Beyond Reality

  Tesla’s recent breakout market performance is proving some of its  skeptics  wrong. By mid-January, Tesla’s market capitalization had reached $107 billion, and it surged past the giant German automaker Volkswagen to become the world’s second most valuable auto company behind Toyota. Tesla’s valuation now  exceeds that of Ford and GM combined. The Wall Street doubters may be in shock, but I’m not. Full disclosure, I own two Teslas and I own stock in the company. But it’s my experience as a three-time software company CEO that makes it increasingly clear to me that the company’s innovative business model represents an existential threat to the auto industry as a whole.How so?“Software is eating the world,” Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, wrote in a memorable 2011 essay. And software is a big part of Tesla’s advantage. In my view, the traditional automakers are ill prepared to compete in today’s software-cen...

  Social distancing due to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the threat of COVID-19 has meant online communication is more popular than ever, with even casual parenting groups discovering the previous enterprise video conferencing tool Zoom. But how will that affect communications? Have you ever met someone who is stiff in person but great on camera or the other way around? Neuroscientists study brain and behavior and in  a recent study  found that a person's gaze is altered during tele-communication if they think that the person on the other end of the conversation can see them. People are very sensitive to the gaze direction of others and even two-day-old infants prefer faces where the eyes are looking directly back at them. The phenomenon known as "gaze cueing," a powerful signal for orienting attention, is a mechanism that likely plays a role in the developmentally and socially important wonder of "shared" or "joint" attention where a number of people atten...