A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

As I keep saying, I do love CB Insights daily newsletter. It provides me with needed information, but my love stems from Anand Sanwal’s quirky, irreverent, incisive comments, like this one.

I now see toothbrushes in a whole new light after this comment by the founder of a subscription-as-a-service toothbrush company.

Does this guy actually believe that something (AKA a toothbrush) that has no wheels, software or circuits can substitute as an “extension of personality?”

The only “change the world” ethos I can find here is greed coupled with the ability to sucker people who are either too lazy, too incompetent or too busy on social media to take care of their basic necessities.

Good grief, is this the best the vaunted Silicon Valley innovation machine can produce?

Image credit: HikingArtist

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Sometimes predictions are hilarious, especially those about where technology is taking us.

It’s not that they get the tech wrong, but they often don’t factor in the minor details — such as customers.

Media is aglow with stories of how autonomous vehicles (AVs) will literally change the world beyond anything you can imagine.

In a recent survey by AAA, for example, 78% of respondents said they were afraid to ride in an AV. In a poll by insurance giant AIG, 41% didn’t want to share the road with driverless cars. And, ironically, even as companies roll out more capable semi-AVs, the public is becoming less—not more—trusting of AVs, according to surveys over the past 2 years by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge and marketing firm J.D. Power and Associates.

And then there’s security.

Every time a software hack is reported, especially from a vulnerability the company knew about two years before it happened, as with Chrysler’s Jeep, or a bank, a retailer, a whatever, people grow more and more aware of just how vulnerable a software-based world that runs on online updates actually is.

Speaking at the National Governors Association meeting last year, Tesla’s Elon Musk, said,  “I think one of the biggest concerns for autonomous vehicles is somebody achieving a fleet-wide hack.”

The solution?

Mr Musk insists that a kill switch “that no amount of software can override” would “ensure that you gain control of the vehicle and cut the link to the servers”,

But what does control mean to an inert lump of metal that has no gas pedal, brakes, or steering wheel?

The car would just shut down wherever it was — maybe the middle of the freeway at rush hour or a lonely mountain road during a storm.

So customer trust and security are the main obstacles to the AV/tech-enabled world companies large and small are drooling over.

Given most companies historically cavalier attitude towards security and the general distrust of auto companies in particular, the result of multiple recalls over the years, changing people’s minds won’t be easy.

And for every step forward a major hack will mean at least three steps back.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Here are two little attitude tweaks that can make a very large difference in your holidays.

The first is a minor mind tweak that I can tell you from personal experience works extremely well.

Don’t let your mind play second fiddle to your assumptions.

And this from Michael Jackson (and others throughout time).

If you want to make the world a better place look inside yourself and make a change.

Of course, both require a level of self-knowledge and self-discipline that many of today’s connected, distracted humans don’t have.

Image credit: Wendy Cope

It’s been well-documented that human touch is crucial for babies and I’m willing to bet that it’s just as crucial for humans of all ages.

Which makes this one of the most demoralizing promotional videos I’ve seen.

This technology isn’t changing the world for the better — it’s making things worse.

Videocredit: info vinclu

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Although I rarely get comments, I would really appreciate any insights you can offer on this subject.

KG sent a press release he thought would interest me; it should interest you, too.

The Montreal-based artificial intelligence startup Lyrebird today unveils its voice imitation algorithm.
With this innovation, Lyrebird is going a step further in the development of AI applications by offering to companies and developers new speech synthesis solutions. Users will be able to generate entire dialogs with the voice of their choice or design from scratch completely new and unique voices tailored for their needs.

First, a quick story.

Years ago a friend got in trouble when someone spoofed his email, catfished him and made a bomb threat to a local school.  Fortunately, he was able to prove it wasn’t him.

It turned out that it was a kid who was mad at his teacher.

People are catfished all the time. Usually it’s not a big deal, but sometimes, as with my friend, potential repercussions can be very serious.

Nobody likes being catfished, but think of the damage that could be done using Lyrebird’s algorithm.

How could you explain a threatening or obscene phone call in your voice?

Lyrebird talks about benign uses, such as “personal assistants, for reading of audio books with famous voices, for connected devices of any kind, for speech synthesis for people with disabilities, for animation movies or for video game studios“ and shows off audio examples, including Donald Trump.

Now think what the outcome could be from a highly inflammatory call to Kim Jong-un mimicking Trump’s voice.

Tech people talk all the time about how they are “changing the world” and making it better, but they seem far more focused on enhancing their personal brand and making money, while turning a blind eye to any potential negative effects.

Are they truly amoral?

Or do they even owe humanity at least some consideration of the possible negatives?

What am I missing?

Image credit: HikingArtist

The entrepreneurial mantra that weaves through every startup vision and recruitment effort focuses on how X product/service will change the world.

This particular passion applies whether it’s a cure for cancer, a big data application, a new messaging app, social network or dating app.

How does one truly change the world?

Or is it a phrase with no real meaning?

Even if one does change it does the change make the world better?

Better by what yardstick and whose standards?

Change isn’t always a positive.

What is your responsibility if you do change it?

In his graduation speech at USC, Larry Ellison said, “You will change the world and the world will change you.”

For better or worse, change is the only true constant.

Flickr image credit: Inspiyr.com

Have you heard about Juicero?

A Silicon Valley-style solution for eating healthier.

“Today over 90% of Americans fail to consume the recommended servings per day,” founder and CEO Doug Evans wrote in a Medium post to unveil Juicero. “We call this the Produce Gap, and though there are many causes for it — from how food is marketed and subsidized to where it’s distributed — one of the primary reasons people don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables is that they see it as inconvenient. … And that’s what Juicero is all about. We’ve made it our mission to help people attain optimal health by making it easier for them to consume fresh raw foods in the most convenient way possible.”

And it does for a mere $700, plus whatever each juice packet costs (one packet = one glass of juice).

Entrepreneurs love to talk about changing the world and some actually do make a difference, but this isn’t going to help those in need — it’s a product for the haves.

The goal is to bring the cost down to $200, plus packets, which still requires a considerable amount of disposable income.

Those involved are a who’s who in the Valley.

He had a lot of help though from some Silicon Valley greats who weighed in on the design, including Apple’s Jony Ive along and famed tech designer Yves Béhar. The years spent perfecting it have been supported by venture capital that’s approaching $100 million from top tier investors like Artis Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Thrive Capital and Campbell Soup Company, among others. The co-founder of smart thermostat Nest, Matt Rogers, is a Juicero investor and board member.

The ultimate juicer for the 1%, in other words, for themselves.

Talk about self-indulgent masquerading as public interest.

Maybe someday a model will emerge for the next 25%, but products like these will never change the real world or the health of the rest of us.

Image credit: Juicero

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

 “I look back on my career and I didn’t change the world as an entrepreneur; I did as an educator. So I’m a little wistful. Now, my charge for twentysomething entrepreneurs is, do you want to be known as the guy who makes the next porn app or fart app or do you want to put men on Mars?” –Steve Blank

In light of Blank’s question above, you might want to take time to ask yourself ‘what am I doing’?

• What value am I adding to my intrinsic worth as a human being?

• Does my product/service make even a tiny portion of the world a better place in any way?

• How will my kids describe/explain me to their kids?

• What legacy will I leave behind?

• How will I be remembered?

• Will I be remembered?

Now write down your thoughts/answers.

Reread them over the next several days/weeks.

If you don’t like the profile that emerges it’s time to pivot your life.

Not randomly, but with the same consideration and planning you would use to pivot your company.

Image credit: HikingArtist

I’m not sure how many people are reading blogs this week, so, to be honest, I didn’t want to “waste” my wisdom (that’s a joke).

Instead of a Monday Golden Oldie, I thought I would share something I learned this weekend that shifted an attitude I had.

I’ve read a lot about virtual reality and the changes it will wrought.

But most of those changes seemed to be in areas that seemed frivolous, such as gaming.

Additionally, I couldn’t see people running around with VR headsets in the real world; perhaps in classrooms…

And I didn’t have much (any?) sense of ‘augmented reality’, other than the meaning of each word, or how it differed from virtual reality.

Then I saw this video from Magic Leap and at least part of the hoopla made a lot more sense.

Even I think it’s pretty cool.

Maybe it will even be used for more weighty things than games.

Cerviscope

Not all entrepreneurs start companies and develop apps, just as most world-changing breakthroughs are not software-based.

Many of the most inventive idea that will affect millions of people around the world are being done in giant corporations, academia and non-profits.

This is especially true when it comes to medical breakthroughs that are truly the stuff of humanity’s dreams.

20 years ago Dr. David Walmer went to Haiti to help paint a church. What he saw was so appalling he spent the next twenty years developing the CerviScope, an affordable tool to diagnose cervical cancer.

In the United States, cervical cancer is considered a preventable disease. “You have 10 years to detect this disease before it becomes untreatable,” Walmer says. “And it’s easy to detect. It develops on the outside of the cervix, which you can see.”

For those who watch Gray’s Anatomy this story about using modified HIV may seem a bit familiar.

There was nothing else to try. Nothing except a crazy experimental treatment never before given to a child: Blood was taken out of 6-year-old Emily’s body, passed through a machine to remove her white cells and put back in. Then scientists at the University of Pennsylvania used a modified HIV virus to genetically reprogram those white cells so that they would attack her cancer, and reinjected them. (…) [When the reaction almost killed her] Doctors gave Emily a rheumatoid arthritis drug that stopped the immune system storm–without protecting the cancer. Emily awoke on her 7th birthday and slowly recovered. A week later her bone marrow was checked. Emily’s father, an electrical lineman named Tom Whitehead, remembers getting the call from her doctor, Stephan Grupp: “It worked. She’s cancer free.”

Another approach is to tweak the body’s own immune system to stop cancer.

Researchers at the National Cancer Institute sequenced the genome of her cancer and identified cells from her immune system that attacked a specific mutation in the malignant cells. Then they grew those immune cells in the laboratory and infused billions of them back into her bloodstream.

Yet another effort uses genetically modified bacteria to target a specific protein found in most brain cancers.

The vaccine, known as ADU-623, uses a genetically modified version of the bacterium listeria monocytogenes — the bacterium that in its native form causes the listeria infection — and a specific mutated protein found only in cancer cells, said Keith Bahjat, a researcher at Providence Cancer Center in Portland. The protein used is found in more than half of brain cancers (…) The idea is to provoke an immune response to the bacterium, assuming the immune system will then also target the proteins found in the cancer cells. The goal is to wipe out the pieces of tumor that are so intertwined with brain tissue they cannot be completely removed by surgery.

Also to be noted, cancer diagnostics are going to the dogs.

Tsunami, a regal-looking dog with attentive eyes and an enthusiastic tail wag for her trainer friends. University of Pennsylvania researchers say she is more than 90 percent successful in identifying the scent of ovarian cancer in tissue samples, (…)  The largest study ever done on cancer-sniffing dogs found they can detect prostate cancer by smelling urine samples with 98 percent accuracy. At least one application is in the works seeking U.S. approval of a kit using breath samples to find breast cancer.

Pretty cool, and a friend/researcher in the industry tells me that rats are used to do diagnostic testing of sickle cell anemia.

On another front,  paralysis isn’t being ignored, either, leading to an amazing discovery.

But now, scientists are developing technology that can read signals directly from the brain and restore motion to a paralyzed hand — no healthy spine required.

Last, but not least, a look at how dentistry has seen the light in a way that could change a lot more than tooth replacement.

A Harvard-led team just successfully used low-powered lasers to activate stem cells and stimulate the growth of teeth in rats and human dental tissue in a lab. (…)  The ability to naturally regrow dental tissue could transform dentistry, making it possible to regrow teeth instead of replacing them with a substitute like porcelain. But even more amazingly, once it’s better understood, this same technique could potentially be used to heal wounds and regenerate bone, skin, and muscle.

Truly amazing, life-changing innovation happening in our lifetime.

Flickr image credit: Family HM