51–60 of 128 posts
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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
Agree, but I think that Augmented Reality will really breakout in 2015. VR and AR are complements, and the press from Oculus and VR over the last year really helps people understand AR. Because of the potential practical applications, I think AR will become more widely adopted and help to spread AR/VR adoption.
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The Feds won't have to - if each state continues to make it legal/regulated, it's the same effect as descheduling it. It's kind of ingenious, actually, on the part of the Federal government.
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…
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For the most part, home automation is a horrible mess right now with incompatible proprietary systems that mostly don't even solve any particular problem. That said, there's a definite tradeoff between having devices that just work and maintaining control over all the information storage and information flows. In the case of the parent comment, automatically backing up photos is actually a great feature for a lot of…
There's a difference between doing it out of self-interest (Kodak, Apple) and providing a user service. It would be perfectly possible to provide automatic backups of photos via the user's choice of cloud (Dropbox, OneDrive etc) with the cloud service copying them to the user's chosen personal storage (PC, NAS, whatever). That would work except for the people who don't and/or won't have any personal storage. However,…
I'm going to disagree with you on that. This piece that John Gruber wrote after the celebrity iCloud account hack is spot on IMO: http://daringfireball.net/2014/09/security_tradeoffs
"Over the years I’ve received numerous emails from past and former Genius Bar support staff, telling similar stories of heartbreak. Customer comes in, their iPhone completely broken, or lost, or stolen, and they had precious photos and videos on it. The birth of a child. The last vacation they ever took with a beloved spouse who has since passed away. Did they ever back up their iPhone to a Mac or PC with iTunes? No. In many cases they don’t even know what “iTunes on a PC” even means. Or maybe they connected the iPhone to iTunes once, the day they bought it and needed to activate it, and then never again."
For many people it honestly is a choice between an automated cloud service and going without a safety net at all.
Do I personally depend on a cloud provider when I can avoid it? I try not to with anything I really care about. I use cloud providers but have plenty of my own backup systems as well. But I'm not the typical consumer.
> 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…
See Ted Schlein of KPCB.
Having tried an Oculus Rift generation 3, where the tracking is PERFECT and the resolution is adequate, I think VR will do better in 2015 than he suggests.
At first Oculus seemed like a cool idea, but you can really only play "simulator" games with it, games where you sit in a vehicle otherwise it ruins the VR feel and you might as well just play on a monitor. Only other thing I've seen was some sort of sculpting thing, but I'd imagine the novelty would wear out there pretty fast. More I think about whole VR thing the less I think it will actually be a thing. I'm sure w…
Reddit use and value will increase.
Fred predicts Chinese companies will make a big entrance to the US market in 2015. At the same time, China restricts US companies in their markets (Gmail blocking being the latest example) Why do we (in America) allow this asymmetry? Is it a mistake to give Chinese companies an open door?
that is a great question. there are two sides to this argument. one side says if they block you, you should block them. the other side says blocking trade backfires and that open markets create more opportunity even if you can't sell into their market
I doubt that. Most of the $1.1bn would be spent defending against IP lawsuits that operating the US would make them vulnerable to. Xiaomi's phones look like a better rip off of Apple than Samsung was able/willing to do, and Apple will sue them if they enter a market with good IP protection.
I 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"…
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