Tag: Tech

Ford’s Future Is Driving Itself

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Kyle Harris | Flickr

Look, ma, no hands! What Ford’s driverless plan means. Tuesday, Ford announced it’s hitting the accelerator on a self-driving car program and aims to roll out a fleet of autonomous vehicles by 2021. (CEO Mark Fields details the plan in NewCo Shift.) Ford’s news connects three big trends in the NewCo world. First trend: Driverless cars are coming, faster than many thought, and they’re going to uproot lots of assumptions about how our businesses, cities, and lives run. Ford aims to leap straight to self-driving cars — no steering wheels, no pedals — rather than incrementally refine driver-assistance systems. The first vehicles Ford envisions will be costly, so it plans to sell to ride-hailing and sharing services initially, individuals later. (GM is a partner/investor in Lyft, but Ford has no such alliance — yet.) Second trend: Big industrial transitions like this are making BigCos like Ford return to first principles and think the way they did when they were smaller and younger. Ford CEO Mark Fields says its autonomous vehicle will have “as big an impact on society as Ford’s moving assembly line did a hundred years ago.” He frames Ford’s new plan as a refresh of the company’s populist, autos-for-everyman heritage. Ford is also increasing its Silicon Valley presence and investing in tech firms (like Velodyne, which makes distance sensors that use “lidar,” or light radar) to accelerate its self-driving program. Third trend: Ford’s move, like so much else that’s happening in business today, will speed up the handoff of decisions from people to algorithms. At the end of this road, the code that runs your car won’t only be picking routes — it will be making life-or-death choices. For a preview of that world, read up on MIT’s “moral machine” (Quartz) — a thought-experiment project that asks people how driverless cars should prioritize human lives when the cars’ brakes fail.

War is hell, and climate is war. World War III is here, and it’s not a shooting war with a foreign enemy — it’s humanity’s fight against climate change. That military language isn’t just a metaphor, writes activist-author Bill McKibben (The New Republic): The planet’s carbon-driven warming is seizing territory and causing casualties as swiftly and mercilessly as a hostile army would, and if we’re going to have any hope of stopping it, we need to launch an effort as vast, and as unified, as the one that, last century, saved the world from Hitler. What would a climate-focused version of the Second World War’s mobilization and Manhattan Project look like? Stanford researchers offer one vision (pdf). We have the technology; we need the will. The good news is, we’ve mounted this kind of all-out effort before — and it works.

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Sunlight Is the Best Disinfectant For Code

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Lulu Hoeller | Flickr

Who will watch the algorithms? Companies today often hand decisions off to code, because code can move faster, incorporate more data, and scale better than humans. That’s great, and algorithms are frequently where innovative new players find their edge. They’re the secret sauce — and they’re typically kept secret, because the more they’re documented, the more easy it is for them to be gamed. But secret algorithms are also an open invitation to discrimination and inequity (Pacific Standard). The more we use them in fields like banking, criminal justice, or hiring and human resources, the more important it becomes to hold them accountable — to open them up so individual users can understand why they were refused that loan or job. Ever combed through the errors in your own credit report? Then you know how meaningful such auditing of algorithms and their data can be.

Apps alone don’t make cities smart. The race to wire up cities with real-time data feedback loops promises to make urban life more efficient and manageable on many levels, from transport to utilities to human services. But we should be careful not to turn this application of Internet-of-things tech into a fetish or an ideology (Boston Globe). Boston’s alliance with Waze has helped residents cope with their region’s choked roads. And it’s little wonder that cash-strapped cities might be exploring ditching municipal bus systems for Lyft and Uber (Bloomberg). But a city’s stakeholders can’t delegate tough political choices to an app. If they do, they risk roping off information that should be publicly shared, driving up the price of housing, and promoting inequality.

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Shorter Runways For Startups = Opportunities for BigCos

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Hussein Abdallah | Flickr

Deal frenzy means investors are holding back. Walmart’s acquisition of Jet.com — like Unilever’s purchase of Dollar Shave Club, and Uber’s sale of its China arm to Didi Chuxing — can be read as a sign of just how much scarcer venture capital has recently become (Wall Street Journal). Each of these operations was burning through cash, and each decided not to stick it out. Of course, the VC business is notoriously cyclical — no need to let the sound of its gears get too distracting. For anyone building a mission-driven company, the lesson here is about control. Selling to a bigger player can reward investors and employees and tack a tidy ending on a startup story. But once you hand the keys over to a new owner, the organization may wind up at a very different destination than its inspiring mission statement once mapped. Then again, big companies are getting religion around new ways to go to market — and so far this year they’re willing to pay for that privilege. Is this the start of a NewCo-BigCo trend?

Think tanks in the tank for funders. The next time you read a report from a big-name research mill, you might want to ask who paid for it. This week a New York Times series is going deep on just how broadly corporate money is shaping the studies that get published and the recommendations that get made under the esteemed scholarly logos of big think tanks. One story describes how Brookings took cash from a developer while it was promoting the company’s big San Francisco redevelopment project; another chronicles the work of an American Enterprise Institute scholar who received consulting fees from Verizon while he campaigned against net neutrality rules. These investigations aim to get your hackles up, and they should. But let’s pause before we all start chanting “Get corporate money out of our research!” We need more data, studies, and scholars taking on our intractable social problems and political logjams. If the private sector wants to pay, why not take the money — and for each new project, report where every dollar comes from? Instead of throwing out this research, let’s use real transparency to assess it, and then put it to work.

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Snapchat Grows Old, Gets Company

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Yuko Honda | Flickr

Social media tools keep growing up and looking for a place of their own. Media platforms start by capturing the young and then climb the demographic age ladder: You saw it with Facebook, and now it’s happening to Snapchat (Backchannel). The tool for sharing ephemeral moments and disposable videos is starting to attract Silicon Valley real estate agents, who are there because their clients are, too. Meanwhile, Facebook-owned Instagram has unabashedly cloned Snapchat’s “stories” feature (The Verge) — which keeps photos and videos around for a day for friends to see. Instagram worries that users are too picky about the images they post, and wants to encourage more candid behavior. Everyone’s trying to win fickle users; at the same time, the reality is, no one’s getting any younger — whatever platform we use.

Location, location, location! First we had cubicles, because they were cheap and gave employees a (tiny, gray) space of their own. Then we had an open floor plan because it was even cheaper and (theoretically) encouraged collaboration (and also headphones). Now we may get into office seating based on productivity profiles. According to a new study (Bloomberg), the ideal office pairs people who crank out “just okay” work at a furious pace with those who produce top-notch work more slowly. Presto — everyone gets more done. How could this possibly work? “A combination of inspiration and peer pressure” (Business Insider).

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Remembering Jimmy

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Jimmy Guterman — We lost the author of this newsletter (and NewCo’s Executive Editor) last week, a terrible blow to family, friends, colleagues, and NewCo. Read more about him here.

Uber Rides Shotgun With Didi in China — Maybe partnership is the new black. After spending billions trying to win at all costs, Uber has decided to work with its Chinese rival (Bloomberg). The company will combine its Chinese business with Didi Chuxing (China’s version of Uber), and by default the Chinese government, which just so happened to legalize ride sharing the week before. Didi will also invest $1 billion into Uber globally. Oh, to be a fly on that particular Chinese wall….

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NewCo Five — How technology disrupted the truth

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The NewCo Five collects the five most important stories for the NewCo economy that our editors found over the past seven days

Photo by: Japanexperterna.se

1. How technology disrupted the truth … and can bring it back (Katharine Viner, The Guardian)

2. Facebook says Facebook’s lack of diversity isn’t Facebook’s fault (Georgia Wells, Wall Street Journal)

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It Wasn’t Marissa Mayer Who Made Yahoo’s Mess

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Marissa Mayer (Photo: Adam Tinworth)

Too Late for a Turnaround. Yahoo announced quarterly results yesterday and they stunk, but that’s not the point. That’s what happens to technology companies that miss dynastic shifts. But as the complaints about CEO Marissa Mayer gain volume, and as the company lurches toward an inevitable sale, it’s worth remembering what former top executives of the company, all but one of them male, did to make the company such a mess before Mayer took over. When the company is sold, many more people will cite Mayer’s recent missteps rather than, say, Jerry Yang’s decade-old decision to spurn a Microsoft purchase. The Washington Post asks, do women in tech get pushed more onto the ‘glass cliff’? Tech turnarounds are notoriously hard, and Yale School of Management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld says women are often “given a shorter timeframe to show success.” Sure, Mayer got four years, but she was given a company that was mismanaged for at least ten.

The Newsbots Are Here. Robots are covering the Republican National Convention. That’s not an insult about network anchors; The Washington Post has sent a robot to roll across the convention floor in Cleveland (Engadget). It’s a telepresence robot, streaming to Periscope, that aims to ask questions of delegates and officials it encounters. BuzzFeed is experimenting, too, with a Facebook Messenger chatbot that queries those on its channel in Cleveland and elsewhere, and makes decisions on what to “cover” based on those inputs. Both these news organizations were famously kicked off the campaign bus by the Trump organization during the primaries; they both have live presences at the convention but they’re taking advantage of their returned access to try new things. Still, it’s humans with human memories that are emerging from the convention with data-centric stories like this one (Quartz)

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Invisible Talent

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Earlier today Wall Street Journal posted a piece titled “Facebook Blames Lack of Available Talent for Diversity Problem”. Facebook has come to the conclusion that their diversity problem is due to there being too few underrepresented people who have the necessary tech skills to work for them. So instead of looking to find this talent, they are passing off the issue to the public education system.


I am a Black woman who will graduate with a computer science degree from Dartmouth College in less than a year. There are thousands of other Black and Latinx who graduate every year with computer science Bachelor degrees. Most of us don’t get hired into the tech industry. So instead of putting in the effort to look for us, Facebook is ignoring the fact that we even exist.

When I saw this article I had to fight back tears. I thought about all the work I’ve put into to get to where I am today and wondered will it even matter when I start my job search in a few months. According to most tech companies, if I can’t pass an algorithmic challenge or if I’m not a “culture fit” I don’t belong. I haven’t even started my first full-time job yet and I’m already so tired of feeling erased and mistreated by the tech industry. I’ve worked so hard to make myself visible over the last few years so it hurt me to see Facebook make such false statements. What more must students of color do to make it clear that we are qualified to be in this industry?

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Is Microsoft Changing Its Stripes For Good?

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New President Brad Smith on a Renewed Mission, a Major Culture Shift, and the Role of a Corporation in Society

This week’s column introduces the Shift Dialogs, NewCo’s new video series featuring in-depth conversations with the leaders driving significant change across business, culture, and society. Our first episode features Brad Smith, President and Chief Legal Officer of Microsoft. We’ve also released the second episode, featuring Max Ventilla, founder and CEO of AltSchool.

Back in 1993, when an early thirty-something lawyer named Brad Smith joined Microsoft, his new employer was a fearsome amalgam of every badass tech company on the planet today. It had the ubiquitous reach of Google, the scary omnipotence of Facebook, the arrogant presumption of Apple, and the heartless calculation of Amazon. Its ruthless business practices were the subject of intense debate — was Microsoft too powerful? What could be done about it?

There was plenty for the new Associate General Counsel to do. His company was a magnet for legal trouble, locking horns with regulators and competitors around the globe. As the dot-com boom swelled in the late 1990s, Microsoft dominated the Internet with its Explorer web browser, and Wall Street crowned it the undisputed king of tech — in 1997, Microsoft’s market capitalization stood at more than seventy times that of its struggling rival Apple Computer.

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