There are a lot of different commercial reasons reasons for sending people into space. Tourism is one. Private research on space stations is another. But one of the biggest potential money makers is hardly ever talked about: satellite repair and upgrading.

Even if the cost of lifting satellites into orbit is dramatically lowered by companies like SpaceX, the machines themselves cost hundreds of millions of dollars. It is far less expensive to upgrade or repair a satellite than to build a new one. And the ‘reduced cost’ launches of the future will still run in the tens millions.

Right now, satellites are not really engineered to be upgraded and serviced. But they will be. Expect to see teams sent into space or even based there whose primary mission is servicing satellites.Think “Sparky’s Sat Service Station.”

Some satellites in geosynchronous orbits are hard to get to. But they will be engineered to use their last bits of fuel to lower their orbits to where they can be captured and serviced. Or a small robot rocket would go get them and bring them in for servicing – a space based tow truck. Their components will be upgraded or repaired and they will be refueled and placed back in service, extending their lives by years.

This will also drive standardization of certain components, particularly around fuel and propulsion. For example, new satellites might come with a standardized mount for a small aftermarket rocket motor that could be attached to them to help them get back into position faster and bring them down for their next service. Sending 10 of these motors or their fuel into space would be far cheaper than 1 new satellite.

Astronauts get all the glory, but pretty soon space mechanics may be much more valued.

 

Did you save some money by not buying that self-driving car? Not so fast. You’re gonna pay that money and more in the long run.

First, your insurance premiums will eventually be higher because the insurance companies know that manual drivers are not as safe as computer drivers, and anyway, the only people  who want to drive manually are the Fast and Furious wannbees who are more likely to get into accidents.

Secondly, you’ll pay more in gas, because the computer will drive the car more efficiently than you ever can.

Thirdly, you’ll pay more tolls. Let’s say that a lane of highway has a capacity of 1,500 passengers cars per hour. But if all of those cars are in self driving mode they will be able to safely follow each other a little closer and do less rubbernecking, etc. The capacity might increase by 25% to 1,875 cars per hour. On a four lane highway, that adds a whole  lane of capacity.

Highways are very expensive to build. If more capacity is needed, it would be way cheaper to fit more cars on the road by encouraging  people to let their cars drive themselves. At the beginning there will be dedicated lanes for this. Then self driving will become the norm, and there will be dedicated lanes for manual drivers. Finally, on congested roads, they will start charging extra tolls to drive manually.

So all of the out of work body shop workers and auto mechanics that cannot afford the new self driving cars will have to pay a bit more money to commute to their new job at the recycling plant 100 km away.

 

Self-driving cars are coming sooner than you think, and that is bad news for the auto repair industry.

For one thing, there won’t be as much body shop work needed because cars will be crashing less often. Most body shops are small, locally owned businesses employing skipped blue collar labor, so look for a lot of small business owners to go out business and a bunch of skilled people to become unemployed. Not a great outcome.

You would think that auto repair shops would be in a better position. After all, cars that are driven wear out and have to be fixed, right?

Not so fast. Cars driven on autopilot will be driven less hard and therefore wear out slower, meaning fewer repairs. And even worse, the liability legalities around self driving cars might mean that in order to get insurance, you have to have certain repairs done by the dealer. Like anything to do with the steering. If steering repairs are not done ‘in house’, the car manufacturer could refuse any responsibility for self-driving mode and make the car uninsurable.

So look for another bunch of folks to be out of jobs, and car dealers to get additional revenue. Isn’t technology great?

Tesla recently started adding all of the hardware required for fully autonomous driving to their new cars. They have not delivered the software for this yet, but it will probably be available within a couple of years, regulations permitting. Other car makers won’t be far behind.

We’ve already noted what self driving cars will do to the Uber and Lyft drivers. Who else will be affected?

Insurance companies will clean up. Claims expenses will go down for property damage, medical costs and life insurance payouts but premiums won’t. In fact, the insurance companies will probably charge higher premiums for self driving cars because they are ‘risky’ and ‘unproven’. After a couple of years of record profits in the insurance industry, the state legislatures will get involved and maybe some of us will get a break on our rates. But don’t count on it.

The other day I grabbed an Uber to meet my wife at an Italian restaurant. On the way there I had the car stop at a flower stand and picked up a rose for her. On the Uber back home we were wishfully chatting about how much fun it would be if we were actually eating Italian food at a restaurant in Italy.

When I got on the internet the next day I got ads for flower delivery and tour packages to Italy for my wife’s upcoming birthday.

The above is fantasy (especially the part about the rose!) but not by much. Uber has already said it may track you even when you are not using its service. Is it really that much of a stretch to think that it will listen to your conversations whenever you are riding in one of its vehicles as well? It would be like Alexa, but listening all the time. Wait a minute, isn’t Alexa already listening all the time . . .  ?

Once self driving cars become the norm, and they are all wired into Big Highway Brother, you really won’t be able to go anywhere at all without being tracked. The assumption will be that anyone manually driving a car is trying to avoid tracking and up to no good. Not only that, since self driving cars can be safely compacted much closer together on the road, manual  drivers will be considered selfish for taking up more space on the roads. So the rap on manual drivers will be that they are selfish and shifty (pun intended). Or rich.

The rich, of course, will find a way around this, as they usually do. So they’ll still have some privacy. But the companies they own and run will know everything about you. Doesn’t the future sound fab?

 

As anyone who has ever tried to figure something out knows, YouTube is the go-to place for ‘how to’. Want to fix a computer? Scramble eggs? Wire a house? Shoot a ‘how to’ video? You can find instructions on YouTube. They won’t all be very good, but they’ll be there.

What’s next? Once augmented reality (AR) goes mainstream, the whole thing could change massively. Instead of browsing through five videos to find the trick to changing the belt on your vacuum cleaner, you will be able to choose from five people to guide you in real time from ‘how to’ to ‘can do’.

They won’t even have to be in your half of the world. They just have to speak your language well enough for you to understand them.

And how will you find these ‘can do’ consultants? Well, that is where it gets interesting. Consider that:

• Google owns YouTube, the far away leader in ‘how-to’ videos
• The leader in the (nascent) AR field right now is Microsoft with its HoloLens product
• The leader of Microsoft sees the cloud as his company’s future

Why would Microsoft help jump start a can do community, only to send that community over to arch competitor Google? Wouldn’t it be better to start its own cloud-based service integrated with its HoloLens product? And since the can-do consultants would want to charge something for their help, there would also be a natural integration with a cloud based payments system. Microsoft set up “Microsoft Payments” last year.

AR is going to be a major disruptor. More to come.

 

Anyone that has worked in an office environment knows that there are one or two people that everyone turns to if they need technology help. You may be one of those people. If you are, you must also know that it is a crap job.

This is one of those situations where the rewards for being smart and helpful are perversely negative. Perhaps someone in the office needed assistance with a function in Word, Excel, Salesforce, etc.and you, being a helpful newb, volunteered the answer. So instead of trying to find the answer by themselves next time, they just ask you from the get go.

And heaven help you if you fix a jam in the printer. From that day forward, every time something goes wrong you are the first call. Even if the damn thing is simply out of paper. FFS, can’t you gits do anything by yourselves?

So as soon as you change jobs or offices, you resolve to be as unhelpful as possible and not let anyone know that you are computer and equipment savvy. For you, that works out well. For office productivity – not so much.

It is kind of a corollary to the Peter Principle. Let’s call it the Rantastic Rudiment. At least in terms of office tech, the more experienced people are, the less helpful they become. In other words, when it come to office tech, you only get help from your least experienced colleagues.

With his company SpaceX, Elon Musk is setting himself up to conquer the space transportation market. Sure, he talks about colonizing Mars but his bread and butter is getting stuff up to space cheaper than the other guys.

If history is any guide then Musk, like the robber barons a century and a half before him, will soon be expanding beyond the transportation business. When the railroads opened up the North American West, they got into tourism and hotels, communications (telegraph lines along their rights of way) and natural resource extraction (timber) among other businesses.

SpaceX has already structured a strategic relationship with Bigleow Aerospace, a provider of space habitats for tourism and industry. SpaceX is also building satellites so it can provide internet services from space – watch out Comcast and Time Warner. Cell/sat phone services will probably be next.

Natural resource extraction is the outlier. The hard part is getting resources into space, not back from there. There are not a lot of resources in space to extract either.

All there is in space is a lot of radiation. Solar radiation. The kind of radiation you can generate electricity from. And beam it down to earth. If only there were a company  that was in the electricity business that SpaceX could team up with. A company that had power storage capability and that already had its tentacles into the power consumption of hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses.

Oh wait. There is such a company. And Musk already owns it. Solar City. How convenient. If I were Consolidated Edison or any other utility I would be playing very close attention.

Whatever you think of Uber and Lyft and similar companies, the industry they attacked pretty much had it coming. Not the cabbies themselves, but the medallion owners and cab companies. The taxi business is a poster child for an ossified industry that has not changed much over the years and made minimal use of technology. How long could it really get away with that and not get targeted by the ‘new economy’?

There were a couple of factors that set this industry up for disruption.

Taxis need a license or ‘medallion’ to cruise the streets legally. Because the number of medallions is tightly controlled and limited, they cost way more than the average driver can afford. In most cities, medallions are disproportionately concentrated in the hands of a small group of owners, many of whom are investors with no connection to the industry. Taxi drivers earn a living, but just barely. The return on their labor is much less than the return on the capital used to purchase the medallions.

One big reason is because the government regulates the industry. There are various types of regulation. Some is to keep us safe such as background checks on drivers and inspections of the vehicle mechanicals. But some is intended to manipulate commerce, i.e., limiting the number of medallions available.

I am not making the argument that regulation is good or bad, but I will say this: generally, when a government tries to regulate commerce in an economy with a free market system, the free market system wins. Maybe not at first, but eventually the system finds a way around the government’s efforts to control supply and demand and/or prices.

So if you were looking for an opportunity where the government was regulating commerce, the economic benefit was concentrated in a select few and the people actually working in the system really were not making out all that well from the current set up, wouldn’t the taxi industry pop up on your radar?

The ride sharing companies win.

Until the next big disruption.

Which could be sooner than you think.

When driverless cars come along won’t you just be summoning one of them instead of a human driver? So the folks that are driving for Uber, what have they got? 5 years? 10 years at the most before the next disrupter hits?

At this point the industry really will be more like AirBnB. With AirBnB, you own the capital (a piece of property) and you rent it out. You may have to pay someone to clean it out after the rental, but otherwise it is a pretty straightforward deal: you rent your asset to someone else. Won’t it be the same in the driverless car world? You own a car that has driverless functionality and put it up on AirCarnCar and someone rents it? It leaves your garage automatically, drives over to the bar and gives someone a ride home. Then it either stays out ready for another fare or comes home to your garage for the evening. Maybe you program it to stop at the all night car cleaners before it comes home so it is all fresh for you to commute to work in the next morning.

What will all the drivers do for income at that point? Hope they don’t invest their retirement money in Uber stock.

Here’s what I want to know about the new realities, virtual and augmented. Particularly augmented. If I have one of these headsets, why would I bother taking up a wall of my living room with a large television? I could put this headset on, wave my fingers around and viola! virtual 90 inch television wherever I want it.

If there were several of us watching there would never be a fight over the remote. We could all sit in the same room and watch the same or different shows together, skip back and forth DVR style, etc. One of us could be watching split screen, the other with subtitles.

Meanwhile TV technology gets cheaper and better. But is it doomed? Do TV’s go the way of stereo systems? Who has a high quality stereo anymore? Everyone listens to music on earbuds or a Bluetooth speaker. The sound is OK, but nothing like a high end audio system. Still, no one seems to care.

Maybe TV technology ends up being re-purposed to more of a background player vs. the focus of our attention. Framed, a TV could be art that changes depending on the mood it senses from your wearable. Or you build one into your room to get a window where a physical one is impossible, like on an inside wall. A camera outside and a large TV on the wall would give you a real time ‘window’ wherever you wanted one.