Category Archives: Technology

Boulder announced on Wednesday that it has launched a speaker series that will focus on how new technology is already affecting how people live and how technology is at the heart of the city's work on resilience, broadband, infrastructure, climate, energy and transportation.

The speaker series, called "The Future is Here: How Technology is Positioning Boulder for Social, Environmental and Economic Success," kicks off May 4 at the Boulder Jewish Community Center, 6007 Oleg Ave., from 5 to 7 p.m., according to a news release.

The workshop will focus on the social, environmental and economic opportunities of high-speed, affordable broadband. Participants will hear from an expert, Louis A. Zacharilla, on the "foundational power of broadband and how it is shaping communities," according to the release.

Zacharilla is the co-founder of the Intelligent Community Forum, and his presentation will be followed by a session designed to collect community member input about what factors the city should consider as it continues to meet with potential partners.

Future sessions will include topics such as energy security and independence, the path to 100 percent renewable energy, and brilliant buildings. The sessions continue monthly until November.

More information is available at http://www.bouldercolorado.gov/innovate. Participants are asked to RSVP.

John Bear 303-473-1355, bearj@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/johnbearwithme

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Boulder announces technology speaker series - Boulder Daily Camera

Typing on a smartphone is a drag. It takes forever to punch out a word on a touchscreen keyboard. Gesture typing (or "swiping") is better, but still slower than a real keyboard, and half the words come out wrong. Voice-to-text is easier, and safer when driving. But accuracy is still below par, and there are many situations when speaking your message out loud is either impractical or rude.

But help is on the way. Facebook just revealed at its F8 conference that the company has had 60 engineers working on a brain-computer interface that will let you type words merely by thinking them. The technology won't eavesdrop on the thoughts you don't want to share, but will capture the words you think of speaking without speaking them out loud, much like sending a telepathic message in a science fiction movie.

Think this is impossible or decades in the future? Not so much. Technology has existed for years that lets paralyzed people type by thought in exactly this way. It requires a surgical brain implant, though, which most Facebook users probably don't want. Facebook thinks it can lick that problem by using optical imaging to scan your brain 100 times per second and detecting the words you want typed. The company is working with scientists from several large universities, including Johns Hopkins and UC Berkley, to make this a reality. Facebook predicts that brain-based typing will be able to reach 100 words a minute, which fast typists can match on a full-sized keyboard (and is about as fast as most people speak). But it's about five times faster than most of us can type on our mobile phones.

This research is taking place inside Facebook's R&D Building 8, a mysterious lab where the company builds some of its most futuristic technology under the direction of Regina Dugan, who headed Google's Advanced Technologies and Projects lab before joining Facebook about a year ago. Before Google, she headed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, a government agency that helped launch the internet years ago and, more recently, developed some of the first self-driving cars. In addition to brain-based typing, she told the audience at F8, Building 8 is working on technology to allow deaf people to "hear" through their skin by using software that allows it to convert vibrations into sounds the brain can recognize, much as the cochlea do in hearing people's ears. A test subject has been able to recognize nine different words this way so far.

All these developments raise a host of ethical questions, something Dugan is keenly aware of. "I've never seen a technology that you developed with great impact that didn't have unintended consequences that needed to be guardrailed or managed," she told the F8 audience. That's why she's in the process of forming an independent Ethical, Legal and Social Implications panel to oversee this research, as she explained to TechCrunch in an interview. (Gotta love the URL for that TechCrunch piece: "i-sure-hope-so.")

In the here-and-now, Facebook is also working on improving the viewing experience of 360 video by developing algorithms that predict where a user will look next, allowing for those areas of the video to be rendered first. (Quality can be a challenge for 360 video because the medium is such a data hog.)

The message is clear: Facebook wants to be first in on futuristic, immersive technology. And it definitely intends to stay ahead of Snapchat.

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Facebook Is Developing Technology That Lets You Type Directly From Your Brain - Inc.com

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. - Fresno police are crediting new technology for their swift response to a triple murder two days ago. The technology used for a quick response to that shooting spree could be coming to Bakersfield soon.

It's been a couple days since Kori Ali Muhammad allegedly shot and killed three men.

"Very simply put, if we did not have the shot spotter activation alerts, our officers would not have responded to the area as quickly as it did,"Fresno Police Department Chief Jerry Dyer said.

The Shotspotter surveillance system uses microphones placed on buildings to locate gun fire. According to Shotspotter, it takes 20 to 45 seconds from the gun discharge to locate the source and notify authorities at dispatch centers, in patrol cars and on smartphones. According to the BPD, the locations are accurate within 75 feet.

"Anytime we can get officers to a scene, especially a scene of violence faster is beneficial for everyone," Sargeant Ryan Kroker of the BPD said.

A city council committee discussed the possible implementation of this system today. Shotspotter requires that it be installed in at least three square miles of a city. Two of the square miles the city is looking to install the system is between California Avenue and Brundage Lane, and Chester Avenue to WashingtonStreet. According to BPD, this area has 35 to 40 percent of the gang-related shootings in Bakersfield.

"We need this kind of technology to build the credibility and trust in our community," Community T.R.U.S.T.T. Co-Founder Marilyn Droppers said.

BPD is applying for a federal grant to fund the new system. They are hoping to be approved for the grant by August, and having Shotspotterrunning by January 2018.

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New gun shot technology potentially coming to Bakersfield - Kern Golden Empire

BBC News

Baidu to share self-drive car technology BBC News Chinese internet giant Baidu has said it will share much of the technology it has created for its self-driving cars. The firm predicted that the move would help drive the development of autonomous vehicles. Called Apollo, the project will make a range ... Chinese Search Behemoth Baidu Set to Launch Self-Driving Car Technology in JulyFortune Baidu to open-source its autonomous driving technologyFinancial Times Baidu to Open Source Its Self-Driving TechnologyWall Street Journal (subscription) PCWorld -Barron's (blog) all 39 news articles »

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Baidu to share self-drive car technology - BBC News

April 19, 2017 Michael Bugeja, professor and director of ISU's Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, explores what might happen if we allow machines to dictate our lives. He says we need to educate ourselves on media literacy and the way in which we use technologyasserting ourselves over the technology. Credit: Christopher Gannon

Most Americans have some form of digital technology, whether it is a smartphone, tablet or laptop, within their reach 24-7.

Our dependence on these gadgets has dramatically changed how we communicate and interact, and is slowly eroding some of our core principles, said Michael Bugeja, professor and director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University. Bugeja is not advocating against technology in fact, he relies on it for his work and personal life but he says we need to recognize the possible ramifications before it is too late.

In his forthcoming book, "Interpersonal Divide in the Age of the Machine," Bugeja explores what might happen if we allow machines to dictate our life. Those machines range from smartphones to robotics to virtual reality. Bugeja theorizes that because of our reliance on machines, we will start to develop the universal principles of technology, such as urgency, a need for constant updates and a loss of privacy.

"We are losing empathy, compassion, truth-telling, fairness and responsibility and replacing them with all these machine values," Bugeja said. "If we embed ourselves in technology, what happens to those universal principles that have stopped wars and elevated human consciousness and conscience above more primitive times in history?"

Need for media and technology literacy

Bugeja warns of the dangers associated with adopting these values. The proliferation of fake news is just one example of how this shift is already influencing our culture. Technology provides a continuous connection to our social media feeds, which has become a popular source for news for many Americans. However, social media tends to cultivate news stories that reflect our individual beliefs and values not a broad spectrum of viewpoints and is an easy way for fake news stories to spread, Bugeja said.

"The business of journalism is already feeling the effect of living in a world of correlation without causation," he said. "We understand what happened and how it happened, but we don't understand why it happened."

That's why Bugeja wants colleges and universities to require students take media and technology literacy courses. He says it is important that students know where to go to find credible news stories, and open their minds to information from a variety of sources, not just those that confirm what they already think or believe.

"We need these courses so that people know where to go for facts and how to deal with technology. If you do not assert yourself over technology, it will assert itself over you and you will be doing what the machine asks you, rather than you telling the machine what to do," Bugeja said.

There is no easy short-term fix for the future, Bugeja said, which is why we need to temper our use. He says the long-term solution is through education.

Machines are not human

It is not just the philosophical and intellectual consequences that have Bugeja concerned, but also the impact of technology on business, behavior and everyday activities. Business and industry increasingly rely on machines or robots to do the jobs of humans. Bugeja says this shift can improve efficiency, safety and the company's bottom line, but he questions what will happen to those individuals who lose their jobs to machines.

Working at a university, Bugeja has witnessed how machines have altered behavior in the classroom, dining hall or when walking across campus. Technology is a distraction that keeps students from focusing on their studies and limits interpersonal interactions, he said. In much the same way, the temptation of responding to an alert from social media or notification of a text message while driving has increased safety concerns.

"We introduce new gadgets by saying they will make our lives better, which is true, but there are also dangers," Bugeja said.

The purpose of his latest book is to raise awareness about the dangers of living in a world dominated by machines. He challenges readers, just as he does with students in his class, to balance their use of technology and not feel pressured to respond immediately to an email or text message. The book, published by Oxford University Press, will be available in July.

Explore further: Time to change how news media cover mass shootings, says psychologist

The amount of media attention focused on the shooter in a mass killing sends the wrong message, says an Iowa State University associate professor of psychology. Douglas Gentile, an expert on media effects, says news reports ...

Facebook announced Wednesday the creation of a Journalism Project aimed at fostering "a healthy news ecosystem" and curbing the spread of fake news.

Researchers at the George Washington University (GW) School of Medicine and Health Sciences found a majority of first-year medical students changed their online behavior after participating in a social media and professionalism ...

Storytelling is a key part of human culture. Where politics and power are concerned, stories become something not only to be told, but to be shaped and influenced so that, in many cases, they are used to mislead or deceive. ...

Facebook is launching a journalism project aimed at strengthening its ties with media organizations to help them expand their audiences, come up with new products and generally promote trusted news in today's "post-truth" ...

"Fake news" probably did not change the outcome of the US presidential election, according to a study of news consumption by voters.

Google Earth is getting a revival, as the 3-D mapping service reorients itself to become more of a tool for adventure and exploration.

Samsung's new Galaxy S8 phone is stunning. But its $100 price hike is hard to swallow.

Hyper-connectivity has changed the way we communicate, wait, and productively use our time. Even in a world of 5G wireless and "instant" messaging, there are countless moments throughout the day when we're waiting for messages, ...

Rice University computer scientists are mapping a new solution for interior navigational location detection by linking it to existing sensors in mobile devices. Their results were presented in a paper at last month's 2017 ...

Your partner comes in and slams a door. What was that about? Something you did? What if you knew to anticipate it because you were notified in advance from an automated text message that he/she didn't have a great day at ...

Alphabet's life sciences unit Verily on Friday unveiled a wrist-worn "Study Watch" designed to gather complex health data in clinical studies.

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Are we prepared for the consequences of technology - Phys.Org

This article is sponsoredby Call2Recycle.

Recent advances in wearable technology are challenging our definition of clothing and technology as they converge to improve our quality of life. Inventors are developing more sophisticated and essential products that are quickly being integrated into the fabric of our lives. These smart electronic devices can be worn on the body as an accessory during everyday life.

Fitness trackers, smart sunglasses, sports trackers and even smart socks, shorts and sleepwear are a far cry from the first wearable technologies childrens athletic shoes featuring heels that light up when they struck the ground. These new devices use Internet of Things technology to exchange data with a manufacturer, operator or other connected devices, with no human involvement.

While the products vary widely, wearable technologies have one thing in common. Users depend on battery power to use the devices wherever they go. Batteries are incorporated into products using glue or through full integration into the products frames. This design approach reduces manufacturing costs and decreases the size and weight of the end product, a huge advantage for the user.

But the design also makes it virtually impossible to remove the batteries and successfully reclaim the constituent metals.It is much more difficult to detach and disassemble the technology from a garment or product than from a cell phone or power tool. It often involves two or more steps: first, the wearable device must be removed from the garment. Then, the battery must be removed from the wearable device.

Product design is becoming increasingly disconnected from how we manage the products components, such as batteries, at end-of-life.

Wearable designs point to a troubling trend in the recycling market. Product design is becoming increasingly disconnected from how we manage the products components, such as batteries, at end-of-life. The resulting impact on the environmental is substantial and real more waste in landfills and a decline in the use of recycled materials in the manufacture of new products. At a time that manufacturers finally have learned to incorporate recycled materials into their products, the ability to recycle these materials is being reduced.

This doesnt just apply to the wearable technology market. Consumer groups openly have complained about how difficult it is to disassemble, reuse and recycle electronic devices from Apple, Samsung and Microsoft based on their product design features. These criticisms are driving action in Europe, where the European Union is reviewing a new design directive that would require the removability of batteries from such products sold in its member countries.

Consumer pressure notwithstanding, the recycling industry has been slow to respond for several reasons. While several recycling companies have developed the ability to perform this type of recycling, they have not found it economically feasible due to the diversity of products and processing complications. Recycling is a razor-thin-margin business; recyclers cannot afford to invest in technologies that do not deliver a short-term positive return.

Recycling is also a complex process. Three factors must be in place to make it financially worthwhile for recyclers to invest in the equipment and technology processes to recycle the materials:

Until market conditions change and products are designed to take these factors into account, it will not be profitable for the recycling industry to invest its resources in recycling wearable technologies to retrieve the component metals.

The cratering of the commodities market has made it cheaper for technology manufacturers to buy virgin (mined) materials compared to their recycled equivalents simply because the latter costs more.

Economic factors also must be considered. The cratering of the commodities market has made it cheaper for technology manufacturers to buy virgin (mined) materials compared to their recycled equivalents simply because the latter costs more. Although reclaiming products is preferable from an environmental perspective, most manufacturers will seek the lowest price for metals, whatever its source.

Mining new materials has other disadvantages. Most major mineral deposits are found in remote regions of the Congo, Bolivia and China. These areas are often governed by factions that are not always sympathetic to Western development. Some local residents may welcome the jobs, but others can be resentful of outside interests using their environment to mine for rare resources. As a result, securing scarce materials such as rare earth metals and cobalt is increasingly expensive and risky.

As one of the first adopters of wearable technology, the Americas face a heightened challenge to ensure that the valuable constituent parts of any technologies can be reclaimed and recycled. Our ability to design and develop new technologies must be directly linked to how we manage materials at the end of their useful lives. If we dont consider the complete lifecycle, we face the risk of repeating the pre-1980 era, a time of increasing landfill waste with little thought to the impact of this waste on the planet.

Wearable technology recycling is just one aspect of a broader challenge we face to understand the impact of any technology on the environment, from the design stage through manufacturing, distribution, use and, ultimately, disposal.

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Will wearable technology destroy advances in recycling? - GreenBiz

Many of the most popular high yield stocks are real estate investment trusts (REITs), master limited partnership (MLPs), and business development companies (BDCs). All of these industries are designed to pay very high dividends.

When it comes to regular corporations, however, a very high dividend yield can be a warning sign that something is fundamentally flawed with the company's business model.

Many of these companies tend to have relatively low Dividend Safety Scores, indicating that their dividends could be at risk of being cut in the future.

Let's take a closer look at Seagate Technology (NASDAQ:STX), which offers a high dividend yield above 5% and has paid higher dividends for six straight years, to see if the stock could be appropriate for our Conservative Retirees dividend portfolio.

Business Overview

Founded in 1978 in Dublin, Ireland, Seagate Technology is one of the world's largest suppliers of data storage hardware, including hard drives, solid-state hybrid drives, solid-state flash-based drives, and memory cards.

The company's products are found in everything, from PCs, mobile phones, tablets, and digital video recorders (DVRs) to cloud computing servers.

However, Seagate's fortunes continued to be tied to its specialty, hard disk drives (HDDs), which is the industry it helped pioneer. HDDs are devices that store digital information on rotating disks with magnetic surfaces. They have been used in a number electronic devices, such as PCs, for decades.

Business Analysis

Up until recently, Seagate was flying high on the boom in demand for data storage devices.

While that demand continues to grow rampantly, the company is facing major challenges in growing its top and bottom line on two fronts.

(Source: Simply Safe Dividends)

First, the introduction of solid-state, NAND flash memory, or SSD technology, has really cut into Seagate's growth runway.

Unlike hard drive memory storage, which involves a physically spinning magnetic medium, solid-state NAND memory has no moving parts. This makes it more reliable (less likely to break), far more energy-efficient, and also much faster to operate (instant on versus boot up).

As a result, technology research firm Gartner forecast in early 2016 that enterprise SSD industry revenue could surpass HDD revenue this year.

The second major challenge Seagate has faced is that it's operating in a fiercely competitive and highly commoditized market, one that is increasingly pressured by weakening demand for desktop computers as well.

That results in weak pricing power, because increasing HDD production from low-cost rivals in Asia means the company is in a constant battle for market share, pressuring its margins and returns on shareholder capital.

You can see that the overall disk drive market's revenue has shrunk over the past two years, while Seagate's market share (green bars) has also declined. Toshiba's (OTCPK:TOSBF) share gain was driven at least in part by its broad presence in both HDDs and SSDs, which makes it easier for customers to consolidate their business with one supplier.

(Source: HotHardware.com)

However, the news isn't all bad for Seagate. For example, while the data storage business may have razor-thin margins, the company has been able to generate better-than-average returns thanks to its economies of scale and aggressive cost-cutting efforts.

(Source: Morningstar)

In fact, management's dedication to disciplined capital spending is why Seagate still generates substantial free cash flow, which allows it to return cash to shareholders via aggressive buybacks (share count declining by 7.1% CAGR over the past nine years) and one of the market's most generous dividends.

In addition, the overall market for data storage devices continues to grow at a torrid pace and is expected to rise to 1.181 million terabytes per year of shipments by 2020 (more than double 2015's shipments).

(Source: Seagate Technology)

The strong growth in data storage devices is due to a multitude of factors, including the rise of Big Data, artificial intelligence and machine learning, the growth of Internet of Things (including driverless cars), and cloud computing.

In fact, the amount of data being generated per year is expected to rise almost 10-fold, from 16 zetabytes last year to 163 zetabytes (or 163 billion terabytes) by 2025.

Increasingly, more and more of this data is being stored in the cloud, requiring massive growth in giant data farms.

On a cost per GB basis, hard drives still have the upper hand, thanks to ongoing innovations by Seagate, such as heat-assisted magnetic recording.

This technology uses a laser to heat the part of the disk that data is being written to, which increases the data density of the material. In other words, it allows the company to increase the capacity of its hard drives, and thus prolongs the length of time that HDDs will have a cost advantage over solid-state devices.

However, it's important to remember that at some point, SSDs will likely come down in price enough to convince many of the world's data centers to switch to this competing technology.

This is really the largest risk to long-term Seagate investors.

Key Risks

The only reason that Seagate's business hasn't declined more in recent years is because the volume of data being generated by the world (and the need to store and analyze it) has grown so much faster than the improvements in SSD costs.

However, remember that SSDs are generally superior to hard drive storage because their lack of moving parts makes them much faster, more reliable (longer lasting), and energy-efficient.

At some point in the future, when SSDs become more cost-competitive with HDDs (which can only be improved so much based on physical limitations), the world's data centers are more likely to make the switch to run entirely on SSD-based server farms. That's especially true because SSD servers would be able to last far longer and consume vastly less power.

Considering that U.S. data centers are expected to consume 73 billion Kilowatt hours of power by 2020 (about 2% of all the electricity used in the U.S., which is enough to power 6.7 million American homes), improving the energy efficiency, and thus, cost effectiveness, of data centers is a secular trend that will only continue.

Can't Seagate simply transition to SSD-based technology? The answer is complicated, but over time, the company will be forced to evolve toward an entirely solid-state business model if it wants to survive.

However, the problem is that its expertise is in hard drives, and it doesn't seem to have a competitive advantage in SSD. In fact the company outsources its NAND flash solid state memory from Micron Technologies (NASDAQ:MU), specifically because it wants to minimize the high fixed costs that come with manufacturing this superior but more expensive form of memory storage.

That's in contrast to major rival Western Digital Corp. (NYSE:WDC), which acquired SanDisk in 2016 for $16 billion specifically because it was one of the world's leading producers of solid-state memory.

In other words, Seagate is at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to the long-term future, precisely for the kind of short-term cost-cutting efforts it is currently pursuing (outsourcing SSD production) in order to stem the decline in its bottom line.

It is also a vertically integrated HDD manufacturer, making it more challenging and costly for the company to change directions.

As a result, Seagate's dividend is likely to come under increasing pressure and even face risk of being cut or suspended entirely over the coming years.

Seagate's Dividend Safety

We analyze 25+ years of dividend data and 10+ years of fundamental data to understand the safety and growth prospects of a dividend.

Our Dividend Safety Score answers the question, "Is the current dividend payment safe?" We look at some of the most important financial factors, such as current and historical EPS and FCF payout ratios, debt levels, free cash flow generation, industry cyclicality, ROIC trends, and more.

Dividend Safety Scores range from 0 to 100, and conservative dividend investors should stick with firms that score at least 60. Since tracking the data, companies cutting their dividends had an average Dividend Safety Score below 20 at the time of their dividend reduction announcements.

We wrote a detailed analysis reviewing how Dividend Safety Scores are calculated, what their real-time track record has been, and how to use them for your portfolio, here.

Seagate's Dividend Safety Score of 19 means it is one of the riskiest dividends on Wall Street. That should come as no shock to investors, since the company doesn't have that great record sustaining its payout during times of economic distress.

While Seagate has nicely increased its dividend in recent years, that's been driven by its decision to raise its payout ratios, which are now approaching more dangerous levels.

Then, there's the issue of the company's weakening balance sheet. While not yet dangerously overleveraged, with a current ratio still well above 1 and sufficient cash reserves to fund the dividend for the next nine quarters, Seagate's torrid pace of buybacks has largely been funded by rising debt levels.

You can see that its debt-to-capital ratio has increased meaningfully over the last decade. I prefer to invest in companies with a debt-to-capital ratio no higher than 50% in most cases.

While that may have worked when interest rates were at all-time lows and cheap debt capital was easily accessible, a rising interest rate environment could create a somewhat more challenging environment for the company.

When we compare Seagate's balance sheet to its industry peers, we similarly see cause for concern. While the leverage ratio is relatively low, at the same time, the company's high debt/capital ratio and lower-than-average current ratio give it a credit rating that is dangerously close to junk status.

(Sources: Morningstar, F.A.S.T. Graphs)

Combined with the decline of its core HDD business, which could eventually become obsolete, Seagate will need to devote a larger share of its free cash flow going forward to deleveraging. You can see that the company's sales have declined year over year in each of the last eight quarters.

In fact, rating firm Moody's recently warned that it has a negative outlook on the company's debt, which could soon result in a credit downgrade.

A downgrade to junk bond status could be troublesome for the company, because it would mean much higher refinancing costs in the future, as well as less flexibility when it comes to acquiring SSD manufacturing ability going forward.

Given that Seagate will eventually have to invest heavily in SSD to remain relevant in the coming years, the company might not be able to afford the $727 million annual dividend cost.

Seagate's Dividend Growth

Our Dividend Growth Score answers the question, "How fast is the dividend likely to grow?" It considers many of the same fundamental factors as the Safety Score, but places more weight on growth-centric metrics like sales and earnings growth and payout ratios. Scores of 50 are average, 75 or higher is very good, and 25 or lower is considered weak.

Seagate's Dividend Growth Score is 32, which at first may surprise you given the company's strong payout growth in recent years.

However, we need to remember that this is a company that appears to be in a secular decline.

Seagate will likely struggle with negative top and bottom line growth in the coming years, potentially causing its already high payout ratios to climb to unsustainable levels. That could explain why the dividend has been frozen for the last six quarters.

Worse still, given the company's worrisome business outlook, as well as its past history of completely eliminating its payout during the last recession, a best-case scenario for Seagate is likely one in which it can simply maintain the current dividend, with little to no long-term growth potential.

Even if management continues the dividend, the company seems likely to underperform the market in the long term, especially from today's high valuations.

Valuation

In the past year, Seagate has soared nearly 90%, compared to the S&P 500's total return of about 12%.

As you can see, not only is the company's current P/E far higher than its industry median, but it's also nearly triple its historic norm.

While the dividend yield is certainly attractive, and in fact, is higher than that of 88% of its peers, given the dangers of a future dividend cut, owning Seagate shares at these levels doesn't seem like a prudent idea to me.

(Source: GuruFocus)

Seagate's valuation almost seems to be completely ignoring the risk of SSDs to its core business. In fact, in its last earnings release, the company didn't even mention solid-state storage, and during the conference call, management only mentioned the term once.

I would prefer if Seagate more directly addressed this potentially existential threat, one that is likely to only further erode the company's sales, profits, and cash flow in the years to come.

Concluding Thoughts On Seagate Technologies

Given the secular headwinds to growth that Seagate is facing, even the current high yield doesn't compensate investors sufficiently for the risks that owning this company represents.

With many better-quality high yield stocks available, investors really have no reason to put their hard-earned money at risk with what could very likely prove to be a long-term value trap.

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Seagate Technology: High Yield Dividend Income Or Value Trap? - Seeking Alpha

GolfTEC, which has given more than 7 million lessons to amateurs over 22 years, is undergoing a brand invigoration that includes updating the appearance and technology of more than 30 planned new stand-alone locations in the first half of this year and will reach all the companys more than 190 facilities in 2018.

The updates include new design of facilities, improved in-bay technology and enhanced clubfitting capabilities.

The technological improvements include better video capabilities for in-bay playback while a lesson is in progress and upgraded online playback so a student can revisit their lesson on their own. In-store improvements also include better lighting to help capture swings.

The companys new emphasis on clubfitting allows more options for custom shafts with a wider variety of heads. The company also will use software that helps match clubheads and shafts to a wide variety of swing types, serving as a starting point for a fitting. Combined with individual launch data, the fitting options should help a player find an optimal shaft and clubhead combination.

Included in the more than 30 stand-alone openings planned for the first half of 2017 are locations that already have opened in Birmingham, Ala.; Burnsville, Minn.; Colorado Springs, Colo.; Ellicott City, Md.; Fort Worth, Texas; Grand Rapids, Mich.; Hartford, Conn.; Hong Kong; Houston; Lakewood, Colo.; Minnetonka, Minn.; Mission Viejo, Calif.; Plano, Texas; Roseville, Minn.; Tokyo; Tucson, Ariz.; and Woodbridge, N.J.

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GolfTEC adds stores, improves technology for golf lessons - Golfweek.com

Silicon Valley workers appear to be looking for jobs elsewhere.

The data team from job searching site Indeed.com recently looked at how many job seekers are viewing positions outside of their own cities and metro areas. They compared data from six primary U.S. technology hubs Austin, Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle and Silicon Valley (which includes San Francisco and San Jose) and found that users in Silicon Valley had the highest outbound interest in moving jobs.

From October 2016 to January 2017, more than 38% of technology job seekers in the San Francisco and San Jose area have clicked on postings outside of the area, up from just 27% four years ago. That trend stands out especially among mid-career employees between 45 and 54 years of age: Half of the Silicon Valley technology job seekers in this age group have been looking for opportunities beyond the border.

And its not the only study to suggest tech workers are looking beyond San Francisco. The Federal Reserves most recent regional economic round-up on the San Francisco district said that talent shortages in the technology industry have both increased the time required to fill positions and the cost per hire.

The rise of the technology sector, in place for years now, has been the modern iteration of the California gold rush, said Mark Hamrick, Washington, D.C. bureau chief for the personal-finance site Bankrate.com. But the combination of high costs and the regions relatively tight job is a double-edged challenge for technology sector employers, he said.

The rising cost of living in Silicon Valley might have contributed to the trend of relocating. The median monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is approximately $3,000 and $2,500 in San Jose, more than double the nationwide average around $1,200, according to Indeed.com.

By looking for job candidates outside the local market, employers widen the pool of potential hires, some of whom might command relatively lower wages, Hamrick said. It has been the case for generations that employment is one of the key forces prompting individuals to move.

Although Silicon Valley is not short of high-paying technology jobs, when adjusted for cost of living, the relative value of the earned salary is far from impressive. Among the seven metros studied, San Franciscos average technology salary ranks third at $93,171 after this adjustment, while San Jose ranks fourth at $92,577. Both are left behind by Seattle and Austin at over $97,000 a year.

Austin and Seattle are good examples of rising tech hubs, where the cost of living is still relatively low and theres a growing supply of tech jobs, Raj Mukherjee, senior vice-president of product for Indeed.com, told MarketWatch. In the last year, Facebook FB, +1.09% Apple AAPL, +0.18% and ORCL, +0.39% have built new facilities or expanded their presence in Austin, he said.

New York and Seattle have a relatively low outbound job search rate around 32% and 28% compared to San Francisco. Among these six metro areas, Austin is the only one that has seen a decreasing percentage of outbound job search since 2012. Austin also has the highest inbound job search rate, meaning job seekers from outside of the area are looking for opportunities there.

Technology employees in San Francisco also tend to change jobs more frequently. The average job length for software engineers in San Francisco is less than 28 months, while their peers in New York stays for an average of 42 months on one job, thats about 50% longer.

The more fluid job market in San Francisco might be a result of the abundant job opportunities in the valley, which is headquarters to nearly 40 of the worlds Fortune 1000 technology companies and thousands of start-ups. Short job tenures may reflect an especially ambitious workforce, aware of a massive supply of opportunity and moving from job to job with a strategy of rapidly getting ahead in their career, Indeed.com found.

Note: The technology jobs analyzed in this report include software engineer, data analyst, quality analyst, web developer, Java developer, software developer, data scientist, UI/UX developer, front end developer, net developer, application developer, mobile developer, senior software engineer, software architect, mobile engineer, DevOps engineer, database engineer, and senior software developer.

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Is San Francisco losing its technology talent to other cities? - MarketWatch

Credit: Illustration by Kotryna Zukauskaite for Advertising Age

You've surely seen those eye charts trying to organize hundreds of marketing technology vendors by category. There are the iconic Lumascapes by Terence Kawaja. And there's my own Chiefmartec.com marketing technology landscape, which last year organized 3,874 martech solutions on a single slide. (Spoiler alert: the upcoming 2017 edition will have more.)

These charts provoke a visceral reaction of shock ("How can there be so many?") followed by fear, uncertainty and doubt ("How do I pick the right ones?"). One marketing executive referred to my landscape as a kind of graphic horror novel for CMOs.

Instinctively, perhaps as a coping mechanism, most people conclude that a martech marketplace of such scale is unsustainable. It's bound to consolidate, and soon. And then, thank goodness, we will have a manageable number of marketing software choices.

But what if that didn't happen?

Before you start sputtering or twitching, hear me out. Because not only is that scenario plausible, it actually could be a good thing.

First, let's clarify what we mean by consolidation. People often frame consolidation as a reduction in the number of vendors in the spacei.e., the number of tiny logos on that marketing tech slide. So going to 50 martech companies from 5,000 would constitute major consolidation.

While that's an easy metric to count, however, it ignores the relative scale of those vendors. A more realistic view would show the distribution of revenue among them. Adobe, with $1.63 billion of revenue for its Marketing Cloud in 2016, is 1,000 times bigger than a martech startup that just made its first $1 million.

Through that lens, the market is already consolidating. It looks like a pyramid: a few billion-dollar giants on top, dozens of firms earning $100 million or more at the next level down and thousands of companies with less revenue below that.

But interestingly, at the same time that the ones on top are growing larger, the number of companies on the bottom is still increasing. So by revenue distribution, the industry is consolidating. But by number of firms, it's expanding.

Is that a paradox?

No, it's actually a fairly common market structure in the age of digital platforms known as a "long tail"a small number of blockbusters and a seemingly infinite trail of ever-more-niche offerings. We see this with Netflix (movies), Amazon (books) and Spotify (music).

In fact, platforms draw their strength from the vibrant ecosystems that blossom on their foundations. For instance, Apple with iOS and Google with Android have "consolidated" the mobile market while simultaneously enabling a long tail of millions of mobile apps.

Martech is a little different, because most of the large vendorswith the notable exception of Salesforceinitially downplayed the platform opportunity and positioned themselves as "all in the box" solutions instead. (In their defense, Steve Jobs was initially reluctant to open up the iPhone to third-party developers too.)

However, that's changing. Adobe, HubSpot, IBM, Marketo, Oracle and others now each support and promote integrations with dozens or hundreds of other marketing technology products. And new technologies such as customer data platforms and integration-platform-as-a-service providers are emerging as platform-like alternatives.

There's growing competitive pressure for who will amass the biggest and best ecosystem. They're motivated by the virtuous cycle that successful platforms can achieve. A large ecosystem attracts more customers, and more customers attract a larger ecosystem.

Stable platforms reduce the cost and risk of adopting third-party products. This encourages more of them to be adopted and, in turn, more to be developed. (How many apps have you installed on your smartphone? Martech won't be that simple, but the principle is the same.)

The result could be a market that is effectively consolidated at the platform level, yet splendidly diverse in the number of specialized products available to plug into those platforms. Some third-party developers will be big, with category-leading, horizontally-applicable applications. Others will be small and narrowly-focused on more vertical solutions. It will be a lengthy long tail market.

You'd have the benefits of stability and plug-in compatibility that good platforms offer, including a common backbone for unifying customer data. But you'd also have the benefits of augmenting those platforms with creative third-party products that best fit your particular business needs, harness the latest innovations and give you the freedom to differentiate in a digital world.

The charts full of logos won't get any less busy, but for marketers, it could be the best of both worlds.

Scott Brinker is the author of "Hacking Marketing" and editor of Chiefmartec.com.

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Marketing Technology May Never Consolidate (But That's a Good Thing) - AdAge.com (blog)