My keynote at the Concur #PerfectTrip Devcon on October 2, 2013. I talk about the "internet operating system," and how sensors are turning it into a real world operating system, with "context aware programming." I use this metaphor to give lessons from some projects and startups putting these principles to work, including Tripit, the Google Autonomous Vehicle, Square, Uber, and Google Now.
Dijkstra's algorithm was conceived by computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra in 1956 and published three years later. He received the Turing award in 1972. The Dijkstra prize is named after him which is given for outstanding papers on the principles of distributed computing. One of his famous quote is that Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
Dijkstra's algorithm solves the shortest-path problem for any weighted graph with non-negative weights and finds shortest distance between 2 vertices. The algorithm creates the tree of the shortest paths from the starting source vertex from all other points in the graph. Works on both directed and undirected graph. It differs from the minimum spanning tree as the shortest distance between two vertices may not be included in all the vertices of the graph.
Chapter 3 Classes and Objects 3
2.1 The Nature of Objects 4
2.2 Relationships among Object 7
2.3 The Nature of Classes 10
2.4 Relationships among Classes 11
2.5 Interplay of Classes and Objects 14
2.6 Identifying Classes and Objects 15
2.7 Importance of Proper Classification 18
2.8 Key abstractions and Mechanism 19
Dijkstra's algorithm was conceived by computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra in 1956 and published three years later. He received the Turing award in 1972. The Dijkstra prize is named after him which is given for outstanding papers on the principles of distributed computing. One of his famous quote is that Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
Dijkstra's algorithm solves the shortest-path problem for any weighted graph with non-negative weights and finds shortest distance between 2 vertices. The algorithm creates the tree of the shortest paths from the starting source vertex from all other points in the graph. Works on both directed and undirected graph. It differs from the minimum spanning tree as the shortest distance between two vertices may not be included in all the vertices of the graph.
Chapter 3 Classes and Objects 3
2.1 The Nature of Objects 4
2.2 Relationships among Object 7
2.3 The Nature of Classes 10
2.4 Relationships among Classes 11
2.5 Interplay of Classes and Objects 14
2.6 Identifying Classes and Objects 15
2.7 Importance of Proper Classification 18
2.8 Key abstractions and Mechanism 19
Transactions and Concurrency Control in distributed systems. Transaction properties, classification, and transaction implementation. Flat, Nested, and Distributed transactions. Inconsistent Retrievals, Lost Update, Dirty Read, and Premature Writes Problem
This is the most important topic of OOAD named as Object Oriented Testing. It is used to prepare a good software which has no bug in it and it performs very fast. <a href="https://harisjamil.pro">Haris Jamil</a>
Basic Concepts of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) explained in layman's terms. For having a better understanding of building blocks of OOPs Language. Explanantion of Class, Objects & Methods followed by explanation of Message Passing, Inheritance, Abstraction, Encapsulation, & Polymorphism with examples.
Transactions and Concurrency Control in distributed systems. Transaction properties, classification, and transaction implementation. Flat, Nested, and Distributed transactions. Inconsistent Retrievals, Lost Update, Dirty Read, and Premature Writes Problem
This is the most important topic of OOAD named as Object Oriented Testing. It is used to prepare a good software which has no bug in it and it performs very fast. <a href="https://harisjamil.pro">Haris Jamil</a>
Basic Concepts of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) explained in layman's terms. For having a better understanding of building blocks of OOPs Language. Explanantion of Class, Objects & Methods followed by explanation of Message Passing, Inheritance, Abstraction, Encapsulation, & Polymorphism with examples.
My keynote at the Twilio developer conference on September 19, 2013 in San Francisco. Reflections on the internet as a platform, why applications like Square, Uber, and the Google autonomous vehicle tell us what that platform makes possible, and why it's imperative for entrepreneurs to create more value than they capture. I also talk about Code for America, government as platform, and Twilio for Good.
Real Life Applications of Distributed Systems:
1. Distributed Rendering in Computer Graphics
2. Peer-To-Peer Networks
3. Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming
State of the Internet Operating SystemTim O'Reilly
Slides from my keynote at PayPal Innovate 09 Conference. Focuses on the risks of increasing centralization of web data services, and the need for more federated services. Will the Internet Operating System be small pieces loosely joined, or will there be One Ring to Rule Them All? We choose.
An operating system (OS) is a collection of software that manages computer hardware resources and provides common services for computer programs. The operating system is an essential component of the system software in a computer system. Application programs usually require an operating system to function.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also include accounting software for cost allocation of processor time, mass storage, printing, and other resources.
For hardware functions such as input and output and memory allocation, the operating system acts as an intermediary between programs and the computer hardware,[1][2] although the application code is usually executed directly by the hardware and will frequently make a system call to an OS function or be interrupted by it. Operating systems can be found on almost any device that contains a computer—from cellular phones and video game consoles to supercomputers and web servers.
Examples of popular modern operating systems include Android, BSD, iOS, Linux, OS X, QNX, Microsoft Windows,[3] Windows Phone, and IBM z/OS. All these, except Windows, Windows Phone and z/OS, share roots in UNIX.
Presentation Regarding functions of operating systems and their working and other information regarding their uses and types. Useful for Students and other for knowing better about them.
Pleases Send Your Valuable Comments regarding it
Embedded System,
Real Time Operating System Concept
Architecture of kernel
Task
Task States
Task scheduler
ISR
Semaphores
Mailbox
Message queues
Pipes
Events
Timers
Memory management
Introduction to Ucos II RTOS
Study of kernel structure of Ucos II
Synchronization in Ucos II
Inter-task communication in Ucos II
Memory management in Ucos II
Porting of RTOS.
A ppt on Mac Operating System by Apple. I've made this presentation simpler by changing the words in it to a simpler English which everyone can understand and explain it easily. For getting customized projects on Information Technology, contact at https://quvor.com
Mobile OS controls smartphone, tablet, PDA, or other mobile device. Modern mobile operating systems combine the features of a personal computer operating system with touchscreen, cellular, Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS mobile navigation, camera, video camera, speech recognition, voice recorder, music player, Near field communication, personal digital assistant (PDA), and other features.
The AIs Are Not Taking Our Jobs...They Are Changing ThemTim O'Reilly
My talk at the Web Summit in Dublin on November 6, 2014. Reflections on the notion that AI will take away jobs, and our need to recognize and redefine the human role in the applications we build. Covers many of the same ideas as my "Internet of Things and Humans" talk, but from a slightly different angle.
Software Above the Level of a Single DeviceTim O'Reilly
My talk at the O'Reilly Solid Conference on May 22, 2014. I mostly talk about UI implications of the Internet of Things, but also about the need for interoperability.
Reinventing Healthcare to Serve People, Not InstitutionsTim O'Reilly
My talk at South by Southwest on March 16, 2015. I use examples from consumer technology (the Apple Store, Uber/Lyft, and Google Now) to show where "the bar" is now for user experience, and what that should teach us about how to redesign healthcare. I also talk about the work of Code for America to debug the UX for CalFresh and MediCal.
Helping Government Keep Up with Moore's LawTim O'Reilly
My talk at the World Government Summit in Dubai on February 8, 2015. I talk about the pace of Moore's Law, and how AI, sensors, and on-demand are raising consumer expectations of government software. I go from there to my notion of government as a platform. PDF with Speaker notes - read the notes for the narrative that goes along with the slides.
My talk at Closing the Gap, Jeff Greene's conference on technology and income inequality, held in Palm Beach on Dec 7-8, 2015. I talk about lessons from technology for 21st century business.
Government as a Platform: What We've Learned Since 2008 (pdf with notes)Tim O'Reilly
My talk at the UK Government Digital Service Sprint 15 event in London, February 2, 2015. I talk about my idea of government as a platform, and what I've learned since I first articulated the idea, with specific reference to what the GDS has taught me about the idea.
My talk from Tech Summit Puerto Rico 2015. An update of my thinking on Government as a Platform. Includes guidance on a model RFP for government services built as modular components called by APIs and so enabling external 3rd party services as well.
Government as a Platform: What We've Learned Since 2008 (ppt)Tim O'Reilly
My talk at the UK Government Digital Service Sprint 15 event in London, February 2, 2015. I talk about my idea of government as a platform, and what I've learned since I first articulated the idea, with specific reference to what the GDS has taught me about the idea.
Disruption, Decentralisation and a Debrief of the rest. A round up of the key themes from The Next Web, Amsterdam, May 2014 given as talks to Sky TV, UK.
Includes Duolingo, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Digital Darwinism, Game changers today, Free is a lie, Post-Snowden Web and the Future of shopping.
My keynote at Velocity New York (#VelocityConf) on September 17, 2014. The failure of healthcare.gov was a textbook DevOps (or rather, lack of DevOps) case study. But it’s part of a wider pattern that reminds us that people should be at the heart of everything we build. In fact, getting the “people” part right is the key both to DevOps and great user experience design. It runs from the Internet of Things right through building government services that really work for citizens.
It's Not About Technology (pdf with Notes)Tim O'Reilly
My talk at Velocity 2015 Optimized Business Day. I talk about the imperative to use technology to empower workers, not replace them. This isn't just for highly paid knowledge workers. Finding ways to put everyone to work productively is one of the great challenges of the 21st century. Bonus: a great segment from Steven Vincent Benet's poem John Brown's Body.
Similar to An Operating System for the Real World (20)
Mastering the demons of our own designTim O'Reilly
My talk about lessons for government from high tech algorithmic systems, given as part of the Harvard Science and Democracy lecture series on April 21, 2021. Download ppt for speaker's notes.
What's Wrong with the Silicon Valley Growth Model (Extended UCL Lecture)Tim O'Reilly
A three part lecture for the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at University College London. I talk about how the Silicon Valley growth model is leading from value creation to rent extraction, then about how public policy shapes our markets and what public policy students can learn from technology platforms (both what they do right and how they go wrong), and finally, I touch on some of the great mission-driven goals that could replace "increasing corporate profits" as the guiding objective of our economy.
Learning in the Age of Knowledge on DemandTim O'Reilly
The London Black Cab driver's exam, "The Knowledge of the Streets and Monuments of London," is one of the most difficult exams in the world, requiring drivers to become a human GPS. With today's tools, the smartphone and the right app turns anyone into the equivalent of a human GPS. I've been asking myself how this concept applies to the field of online learning, particularly in my own field of programming and related IT skills. How should we rethink learning in the age of knowledge on demand? My keynote at the EdCrunch conference in Moscow on October 1, 2019. As always, download the PPT to read the detailed script in the speaker notes below each slide.
What's Wrong With Silicon Valley's Growth ModelTim O'Reilly
A talk I gave on the oreilly.com live training platform on January 22, 2020, focusing on the way that many Silicon Valley startups are designed to be financial instruments rather than real companies. They are gaming the financial system, much like the CDOs that fueled the 2009 financial crash. I talk about the rise of profitless IPOs, and contrast that with the huge profits of the last wave of Silicon Valley giants. In many ways, it is an extended meditation on Benjamin Graham's famous statement, "In the short term, the market is a voting machine, but in the long term it is a weighing machine."
Google handles over 3 billion searches a day, Amazon offers a storefront with 600 million unique items, Facebook users post 6 billion pieces of content sailing, all with the aid of complex algorithmic systems that respond to a constant influx of new data, adversarial activity by those trying to game the system, and changing preferences of users. These systems represent breakthroughs in the governance of complex, interacting systems, with algorithms that must be constantly updated to respond to rapidly changing conditions. The economy as a whole is also full of complex, interacting systems, but we still try to manage those systems with 20th century tools and processes. This talk explores what we can learn from technology platforms about new approaches that the Fed might take to improve its historical mission using the tools of agile development, big data, and artificial intelligence. My talk at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank FedAgile conference on November 7, 2018. Download the PPT file to read the narrative in the speaker notes. (I wish slideshare did a better job of displaying these, but they don't.)
My talk for TechStars at Techweek Kansas City in October 2018. While this is a talk based on my book WTF?, it is fairly different from many of the others that I've posted here, in that it focuses specifically on parts of the book that contain advice for entrepreneurs, rather than on the broader questions of technology and the economy. As always, look at the speaker notes for
My plenary talk to the California Workforce Association Conference in Monterey, CA, on September 5, 2018. I talked about the role of technology to augment people rather than replace them from my book WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us, and my ideas about AI and distributional economics, in the context of today's education and workforce development systems. I also summarize some of the work Code for America has been doing on the current state of the California Workforce Development ecosystem.
My keynote at OSCON 2018 in Portland. What I love about open source software, and what that teaches us about how we can have a better future by the better design of online marketplaces and the algorithms that manage them - and our entire economy. The narrative is in the speaker notes.
My keynote at the 2018 New Profit Gathering of Leaders conference in Boston on May 17, 2018. I talk about the lessons from technology platforms, how they teach us what is wrong with our economy, and the possibilities of AI for creating better, fairer, more effective decisions about "who gets what and why" in the economy.
Slides from my talk at the Price Waterhouse Coopers Deals Exchange conference on April 26, 2018. I talk about algorithmically manage, internet-scale networks and how they are changing the very nature of the economy, the shape of companies, and the competencies that are required for 21st century success. There are many similar themes to other talks, but this is tailored to a business audience, and very specifically to one concerned with how to do M&A in an age of dominant platforms.
My keynote at the Open Exchange Summit in Nashville on April 18, 2018. I talk about the implications for many different kinds of companies of the fact that increasingly large segments of our economy are being dominated by algorithmically managed network marketplaces.
Yet another version of my book talk, this time at Harvard Business School, on March 28, 2018. This one had fewer slides with less connecting narrative so that I could spend more time interacting with the audience. I think it went pretty well. As usual, the speaker notes contain the narrative that goes with the slides, which are mostly images.
Do More. Do things that were previously impossible!Tim O'Reilly
My keynote at SxSW Interactive on March 9, 2018. I tackle the job of the entrepreneur to redraw the map, and not to accept the idea that technology will put people out of work rather than creating new kinds of prosperity. I try to provide a call to action to throw off the shackles of the old world and to build a new one. So many companies play defense. Cut costs, watch the competition, follow best practices. Great entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk play offense. They see the world with fresh eyes, taking off the blinders that keep companies using technology to make slight improvements to existing products and practices, rather than imagining the world as it could be, given the new capabilities that technology has given us.
We Get What We Ask For: Towards a New Distributional EconomicsTim O'Reilly
My keynote at the Venturebeat Blueprint conference in Reno, NV on March 6, 2018. The bad maps that are holding us back from building a better world. Technology need not eliminate jobs. It could be helping us tackle the world's great problems, and helping design marketplaces that ensure a more equitable distribution of the proceeds from doing so. The narrative that goes with the deck is in the speaker notes. There is also a summary and link to the video at https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/06/tim-oreilly-to-tech-companies-use-a-i-to-do-more-than-cut-costs/
Towards a New Distributional EconomicsTim O'Reilly
A talk I gave on December 1, 2017 for a workshop on AI and the future of the economy organized by the OECD and the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy. In it, I explore implications of AI and internet-scale platforms for the design of markets, with the goal of starting a conversation about what we might call "distributional economics."
We forget that when technology destroy, it helps us to create new ones, as long as we remember that the point isn't just cost-reduction, but doing things that were previously impossible! That means both solving hard problems, and pairing technology with people in ways that play to the strengths of each. My keynote at Strata+Hadoop World London, May 2017.
This is my March 8, 2001 pitch to Jeff Bezos on why Amazon ought to offer web services. I'm uploading it now because I'm referencing it in my forthcoming book, WTF: What's the Future and Why It's Up To Us, due from Harper Business in October 2017, and want people to be able to take a look at it. This is of historical interest only.
A somewhat longer version of my Frontiers talk about technology and the future of the economy, with additional material pitched to an audience of Internet operators at Apricot 2017, in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam on February 27, 2017
WTF - Why the Future Is Up to Us - pptx versionTim O'Reilly
This is the talk I gave January 12, 2017 at the G20/OECD Conference on the Digital Future in Berlin. I talk about fitness landscapes as applied to technology and business, the role of unchecked financialization in the state of our politics and economy, and why technology really wants to create jobs, not destroy them. (There is a separate PDF version, but some readers said the notes were too fuzzy to read.)
Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey 2024 by 91mobiles.pdf91mobiles
91mobiles recently conducted a Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey in which we asked over 3,000 respondents about the TV they own, aspects they look at on a new TV, and their TV buying preferences.
Climate Impact of Software Testing at Nordic Testing DaysKari Kakkonen
My slides at Nordic Testing Days 6.6.2024
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Observability Concepts EVERY Developer Should Know -- DeveloperWeek Europe.pdfPaige Cruz
Monitoring and observability aren’t traditionally found in software curriculums and many of us cobble this knowledge together from whatever vendor or ecosystem we were first introduced to and whatever is a part of your current company’s observability stack.
While the dev and ops silo continues to crumble….many organizations still relegate monitoring & observability as the purview of ops, infra and SRE teams. This is a mistake - achieving a highly observable system requires collaboration up and down the stack.
I, a former op, would like to extend an invitation to all application developers to join the observability party will share these foundational concepts to build on:
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Participants will gain insights into the responsibilities, challenges, and best practices associated with test management in SAP projects. Additionally, the webinar delves into the significance of heatmaps as a visual aid for identifying testing priorities, areas of risk, and resource allocation within SAP landscapes. Through this session, attendees can expect to enhance their understanding of test management principles while learning practical approaches to optimize testing processes in SAP environments using heatmap visualization techniques
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1. Insights into SAP testing best practices
2. Heatmap utilization for testing
3. Optimization of testing processes
4. Demo
Topics covered:
Execution from the test manager
Orchestrator execution result
Defect reporting
SAP heatmap example with demo
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📕 Vedremo insieme alcuni esempi dell'utilizzo di Autopilot in diversi tool della Suite UiPath:
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Autopilot per Studio
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Clipboard AI
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Flavio Martinelli, UiPath MVP 2023, Technical Account Manager @UiPath
Andrei Tasca, RPA Solutions Team Lead @NTT Data
5. @timoreilly #perfecttrip
2004: How can you call the Internet an operating system?
No kernel
No memory management
No processor
Photo: Patrick Tufts http://www.flickr.com/photos/zippy/50537423/sizes/o/
7. @timoreilly #perfecttrip
An application that depends on cooperating
cloud data services:
- Location
- Search
- Speech recognition
- Live Traffic
- Imagery
What Is the Operating System for Google Maps?
13. @timoreilly #perfecttrip
The Google Autonomous Vehicle
“We don’t have better algorithms. We just have more data.” - Peter
Norvig, Chief Scientist, Google
26. @timoreilly #perfecttrip
“Uber is a $3.5 billion lesson in building for how the world
*should* work instead of optimizing for how the world *does*
work” - Aaron Levie of Box.net
29. @timoreilly #perfecttrip
Uber and Taxi Magic Rely on that “Internet Operating System”
Real Time Location Sensing
Real Time Communications
Identity
Payment
Reputation
36. @timoreilly #perfecttrip
“You shouldn’t have to
ask for a taxi. One
should show up”
“You shouldn’t have to call to
change connecting flights. The
app should know that the flight’s
been delayed, and even rebook
the flight for you.”
41. @timoreilly #perfecttrip
There’s a wonderful section in Les Miserables about the good that
Jean Valjean does as a businessman (operating under the pseudonym
of Father Madeleine). Through his industry and vision, he makes an
entire region prosperous, so that “there was no pocket so obscure that
it had not a little money in it; no dwelling so lowly that there was not
some little joy within it.”
And the key point: “Father Madeleine made his fortune; but a singular
thing in a simple man of business, it did not seem as though that were
his chief care. He appeared to be thinking much of others, and little of
himself.”
61. @timoreilly #perfecttrip
Government as a platform means an end to the design of
only complete, closed “applications.” Instead the
government should provide fundamental services on which
we, the people, (also known as “the market”) build
applications.
Government as a Platform
64. @timoreilly #perfecttrip
“We’ve opened up huge amounts of government
data to the American people, and put it on the
Internet for free.... And what’s happening is
entrepreneurs and business owners are now
using that data -- the people’s data --to create
jobs and solve problems that government can’t
solve by itself or can’t do as efficiently.”
Barack Obama
65. @timoreilly #perfecttrip
“The legitimate object of government is to do for
the people what needs to be done, but which
they cannot, by individual effort, do at all, or do
so well, for themselves.”
-Abraham Lincoln, July 1,1854
Editor's Notes
I like to begin my talks with a quote, because, as Oscar Wilde once said, “Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.” Edwin Schlossberg once said... I want to give you some context for thinking about developing the applications of the future, and lessons from those who I think are already doing that.
Now, one of the big, context-setting ideas I ’ ve been working for the past dozen years or so is the idea that the internet is a platform.
More than that, I even put on a conference in 2002 called Building the Internet Operating System.
Later, when we introduced the Web 2.0 conference in 2004, we focused on the Internet as Platform. In his talk at that conference, Bram Cohen of Bittorrent gave me a bit of a roast about the Internet as operating system idea. He pointed out that the Internet was lacking many of the features that characterize operating systems.
Even now, when you look at definitions of an operating system, you can see how much of the framing still echoes the thinking of the PC era.
But as the mobile era accelerated, it became clear that we need to change our idea of an operating system. What is the operating system of an application on a smartphone? To be sure, there are local functions, managed locally by the device OS, but there is a more powerful service layer that resides on the internet. In this slide from a few years later (dated to 2010 by the Nexus One phone in it), I make the case that yes, there is an operating system for mobile devices that consists of software above the level of a single device. Applications like Google Maps make numerous calls to data services provided by this cloud “ operating system. ”
My key idea, going back to the days when I was evangelizing “ Web 2.0 ” , was that the internet operating system was all about “ Managing access... ”
You see this same kind of internet operating system thinking in Tripit, a company I invested in through O ’ Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, my early stage venture firm, and later was delighted to have acquired by Concur. What originally attracted me to tripit was its clever use of email as a data pipe, assembling data from transportation, hotels, car rentals, weather and maps into a truly useful integrated application. This is the internet OS at work.
There ’ s a great lesson for developers from Tripit: Be Creative in finding and integrating data. This “ internet operating system ” is in its infancy. There aren ’ t well developed APIs for a lot of things, but it ’ s possible to combine existing services and data sources in a way that creates huge and unexpected value. Tripit figured out how to take something designed for human consumption (email) and turn it into a programmable data source.
What we ’ re really seeing is not just an Internet operating system but a kind of operating system for the real world.
GPS is a great example of how idea of an operating system for the real world goes beyond just the “ internet ” as we know it. First off, GPS signals are not an internet service per se. Signals are read by a specialized radio receiver. And that signal is consumed not just by smartphone applications, but by autonomous vehicles. (Autonomous tractor image from http://www.agriculture.com/machinery/precision-agriculture/gps-guidance/remotecontrolled-farm_236-ar26197 )
There ’ s no more striking example of this “ operating system for the real world ” than Google ’ s autonomous vehicle. It ’ s easy to forget that the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge winner went seven miles in seven hours. Yet only six years later, Google announced that they had a car that had driven hundreds of thousands of miles in ordinary traffic. Was this a triumph of AI? It was surely that. But there ’ s another important factor that is easy to overlook. Google ’ s chief scientist, Peter Norvig, says that the algorithms aren ’ t any better. Google just has more data. What kind of data?
It turns out that the autonomous vehicle is made possible by Google Streetview. Google had human drivers drive all those streets in cars that were taking pictures, and making very precise measurements of distances to everything. The autonomous vehicle is actually remembering the route that was driven by human drivers at some previous time. That “ memory ” , as recorded by the car ’ s electronic sensors, is stored in the cloud, and helps guide the car. As Peter pointed out to me, “ picking a traffic light out of the field of view of a video camera is a hard AI problem. Figuring out if it ’ s red or green when you already know it ’ s there is trivial. ” So this is a unique and unexpected application of the notion of human-machine symbiosis, which was originally called out as an important thread in computing by JCR Licklider in a paper all the way back in 1960.
If you want to build what Warren Buffett calls a defensible moat around your business, you can ’ t just rely on baseline data that is available to everyone else. You do need to layer on additional data that you gather yourself. This can come from network effects in data (like facebook - the more people belong, the more useful it is to belong), or to conscious efforts, like Google ’ s to enhance public data.
Next, let me talk about Square. There ’ s so much to learn from this business. How many of you have ever bought something from a store with Square ’ s iPad cash register? How many of you had the Square Wallet app running on your phone when you did that?
It automatically checks you in when you walk into a participating merchant. Your name and face appear on the register, and since your payment details are already on file, all the retail clerk has to do is confirm your identity, as shown in this screen shot. Frankly, hotel registration is a great application for this kind of technology.
This is so key. The phone already knows you ’ re there. Why make you “ check in ” manually? This makes sense for apps like Foursquare, but it ’ s so important to think through what the sensors in the phone let you take out of the UI. This is going to be one of the big voyages of discovery over the next few years, as we design interfaces for devices that have “ senses ” of their own.
Square started with this creative hardware hack, a little free dongle that uses the phone ’ s microphone jack to turn it into a credit card reader. Google got creative with streetview hardware. What are interesting hardware/sensor possibilities in the travel business? The Maker movement isn ’ t just about 3D printing and robots. It ’ s about the way that sensors are changing the landscape of applications.
But with the addition of the cash Register app, Square saw the possibilities of building a system that actually connected buyer and seller in a more profound way. The software system includes both an app on your phone, and an app on the merchant ’ s ipad, and a cloud database and services in between. This is of course also true of applications like Tripit. It ’ s also clearly software above the level of a single device, connecting passengers to the reservation systems of every travel-related company on the planet. But think hard about what services and devices you can integrate.
When I first talked to Jack Dorsey about Square, he talked about it as a data business - using social network data to make better credit scoring decisions. Long term, once square has millions of participating merchants and consumers, they have built a powerful data system that literally gets better the more people use it. But even apart from this banking angle, think how Square transforms the way a small merchant operates, bringing “ knowing your customer ” to a new level. Square has my face, my credit card info, and, potentially for a repeat buyer, my preferences, like what kind of coffee I normally order.
And finally, Square leads to a profound rethinking of the retail experience.
Now Concur has put a lot of these principles to work, bringing together travel booking, expense reporting, trip organization, into an integrated application that not only gets better the more people use it, but finds new utility in overlapping data sets, connecting multiple systems into an overarching workflow that simplifies everything for everyone from the traveler to the accounting back office. But there ’ s still further to go.
Consider how technology has transformed the Apple Store. Where most stores (at least in America) have used technology to eliminate salespeople, Apple has used it to augment them. Each store is flooded with smartphone-wielding salespeople who are able to help customers with everything from technical questions to purchase and checkout. Walgreens is experimenting with a similar approach in the pharmacy, and US CTO Todd Park foresees a future in which health workers will be part of a feedback loop including sensors to track patient data coupled with systems that alert them when a patient needs to be checked up on. The augmented home health worker will allow relatively unskilled workers to be empowered with the much deeper knowledge held in the cloud.
This may be the real opportunity for new information retrieval UIs like Google Glass - in specialized settings where access to a computer can be seen as a powerful kind of human augmentation. I expect it to be used in professional settings before it becomes popular as a consumer device. (In social settings, it will require even more profound resets of behavior than the “ always-on ” mobile phone.) One of those professional settings might well be hotel check-in. Being recognized on the street would be creepy, but being recognized when you walk up to the check-in desk might just be a moment of surprise and delight.
Now I want to move on to another of my favorite apps. Aaron Levie of Box said it perfectly in a tweet: “ Uber is a $3.5 billion lesson in building for how the world *should* work instead of optimizing for how the world *does* work. ”
Many of the notions that I highlighted about Square also show up in an app like Uber. A driver and a passenger both augmented with a smartphone changes our expectations about transit, and has the ability to change the way we organize public transit. Uber also shows us the principles of Software Above the Level of a Single Device, the use of sensors (both you and the driver have phones that know where you are), a data back end as part of the system, and “ doing less. ” Because your credit card is already on file, they ’ ve taken payment out of the workflow. And replaced it with reputation - they ask you to rate the driver, and the driver to rate the passenger. And like Square, they have a focus on building value for stakeholders - every driver I talk to loves the service because it increases their utilization and thus their income. It ’ s a win-win all around.
This is also true of Taxi Magic, one of the companies in Concur ’ s Perfect Trip Dev Fund.
Here are some of the Internet OS data subsystems that come into play in applications like Uber and Taxi Magic.
But there ’ s one other great lesson from Uber and Taxi Magic.
Investor Chris Sacca, who used to run special projects for Google, and who is an early investor in Uber, once remarked “ What I learned... ” This is what Google did with advertising, figuring out how to predict what ads people would click on. And in the case of Uber, it ’ s fundamental to the value proposition. With a taxi, you wait and hope to find one. With Uber, you know where the car is, when it ’ s going to arrive, and can even watch its progress towards you. Uber closes the loop and takes the uncertainty out of the experience.
My next lesson is that using both data that the user provides and that you can determine from sensors, it is increasingly possible to develop applications that anticipate user needs.
This is the idea at the heart of Google Now. Using location sensors and its deep set of data resources, as well as data from your calendar, Google Now suggests useful information without being asked. For example, if you ’ re at a bus stop or subway station, when the next bus or train will come.
This same “ just in time ” information model is at the heart of the Tripit app ’ s redesign.
This idea is also at the heart of Tripit features like Price Tracker and Seat Tracker. While these features are not on by default like Google Now, they allow you to register things that you care about, like better prices or better seats. This is the world of anticipatory agent-based programming that we ’ ve all read about in science fiction for years. Only now they are happening in the real world.
Steve Singh, Tripit CEO, articulated this same vision in one of his talks, articulating some aspects of “ The Perfect Trip ”
Back in about 2002/2003, when I was first evangelizing the idea of the internet as platform, one of my rallying cries was “ A platform beats... ” I pointed out that Microsoft had dominated the PC era, beating dominant applications like Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and DBase, by integrating them more closely into their operating system. Companies like Google, Amazon, and Salesforce have followed the same game plan in the internet era.
Concur clearly understands this lesson. Like a lot of other companies, it ’ s built APIs to allow developers to build on its platform and use its services.
As we saw with Tripit, the fundamental notion of concur is to bring together data services from many different sources. This is a model that I like. In the case of Google Maps, all of the Internet Platform services come from one vendor. This has a few uncomfortable echoes of the era where Microsoft ruled the roost, and its operating system displayed what devotees of Lord of the Rings might call the “ One ring to rule them all ” strategy. But there is another model, which has always been the model of operating systems like Linux, and also for the Internet itself. I call this “ small pieces loosely joined ” - a model where services from multiple sources are nonetheless woven into a seamless whole. I ’ ve long represented this model with a routing map of the Internet.
There ’ s one other great lesson about platforms. The most successful platforms create value for more than just the platform owner. Don ’ t just think about how much value you can create for yourself, your company, and your investors. Think about how much value you can create for your partners and your customers.
I ’m reminded of this wonderful quote from Les Miserables.
This is in sharp contrast to the dominant ideology of modern capitalism over the past few decades, which says that the only responsibility of a company is to make money for its shareholders. Leaving aside the fact of excessive executive compensation as prima facie evidence that no big company really believes that principle, this notion misses the point that an economy is an ecosystem.
This desire to build value for a community of stakeholders also shapes companies like Etsy, AirBnb, and Kickstarter.
And while it may not have the same obvious “ do good ” cachet as Etsy or Kickstarter, I do think that there ’ s an element of this “ create more value than you capture ” ethos with Concur as well. You ’ re creating value not just for customers - both end users and their companies - but also a much bigger ecosystem: airlines, hotels, local transportation. And with the Perfect Trip Fund, Concur is going beyond just reaching out to developers and trying to build a deeper ecosystem of companies.
Perhaps the more general lesson here is to work on stuff that matters.
There are also amazing entrepreneurial opportunities building companies that also solve interesting social problems. Jen Pahlka, who founded Code for America, wrote a blog post recently that summarized one of these opportunities, which we ’ ve been brainstorming recently. How do you reinvent the corner store so that it delivers what people really need, at affordable prices, in a walkable city?
People are hungry for meaning. When you really care about creating value for more than yourself, and work hard at it, people understand it. So don ’ t be afraid to talk about your values, and why what you do matters. Tell it to yourself, and then tell it to your customers.
But there ’ s one more lesson here. Let me point to some of the things that matter that I ’ ve worked on. In each of these cases, I did some good for my business, but I was mainly concerned with telling the story of an industry movement, and trying to create awareness and value that benefited many people besides myself and my own company.
One of my best experiences with doing this was when I gave a talk at my Emerging Technologies Conference in 2008 entitled, “ Why I love hackers. ” They work on what is hard. I recited a poem by Rilke, the Man Watching, which talks about Jacob wrestling with an angel. He knew he couldn ’ t win, but came away strengthened from the fight. The poem ends with something like this: “ What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated decisively by successively greater beings. ”
A great example of this is a company called Makani Power, which is building drone aircraft for high altitude wind farms. One of the early employees left a Wall Street hedge fund not because he thought he ’ d make more money, but because, as he said, “ the math is harder and more interesting. ”
Not to step on the toes of the Concur Perfect Trip Fund but ... These are the kinds of opportunities that we ’ re looking for at O ’ Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, our early stage venture firm. If you want to apply the principles I ’ ve outlined here to build a great business that also just happens to make the world a better place, we ’ d love to hear from you. [email_address]
There are lots of ways to work on stuff that matters. Code for America, a non-profit I ’ ve been working with, brings talent from the tech industry to work with local governments to build simple, beautiful and easy-to-use interfaces to government services and helping government to reinvent the way it engages with citizens.
The White House Presidential Innovation Fellows, inspired by Code for America, offers similar opportunities to bring technology expertise into the Federal Government. I encourage any of you to apply to either of these programs.
There are a number of Code for America applications. Here, side by side, are Textizen, which we built to let Philadelphians weigh in on city planning issues without having to go to planning meetings, and CityVoice, which we built for South Bend, to let people give feedback on abandoned properties.
Prompt.ly is an app in San Francisco that uses text messages to remind social service recipients of required reporting and other alerts, to make sure they don ’ t lose their services.
TextMyBus lets schoolkids in Detroit know when buses are coming. They don ’ t all have smartphones, and messaging lets anyone with an SMS-enabled phone get information about when the next bus is due. This photo was taken in summer, but our fellows noticed this as a real problem last winter. Sometimes kids were waiting in the dark, in freezing weather, for half an hour, to get to school. Knowing when the bus is coming really matters in a situation like that. Of course, the fact that the bus comes only every half an hour may be a problem of another sort.
With the government shutdown putting the dysfunctionality of Congress front and center, I ’ d like to give a shout out to the incredible value that all of us get from government services. Public transportation is one aspect of what I ’ ve called Government as a Platform. So are roads, sanitation, power and water and other regulated utilities. But there are also twentieth century examples of government as a platform, including the National Weather Service and the GPS satellite system.
That ’ s why I ’ ve been trying to shift the mindset from government as a vending machine for services paid by taxes, to the notion that government should be a platform. This doesn ’ t mean that the government doesn ’ t provide any “ applications ” - any more than the iPhone as a platform means that Apple outsources everything!-but it does mean that government should provide affordances for the private sector to build on.
One of the clearest expressions of this notion are national highway systems, not to mention the role of government in setting and enforcing rules of the road. But apart from aberrations like the Road to Nowhere, the crowdsourced destinations we call cities determine where the roads go, and we the people are free to use them to go where-ever we want. The US Interstate system, which provided a transformative economic foundation for our country, was championed by President Eisenhower in 1956.
Data is the 21 st century equivalent to the highway system. But Government has been in this business for a long time. Consider weather. Here ’ s Google ’ s forecast for San Francisco this morning when I was finalizing the slides for this talk. But where did that data come from? I ’ ve always found myself wondering why people aren ’ t more aware of how government data powers non-governmental services that citizens take for granted, many of them never taking the time to think how much government investment went into building the infrastructure that makes it possible for the private sector to offer services like weather predictions.
Last month, when President Obama talked about his second term management agenda, open data, and its role in enabling private sector to build on government as a platform, was a key part of the message.
When he said this, he was echoing the words of Abraham Lincoln, one of the founders of the Republican Party. His point, government is a form of collective action. One of the things that attracts me to work on government is the incredible power of all these ideas I ’ ve sharing with you,