San Francisco and Silicon Valley are at the heart of many of the world’s best tech Incubators and Accelerators. The chance for startups around the world to work and live in the center of the technology universe was a massive benefit for uprooting and moving to the Bay area. Bringing in the best of global technologists to the area was also a benefit to the community. But it didn’t stop there. Educational institutions like Stanford and Berkeley could draw in some of the best entrepreneurial professors, instructors and students because of their technology spirit. Real estate prices soared, business flourished, and the good times were rolling.
Now, at the end of 2020, things are less than rosy. Technology is one of the industries that can work remotely for extended periods of time and with recent announcements from the industry that this is becoming a normal business practice, the need for physical presence is being redefined. And with that comes the impact on the numbers of Accelerators and Incubators being held in person versus through digital connectivity.
Does this spell doom and gloom for San Francisco and the Bay area in terms of technology leadership? I argue that there is opportunity in every crisis and that entrepreneurial leadership for decades to come can be cemented by the actions of policy makers and Californians who want to stay and build a sustainable future for technology and its users. Shy of slipping into the ocean, California is a force of nature and of people. Other boom and bust cycles have been overcome and this one will too. But there has to be concentrated effort between the public and private sectors to solve our issues and spread these successes to the world.
Let’s make some assumptions:
Some form of Remote Work is here to stay
People are social and inherently like to be with other people
Healthy living includes nurturing mind, body and soul
We like to grow and learn
Family and friends are important to us
The movement toward personal control of our data is accelerating
I could go on and on. And California is great for all of the above. We have community and the climate is great for getting outside to nurture our social and personal needs. We also have a connectivity infrastructure that is one of the best in the world and perfect for advancing a hybrid of work from home, work from an office and work off the grid.
As Californians, we need to drive the adoption of Edge Computing and tie it very close to a global interconnectivity so that global and distributed startups can get nurtured by the talent that is centered here. Because at the center of Accelerators and Incubators are the people who are mentoring those cohorts. All Mentors should start using the best technology for connecting globally including professional in-house studios and Virtual Reality meeting proficiencies. A famous startup Mentor, Jason Calacanis, insists that all presenters on his platforms connect via a cable to the internet versus a wireless connection. How many times have we watched the remote “expert” on TV break up via a bad wireless signal? Leadership means leading others. With remote work and technology expertise, let’s make San Francisco and the Bay area a beacon of learning and individual technology expertise and bring that to the world. At Fortress Data Centers, we are focused on supporting our communities to build an advanced and interconnected environment with 5G, Mission-Critical Colocation, Meet-Me Room connectivity, and new technologies like Blockchain and Virtual Reality. And let’s ensure that the People leadership here is accessible to the world. You are here and We are Here for you.
Here we go again. More restrictions, more anxiety, more need to find outlets to keep us from going insane. Enter a new era of the Home on the Edge. For those who have the room, the ability to create micro-environments in your home is proving beneficial for times of lockdowns. We hope this time passes but it is also dramatically changing how we address future pandemics or crises. Looking at some of the new innovations for living in today’s reality, we have some ideas that can prepare you for the future.
The Learning Space
Whether for your children or yourself, dedicated learning spaces provide a way to separate activities from the relaxing aspect of home life. A couple of ideas to consider:
A green screen wall. Imagine your kids creating school projects with video and custom imagery behind them. With a green screen or even green painted wall, you can learn a new way to be creative.
A dedicated Virtual Reality experience space. Learning is using VR like never before and it is proving to provide significant advancements in understanding through simulation. The room does not have to be large but should have a standing and a sitting section. The standing section is for activities like sports or gaming while the sitting section provides stability and the ability to spin in your seat to experience the 360° view around you. This space can also double up for VR company meetings and be supportive of your work-at-home needs.
Large projection screen for video classes. There is nothing more tedious than being in Zoom conferences for 6-8 hours a day. By projecting to a large screen, we take the learner out of a concentration on the little screen to the immersion of a larger experience, getting just a little closer to the real-life size of real classmates.
Setting up a dedicated home schooling space keeps learning in place
The Working Space
Similar to learning spaces, the working space needs to have a Zen feel about it. Let’s face it, work is work and you probably won’t come out from a day in the basement feeling extra charged up. And if you do, it may just be the 10 cups of coffee you drank. But by structuring your place to have a level of comfort that supports you, the day can pass pretty well.
Bottom line, unless you are in a small apartment, try not to do all your work at the kitchen table. Separation of work and home add to your enjoyment of life.
Declutter and clean up all of the stuff around you. Less is more in this case. It makes you feel more in control when you don’t have to go down or up to a mess around your workspace.
Use the green screen with custom background rather than the Zoom or other web conference tools with a graphic behind you. Those halos are old news. But don’t overdo the use of a green screen because in many cases, people want to identify with you by your backgrounds. Pay attention to your space. I often wonder why the professional news guy is clearly using a sheet to cover his exposed basement unframed walls and has a half dead plant next to the TV behind him. Think about it.
Also, you might like gin or vodka but having your liquor shelf behind your desk doesn’t work for most of us. Or it drives us to our own too soon in the day!
Connect your office to a wired internet connection and plug your computer into that. You will most likely see a huge improvement in call quality. The people on the opposite side of your conference will thank you.
Home is home and office should be office
The Work Out Space
This is probably one of the most difficult for most of us to take out of our living rooms and into a dedicated space. But a space to leave your mats and set of free weights and machines can take the pressure off having to lay out a floor for a T-25 workout. However, do what you have to do to get the exercise in. It is proven that life is better long term fit than fat.
Keep the middle of the space open with at least one side clear to a wall with mirrors. Some of us hate mirrors but there is a reason you see them in gyms and dojos.
Get a good system for watching the workout videos or the news if that is what you prefer. With large screen monitors and TV’s being quite cheap today, get at least a 40” monitor or TV. That way, you don’t have to move your elliptical across the room to get close every time you use it.
Set up a dedicated input device for logging your workouts. That old iPad or laptop works great as long as it doesn’t take 10 minutes to boot up.
The Digital Heartbeat of Your Home
Finally, take some time to research setting up a mini datacenter in your home. The future is about controlling the data that is being created by you before sending it out to the cloud for others to harvest. At Fortress Data Centers, we are bridging the needs for Edge Computing with hybrid cloud systems. We are local ourselves and we bring a holistic approach toward providing our clients and their customers with data interconnectivity. We believe in the power of Edge and We are Here to help it benefit all of you.
Disclaimer – these opinions are my own, but they come from experience. Use them as you will and happy holidays.
There is a massive movement underway toward understanding who owns our data and what can be done with it. As individuals, we are subject to the “terms of use” that we blindly agree to when we sign up for online services. The personal information that we give away is growing exponentially as we add more smart devices to our networks. From phones to our smart houses, cars, and even refrigerators, we are inviting others to track our movements and information and build models around how to monetize or manipulate our behavior.
Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are facing significant pressure from governments and private groups to change practices that protect personal data privacy. Europe has been at the forefront of this movement and recently, Ireland ordered Facebook to suspend the transfer of European citizens’ data to the U.S. or face billions of dollars in fines.
Imagine this scenario: A Roomba vacuum cleaner is roaming your house cleaning up while you are at work but also mapping your room layouts. Your Samsung smart refrigerator is keeping track of what goes into your fridge. Ring and Amazon know when you are home, provide videos of those coming to your door, and can start to integrate facial recognition for helping fight crime at the local level. Or they can monitor which relatives visit and when. Add to this the integrated car/home/work scenario, then layer on social media, buying habits, and spontaneous testing triggers for getting you to stop on the way home for a discounted bottle of wine right when you are most susceptible to the suggestion and we start to have a manipulated society.
All this said, the tradeoffs for letting this data access happen are significant. We want our social media fix so that we can see where our friends have recently vacationed, and knowing that we are just about out of ketchup has value. Especially if we are cooking burgers on the grill that night. And yes, that bottle of wine to complement the meal would be helpful so that we don’t have to run back out to the store.
This discussion has raged for over a decade and in late 2007, a colleague was developing a system to aggregate social media feeds into a central control environment for individuals but back then, the tools to do so were much more fragmented. Enter Blockchain, Edge Computing, 5G, and a new mindset that controlling our data makes sense and we are ready for the revolution.
Oasis Labs has been creating tools for controlling and sharing data for several years and through the power of blockchain, they are creating a new “privacy paradigm.” Founder Dawn Song is also a Professor in the Computer Science Division at the University of California, Berkeley. In this article from Wired, it is discussed how she thinks that our information can be monetized for our benefit rather than just for those providing the services.
At Fortress Data Centers, we are working with several new promising ventures including the Butterfly Protocol project where they are creating a peer-to-peer environment that begins to replace ICANN control over our domain usage. Butterfly creates a way for people, businesses, government, and other entities to get a domain name and never have to pay for it again. In other words, it can’t be lost due to forgetting to pay the registrar like GoDaddy a yearly fee. It is yours as long as you want it. With new top-level domain names like .(dot)human, we can create our infinite repository for any information we want to store and then use technology like the Oasis Protocol to layer in other privacy and monetization methods. With JasonWarner.Human, I can have a unique identifier that can also be used for logins, device authentication, and more.
As discussed previously, all data that we create starts at an Edge. With the heightened focus on owning our data and in allowing it to be used based on our control, Edge Computing becomes even more important. Oasis and Butterfly will work at the Edge as will many other technologies.
So before we all just blindly send our information to the cloud because it is convenient to click the box for approving the terms of use, let’s think about how we can build a new world that works for us. Fortress Data Centers is committed to bridging the divide between companies that want to work at the Edge and the needs of the end-users. Because as always, We Are Here to connect.
For decades, startups relying on venture capital flocked to Silicon Valley to entice investors there to take a chance on their ideas. The VC world grew up around prominent capitalists like Bill Draper and his family. It continues today but new ways of raising are allowing the general public to take advantage of an early move into a potential winning stock.
The Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, or JOBS Act was passed into law in 2012 with the SEC finalizing the rules in May of 2016. This allowed non-accredited investors to put money into private companies for equity. In other words, this opened up an equity investment in a non-publicly traded company by everyone based on certain investment limitations. Imagine buying into Apple or Google before they went public. With this move by governments around the world, entire new industries started popping up like crowdfunding platforms and marketing teams that focused on maximizing the raise for their fund-raising clients.
Until the announcement by the SEC to expand the amount that could be raised in a year as well as how companies promoted themselves to investors, the Regulation CF cap raised was $1.07 million and little could be said about the offer. The cap is now being raised to $5 million per year and will be effective sixty days after recording these rule changes in the Federal Register. Expect that to happen in early 2021. As well, companies can promote more effectively and some rules around what any individual investor can invest have changed.
Will this mean the demise of Venture Capital as it has come to evolve? Not at all. VC’s are joining in by becoming very active on the crowdfunding portals like Republic, StartEngine, and Wefunder. Several investors have been aligning with these platforms to offload some investment risk and build a solid pipeline of vetted startups. Tim Draper and his television showMeet the Drapers has been working with Republic for several years and you will find many of his show participants on the Republic platform.
Innovators in the Edge Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, and other new technology space will reap the benefits of this change from $1.07 million to $5 million. It can mean that they have more capital to bring their tech to market without immediately having to go back into the fund-raising mode as soon as the first amount is raised. It also means that they can raise in a series of tranches over the course of a year where they can level up their market capitalization without a significant upfront dilution.
While executives from Facebook and Twitter are facing questions about centralized censorship of our social media feeds, new opportunities are popping up to take more control of our posted content. Ownership of data has long been a subject of contention. Does the person or company generating it own it? Does the platform own it? What about the images we post to an Instagram feed? Even if we still own the original, are we giving rights in perpetuity to the platform? The 2020 election is bringing these questions and more to the forefront of a global debate.
At Fortress Data Centers, we are preparing for the movement of core data from centralized systems to hybrid and more decentralized storage and processing environments. When we consider that all data we transmit using technology is generated from a device, the idea of that device as local becomes central to the movement to Edge Computing. The emergence of distributed ledger and blockchain technology aligns with our belief that we can start to control more of our data at the source and use it with other permissioned data for processing to help solve tasks and problems.
On the social media front, new platforms like Parler are bringing so-called censor free speech so that you can “Speak freely and express yourself openly, without fear of being “deplatformed” for your views.” And decentralized platforms such as The Butterfly Protocol promise to bring a decentalized approach to domain names, opening up a way to use decentralized apps for publishing. With decentralization, there is no central control manager who can shut you off, delete you and censor you. The content lives forever if it is accessed. It can fade away if no one looks at it because the links get buried but the content is always there.
The difference between what Parler is doing and what The Butterfly Protocol is doing is policy versus technology automation. Policy can be changed. Imagine that a government forces a platform like Parler to change its policy to allow interal people to censor content. Then we are right back to where we are with the current platforms. Technology automation that is decentralized means that once content is posted, only the owner can change it or delete it. You are authenticated based on your identity on the blockchain.
This leads to the ownership question of the data. If you post it and are the only one who can manage it, you own it by default. When you own and control data, you have the power. You can lease it, sell it, give it away, pool it and learn from it. Edge computing allows us to process at the edge and use hybrid cloud systems to your benefit.
Imagine the future where every IoT device you own is putting out data about you. We need Edge Computing to store and process this data while connecting a 5G network to support the local use and integrate with the broader systems in the cloud. Fortress Data Centers will connect all of these systems to support our customers and their customers. With carrier-neutral, 5G enabled Meet-Me Rooms, Mission Critical Colocation, Software Defined Network integration, and more, We Are Here to help drive the innovation of data movement, ownership, and control.
Podcasts are becoming very prominent as news and opinion sources for many of us. I listen and watch numerous podcasts on topics that interest me for both personal and business value. The Edgevana Podcast Series has been very informative and aligned with much of what we work on at Fortress Data Centers. Host Mark Thiele, CEO and Founder of Edgevana, brings a significant wealth of experience in the industry and an interviewing style that engages the interviewee and audience.
In the latest episode, Mark interviewed Tim Crawford about the effect pandemics have on driving technology innovation and most specifically Edge Computing. Our thinking parallels many of the points in this series including the need to build trust and credibility using new technologies like blockchain for personal and device identification and authentication. Or the need to bring our children and other students new learning systems such as virtual reality and augmented reality.
Building an Edge enabled ecosystem is more than laying down fiber and connecting routers and switches. It is a mindset that all data starts locally and should be processed as effectively and efficiently as possible while providing the ultimate in data security and accurate results. 5G gets us closer to realizing the massive benefits that Edge Computing can give us, especially when we are working and learning remotely. I have written in the past why governments that are quick to implement Edge focused infrastructure investment policy will make their constituents globally competitive. Those that fall short will see population and business flight to areas that have provided the tools Edge gives.
San Francisco is a case in point. It is currently experiencing a significant reduction in people working in the city which leads to businesses such as coffee shops and co-working spaces at risk of closing. The cascading effect can create decades of decline or at the least, a slower rebound rate than other metropolitan areas. However, shifting to a suburb-apolitan mindset where communities are connected for the ultimate in work-from-home meets high-rise amenities and access to great restaurants, quality health care, and the best hybrid schools can bring a new generation of city dwellers. The vibrancy of a city like San Francisco will never be the same as a place in the burbs and the city needs to embrace the changes occurring with work and school. Like Tim and Mark state in episode 4 of their podcast, it’s not about the pandemic but the aspect that our world has been tipped upside down and that we are being driven to look at all the things we can do as individuals, businesses, and governments to change for the better. At Fortress Data Centers, we are committed to being part of an Edge evolution and we applaud groups like Edgevana for their forward-thinking. As they say, we are all in this together. And as we say, We Are Here.
A look at the Bay Bridge behind tall buildings in San Francisco CA. close to Fortress Data Centers
