Author: Rob Enderle

Last week was NVIDIA’s GTC. GTC, or the GPU Technology Conference, made a hard pivot this year to AI, and their Autonomous Car section was particularly robust. One of the most exciting car talks was by Hildegard Wortmann, a member of Audi’s management board. My wife and I have been fans of Audi for years, and we’ve owned two TTs, one S5 Cabriolet, and one of the few A3 with a six-cylinder engine in it (which I regret not keeping as a track car). Audi seems to do the best job creating a balanced vehicle; this Car & Driver comparison…

The big problem with electric cars is that, should you run out of power, you are screwed. Unlike a gas car where you can get a can of gas, the typical outcome of running out of electricity with an electric car is to call a flatbed tow truck and have your car taken to a fast charger. Some tow trucks carry generators, but it is more miss than hit, and the related fear, called range anxiety, can put you off electric cars. Well, GM may have just fixed this as they announced that their coming electric trucks would have a…

The FTC vs. Qualcomm litigation, from the start, looked like it was a combination of false claims and abuse of power by Apple and undue influence over the FTC, all focused on getting Apple a lower cost for Qualcomm licenses. This series of events looked to me like the FTC was acting as Apple’s agent. They did an incredible amount of damage to Qualcomm, almost forcing a hostile merger that would have gutted and likely shuttered the company—giving Apple Qualcomm’s patents at pennies on the dollar. Apple’s troubling history would suggest there is more to the FTC’s actions than just…

IBM may be in the cloud business, but its approach to the segment is dramatically different from the mainstream cloud providers. You might argue that they are acting a bit as Switzerland does with international banking—as a trusted resource that assures the validity of transactions and the security of the related information while remaining relatively agnostic concerning governments or individual banks. Both don’t pick sides. They focus on enabling secure and reliable financial transactions. This comparison is apt because this week, METACO, a Swiss company specializing in helping large banks manage their digital assets, blessed IBM’s new Cloud Hyper Protect…

AMD had a busy week last week, launching three significant new offerings across their ecosystem. First, they released their new EPYC enterprise-class of processors, which appear to more than double performance in some implementations. They refreshed their Mobile Ryzen line to address the hot laptop market, and finally, they brought out a new Radeon solution into a market hungry for greater graphics power. This combined effort in one week has investors excited, server buyers excited, and gamers would be more excited if there weren’t still a shortage and very high demand for the graphics cards. People are paying almost twice…

One of the big promises for the next generation of computing systems is medical solutions that can quickly and preemptively identify potential health problems to be corrected before permanent damage is done. Maladies like cancer and blindness often occur over long periods, and—as a result—they are tough to catch early enough to mitigate to assure a positive outcome. Technology is being rapidly spun up to address this speed problem, and one of the more exciting efforts is based on Intel technology. Intel, Sankara, Leben Solution Intel is working with the Sankara Eye Foundation and Leben Care to deploy a comprehensive…

Cisco is a fascinating company to watch because they seem to spend an unusual amount of time on projects that address industry and societal problems. A case in point is this week’s presentation lead by Laura Quintana, Vice President & General Manager, Cisco Networking Academy, on the Cisco Networking Academy program. This effort focuses not only on taking people with low paying jobs or who are unemployed and giving them a career but also on eliminating the huge gap in workforce skills, causing a drag on technology growth and revenues. We have homeless, wage disparity problems, and entire cities that…

We tend to fight against change. We like things we’ve become comfortable with to stay the same even—or maybe even mainly—if there is a better way.  Change generally brings risk, and change, for change’s sake, is almost always stupid.  But, when the current way of doing things isn’t working, change is needed, and the effort should be focused on finding a better way, not fighting change. These thoughts all came to mind last week while I was speaking on a panel on health and wellbeing.  All of us argued the core of the problem was education; if we weren’t taught…

The war between Huawei and the US has never made much sense to me. It seemed more like some personal tiff that got out of control than crime and punishment. There was little evidence, a lot of allegations, no trial, and then sanctions. But there has been a substantial adverse impact on the US for this fight in terms of image, technology readiness and strategic market leadership. Let’s explore that this week. Perception The process that typically surrounds crime and punishment is called due process. It consists of gathering evidence, making allegations, a trial, and then, if found guilty, consistent…

This month one of the most popular actors out of “The Mandalorian” Lucas Film TV series was terminated because of a Tweet. Gina Carano is far from the first and likely will not be the last. She wasn’t just terminated; when a major studio like this fires you, getting work as an actor may be impossible because no studio wants to hire a problem. This outcome could have been prevented with an AI tool that kept her from retweeting a meme that would most certainly cause Disney to terminate her. Disney’s hot buttons are well known, and when I first…