Apple and Uber lagging in self-driving car league table

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn BusinessLeave a comment

Self-driving cars are frequently in the news. The technology has progressed strongly, but we’re nowhere near ‘perfect’ yet. There are a significant number of companies working on test vehicles, especially in California, with the focus on improving safety and the cars’ software capabilities. As Niall McCarthy, a data analyst at Statista writes in Forbes, “Disengagements, and the reasons they occur, are a key part of that test process.” What are ‘disengagements’? A disengagement is what happens when the car’s software detects a problem, or the driver sees some danger coming, and is then able to take control of the car, so it is no longer self-driving.

According to data from the California DMV published by website The Last License Holder, test models experience different levels of disengagement. For example, Google’s Waymo is way out ahead of the pack when it comes to “flawless autonomy.” The company’s cars covered an impressive 1.27 million miles in 2018 but more impressively still, the test fleet drove 11,154 miles per disengagement.

Las year there were 28 companies actively testing self-driving models on public roads in California. This equated to 467 vehicles with 2,036,296 miles covered in autonomous mode, and with 143,720 disengagements occurring.

Google is doing well, statistically speaking. And it is specifically doing better than Apple or Uber, who are both engaged in developing autonomous cars. Niall McCarthy reports, “Uber’s cars clocked up nearly 27,000 miles with only 0.4 miles covered per disengagement. Similarly, Apple had 1.1 miles per disengagement with just under 80,000 miles covered in total. The second-best record of miles per disengagement goes to GM Cruise with 5,205 while Zoox comes in third with 1,923.”

It is indeed somewhat strange to see Uber and Apple trailing in last place on Statista’s league table, and Mercedes Benz is only one step up from them. Even Nissan is doing better with a position around the middle of the table. Indeed, they all have a way to go to catch up with the Waymo!

Is Google making the blockchain searchable?

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Bitcoin, Blockchain, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I came across an interesting article on Forbes the other day by Michael del Castillo. He tells a story about data scientist Allen Day, a former Google employee, who while looking at some of the tools he developed there, saw something puzzling. What he saw was “a mysterious concerted usage of artificial intelligence on the blockchain for Ethereum.”

Day was able to look into its blockchain and see a “whole bunch” of “autonomous agents” moving funds around “in an automated fashion.” Although Day has no idea who created the AI, he suspects “they could be the agents of cryptocurrency exchanges trading among themselves in order to artificially inflate ether’s price.”

Day also remarked that he didn’t believe this was the work of a single exchange, but is rather a group effort. Part of Day’s job is anticipating demand for a product before it even exists, and in the light of what he has seen, he believes that making the blockchain more accessible is the next big thing.

Let’s not forget that Google made the Internet more usable, bringing it billions in revenue, and if Day is correct in his predictions it could have another major pay day by making the blockchain searchable. Del Castillo says if it does, “the world will know whether blockchain’s real usage is living up to its hype.”

Day has already been working on this with a team of open-source developers, who have been loading data for bitcoin and ethereum blockchains into Google’s big data analytics platform called BigQuery. And, with the help of lead developer Evgeny Medvedev, he created a suite of sophisticated software to search the data.

Day is hoping that his project, known as Blockchain ETL (extract, transform, load) will bring Google’s revenues from cloud computing services up to the level of Amazon and Microsoft. Google is some way behind both of them, but it will struggle to match Amazon’s revenues of $27 billion from cloud services, because Amazon has been in the blockchain game since 2018 with a suite of tools for building and managing distributed ledgers. And Microsoft got into the space in 2015, when it released tools for ethereum’s blockchain. These two companies are focused on making it easier to build blockchain apps, whereas Day wants to reveal how blockchains are actually being used, and by whom.

Day has been demonstrating how his Blockchain ETL could function by examining the hard fork that created bitcoin cash (BCH) from bitcoin. “I’m very interested to quantify what’s happening so that we can see where the legitimate use cases are for blockchain,” Day says. “Then we can move to the next use case and develop out what these technologies are really appropriate for.”

Day is now expanding beyond bitcoin and ethereum. Litecoin, zcash, dash, bitcoin cash, ethereum classic and dogecoin are being added to BigQuery.

It seems Google is waking up to blockchain and is now powering ahead by filing numerous patents related to the blockchain. The company is also encouraging its developers to build apps on the ethereum blockchain, and GV, Google’s investment division has made some investments in crypto-related startups.

Is the JPM Coin another attempt to kill off bitcoin?

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

The announcement of the launch of JP Morgan’s ‘native’ cryptocurrency, the JPM Coin, was one of the biggest news stories of the last week. It was a big surprise, because alongside economist Nouriel Roubini, Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan’s chairman and CEO, is one of the biggest crypto ‘haters’ around. Dimon has said many things about bitcoin including calling it a “fraud”. So, how come ‘his’ bank, one of the biggest in the world, is launching a cryptocurrency?

Dimon once said he would fire any employee he found trading in cryptocurrency, and yet here we are in a situation where the bank itself plans to use the JPM Coin to facilitate international transactions at greater speed and at a lower cost.

Needless to say, quite a few people are affronted by the move. It could be interpreted as a positive sign that the major financial institutions are finally coming around to the idea of cryptocurrency, but more than a few responses to the JPM Coin announcement suggest that there is a band of crypto defenders who see it as nothing more than game play by an institution that is upheld as one of the ‘bad guys’ of the 2008 financial crisis.

Others point out one very important fact: the JPM Coin isn’t a cryptocurrency in the purist sense; it’s a stablecoin or a centralised cryptocurrency. Several writers have wondered why JP Morgan simply didn’t use XRP for their transactions, as Ripple’s token does exactly what the JPM Coin does. Others say the JPM Coin could potentially kill off XRP. Also, as Dante Disparte observes in his article at Forbes, “few centralised cryptocurrencies have been successful,” and he suggests JP Morgan’s move into “into digitally minting its own cryptocurrency” may be a foolhardy enterprise.

He also points out that even if it is seen as a welcome move, then it must be accompanied by certain prerequisites. He writes: “This is a welcome move, provided of course large enterprises get the right combination of ceding control, augmenting transparency and reducing friction that blockchain-based business models entail.” However, as he adds, it will be difficult for a banking behemoth like JP Morgan to follow through on these, because its success is built on “opacity, complexity and asymmetries of information inherent in the market and its business model.” It is a case of smoke and mirrors at its institutional finest!

Furthermore, it is not the case that Jamie Dimon has had a change of heart about bitcoin: indeed, it is more likely that the intention behind JPM is to kill off bitcoin, Dimon’s bête noir, and possibly take down some other altcoins with it.

Is the crypto community just smoke and mirros?

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Bitcoin, Blockchain, ICOLeave a comment

You’ve probably noticed that ‘community’ is a buzzword in the crypto sphere. There isn’t an ICO that doesn’t refer to building its ‘community’, which is really another way of talking about their investors, because that is what they are. But ‘community’ sounds warm, fuzzy and friendly when compared with the ‘investor’, which instead suggests neutrality, detachment and anonymity.

Why crypto geeks chose ‘community’

In the traditional world of business it is very important to build loyalty among clients and customers; that’s one of the functions of great branding, but the crypto startups focused on the concept of ‘community’ at the start, in my opinion because they were operating on the fringes and therefore wanted to use a word that suggested a coming together of like-minded people, as well as a sense of equality between those who developed the crypto projects and those who basically crowdfunded them.

In the early days of crypto, this rather ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ approach served a good purpose; it strengthened belief in a new technology by making everyone feel they had skin in the game, even if an individual’s financial commitment to a new project was $100, let’s say. However, as the ICO took off and every project wanted to build followers who would buy into it, what had been a collection of believers turned into, as Michael K. Spencer writes in his article for Medium, “communities more prone to pump and dump” who were never really loyal followers.

Now crypto projects need to get real

Spencer’s argument is, and I agree with him, is that the so-called ‘communities’ built up by ICOs on Telegram and elsewhere are not as useful to projects as they were once thought to be. The reason for this is that the crypto world has moved on significantly since the launch of bitcoin. Crypto projects now need real clients and products with a real world use.

Communities show no loyalty

In short, a project’s community that has come together just for the Airdrop, or whatever freebies a project wants to hand out, is rarely loyal. These marketing tools may build numbers of followers on social media quite rapidly and make a project look as if it has broad support, but most of those people are just there for the giveaways and once they have them, they’ll be off.

Spencer says, “Crypto saying that its community is its best resource, is like Facebook saying it’s valuable because it has over 2 billion users.” Building community is not where crypto projects should be focusing; they should focus more on real world applications, demonstrate utility and by doing so attract loyal clients and investors.