Draw Conclusions from Models, Not the Reverse
New Scientist this month reports on a study by the Santa Fe Institute comparing dummy and actual market and limit orders on the London Stock Exchange. I do not make this stuff up, folks. If we keep getting all this hilarious copy, we shall be forced to revive Bread & Circuses, our industry humor gazette on ice, so as to clearly differentiate it from the serious stuff. Don’t make me do it!
Entitled, ‘Zero intelligence’ trading closely mimics stock market, it shows that a lot of the volatility is irrational, e.g. not tied to information. Oh, to have the luxury of time to draw parallels, but alas, I must leave that up to you. I am far too busy modeling the highly evolved behavior of Hollywood studios, record labels, and other content developers interacting with the orderly evolution of delivery technology, and predicting the logical and reasonable reaction of consumers to those coherent business activities so as to forecast markets to illuminate the most economically efficient path. Do post at will.
This story was pointed out by Ray Kurzweil’s news feed, highly recommended reading for the eclectic technophile, along with the news from Esther’s Papa Freeman Dyson, writing in Technology Review, “Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over.” Far from the threatening specter of genetically modified food supplies that substitute Monsanto’s and Pfizer’s earnings objectives for natural life, his brief description has exotic birds singing and innocent children giggling on a soundtrack hidden in the narrative.
Which is all by way of introduction to the main course, a pointer to CNET’s article on the formation of the Holographic Versatile Disc Alliance, yes, Versatile, to develop pre-commercial standards for the next generation of optical discs. This led me to update our technology tracking of InPhase and Aprilis, the two leading venture-funded development labs for holographic media, which led to including the discs in the current-decade roadmap for commercial optical disc technologies being released tomorrow. Although the article speaks about six founders, the members and their investors and partners comprise a far larger and more influential consortium with deep ties to government funded R&D projects PRISM and HDSS where much of the basic science was developed.
The roster of collaborating organizations includes both US start-ups, Aprilis and InPhase, plus Optware who names as among its investors Intel and Matsushita (Panasonic brand), as well as corporate media firms Fuji and Konica, replicator MemoryTech, memory chip makers Micron Technology and Texas Instruments, coatings makers Nippon Paint and Toagosei and equipment makers PulsTec and Coherent. InPhase investors include 3M spin-off Imation, Hitachi Maxell, and ALPS. Aprilis, also involved with PRISM and HDSS, used early stage funding to purchase additional holographic memory patents from Manhattan Scientific, and has a Dow Corning executive on its BOD.
This surge in credibility, while not tough enough soon enough to be a direct blue laser disc alternative, puts the heat on the blue generation to Eat or Be Eaten, with specs that not only represent a higher order of magnitude improvement in performance like CD represented with its long life cycle and yet unbeatable sales history, but put optical storage back on track with fixed magnetic and semiconductor memories having better generation-over-generation performance improvements.
While there is neither time nor desire (read: funding) to model every aspect of innovation and market outcomes, there is still much to do to track and predict how content and technology trigger product life cycles to allow management to outperform the “zero intelligence” trader.