Friday, March 04, 2016

For all the "incubaters" in Silicon Valley - there is a whole lot of nothing coming out. I can't believe how much time I waste for nothing. Somebody better come up with some good ideas soon or the Valley is going to be in serious trouble.

5 comments:

  1. I've got to disagree with you on this one. There are some pretty cool things going on. Just automated cars are enough to blow one's mind when you consider the impact it will have on this world. If anything the valley is too hot. DF

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  2. Not because of cars. All the low hanging fruit has been picked with the cars. Putting on all the lidars, and now they've got 360 cameras. Now the hard part comes. The next phase is tedious. Machine learning. It will make your brain hurt how tedious. But will create the kind of supporting sector the likes we haven't seen since The Valley supported defense. This area used to be full of Lockheed Martins. They used to support Moffett Field. Cars will need that type of support structure for geospacial maps. Interpreting data from the sensors. V2V. And the new types of wifi.

    We are at the beginning of this, not even close to overheating because of the cars.

    The complexity is pretty intense. It will take a while to get to stage 4 automation. And all sorts of companies will be created.

    Full disclosure. Mr S.'s company is in that sector. So I'm super biased.

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  3. I also might be more jaded because a lot of the stuff they are using for automated cars - really started in robotics. They are just putting it on cars now. But, this is about the phase where robotics hit a wall, because getting machines to recognize the world is really effing complicated.

    Every year it gets better, but the absolute imperative was not make
    people not die. Obviously they don't want robots killing people. But
    the whole mandate of self driving cars is to save lives. Also robots operate in confined spaces. Not the randomness of the driving space.

    There are going to be a lot more companies popping up to try and resolve those problems.

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  4. Even beyond self driving cars, there is still a ton of potential for new fuel systems. Everytime I drive past the Tesla dealership I get a little creeped out because there are no cars in their lot. Imagine what demand must look like if they can't even stock showroom models. I see a lot of interest in quantitative Analytics as well. Being able to pinpoint someone's interests will make it a lot easier to sell them products. The valley has complete control over this industry and the rest of the world is eager to pay for it. Even in Antioch home prices are up nearly 400 percent from the bottom. If people are willing to pay a fortune to commute an hour and a half each way, it says something about the desirability of the region and the wages their earning from the jobs. DF

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  5. You could be misinterpreting that signal. I mean, I don't know - but "rumor" on the street is they are having problems. While they do have a year backlog, the manufacturing side is the problem. Again, rumor has it, they are hiring contract workers for 6 months and working them to death and letting them go rather than bringing them on. The rumor mill says workman's comp is so expensive - that it's less expensive to do it this way. Which I thought was interesting when I heard it. Contract workers used to be slightly more expensive than regular workers because you didn't get all the bennies.

    Mr S. and I already started an over and under on those gull wing doors. He says it will be a year before there is a recall. I think two years. My theory is that over the whole car landscape only a couple of cars have those doors. They must be a super bitch. And back in the 80's you couldn't even get those headlights that flipped down to last very long. It's not even a whole door. I could be wrong though. It just seems like if they weren't a bitch more companies would have tried it.

    Wow. Antioch is up 400%? That is interesting news. The best my city has done is a 200% increase. At the very low end. But that is an extremely rare occurrence. You guys might be getting a bump because the East Bay is growing slighting faster than even Silicon Valley proper right now.

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