The Snarchitect | Technology meets creativity meets culture. And snarky commentary to make it all taste great.

FedEx and UPS update prices

Posted on January 13, 2015 by Rick

Having successfully navigated the holiday peak shipping season, UPS and FedEx will next roll out a change to their pricing model.

Starting Monday, UPS will no longer charge for U.S. ground packages under 3 cubic feet by weight but by their “dimensional weight.”
Memphis-based FedEx will roll out the same change on Jan 5.
Instead of simply weighing a box, retailers must multiply its length by its height and width, and then divide that by 166 to reach its dimensional weight.
“We believe this (dimensional weight pricing) will encourage customers to reduce their package sizes,” Bill Smith, UPS vice president of marketing, told Reuters.

The Big Dig grinds down

Posted on January 13, 2015 by Rick

What does Seattle do, when it reaches the bottom of a giant underground urban boondoggle? Keep digging.

In short: There is no plan to resolve the dispute over cost overruns, which are ubiquitous on projects like this; at $4.2 billion, it’s the most expensive transportation project in state history. The tunnel will have no exits — no ingress or egress — throughout the entire downtown core (which makes the support of downtown businesses all the more mystifying). It won’t allow transit, only cars. It will be tolled, highly enough, by the state’s own estimates, to drive nearly half its traffic onto the aforementioned side streets. It will be a precarious engineering feat, the widest deep-bore tunnel in history, digging right between a) Puget Sound and b) the oldest part of Seattle, with vulnerable buildings and God-knows-what buried infrastructure. Also: Pollution. Climate change. It’s the 21st f’ing century. On and on. People said all this and more, in real time, to no avail.
One of the people fighting hardest against the tunnel? Visionary mayor Mike McGinn, who spent his term in office warning that exactly what is happening now was going to happen. For his efforts, Seattle voted him out of office. We prefer to hang on to our illusions.

Stop pursuing happiness and go for more

Posted on January 12, 2015 by Rick

Why you should stop pursuing happiness and go for more.

Why do we experience such a disconnect between what we know to be true in the abstract and what we believe is true for us? I think a big part of the answer is that our choices are driven not by fame or fortune but by the pursuit of happiness itself–and we’re going about it in the wrong way, because we’re not sure what better alternatives exist. We buy things and experiences that might bring us some momentary feelings of delight and cheer. But will they truly bring us deeper feelings of happiness and satisfaction with our lives–the feeling that our life is, in the end, meaningful?
Psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues have tried to distinguish between lives high on happiness and lives full of meaning. By their definition, happiness is a positive feeling or emotion. We say we are happy when things are going well for us, when we are feeling more positive emotions than negative ones, when we feel satisfied with our lives. The time span of happiness is typically short: a good day, a stellar semester, a great year. A wedding can bring us happiness in a moment or a weekend, for example, because of the fun and love involved, because of the good food and good music and good company.

Smart basketball

Posted on January 12, 2015 by Rick

Will a “smart” basketball improve your game?

Developed by a Ohio-based startup called InfoMotion, the ball itself looks totally normal from the outside with a leather, waterproof exterior. But on the inside is where the magic happens, as a motion processing algorithm detects forces applied to the ball — spin, acceleration, etc. — and immediately spits out feedback to a companion app via Bluetooth.

The Internet of Beer

Posted on January 12, 2015 by Rick

Finally, an IoT initiative that brings some value.

Meet PicoBrew Zymatic, which is marketed as the world’s first fully automatic all-grain brewing appliance. The product was at the show and in use, crafting fresh beer.
“It takes a commercial brewery and scales it down to your countertop,” Greg White, a software engineer with Seattle-based PicoBrew, said on Wednesday.
Shaped like a metal oven, the 50-pound appliance can brew beer in about 3.5 to 4 hours, and produces about 3 gallons of beverage in each batch. Once done, the beer can be poured and stored for days or a few weeks.
Users simply place their beer ingredients in a cartridge tray that goes inside the appliance. The brewing is automated, but the product comes with Wi-Fi and ethernet connectivity, letting the user control it from a connected device such as a smartphone.

www.pcworld.com

Six tech trends for 2015 from Harvard Business Review

Posted on January 12, 2015 by Rick

A new year brings new lists of things. Here’s a short and thoughtful list of six trends in the technology industry, from HBR.

Deep learning: Artificially intelligent computers are now capable of deep learning using neural networks, which you can think of as brain-inspired systems capable of translating pixels into English. Toward the end of 2014, Google researchers unveiled a new project that uses neural networks and deep learning to identify multiple elements of a scene without human assistance. Its software “learned” how to think by processing vast quantities of data. For example, deep learning will eventually allow robots to recognize objects they haven’t seen before and navigate to new locations on their own. Deep learning intersects with numerous fields, and it will soon aid in manufacturing, medicine, retail, utilities, and beyond.

hbr.org

Boeing commercial space travel

Posted on January 12, 2015 by Rick

An interview with Chris Ferguson, Boeing Director of commercial space programs, who discusses the company’s entry into commercial space travel.

Following the end of the space shuttle programme in 2011, the US was left without the ability to send astronauts back and fourth to space, forcing the country to rely on old rival Russia for the capability for the last three years.
This changed in September when NASA announced the selection of Boeing’s Crew Space Transportation-100 (CST-100) and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft to transport American crews to and from the International Space Station (ISS), with the goal of ending the nation’s sole reliance on Russia in 2017.
“Some of the more vocal members of Congress have been questioning why we’re relying on the Russians to do this, and I think that there is a certain amount of support in bringing the business back to the US from their perspective as well,” admits Ferguson.
The move broke new ground in that it effectively turned over low-Earth orbit transportations to the private sector for the first time, where as previously, the acquisition plan was a government run and managed programme, subcontracting out parts of each individual spacecraft.

gulfbusiness.com

Boeing incentives for job growth in St. Louis

Posted on January 12, 2015 by Rick

Large incentives for Boeing to grow jobs in the St. Louis area.

Under the deal, Boeing will get $229 million over 18 years if its current St. Louis-area workforce increases by 2,000 jobs. If it maintains employment at its current level of 14,500 jobs, Boeing would collect up to $146 million of the state incentives over 10 years. And the company would collect a smaller subsidy as long as its job count stays above 12,500. Boeing would have to give back money if the job count falls below 11,000 any time in the next decade.
“We want them to retain their current employment and create 2,000 new jobs. That’s our primary objective,” said Mike Downing, director of the Missouri Department of Economic Development.
Paying Boeing to retain the jobs it already provides is “pretty unique,” said Richard Ward, a longtime St. Louis development consultant. “It’s not normal, not frequent. The state is trying to make sure they continue a significant presence.”

chicago.suntimes.com

Focus more on innovation and less on strategy

Posted on January 12, 2015 by Rick

From Harvard Business Review: when growing your digital business, focus more on rapid innovation and less on strategies which are probably based on the old world view anyway.

For many companies considering how digital technologies could or should transform their business models, the questions they face are questions of unprecedented uncertainty, where past experience may be no help.
It’s uncomfortable terrain for many strategists. But it’s familiar territory to innovators, who’ve spent decades wrestling with the problem of how to manage uncertainty when there is little to guide them in getting their new offering to a new audience or market.
But unless your company competes on the basis of continuous innovation, like, say, Apple or Amazon, your innovators probably work separately from your strategic thinkers. That’s a shame, because the discipline of the innovation process is tailor made for addressing the wealth of unknowns that moving to a digital business model entails.

hbr.org

IT infrastructure changes produce opportunity

Posted on January 12, 2015 by Rick

From a couple months ago, but well worth repeating: Massive changes in the IT infrastructure industry are disrupting traditional vendors and creating significant upside opportunity for Cisco.

Ader asserts that “Cisco is the “best house in a bad neighbourhood,” as networking faces fewer headwinds than servers and storage, the cloud has positive implications for Cisco, and storage is a natural stack extension for Cisco.”
He says Cisco will seek a deeper level of IT stack integration;
Evidence for this may be seen in Cisco’s acquisition of flash storage provider Whiptail in 2013, which it is now integrating into UCS (servers) for a high-performance storage capability, together with Cisco’s recent decision to sell its stake in the VCE joint venture back to EMC (which sold Vblocks). This could signal that Cisco is interested in making more acquisitions in the storage space in the months ahead.
Summing up, Ader thinks “Combining UCS with its own storage technology makes both strategic and financial sense, in our view.”
Other well-placed industry players from the cloud adoption point of view, as well as customer focus on data security and application availability, are Aruba, Barracda, F5 and Ruckus, Ader believes.