I have long held the belief that incumbents in a sector never disrupt themselves and actively fight the breakthroughs to their detriment. The automotive industry would have remained delightfully stagnant in its innovation, or at best incremental, until Tesla showed up on the seen. Plethora of other examples abound. For example, do you still book hotels? Really? What is a hotel? Do you still call of a cab or a taxi? Really? What is a taxi?
While the Digital Oil Field (DOF) has been a dream being had for the last 30 years, new, innovative, and entrepreneurial players a making inroads to deliver the solutions.
"Predicting failures and changing operations in real-time are now table-stakes for an industry that is already stressed by low oil prices. ARC expects the survivors in the oil and gas industry to follow the lead of Henry-Pump and make use of IoT Analytics Platforms. In fact, according to Meshify representatives, the Industrial IoT platform is fully commercialized, and other customers now include Sierra Resources, Tyco Gas & Flame Detection and Lubrizol, to name a few."
I spoke with Meshify in their infancy and I am delighted to see the progress they have made. Henry-Pump is just a small example of what is possible. Question remains, why have the companies in Oil Field Services, who have had resources on hand, could not build something like Meshify 10 years ago?
Read the article here on the Industrial IOT blog.
Thursday, March 24, 2016
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
Oil & Gas: Defunct business models
Interesting article in FuelFix quoting Mr. Paal Kibsgaard, CEO of Schlumberger.
"“We believe that project performance can only be improved by finding ways of breaking with the past and replacing the existing model with a new approach based on collaboration and commercial alignment between operators and the largest service companies,” (Kibsgaard) said."
Mr. Kibsgaard highlights the waste that follows the business model in use for the past 25 years:
"For roughly the past two decades, producers have drawn up master plans in house, then gone out and contract with dozens of suppliers separately for each piece of the larger project. The lack of coordination during the planning phase, as well as the lack of coordination between suppliers, has led to high costs poor financial results, Kibsgaard said."
Read the article here.
"“We believe that project performance can only be improved by finding ways of breaking with the past and replacing the existing model with a new approach based on collaboration and commercial alignment between operators and the largest service companies,” (Kibsgaard) said."
Mr. Kibsgaard highlights the waste that follows the business model in use for the past 25 years:
"For roughly the past two decades, producers have drawn up master plans in house, then gone out and contract with dozens of suppliers separately for each piece of the larger project. The lack of coordination during the planning phase, as well as the lack of coordination between suppliers, has led to high costs poor financial results, Kibsgaard said."
Read the article here.
Thursday, March 17, 2016
Long settled? does not apply for breakthroughs
"Q-Carbon and The Man Who Makes His Own Diamonds" via friend Mr. Jim Verdonik:
"I found Prof. Narayan’s work fascinating for many reasons starting with a relatively simple solution dreamed about for centuries. But if it had been up to me go choose a research area, studying carbon would not have been among them. After all it is an old settled topic; carbon is either in the form of graphite or diamond – end of discussion. Fortunately, Professor Narayan and PhD candidate Bhaumik had the genius of avoiding my presumption and researched carbon phases. Sometimes the greatest innovations come from taking another look at the so-called long settled subjects."
Read the complete article here.
"I found Prof. Narayan’s work fascinating for many reasons starting with a relatively simple solution dreamed about for centuries. But if it had been up to me go choose a research area, studying carbon would not have been among them. After all it is an old settled topic; carbon is either in the form of graphite or diamond – end of discussion. Fortunately, Professor Narayan and PhD candidate Bhaumik had the genius of avoiding my presumption and researched carbon phases. Sometimes the greatest innovations come from taking another look at the so-called long settled subjects."
Read the complete article here.
Wednesday, March 16, 2016
Artificial Intelligence part of the 21st century corporate
At times it feels that some of the sectors that depend deeply on technology are oblivious to how their world is about to be disrupted from outsiders and where the future will be. Case in point from an article via friend Mr. Pete Stuntz:
"… the launch of OpenAI, the billion-dollar nonprofit research center announced this week, opens a window into what some of the big thinkers in the computer science and business consider as opportunities and challenges."
Creative Destruction is to follow shortly, and IBM was not asked to be part of the founding group:
""The way software is eating the world today, well, AI will do that to software," says Amir Husain, CEO of Spark Cognition, an AI security startup in Austin, Texas.
He explained that many kinds of business software that replaced paper documents and in filing cabinets will eventually be transformed into a new format. And that format will likely be more user-friendly because of hard work done by artificial intelligence behind the scenes.
“All of these categories will be destroyed and remade, so there’s a lot of economic potential locked up in this,” says Husain. “It’s sort of like being the only guy in 1995 who knows HTML.”
And that, more than anything, is why the big brains in Silicon Valley and at other companies left out of the OpenAI effort are hustling to stake a claim in this space. Rob High, an IBM Fellow, and VP and CTO of IBM’s Watson Group, explained that the computing giant is interested in learning more about the organization and getting involved."
Read the complete article here.
He explained that many kinds of business software that replaced paper documents and in filing cabinets will eventually be transformed into a new format. And that format will likely be more user-friendly because of hard work done by artificial intelligence behind the scenes.
“All of these categories will be destroyed and remade, so there’s a lot of economic potential locked up in this,” says Husain. “It’s sort of like being the only guy in 1995 who knows HTML.”
And that, more than anything, is why the big brains in Silicon Valley and at other companies left out of the OpenAI effort are hustling to stake a claim in this space. Rob High, an IBM Fellow, and VP and CTO of IBM’s Watson Group, explained that the computing giant is interested in learning more about the organization and getting involved."
Read the complete article here.
Tuesday, March 1, 2016
Bloomberg Business (Interactive): Five years of oil run up and its collapse
Excellent interactive visualization showing growth of the oil industry in the USA over the past five years, and its quick decline at Bloomberg Business article - Watch Five Years of Oil Drilling Collapse in Seconds, here.
Friday, February 26, 2016
IOT Value Chain
I have been asked to explain Internet of Things (IOT) a few times and where does value lie in IOT. Below is a diagram I have put together to consolidate it into a value chain. Note that the below diagram applies both to IOT in batch and real-time.
Sunday, February 21, 2016
Superbosses and innovation
Mr.Vivek Wadhwa writes in How I realized the incredible impact that great bosses have about the impact of great managers on their specific sectors and individuals. The article further validated for me the fact that breakthrough innovation comes from outside the sector in consideration and that the managers play a key role in making sure that disruptions do not emerge from within the sector. See my blog Innovation is coming from outside the sector here.
Vivek writes:
"Yes, I know that I got lucky in having good bosses; most are jerks who demotivate employees, slow their growth, backstab, and take credit for others’ work. You are usually stuck with whomever you get. But there is nothing that stops you from being a superboss. As you begin to achieve success, start helping others and nurturing your colleagues and subordinates. Show the leadership qualities that you’d like your own boss to have. You will gain as much as the people you help — and build a better company."
Vivek's article can be read here.
Vivek writes:
"Yes, I know that I got lucky in having good bosses; most are jerks who demotivate employees, slow their growth, backstab, and take credit for others’ work. You are usually stuck with whomever you get. But there is nothing that stops you from being a superboss. As you begin to achieve success, start helping others and nurturing your colleagues and subordinates. Show the leadership qualities that you’d like your own boss to have. You will gain as much as the people you help — and build a better company."
Vivek's article can be read here.
Thursday, January 28, 2016
Google's Machine Learning triumph
When Deep Blue won chess match against Kasparov, as a data guy and coder I knew how it was done, its called brute force. Almost 20 years later, Google's AlphaGo program has taken a leap in emulating human experiential learnings in deep neural networks, and winning Go.
"The key to AlphaGo is reducing the enormous search space to something more manageable. To do this, it combines a state-of-the-art tree search with two deep neural networks, each of which contains many layers with millions of neuron-like connections. One neural network, the “policy network”, predicts the next move, and is used to narrow the search to consider only the moves most likely to lead to a win. The other neural network, the “value network”, is then used to reduce the depth of the search tree -- estimating the winner in each position in place of searching all the way to the end of the game."
Google Research article by was of Dr. Mark Vorderbruggen, read here. The article closes with:
"We are thrilled to have mastered Go and thus achieved one of the grand challenges of AI. However, the most significant aspect of all this for us is that AlphaGo isn’t just an ‘expert’ system built with hand-crafted rules, but instead uses general machine learning techniques to allow it to improve itself, just by watching and playing games. While games are the perfect platform for developing and testing AI algorithms quickly and efficiently, ultimately we want to apply these techniques to important real-world problems. Because the methods we have used are general purpose, our hope is that one day they could be extended to help us address some of society’s toughest and most pressing problems, from climate modelling to complex disease analysis."
"The key to AlphaGo is reducing the enormous search space to something more manageable. To do this, it combines a state-of-the-art tree search with two deep neural networks, each of which contains many layers with millions of neuron-like connections. One neural network, the “policy network”, predicts the next move, and is used to narrow the search to consider only the moves most likely to lead to a win. The other neural network, the “value network”, is then used to reduce the depth of the search tree -- estimating the winner in each position in place of searching all the way to the end of the game."
Google Research article by was of Dr. Mark Vorderbruggen, read here. The article closes with:
"We are thrilled to have mastered Go and thus achieved one of the grand challenges of AI. However, the most significant aspect of all this for us is that AlphaGo isn’t just an ‘expert’ system built with hand-crafted rules, but instead uses general machine learning techniques to allow it to improve itself, just by watching and playing games. While games are the perfect platform for developing and testing AI algorithms quickly and efficiently, ultimately we want to apply these techniques to important real-world problems. Because the methods we have used are general purpose, our hope is that one day they could be extended to help us address some of society’s toughest and most pressing problems, from climate modelling to complex disease analysis."
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
The immigrant genius - Schema Violation
By way of Ms. Aruna Viswanathan, in the Wall Street Journal article The Secret of Immigrant Genius:
"Scan the roster of history’s intellectual and artistic giants, and you quickly notice something remarkable: Many were immigrants or refugees, from Victor Hugo, W.H. Auden and Vladimir Nabokov to Nikolas Tesla, Marie Curie and Sigmund Freud. At the top of this pantheon sits the genius’s genius: Einstein. His “miracle year” of 1905, when he published no fewer than four groundbreaking scientific papers, occurred after he had emigrated from Germany to Switzerland."
From the number of entrepreneurial businesses started to the number of patents published in the US alone, one easy answer is that the "Scruffy but determined immigrant, hungry for success, arrives on distant shores. Immigrant works hard. Immigrant is bolstered by a supportive family, as well as a wider network from the old country. Immigrant succeeds, buys flashy new threads."
Yet, the article debunks this myth and shares research showcasing various traits of immigrants that enable the creative disruption anchored in what is called Schema Violation.
Read this excellent article here.
"Scan the roster of history’s intellectual and artistic giants, and you quickly notice something remarkable: Many were immigrants or refugees, from Victor Hugo, W.H. Auden and Vladimir Nabokov to Nikolas Tesla, Marie Curie and Sigmund Freud. At the top of this pantheon sits the genius’s genius: Einstein. His “miracle year” of 1905, when he published no fewer than four groundbreaking scientific papers, occurred after he had emigrated from Germany to Switzerland."
From the number of entrepreneurial businesses started to the number of patents published in the US alone, one easy answer is that the "Scruffy but determined immigrant, hungry for success, arrives on distant shores. Immigrant works hard. Immigrant is bolstered by a supportive family, as well as a wider network from the old country. Immigrant succeeds, buys flashy new threads."
Yet, the article debunks this myth and shares research showcasing various traits of immigrants that enable the creative disruption anchored in what is called Schema Violation.
Read this excellent article here.
Thursday, January 21, 2016
Cars? No. Business/personal services driven transportation? Yes!
I believe the graph below from The Economist says it all from their article The driverless, car-sharing road ahead here:
The tie-ups between automotive companies and the large technology companies announced at CES like "Ford partners with Amazon to connect cars with homes" here, investments "GM is investing $500 million in Lyft to develop self-driving cars" here, and others are now the realization of the a future built upon technology driven services. Will I own a car in 10 years from now, perhaps. Will the new generation in high schools? That remains to be seen.
The tie-ups between automotive companies and the large technology companies announced at CES like "Ford partners with Amazon to connect cars with homes" here, investments "GM is investing $500 million in Lyft to develop self-driving cars" here, and others are now the realization of the a future built upon technology driven services. Will I own a car in 10 years from now, perhaps. Will the new generation in high schools? That remains to be seen.
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Let's just call it "How much is my dollar worth in the world?"
(Enlarge the image by clicking on it)
The bigger concern for 2016 is the Dutch Disease:
"… as revenues increase in the growing sector (or inflows of foreign aid), the given nation's currency becomes stronger (appreciates) compared to currencies of other nations (manifest in an exchange rate). This results in the nation's other exports becoming more expensive for other countries to buy, and imports becoming cheaper, making those sectors less competitive."
Read an explanation of Dutch Disease here.
Read the complete article from The Economist here.
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Australia - Mini stratup boom?
What are the ingredients of Silicon Valley that make it the Valley? Is it the Venture Capitalists who understand risk and reward? Is it the US bankruptcy laws that allow for the innovation to find new foot holds? One thing is for certain, it is a culture, and attempts at its replication across the globe have not yielded the same results.
The Economist in From lucky to plucky shares the current trend in business innovation in Australia:
"Mr Lynch (of DesignCrowd) foresees a “mini startup boom” emerging in Australia. And he is optimistic that the interventions of the tech-friendly prime minister can only help Australia go from being the Lucky Country to one that makes its own luck."
One thing is for certain if history is a guide, politics and policy do not create technology booms. Let's watch closely as Australia with a commodities driven economy moves forward in this quest. See the complete article here.
The Economist in From lucky to plucky shares the current trend in business innovation in Australia:
"Mr Lynch (of DesignCrowd) foresees a “mini startup boom” emerging in Australia. And he is optimistic that the interventions of the tech-friendly prime minister can only help Australia go from being the Lucky Country to one that makes its own luck."
One thing is for certain if history is a guide, politics and policy do not create technology booms. Let's watch closely as Australia with a commodities driven economy moves forward in this quest. See the complete article here.
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