Perspective on technology has everything to do with where you start.
If you see the potential in every new technology innovation, you may be highly optimistic about the future.
Or, if you take a longer view, looking back, you may see that many of the promised benefits of technology have not come to pass.
This is the perspective of Dr. Jeffrey Funk, my guest on The Eddy Network Podcast. We have had a very interesting discussion about the diffusion of technological innovations (Everett Rogers) over the past few generations.
Dr. Jeffrey Funk
Technology Consultant
Retired Associate Professor
National University of Singapore
Author - Unicorns, Hype, and Bubbles: A Guide to Spotting, Avoiding, and Exploiting Investment Bubbles in Tech
LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/dr-jeffrey-funk-a979435
About Jeffrey Funk:
My career has focused on how new technologies emerge and diffuse as a professor and consultant. After working in a semiconductor factory for two years and receiving my PhD from Carnegie Mellon, I was one of the first to recognize the potential for smart phones during the late 1990s and early 2000s in Japan, and I worked with several Western companies (2003 book, Mobile Disruption). I was also recommending to mobile service providers as early as 2004 that they should focus on apps long before the iPhone was released in 2007. The research done as part of this consulting earned me the NTT DoCoMo mobile science award in 2004.
After I began working at the National University of Singapore, I was also one of the first to recognize that new technologies were not quickly diffusing and that most were vastly overhyped. My Linkedin account reports daily on this evidence and the need for better assessments of new technologies. I am conversant in economic assessments of VR, AR, AI, 5G, delivery drones, smart homes, wearables, and many others.
My latest book is " Unicorns, Hype, and Bubbles: A Guide to Spotting, Avoiding, and Exploiting Investment Bubbles in Tech. The book helps readers understand the economics of startups and why 90% of Unicorn startups are unprofitable. The two biggest reasons are tech-lite ideas that have little chance of raising productivity above existing businesses and when new technology has been considered, startups have assumed that a new technology would diffuse so fast that they didn't have to identify which customers and applications would be the first.
