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In a recent article at Business Insider the acceleration in the pad device market is discussed. I n a blog post from January of 2010, just prior to the release of the Ipad I explained why the pad device was going to be the hottest consumer electronic device of the next 5 years. Now, nearly 2 years later my prediction has become more than validated by the market. The fastest growth rate of any consumer device by far Pad devices are finally taking off in the mind of the consumer and many players are itching to get in the game. I had been wondering of the ways that the form factors of these devices constrain manufacturing and price conditions and decided to write those out in this blog post. The premise of the BI article was that Amazon had no clear line to profitability but that analysis leaves out what costs will be like for such devices even two years down the line. If Amazon can gain market share now they'll make profit when production costs are far lower than they are today but

From this blog post an interesting quote highlighted is: it is twice as energy efficient for people in Britain to eat dairy products from New Zealand than from domestic producers. It is four times more energy efficient for them to eat lamb shipped from the other side of the world than it is to eat British lamb. The main reason for this is one simple phrase from the economics of manufacturing: Economies of scale. New Zealand pretty much has defined industries around the lamb, they have massive herds and it is a big part of the economy as a result locally lamb is very cheap to produce. It is also over abundant there for the population, we means demand is low and that in turn means local pricing is low...local producers would have a glut if they don't export. Exporting is profitable since local producers can tie the price of export into the final distributor fees and those are padded on a bit before sitting in English meat stores, where lamb is much more rare...is not in

As I approached the problem of creating a distributed web application platform I found it necessary to construct an efficient workflow and business process foundation that would enable any applications built on the platform to enable fluid collaboration and interaction between the agents responsible for designing, building, maintaining and using the created applications. Around 2004 as the critical aspects of the architecture were being finished I began to think about how to build this workflow tool. It turns out that choices I'd made in the architecture pushed me to think about the concept of "action" in the context of a business application and business process workflows. Action is all that matters A common business consists of a group of people separated into specific roles and responsibilities over business related objects, products or services working together to serve the business goals with regard to those objects, products or services. We can look at each f

This is a response I posted to a thread on Facebook regarding Google+, I'd been reading from some who think that Google is trying to swipe users from Facebook and that is not only a failing strategy it is not the strategy that their actions indicate. Read: Google is not interested in pulling you and your massive network over to their service primarily. They want to allow people who are using their distinct services to create a social networking home on G+. The point is often made that many people who go to Google+ from Facebook come back. I've read many formerly very active users here with big networks go and stay there. They have much more to lose by switching but went anyway...yet still they aren't the fish Google are trying to catch. Those fish are mostly not even American's for the most part they are people in foreign countries using mobile devices for accessing google services...where FB penetration is still low (the numbers of people fitting bill hover in the bill

In this series of articles on the robot revolution, popular science writer and founder of howstuffworks.com Marshall Brain does a great job of explaining the technological factors of automation that are fast eliminating manufacturing jobs world wide and are contributing to rising unemployment in the human work force as an automated work force ascends. I wrote a blog post in July that explains why eventually the robot workforce will completely remove humans from the production loop. Once humans are no longer required to either design or build the machines that othttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifher humans use to build and farm the world around us, the costs of production will virtually collapse. Marshall paints a gloomy scenario of a future with rising numbers of unemployed humans that suddenly appear due to specific automation events, for the most part he is correct. The events have been happening, the last great one occurred after the dot com bomb of the early aughts and led t

The predominant reason jobs are dwindling in the states is over overwhelmingly due to advances in automation HERE. The number of jobs created else where as companies look for ways to save money or reduce production costs pales in significance to the number of jobs gone up in smoke because of better use of software and automation of hardware. The studies are 100% clear on this point, so why people can't do the home work to realize that their assumption is patently false in this internet age is beyond me. Here some sources: (Marshall Brain ...incase you don't know is the founder of the very popular site , "howstuffworks.com", his story is anecdotal but representative of why America really is shifting in how jobs are available) http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm Here's another: http://www.policyarchive.org/handle/10207/bitstreams/8039.pdf "Baily and Lawrence released a paper in late 2004 that asserted that the manufacturing job loss su

In a recent article the actions of the president to chose a stance that seems anti-environmental has gotten many eye brows to raise. The action involves giving up a little bit on the environmental conservation in hopes of enabling businesses to create more jobs in a particular sector. The nuance of the give and play of politics is only a side actor to the real story driving the debate which to me falls on a simple core difference between the free markets and species in evolution. A capitalist economy...models in a very similar way, the natural process of survival of the fittest identified by naturalist Charles Darhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifwin. Though he and Adam Smith weren't contemporaries I am sure they would have seen eye to eye on many ideas and I am sure watching nature inspired Smith. The difference is that in evolution species emerge in environmental niches due to the selection processes produced by the fact that environments shift *under* populations of com