entrepreneurship

The freelance economy: Top trends to watch in 2017 — from blog.linkedin.com

Excerpt:

Freelancers now account for nearly 35% of the U.S. workforce and the trend is only picking up speed with more professionals opting to create their own jobs in lieu of more traditional full-time employment.

As we head into the new year, we want to shed a bit more light on this burgeoning sector of the workforce. What kind of location, industry and demographic trends are surfacing among the freelance professionals of 2016? You might not know, for example, that a whopping 40% of our freelancers are concentrated in just four states: California, Texas, Florida and New York. Or that more senior men are most likely to take the leap into freelancing.

The time is ripe to be a freelancer in America so we’re revealing insider insights like these to help you learn more about this trending profession. Check out the report below – gleaned from a survey of more than 9,500 of our ProFinder professionals – to see what we discovered.

From DSC:
Besides the workforce moving towards the increased use of freelancers, the pace of change has moved from being more linear in nature to more of an exponential trajectory.

Some important questions, therefore, to ask are:

Are our students ready to enter this type of workplace?
Can they pivot quickly?
Do they know how to learn and are they ready to be lifelong learners? (Do they like learning enough to continue to pursue it? Peoples’ overall quality of life would be much higher if they enjoyed learning, rather than be forced to do so in order to keep the bread and butter on their tables.)
Are they able to communicate in a variety of ways?
How are their customer service skills coming along?
How are their problem-solving skills coming along?
Do they know how to maintain their businesses’ books and do their taxes?
Are they digitally literate and do they have an appreciation for the pluses and minuses of technology?

I sure hope so…but I have my serious doubts. That said, many institutions/organizations representing K-12 and higher education are not doing a great job of innovating either. Though there certainly exists some strong pockets of innovation in some of our institutions out there — and the ability to pivot — taken as a whole, our institutions and organizations haven’t been as responsive, nimble, and innovative as our students need them to be.

After all, we are trying to prepare students for their futures (with the externality effect being that we, too, will also be better prepared for that future).

Some brief reflections from DSC:

#Blockchain will likely be used by colleges, universities, bootcamps, MOOCs, and others to feed web-based learner profiles, which will then be queried by people and/or organizations who are looking for freelancers and/or employees to fill their project and/or job-related needs.

As of the end of 2016, Microsoft — with their purchase of LinkedIn — is strongly positioned as being a major player in this new landscape. But it might turn out to be an open-sourced solution/database.

Data mining, algorithm development, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will likely have roles to play here as well. The systems will likely be able to tell us where we need to grow our skillsets, and provide us with modules/courses to take. This is where the Learning from the Living [Class] Room vision becomes highly relevant, on a global scale. We will be forced to continually improve our skillsets as long as we are in the workforce. Lifelong learning is now a must. AI-based recommendation engines should be helpful here — as they will be able to analyze the needs, trends, developments, etc. and present us with some possible choices (based on our learner profiles, interests, and passions).

“At this year’s WIRED conference, technology entrepreneurs were dialed in to how they might tackle world issues.” [jwtintelligence.com; Jade Perry]

On 11/11/2016, in 21st century, art, change, education, education reform, education technology, emerging technologies, engineering, entrepreneurship, ethics, future, global / globalization, society, technology (general), UK, user experience (UX), Virtual Reality (VR) / worlds / learning, by Daniel Christian

Tech for change – from jwtintelligence.com by Jade Perry

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

At this year’s WIRED conference, technology entrepreneurs were dialed in to how they might tackle world issues.

Over two days of sessions in London, speakers celebrated technology’s latest developments in fields ranging from healthcare to finance, from energy to art. Throughout the event, the notion of ‘humane tech’ emerged to describe the ways in which technology is being used to improve the state of the world. Increasingly, technology startups are harnessing the latest advances, including virtual reality and mobile technologies, to solve societal problems and tackle real issues.

Alexandra Ivanovitch, founder of Simorga, presented the company’s mission to develop VR apps that combat prejudice. The work follows research from BeAnotherLab which demonstrated that racial and gender biases can be reduced using virtual reality. When a user experiences the world as someone else, essentially swapping their body for a different one, empathy increases and bias decreases. Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab has created a similar experience in which participants encounter racism while embodying someone else. The project’s mission is reminiscent of Sandy Speaks, the chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to educate people about the Black Lives Matter movement.

In a world where 26% of countries are described as ‘not free,’ technology is increasingly coming into play to empower citizens.
…
Another human rights issue that technology can seek to tackle is access to education. With approximately 250 million children globally failing to learn even the basics, there is scope for teaching through a range of technologies.
…
In addition to social issues and human rights, technology is being used on a broader scale to fight climate change…
…
Renewable energies that transform the everyday were another key focus.

Why deep learning is suddenly changing your life — from fortune.com by Roger Parloff

Excerpt:

Most obviously, the speech-recognition functions on our smartphones work much better than they used to. When we use a voice command to call our spouses, we reach them now. We aren’t connected to Amtrak or an angry ex.

In fact, we are increasingly interacting with our computers by just talking to them, whether it’s Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, or the many voice-responsive features of Google. Chinese search giant Baidu says customers have tripled their use of its speech interfaces in the past 18 months.

Machine translation and other forms of language processing have also become far more convincing, with Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Baidu unveiling new tricks every month. Google Translate now renders spoken sentences in one language into spoken sentences in another for 32 pairs of languages, while offering text translations for 103 tongues, including Cebuano, Igbo, and Zulu. Google’s Inbox app offers three ready-made replies for many incoming emails.
…
But what most people don’t realize is that all these breakthroughs are, in essence, the same breakthrough. They’ve all been made possible by a family of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques popularly known as deep learning, though most scientists still prefer to call them by their original academic designation: deep neural networks.

Even the Internet metaphor doesn’t do justice to what AI with deep learning will mean, in Ng’s view. “AI is the new electricity,” he says. “Just as 100 years ago electricity transformed industry after industry, AI will now do the same.”

Graphically speaking:

“Our sales teams are using neural nets to recommend which prospects to contact next or what kinds of product offerings to recommend.”

One way to think of what deep learning does is as “A to B mappings,” says Baidu’s Ng. “You can input an audio clip and output the transcript. That’s speech recognition.” As long as you have data to train the software, the possibilities are endless, he maintains. “You can input email, and the output could be: Is this spam or not?” Input loan applications, he says, and the output might be the likelihood a customer will repay it. Input usage patterns on a fleet of cars, and the output could advise where to send a car next.

From DSC:
Consider the affordances that we will soon be experiencing when we combine machine learning — whereby computers “learn” about a variety of things — with new forms of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) — such as Augment Reality (AR)!

The educational benefits — as well as the business/profit-related benefits will certainly be significant!

For example, let’s create a new mobile app called “Horticultural App (ML)” * — where ML stands for machine learning. This app would be made available on iOS and Android-based devices. (Though this is strictly hypothetical, I hope and pray that some entrepreneurial individuals and/or organizations out there will take this idea and run with it!)

Some use cases for such an app:

Students, environmentalists, and lifelong learners will be able to take some serious educationally-related nature walks once they launch the Horticultural App (ML) on their smartphones and tablets!

They simply hold up their device, and the app — in conjunction with the device’s camera — will essentially take a picture of whatever the student is focusing in on. Via machine learning, the app will “recognize” the plant, tree, type of grass, flower, etc. — and will then present information about that plant, tree, type of grass, flower, etc.

Above image via shutterstock.com

horticulturalapp-danielchristian

In the production version of this app, a textual layer could overlay the actual image of the tree/plant/flower/grass/etc. in the background — and this is where augmented reality comes into play. Also, perhaps there would be an opacity setting that would be user controlled — allowing the learner to fade in or fade out the information about the flower, tree, plant, etc.

horticulturalapp2-danielchristian

Or let’s look at the potential uses of this type of app from some different angles.

Let’s say you live in Michigan and you want to be sure an area of the park that you are in doesn’t have any Eastern Poison Ivy in it — so you launch the app and review any suspicious looking plants. As it turns out, the app identifies some Eastern Poison Ivy for you (and it could do this regardless of which season we’re talking about, as the app would be able to ascertain the current date and the current GPS coordinates of the person’s location as well, taking that criteria into account).

easternpoisonivy

Or consider another use of such an app:

A homeowner who wants to get rid of a certain kind of weed. The homeowner goes out into her yard and “scans” the weed, and up pops some products at the local Lowe’s or Home Depot that gets rid of that kind of weed.
Assuming you allowed the app to do so, it could launch a relevant chatbot that could be used to answer any questions about the application of the weed-killing product that you might have.

Or consider another use of such an app:

A homeowner has a diseased tree, and they want to know what to do about it. The machine learning portion of the app could identify what the disease was and bring up information on how to eradicate it.
Again, if permitted to do so, a relevant chatbot could be launched to address any questions that you might have about the available treatment options for that particular tree/disease.

Or consider other/similar apps along these lines:

Skin ML (for detecting any issues re: acme, skin cancers, etc.)
Minerals and Stones ML (for identifying which mineral or stone you’re looking at)
Fish ML
Etc.

fish-ml-gettyimages

Image from gettyimages.com

So there will be many new possibilities that will be coming soon to education, businesses, homeowners, and many others to be sure! The combination of machine learning with AR will open many new doors.

* From Wikipedia:

Horticulture involves nine areas of study, which can be grouped into two broad sections: ornamentals and edibles:

Arboriculture is the study of, and the selection, plant, care, and removal of, individual trees, shrubs, vines, and other perennial woody plants.
Turf management includes all aspects of the production and maintenance of turf grass for sports, leisure use or amenity use.
Floriculture includes the production and marketing of floral crops.
Landscape horticulture includes the production, marketing and maintenance of landscape plants.
Olericulture includes the production and marketing of vegetables.
Pomology includes the production and marketing of pome fruits.
Viticulture includes the production and marketing of grapes.
Oenology includes all aspects of wine and winemaking.
Postharvest physiology involves maintaining the quality of and preventing the spoilage of plants and animals.

If you doubt that we are on an exponential pace of change, you need to check these articles out! [Christian]

On 09/22/2016, in 21st century, Amazon, Apple, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Asia, Australia, business, Canada, career development, change, changing business models, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, colleges, community colleges, computer science, convergence, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, dangers of the status quo, Daniel S. Christian, data related items, disruption, emerging technologies, engineering, entrepreneurship, ethics, Europe, experimentation, faith, future, game-changing environment, generational differences, global / globalization, Google, health, hearts -- matters of the heart, heutagogy, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, human-computer interaction (HCI), IBM, ideas, India, innovation, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, interaction design, internet, K-12 related, leadership, learner profiles, learning, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, legislatures / government / legal, lifelong learning, machine-to-machine communications, marketplaces, Microsoft, mobile technologies, Near Field Communication (NFC), new business models, organizational change, pace of change, platforms, political science, professional development, psychology, reinvent, relationships, religion, research, robotics, society, sociology, staying relevant, strategy, student-related, surviving, the downsides of how people use tech, training / L&D, trends, UK, United States, universities, web-based collaboration, workplace, youth, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
The articles listed in this PDF document demonstrate the exponential pace of technological change that many nations across the globe are currently experiencing and will likely be experiencing for the foreseeable future. As we are no longer on a linear trajectory, we need to consider what this new trajectory means for how we:

Educate and prepare our youth in K-12
Educate and prepare our young men and women studying within higher education
Restructure/re-envision our corporate training/L&D departments
Equip our freelancers and others to find work
Help people in the workforce remain relevant/marketable/properly skilled
Encourage and better enable lifelong learning
Attempt to keep up w/ this pace of change — legally, ethically, morally, and psychologically

PDF file here

One thought that comes to mind…when we’re moving this fast, we need to be looking upwards and outwards into the horizons — constantly pulse-checking the landscapes. We can’t be looking down or be so buried in our current positions/tasks that we aren’t noticing the changes that are happening around us.

LinkedIn ProFinder expands nationwide to help you hire freelancers — from blog.linkedin.com

Excerpt:

The freelance economy is on the rise. In fact, the number of freelancers on LinkedIn has grown by nearly 50% in just the past five years. As the workforce evolves, we, too, are evolving to ensure we’re creating opportunity for the expanding sector of professionals looking for independent, project-based work in place of the typical 9 to 5 profession.

Last October, we began piloting a brand new platform in support of this very endeavor and today, we’re excited to announce its nationwide availability. Introducing LinkedIn ProFinder, a LinkedIn marketplace that connects consumers and small businesses looking for professional services – think Design, Writing and Editing, Accounting, Real Estate, Career Coaching – with top quality freelance professionals best suited for the job.

Also see:

Entrepreneurs & VCs out there, take note. How much longer before the functionalities found in tools like Bluescape & Mural are available via tvOS-based devices?

On 08/04/2016, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, A/V -- audio/visual, active learning, adult learning, Bring your own device (BYOD), collaboration, colleges, communications, communities of practice, community colleges, convergence, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, Daniel S. Christian, digital learning, education technology, emerging technologies, engagement / engaging students, engineering, entrepreneurship, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, interactivity, K-12 related, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, lifelong learning, multimedia, platforms, productivity / tips and tricks, project-based learning, real-world assignments, smart/connected TV, social learning / networks, technologies for your home, telepresence, television, tools, training / L&D, ubiquitous learning, universities, user experience (UX), using teams, vendors, videoconferencing, virtual K-12 schools, virtual tutoring, visualizing information, web-based collaboration, webinars, workplace, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
How much longer before the functionalities that are found in tools like Bluescape & Mural are available via tvOS-based devices? Entrepreneurs and VCs out there, take note. Given:

the growth of freelancing and people working from home and/or out on the road
the need for people to collaborate over a distance
the growth of online learning
the growth of active/collaborative learning spaces in K-12 and higher ed
the need for lifelong learning

…this could be a lucrative market. Also, it would be meaningful work…knowing that you are helping people learn and earn.

From DSC:
I would like to highlight a few items from this month’s Campus Technology magazine:

2016 Campus Technology Innovators Awards
We honor 11 institutions using technology in innovative ways to improve teaching, learning, administration and operations in higher education.

Editorial: CT Innovators Honorable Mentions
Gleaned from this year’s Campus Technology Innovators award nominations, these 8 projects are making strides in virtual reality, synchronous online learning, digital literacy and more.

How blockchain will disrupt the higher education transcript
Blockchain technology could offer a more learner-centered alternative to traditional credentialing.

MIT Technology Review | 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2016

On 07/01/2016, in 21st century, biology, bots, communications, data related items, emerging technologies, entrepreneurship, future, global / globalization, health, robotics, society, by Daniel Christian

10 Breakthrough Technologies 2016 — from technologyreview.com

Excerpt:

Which of today’s emerging technologies have a chance at solving a big problem and opening up new opportunities? Here are our picks. The 10 on this list all had an impressive milestone in the past year or are on the verge of one. These are technologies you need to know about right now.

Also see:

5 essential skills you need to keep your job in the next 10 years — from fastcompany.com by Gwen Moran
Automation may affect half of jobs. Here are five areas to develop to keep yourself employed.

Excerpts/quotes (emphasis DSC):

Trendspotting
Collaborating in new ways
Building brands—even as employees
Learning next-level technology
Developing your emotional intelligence

Trendspotting
With the workplace changing so quickly, it’s essential to develop systems to not only monitor those changes, but to distill the information and training you’ll need to keep up with them. That means staying abreast of industry developments, taking classes, attending trade events, and following thought leaders who are talking about your sector. It also means being observant about the day-to-day tasks and functions that matter and how they’re changing, separating anomalies from trends.
Looking for the next changes and remaining ahead of the curve in learning about them will be essential to remaining among the most marketable employees.
In addition, following trends and thought leadership in your own sector and ensuring that your skills are staying up to date will also play a role.
…remaining employable will require embracing rather than eschewing tech changes
Pay attention to what’s happening in the most advanced workplaces in your field and prepare. That way, you’ll be ahead of the game when the changes come to you.

From DSC:
It is great to see an article that encourages trendspotting, being aware of what’s happening in the world around us, and looking upwards/into the horizons as key skills! Given the pace of change, this is becoming critical for people to do — otherwise, we risk being blindsided by changes — by incoming “waves” of change — that we didn’t see coming. We don’t want to be tapped on the shoulder, personally escorted to that conference room with all of the windows having cardboard on them, and then be let go…to our utter shock and dismay.

Laid Off Get Back On Track

Image from:
ttp://www.careerealism.com/laid-off-get-back-immediately/

This also means that we should be teaching more about trendspotting and futurism in K-20.

Further questions/thoughts:

Will our students be able to pivot? To reinvent themselves? To practice lifelong learning?
.
Will our students have the ability to peer into the horizons and be able to ascertain potential scenarios and directions that could impact them? Will they have the problem solving skills to plan for potential plans of action to address these scenarios?
.
Does each of us have an effective learning ecosystem that is robust enough — and up-to-date — that will help us adapt, learn, and grow?

CNBC’s Top 50 Disruptors for 2016

On 06/14/2016, in Augmented Reality (AR), business, change, changing business models, corporate / business world, entrepreneurship, experimentation, human-computer interaction (HCI), innovation, new business models, pace of change, Virtual Reality (VR) / worlds / learning, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Meet the 2016 CNBC Disruptor 50 companies — from cnbc.com
CNBC reveals the 2016 Disruptor 50 list, identifying start-ups out ahead of big consumer and business shifts, and already worth billions.

Excerpt:

In the fourth annual Disruptor 50 list, CNBC features private companies in 15 industries — from aerospace to financial services to cybersecurity to retail — whose innovations are revolutionizing the business landscape. These forward-thinking starts-ups have identified unexploited niches in the marketplace that have the potential to become billion-dollar businesses, and they rushed to fill them. Some have already passed the billion-dollar mark at a speed that is unprecedented. In the process, they are creating new ecosystems for their products and services. Unseating corporate giants is no easy feat. But we ranked those venture capital–backed companies doing the best job. In aggregate, these 50 companies have raised $41 billion in venture capital at an implied Disruptor 50 list market valuation of $242 billion, according to PitchBook data. Already it’s hard to think of the world without them. Read more about the consumer and business trends that stand out in the 2016 list ranking and the methodology used to select this year’s Disruptor companies.

Top 10 future technology jobs: VR developer, IoT specialist and AI expert — from v3.co.uk; with thanks to Norma Owen for this resource
V3 considers some of the emerging technology jobs that could soon enter your business

Top 10 jobs:

10. VR developer
9.   Blockchain engineer/developer
8.   Security engineer
7.   Internet of Things architect
6. UX designer
5.   Data protection officer
4.   Chief digital officer
3.   AI developer
2.   DevOps engineer
1.   Data scientist

Big Data in 2016: Cloudy, with a chance of disappointment, disillusionment, and disruption — from insidebigdata.com by Daniel Gutierrez

Excerpt:

Expect to see many organizations become deeply disillusioned by Big Data in 2016 because they had hoped to get different results from their business, without using Big Data to actually change how they operated. Those who used Big Data to make substantive changes to how they operate will dramatically out-compete those who used Big Data to produce merely-more-detailed reports, but little actual change.

Young entrepreneurs are applying the power of big data to the real world — from entrepreneur.com by John Pilmer

Excerpt:

Two 15-year-old students from Business Technology Early College High School (BTECH) in Queens, New York dazzled me with big-picture thinking about the social implications of harnessing big data while protecting our future. The teens shared very entrepreneurial thoughts of how to deliver genomic big data solutions without diminishing individual self-worth.

One young man used the example of applying genomic big data to people to create a “Superman” in the future. Yet, he noted that if everyone were Superman, no one would be. In other words, no one would be unique, stand out from the crowd. Wow! That’s big picture thinking that reminds me of a science fiction novel.

The data science industry: a look at the key roles — from dataconomy.com by Darya Niknamian

Here is the infographic from that article:

The art of data science: The skills you need and how to get them — from kdnuggets.com by Joseph Blue
Learn, how to turn the deluge of data into the gold by algorithms, feature engineering, reasoning out business value and ultimately building a data driven organization.

The 22 skills of a Data Scientist… — from dataconomy.com by Matt Reaney

From DSC:
The items above made me think of trying to excerpt meaning from big data…which made me think of programming…which lead me to think of algorithms…which lead me to think of artificial intelligence (AI). Then, when I was thinking about AI, I wondered…

How might AI and algorithms play into the future of MOOCs — especially in regards to providing automated assessments, scoring, and grading…?

Hmmm….could be helpful…though knowledgeable experts/humans will likely still be needed. But such technologies could help with some of the heavy (and often time-consuming) lifting here.

Learning Ecosystems

“At this year’s WIRED conference, technology entrepreneurs were dialed in to how they might tackle world issues.” [jwtintelligence.com; Jade Perry]

Highlighting a few items from this month’s Campus Technology Magazine

CNBC’s Top 50 Disruptors for 2016

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