Surprisingly, nearly two-thirds of subscribers believe the autonomous car revolution will take place outside the U.S., according to the latest subscriber survey. 

I am more surprised that one third of subscribers believe that the autonomous car revolution will take place inside the USA. Let's file this away in the 'American Exceptionalism' folder and the unfailing ability of so many people to believe we are number one despite al facts the contrary.

Read All About It.

"Do you pick someone who's under federal investigation for using a private email server?"

OR

†Do you pick someone who called Mexicans rapists, claimed the president was born in Kenya, proposed banning an entire religion from entering the US, mocked a disabled reporter, said John McCain wasn’t a war hero because he was captured, attacked the parents of a fallen soldier, bragged about committing sexual assault, was accused by 12 women of committing sexual assault, said some of those women weren’t attractive for him to sexually assault, said more countries should get nukes, said that he would force the military to commit war crimes, said a judge was biased because his parents were Mexicans, said women should be punished for having abortions, incited violence at his rallies, called global warming a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, called for his opponent to be jailed, declared bankruptcy six times, bragged about not paying income taxes, stiffed his contractors and employees, lost a billion dollars in one year, scammed customers at his fake university, bought a six-foot-tall painting of himself with money from his fake foundation, has a trial for fraud coming up in November, insulted an opponent's looks, insulted an opponent’s wife’s looks, and bragged about grabbing women by the pussy?â€

Remembering a lot today ...

For today's Musical delectation ...

REPOST

First thing to point out ... I definitely am not a techy - but love what Dave Winer keeps on pushing with his work around the open web. That is why I signed on here and am loving what I am seeing.

I installed 1999 yesterday without a hitch. I have hit a couple of issues of Java exceptions that I have not reported - since I can't really get a repeatable case. The 'switch it off - switch it on' again solution has worked every time.

I love the live updating. Simple to use. As Mr Jobs used to say "It just works".

Seperately I am compiling a short list of nice to haves that I will post at sometime in the future - not yet though, I am still playing.

I hit a bug with RSS which I posted into Github - and Dave reponded VERY quickly - which in turn made me read the documentation. Sorry Dave. The documentation included this post. Duly read. Duly absorbed.

I think there is similar behavior with how 1999 works as with DayONE, of which I am a long time user. DayONE's recent changes cut off my ability to share from my personal journal into the big wide world. I wonder if there is synergy between them and this. Don't know.

Depite getting RSS recognized by IFTTT - thanks to reading Dave's documentation, I still haven't got the recipe working - it says it is working - but nothing is posting into the stream. Still thinking.

I also notice that I am not getting live updating on my blog of these posts. I have added the RSS widget on the menu bar to the left - and it has picked up the first few posts - but nothing since. If anyone is interested, it is running here on Beyond Bridges scroll all the way down to the bottom left headed 1999 Feed. None of this reported, since it still may be me - who knows. However, I did note that when I checked the feed at The W3C Feed Validation Service - it recognizes a valid feed - but at the same time lists a number of areas that it calls out under an initial statement

"This feed is valid, but interoperability with the widest range of feed readers could be improved by implementing the following recommendations."

All that said ... I am loving this - very happy bunny.

Thankyou Dave.

Originally posted on April 22nd, 2016 with my 'first thoughts' on 1999.

REPOST

I Liked Dave Winer's post 'this' morning (actually April 22nd).

... as I wrote yesterday, auspicious that the day his project 1999 widens out for testing with a larger group was on the very day that Prince passed.

More to come on this topic.

Originally posted on April 22nd, 2016.

REPOST

Originally posted on April 22nd, 2016.

This blog / river / though stream is written using a system developed by Dave Winer called 1999. It references back to the halcyon days of 1999 - when life was easier.

When Dave opened up his product to a more public collective, I joined and haven't looked back - learning more about coding than I ever thought I would. But it has been fun.

My day of joining the fold was auspicious - as it turned out, the same day that Prince (of 1999 fame)  passed into history at 57.

• A Great Prince story

• Prince Does Radiohead

• Jon Stewart's first Daily Show was in 1999.

Superb Article from Gustavo Tanaka, a Brazilian author and entrepreneur.

The article was published nearly a year ago, so you may have already seen it. But always good to be reminded. Right?

If any one of these headlines makes you pause for a couple of seconds then click through and read the article.

1- No one can stand the employment model any longer
2- The entrepreneurship model is also changing
3- The rise of collaboration
4- We are finally figuring out what the internet is
5- The fall of exaggerated consumerism
6- Healthy and organic eating
7 - The awakening of spirituality
8 - Unschooling trends

FutureWorld is a boutique consulting group that help companies visualize and try to understand where the world is heading. They also have a weekly newsletter that takes a piece of news from the previous week and extrapolate into the future. 

You might have caught the Otto story recently. An autonomous truck delivering beer.

Great Future Read ... and is this a possible future?

This is how it works. Sensing an unavoidable collision (moose on the highway), the autonomous beer truck polls other affected parties (approaching Uber, pedestrian on sidewalk, overtaking vehicle). They immediately bid to be kept out of the mess. The beer truck then accepts the highest bid, and manoeuvres to limit damage to the winner.

Read All About It.

Great Article from Anil Dash that popped into my feeds today (even though it seems to have been published back in August). It hits on a number of themes that have been running through my head for a while.

I am not as erudite as Anil - but I have long felt that companies need to forget the role of CIO/CTO et al - since their business is by definition - tech. And I don't care who you are - it is. And if it isn't - it should be.

It all started years ago, as I realized that a 'tech at the table' allows others 'at the table' to believe that they do not need to understand the emerging technology landscape. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Example

Back in the 80s, I was always stunned by how little understanding of Marketing, Business and Tech people had in the 'MarCom' teams of various organizations. 'We do graphics and design.' 'We write.' 

Thankfully those days are behind us. Sadly, the virus has spread into all kinds of people inside of organizations. Time to wake up.

Three choice quotes to wet your appetite - but why not just go read the article.

Similarly, it's easiest to understand Uber as a machine for converting publicly-planned metropolitan transportation networks into privately-controlled automated dispatch systems; the fact that an app is used to achieve that transition is almost incidental to the overarching goal of owning a market. 

and

When we see a company like Theranos unravel from being a widely-lauded medical technology pioneer to being investigated in a criminal probe for misrepresenting its products, one of the reasons the scam could be perpetuated for so long was because the company, its founder and its investors all shielded themselves under the cultural cover of being a glamorous member of the 'tech industry' rather than a prosaic medical supplier.

and

... why does it matter what we call the industry overall? The reason is simple: A reductive name for the industry masks an enormous set of social challenges that we need to tackle quickly. 

... just a name I am thinking about. There is a lot going on up there.

Important this post was written in and an on a for 1999 .... now the post is here - it is probably irrelevant.

Making some notes to myself about 1999 experiences.

CSS

I am slowly restyling the site - but stuck on why I can't seem to alter the size of the body copy on a story page like this - without also affecting the size of the body copy on the river. In other words - I am happy with the size of the text on the river - but want to take down the size of the copy on the story page. How do I do that?

And CRACKED ... One down - a few more to go

Archives

You can find my Archives, but - what I am stuck on is why only the last two months are showing up.

Writing this in October and I can see October - BUT anything prior to September or even August is not showing up. Yet.

And now I am in November - that month is working September and before is failing. And now I know why. Known issue - so at least I can put it to bed and know that it is not me!

Of course if I knew how to make this work - I could fix it !

Home Page

Really want to add some welcome text and a Google search ... thinking.

Text Alignment

I have been spending an inordinate amount of time on alignment. 

The river on the home page works just fine, fine size as I want it - centered, balanced, aligned - EXCEPT where is that grey line coming from?  I want to remove it - tried every possible variation that I can find ... donuts.

Fixed - good friend Tony and all round whizz took about a nano second to tell me that ...

The offending css class is: .divBlogPostList (line 162 of ‘styles.css’ ) and the offending css rule attached to the class is: s is border: 1px solid gainsboro;
Simply remove the offending rule or change it to: border: 0 solid gainsboro;

Only thing left is when you click through to a story - why is there a large gap on the right hand side - why is the post not balanced like on the main river?

Managed to move it over  - now there is a gutter on the left. Not right - but it looks better.

I don't get it - I sent in my $39 - and I still can't speak German. The iMore headline specifically reads :   

Digital Offers: Learn a new language for just $39!       

Turns out that the devil is in the detail. I also have to spend time!

We all live in the attention economy. And part of that is that as the price of 'stuff' continues to tumble, mainly because the supply/demand curves continue to give us more and more for less and less, it turns out that the time we have to devote to stuff is just the same.

Consider that the average life span of a US resident in 2012 was slightly under 79 years. That is roughly 690 thousand hours. Total. Tops. You get to choose how you spend that time.

Some of it will be spent doing work, then you have eating, sleeping, working out, socializing ... stands to reason that your 'disposable time' is something a lot less.

Now, how do you value your time? Starbucks values their Barista's at $11 an hour.

There are lawyers who charge their clients thousands an hour. 

We also know that to learn Spanish has a minimum commitment of 134 hours (since that is the number of hours of lesson time this fine product comes with.) Of course - it could be more. But let's go with 134.

So, for a lawyer to learn Spanish there is a minimum lost opportunity cost of $147,400 - but as a Barista it's only $1474. 

I think there is a big opportunity for Barista's to learn a foreign language. It's a low base price and the lost opportunity cost of time commitment is negligible - and with the language learnt, more horizon's open. A lawyer ? Not so much. They will probably take a 'language as a service' approach - something that we used to call a Translator. 

I wonder how many ex Starbuck's baristas are now translators?

Excellent read if you at all care about the F**D up world of Marketing....

Gartner’s recent Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising (2016) saw attribution sliding down the Peak of Inflated Expectations deeper into the Trough of Disillusionment. According to Gartner, reasons for the descent range from unrealistic expectations to vendor hype. In contrast, old-fashioned, aggregate data-based marketing mix modeling was considered to remain in the Plateau of Productivity.

Read All About It and get a better look at the cartoon that explains why this failed thinking continues despite all logic.

Apple didn’t launch a crappy product, they launched devices which still are the best option on the market. Which still have top notch industrial design. Which still have the best operating system. Which still have the best third party apps on any desktop platform. Which are still the best option for most people in the world. And frankly, if you can’t see that, then you need to go buy a non-Mac laptop and see for yourself how bad it truly is.

Ben Brooks. Drops Mic. Walks Off.

Ian Duncam Smith's  single point - The British Government needs to level the playing field when it comes to Uber and The Black Cabs.

In my view about this is that it is an unfair market. I've talked to a lot of black cab drivers. They are under huge restrictions, they have to have as special kind of car, they have to have a special space, they have to have disability ramps, they have to be above board, they have to pay all their tax.

I think for the most part they are pretty brilliant. The reality is that it is not a fair market , because the Uber lot don't do any of that.

Said it before - and I will say it again .... solving first world problems in San Francisco does not a Global business make.

Click through to watch the video.

Great Article From Brian Solis.

Turns out that the problem companies have with 'Customer Experience' is silos ... again !

Each group inadvertently contributes to a disconnected approach to CX because they’re attempting to solve one part of the customer’s journey and experience from their silo. Yet, customers don’t see departments, they see one brand.

and guess what ... it is

the customer who owns the customer experience.

and on this ...

There’s an Uber of everything on the horizon of every business and digital transformation is the best defense and offense to compete in a digital economy.

... I totally agree. That's why I bang on about platforms all the time.

BTW - this article also resonated, because of the similarities to the question of who owns Customer Data? Answer ... the same person who owns the Customer Experience. Why? Because I Am My Own System Of Record.