Geoff Zeiss on combining satellite imagery and spatial analysis to identify tree encroachment in utilities:
Transmission line inspections are essential in ensuring grid reliability and resilience. They are generally performed by manned helicopters often together with a ground crew. There are serious safety issues when inspections are conducted by helicopter. Data may be collected with cameras and analyzed to detect a variety of conditions including corrosion, evidence of flash over, cracks in cross arms, and right-of-way issues such as vegetation encroachment. in North America annual inspections are mandated by NERC and are not optional. With over 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 5.5 million miles of distribution lines in the United States, improving the efficiency and reducing the risk of inspections would have a major impact on the reliability of the power grid.
Google Sheets now supports using BigQuery data inside of Google Sheets features like pivot tables and formulas, which means orders-of-magnitude increase in data limits.
I enabled a trial of Googleâs Stadia gaming service yesterday to kick the tires. In Google fashion, their entry into the gaming market isnât centered around consoles and hardware, but cloud-distributed streaming.
During the unveiling at GDC last year, it seemed impossible to believe that you could deliver a latency-free, 4K experience in high-end games.
15 years ago I was gaming a lot more, but in the last several Iâve done almost none outside of the random iPhone game. I still loosely follow the gaming industry, and often wish I could easily jump in and mess around in games without the heavy investment in consoles and $60+ titles.
Stadia gets you around the need for upfront expense, and its subscription model should make it easier to dip in and try games.
Within 2 minutes of making my account, I had Destiny 2 loaded up. It runs inside a browser window and has some amazing auto-scaling tech to keep latency low and graphics as high as they can be given bandwidth constraints. In the few minutes I ran around, the visuals were in and out, but completely playable.
The big console makers should be worried. This is exactly the type of disruptive shift that steals customers. Itâs not ready to pull over the hardcore gamers, to be sure, but the semi-casual folks like me never want to own more hardware. If they can improve the tech (which is a certainty) and get the business model right for subscriptions (less certain), they could capture big market share in games.
Google Maps just had its 15th birthday. This post from one of the original team on Maps back in 2005, Elizabeth Reid, reflects on a history of the product from its first iteration.
On Feb 8, 2005, Google Maps was first launched for desktop as a new solution to help people âget from point A to point B.â Today, Google Maps is used by more than 1 billion people all over the world every month.
It was the early days of Web 2.0, and Googleâs launch of the Maps API was one of the keys to the âmashupâ movement that sparked a new wave of startups.
As a geographer, Google Maps and Earth are tools I use every day, both for fun and work. Maps is likely up there with Wikipedia at the top of my web visit history over the last 15 years.
Hard to believe they launched Street View all the way back in 2007. Today it still surprises me how much data thatâs been collected, and the amazing feeling of zooming into any place to see it from the ground level.
This is a neat piece showing some of the process and iteration behind the Google design teamâs work on the controller for their new gaming service, Stadia.
Olsson says the team went through âhundredsâ of prototypes, some of which were more successful than others. One of the first steps included giving test subjects sculpting clay and letting them shape it to their tastes. The company then 3D scanned and photographed the models, most of which were, at Olsson puts it, ânot so successful.â
Another prototype included a controller with a grid-shaped pattern on the front that allowed users to place elements like the thumbsticks wherever they found them most comfortable. Even the angle of the protruding hand grips got the full scrutiny of the design team. A clear acrylic prototype with rotating handles and a built-in protractor helped track player hand positions for analysis.
Iâm looking forward to trying out this service. The idea of having access to games without any new hardware or up-front investment is interesting. Iâd give it a try.
Honest postmortems are insightful to get the inside backstory on what happened behind the scenes with a company. In this one, Jason Crawford goes into what went wrong with Fieldbook before they shut it down and were acquired by Flexport a couple years ago:
Now, with a year to digest, I think this is true and was a core mistake. I vastly underestimated the resources it was going to takeâin time, effort and moneyâto build a launchable product in the space.
In the 8 years since we launched the first version of Fulcrum, weâve had (fortunately) smaller versions of this experience over and over. Each new major overhaul, large feature, or product business model change weâve undertaken has probably cost us twice the time we initially expected it to. Scoping is a science itself that everyone has to learn.
In Jeff Bezosâs 2018 letter to Amazon shareholders, he discusses the topic of high standards: how to have them and how to get your team to have them. (As a side note, if you donât read Bezosâs shareholder letters, youâre missing out. Even if youâve already read all the business and startup advice in the world, you will find new and keen insights there.)
Bezos makes a few interesting points, but Iâll focus on one: To have high standards in practice, you need realistic expectations about the scope of effort required.
As a simple example, he mentions learning to do a handstand. Some people think they should be able to learn a handstand in two weeks; in reality, it takes six months. If you go in thinking it will take two weeks, not only do you not learn it in two weeks, you also donât learn it in six monthsâyou learn it never, because you get discouraged and quit. Bezos says a similar thing applies to the famous six-page memos that substitute for slide decks at Amazon (the ones that are read silently in meetings). Some people expect they can write a good memo the night before the meeting; in reality, you have to start a week before, in order to allow time for drafting, feedback, and editing.
David Blankenhorn calls for a return of intellectual humility in public discourse.
At the personal level, intellectual humility counterbalances narcissism, self-centeredness, pridefulness, and the need to dominate others. Conversely, intellectual humility seems to correlate positively with empathy, responsiveness to reasons, the ability to acknowledge what one owes (including intellectually) to others, and the moral capacity for equal regard of others. Arguably its ultimate fruit is a more accurate understanding of oneself and oneâs capacities. Intellectual humility also appears frequently to correlate positively with successful leadership (due especially to the link between intellectual humility and trustworthiness) and with rightly earned self-confidence.
At the recent WWDC, Apple announced an overhaul to their Maps product, including millions of miles of fresh data from their vehicle fleet, along with a new Street View-like feature called âLook Aroundâ. Even though itâs exciting to see them invest in mapping, it seems like a bridge too far to ever catch the quality of Google Maps. Om Malik compares the relative positions between the two to that of Bing to Google in search. Apple is approaching Maps as an application first, when really maps are about data:
Why do I think Google Maps will continue to trump Apple despite the latterâs fancy new graphics and features? Because when it comes to maps, the key metrics are navigation, real-time redirection, and traffic information. Googleâs Waze is a powerful weapon against all rivals. It has allowed Google to train its mapping algorithms to become highly effective and personal (not to mention how much intelligence that might have been shared with Waymo).
I would add point of interest data to this list as a key metric. That used to be purchased from commercial providers, scraped from the internet, and mapped manually, but now the fleet of vehicles (and Googleâs users searching for places) provide a continuous stream of validation and updates to place data. With the combination of Google Maps, the Android OS, and soon a fleet of autonomous Waymo vehicles, it seems like Google will continue to be an unstoppable data juggernaut.
Iâve been thinking and reading more about OKRs and how I might be able to implement them effectively â both professionally and personally. The idea of having clearly defined goals over bounded timelines is something we could all use to better manage time, especially in abstract âknowledge workâ where itâs hard to see the actual work product of a day or a weekâs activity.
This is an old workshop put on by GVâs Rick Klau. He does a good job giving a birdâs eye view of how to set OKRs and the importance of linking them through the organizational hierarchy:
He also has a good post on the subject from a few years later.
Google has built their own custom silicon dedicated to AI processing. The power efficiency gains with these dedicated chips is estimated to have saved them from building a dozen new datacenters.
But about six years ago, as the company embraced a new form of voice recognition on Android phones, its engineers worried that this network wasnât nearly big enough. If each of the worldâs Android phones used the new Google voice search for just three minutes a day, these engineers realized, the company would need twice as many data centers.
An excellent read. Their philosophy of experimentation comes through. I liked this bit, on the âvelocityâ of decision making:
Day 2 companies make high-quality decisions, but they make high-quality decisions slowly. To keep the energy and
dynamism of Day 1, you have to somehow make high-quality, high-velocity decisions. Easy for start-ups and very
challenging for large organizations. The senior team at Amazon is determined to keep our decision-making velocity
high. Speed matters in business â plus a high-velocity decision making environment is more fun too. We donât know all
the answers, but here are some thoughts.
First, never use a one-size-fits-all decision-making process. Many decisions are reversible, two-way doors. Those
decisions can use a light-weight process. For those, so what if youâre wrong? I wrote about this in more detail in
last yearâs letter.
Second, most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you
wait for 90%, in most cases, youâre probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing
and correcting bad decisions. If youâre good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think,
whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.
The Economist analyzes the state of parking economics. The gist: free or low-cost parking equals congestion and more drivers roaming for longer. Some great statistics in this piece:
As San Franciscoâs infuriated drivers cruise around, they crowd the roads and pollute the air. This is a widespread hidden cost of under-priced street parking. Mr. Shoup has estimated that cruising for spaces in Westwood village, in Los Angeles, amounts to 950,000 excess vehicle miles travelled per year. Westwood is tiny, with only 470 metered spaces.