Automation has changed from when Japan was on top. The focus is now on software and open collaboration in a globalized society, not hardware built by factory workers with proprietary standards (looking at you, FeliCa)
China may surpass Japan in the automation/AI sphere. Lots of young, English-speaking, western-educated workers, plus the PRC has already innovated so much in manufacturing, shipbuilding, etc., and an ecosystem willing to splash cash on daring startups (albeit a lot of that is state funding, and you need CCP connections to come up in the Chinese startup world) in ways that leave Japan in the dust. Look at how Nvidia is working in China, look at the rise of Aliyun, Baidu Cloud and Tencent Cloud.
The only Japanese companies I know that are geared for automation for the new economy are companies like Mujin, LeapMind and Preferred Networks.
As a side note, the fact that Japan has managed zero-growth despite a rapidly shrinking, aging population; almost zero immigration; and roughly the same economic policy as from the 1980, is nothing short of a Herculean endeavor. I wonder what Japan is going to do when the population decline really gets in gear around 2040.
"The only Japanese companies I know that are geared for automation for the new economy are companies like Mujin, LeapMind and Preferred Networks."
I've worked closely with one of these companies... Perhaps they were just not suited to the project we were working on, but I found them quite dis-organized, lacking in focus and mostly buzzwords and fakery. Kind of sad.
I really can't see, at least the company I worked with, as "the future of automation"... a lot of it just seems to be neat but impractical toys.
> I've worked closely with one of these companies... Perhaps they were just not suited to the project we were working on, but I found them quite dis-organized, lacking in focus and mostly buzzwords and fakery. Kind of sad.
You can't just drop an anecdote like that without naming and shaming.
I never said that Preferred/Mujin/LeapMind would be the future of automation. I just said that in my uneducated opinion, having followed these companies for some time now, I feel like they may be better equipped to handle "new economy" automation--shift from hardware to software, shift from closed-off proprietary standards to open collaboration. Aka the anathema of Sony, Sharp, Fujitsu, KDDI, etc.
Can you show any evidence that they are better equipped? Other than just their vague mission statements or general attitude?
I also prefer open standards, I think they're generally "a good thing". However big companies (like Sony) always seem to prefer closed standards... I guess it promotes lock-in.
It would be nice to have something backing up these statements though.
Personally, while I don't much like there working style. I still see companies like Sony providing a lot of fundamental value in, for example, imaging sensors.
>As a side note, the fact that Japan has managed zero-growth despite a rapidly shrinking, aging population...
I think they have done an admirable job to be the no. 3 economy in the world despite neo-liberal economics --as they say, even Fukuyama is no longer a Fukuyama-ist and I think they are working hard at making a soft landing for their post neo-liberal economy, whatever shape that takes.
We all know consumerism only gets us so far and what lies beyond is still amorphous. They're trying to give it some shape.
Ok, that makes sense now. I agree it's quite an accomplishment. If anyone can manage that transition, I think it's Japan --despite not being quite the centrally planned econ.
> Automation has changed from when Japan was on top. The focus is now on software and open collaboration in a globalized society, not hardware built by factory workers with proprietary standard s(looking at you, FeliCa)
Like before, won't software and open collaboration merely be an aspect of automation? Who's open-sourced their driverless car tech - anyone with wheels on the ground and a car you can buy? Some advanced mechatronics will be required to fill a lot of voids in the manual labour space. Whose battery tech and engineering prowess will we be using in these vehicles and machines? Japan's?
> As a side note, the fact that Japan has managed zero-growth despite a rapidly shrinking, aging population; almost zero immigration; and roughly the same economic policy as from the 1980s.
That should be praise, no? I mean, aspects of sexism and odd views about social hierarchy can go in the trash, but their productivity is still very good.
> I wonder what Japan is going to do when the population decline really gets in gear around 2040.
With freed up housing and resources? Probably get better pay, make more children and ultimately kick off a new cycle of growth. A bit hard when you're in your 40's and still living with your parents...who are still working at retirement age.
> Who's open-sourced their driverless car tech - anyone with wheels on the ground and a car you can buy? Some advanced mechatronics will be required to fill a lot of voids in the manual labour space. Whose battery tech and engineering prowess will we be using in these vehicles and machines?
Ah, but that's on the hardware side. Japan is excellent at hardware, its education system spits out lots of factory workers. But I have a hunch that AI and automation, in the future, will emphasizing hardware a bit less (since China/Taiwan/Korea has gotten so good at efficient manufacturing), and refocus towards software--that may be where the growth will be. Since you mentioned Tesla Motors, I will note that they hire a lot of software engineers, and it's not a 100% proprietary locked-down atmosphere on the software side; open source collaboration is encouraged. Tesla even open sourced some of their patents, though I will admit I think Elon Musk's attitude towards open source software can be a bit duplicitous.
> That should be praise, no? I mean, aspects of sexism and odd views about social hierarchy can go in the trash, but their productivity is still very good.
Haha...accidentally several words there. I've fixed it.
> Ah, but that's on the hardware side. Japan is excellent at hardware [...] I have a hunch that AI and automation, in the future, will emphasizing hardware a bit less [...] it's not a 100% proprietary locked-down atmosphere on the software side; open source collaboration is encouraged
What you're saying doesn't make economic sense to me: won't open-sourcing the AI and software components commoditize those things, leaving the hardware components like robotics, vehicles and associated hardware like sensors to be the bit that makes the money? Similar to how operating systems are now given away for free with computers and phones?
This would be true if Japanese companies were eager to embrace the open software revolution. However, even as companies in the U.S. and Europe democratize AI, Japanese companies have stubbornly plodded along with closed-off, proprietary standards just like in the 70s and 80s. Sharp, Toshiba, Hitachi, Sony, KDDI, and so on. There needs to be a cultural shift.
Whether a Japanese company is closed off software-wise or not doesn't make a difference in terms of hardware profitability. Sony's camera sensor business is doing particularly well due to their sensors being in almost every flagship smart phone. They might not play a part in the software used by the owner of the phone - but I'd say competing against Google in the software space when their product is free might not be a winning strategy.
The provincial government in my home province of British Columbia, Canada, is developing a genuine progress indicator (GPI) to replace the GDP metric, which was the idea of the BC Green Party. The point made here is that GDP is a very imperfect solution. Christy Clark may have boasted about BC's booming economy by pointing to GDP numbers, but do they explain the whole story?
it's funny you mention open collaboration and praise China in same comment, while China is slowly shutting itself from rest of the world and literally none startups from China have been successful abroad where they don't have benefit of government protectionism
I did some digging in the /r/uwaterloo subreddit and it turns out that some customers were getting packages at no cost. Perhaps it wasn't financially viable.
I used it a bunch of times and having it on campus was pretty great. It was way safer than having the packages left randomly at the front of your residence. So as far as a "solved problem" is concerned, this definitely wasn't solved in any shape or form at Waterloo until BufferBox arrived.
On the microscopic chance that Jeff Bezos sees this: mellow out, man! There was an anecdote, I can't remember from where, maybe from the "Faces of Amazon" page, related to Jeff's response to the NYT criticism back in 2015. Jeff's response was, "should that happen to you, escalate to HR or email me directly". Someone did exactly that and got fired for it.
Isn't it a bitter irony that someone who became successful in Silicon Valley (Peter Thiel) was a driving force to get a president, whose policies could potentially lead to a bit of a decline for Silicon Valley, elected?
$600 CAD/month for a bedroom in a house that's close to frequent transit and in a low-crime area isn't hard to find if you don't have your heart set on living right in downtown Vancouver. I am not going to pay $2200/month to live in gangland-torn East Menlo Park.
"$600 CAD/month for a bedroom in a house that's close to frequent transit and in a low-crime area isn't hard to find if you don't have your heart set on living right in downtown Vancouver."
(Has not looked for an apartment in Vancouver in the last 10 years)
600 a month for a bedroom is definitely doable... I found two <$500/month vacancies within a year of moving to the vancouver area in 2014.. One was in Burnaby near SFU and the other was a steal in the commercial drive area with the catch of having a roommate who filled up the living room with bike parts.
You're right that it's not easy to come by though, and if you want to live within a 30 minute transit commute of downtown and have a single bedroom, it's unlikely you'll find anything for less than $750 that's not an SRO
And a salary that's a tiny fraction of SV (or anywhere in the US for that matter.) I recently had someone offering $35/hour for a "Lead Ruby Engineer" contract role in Vancouver. Salaries are ridiculously low there which even with cheaper housing, results in far less disposable income.
Yep, no options either, and our dollar is expected to plummet below $0.63 USD over next 3 years too so making $20-25/hr USD as a senior developer if anybody foolishly moves here.
The area bordered by US 101, Willow Road and the Union Pacific tracks is an exception. However, the rest of EMP makes Vancouver's Downtown Eastside or even the neighbourhood of Whalley in Surrey look like the most peaceful, crime-free utopia that has ever existed. At least we don't have Nortenos and Surenos blowing each others' heads off like in adjacent East Palo Alto.
Dude, what are you talking about? That triangle you outlined is virtually all of East Menlo Park that isn't office space. Anything south of 101 is not EMP (and generally pretty nice).
Have you been in the area in the last 30 years? There hasn't been a homicide anywhere in Menlo Park since 2012.
Even EPA has come up in the world dramatically in the last few years. As of 2014, its violent crime rate was half that of SF, only 25% more than San Jose, and roughly double that of Mountain View. I'd consider Mountain View a very safe place; EPA is basically turning into just another Silicon Valley suburb.
Combined with Expa Labs opening an office in Vancouver, it seems that President Trump is the best thing that could ever happen to Vancouver's tech scene. Our anchors historically have been companies like IBM, HSBC, Nokia, and Ericsson, which are all shells of their former selves and have long since closed down their presences in Vancouver. The few existing long-term anchors include MDA and Vision Critical, and SAP's BI division (SAP BusinessObjects and BusinessObjects Cloud, which originated from a local startup called Crystal Decisions which was purchased by SAP in 2008 by way of some Seagate M&As), along with gamedev and film/TV VFX studios which are all feast-or-famine. Just look at the fate of Radical, Roadhouse Interactive, United Front Games, Pixar's office in Vancouver. Sony Imageworks, A Thinking Ape and Animal Logic might go the same way if the loonie increases in value. HootSuite is set to go under eventually as CRM suites integrate social media management; they waited too late to IPO. So this might be the kick in the ass the Vancouver tech scene needs in the eventual post-HootSuite landscape.
Expa's founder is from BC so I think them opening up an office there is mostly due to an excess of cash they have from Uber's success, not that it necessarily makes sense from a VC perspective.
I hope I'm wrong since I would love to see Vancouver / Toronto have the same earning power as SV.
> Expa's founder is from BC so I think them opening up an office there is mostly due to an excess of cash they have from Uber's success, not that it necessarily makes sense from a VC perspective.
The founder of Slack grew up on Vancouver Island and went to UVic, the co-founders of Tableau is an SFU comp sci alumnus; so is the founder of Buddybuild[1] (the first genuine mobile-first CI provider, raised a series A round from KPCB (!) for $7.6M which is unheard of for a Van company, let alone they managed to find an SV VC firm which was okay with the company keeping the company local).
The way I see it, it matters less why they came (whether it makes sense from a VC perspective, the founders are homesick, or as a response to shifting political tides in the United States) and matters more that they're here.
We're opening up Vancouver because there's a massive untapped potential of talent in the area that we can help bridge with SF.
I've met and seen many amazing entrepreneurs, developers, designers and all other roles of a startup in this city who are very capable and talented. Our goal is to give them a platform and a opportunity to realize success without having to move south.
One big problem is economies of scale. The U.S. has more than five times the combined population of these three countries. A similar problem affects the Nordic wundercountries. They are some of the richest and happiest countries in the world and have some of the best education systems in the world, but their small population sizes hinder their sheer economic potential. Finland's population is only 5.4 million and Sweden's is only 9.5 million, and yet they still gave birth to Colossal Order, Spotify, Supercell, Rovio among others. Imagine how many tech powerhouses would come out of the Nordic countries if they had larger populations and thus larger economies of scale. Same with Norway. For years its economy has been tied to O&G, but with the collapsing price in oil the Norwegian government is investing their oil billions into startups; in the coming years, Norway's startup scene will explode. And all with a population of 5 million. If their population was larger, I think Norway's startup scene could be so, so much bigger.
One possible issue with the Nordics usurping the US's lead is their Janteloven which can work against entrepreneurship. However, other European countries may be able to take advantage, the UK, DE, FR (to a lesser extent due to regulations).
