’t necessarily reflect how much they like it, so a one-vote-per-customer model sounds good, just like a country.

However, because it is so cheap and easy to become a citizen-customer of a retail brand, profits cannot be distributed equally amongst customers – otherwise people will just buy products to get the (ongoing) profits. It will only work for a non-profit, where being a citizen has non-monetary rewards and/or engagement.

The Return of Sponsorship

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Soap Operas were named after being sponsored by a soap company. One company instead of a variety of ads.

ChatGPT etc will spawn an answer service (as distinct from a search engine). It might only happen when we fully understand what it can give accurate answers to. Quite possibly it outputs answers and ideas to explore. The latter being a fancy way of saying it is not confident of being correct.

People will learn what an answer service is good for. It won’t be for finding a local plumber! Which means the types of ads we see in search engines won’t necessarily apply.

If you want a summary of the best features of an iPhone, then perhaps the ads we are used to seeing on Google can appear there. But I expect it would be more like this:

  • Sponsored ad at the top, from a sponsor – one advertiser who sponsors all queries of that type. For example, an electronics store could sponsor all tech queries.
  • Embedded affiliate links to products – possibly a link to something akin to Google Shopping
  • A list of suggested resources, commercial or otherwise, at the bottom
  • Below those resources, some contextual ads, like on Google Search. Yep, relegated to the bottom, but still existing because why not.

But the sponsorship will be new and lucrative. All requests for the system to conjure up imagined lyrics can be sponsored by Spotify. All generative images by Adobe. And so on.

It could become new/fresh/different enough to become a successful form of advertising. We might see the return of soaps sponsoring TV shows.

AI and Private Data Training

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For conversational AI, there are many contenders for winner, and probably there will be a winner who rules all, because they are all being trained on public data (the Internet).

For using AI to create images in Photoshop, or spreadsheets in Office, they already have monopolies, and those abilities will simply cement the monopolies further.

But there is a world of potential uses that need to be trained on private data, and that will help one AI business rise to the top. First mover advantage from training on private data.

Example:

In business meetings with client I often need to recall data to respond to a question. It is far better for me to know it off the top of my head, than “excuse me while I look for it”. AI can listen the conversation, and based on its learning, know which data to surface for me, and present it on my screen or AI spectacles.

That takes training. A company like Zoom could (with permission) listen in on meetings and get a head start.

Don’t be surprised if Microsoft wins. They already have Office and Teams. They already have OpenAI. And they can easily buy the companies who can access the private data for training.

Google doesn’t have the same potential for data access. Far fewer people use their platforms for meetings.

The other angle is hardware. If Apple can get their AR glasses out there en masse in businesses, those glasses can listen in (with permission) and learn.

Amazon won’t even partake, thankfully. But they will go after home automation (a talking house), but never be sufficiently innovative to own that space, and hopefully do not buy the winner.

The Next Twitter Won’t Be Social

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What we consider to be “social networks” mostly aren’t.

Facebook is a true social network, where keeping up with and communicating with hundreds of actual friends and acquaintances is typical. You cannot leave FB for a rival social network, because your friends are not there – Catch 22.

Twitter is mostly for following what famous people and news sources say, and commenting. Or people of minor fame in a Ponzi scheme of acknowledgment and validation. You can DM people but it wouldn’t matter if that went away.

Instagram is similar to Twitter – easily replaced, with connections not being critical in the real world.

Musk has mused that Twitter could become like WeChat, a Swiss-army-knife social app (there are many reasons why that would fail). I suggest that it should go the other way, and have zero social applications.

The next Twitter, I think Pony Express is a good name…

Pony Express would be just a news aggregator. So, the same as Twitter is now, but:

  • Greater variety of post types – images, links, long-form, PDF, press release, scores, polls, products with “buy now” buttons.
  • Categories for posts that you decide, like folders in an email account
  • No video.
  • No DMs
  • Sharing is all external, like “share to Facebook”
  • No promoted posts

It will need to be a system that can expand to have whichever post types business want.

Pony Express will have verified and non-verified users. Only the verified can post or leave comments. Everyone else can still read posts and share externally.

Verification is free, via TripledChecked.com. Because of the verification, which truly knows who you are, people will be very wary of doing anything illegal on Pony Express, which means moderation costs will be significantly reduced. We could even reward users for moderating – easily done by ratios of reporting and others verifying that there is a problem.

There will also be different subscription types. Standard is similar to what Twitter has today, ads that are not tailored to you. But if you are willing to see ads for categories like gambling, crypto etc, then you can earn credits/points/crypto for that, regardless of your interactions with them, but do you need levels of general activity.

If you pay, then you get to:

  • choose which categories of ads you see
  • see far fewer ads
  • prioritise the users that you follow, how they rank in your feed

Also different, is that the famous people / news sources that you follow, have their own profile page that is much better than what the other services offer. A page that can be your home page you send everyone to:

  • Links to everything you have – other socials, online store, etc (Pony Express will not have any store function)
  • Photos
  • Archive of posts, sortable by category as well
  • Badges (like a charity you have donated to, probably NFT-powered)
  • Endorsements (essentially the other users that you like)
  • Background art if you want, but it will be just wallpaper down the sides.
  • Music playlist (via a 3rd party)
  • Recommended books (affiliate with Amazon or the like)
  • Bio
  • Contact form for businesses

And so on. Not dissimilar to what the other networks have, but making it a true feature. Regular people can use it instead of having a website. Businesses can use a template that makes it is a good landing page for ads.

And here’s the killer – GET THE NEWS FIRST

For a fee (probably a freemium model), there is a companion app that is for creating the posts, and sending them to other platforms as well. Not unlike existing 3rd party tools that schedule posts. What makes it special is that your posts will appear on Pony Express first, and the others via a time delay. That delay might only be a few minutes, but everyone will know where they can get the news first.

Introducing Artus

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Artus is an art exploration app. Most art sharing sites/apps are either art for sale or sharing work between artists.

Artus is more like Twitter, with a far more viewers than creators.

To share your art, some of it must be 100% free, for any use.

The typical user is a lover of art (not a creator =- they are a minority), who can see new art daily, via:

  • Scrolling feed, like social media
  • New tabs in the browser (it is already loaded in the background)
  • Digital picture frames

When you like a piece of art, you can follow the artist (and potentially pay them for art somehow), or the style/theme, which is done vias AI analysis.

AI art is allowed but must be designated as such.
No photos.

Think of it as a TikTok scrolling activity, but for sophisticated people. Or Instagram but purely for art.

BTW, the Ello social network is kinda in the right direction, but the users seem to all be artists…

White House: AI Bill of Rights

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This is good news – a series of guidelines aimed at protecting the American public from burgeoning technologies that utilize artificial intelligence (AI). Here’s my take on how the 5 principles could affect one of the biggest services of all, Google Ads.

“Safe and Effective Systems” – Google have hubris and will resist any external input into how safe theirs is.

“Algorithmic Discrimination Protections” – only covers what is already enshrined in law as discrimination, like race and gender. Google has always been keen to not fail on this one.

“Data Privacy” – again, won’t be an issue, in the US. Google does have problems with using a global network of servers storing the data from particular countries who do not like that practice.

“Notice and Explanation,” argues that users should know whether an automated system is being used by a company in the first place by providing “generally accessible plain language documentation” that includes “clear descriptions” of how the system functions.

This is a big problem for Google. While they can cite commercial sensitivity for many things, they will struggle to simply explain how the machine learning does what it does. Already support staff cannot explain decisions that affect the account. However, the language of the guidelines also mention calibrated to the level of risk based on the context, and Google could argue that there is no risk, therefore nothing needs explaining. And they would have a point. Results can be judged daily, and the service discontinued if not satisfactory.

“Human Alternatives, Consideration, and Fallback” – this is the biggie.

“You should have access to timely human consideration and remedy by a fallback and escalation process if an automated system fails, it produces an error, or you would like to appeal or contest its impacts on you,” the blueprint says. “Human consideration and fallback should be accessible, equitable, effective, maintained, accompanied by appropriate operator training, and should not impose an unreasonable burden on the public.”

Google Ads suspends advertisers based on risk profiles created by machine learning. Such suspensions, from the dominant search advertising platform, can destroy livelihoods.

Google suspends accounts that look and feel like bad advertisers, without proof, and without much in the way of genuine recourse.

Google Ads is trending towards doing without humans altogether, and this is exactly the type of law we need to stop such things from happening. We cannot have a world where “the computer decided” is the final word.