Top Bananas | Monthly Archives: September 2016

Intelligent Pizza Delivery

Posted on September 30, 2016 by admin Posted in Business Leave a comment

What it is: Zume Pizza is a new delivery service that uses robots to cook pizza while driving to its final destination.

When most people think about robots and automation, they may think of massive assembly lines or exotic robots out of science fiction. Yet the biggest innovation in life often comes from small niche markets that nobody really notices until the change becomes so massive they can no longer avoid seeing the obvious.

What made Netflix popular wasn’t the idea of mailing DVDs to customers, but in creating a massive streaming video library. What made the iPhone popular wasn’t the fact that it was another smartphone, but that it was essentially a computer in your pocket. What made PCs initially popular was that they put the power of computers on everyone’s desk back in the days when computers were isolated chunks of machinery hidden behind locked doors in special air conditioned rooms that only certain people could access at any given time.

The public almost never notices innovation right away because it sneaks into society until it blossoms into something so big that everyone finally takes notice of it. That’s the latest situation with Zume Pizza.

All innovation stems from solving problems. While some people strive to solve big problems like creating drinkable water out of the ocean, other people solve much smaller problems that. In the case of Zume Pizza, the big problem is that pizzas are often delivered cold and late.

That might not seem like a big problem, but it’s a problem that no one else has solved. The traditional way of pizza delivery is to cook a pizza, then delivery it as fast as possible before it gets cold. That’s often inefficient because the driver needs to make multiple stops.

Zume Pizza avoids this problem by using robots and algorithms to maximize efficiency. First, Zume Pizza’s robots help put together pizzas so the cost of labor is completely eliminated except for the driver. Second, Zume Pizza’s delivery trucks contain multiple ovens so they cook the pizza on the way to the destination. That way the pizza gets to your house hot out of the oven and completely fresh.

By using robots, Zume Pizza reduces labor costs. By cooking pizzas in the delivery truck, Zume Pizza avoids the problem of cold pizzas being delivered. With GPS tracking, Zume Pizza’s ovens can estimate how much time the truck will take before it reaches its destination. Robots put the pizza together and the smart ovens time its cooking so it’s ready when the delivery truck pulls to your house.

How can traditional pizza delivery services compete against Zume Pizza? They can’t. While traditional pizza delivery services continue struggling with cold pizza and slow delivery, Zume Pizza can always deliver hot and fresh pizza every time. The money saved from labor goes into buying locally sourced ingredients so your pizza is not only hot, but full of natural ingredients from the surrounding area as well.

Zume Pizza will revolutionize something as simple as the pizza delivery industry. Just as the iPhone wiped out Blackberry and Nokia because neither could compete, so will Zume Pizza wipe out traditional pizza delivery services. Who would have guessed that food delivery would be a prime market for massive innovation with robotics, software algorithms, and locally sourced ingredients to provide a healthy, fresh meal every time?

The Apple Watch in the Hospitality Industry

Posted on September 29, 2016 by admin Posted in Hardware Leave a comment

What it is: NYC restaurateur, Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group will use Apple Watches to improve service at the Union Square Cafe in Manhattan.

When Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, many people didn’t think it was a revolutionary product. Only a few years later when the iPhone got more powerful, reached more carriers, and opened its App Store for developers to market their apps to consumers did the iPhone rapidly change the entire smartphone industry. Yet in the beginning, the iPhone was still revolutionary, but wasn’t able to change the smartphone market overnight.

The same cycle is occurring with the Apple Watch. Many people are initially disappointed that the Apple Watch didn’t revolutionize the wearable computer market overnight, but they forget that the iPhone didn’t revolutionize the smartphone industry overnight either. It took time for the iPhone to change the world and it’s slowly taking time for the Apple Watch to do the same thing.

Apple has improved the Apple Watch with a faster processor and redesigned operating system, based on feedback from the original Apple Watch. Now the Apple Watch is moving into the hospitality industry as a necessary item.

In the past, service in restaurants depended on waiters/waitresses and other workers physically interacting with customers. The coat check attendant wouldn’t know which coat to get until you showed up and asked for it. That’s all going to change with he Apple Watch.

When the Union Square Cafe reopens in Manhattan next month, every floor manager and sommelier will wear an Apple Watch. Now when a VIP walks through the front door, someone orders a bottle of wine, a new table is seated, a guest waits too long to order her or his drink, or a menu item runs out, every manager will get an alert on their wrist.

Suddenly service will greatly improve because managers will know of an important task without having to physically be there to find out about it. such improved service will please customers when their problems magically seem to get fixed without the hassle of actually talking to multiple people.

Without wearable computers, this would be impossible. With wearable computers like the Apple Watch, this seemingly impossible task will soon become commonplace. Wearable computers simply provide information rapidly. While many critics compare the Apple Watch to dedicated fitness trackers, dedicated fitness trackers are not versatile enough to compete against the Apple Watch.

As third-party developers find more unique uses for the Apple Watch, you can expect wearable computers (led by the Apple Watch) to continue breaking new ground and allowing people to perform tasks that were impossible to accomplish before, which is the real definition of a revolutionary product.

Blackberry Stops Making Phones

Posted on September 28, 2016 by admin Posted in Business, Hardware Leave a comment

What it is: Blackberry announced they will no longer manufacture smartphones.

Blackberry announced that they will stop making their own Blackberry phones and will rely on an Indonesian partner to manufacturer phones for them. In related news, buggy whip manufacturers announced they will no longer sell buggy whips and slide ruler manufacturers announced they will stop making slide rulers to compete against pocket calculators.

Blackberry was once the leader in the smartphone market. Where Blackberry stumbled was in providing incremental improvements to their phones when Apple blinded them with the touch screen interface of the iPhone. Originally, Google was developing Android as a Blackberry clone, but as soon as Google saw the iPhone, they realized the future wasn’t Blackberry but the iPhone, so they revised Android to look and act more like the iPhone.

Meanwhile, Blackberry still kept trying to sell smartphones with physical keyboards because that’s what people liked about their phones at one time, in much the same way that people might have once liked buggy whips to go along with their horse and carriages at one time.

Blackberry simply saw the future and denied it was happening right before their eyes. Only after watching their market share plummet from the leader to below the market share of Windows Phone did Blackberry finally realize it was hopeless to keep selling classic Blackberry phones any more. Now the company is shifting to become more of a services company rather than a smartphone manufacturer.

In its time, Blackberries weren’t bad phones. They just couldn’t compete against the iPhone in the same way that video rental stores couldn’t compete against streaming videos over the Internet. While Google recognized the future and quickly pivoted towards the touch screen interface of the iPhone with Android, Blackberry saw the same future and stubbornly stuck to what they thought was their strength by not changing at all.

Until Microsoft dumped Steve Ballmer as their CEO, Microsoft was headed down the same dead end trail in pushing Windows on PCs as the most important product of the company. Now that PC sales have steadily fallen over the years and people no longer rely on Windows for all their computing needs, Microsoft has shifted to rely less on Windows and more on cloud computing and subscription services such as Office 365. Microsoft may have missed the mobile computing market (and the wearable computing market), but at least they’re not as stubborn as Blackberry by clinging to the past while the future changes all round them.

Anyone surprised by Blackberry’s announcement that they will no longer make their own phones will likely also be surprised to find out that carbon paper is no longer the preferred way to make copies any more. It’s easy to see the future by just opening your eyes. It’s just as easy to ignore the future by refusing to admit the market has changed and that a leading product like the Blackberry is no longer desirable in the changing market of today.

Amazingly, there will always be people and entire companies unable to see change occurring right before their eyes. Think of Kodak ignoring digital photography and Borders Books ignoring Amazon. When you ignore reality, it’s no surprise when you suffer in the future. When you acknowledge reality, it’s also no surprise when you can predict the future by simply analyzing the present.

Aetna Subsidizes the Apple Watch

Posted on September 27, 2016 by admin Posted in Business, Medical Leave a comment

What it is: The Apple Watch is a wearable computer that offers real-time health monitoring and tracking.

Beginning this fall, Aetna, one of the U.S.A.’s leading diversified health care benefits companies, will make the Apple Watch available to select large employers and individual customers during open enrollment season. Aetna will also be the first major health care company to subsidize a significant portion of the Apple Watch cost, offering monthly payroll deductions to make covering the remaining cost easier.

In addition to the customer program, Aetna will provide Apple Watch at no cost to its own nearly 50,000 employees, who will participate in the company’s wellness reimbursement program, to encourage them to live more productive, healthy lives.

As an insurance company, Aetna realizes that people who lead healthy lifestyles are likely to be at lower risk for health problems. Thus by using tools such as the Apple Watch to keep people healthier, Aetna can avoid paying out much larger health care costs in the future. Like all insurance companies, Aetna is simply relying on statistics.

Statistically, smokers are more at risk to dying earlier and suffering health problems sooner. That makes smokers riskier customers than someone who doesn’t smoke at all, exercises regularly, and eats a healthy diet. Ultimately, this is just another way to lower costs for Aetna and maximize profits. The big difference is that Aetna is using the Apple Watch’s real-time health monitoring features to do it.

If the average Apple Watch owner stays healthier due to real-time monitoring, then Apple Watch owners will be lower insurance risks (which increases profits). Other insurance companies are likely to follow, which leads to a curious dilemma. If you agree to real-time health monitoring through wearable computers like the Apple Watch, you’ll be rewarded with subsidies to offset the cost of the Apple Watch. If you don’t agree to real-time health monitoring, then the insurance company will likely charge you higher health and life insurance premiums.

So wearable computers can lower your premiums, provided you live a healthier lifestyle. By voluntarily wearing the Apple Watch, you can provide the insurance company with data to prove you’re healthy and thus a lower risk, which means lower insurance premiums. What happens if your lifestyle drastically changes and your health gets worse? Then the insurance company will likely raise your premiums to adjust for your greater risk.

Real-time health monitoring is the future of wearable computers. Aetna knows this and other insurance companies will likely follow their lead. Getting a free or subsidized Apple Watch is one incentive to using one, but the big question is whether people will willingly hand over real-time health data to insurance companies to verify their health and lower premiums.

So the Apple Watch is helping lead the way to wearable computers and real-time health monitoring. Only time will tell whether this will improve people’s health or simply improve the insurance company’s profits. In either case, the Apple Watch is a revolutionary product that many people still haven’t recognized yet.

From Health Monitoring to Health Diagnosis

Posted on September 26, 2016 by admin Posted in Medical, Software Leave a comment

What it is: HealthKit is Apple’s framework for capturing and storing health-related data in a single format that can be easily shared among doctors and hospitals.

When you look at the tremendous strides technology has made in a few decades, it’s even more astounding at how backwards health care data storage has remained. While the advertising world has gone from placing ads and hoping they’ll work to monitoring precise clicks on ads from specific IP addresses around the world, the health care industry still operates largely the same as it did before the advent of personal computers.

A patient has problems and tells a doctor. The doctor tries to interpret the patient’s information in a way to diagnose the problem. Different hospitals often store data in different databases, making it easy to lose data or neglect crucial information altogether. Each doctor and hospital sees to be working on their own in isolation with no idea what may have happened in the past or how they could share critical health data with one another.

That’s why Apple created HealthKit. The initial goal of HealthKit was to provide real-time health monitoring in ways impossible to do in the past. By strapping an Apple Watch on to your wrist, you can capture health data second by second to spot trends or identify abnormalities. Real-time health monitoring is simply the biggest killer app of the Apple Watch that most people are ignoring. Now Apple plans to go one step further and provide health diagnosis as well.

“If you drive for a while and your car gets too hot, it says pull over. If you need an oil change, it says check your oil. What’s the equivalent for the body?” Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, said at a May conference in Amsterdam. “Health is a huge issue around the world and we think it’s ripe for simplicity and a new view.”

“I will be working on building a platform, a set of application program interfaces, and a simple product that will bring what we believe will be a disruptive consumer health-care application to the U.S. for the first time,” Apple Health senior engineer Mohan Randhava wrote on his LinkedIn profile, which states he was employed at Gliimpse until February. Apple bought Gliimpse Inc. early this year, a startup that built software to convert electronic health records from different databases and formats.

If real-time health monitoring and diagnosis becomes practical and accurate, it will give people one more reason to stay wedded to the Apple ecosystem. After all, why would you not want to keep buying periodic updates to the Apple Watch if it tracks your health? Switching to a rival product will likely be troublesome with the need to convert your HealthKit data to another format. By helping monitor and diagnose your health, Apple hopes to save lives and make their products indispensable at the same time. It’s easy for rivals to build a copy of any Apple product. It’s much harder for any rival to build a copy of Apple’s ecosystem as well whether it’s iTunes or HealthKit.

The Apple Watch isn’t quite where it needs to be, but each new version gets the ultimate vision closer to realization. Health diagnosis products will likely be regulated by governments, so it’s possible for the Apple Watch to continue offering general purpose sensors with smart bands offering specialized sensors for specific uses such as tracking diabetes. Such smart bands could go through the normal government regulatory tests without holding up progress for newer versions of the Apple Watch.

Real-time health monitoring is already a game changer that most people don’t recognize in the Apple Watch. Real-time health diagnosis will simply cement HealthKit as the new health standard in much the same way that Windows has cemented itself as the standard for corporate computing. In the world of real-time health monitoring, Apple has numerous rivals. In the world of health data storage, most of Apple’s rivals are not in the wearable computing market and most rivals who are in the wearable computing market aren’t building their own health data storage framework.

That leaves Apple mostly alone in pursuing health monitoring and diagnosis because other companies don’t see a short-term profit in copying Apple’s HealthKit. By the time they finally do see the huge profit potential in HealthKit, it will be too late for them to copy it fast enough.

Spoken News Podcasts

Posted on September 24, 2016 by admin Posted in Business, Music Leave a comment

What it is: Podcasts are often specially recorded audio segments, but now Apple may be working with others to convert written articles into audio files.

For many people, books on tape has allowed them to enjoy a book without reading it. Instead, you just listen to an audio file of someone reading the book to you. The problem with books on tape is that someone actually has to sit down and read the book out loud and record it.

Now Apple has opened a Spoken Edition category in iTunes, which promises to turn written news articles into audio files that people can listen to as podcasts. This will allow people to listen to their favorite news stories from different sources such as Time Magazine, The Economist, or The New York Times. In the past, hiring someone to read news articles wasn’t practical but a company called SpokenLayer seems to be working with various news publications to make this more cost-effective.

Publications pay SpokenLayer to turn their written articles into audio podcasts that they can put on iTunes. to monetize these podcasts, these publications insert audio ads. SpokenLayer works with a team of people who then recite these news articles so the cost of hiring a reader doesn’t fall on the publisher’s shoulders. As a result, SpokenLayer’s team of professional readers can turn written articles from various publications into podcasts.

For publishers, this is one more way to profit off their existing content. For consumers, this is one more way to enjoy news without reading. In the old days, news was carefully segmented among newspapers, radio, and television. With the Internet, the boundaries of information are getting blurred where written news gets turned into radio-like audio segments. It’s actually easier for someone to record television news as audio-only podcasts as well since you just need to strip out the video portion. That way podcast consumers can get news from both print and television sources as well.

The more news available, the more educated people should get. Assuming, of course, that people actually read news from different sources instead of focusing only on news sources with the same bias as they have.