Jim Harris

Download PDF Inexpensive solar disrupts traditional power producers By Jim Harris Solar power is the cheapest source of new electricity globally. In April 2021, the world record low bid of 1.04 cent per kWh of solar power was announced for 600MW of solar power in Saudi Arabia — that is enough energy to power 100,000 homes. Power Purchase Agreements (PPA) are for 20 or more years and include both capital and operating costs. This is bad news for traditional power producers globally. It costs more than a cent to run an existing gas, coal or nuclear power plant. In other words, the combined capital (CAPEX) and operating (OPEX) expense of some solar is now cheaper than the operating expenses of traditional power plants. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the cost to operate nuclear power plants are two to five cents per kWh; for coal it is two to four cents; and for natural gas it is between four and ten cents. Solar and wind power are the cheapest source of electricity for two thirds of the world's population, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF). The economies in these countries represent 72% of the world’s GDP and 85% of global power demand. Looking back, the price of solar power has plummeted from $77 per Watt in 1977 to just 12¢/Watt in 2020. This stunning decline of 640X is head spinning. Solar power has been declining in cost 18% annually since 2010. Most traditional electricity utilities have been slow to embrace … [Read more...] about Plummeting Price of Solar Power

Download PDF How Zoom Beat Huge, Established Videoconferencing Players By Jim Harris In December of 2019, Zoom had 10 million daily users. From April to June 2020, the app was downloaded 300 million times – 200 million times from Google Play and 94 million times on Apple’s App Store, shattering records for the most downloaded non-game app in history. How many companies do you know that increased their customer count by 30X during the pandemic? And look at Zoom’s revenue growth: Zoom’s Quarterly Revenue Zoom had the highest growth in brand recognition among American consumers in 2020, according to Morning Consult’s annual study. And Zoom is worth as much as the top seven airlines (by 2019 revenue) COMBINED in March 2021. How could videoconferencing upstart Zoom crush well established players like Skype (owned by Microsoft) and Cisco’s Webex? I was in Nepal in 1998 and needed to call back to North America. By telephone, it cost 300 Nepalese Rupees per minute (about $2.50 US). Instead I went to an Internet café, put on a headset and called for just 10 Rupees a minute (8.5 cents). While at the time the Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology wasn’t duplexed, I nonetheless predicted that all long distance would be free by 2005 for North American consumers. Skype beat my prediction by 2 years launching in 2003. In the graph below, VoIP calls (in red) don’t even register until 2005. International long distance for telcos (navy blue) peaked in … [Read more...] about Zoom Boom

Download PDF By Jim Harris The Augmented Reality market has evolved. By 2025, the AR global market will be $300 billion with 1.2 billion users. I attended Huawei’s Better World Summit for 5G + AR online on Jun 17, 2021. The company introduced the Huawei AR Engine, a development platform for mobile devices, and released a white paper AR Insight and Application by Strategy Analytics which you can download here. AR has huge potential in application in retail and eCommerce, tourism, health care and education. To drive AR’s adoption and predicted explosive growth, Huawei called for greater collaboration among industry players. The explosion of AR will be driven by developer tools becoming simpler and more powerful. For instance, Huawei's Air Photo uses unique algorithms to convert a 2D photo into a digital 3D model, significantly simplifying AR 3D character modeling. And Huawei’s AR Engine allows developers to write 10 lines of code to create mobile AR effects during app development. What is Augmented Reality (AR)? Ikea has an AR application that lets you see what a room would look like with an Ikea couch in it. The reality (a photo of your home) is augmented with an image of an Ikea couch. This is a great example of how AR can be used in retail. One of the most basic mobile AR apps are the Instagram filters people overlay on pictures that they take of themselves. Cosmetic App During the COVID pandemic, women don’t want to try on makeup … [Read more...] about Augmented Reality & 5G

Download PDF Plug and Play Options for Zooming Like a Pro By Jim Harris In December 2019, Zoom had 10 million daily users. In the second quarter (April, May and June) of 2020, Zoom’s app was downloaded 300 million times: 94 million from Apple’s App Store (shattering the previous record of 50 million downloads for a non- gaming application) and more than 200 million times from Google Play. During the pandemic, Zoom has become the go-to video conferencing service – downloaded at six times the rate of any other competitor: Source: Apptopia and Bloomberg According to Gartner 54% of leaders say that poor technology and/or infrastructure for remote working is the biggest barrier to effective remote working in their organization. Given how much people are zooming from home for work, how can you easily create professional setup? Companies like Google, Spotify and Twitter are giving employees a $1,000 budget to get an ergonomic chair and all the technology required to have a professional work from home setup up. As no one from the IT department can drop by to help you, what peripherals are easy to set up, high quality and easy to use? Web Cam The Logitech Brio 4K is amazing. Every Zoom call I’ve been on in the pandemic I’ve had the highest resolution video of anyone. The images are so crisp that you can read the titles of the books in the bookshelf behind me. This USB cam is easy to set up. Most importantly the camera automatically adjusts … [Read more...] about Easy Work-From-Home Zoom Set Up

Download PDF Cheaper batteries, COVID-19 and autonomous tech are all driving the death of legacy car companies At Tesla’s Battery Day in September, CEO Elon Musk announced a number of innovations that should, if all goes according to plan, drive down battery prices by 56% by the end of 2023. That’s when Musk plans to release a US$25,000 electric vehicle (nicknamed the Model 2 by the company’s fans) – that’s $10,000 less than what the average new gas-powered car currently costs in the U.S. Its arrival is destined to spell trouble for the US$10-trillion global transportation market. Historically, EVs have been about $12,000 more expensive than gas cars, in large part thanks to battery costs. But as batteries become cheaper every year, EV sales have been growing exponentially. The cost of lithium-ion batteries plummeted 89% from 2010 to 2020, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. In 2016, batteries accounted for 48% of the cost of EVs. Today, that’s fallen to 26%. It’s not the only trend driving the conventional car industry off a cliff. Pandemic is fuelling “peak auto” Other than spikes in leisure-wear sales, the pandemic has dramatically slowed consumer spending – and cars are the second largest capital expense for North American families, after housing. Seventy million U.S. households own two or more cars, and pre-pandemic, the average American worker spent five work weeks a year in traffic commuting to and from their jobs. Now that approximately … [Read more...] about The top trends killing the auto industry

Download PDF Medicalization of the Smartphone Driving Adoption By Jim Harris The COVID crisis is turbo charging the adoption of telemedicine and transforming health care. During the COVID-19 outbreak in China a staggering 50% of all medical visits were remote. Who really wants to go sit in a hospital or doctor’s office with people who are sick? When was this ever a good idea? With more than 300 million registered users in China, Ping An Good Doctor, is the world’s largest health care platform offering online consultations, hospital referrals and appointments, health management, and wellness interaction services. It connects individual consumers with health care resources. US Telehealth At the end of 2018, digital health was a $3 billion industry in the US. By the end of 2020 it will be a $250 billion a year industry in the US, according to McKinsey & Company. The COVID pandemic is driving almost 100X growth! Digital health was used by 11% of US patients in 2019 and during the pandemic that surged to 46% in 2020. The adoption of telemedicine shifted into hyper-drive, with US virtual health-care interactions on pace to top a billion in 2020, according to analysts at Forrester Research. UK’s Babylon Health Babylon Health allows someone to access a doctor online by video conferencing and extensively uses artificial intelligence (AI) to prompt the doctor on what question to ask the patient and, with each answer, the system re-calculates the … [Read more...] about COVID Crisis is Transforming Health Care Globally

Download PDF The COVID Crisis Accelerating Mobile Dominance By Jim Harris MOBILE FIRST FIRMS have a 825% higher value upon IPO than companies with no mobile focus, highlighting how essential mobile is for success. This is a staggering finding from the 2020 Mobile Report by App Annie. Here are a few reasons: Scaling Mobile first firms scale far faster than physically based enterprises. Uber which was founded in March 2009 is worth more than every taxicab company in North American added together! Supercomputer In My Pocket In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov. For IBM, this was a $100 million project. Today the $1,000 smartphone I carry in my hip pocket has more raw computing power than Deep Blue. Companies that have no mobile focus are choosing not to use the smartphone supercomputer that rests in billions of peoples’ pockets or purses. Location The highest revenue for any non-gaming app is . . . Tinder. Tinder uses geo location to match users with others nearby. In the same way, LetGo and OfferUP use geo location to allow local buyers and sellers of second hand items to instantly connect. Both companies are less than 10 years old and each have a valuation of $1.5 billion. In March 2020, they announced that they will combine their US operations. All Needs Millennials and GenZ live a mobile-centric life. They turn to their mobile to connect, for entertainment, for dating and relationships, for buying … [Read more...] about Mobile First Firms Have 825% Higher Value Compared To Companies with No Mobile Focus

Download PDF Electrification, Autonomous Vehicles and the Internet of Things revolutionize the school bus market By Jim Harris The price of Lithium-ion batteries has plummeted by 89 percent from 2010 to 2020, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), and the trend will continue: Source: BNEF The largest cost of electric vehicles (EVs) historically has been batteries. In 2016, for instance, batteries were 48 percent of the cost of electric vehicles. Today, that’s fallen to only 26 percent, according to BNEF. Electric vehicles are getting cheaper and cheaper every year. Tesla Battery Day Tesla’s Battery Day was on Sept. 22, which happened to coincide with my Tech Talk on Day 2 of the virtual Bus Technology Summit presented by School Transportation News. Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced many innovations that will dramatically drive down battery prices even further over the next three years. By the end of 2023, batteries will be 56 percent cheaper per kWh—$58/kWh based on BNEF’s weighted volume average price. This will completely disrupt the $10 trillion global transportation market and it will have a profound impact on the school bus market. By the end of 2023 electric vehicle (EV) passenger cars will become cheaper than gas powered autos. Musk announced that Tesla will release a $25,000 EV, which has been nicknamed the Model 2 by the company’s fans. Given that the average new gas car costs $35,000, that spells big trouble for the U.S. auto … [Read more...] about Tech Trends Driving Dramatic Disruption

Download PDF Firms Focused On Digital Transformation, Mobile First & AI Centric Strategies Experiencing Explosive Growth By Jim Harris The Coronavirus has wreaked havoc on the global economy. COVID-19 is hyper-charging the growth of companies that have aggressively pursued digital transformation, by putting mobile first philosophy at the core of their business strategy and embedding artificial intelligence (AI) in all their products, services and business models. Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom had 10 million daily users in December 2019 and in April 2020 that had exploded to 300 million daily participants. How many companies can boast at 30X growth in customer count during the pandemic? COVID Consequences Many companies prevented people from working from home pre-pandemic. All that has changed. Companies and boomer executives are discovering that people can be productive working from home. Post pandemic not everyone is going to want work in the office. Dell Computer in Austin, Texas expects that half of its 160,000 employees will never work from its offices going forward. About 40% of the average large company’s employees could work from home. I predict that companies will, on average, allow people to work two or three days from home. Firms will realize that they can cut the square footage of their corporate office space by 40% and drive millions of dollars directly to the bottom line. This is bad news for corporate real estate companies and property … [Read more...] about COVID Crisis Accelerating Three Trends

Download PDF The hottest topic at CES, in my opinion, was artificial intelligence (AI). AI chips will add intelligence into billions of smart devices in the coming years. These devices will be at the edge — meaning that they’ll work without having to be connected to the cloud or a data center. Syntiant won a CES 2020 Best of Innovation Award for its NDP100 Processor. It is the frst chip to put machine learning processing into almost any consumer device. The chip only draws 150 microwatts of power and is so tiny it can be embedded in a hearing aid. What’s the benefit? At a noisy party, the AI chip can distinguish which voices are in conversation with the hearing aid wearer and amplify them while quietening the background noise. We know about CPUs (central processing unit) from PCs, and GPUs (graphics processing units) from graphics, gaming and now blockchain applications and crypto mining. Now we are going to see a dramatic rise of NPUs — neural processing units. Syntiant's NDP100 is one of these. Duncan Stewart is director of research at Deloitte for TMT (Technology, Media and Telecommunications). At Deloitte’s TMT Predictions 2020, Duncan predicted that AI chips at the edge are poised for explosive growth. In 2020 a staggering 750 million AI edge chips will be sold and that will more than double to 1.6 billion by 2024. More than 60% of these — a billion chips — will be embedded in our smartphones making them even more intelligent. AI chips are already … [Read more...] about Artificial Intelligence: A Hot Topic at CES 2020