Peter Yared's Musings

This post was also published on TechCrunch. We are approaching a new phase of enterprise software, where every niche of Software-as-a-Service has been filled and cloud companies are being consolidated into larger companies. Markets have a tendency to cycle from bundling to unbundling, and software is due for a bundling event. The cloud, open APIs, next-generation messengers and machine learning are combining to turn the end-user interface to enterprise software into a unified experience. There have been attempts to do this, ranging from portal servers like Portal Software, to “Enterprise 2.0” collaboration software like Jive Software, to communications platforms like Yammer. However, none of these have stuck pervasively because they only solved one slice of the problem, various backends were difficult to integrate, it was hard to work with people outside of the enterprise and there was no machine learning to sift through all the data on users’ behalf. In just the past couple of...

This post was also published on TechCrunch. Application development has long been fraught with peril: Projects become bloated, expensive and never ship. Implementation technologies tend to match the bloat, ranging from Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to Business Process Management (BPM). As Redpoint’s Tomasz Tunguz recently pointed out, growth in Software-as-a-Service is slowing , and a next generation of applications will weave new workflows across existing applications in novel ways The “micro wave” of services, apps and flows The “micro” trend in application development is focused on delivering bottoms-up, simple solutions to complex problems. Micro services can easily integrate multiple systems, micro apps can present them as easy-to-consume user interfaces and micro flows allow users to simply complete tasks across systems. This “micro wave” triad of services, apps and flows offers a new way to weave existing systems in novel, organic ways in order to deliver solut...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. In the week since its launch, Facebook Messenger’s bot platform has seen a litany of complaints , with users arguing that it is tedious and unusable. The reality underlying the feedback is that natural language processing isn’t ready for prime time. The techies at Facebook Messenger clearly recognize this fact and have a few tricks up their sleeve that are very old school and reminiscent of the simplified HTML in Facebook’s app platform from almost a decade ago. Chatting with bots just doesn’t work Artificial intelligence experts are indeed pursuing systems that pose as humans and can pass the Turing test, but companies attempting to sell flowers or airline tickets are fast realizing that even specialized bots are incredibly difficult to create. The bot platforms are providing tools like Facebook’s wit.ai and Microsoft’s cognitive services to make creating interactive bots easier, but it is going to take years for these s...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. Bots are fast becoming all the rage in tech, offering users the ability to use a messaging app to type in simple English requests to services like Uber. The user interface is just like texting a friend, and it’s far simpler to enter a message than to download and use a clunky native app. As more bots and bot platforms like Slack emerge, it’s interesting to note that Google has spent almost 20 years perfecting how to respond to a text query. Today’s bots have a lot to learn from Google’s lessons in natural language interpretation, artificial intelligence, and user interface. The quintessential example of a bot is ordering an Uber on Slack, which is relatively straightforward since Slack on mobile knows where you are. However, most current bots quickly devolve into endless back and forth. For example, picking an airline flight via text is about as tedious as using an airline voice response system. Messaging back and forth with a bot...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon have been dubbed the four horsemen of the tech industry. They are the biggest consumer companies and dominate the discussion through new initiatives such as drones and acquisitions such as Oculus. As our current tech era has evolved, Apple has led the pile with a huge market capitalization, and Facebook was the newcomer with the smallest market cap. In the past few weeks, however, Apple’s phenomenal iPhone sales have finally slowed and Amazon’s endless losses have finally caught up with it . In the meantime, Facebook has blown past Wall Street expectations and Google is continually growing despite its per click revenue dropping. Google and Facebook are weathering the recent tech doldrums better than their peers. It all makes sense from a macro perspective: It’s far easier for Google to get you to do another search and Facebook to get you to look at another photo than it is for Apple to ...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. Over the holidays, I heard Donald Trump giving his stump speech in South Carolina on my car radio. It strikes me that, for all we hear about Trump’s outlandish statements in the press, there’s very little reported about his actual message. Beneath all of his bluster and meandering, Trump is advocating a cogent economic platform targeting an increasingly disenfranchised middle class. It is well understood in economic circles that a combination of globalization, technology, and government policy — trends that most members of the Republican and Democratic parties fully support — has stagnated wage growth in the middle class. Trump and Bernie Sanders are the lone presidential candidates questioning this status quo, which is why they’re both drawing so much interest. Above: Source: Congressional Budget Office, Average Federal Taxes by Income Group, “Average After-Tax Household Income,” June, 2010, http://i...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. A lot of noise has been made about the inflated valuations of Aileen Lee’s unicorns and the amount of money they have raised. There are rumors that uber-unicorn Uber is now raising an additional $1 billion, in order to continue to fuel growth financed by losing a rumored two dollars for every dollar in revenue . On the one hand, that seems irrational; but on the other hand, loss-fueled growth is how companies like Amazon became the behemoths they are today. In the broader context of Silicon Valley technology companies, the unicorns in aggregate form barely a ripple in the fabric of space-time. According to CBInsights, there are 87 Unicorns in the United States , with a combined valuation of $312 billion. Cross-referenced with Crunchbase , those 87 have raised a cumulative $48 billion, with over half of that amount invested in the top 14 unicorns. What if all of these unicorns vanished to Candy Mountain tomorrow? What would the ra...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. Unlike other category-defining Internet companies, Twitter has struggled to meet both user growth metrics and Wall Street’s expectations. There are a lot of possible explanations for Twitter’s user growth problems, but they really boil down to one simple thing: As the content shared into streams grows exponentially, the streams have to get smarter in order to remain relevant to users. Twitter presents cards in a straight reverse chronological stream that shows all content. The more people you follow and the more you use Twitter, the worse the Twitter experience becomes. Facebook took a very different tack. Back in 2008, Mark Zuckerberg established Zuckerberg’s Law of Information Sharing , which predicted that the rate people share information like status updates and photos would double every year. In 2009, Facebook acquired Friendfeed for $50 million , integrating a team that was using content shared from external sites to learn what...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. Uber’s fifth year anniversary highlights that sharing economy services have rapidly become persistent and mainstream. Uber facilitates over one million rides a day . It’s estimated Airbnb will make $6 billion in gross bookings in 2015 . Legacy regulatory environments were first ignored and then fell by the wayside or changed as people recognized that a customer-reviewed driver in a personal modern car was just as good, if not better, than a sociopath in a yellow Crown Victoria. However, Uber drivers are now congesting major cities, and neighbors of Airbnb-listed rentals don’t want to live adjacent to what is effectively a hotel . As the adage goes, bureaucracies are created to solve a real problem, actually address the problem, and then simply sustain themselves. There is no doubt that taxi commissions and hotel regulations have far exceeded that threshold. Jurisdictions like Las Vegas that forbid street-side pickups in conjunctio...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. There has been a lot of discussion about how the acceleration of technology is decimating the middle class and traditional jobs . But there has been very little discussion of an emerging trend where individuals are opting out of these same jobs people fear will disappear. Driven by a post-scarcity economic model whereby you can live very frugally if you choose to, some workers (mostly college-educated and urban) are opting out of the now traditional work structure and choosing their own path. As Chelsea Rustrum puts it in her book It’s a Shareable Life , “You can live a life dictated by choice, passion, and freedom — a life where your … experiences are of the highest value.” They are opting into alternative, passion-based professions that have gained popularity and acceptance, such as craft beer producer or yoga teacher, and that have flexible hours. Twenty years ago, if Bob, the valedictorian, showed up to his high s...