Industry News

CrowdStrike and the Global Microsoft Windows Outage

CrowdStrike is reporting that a single errant piece of content in one of their security updates may be linked to a massive Windows outage that is impacting the United States and world. Many flights are cancelled.

How to protect yourself or business? You can’t. We live in a precarious time where our lives and economies are connected to the Internet.

This morning many people are experiencing the Blue Screen of Death. Are you?

Update: This became the largest global outage in history. You don’t want your employees to have to do a fix like this in real time!

The fix:

1. Boot Windows into Safe Mode or WRE.

2. Go to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike

3. Locate and delete file matching "C-00000291*.sys"

4. Boot normally.

July 19, 2024 by Robauto Support Industry News

Peter Zeihan & The Geopolitics of Goods

If you can get past the “China Will Fall” sensational headline of this video, there is some good meat as it relates to technology. I can spare you the time in case you can’t listen to the whole thing. Peter Zeihan is a geopolitics expert and looks at the world from the perspective of demographics, populations and economic forces.

He ends up telling Grant Cardone at the end that the biggest opportunity of this century is going to be “Technical Experts Who Speak Spanish and English”.

This was not what I was expecting the answer to be. Long story short – the why of this -as it turns out the only group of people that are in a position to take over some of the production of goods and technology that currently takes place in China – is Mexico.

Apparently, China’s population of eligible workers is dwindling and thus the pending shift and Mexico is one of the only countries equipped to take on some of that technical production.

Silicon Valley Bank, Hype and the Plateau of Productivity

Sometime around 1999 I remember going to a Dot Com event that was basically an entire movie set rented out and provided to several thousands of tech entrepreneurs.

Ever since then, this insane world of startups has had it’s up and downs but one thing that has always been consistent. The hype.

Gartner puts out this great infographic each year about the hype cycle. It basically says that eventually products and technologies get past the hype and either die or start to become really useful.

There is no doubt that “Silicon Valley” has cranked out some amazing new inventions over the last 24 years.

But much of it is hype. If a business has no chance of making money, it’s not a business. It’s a feature that VCs are paying to be in existence.

Quite a few people predicted this bank would fail – the balance sheet didn’t add up at all.

It’s time to focus on real solutions to hard problems, and enough hype, it only weakens the ecosystem.

Let’s quickly shed anything built on hype and move on to the golden years of technology.

March 20, 2023 by Jalali Hartman Industry News

McDonald’s New Drive Thru Robots Represent the New Era

I saw a news piece that caught my eye: A fully robotic drive thru being tested by McDonalds. By tested, I’m sure it means it’s coming at scale to stores near us. And it makes sense – not only is a drive thru attendant way less accurate and sterile than a robot arm, it costs much less to operate.

You might be noticing how the pandemic has started to usher in more and more automation. Part of this is due to the fact that staffing traditional roles has become harder and harder.

When we started in 2013 our power point decks exclaimed “The Robots are Coming”. In fact – back then they were already here and they certainly are now. This McDonald’s ‘test’ is just one in-your-face example of an organization working to close the digitization gap.

So, are robots taking our jobs? Yes. Will it be fair? Probably not. Suddenly, with an automation a business can replace a person and team or people. Applications like Zapier, combined with some smart messaging, robotics or system integrations, can instantly take the place of humans doing mudane tasks.

December 24, 2022 by Jalali Hartman Industry News Robots

Could you beat this robotic ping pong player?

December 9, 2022 by Robauto Digitization Gap Industry News

Opt A.I. out of using your content

November 12, 2022 by Jalali Hartman Artificial Intelligence Deep Learning Industry News Machine Learning

HoneyBadger and the Digitization Gap

Society is badly in need of automation and robotics. The issue is that suddenly the tidal wave of demand has been met with supply chain and labor shortages. Expert labor that understands the old paradigm, plus the new at the same time pretty much does not exist.

This gap is real.

Caleb Eastman and I have talked quite a bit on this topic of total digitization universality. Otherwise old systems can’t talk to new. We’ve even a new startup HoneyBadger Controls specifically to be a new type of Zapier of Industrial IoT. Zapier by the way, is an amazing piece of technology that Zaps data back and forth between SaaS applications so you don’t have to go ask your dev team to do it. Thanks to Andy Hayes for telling me about Zapier years ago. It basically put my custom integrations business out of business, but saved thousands of dollars in the meantime for customers.

We’re in stealth mode still but basically we just love badgers and see a real need for some better cross-domain connectivity.

October 3, 2022 by Jalali Hartman Entrepreneurship Industry News Internet of Things Machine Learning Robotics Research Uncategorized

The Concept of a Tugboat Computer by Caleb Eastman

Above: A picture of a screen grab of Caleb Eastman made into an NFT and then cast through a TokenFrame.

Caleb Eastman is a friend and colleague. His LinkedIn profile says he’s ‘always worried about time and timing’. He is busy, but it’s also a play on words that only control engineers get.

Simply put Caleb spends a lot of time getting data from different types of hardware and software to talk on time, in a way that everyone, including the machines, understands.

It can be frustrating and tedious – yet data acquisition is also the limiting factor in organizations truly harnessing the power of data (See: Data is the New Oil).

Which is why he’s busy.

I was coming back from a refresh in the wilds and got a text from him with a link from his Medium blog.

He has a great analogy about computers and tugboats. It’s not actually what you think – but worth the read.

(Oh and Tom originated it.)

If you are interested in the future of A.I. and distributed computing you are going to want to check out the full article here.

October 3, 2022 by Jalali Hartman Artificial Intelligence Education Entrepreneurship Industry News

Your Business Won’t Survive – Without Automation & Intelligence

Above: Robauto built systems and technology for – KrystalKlean.com – helping them grow from a family owned window cleaning company to the leading building care company in the Southeast.

There used to be a time when you could build a business with a rolodex. I still have an actual rolodex, which I have not looked at in years. It seems – and is – an archaic practice. While relationships still do matter, they cultivate in a different way now. Especially in the year 20https://www.acecashhomebuyer.com/20, we need automation. Digital. Smart business.

Data can help determine business trends. What business will you start in 2020? McDonald’s exec used real estate data to launch AceCashHomeBuyer.com, which provides easy and fair cash offers for homeowners to get out of mortgages. His experience selecting sites for future McDonalds, combined with automation and market data allows for efficient deal flow, giving Asa a significant advantage over competitors.

The automation and intelligence can go on and on. And it will. Many of the systems we work on are very complex.

But they are all the same: a data-centric strategy combined with seamless and smart tech. It’s time to get your businesses automated, streamlined and working for you.

July 5, 2020 by Robauto Artificial Intelligence Industry News

Wing Drone Delivery

Wing.com – a Google project – is now live. One thing about acrisis – it drives innovation by removing barriers. Something that seemed a ways off a few months ago suddenly is very useful. Drones that can deliver medication, food, and supplies anywhere with zero human interaction is pretty useful as providers like Instacart and DoorDash are hit with sick workers and skepitcal consumers.

April 14, 2020 by Robauto Artificial Intelligence Entrepreneurship Industry News