CNBC:

German multinational Siemens is expanding its already sizeable Middle East presence by investing in the digital sphere, to the tune of $500 million over the next three years. […]

The company plans to build 20 MindSphere Application Centers in 17 countries, where hundreds of Siemens engineers and specialists will work with customers on projects in machine learning and data analysis.

The MindSphere center in Abu Dhabi will focus on developing operational efficiency for customers in areas like water, waste and oil and gas, while the other, to be located in Dubai, will work on solutions for airports, cargo and logistics.

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Bloomberg:

Raj Kapoor thinks autonomous vehicles will save the Earth. With some caveats. “The big idea is actually making sure that we have all four together: autonomous, electric, shared rides with shared ownership,” explains the chief strategy officer at Lyft Inc. “Climate change is probably one of the world’s biggest challenges,” because one person acting alone can’t really make a difference. “Policy alone can’t change it. Technology alone can’t change it. So I felt like I had to do something.”

Consumer-owned cars, Kapoor says, spend most of their time parked, whereas a shared vehicle could almost always be in use. Electric engines have 20 moving parts, vs. many hundreds in gas-powered ones, so they require less maintenance. Thanks to the diminished cost of upkeep, cheaper fuel, and lack of operators, driverless EV rides should be cheap enough that the average person could take one every day, providing a key link between public transit and your front door. […]

Reducing carbon emissions will hinge on designing cities with efficient transportation—a massive business opportunity. Kapoor considered starting an investment fund focused on urban development, but he ultimately came back to Lyft and its potential to influence urban behavior. He wanted to work there, he told founders Logan Green and John Zimmer, but only if he could focus on environmentally ­responsible expansion. They accepted.

Kapoor’s work is cut out for him as he guides the company’s transition from a gig-economy model to a mostly driverless EV fleet. Lyft has teamed up with Ford Motor Co., Waymo LLC, and a few self-driving startups to develop technology, but the company is far from profitable and will have to build infrastructure to support a fleet.

​Nice PR for Lyft.

Bloomberg:

BNEF’s latest report on the levelized costs of electricity, or LCOE, for all the leading technologies finds that fossil fuel power is facing an unprecedented challenge in all three roles it performs in the energy mix – the supply of ‘bulk generation,’ the supply of ‘dispatchable generation,’ and the provision of ‘flexibility.’ […]

Elena Giannakopoulou, head of energy economics at BNEF, said: “Our team has looked closely at the impact of the 79% decrease seen in lithium-ion battery costs since 2010 on the economics of this storage technology in different parts of the electricity system. The conclusions are chilling for the fossil fuel sector.

“Some existing coal and gas power stations, with sunk capital costs, will continue to have a role for many years, doing a combination of bulk generation and balancing, as wind and solar penetration increase. But the economic case for building new coal and gas capacity is crumbling, as batteries start to encroach on the flexibility and peaking revenues enjoyed by fossil fuel plants.”

​This is awesome.

Echo Huang at Quartz:

How hot is blockchain in China? “Even vendor aunties selling vegetables are talking about blockchain” is a saying spreading widely on social media—and it isn’t much of an exaggeration. Chinese companies, if not street hawkers, are racing to file patents tied to the technology that makes it hard to tamper with information.

Last year more than half of the world’s approximately 400 blockchain-related patent applications were from China, according to Thomson Reuters, which sourced data from the World Intellectual Patent Organization, a self-funding group under the United Nations. China nearly quadrupled its number of such filings in 2016. The US ranked second last year, with 91 filings compared to 21 in 2016. It’s all part of “land grab” underway as technology and financial firms around the world try to secure intellectual property centered around blockchain.

Hm.

Axios:

Facebook and Google execs privately complain about the barrage of critical coverage they face, charging that media companies have a financial incentive to attack them and that media execs are settling scores. They’re right. […]

Many journalists live and breathe social media, so Facebook’s lapses and betrayals aren’t some distant calamity — they’re happening in reporters’ own backyards. Yet for all the ingrown enmity, traditional media and social media are more similar businesses than either are likely to admit right now.

Both involve providing a public good (reliable information, timely news, software services and interpersonal communication), then subsidizing the cost by selling the eyeballs of the people who consume that good.

Yup.
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Marshall Kirkpatrick:

Discovering a great new podcast is a real thrill and a relatively new app called Breaker makes it easy to do. It uses your friend list from Twitter or other social networks to tap you into a stream of podcast listening activity. And the interface is beautiful.

The social discovery is awesome – I’m finding new shows and new episodes to listen to that I really enjoy. It also prompts me to listen to popular things I’ve never bothered to listen to before, like The Daily from the NYT. Everyone likes it and so it was easy for me to give it a try once. There are far more shows and specific episodes being published now than anyone can listen to, it’s really overwhelming, and this is a good way to filter.

This is what sharing your social data like your list of friends with third party apps can do for you, by the way. This is the upside of that kind of capability, ways it can improve democratic values for a change.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball:

But if Apple gets it into its head that they should only work on iPhone-sized opportunities, it would paralyze the company. In baseball terms, it’s fine for Apple to hit a bunch of singles while waiting for their next home run. According to Apple, they had more watch sales by revenue in 2015 than any company other than Rolex, and Apple’s “Other” category, which is where Watch sales are accounted for, had a near record-breaking holiday quarter three months ago, suggesting strongly that Watch sales were up over the year-ago holiday quarter.

These two facts are both true: Apple Watch sales are a rounding error compared to the iPhone, and Apple Watch is a smash hit compared to traditional watches and other wearable devices.

Peter Kirn at CDM Create Digital Music:

The failure of CDs seems to be more of a case of marketing getting divorced from science. We’re never free of the constraints of the physical world. As an archivist will tell you, we have to simple adapt – from duplication to climate control.

But I’d say generally, with network-connected storage and automation, digital preservation is now better than ever. The failure point is humans; if you think about this stuff, you can solve it.

Indeed.

Ben Thompson at Stratechery (paywall):

It’s also worth noting that the very forces that make it possible for first Larry Page and Sergey Brin and later Zuckerberg to maintain control of their companies — the fact they grew so quickly that they were never meaningfully diluted — is intimately tied into the power said companies exert on the world broadly. To that end, it is certainly concerning to remember that there is basically no governance on either Google or Facebook; the fact that their power derives from user selection means that antitrust regulation doesn’t apply very well at all, and it is that same selection that drove growth at a sufficient scale to avoid dilution, meaning shareholders, were they somehow united into one voice, cannot compel any sort of action either.

Anil Dash:

Once upon a time, it made perfect sense to talk about “the high tech industry” in America — pioneering companies like Intel or Fairchild Semiconductor or IBM or Hewlett Packard made computer processors and related hardware, and most of the companies in Silicon Valley dealt with actual silicon from time to time. These companies offered competing products that shared a market, a set of customers, and sometimes even had employees in common when talent would move from one company to another.

But today, the major players in what’s called the “tech industry” are enormous conglomerates that regularly encompass everything from semiconductor factories to high-end retail stores to Hollywood-style production studios. The upstarts of the business can work on anything from cleaning your laundry to creating drones. There’s no way to put all these different kinds of products and services into any one coherent bucket now that they encompass the entire world of business.