Why Xiaomi uses its own Android flavour for the Chinese market is clear. But I don't believe they will push their own Android flavour to the US and EU markets, but rather use Playstore-enabled versions. Their first goal is to compete against Samsung in handset price. And Samsung has shown that it is very hard for an Asian manufacturer to introduce their own OS flavours and apps into a Western market.
What is going to happen in 2015
21–30 of 128 posts
Re: What is going to happen in 2015
#22> 10/ cybersecurity budgets will explode in 2015 as every company, institution, and government attempts to avoid being Sony’d. VCs will pour money into this sector in the same way they poured money into the rental economy. and, yet, the hacks will continue because on the open internet there is no such thing as an impenetrable system.
This seems misinformed. You don't need perfect security to avoid getting hacked. And perfect security is, actually, an attainable goal if you care to work towards it and take heed of current research (see, for example: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/ironclad/).
Is Fred trying to say that all the money spent on security will be wasted? I could agree with that. IMHO security is a classic case of a lemon market where buyers are unable to determine the security properties/utility of wares before purchase. Buyer sophistication is low and nearly all are beholden to marketing (the same is largely true of VCs choosing investments!).
Or maybe Fred is saying that it will take years for security investments to pay off. I agree with this too. "It can't/won't happen to us" is still a pervasive attitude, even in 2014, and it generally takes a major incident at each and every company to 1) wake them up and 2) inform them about what works and what is snake oil 3) drive adoption of new tech. (related problem: convincing management to divest themselves of old, broken tech that never worked in the first place to free up budgets.)
People talk about the talent gap in security a lot, so we try to train more experts in this field. But the same gap is present elsewhere: I have yet to see many VCs with a sophisticated understanding of security. I'm not sure where they could learn if they wanted to. If I had to predict something, it's that new-money security experts from companies with acquisitions/IPOs in 2014 start funding security tech that actually works. In the meantime, DARPA continues to lead: http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/I2O/Programs/
Re: What is going to happen in 2015
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is still a lot of stuff that depends on weed being legal at the federal level, beyond just the consumer not getting arrested for buying small amounts. We're never going to see serious investment in the space until sellers can access bank infrastructure, there is no longer a risk of DEA raids, state laws are aligned with federal laws, etc. It's not going to happen in 2015 though, unless it gets tacked onto some…
Question for the historically minded folks here - Has there ever been a situation where a bunch of states decided that making something legal (or conversely illegal) against the federal government's position, cause a change in federal policy? How did that work? Can lessons from that apply now to the marijuana debate, amongst others, in the US?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law
When the US passed the 55 mph speed limit, it was generally ignored by motorists and wasn't really enforced by a lot of states--and it was eventually repealed. Key difference though is that the feds never had enforcement authority unlike the case with the DEA.
Re: What is going to happen in 2015
#24I more or less agree with everything except this points:
>2/ Xiaomi will spend some of the $1.1bn they just raised coming to the US. This will bring a strong player in the non-google android sector into the US market and legitimize a “third mobile OS” in the western world. The good news for developers is developing for non-google android is not much different than developing for google android.
The "third mobile OS" is Windows Phone and even if something else takes this spot, it's still not that great to be third.
>3/ More asian penetration into the US market will come from the messenger sector as both Line and WeChat make strong moves to gain a share of the lucrative US messenger market.
I doubt those companies will be more than marginal players in the us market next year, maybe later?
>11/ ... patients treating patients (p2p medicine) ...
This seems kind of insane!
I didn't understand the following very well, if someone can explain or point me elsewhere, I'd really appreciate it:
>8/ The horrible year that bitcoin had in 2014 will be a wakeup call for all stakeholders. Developers will turn their energy from creating the next bitcoin (all the alt stuff) to creating the stack on top of the bitcoin blockchain. Real decentralized applications will start to emerge as the platform matures and entrepreneurial energy is channeled in the right direction.
I don't see the point of bitcoin or any other virtual currency? To me nothing beats legal tender currencies.
Re: What is going to happen in 2015
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is serious money in labor arbitrage for the top financial and executive class. We've had decades of heavy lobbying for these kinds of asymmetries to break the back of domestic labor and smaller competitors.
What does labor arbitrage have to do with protectionism in favor of domestic firms? e.g., RenRen over Facebook or Baidu over Google
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Re: What is going to happen in 2015
#26The "death of the file" is a really mixed bag. The replacement is walled gardens with no privacy, control and perhaps even ownership of your data, questionable security, and the potential that your data could vanish if one is acquires or goes under.
I have a friend who had a Kodak camera that, you plugged it into your PC and it uploaded straight to Kodak's photo hosting (this was before we called such things "cloud storage"). If you wanted your own copies of your own photos you would need to go onto said site and right-click download them one at a time. One day Kodak decided they weren't going to run this site anymore, and just deleted the whole lot. She was hea…
There's a whole raft of home automation devices, printers, etc. that will become bricks if certain cloud servers are turned off.
Personally I think this fad will crash and burn, but it will take many rounds of consumer disappointment and flagrant disregard like you describe. Eventually "you control it" will become a selling point.
Re: What is going to happen in 2015
#27+1 for 2015 being a tough period after the hype for VR and wearables. They will both be a thing, but people always overestimate progress in the short run and underestimate it in the long run. +1 for cybersecurity budgets exploding. How would one make a financial bet on this fact? It doesn't seem doable through a "normal" brokerage firm; it seems you need to be a VC or early investor.
If you want to invest in some larger publicly traded companies, there is a new cybersecurity ETF, ticker symbol HACK. You could buy some shares of the ETF or shares of some of the individual holdings. A list of holdings can be found here:
Re: What is going to happen in 2015
#28+1 for 2015 being a tough period after the hype for VR and wearables. They will both be a thing, but people always overestimate progress in the short run and underestimate it in the long run. +1 for cybersecurity budgets exploding. How would one make a financial bet on this fact? It doesn't seem doable through a "normal" brokerage firm; it seems you need to be a VC or early investor.
There does exist a cyber security ETF with the ticker HACK. You can also just invest in FireEye.
Re: What is going to happen in 2015
#29I more or less agree with everything except this points: >2/ Xiaomi will spend some of the $1.1bn they just raised coming to the US. This will bring a strong player in the non-google android sector into the US market and legitimize a “third mobile OS” in the western world. The good news for developers is developing for non-google android is not much different than developing for google android. The "third mobile OS"…
> patients treating patients (p2p medicine)
The startup that immediately came to mind here is CrowdMed: http://readwrite.com/2013/05/08/crowdmed-wants-to-crowdsourc... . Crowdsourced diagnoses are a regulatory and liability minefield, but the upside to patients is huge and (in my opinion) worth the risk - instead of an impersonal WebMD, you get individual attention by experts to specific cases, with oversight from other community experts in the form of powerful downvotes.
N.B. CrowdMed's spend-reputation-to-answer "prediction market" methodology (in contrast to the free-to-answer StackOverflow/Quora model), described a bit in the article, might be of interest to other HN'ers. I would expect it to drive away potential contributors, but in the case of CrowdMed, it seems that the potential contributors with other incentives to contribute are also the higher-quality contributors (namely people who want to do good with their answers and are confident in their expertise) so it tends to weed out only the bad actors. It's a dynamic that's worth considering for anyone starting a Q&A site of any kind.
Re: What is going to happen in 2015
#30> 10/ cybersecurity budgets will explode in 2015 as every company, institution, and government attempts to avoid being Sony’d. VCs will pour money into this sector in the same way they poured money into the rental economy. and, yet, the hacks will continue because on the open internet there is no such thing as an impenetrable system. This seems misinformed. You don't need perfect security to avoid getting hacked. And…
He's not saying it's a market for lemons, though it is. He's saying that even when big companies select the best vendors, the end results aren't meaningfully different.
For a Fortune 500 enterprise, retaining the very best firms in the world and selecting the very most secure products does not foreclose on Sony-style outcomes. To accomplish that, enterprises need to rewire their entire internal IT processes to orient themselves towards security. Nobody does that, for the same reason that most modern software isn't built with processes (immutability, strong typing, pattern matching) that foreclose on bugs.
There's a benefit to selecting security expertise carefully. But that benefit isn't "insurance against the Sony outcome".
I'm unaware of a VC that's intelligent about security, but the expectation that they would have any security domain expertise misconstrues the job of a VC; it's a little bit like thinking that an energy options trader would have a significant understanding of mechanical engineering principles. It's much more important that they know how to evaluate addressable market size, go-to-market plans, and sales management.