Category: Strategy

Future of Work

I’m obsessed with all things future of work, mostly because it effects, well, everything.  With so much converging digital technology rapidly changing products, services and social mores faster than most of us, never mind government policy can keep up.  Life is changing fast; and slowly at the same time.

Humans find change unsettling or exciting, often both at the same time.  Context is important and it’s often hard to remember how young so many of the companies that consume our lives are.  Facebook is fourteen, that’s 14 years young.  Google is  19 and pulling up the rear, Amazon is  23 years old.  They are young and yet, deeply embedded in our lives.   It’s important to note, the tech that making them possible, including computational power has been decades in the making.  That would be the fast, yet slow change that tech brings.   Bottom line is these companies have changed they way we communicate, connect, work and live.  In a word: everything.

The entire world’s workforce is trending toward many, most workers by 2020 or 2025, depending on the report,  will be working on a project basis as a freelancer or contract worker.   That means all kind of change and these exciting startups below are applying all sorts of technology from #AR to #AI to this changing marketplace today.   I’ve linked to company videos that explain more.

  • PowerToFly  is says Wikipedia, “a recruiting platform that connects companies to women in tech”.  They are building a robust community of talent and a direct pipeline into companies from Dow Jones to GitLab.  They are creating a new model in human capital and solving a relentless diversity in tech problem.
  • JustWorks  the company says “is a platform that automates payroll, benefits, and compliance so entrepreneurs can focus on what matters: growing their business and their team.”  I would add, entrepreneurs and anyone working for themselves in any capacity.
  • BEAM is “a full-service, interactive marketing and experience design agency.”  They developed a mind-blowingly interesting an HR onboarding augmented reality (#AR) prototype”. It’s worth the time, check out the video.

 

 

 

 

 

Reality: There Will Be Winners.

Travel at the speed of light.  That’s the superpower my amazing 9 year old daughter said recently she would love to have. Why?  She wants to be able to see things being made everywhere in the world whenever she wants. She wants to hang out in Denmark at Lego, Florida at NASA, Antartica at one of the science stations, bouncing between and among many places.

The way she sees it, the only really cool places to be are where new things are being made or the blocks for making things are being created, in other words, where change is alive and thriving.   She gets a thrill out of change and discovery and realization, which is actually what a lot of human “discovery” is.  That is to say bacteria exists and North America existed before people identified either.  Change is jet fuel for the process.  We change what we do, what we think, how we think, how we do what we do based on the every, flowing nugget of identification and realization.

While it can be scary or great fun depending on your perspective, it is inevitable.  Technology is a tremendous symbol of constant evolution, sometimes small and then often every once in a while, huge.  We are at a HUGE moment right now.   New threads, related threads and entirely new lines of inquiry are exploding around digital transformation.  There are potential applications for every single part of our personal and work lives. The rate at which we embrace this in the marketplace depends on our ability to travel not at the speed of light per se, but across disciplines and functions, to assign focus and resources on the potential roads to adoption that either optimize our business or create new products and services.

I have this conversation almost daily with executives across industries from healthcare to entertainment to industrial manufacturing.  They are often surprised when I say, don’t spend all your time or all your money on what’s coming, but a small percentage of both and do it consistently.  They say they expect me to push harder for more money spent on virtual reality, augmented reality, blockchain, artificial intelligence and son on.  No.  Development takes time and there are too many pieces right now to even have a cohesive plan in most businesses as to what the application is, who to hire, how to engage consumer/enterprise base and so on.  But there are guardrails, because there will be winners.

“What are some of the ingredients to getting on that practice path to winning?

1) Pay Attention and Be Curious

Take time to stay close to what’s happening on the ground and assign this task to a person who knows your business so they can assess and understand the applications to your core business. It’s shocking how many people I’ve talked to legacy companies who have absolutely no idea, and haven’t even tried any VR/AR experiences, blockchain is something they’ve heard of but aren’t sure what it is, and AI they think is being “worked” on internally. Don’t be that company.

2) Allocate Enough Resources

There is so much to research, experiment on/with and perfect for these technologies to be used in new ways.  It requires significant R&D resources and the risk that comes along with that. The cold, hard fact is a lot of things might not work at all, but that’s critical intelligence. And the other side of the coin is that something eventually will work. This is not to say quit the elements of your day job, but some minimal amount of time needs to be spent because, given your expertise, you might actually help accelerate what that winning, home-run unicorn company, product, or service might actually look like.  And lest you forget, your competition, somewhere out there might be taking that extra step that will catapult them ahead no matter how far your lead today might be.

3) Weigh the Risk and Rewards

There’s been a steady stream of analysis and reports on emerging technology, some free others for pay.  Deloitte Insights covers a lot of ground, McKinsey&Company just released a paper on AI, and Goldman Sach’s 2016 VR/AR report reveals wide agreement among technologists, practitioners, and key market players that the next generation of computing is here, and in short order it will grow to become a trillion-dollar global market within the next decade across enterprise and consumer products. They don’t say that in a vacuum.  If you’re paying attention, you’ve already seen the evolving products and the promise behind them. (See suggestion #1, above.)

That’s a good start. It’s not so much as suspending belief; it’s more about getting past the inability to see all the possibilities that lay ahead. I remember those days in the not-so-distant past when people would actually argue about why anyone would want a personal computer in their home. It sounds crazy today, but it wasn’t then. While most seem to accept AI is the new way of life, current VR/AR conversation often veers into crazy territory.  And those arguments are likely to sound crazy ten years from now. Believe that. Something new is coming.  Remember above all else, there will be winners.

In Reverse

Like many millions, I regularly use Power Point (presentations) or Excel (spreadsheets) or Microsoft Word (documents). You probably do too, or have.  I think about this suite of products and the relationship to the evolution of virtual reality, augmented reality and artificial intelligence.  There is a connection.

First though, making virtual reality and augmented reality content is real hard right now.  The software, hardware and the nature of the content is rapidly iterating, not settling quickly. It’s  the ubiquitous notion of  trying to change the wheels on a car speeding down the Autobahn in Germany (there is barely a speed limit).

I just spent three months on a virtual reality project, and while I have produced hundreds of video for broadcast and the internet, meaning I have a lot of experience making visual stories, live action 360 video is a beast; an entirely different process. The work flow doesn’t flow like preparing for the stage or a 2D film or 2D digital video. Why? The output itself, a 360 degree moving picture is not like any of those others.

We have far more questions than answers.  Are we telling stories, a narrative or creating experiences?  What might a story look like when the USER can choose to look anywhere in that spherical space, and so on?

What does that have to do with Microsoft?  While technologists built those utility pillars, they could then hand to the masses, and say carry on.  People can and do use them for anything they choose from personal journals to professional financial modeling.

These emerging technologies actually work in the EXACT opposite way, meaning while VR and AR  technology is cool, it has almost no meaning without a specific application.  Consider, a surgeon having a conversation with a technologist.

Technologist:  “We have some cool tech that makes 3D digital assets, how might that help you?”

Surgeon:  “Medical images, say X-rays or MRIs would be great to have 3D versions in augmented reality.”

Technologist:  “Great, what type of features will help you diagnose a patient’s issue?”

And so on.  The technologists need direction from domain expertise whether it’s educators or doctors, real estate developers, industrial manufacturers, human resource professionals or those working in sports, media and entertainment.  Materially beneficial applications, products, will only have meaning for those who are using them in the course of daily use,  particularly in enterprise or professional capacities.

We live in a 3D world, it’s fantastical to believe the ability to create 3D digital products, tools and assets will not have fundamental uses across the way we live and work.  Right now, the problem is we don’t know exactly what that looks like, except to say, the winners will be busy collaborating across disciplines with  technologists and domain experts at the table.  Let us not forget in every technological evolution someone, some company, some team comes up with a winning step. There will be winners.

 

 

Making VR, for real.

                    FirstPost.com

You are looking at Ritu Varma as Samaya, India’s reportedly first real-time VR character according to FirstPost.com.  We are at a critical point in the creation of virtual reality (VR) and Augumented Reality (AR) content. That is to say, while we’re learning as we go in understanding the new technologies and the necessary tools to make an immersive or cinematic experience, no doubt we have a long way to go.If you read one article this week, this one is it from First Post about the making of Baahubali VR.

It tells a meaty and detailed tale about the collaboration among tech giant AMD, India’s prolific studio, Arka Mediaworks, that produced the iconic director and screenwriter SS Rajamouli’s epic movie Baahubali. From the custom 360-degree camera built to how they handled daily challenges, it’s an important read for anyone taking on the challenge of content making in VR today.   Baahubali VR will be shown at Tribeca 2017. Here is a link to the festival’s full lineup.