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Posts Tagged ‘Assumptions’

Downey, Calif. says yes to Tesla Model S Plant

Downey, Calif. is one step closer to becoming home to Tesla Motors‘ pricey new assembly plant. The City Council voted earlier this week to approve a memorandum of understanding with the Industrial Realty Group, the company that manages the 80-acre tract of land that Tesla is considering.

Currently used by a film and television production studio, the property would be home to the EV company’s Model S manufacturing facility — a factory that could bring up to $365 million in investment to the local area. That’s how much the company said it would allocate from the $465 million low-interest loan package it received from the U.S. Department of Energy earlier this year.

According to the Downey Council, the plant could result in $20 million in extra tax and utility revenue, on top of 1,200 to 1,500 new jobs. As part of its deal with the Industrial Realty Group, the city will pay the firm $8.7 million to lure Tesla to the area, money that could prove well worth it.

The electric vehicle company has been scouting for a plant site for months now. Its CEO, Elon Musk, had been adamant from the start that he wanted it to be in California — an interesting choice when competitors like Fisker Automotive have located much of their manufacturing operations in cheaper locales, including Asia.

It still hasn’t confirmed that Downey is its choice for the plant. The deal between the realty group and the city — which owns 20 acres of the land in question — would only make it easier for Tesla to choose it. But Downey mayor Mario Guerra insists that it’s pretty much a done deal.

Still, maybe the town shouldn’t get it’s hopes up. The company has previously been in pretty serious talks with San Jose, Calif. and Albuquerque, N.M. So until it actually inks a deal with Downey, no assumptions should be made.

Tesla is running out of time, however, and needs to get production rolling at its new facility fairly quickly to hit its late 2011 deadline for the Model S’s release. The company plans to sell each for $57,400, or about $50,000 after government tax breaks.

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Google Should Stop Playing Around With Wave and Focus on Spreadsheet

Disclosure: I didn’t get an early invitation, so this is not a first-hand review of Google Wave. But from what I know now, I don’t want an invitation anymore. It looks like too much of a productivity suck. But I do use Google Spreadsheet all the time. It is the de facto real-time, online, distributed collaboration tool for serious GTD business. It is the best tool for an agile, networked business.

But it could be way, way better. Excel is still the best spreadsheet; it has just fallen behind on collaboration (and collaboration is a show-stopper). But Microsoft could catch up there, and a lot of really sharp startups are gunning for the same space.

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A Short History of the Programmer-less App Mirage

Since about, oh, maybe the days of punch cards, ventures have proclaimed some variation on this pitch: no need for programmers; ordinary folk can create really useful apps!

Fourth generation, Fifth generation! Far too many acronyms and buzzwords and brilliance and capital have been sacrificed on this altar.

On the other hand, ordinary folk create real apps on spreadsheets all day long. Millions of people do it. Businesses run on them, to the horror of IT folk. Banks and VCs burn billions of dollars based on crazy assumptions in those spreadsheets. Mr. Assumption pleads guilty. Mr. Spreadsheet says, “I was only following orders!”

Real-Time Spreadsheets? That Is So 1980s, Dude!

Yes, traders were doing real-time spreadsheets using Excel in the late 1980s, and by the mid-1990s (as in, 15 years ago) they were totally mainstream in trading rooms. Sorry if that is news to folks who think “real time” is new.

But It Could Be a Lot More

Excel has one problem: version control. That’s it. Collaboration is a fancy word, but the simple problem before we had online spreadsheets was version control. You either endured chaos and frazzled nerves or you put in the kind of IT process management rules that the ordinary GTD folks were fleeing from by using a spreadsheet rather than a custom system.

Online spreadsheets that anyone can edit concurrently solved the version control problem. Problem solved! Done, finished. Can we move on now?

I wish Google would focus on the things that would now make its Spreadsheet an awesome business tool. Here are the top four items on my wish list:

1. Offline sync that does not get in the way and is totally seamless.
I gave up on Gears because it seemed to do more harm than good. I know that it is a tough engineering challenge, but I know that Google has some pretty smart people (Wave alone has 60 engineers). Offline sync is essential for serious spreadsheet use. Please don’t tell serious business users that they can get Wi-Fi anywhere. Or that they will be able to very soon. Or that waiting for the bandwidth to catch up with their actions is okay.

2. The same level of sophistication in features that Excel has.
I am not a power Excel user, but even I hit limits on Google Spreadsheet. The spreadsheet jockeys who create those powerful (and dangerous) models view Google’s app as a toy.

#1 and 2 are linked. You cannot have that level of sophistication without using local CPU capacity.

3. Better hooks to real databases.
Spreadsheets are database-like, but don’t try anything serious that a RBMS does with its eyes closed. Add in linked data and XML assets.

4. APIs and other tools to enable an eco-system of apps that do forms and process management.
In a business, something happens when someone signs off on something. That gets tracked somewhere, as in a spreadsheet. Enable that eco-system to grow.

If Google won’t seize this challenge, Microsoft will. Excel may be Microsoft’s best product ever, and it understands business needs.

Wave looks like the kind of over-engineered, overly complex, promise-the-moon-at-some-far-off-date project that has gotten Microsoft in such deep trouble so often. Sure, Wave will be evaluated by a lot of big companies. Meetings will be convened to discuss Wave. Wave Committees might even be formed. Ho and hum! This is not the Google we admire. This is the Google that dreams of being Microsoft and then wakes up and finds that it is Microsoft, and it is a nightmare.

Actually, it looks like Google cannot decide whether it is trying to be Twitter (”Look at me! I’m hip, young and hot”) or Microsoft (”It may not be that exciting, son, but it works, and that’s what matters”). Self-conscious attempts to be hip almost always fail.

Where Google has historically scored well is in providing tools that you can be productive with immediately and that gradually grow in competence, never requiring a big decision. Millions of folks have a business or non-profit to run and need Google to build on the early promise of Google Spreadsheet.

If it doesn’t, Microsoft will make the online version of Excel work as easily as Google Spreadsheet.

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"White Guys Suck" & Other Insights from OKCupid Study on Race & Online Dating

According to a recent study conducted by dating website OKCupid, “Black women are sweethearts… white men are sh*tty,” and white people in general are a horrible bunch of xenophobes.

The company recently ran some numbers on response rates for messages sent between almost a million otherwise compatible men and women of varying races, and the results are eye-opening. “Whenever we compare the match/reply charts for a given breakdown of the population, they should look about the same,” the related blog post reads. “However, this, like so many other fine assumptions, totally breaks down when race gets involved.”

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In general, the greater a pair’s compatibility according to OKCupid’s mysterious matching system, the greater the likelihood that a sent message will receive a reply.

As a control group, the folks at OKCupid examined reply rates based on zodiac signs. They predicted a 60% match rate among all zodiac signs, and there was relatively little variation between the response rates, which ran in the 30% range and pretty much match up with the line graph above:

However, when looking at profiles with a similar degree of compatibility – right around 60% – the reply rates varied wildly based on gender and, interestingly, race:

It probably comes as no surprise to the seasoned Internet user that, in general, the ladies have a better chance of getting a reply to a sent message (sorry, fellas!), but looking at the exact breakdown of replies is a disheartening commentary on interracial dating.

Here’s a table showing response rates for male senders of varying ethnicities:

The data show that black women reply “about a quarter more often” than women of other races, that white men get more responses, and, to quote from the post, “White women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else–and Asian and Hispanic women prefer them even more exclusively. These three types of women only respond well to white men. More significantly, these groups’ reply rates to non-whites is terrible.”

Next, let’s take a look at what happens when the sender is a woman:

And now we see why white men are today’s punching bag – at least on the OKCupid blog. They respond less than any other group, and they respond least of all to black women. And speaking of black women, who we saw in the last table responded more than other groups: These ladies are receiving fewer responses than their peers of other races.

Finally, take a look at this chart looking at users’ responses to the question, “Would you prefer to date someone of your own skin color/racial background?”

Ouch! White men and women do not come off particularly well, especially considering the relative open-mindedness of their peers. And sadder still, according to OKCupid’s internal metrics, their users are younger, better educated, and more progressive than users on other sites. Truly, the mind reels.

Without making any assumptions, we would also love to see how the data look for same-sex couples of varying races. Is there something about GLBT culture that might make queer folks less racist than our straight counterparts?

What do you think this research signifies, RWW reader? Are there other, unseen factors at play, or do you think the data stand as a sad commentary on unjustifiable race-based phobias inherent in a hegemonic culture? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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High-tech adoption happening faster, driving economic growth

If you’ve had the sense that new technologies are being adopted at an ever-accelerating pace, it’s probably not just your imagination. That’s the conclusion of a couple of economists who have modeled the adoption of 15 key technologies that have been developed over the past two centuries. They find a consistent acceleration of adoption across that entire period. And, although the pace of adoption has a significant impact on national economies, there’s a bigger variance between technologies than there is between nations.

The study was performed by two economists, one at Harvard, the other at New York’s Federal Reserve Bank. The basic premise was that it should be possible to build a single model that can estimate the pace at which a technological innovation can spread within a national economy. There are a lot of assumptions behind this model (not to mention over a dozen pages dedicated to equations and explanations of them), but the gist is relatively straightforward.

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