Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, told me in a recent conversation, he expects China will surpass Silicon Valley in artificial intelligence advances in about a year. Edward Tseexplains why.
.. “China has an edge in its ability to combine strong, top-down government directive with vibrant grass-roots-level innovation. Beyond this, China has an abundance of data to train AI-learning algorithms because of its huge population of Internet users — more than 700 million. China’s thriving mobile Internet ecosystem also provides a test bed for AI researchers to collect and analyze valuable demographics and transactional and behavioral big data and to conduct large-scale experiments at a much higher level than foreign counterparts.”
.. In China, the security state is well on its way to becoming an all-seeing Big Brother.
Steve Ballmer Serves Up a Fascinating Data Trove
On Tuesday, Mr. Ballmer plans to make public a database and a report that he and a small army of economists, professors and other professionals have been assembling as part of a stealth start-up over the last three years called USAFacts. The database is perhaps the first nonpartisan effort to create a fully integrated look at revenue and spending across federal, state and local governments.
.. Want to know how many police officers are employed in various parts of the country and compare that against crime rates? Want to know how much revenue is brought in from parking tickets and the cost to collect? Want to know what percentage of Americans suffer from diagnosed depression and how much the government spends on it? That’s in there. You can slice the numbers in all sorts of ways.
.. Using his website, USAFacts.org, a person could look up just about anything: How much revenue do airports take in and spend? What percentage of overall tax revenue is paid by corporations? At the very least, it could settle a lot of bets made during public policy debates at the dinner table.
.. With an unlimited budget, he went about hiring a team of researchers in Seattle and made a grant to the University of Pennsylvania to help his staff put the information together. Altogether, he has spent more than $10 million between direct funding and grants.
.. “How many people work for government in the United States?” he asked, with the excitement of a child showing off a new toy, before displaying the answer. “Almost 24 million. Would you have guessed that?”
.. Most of the not-for-profits we work with would be 50 to 90 percent government funded,
.. I didn’t realize all these not-for-profits were in a sense almost like government contractors.”
.. “If you look at these tax deductions for employer-provided health or for state and local taxes or mortgage-interest deductions, they’re really subsidies to the affluent, which I guess I hadn’t thought about them.”
.. One rule Mr. Ballmer said his team made early on was to use only government data — no outside providers — to avoid accusations of bias. But this created its own challenges.
After Years of Challenges, Foursquare Has Found its Purpose — and Profits
In the spring of 2016, Foursquare CEO Jeff Glueck went on CNBC to make a bold prediction: Chipotle comparable sales would fall by 29 percent in its first quarter. The network’s anchor seemed skeptical. The fast-food chain was reacting to some health scares at the time, but no one was predicting nearly as steep a drop in revenue. “What is the technology here? What have you got that enables you to do this?” the anchor asked.
.. Foursquare had reinvented itself as a location intelligence company for business
.. Glueck had been making the rounds for less than a year, seeding the market with all kinds of predictions based on his company’s data — how many new iPhones Apple would sell, or how well McDonald’s all-day breakfast launch was going. The Chipotle forecast was the boldest yet, and it held true.
.. The startup had accumulated mountains of data about where people shopped and traveled but hadn’t figured out how to monetize it. Today, that puzzle seems to have been solved: Foursquare is on the path to $100 million in revenue
.. The reward for sharing? Stickers. Badges. Friendly competition to become the mayor of a favorite bar. And, critically, being part of a community of people sharing recommendations on the best of everything around them.
.. “He initially thought this company would build a local Yellow Pages-type business,”
- .. Asset number one: The more than 11 billion check-ins tracking people in real life since 2009.
- Asset number two: The four million monthly updates to its Places database — changes in address, phone number, a Japanese restaurant that was now a spaghetti joint.
- And then there was the sleeper, asset number three: 100,000 developers tapping into the Foursquare API — its location technology — for free
Enormous companies like Yahoo and Pinterest were using it a billion times a year; for example, when you pin a photo in Pinterest and tag its location, that’s using Foursquare’s data. But Foursquare had never asked these companies to pay.
.. The company needed to think of itself as a location data company. Based on GPS and other location signals, Foursquare could tell what business a user was visiting — something no other company could do as reliably.
.. It asked those big companies to start paying for its API;
.. the developers on the other end of the line basically laughed and said, “Yeah, we were wondering when you were going to start charging.”
.. the flywheel concept, a visual metaphor for business. When first pushed, a flywheel moves slowly and with great effort. With every successive revolution, the pace quickens. To the outsider, it appears the momentum is sudden, but, in fact, it’s the product of a steady grind.
.. investors told him it would take eight to 10 years to make the business work.
.. Ninety-two percent of commerce takes place in real life, not online. That means Google can tell you about only 8 percent of what everyone is doing with their spending habits.
.. Foursquare has signed deals with Snapchat to improve its geo-filtering. More than one million users have agreed to leave location sharing on all the time so Foursquare can track and analyze their movements; through a partnership with Nielsen, that data is then being connected to consumers’ purchasing data, so that marketers can understand how ads people see directly relate to purchases they make.
.. “Three of the top five hedge funds are using Foursquare data to give them an investing edge.”
.. it’s a location intelligence company — something that should be measured the same way as a services-as-a-software or programmatic advertising firm
Chinese Companies with Vast Amounts of Data Rife for Analysis
Besides money, Chinese companies have another edge against their U.S. competitors: the vast amount of data they have to work with—created by 731 million online users. In China, people use their smartphones to a much greater degree than in the U.S., and that has created a much richer trove of data for researchers.