A New Path for E-Commerce

Here is a crosspost to an article posted on Kent's blog The 41st Square. 

imagine what has happened with e-Commerce in China by much bigger. Bigger than Alibaba, Amazon and every other centralized E-Commerce market combined offering to and receiving service to and from anyone anywhere with a device and internet connection.

Go ahead, be with that for a moment.

What would the market cap be on something like that? A trillion dollars? Something very interesting is brewing that made me think that of the book. It’s called OpenBazaar. Put simply OpenBazaar allows anyone, literally anyone without any centralized permissions or authority to be an e-commerce retailer in a global market place. Or, in their own words, "Decentralized marketplace for instantly trading with anyone using Bitcoin."

Read the Full Article at The 41st Square

Dematerializing the Data Center

For several years now I've been building companies, watching, working and researching. Finally, things are getting interesting again since that initial cloud computing rush back in 2007! At just about the time most businesses have accepted the cloud in the likes of AWS or Google Cloud their replacement is already on the horizon. Soon, centralized cloud hosting services will no longer be needed. You see, there a new stack on the horizon that is distributed, serverless in the traditional sense, always on and will have a near zero marginal cost of operations at nearly any scale. This will empower entire new classes of applications that have never been feasible.

Most computing is about three things. Compute, Storage and Networking. I went over that in an article I wrote here years ago called "Cloud Computing: Back Down to Earth." It was 20 August 2008. I discussed what a computer is and how that might translate to a cloud computer. Later on 17 April 2011 I posted about Cloud Native Applications.

Fast forward five more years and we have bitcoin, the bitcoin blockchain, IPFS, Ethereum, Ethereum Swarm and an interesting hybrid called IOTA. We actually have a cloud computer and can create truly cloud native applications! Those applications do not require data centers to run. They have the potential to disintermediate the major cloud providers over time. 

Develop an application as a full stack client side application that can run on any device. Give that application effectively infinite storage, networking and compute that comes from the users that use the application itself. Your costs to deploy this are effectively zero. The demand will generate the supply you need when you need it! This is your compute.

Store all the applications and their data securely on an IPFS or Ethereum Swarms with security and veracity protected by blockchain-like technology. That's your new server hard drive. This is your storage.

This be peer to peer and fully distributed. You will no longer require a server. Bandwidth usage will be spread over the nodes and up/down links of the users. Collectives of people acting through automated consensus mechanisms to remove any need at all for even centralized services and decision making. For example, look at what is happening with TheDAO and the evolution of smart contracts.

It feels strange and archaic to me to deploy physical servers myself today for almost any purpose. I'm not deploying them by the container of course like some very large players. The last time I personally deployed physical servers myself was around 2010 with my company nScaled. Enterprise didn't much trust "the cloud" then. In a few years more I suspect we will feel similarly marshaling compute, storage and networking via virtualized or containerized services from what we call the cloud today (eg. AWS or Google). At that point, effectively the data center will have been dematerialized and decentralized. You do this today already in early forms with IPFS and Ethereum. It's just a matter of time and the apps you write that live client side but operate similar to the ways that networks like Kazza or Bittorrent have in the past will seem natural. Oh, and one other little side effect. The SaaS model will die as well. It simply will not be necessary.

It's cloud all the way to the edge.

Powerfully Creating OpenAI, the Company

This is an excerpt from an article posted on The 41st Square.

OpenAI is something to keep an eye on and already teaching a powerful way to create and staff a company in a hyper competitive environment.

This mission is helping attract and retain desirable talent. One recount states that 9 of 10 researchers that were offered positions at OpenAI accepted and turned down excessively lucrative counter offers from their existing employers. It appears they did this because of the mission. Not because of the money.

Singularity University Exponential Data Talk

Yesterday I had the honor to present at Singularity University's Mountain View campus to speak about Data, Data Science and Big Data. I spoke to and met many of the 100 participants of the Executive Program. People come from all over the world for this program.

I had a great time sharing my Exponential Data presentation. Afterwards we had lunch and many excellent conversations!

Stephanie from http://www.thechrysalissolution.com/ was awesome as always and produced this lovely illustration from my talk.

Singularity University Executive Program - Exponential Data Lecture Illustration

My May 2016 lecture on big data and data science at the May 2016 Singularity University executive program.

The Exponential Data talk is my take on the nature of data, its impact on organizations and the people within them. All companies are data companies and need the processes and technologies to adapt. The Data Science Operations framework presented within the talk will help any company begin the process of deriving meaningful insights from data.

This lecture included:

• Information on the nature of data itself and several key attributes that make data special
• My framework that describes how to integrate and operate with data in your organization
• Several real world examples of using data to save lives, heal the planet and generate immense economic value

With the right data, processes and technologies companies can create immense leverage for people. Data is power.

Exponential Data Implementation Framework

Three Things Observed in the Field That Help Make You a Data Scientist

An interesting and little understood fact about being or becoming a Data Scientist is that almost anyone can be a data scientist.

Like most professions there are different types and skill levels involved. Some are more hardcore in areas like math, software engineering or information design. Others are more day to day business. The traits that make it far more likely that someone may adopt the title or work of a data scientist regardless of their specific role are as follows. I tend to find these traits in the people I like to work with the most.

Scientific Process Approach

The scientific method reigns supreme in real data science. It's quite different to do data science that it is to do software engineering. Generally, when you build software to a specific goal it gets better and better and better until you can release. When you do data science, sometimes no matter how hard you work on your models you get the end and it's a dead end and you simply have to discard the results and go back to the beginning.

Have (and be able to keep) Beginner’s Eyes

To minimize the impact of bias as much as a human being can is extremely challenging. Some may even argue that it is impossible. Therefore, if you are approaching a data science problem it's very useful to do so from a beginner's mindset. Do not already know that you know the best algorithm. Hypothesis that you might then test. Do not already know the answer before you have even asked the question. Try to look at each opportunity to apply data science with fresh eyes.

Ability to Communicate Results Effectively

No matter how amazing the model you train. No matter how eloquent the solution you devise. No matter at all. No one cares. They care about results. They care if they can understand you. Becoming a master of the visual display of information could not be more critical to the efficacy of your results over time. This might be a pretty chart or graph. It might be a highly complex mobile or web application. Your output might be a powerpoint presentation. Whatever the delivery medium it pays huge dividends to invest in the consumability of the output.