Category: Uncategorized

Commercial success of autonomous vehicles was bit like Berlin airport construction. Every year it was expected to happen in the next year. Look back, when my blog on this topic (in Slovak) went live.  After several years of missed promises (mainly from Tesla), self-driving cars finally realized that they have been eating the cake from wrong side. Most of the showcases (and demo videos) for cars driving on their own focused on passenger cars. Sounds logical, as most of the cars in world are the personal ones. Or?

If you take few steps back, as much as you charm most of the population with making David Haselhoff’s K.I.T.T. dream come true, when it comes to commercial value (what would be people willing to pay for), most people are not ready to pay extra to replace them behind the steering wheel. However, segment where there IS somebody willing to pour money in for replacing the driver is TRUCK transport.

It makes whole much more sense, as the roots of many truck shipments are tedious round trips between two locations (e.g. from supplier to factory OR from warehouse to the store), which are easier to program and monitor. These shipments often can (or even have to) happen in the night, when there is less traffic on roads (and extras for night work of drivers apply). Also truck drivers drive many more kilometers per day than us, passenger car drivers. Robo-driver also does not have to take mandatory brakes, unlike his human counterpart, so the robo-truck can drive more km’s per day, too. Makes you almost think why all those years tesla was expected to be the pioneer of self-driving cars?

If you wonder “Why all of the sudden in 2021?”, there are few reasons that favor now from yester-<insert_your_time_unit_here>. The 2020 pandemic pushed so hard for e-commerce that demand for deliveries went through the roof. Second one is that it cumulatively took several years of “experience” to pass the necessary Prove-of-concepts, which one after another seem to be arriving at encouraging successes. Thirdly, due to large data flow between the self-driving car and its control center, operating large fleets of autonomous cars without 5G networks would be tricky. Therefore, (mass) autonomous car deployment needs to be cart of the 5G internet horse. Lately also Waymo, Nuro, Aurora (and other autonomous driving software providers) realized that driving goods off the road is better insurable and faces less regulation (and reputation hit) than killing human driver in autonomous muscle-car.

Yes, it is coming, there are already signed 2021 projects for cargo transport across US highways. The itching question is: What comes next? Taxis? Airport busses? Last-mile delivery robots? Probably all the above.

 

 

Out of long list of what you could do during lockdown’s, somewhere at the top was to rent/move to cottage in woods with good internet connection. As much as you might lough, one of the side effects of tele-working is that flats stand out as the worst places to telework from. You get all the discomfort of busy place (yes, think you, spouse and 2 kids in house scenario) with, ehm, no extras to compensate (and few kilos of body-fat as side effect). This trend goes hand in hand with States reprofiling (mentioned in this year’s trends as well).

But this “trash-the-office” mega trend will have another effect to adapt to. Vast empty office spaces. In many cities developers have built new shiny office towers in hope of luring the businesses from office complexes of the previous decades. After all, who would not like to boast in HR interview with all the Google-like perks? As a result, in many locations the (total) supply of office space (including the clumsy ones) was already pre-COVID slightly about demand. Now factor in few businesses going bust, many realizing that they do not need permanent office, and you end-up with plethora of hollow floors or even entire buildings.

So, what happens next? Small cities and communities will feel inflow, especially those close to pleasant nature habitat. End empty office spaces will turn into what there is already shortage in many metropoles: individual housing. Some urban planners even go as far as suggesting that shopping malls (hit by e-commerce habit being created) will need to convert some parts into in-house-parks or other amenities to attract the human flow needed for their business operation.

 

 

Every few years or so we are pushed by galloping innovation to change to something-new-first. We lived through digital-first, social-first and mobile-first eras. (And still managed to stay alive 😊). So what exactly is waiting round the corner?

Working for TeamViewer, one gets across heap of feature suggestions from customer, trying to improve their video conferencing and digital connectivity experience. But what struck me in last years was how pulsing the demand was for tiny meeting feature. Black-screen (or fixed image behind you while video calling) seemed to be popping suspiciously too often even before COVID times. With coronavirus turning our libraries (or storage racks) into video call background, need for making your kitchen or living room bit more virtual than real, became really imminent.

With no clear cut-off time for lockdown and remote work period end, businesses realize that singularity of our office space shattered in 2020 not only to duality of office+home-office, but into triage of office+home-office+virtual-office. Number of virtual Xmas parties, virtual shareholder meetings or other range of events happening, literally in the air, just confirms this. And it also makes companies think twice.

If you are teacher, bank teller or psychologist, your living room will not make for long term office replacement. With Augmented reality and Virtual reality turning so cheap and easy to set, why would you project image of your pre-schoolers running around onto your client(s). Almost 93% of all GP meetings in UK happened last year neither at client-side, nor physically in the doctor’s office, but rather in virtual set-up. And primary health care is the not the only sector jumping on virtual-first.

Augmented reality can “move” all of the furniture or appliances objects into customer’s own space. And no one even sweats to do so. Co-browsing and supervising-remotely-along has becoming the norm not only for setting your boiler after surprising reset, but for any task that needs somewhat know-how to get things right. Virtual reality (headsets) can emulate also any set-up or situation you need to walk the person through. So for long time, many more beyond army virtual drills can benefit from it already.

As much as your business might not to be on the frontier of turning fully virtual, it becomes advisable to at least blue-print how your business would in virtual look like. Or some of your rivals might do that instead of you.  Ignore on your own risk.

 

 

 

The interesting part about WIRED 2021 trends is that they click into each other, reinforce each other much more than was usual in the previous years. That is also reason why teleworking norm, introduced (somewhat harshly) by pandemic lockdowns, has one more side effect: Recruitment will disregard your location.

This trend completely relates to my experience of last months. Once your LinkedIn profile gets some (thousands) visitors’ traffic per month, it is normal to receive few offers every now and then.  What stunned  me, though, how many of them were from locations completely unrelated to even continent I dwell on now. (Including one from F_____, social media company. No, not the Fwitter) The argument went “You can start completely remotely and later we decide if you want to move here”. And it all makes hack of the sense. I spent less than 10% of 2020 in my office. Thus, the 90% of my year could have been contracted equally easy for Kuala Lumpur, Sydney or Montevideo as it was for Berlin.

But carefully, that coin comes with two sides! For besides, you can work for your dream companies which reside in countries you would never move to, this trend also means your competition gets much fiercer. When all the sudden your location becomes back-seat to your skills or experience, you compete with, quite literally, anybody on earth (having computer access). So you better be one of the best ones or you might not qualify for next round of the hiring game. There is still time to think about it. Or to take benefit of fact you are in top tier in your area.

Ultimately this will lead, most likely, also to erecting of new “digital work only VISA”, where you will be allowed to work in (e.g. Shengen) zone, but would not gain permanent residency or even travel permit into area per se. See how we are converging to state repositioning again? Yes, terrific governments have much to win in next years.

 

 

Observing the user trends, experts suggest that world’s love affair with free online services might be coming to its end. Even the most naïve users grasp the idea that free-for-me means that provider of the service has to live out of advertising (or selling user data), both annoying enough to take few bucks out of wallet to silence it.

There are also benefits on provider’s side to dump the ad-based model and go with “just pay for this, please” alternative. In order to dwell on the advertising model, companies need to invest a lot in setting, maintaining (and defending against data privacy regulators) tracking of the users. If that accounts for significant part of your cost-base, dropping altogether brings the needed break-even price of service much lower. So maybe you try?

Few quarters back we have seen already rise of the newsletters and online publishing platforms that strive to deliver high-quality, ad-free, paid content. Even web-search can become paid, to ensure you really get impartial info (and are spared from revealing what you have been searching for). If this comes from companies like Neeva, launched by Sridhar Ramaswamy, former SVP of Google Ads, you should watch the trend closely. Free services build our habits to have the info (for free). Now we finally mentally cracked through hurdle of throwing euro here and there on having those services “ourway”. If your business lives off advertisement-fees or your user acquisition stems heavy from advertisement, mind the ad-free gap, please!