As we were talking about disruptive innovation in class today, I found a very interesting article about how Netflix successfully disrupted the DVD rental business and changed the way we watch television and movies. It’s really interesting to me because I never even thought that Netflix could be part of the reason that the beloved movie rental store, Blockbuster, was put out of business. Similar to what we learned in class about music streaming services like Spotify overtaking the music buying industry, Netflix and other services did the same thing to Blockbuster, which changed the TV and movie business as we know it.

Like the music streaming industry, the movie and video industry evolved from paying each time you rent a video to now paying a subscription to watch as many movies and TV shows as you want. Netflix disrupted Blockbuster’s business by making their services more innovated and modernized, more accessible from anywhere, and gave personalized options to users that Blockbuster was never able to match. As talked about in the article I found, some of the keys that drove Netflix’s growth include technology, comfort, on-demand content, subscription and data driven content to fit personal preferences.

When I was taking my weekly trip to Blockbuster as a kid, I could have never predicted how much change there would be within this industry, and that Blockbuster would be completely gone in a few years. That makes me wonder about today’s streaming services, and the future of the industry. What’s the next disruptive innovation that is going to take over the already advanced services that we use every day? How long until there is a new disruptive innovation in the streaming industry?

source: https://www.businessmodelsinc.com/exponential-business-model/netflix/

The article I found talks about Google’s new Nest Mini, which is an improved version of their Google Home products. It only costs $49 and is very compact, as the article says it is about the size of a doughnut. It comes with a lot of new intelligence and improved hardware in software that allows it to compete directly with its main competitor, the Amazon Echo Dot.

The new Nest Mini smart speaker has twice the amount of bass as the Google Home Mini, making its sound much louder and clearer. Another new feature that this product has is that you can mount it to the wall, which allows users to truly incorporate it into their homes. Likewise, Google says it updated the product’s ability to hear you in loud areas where background noise might overpower the user’s voice. Not only does this try to hear you better in a noisy environment, but based on the amount of background noise, the Nest Mini will adjust its own voice when responding to ensure that you can hear it. Similarly, if you have more than one Google home intelligence product in your home, you can connect your Nest Mini to those devices to create a group and have all the devices playing the same audio throughout your home. You can even use them as an intercom speaker to talk between your Google home intelligence products. This new addition also comes with software and hardware updates, so the Google Assistant on the Nest Mini is much faster, and seems to be using more machine learning to recognize commands you use often and to learn to anticipate what you are going to ask more often.

With all the new home intelligence technologies being released in the past few years, there is a constant competition for who can do it better, and which products can truly make our lives easier, as that is the ultimate goal for these products. I currently have an Amazon Echo Dot, but I really like the new features being added for the Nest Mini, especially that it can be mounted onto your wall. I also really like that as these products improve, they are adding more and more artificial intelligence and machine learning, as it really seems to be making these products more efficient and helpful to users, which is the ultimate goal of home intelligence products like this. What are everyone else’s thoughts? Would you choose the new Nest Mini over the trusted Amazon Echo Dot?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2019/10/15/google-smart-speaker-nest-mini-has-better-intelligence-louder-sound/3988206002/

An extremely large facial recognition photo database called MegaFace has thousands of photos of children, families and other people. This database contains photos of almost 700,000 people and has been used by a bunch of other companies to create and train new face identification algorithms for spying, surveillance, and tracking purposes. The article I found focused on one family who found their photos from 14 years ago on MegaFace.

This ties into the grey area that is privacy, and how the laws of privacy are different in every state. Some states have very loose privacy regulations, but others like Illinois where this family lives protect their citizens with strict privacy laws. One specific privacy law that Illinois enforces is the Biometric Information Privacy Act of 2008, which “imposes financial penalties for using an Illinoisan’s fingerprints or face scans without consent” (Hill, Krolik 1).

While this family is protected, other families in other parts of the country are not. While names are not released on MegaFace, it is publicly available for download, so anyone can see these photos. This brings about a lot of the issues we talked about in class with privacy, and how privacy laws change state to state. I personally like that the Illinois law is putting stronger regulations on companies who are using peoples’ likeness without their consent. They are seeming to follow how Europe is with their privacy policies in putting more of the responsibility on the company than the individual. This also brings up a lot about choosing wisely what we share on the Internet and on which platforms we share them on. I’m sure this family who updated photos from a vacation to Flickr ever expected their photos to be posted on a random face identification database, so you never know where one your Instagram posts or Tweets could end up!

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/11/technology/flickr-facial-recognition.html

Artificial intelligence and facial expression technology is starting to be used for job interviews throughout the United Kingdom. There are many companies using this technology for hiring purposes, including Unilever and Hirevue, who are analyzing the language, tone, facial expressions and more to see if candidates are a good fit for their company when responding to various interview questions. This is mainly being used for video interview purposes, such as with Hirevue, and is also comparing all of these factors to previous interviewees who have successfully gotten and excelled in the job.

While this seems like an efficient way to do interviews on the surface, there appears to be a lot of unconscious bias built into the AI and facial recognition technology. These biases have been known to discriminate against certain candidates who were perfect for the job. There are hundreds of features that the technology looks for in potential candidates, and those features are based on what type of job the candidate is interviewing for. For example, if you are interviewing for a sales position, they want someone who is an engaging and interesting speaker, which is something the technology will look for when analyzing the candidate’s video interview.

I find this technology really interesting because it allows for employers to catch things in an interview, like body language or facial expression, that they might not be able to notice right away. However, I don’t particularly think I would like to have one of my interviews be analyzed by this technology. It catches every small move you make, every brow furrowing, and every emotion that comes across your face. I think it can be bad in situations with candidates who don’t interview well or those who get nervous and let it show on their face during the interview. I understand where interviewers are coming from with using this technology to try and find the perfect candidates for their jobs. However, I think the analysis may be a bit too detailed and technology based and make the interviewers forget that these candidates are real people who deserve more than an AI computer analysis to determine if they are a good fit for a job or not.

Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/09/27/ai-facial-recognition-used-first-time-job-interviews-uk-find/