I more or less agree with everything except this points:
>2/ Xiaomi will spend some of the $1.1bn they just raised coming to the US. This will bring a strong player in the non-google android sector into the US market and legitimize a “third mobile OS” in the western world. The good news for developers is developing for non-google android is not much different than developing for google android.
The "third mobile OS" is Windows Phone and even if something else takes this spot, it's still not that great to be third.
>3/ More asian penetration into the US market will come from the messenger sector as both Line and WeChat make strong moves to gain a share of the lucrative US messenger market.
I doubt those companies will be more than marginal players in the us market next year, maybe later?
I didn't understand the following very well, if someone can explain or point me elsewhere, I'd really appreciate it:
>8/ The horrible year that bitcoin had in 2014 will be a wakeup call for all stakeholders. Developers will turn their energy from creating the next bitcoin (all the alt stuff) to creating the stack on top of the bitcoin blockchain. Real decentralized applications will start to emerge as the platform matures and entrepreneurial energy is channeled in the right direction.
I don't see the point of bitcoin or any other virtual currency? To me nothing beats legal tender currencies.
The startup that immediately came to mind here is CrowdMed: http://readwrite.com/2013/05/08/crowdmed-wants-to-crowdsourc... . Crowdsourced diagnoses are a regulatory and liability minefield, but the upside to patients is huge and (in my opinion) worth the risk - instead of an impersonal WebMD, you get individual attention by experts to specific cases, with oversight from other community experts in the form of powerful downvotes.
N.B. CrowdMed's spend-reputation-to-answer "prediction market" methodology (in contrast to the free-to-answer StackOverflow/Quora model), described a bit in the article, might be of interest to other HN'ers. I would expect it to drive away potential contributors, but in the case of CrowdMed, it seems that the potential contributors with other incentives to contribute are also the higher-quality contributors (namely people who want to do good with their answers and are confident in their expertise) so it tends to weed out only the bad actors. It's a dynamic that's worth considering for anyone starting a Q&A site of any kind.
the potential contributors with other incentives to contribute are also the higher-quality contributors
I'm skeptical that's true in medicine, though it depends on how else they filter their community. My own experience is that non-doctors with strong opinions about medicine that they feel motivated to share are usually precisely the people you don't want medical advice from. Often they are adherents of one or another alternative-medicine system, or otherwise have really idiosyncratic views.
This is true about so many things. Sometimes people are driven by their knowledgeable and passion, but there is also a large group driven by selfish desire to promote themselves or an agenda. The guy who wants to be in charge so he can be in charge instead of lead, is not the guy you want in charge.
It's amazing how much wasted energy is spent on pseudo science. From zero-energy devices to "secret" cancer cures. Those involved create boogie men(usually the government) who are repressing "the truth", as the actual data to support their claims is weak. Rallying people against a common enemy is easier than coming up with an actual product that works. It's incredibly lazy, and usually a few minutes of research will cast doubt on claims. The scamsters are scum, but you can see the motivation. Those who actually believe are scarier.
I don't think you really get medical advice from CrowdMed.You get ideas for diagnosis(probably with reasoning) - and you go with them to your doctor, to verify.In general CrowdMed deals with cases where regular doctors failed to find a good diagnosis,so they will be happy to get GOOD ideas.
It has created a new way to send money across the world with very small fees. This may not be such a big deal for Americans, but in some countries being able to send money to/from abroad when they can't access a bank account or Paypal account is a big big thing.
It does have it's weaknesses though. The first is that you need a good knowledge of security to successfully manage your own bitcoin stored offline. For example how intuitive is it that spending from the same address twice is a potential security hole? Or that your RNG isn't good enough.
Otherwise you store it online, but that has a lot of risk as we have seen with so many successful attacks in myriad different ways.
The other problem is no one really trades in units of Bitcoin. The value of something is in a fiat currency e.g. USD which then needs to be converted to Bitcoin, and so when your Bitcoin crashes to 50% of what it was worth yesterday, it becomes high risk just to hold it. It has no intrinsic worth.
Bitcoins have never crashed to 50% of what they were worth yesterday. They are volatile, but they have never been that volatile. And volatile currencies aren't worthless either, the ruble is still an important currency, and so are many others that have gone through drastic devaluations. I've lived through one such devaluation with one such currency, and life went on, the economy recovered.
Also, no currency has any intrinsic worth anymore. Currencies are all a consensual mass hallucination. I still think it's feasible that if enough of us agree that bitcoins are worth something, then they are worth something.
The biggest difference with bitcoins is that nobody can create them out of thin air due to whim like they can with USD.
I agree volitile isn't worthless. But it limits the mass adoption I have about 3BTC and I saw them be worth $600 and now $300. Had I been an ordinary 'risk averse' person, and I paid $600 for them I'd be pretty cheesed off (aka pissed).
>> Also, no currency has any intrinsic worth anymore.
Yes! This can be generalized to "nothing has ever had, has, or will have any intrinsic worth", which I agree with. A dead cow is worth more than a bar of gold on a desert island, but vice-versa in the 'normal world'.
>> The biggest difference with bitcoins is that nobody can create them out of thin air due to whim like they can with USD.
Yes BTC is more like Gold in that respect, although ironically the intended use case is a currency not an investment. Fiat currencies are the best confidence trick. Even if you know you are being conned, you still have to play along!
> The biggest difference with bitcoins is that nobody can create them out of thin air due to whim like they can with USD.
I've never really understood the objection that people have with regards to the Fed printing USD (for instance). It's actually a pretty powerful regulatory tool, isn't it? A small amount of inflation is fine (I think the Fed targets about 2%), but high inflation or deflation is a problem for people who have savings in USD. One way to manage inflation is to control the amount of dollars in circulation, which can be controlled by printing or not printing new dollars (and removing old ones from circulation). There are other ways, but the Fed is fairly limited in terms of techniques it can apply. Can someone explain why bitcoin advocates so often object to that control?
Printing money is but one way to create and it's not how most USD is created. Most USD is created by banks, and not the federal bank, whenever they give out loans. This is the basis of fractional reserve banking.
There's a pretty big difference between increasing the money supply by loaning money, borrowing from the fed at the discount window, and creating money out of thin air to use however you'd like.
While that's true, isn't the exact same true of any currency (including BTC)? In principle, a bank could loan BTC with a fractional reserve and produce the same outcome, could it not?
I suppose banks could create some sort of financial instrument that says "IOU 2.5 BTC" or whatever, but this thing they create couldn't pass off completely as bitcoins, since you couldn't spend this thing on the blockchain like you can with ordinary bitcoins.
>Bitcoins/Altcoin "mining" creates coins out of thin air
Yes, but not at a whim; that's the important distinction. The precise creation schedule for all bitcoins ever is known in advance (and Bitcoin creation is slowing, and eventually will stop). This is distinct from any fiat currency, where the minting authority can arbitrarily decide to inflate all your cash holdings out of existence. This has happened many times throughout history. See the German Papiermark.
> I don't see the point of bitcoin or any other virtual currency? To me nothing beats legal tender currencies.
All currencies are "virtual". They all exist because we agree they exist. They're all a consensus reality. Due to the banking system, most USD exists merely because banks claim they exist.
The point of bitcoins is internet cash. They are frequently compared to credit cards because that's what we mostly use right now, but bitcoins behave a lot more like cash. They are mostly anonymous like cash, mostly irreversible like cash, instantaneous like cash. You can't whisk away coins and bills on the internet, you can't use credit cards without identifying yourself completely, you can't use any other currency on the internet without a 3rd party's permission.
I wish people would stop saying that currencies are based on consensus. They are not.
If you live in any country (say the US), and engage in economic activity, and never acquire the local currency, you WILL go to jail for tax evasion. At some point, you need to acquire the local currency to pay your taxes, otherwise men with guns will put you in prison. Fiat currency's demand is underpinned by this.
You have also conflated demand deposits and currency. Demand deposits are usually worth the same as currency, and it is true that this is because of confidence. However, there have been several times in the last century in the US (and many other countries) where that has not been true.
If you think bitcoin is anonymous (or mostly anonymous, whatever that means), I have a bridge to sell you. Bitcoin is taxable (meaning that transactions in it are taxable events). I can guarantee the IRS (and probably the FBI) have developed (and are developing) some neat little analysis tools.
It always pays to remember that despite the huge number of crimes committed by Al Capone, he was only convicted of evasion of federal income tax.
My prediction is that BitCoin will become so heavily regulated that it will end up being more expensive to use than USD for international transactions; more expensive because there will be lower volumes. Not using the regulated channels will result in heavy fines, or men with guns putting you in a metal box.
It's still a consensus if you think that our laws are based on a consensus. If you disagree and think our laws are also not based on anyone's opinion, then I suppose currencies are not based on anyone's opinion either. Perhaps the government never asked you what laws should exist, and perhaps the consensus doesn't include everyone, only the consensus of those in power.
Sell me that bridge. Identify the bitcoins I've used. Perhaps you'll succeed in finding some, but I don't think you'll succeed in finding all.
Cash is taxable too. I've paid plenty of taxes when using bitcoins, and unlike many other bitcoiners, I actually think taxes are a great thing. I don't think bitcoins' near anonymity have anything to do with evading taxes, anymore than paying with cash at the grocery register is enabling me to avoid taxes.
I don't want to make any predictions for bitcoins. I don't know if they will be heavily regulated or not. But so far, it has been very convenient for me to have internet cash.
The Blockchain is a distributed consensus system or some think of it as a decentralized asset managing system. That also can do currencies like Bitcoin. So this is more about new ideas that also use the Blockchain. For Example: Crowdfunding, DNS or TLS/SSL Certificates alternatives could be implemented and managed over the Blockchain.
There's a very simplistic "in principle" reason to consider the blockchain. It can store information symmetrically - i.e. once you have access to it you have complete ability to search it and reuse the data, and it can't be "lost" like data you've stored on a server or a hard drive - it only goes down if the whole network does. This maximizes information availability and reduces the middleman problem to "who provides hardware and bandwidth" and "what ui is available for accessing the blockchain."
Although bitcoin makes the blockchain look capitalist, its underlying tendencies are like that of the internet at large - self organizing infrastructure for information.
I think we can agree that distributed is better for the consumer than centralized (privacy and availability), but given that the Blockchain is not the only way to achieve a distributed architecture, I'm interested in why I would use the Blockchain when I can achieve similar results with an arguably simpler solution.
Blockchains allow people to enter into agreements that don't require enforcement. They're enforced by the programs that generate and validate the blockchain. Eliminating the need to enforce agreements will make them easier to enter into. Blockchains make it easier for people to work together.
The problem with this statement is that for it to be true, everything referenced in the agreement has to exist in the blockchain. The system can't seize collateral that is real property. That still needs to be enforced by the courts and the sheriff. Whoever finds the way to match borrowers and lenders using bitcoin but with traditional collateral enforcement is going to make a lot of money.
A cheaper version of western Union is great and so is reduced fees for merchants. There is so much more that can be done with blockchain technology but I don't think it well happen as soon as 2015 because of the chasm between the people who understand the technology and the people who understand the business and law.
Go run a tip system on reddit using fiat currency.
Go try sending money to someone in Ethiopia in fiat currency.
Ensure nobody can steal your money without you making a mistake first (either giving someone else access, or leaving your wallet password in the open).
Transfer a large sum of money (in excess of, say, 100k) in seconds between an arbitrary sender and receiver.
>Go run a tip system on reddit using fiat currency.
changetip is off chain so it doesn't matter what currency you use it would work the exact same. There are other micropayment and tipping systems that don't use bitcoin and they are just about as successful as changetip(not very).
>Go try sending money to someone in Ethiopia in fiat currency.
Try sending money to someone in Ethiopia using bitcoin in a way they allows them to actually use it in Ethiopia.
>Ensure nobody can steal your money without you making a mistake first (either giving someone else access, or leaving your wallet password in the open).
Ensure that if you do make a simple mistake(how many relatives do you know that have installed toolbars? Thats the level of simple mistake you have to avoid) you will lose all your money with no recourse.
>Transfer a large sum of money (in excess of, say, 100k) in seconds between an arbitrary sender and receiver.
Large wire transfers are simple and given the cost and difficulty of acquiring 100k worth of bitcoin would almost certainly be cheaper and faster.
> Large wire transfers are simple and given the cost and difficulty of acquiring 100k worth of bitcoin would almost certainly be cheaper and faster.
I would add to that safer too. Something goes wrong you can call the banks and they can roll things back. There is a paper trail that works in your favor.
My understanding (admittedly tremendously superficial) is that the best way to send money to someone in Ethiopia is Hawala, and that this does typically move fiat currency.
What I want to see is Xiaomi's Macbook AIR clone with 16 gb RAM and a 15 inch screen for $480. It's rumored to run Linux and though the pictures leaked last week are fakes company sources say its still in the works for 2015
> Capital markets will be a mixed bag in 2015. Big tech names will continue to access capital easily (see 1/), but the combination of rising rates and depressed prices for oil will bring great stress to global capital markets and there will be a noticeable flight to safety around the world. Safety used to mean gold, US treasuries, and blue chip stocks. Now it means Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook.
So several of the biggest momo plays of an extended bull market are now safety stocks?
Notwithstanding the fact that anyone who has even a modicum of knowledge of the public equities markets will cringe at the notion that GOOG, FB, et. al. are the new Treasuries (they're not), it's worth pointing out that Google's shares were basically flat last year and Amazon's shares lost more than 20% in 2014 as investors started to question the company's strategy in light of the fact that some of its big investments clearly aren't working. That Wilson lumped these two names in with FB and AAPL, which had excellent years, tells you how informed this prediction is.
The "death of the file" is a really mixed bag. The replacement is walled gardens with no privacy, control and perhaps even ownership of your data, questionable security, and the potential that your data could vanish if one is acquires or goes under.
I have a friend who had a Kodak camera that, you plugged it into your PC and it uploaded straight to Kodak's photo hosting (this was before we called such things "cloud storage"). If you wanted your own copies of your own photos you would need to go onto said site and right-click download them one at a time.
One day Kodak decided they weren't going to run this site anymore, and just deleted the whole lot. She was heartbroken. And I look at all these guys selling similar solutions, and I got to wonder at what point did they knowingly cross the line to exploiting and victimising ordinary users?
There's a whole raft of home automation devices, printers, etc. that will become bricks if certain cloud servers are turned off.
Personally I think this fad will crash and burn, but it will take many rounds of consumer disappointment and flagrant disregard like you describe. Eventually "you control it" will become a selling point.
For the most part, home automation is a horrible mess right now with incompatible proprietary systems that mostly don't even solve any particular problem.
That said, there's a definite tradeoff between having devices that just work and maintaining control over all the information storage and information flows. In the case of the parent comment, automatically backing up photos is actually a great feature for a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't back them up at all. But it's not so good when the service shuts down or your account gets hacked (as in the celebrity photos this past year).
There's a difference between doing it out of self-interest (Kodak, Apple) and providing a user service. It would be perfectly possible to provide automatic backups of photos via the user's choice of cloud (Dropbox, OneDrive etc) with the cloud service copying them to the user's chosen personal storage (PC, NAS, whatever).
That would work except for the people who don't and/or won't have any personal storage. However, if people won't look after their own data, I'm unlikely to be too sad when they lose it.
"Over the years I’ve received numerous emails from past and former Genius Bar support staff, telling similar stories of heartbreak. Customer comes in, their iPhone completely broken, or lost, or stolen, and they had precious photos and videos on it. The birth of a child. The last vacation they ever took with a beloved spouse who has since passed away. Did they ever back up their iPhone to a Mac or PC with iTunes? No. In many cases they don’t even know what “iTunes on a PC” even means. Or maybe they connected the iPhone to iTunes once, the day they bought it and needed to activate it, and then never again."
For many people it honestly is a choice between an automated cloud service and going without a safety net at all.
Do I personally depend on a cloud provider when I can avoid it? I try not to with anything I really care about. I use cloud providers but have plenty of my own backup systems as well. But I'm not the typical consumer.
You're not actually disagreeing with me. I didn't say anything against cloud services, only that they could be set up to benefit users rather than suppliers.
However, if people are too lame-brained to look after their own data, then I still won't feel sorry if they lose it. You can feel sorry if you want, but it won't make the tiniest bit of difference.
While paying for a service gives one more confidence and, if it's a large company, I'd be surprised if they just shut things down overnight, you don't really have meaningful recourse if they just go belly up or just make a really bad IT mistake. Ideally, use multiple storage locations--private and hosted.
With respect to the parent comment about Kodak, they actually transferred things to Shutterfly and photos supposedly did not just go away: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/05/business/la-fi-tech-... This also wasn't really a "free" service as it was supposedly a feature you got with the camera.
It's happening already with early adopters. My brother-in-law just bought a NAS that markets itself as "Your own personal cloud" - it's an 8TB hard disk that plugs into Ethernet (or wireless), is available from every computer connected to the network, and is also available (encrypted) across the public Internet from computers that were authorized on the home intranet.
Stories like this make me wonder if there should be some sort of law/regulation to ensure data availability for a certain amount of time if a site is shut down - in a similar way that there's a process for the government to force companies to issue safety recalls. There's an interesting philosophical question here - if our data makes up part of our memories, is negligence of that data tantamount to, say, negligence in making football helmets that could permit head trauma and potentially "erase" the ability to access memories?
I don't see the death of the file, rather more of them than fewer of them. Underneath all that pretty eye candy it's still files.
What I would love to see is the death of the walled garden, but then again that's probably a pipe dream.
I don't care if I'll be the last guy on the planet to self host his stuff but I can't see moving my email, my files or anything else off into the cloud. Outsourcing responsibility over my digital storage seems like asking for trouble.
>I don't see the death of the file, rather more of them than fewer of them.
Yes, I don't either, unless some radical invention comes along - maybe memristor based PCs from HP as was in the news some time ago - google "hp memristor computer" - so that there is no separate RAM and disk, just one kind of storage.
Even then, naming of data objects will be needed, so it may still be something like a file. Plus, there is a huge existing software investment in code to handle file names and file naming conventions - it must be something on the order of magnitude of the {m|b}illions of lines of COBOL code that still exist in production, maybe an order less ...
But many of these big revolutionary announcements (e.g. memristor-based PC) turn out to be vaporware, though some of them do end up in at least some spinoff tech that is of use. Time will tell.
As I stated in a previous post, there is no "death of the file". There is the obfuscation of the file, merely putting a splash screen on it and pretending it doesn't exist.
Once we actually replace hierarchical file systems with a different paradigm (like persistent object stores), then we can talk. Right now we live in a world dominated by the hierarchical file system, and this likely won't change soon. Nor am I necessarily advocating one, as none of the alternatives have ever reached usages anywhere near as widespread.
Trying to pretend that fundamental principles of your environment aren't real is an anti-pattern and a recipe for disaster.
Why Xiaomi uses its own Android flavour for the Chinese market is clear. But I don't believe they will push their own Android flavour to the US and EU markets, but rather use Playstore-enabled versions. Their first goal is to compete against Samsung in handset price. And Samsung has shown that it is very hard for an Asian manufacturer to introduce their own OS flavours and apps into a Western market.
They can't make Playstore-enabled versions; Google doesn't allow you to make both Google- and non-Google Android devices. It's either all Google or no Google.
i don't think that's true. They don't allow you to make an incompatible fork and a compatible fork, but as long as your fork is capable of running Play Services, you can distribute a version without it.
You just get into trouble if you do like Amazon did and try to block the installation of Google Play Services.
Samsung and Software ... let's just say that it is not the best association ever.
They wanted to launch a Tizen phone 'Samsung Z' before the end of 2014. Even by their own standards it was not good enough so it has been delayed.
The decreasing sales of the Galaxy line has also prompted a (long overdue) shake up.
I don't know if Tizen will continue to play a role in the upcoming lineup or if Samsung will realize that creating a new mobile OS is not that easy.
They are still pushing Tizen as their smartwatches OS (except for the ones that run Anrdroid). I have been able to test the Galaxy Watch 3 a couple of months before its release and I have to admit that I have been favorably impressed.
It does not transform smartwatches into must-own gadgets (but to be fair, IMO neither do Apple or Google), but it i nice, has cool features (always on hear-monitor) and is almost exempt of the samsung mega feature creep.
Having tried an Oculus Rift generation 3, where the tracking is PERFECT and the resolution is adequate, I think VR will do better in 2015 than he suggests.
I assume you're referring to the Crescent Bay prototype, and I agree. The Gear VR will help too, as will potentially their acquisition of Nimble VR (more robust hand-tracking than the Leap).
That said, 2015 is just the beginning of the VR explosion, and Fred Wilson's prediction is phrased vaguely enough that he could probably claim it to have been accurate at the end of 2015 either way.
Not to mention that Oculus has already shipped a consumer device, the Gear VR. So, we have an existence proof that they can ship something real. It's not being heavily marketed yet, and requires the Note 4 so it's expensive, but it's a great VR experience in a consumer-friendly form factor. There are a lot of challenges ahead (and a bit of a chicken and egg problem vis a vis customer base/content) but I think there's a good chance VR is going to be the gift to give for the holidays in 2015.
At first Oculus seemed like a cool idea, but you can really only play "simulator" games with it, games where you sit in a vehicle otherwise it ruins the VR feel and you might as well just play on a monitor.
Only other thing I've seen was some sort of sculpting thing, but I'd imagine the novelty would wear out there pretty fast.
More I think about whole VR thing the less I think it will actually be a thing. I'm sure when Oculus Rift comes out for reals a lot of people are going to buy them, but I don't really see a lot of value for developers supporting them in most games, but someone comes up with killer app/game for it.
> At first Oculus seemed like a cool idea, but you can really only play "simulator" games with it, games where you sit in a vehicle otherwise it ruins the VR feel and you might as well just play on a monitor.
Check out castAR which you might consider an "inside out" VR experience that projects the virtual world into the real world. Thus you can walk around and look at 3D objects from all sides, see other players, your coffee, or whatever is in the real world, instead of the VR approach of sitting in one place looking around. So it's a way of working you can't do with a monitor.
(CastAR can run regular VR apps too with a small adaptor, but that feels less compelling than the mixed/augmented reality)
I agree, that's why I'm keeping my eye on Magic Leap in 2015. If they can really compactly do what their patents show, they will change everything and be a great platform for not only games, but get us away from all these screens in general.
That's an early VR demo of TxK, being ported from PS Vita, which is a Tempest remake (fast paced twitch shooter). I haven't played it myself, but those who have say great things about it. An example of a non-simulator game. What's remarkable is Jeff (one of the dev's) doesn't have the ability to see stereoscopic vision.
Most of TxK is played facing towards a web without lots of head turning. Certain games like this will benefit simply by being in 3D, along with VR's total-immersion effect.
VR is a new medium so content creators are figuring out what works. Simulator games were low hanging fruit since even with less-than-perfect hardware/software they prevent sim sickness. The product for the company I work for is a VR experience with a first-person perspective and we are having no trouble preventing sim sickness by designing things properly.
That's why, in my view, the most important thing for VR to be successful isn't just getting the headset perfect. The most important thing is a better input technology. If that is hand tracking, body tracking, or something else, I don't know but I do know this is one of the most important things to make VR achieve it's potential.
This is no longer true. The Gen 3 (latest) helmet lets you walk around just fine.
For instance, my favorite demo is in some kind of nuclear sub control room. You can walk around, up to panels, even kneel down and look up under a shelf.
Does Oculus Rift have any plans to make this an online product where you can play with other Oculus players? I haven't seen any information about any plans to create an online gaming presence, but I can definitely see a lot of great commercial applications for it already.
Oculus Rift is just a monitor so of course there will be multiplayer games if that's what you're speaking of. Anyone can develop a game for it and there already are ports of Quake etc out there. No need for Oculus themselves to be involved.
> 3/ More asian penetration into the US market will come from the messenger sector as both Line and WeChat make strong moves to gain a share of the lucrative US messenger market
I get that it's very hot right now, but is the US messenger market actually lucrative? Who is making significant money from it? My understanding is the leader in the sector as far as revenue goes is WhatsApp, which last I heard was on track for ~30M in 2014[0]; doesn't seem like enough of an incentive for a bunch of Chinese players to enter the market aggressively.
First of all - nobody has been serious about monetizing messaging yet in the US apart from Tango. Kik, Snapchat and FB Messenger have barely started doing anything.
Second of all, I think that there is some kind of hope from Fred Wilson (who is an investor in Kik) that one of the Asian player buys Kik so that he has a big exit there. I doubt he other thoughts than that: WeChat has spent millions of $ trying to get users in the US without much traction to show for it...
Xiaomi's MIUI is not much different from other OEMs offering their own layer of UI over Android. It is in no way a third OS. I doubt here if Fred ever used a Xiaomi phone. If not, it is weird at best that a comment about it's future is second on his list.
Moreover, Xiaomi's international versions come with Google Play services and all Google apps installed, just like any other phone. You do not get Xiaomi's app store (similar to Kindle store) in international versions. You get Google Play store.
It is really just another Android phone, from an OS standpoint. They have fixed a lot of things bad with Android, like permissions control and integratedness. But that doesn't mean that it is a different OS.
The oculus rift purchase was listed as a major factor in football predicted revenues in the next few years in an impressive book I read over Xmas
I was knocked sideways by a book this Xmas - "The secret footballers guide to the modern game". It's a really good read especially for those of us who thought / think brains and insight vanish at the boundary of real life and sports. It's written by a top class footballer with current links to top flight commercial and sporting people.
And he mentions Facebooks acquisition of Oculous Rift. It's part of how the current commercials are tipping in favour of clubs and how leagues will stop dancing to the needs of TV schedules
Expect one club in 2015 to do a Louis CK - put out a self published "view from the pitch" via oculus rift and make more money directly than they would from traditional TV rights. Then everyone else will follow once contracts expire.
8/ A new generation of apps redefining work habits is well overdue. The obvious driver I see is that people's expectations for software usability/design are set by consumer apps. Also millenials are entering the workforce, and they have never had to take a course to learn how to use a piece of software. Any tool which requires training is arcane in their eyes, and probably rightly so. Add zero downtime, access-and-share from any device, auto sync & backup, beautiful UI to the list of requirements. Some of these are being addressed by office 365 and the like, but unbundled web-based productivity software looks ripe to dethrone mircosoft as THE enterprise productivity software vendor.
> 10/ cybersecurity budgets will explode in 2015 as every company, institution, and government attempts to avoid being Sony’d. VCs will pour money into this sector in the same way they poured money into the rental economy. and, yet, the hacks will continue because on the open internet there is no such thing as an impenetrable system.
This seems misinformed. You don't need perfect security to avoid getting hacked. And perfect security is, actually, an attainable goal if you care to work towards it and take heed of current research (see, for example: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/ironclad/).
Is Fred trying to say that all the money spent on security will be wasted? I could agree with that. IMHO security is a classic case of a lemon market where buyers are unable to determine the security properties/utility of wares before purchase. Buyer sophistication is low and nearly all are beholden to marketing (the same is largely true of VCs choosing investments!).
Or maybe Fred is saying that it will take years for security investments to pay off. I agree with this too. "It can't/won't happen to us" is still a pervasive attitude, even in 2014, and it generally takes a major incident at each and every company to 1) wake them up and 2) inform them about what works and what is snake oil 3) drive adoption of new tech. (related problem: convincing management to divest themselves of old, broken tech that never worked in the first place to free up budgets.)
People talk about the talent gap in security a lot, so we try to train more experts in this field. But the same gap is present elsewhere: I have yet to see many VCs with a sophisticated understanding of security. I'm not sure where they could learn if they wanted to. If I had to predict something, it's that new-money security experts from companies with acquisitions/IPOs in 2014 start funding security tech that actually works. In the meantime, DARPA continues to lead: http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/I2O/Programs/
He's not saying it's a market for lemons, though it is. He's saying that even when big companies select the best vendors, the end results aren't meaningfully different.
For a Fortune 500 enterprise, retaining the very best firms in the world and selecting the very most secure products does not foreclose on Sony-style outcomes. To accomplish that, enterprises need to rewire their entire internal IT processes to orient themselves towards security. Nobody does that, for the same reason that most modern software isn't built with processes (immutability, strong typing, pattern matching) that foreclose on bugs.
There's a benefit to selecting security expertise carefully. But that benefit isn't "insurance against the Sony outcome".
I'm unaware of a VC that's intelligent about security, but the expectation that they would have any security domain expertise misconstrues the job of a VC; it's a little bit like thinking that an energy options trader would have a significant understanding of mechanical engineering principles. It's much more important that they know how to evaluate addressable market size, go-to-market plans, and sales management.
Xiaomi will spend some of the $1.1bn they just raised coming to the US
I doubt that. Most of the $1.1bn would be spent defending against IP lawsuits that operating the US would make them vulnerable to. Xiaomi's phones look like a better rip off of Apple than Samsung was able/willing to do, and Apple will sue them if they enter a market with good IP protection.
My prediction for 2015. Something related to machine learning / AI will hit the consumer market that will truly amaze, and feel like it's ahead of its time. I don't know what this "something" will be, but it will be obvious when it happens.
The Feds won't have to - if each state continues to make it legal/regulated, it's the same effect as descheduling it. It's kind of ingenious, actually, on the part of the Federal government.
There is still a lot of stuff that depends on weed being legal at the federal level, beyond just the consumer not getting arrested for buying small amounts. We're never going to see serious investment in the space until sellers can access bank infrastructure, there is no longer a risk of DEA raids, state laws are aligned with federal laws, etc.
It's not going to happen in 2015 though, unless it gets tacked onto some other crazy spending bill, which is unlikely. It'll probably happen sometime between 2016 and 2024.
Also, there are concerns with Alaskan towns only reasonably reachable by boat, which means the coast guard can legally prohibit any marijuana from entering the island under national law. Considering Hawaii leans pretty far left in most elections, they might legalize soon, and that's when you get really weird things happening with border control vs. state law. I'm not sure there are a lot of direct flights from marijuana-legal states to Hawaii.
Question for the historically minded folks here - Has there ever been a situation where a bunch of states decided that making something legal (or conversely illegal) against the federal government's position, cause a change in federal policy? How did that work? Can lessons from that apply now to the marijuana debate, amongst others, in the US?
When the US passed the 55 mph speed limit, it was generally ignored by motorists and wasn't really enforced by a lot of states--and it was eventually repealed. Key difference though is that the feds never had enforcement authority unlike the case with the DEA.
After a big year in 2014 with the Facebook acquisition of Oculus Rift, virtual reality will hit some headwinds.
Agree, but I think that Augmented Reality will really breakout in 2015. VR and AR are complements, and the press from Oculus and VR over the last year really helps people understand AR. Because of the potential practical applications, I think AR will become more widely adopted and help to spread AR/VR adoption.
+1 for 2015 being a tough period after the hype for VR and wearables. They will both be a thing, but people always overestimate progress in the short run and underestimate it in the long run.
+1 for cybersecurity budgets exploding. How would one make a financial bet on this fact? It doesn't seem doable through a "normal" brokerage firm; it seems you need to be a VC or early investor.
Be prepared to see a lot more teeth coming to the current CFA laws. The law will either be amended with stiffer sentences, and higher minimum sentencing guidelines or you're going to see a rash of federal laws regarding hacking.
Yes, the businesses will react, but you can bet lawmakers are keen to start hammering hackers, making it even more dangerous to be doing this stuff.
If you want to invest in some larger publicly traded companies, there is a new cybersecurity ETF, ticker symbol HACK. You could buy some shares of the ETF or shares of some of the individual holdings. A list of holdings can be found here:
Partnering with "world class industry experts" is a bit too vague for me. It sounds like they are spread across many verticals, so it's hard to judge their expertise in a particular vertical.
I think most current security solutions aren't very good. There's a really big problem with information asymmetry, in that the customers of security products have less knowledge than the vendors.
If that's true, then I imagine that most of the value created in the security space in the next 10 years will be from new companies.
Would you buy this fund yourself? Just trying to be a bit critical :) Thanks for the information.
The don't need expertise it is just an index fund, like the majority of ETFs, it is based on the ISE Cyber Security Index http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20141111006259/en/ISE-... and has a bit of Juniper and a bit of Splunk and other publicly listed "security" companies.
I hope that he is right on point 7. I plan to emigrate to the USA and the H1-B route is just insane.
I am a skilled engineer in a field where there is a lot of demand, it should be extremely easy for me to move there.
Fred predicts Chinese companies will make a big entrance to the US market in 2015. At the same time, China restricts US companies in their markets (Gmail blocking being the latest example)
Why do we (in America) allow this asymmetry? Is it a mistake to give Chinese companies an open door?
General Motors makes 58% of its entire profit in the Chinese Car market. Ford makes 18% of its profit from China. So clearly, US gains by trade in cars. This is clearly one example. The broader point is that a whole lot of US companies make money in China.
Sure, but I don't think the case is weak. Much of China's internet blocking is blatantly economic, and whats more: China refuses to officially acknowledge that it blocks these websites at all, it just does.
However, like everyone says, US companies make money in China, while the US wants to maintain a strong relationship, while WTO action would probably just devolve into another pointless tit for tat, so why bother going there?
that is a great question. there are two sides to this argument. one side says if they block you, you should block them. the other side says blocking trade backfires and that open markets create more opportunity even if you can't sell into their market
There is serious money in labor arbitrage for the top financial and executive class. We've had decades of heavy lobbying for these kinds of asymmetries to break the back of domestic labor and smaller competitors.
Depends on which side will be hurt more. Chinese companies have limited direct sales in US. As the congress/ Huawei affair a couple of years ago showed that they are just not welcome.
While a lot of stuff is made in china, it is OEM-ed for american companies.
>2/ Xiaomi will spend some of the $1.1bn they just raised coming to the US. This will bring a strong player in the non-google android sector into the US market and legitimize a “third mobile OS” in the western world. The good news for developers is developing for non-google android is not much different than developing for google android.
The "third mobile OS" is Windows Phone and even if something else takes this spot, it's still not that great to be third.
>3/ More asian penetration into the US market will come from the messenger sector as both Line and WeChat make strong moves to gain a share of the lucrative US messenger market.
I doubt those companies will be more than marginal players in the us market next year, maybe later?
>11/ ... patients treating patients (p2p medicine) ...
This seems kind of insane!
I didn't understand the following very well, if someone can explain or point me elsewhere, I'd really appreciate it:
>8/ The horrible year that bitcoin had in 2014 will be a wakeup call for all stakeholders. Developers will turn their energy from creating the next bitcoin (all the alt stuff) to creating the stack on top of the bitcoin blockchain. Real decentralized applications will start to emerge as the platform matures and entrepreneurial energy is channeled in the right direction.
I don't see the point of bitcoin or any other virtual currency? To me nothing beats legal tender currencies.