Hyped up Gartner Hype Cycle

In a recent posting from TTI/Vanguard:

"Has anything on the Gartner hype cycle been hyped quite as much as the Gartner hype cycle itself has? In any event, it’s always interesting. [I agree] The headlined item this time around is smart machines, which, weirdly, moved backward since last year. (Has the Second Law of Thermodynamics been repealed without our hearing about it?)"

The post referenced article on Datanami is "'Smart Machines' Top the Hype Cycle, Gartner Says" here:

"And while Gartner talks about the importance of “deep neural networks” for big cognitive workloads, it apparently doesn’t think that “deep learning”—which is the core underlying technology that’s enabling much of the advances in this arena—is worth adding to its report. Or maybe the group just prefers to come up with its own names for things."

Oil & Gas: Digital Frontiers

Good friend Mr. Naveed Iftikhar sends along an article from McKinsey "The next frontier for digital technologies in oil and gas":

"Harnessing new technologies could boost efficiency—a mandate that’s especially important for oil and gas players globally."

The article states the obvious in layman terms. The oil and gas leadership that understands the imperatives discussed is already moving ahead. The ones who are tied up in cost cutting and "going back to the basics" have claims such as how can we even take the first step when the data is not organized and is in silos.

My company The RBR Group is currently engaged with the oil and gas leadership, which has chosen to quietly begin the leapfrog to machine learning, deep learning and cognitive computing.  The next few years are going to be interesting if the oil price fluctuates significantly in either direction.

Read the complete article here.

Following a recipe can lead to disaster

Do you believe if one receives an MBA in Entrepreneurism, one will become the most brilliant of entrepreneurs, and even better with the degree from a superior university?  Do you believe that breakthrough innovators can document a process that one can follow and be just that brilliant?

I believe "true entrepreneurs" have it in the genes (see my blog here); I believe leadership cannot be taught; both are born"with it".

Following is a short and an exceptional video from Mr. Jacques Pepin showing how a recipe, a formula, "is a point of departure" not the destination.  A simple yet powerful analogy.  Enjoy!

End of golf?

From a Bloomberg Magazine article "How Golf Got Stuck in the Rough":

"Today companies are relying less on glad-handing on the links, and many young people are cool to a pursuit viewed as time-intensive and elitist.  The result: Golf is suffering from an exodus of players, and courses are closing. The number of U.S. golfers has dropped 24 percent from its peak in 2002, to about 23 million players last year, according to Pellucid."

Golf is an unsustainable sport unless the golf course is in the tropics.  A cultural shift has occurred as well.

"Those sticking with the sport are playing fewer rounds.  U.S. golfers played a total of 462 million rounds last year, according to researcher Golf Datatech.  That was the fewest since 1995.  Says Morelli: "All the people under 35 are leaving the game.""

I believe golf is a sport that will significantly decrease in the next 10 to 15 years unless it rediscovers itself like Cricket has through shorter and faster games.

The Economist predicted oil crash

"As oil begins to pool in the Gulf, a gap has opened between the prices of LLS and Brent (see chart), even as LLS and WTI have moved into alignment. The discrepancy in prices between the middle of America and the East and West coasts will persist until someone works out a way to move the stuff around in greater quantities. But even if that happens, in a couple of years the whole country will have more light, sweet crude than it needs. If the oil continues to back up, prices will fall further compared with global markets, threatening production from high-cost shale beds and perhaps even smothering America’s resuscitation as an oil power."

From The Economist article "Spreading disarray" on Dec 14th, 2013 here.

HP's The Machine - Rethinking computer architecture

"“We have moved to what I call the Wall Streetization of technology,” says Shrijeet Mukherjee, the vice president for software engineering at Cumulus Networks, a maker of networking software. “It’s all about short-term gain.”"

From Bloomberg Magazine article "Can HP Build the Computer of the Future?" here.  I was reminded of the quote above.  The article ends a bit ominously:

"Mukherjee, who worked at SGI, says Web companies such as Google and Amazon have, in effect, achieved important advances for computer science with their high-efficiency data center software. They haven’t dedicated resources toward experimenting with radical advances in hardware. This is part of a generational shift, say Mukherjee and Fink, who both complain that few university students know how the guts of computers work. “There is a definite fear that we have stopped doing basic research around computer technology and that students are focused on much higher-level problems,” Mukherjee says. If HP’s hardware moonshot fails, he says he doubts a Facebook or Google will rise to take its place, but the R&D cash is there. “They certainly have the economic fortitude to make such a system,” he says. “It will require an individual who is willing to change the balance of things.”"

HP has designed its own grand challenge, to redefine the architecture of a computer.  See the HP The Machine website here.  I am following it closely.

Total's has the largest industrial supercomputer

Oil and gas sector has notoriously complex scientific problems.  One solution has been High Performance Computing (HPC).  With the 21st century's hardware commoditization and speed acceleration, it is exciting to see an oil company investment in tripling its supercomputing power by approximately 3 fold.  Yet, what is more encouraging is that this is being done during one of the worse oil price crashes. Hat's of to Total.

Read the complete article, "Total’s Pangea is now the Largest Industrial Supercomputer" here.

Incumbents don't create disruptions

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.