Scipio's Profile

After reading this article it seems that 3-D printing is certainly going to be the go-to manufacturing in the future. As with all new technologies, I imagine there will be rapid development in the coming years and would find it interesting to ponder where 3-D manufacturing could go. I could see a world where someone can custom design a car and the entire thing is printed out of a 3-D printer autonomously with a minimal assembly line or human labor component. Will these printing machines at some point become so sophisticated that more affluent people will have them in their homes and be able to print out whatever they want whenever they want? Perhaps, we’ll see.

I agree with the premise that streaming is here to stay and that monetizing these streamers is a difficult task. Getting these streamers to stream your game seems to hinge on having a popular game that will get them viewers and having someone the likes of Ninja or Tfue sign a contract to essentially play your game will be tricky. I think the right move is to give top streamers exclusive access to betas and host all-pro tournaments for free to push awareness and get feedback on game mechanics. Asking to share in the streaming revenues could scare away certain streamers unless you know for a fact you have a product that is going to massively increase their viewership. As far as open innovation is concerned, getting feedback from popular twitch streamers both before and after the game launch and incorporating their suggestions is the way to go.

I like the idea to use crowd sourcing and open innovation to provide new products to customers but I am not sure how useful it is with legos. As someone who has logged in thousands of hours playing with legos as a kid, most of the legos were simply based off of new movies that came out or classic toy concepts such as castles and knights or dinosaurs and explorers. I am not sure that children playing with legos need that much innovation to keep legos relevant, especially since there is a constant churn of customers — noting that kids will abandon legos once they go into middle or high school, so there is not a huge concern about customers getting bored of the product. I am not sure crowd sourcing ideas from 10 year old, who I would assume are legos target demographic is that possible anyway. I think brand positioning is more important than actual product innovation here.

This is an interesting technology and appears to be one level of analysis deeper than what sabermetrics is to baseball. I am curious as to how professional teams/scouts will view this new tool. I think it would help them as a training device for their current athletes, to fix current inefficiencies in their movement and game in general. I would guess it would be a bit more difficult to make a judgement call on a recruit or potential draft pick using this alone, as even some baseball scouts are pushing back on sabermetrics now in favor of the old-school sit and watch scouting techniques. However, I do think it has big potential upside and its most important value proposition is running simulation games against opposing teams.

Very interesting product that Muse has released. As far as stunting the growth of meditators, I hardly think the Muse headband would be any sort of hindrance to serious practitioners; I do not believe they would use it in the first place. It takes years and years of training to even come close to mastering the art of meditation, and these people would be very skeptical of such an invention. This seems like more of a product for novice meditators who could use it in the beginning stages of their meditation practice to augment their normal meditation routine.

It the future if a technology similar to the Muse headband could be implanted or otherwise worn continuously without annoyance, it would be able to send real time mental data to a central location. AI could analyze this data and perhaps predict events and avert things such as national security threats before they occur. A bit big brother-ish, but possible.

As voice recognition improves, I do believe its integration into consumer purchasing will increase marginally but certainly not compete with the standard methods like a phone or computer. It is simply the nature of speaking that one can not vocally output data faster than typing and clicking on items on their phone. Also the fact that people are potentially willing to buy office supplies via Alexa but not basically everything else is disconcerting. Additionally, adding a screen to Alexa would basically just turn it into a clunky iphone and I am very suspicious that 38% of people would want more ads in their life. Overall, I am bearish on voice to shop technology in the near term; maybe Alexa should stick with trivia questions and weather for now.

This reminds me of the movie Minority Report in which people were arrested on analytics from machine learning before they actually committed the crimes. I am curious to see the statistical breakdown of the algorithm’s outputs for other various groupings such as socio-economic status, gender, age etc. to attempt to triangulate the root of the algorithm’s malfunction. I am also fairly floored that this was actually employed considering how low its accuracy is. A testing period to collect data and determine COMPAS’ efficacy before it went live seems like a much safer way to go about things.

It seems that Aurora has found its competitive advantage in 3D printing and maintains a clear value proposition to attract the likes of Boeing. However, I find it questionable that Aurora was operating independently under Boeing yet you infer that the relationship somehow caused Aurora to lose their DARPA contract. If they are operating independently then would it not be primarily Aurora’s fault for losing the contract, and if not, did Boeing fail to provide Aurora with the proper resources to meet their time constraints or somehow hold them back in another way? If the latter is the case then maybe Boeing simply acquired them to take them off the market and is not serious about utilizing their 3D printing technology.

It seems to me that Glossier does a good job of balancing crowd sourced ideas with brand strategy by limiting the scope and authority of customer’s inputs. I would like to know exactly how much weight is given to the user’s opinions when developing a product and if Glossier uses it primarily to confirm something they already had planned or actually use the customer’s ideas to innovate. Regardless, it is a genius way to make people feel like they have an voice in the company’s product lines, whether they do or not.

I agree James Bond will not be out of a job for a long time since HUMINT will never cease to require American agents, as opposed to various other things such as SIGINT or IMINT, which are becoming more and more the domain of AI, especially on the analysis side.
However, do you think that projecting a new image and educating Americans on the importance of the CIA will actually attract top tier programming talent from the private sector to the agency when the compensation is so uneven? I don’t believe it is an image problem as much as a money problem. It follows they must raise salaries or be forced continue to contract work out to companies like Palantir, who can afford more attractive compensation for its employees.