Skip to main content

POST So I went to a meeting

There’s a lot of pressure on me to be in two places at once these days, so I was happy to see Google file and trivial and obvious “patent” on how to help busy executives achieve this using new (well, pretty old, actually) technology by gluing a wireless web cam to a drone.

Google is hoping to patent a small videoconferencing “telepresence” drone for collaborating with colleagues from remote locations, according to an application that was made public today. The drone is designed to fly indoors and move from room to room.

From Pocket: Working from home? Google wants to create a drone to go to meetings for you.

Not only is this more trivial than it appears at first glance, it already exists in essence. Here, for example, is photographic proof of me annoying Tony Moretta, the CEO of Digital Jersey, in precisely this fashion by sending a meeting bot (an iPad glued to a Segway, basically) to talk to him while I sat comfortably with my iPhone in a distant location (well, the room next door to be honest, but you get the point).

RoboDave

As Tony himself pointed out, this implementation suffers from the Dalek Deficiency, in that he can escape my dreary lecture about the difference between a digital currency and a cryptocurrency by heading downstairs to the gents. Fair point. But with the google-powered flying Drone Dave there will be no escape (unless they’ve fixed the door on the gents, of course).

This doesn’t actually solve my problem because although I can attend remote events in this manner, and thus cut down on travel time, I can still only attend one at a time. Surely if Google were being truly creative they would connect their Go-master AI in to the drone so that I could send a bot to the meeting instead of going in person? A great many of the meetings I attend would be adequately served by a bot programmed to deliver a few key phrases at the right juncture. For example:

  • "What's in the blocks?"; 

  • "That's not identificaton, that's authentication"; and

  • "There's no transaction type for doing that on the network". 

That's should take care of most eventualities. It’s hard enough to tell whether people are actually listening on a conference call or call or not so how we’ll be able to tell whether it’s a bot or a person sitting in by drone will be a whole new ball game. I can forsee a time when we’re going to need a new version of the Turing test specifically for management meetings otherwise one day I will undoubtedly end up like this guy who is playing World of Warcraft when he realises that he is the only actual human playing the game and all of the other players are bots. Pay attention because one day this will happen in a meeting about EMV Next Generation or something.

My only goal left in life is to become the Leroy Jenkins of Consultants. In the meantime, however, and I am beginning to sound like a broken record (note to younger readers: I mean of the vinyl kind) on this one, I will merely point out once again that IS_A_PERSON may turn out to be the most valuable credential in the very near future. If this is true, then Consult Hyperion should seek out a market that needs such a credentials right now and work out a way for our clients to provide this as a business, right? My candidate? Internet dating.

The online dating industry generates around $2 billion in yearly returns in the United States only, with over 15 percent of US adults reporting utilizing online dating services and/or mobile dating apps. Statistics reveal that close to 40 percent of couples run into each other through common friends in spite of the rise of online dating.

From CoinReport Ex-hedge fund manager to launch blockchain-based dating, matchmaking platform - CoinReport

It’s a mass-market mainstream business that would be even bigger if it wasn’t rife with fraud (and, as you will recall from the Ashley Madison hack, bots).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

There is no excuse for not taking cards

So we went to the pub. For lunch. Seven of us. Say £20 per head. £100+ quid. Say £50 quid gross for the pub. Colleague goes to order food and drinks and pay at the bar. Apologetic barmaid comes over to explain that their “card machine” is down, so she can only accept cash. Under normal circumstances I would have simply walked out, feeling it wholly inappropriate to reward such a poorly managed establishment and, as a functioning actor in a capitalist economy, done my duty to depress their lunchtime takings. Here’s what we wanted to say: This is absurd. This is 2016 not 1916. Your card machine is down? Well, so what! Are you seriously telling me that mein host has no mobile phone number capable of registering for PingIt or PayM? That none of the staff or the pub itself have a PayPal account that I can send the money to? That neither the owners nor managers not contingency planners thought to tuck an iZettle behind the bar to use when the clunky and expensive GPRS terminal fails for o...

Financial Cryptography: Corda Day - a new force

Forum friend Ian Grigg, who I always take very seriously indeed on any such topic, wrote about Corda on his blog and concluded with a powerful statement. Bitcoin told the users it wanted an unstoppable currency - sure, works for a small group but not for the mass market. Ethereum told their users they need an unstoppable machine - which worked how spectacularly with the DAO? Not. What. We. Wanted. Corda is the only game in town because it's the only one that asked the users. It's that simple. From Financial Cryptography: Corda Day - a new force xxx It seems to me, however, what Ian is pointing to as the greatest strength of their approach is also the greatest weakness. A staple feature of unimaginative management consultants presentations about innovation is some variation on the statement by Henry Ford that if you had asked users what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses coupled with some variation on the statement by Steve jobs that it was pointless ask...

We could fix mobile security, you know. We don't, but we could

Earlier in the week I blogged about mobile banking security , and I said that in design terms it is best to assume that the internet is in the hands of your enemies. In case you think I was exaggerating… The thieves also provided “free” wireless connections in public places to secretly mine users’ personal information. From Gone in minutes: Chinese cybertheft gangs mine smartphones for bank card data | South China Morning Post Personally, I always use an SSL VPN when connected by wifi (even at home!) but I doubt that most people would ever go to this trouble or take the time to configure a VPN and such like. Anyway, the point is that the internet isn’t secure. And actually SMS isn’t much better, which is why it shouldn’t really be used for securing anything as important as home banking. The report also described how gangs stole mobile security codes – which banks automatically send to card holders’ registered mobile phones to verify online transactions – by using either a Trojan...