China’s JD.COM shares its automated warehouse and logistics system

Axios posts on JD.COM’s automated warehouse. https://www.axios.com/china-jd-warehouse-jobs-4-employees-shanghai-d19f5cf1-f35b-4024-8783-2ba79a573405.html 

 “JD.com, a Chinese e-commerce gargantuan, has built a big new Shanghai fulfillment center that can organize, pack and ship 200,000 orders a day. It employs four people — all of whom service the robots.

What's going on: Welcome to the creeping new age of automation. When the talk turns to Chinese big tech — rivals to Google, Amazon and the rest of Silicon Valley — the names usually cited are Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent. But scrappy JD, with a respectable $58 billion market cap, is investing aggressively to be added to the pantheon.”

JD.COM shares its vision is similar to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

”The rap on JD has beenthat it is far less profitable than Alibaba. But JD responds that, as Jeff Bezos expanded Amazon, its logistics buildout is proof it is investing in itself.

• "Everything is about scale," says CTO Chen Zhang, speaking with a small group of reporters at its Beijing headquarters.
• "When you invest in technology, you don't worry about spending money. You worry whether you can get to scale. When scale comes, profit will come."”

The one slide out of 294 Mary Meeker’s 2018 Internet Report that shows great insight

Mary Meeker is famous for her 2018 Internet Trends report. Here is the link that you can go through it. http://kpcbweb2.s3.amazonaws.com/files/121/INTERNET_TRENDS_REPORT_2018.pdf?1527701640 

It is 294 slides. 

Out of all the slide, here is the one that caught my eye as demonstration of the insight Mary has.  This is slide # 228.

In this one slide Mary covers the state of China’s AI efforts and 6 goals that are part of the plan. This is something that had occurred to me a couple of years ago, but hadn’t summarized it as well as Mary did. 

When you plan your AI and ML efforts you need to account for what China is doing and how your efforts will be impacted by China’s effort.

Chayora announces Data Centers for Beijing and Shanghai

Chayora has a press release announcing its China data centre campuses.

Beijing is currently under construction.

“it has finalised agreements with the government of Beichen, Tianjin, to begin construction of the company’s first hyperscale data centre campus in China. The 300MW, 32-hectare / 80-acre campus will serve the greater Beijing region that is home to more than 150 million people in the JingJinJi mega-metropolitan area of northern China.”

And soon the 2nd data center will start for Shanghai.

“Forthcoming in the second quarter of 2018, Chayora will begin construction of its second hyperscale campus, a 280MW data centre to serve the greater Shanghai region. Unlike most other options for Shanghai, Chayora’s facilities will be newly-built and designed from the ground up to international standards with all necessary permits to enable global corporates to access Shanghai and the surrounding provinces of eastern China, a population of more than 200 million. Shanghai is a key location for global organisations, including financial services, e-commerce and cloud service providers, and is in need of significant high performance data centre capacity.”

Chinese Zodiac used to organize people

Ted has a video explaining the Chinese Zodiac.

one of the insightful parts was how asking the your sign says how old you are without asking your age.

Listening to the presentation more it occurred that sometimes it is helpful to organize people into smaller groups so they can interact. Dividing people into groups of 12 is what the China Zodiac system does.  The western monthly zodiac is not nearly as useful.

So what is the Chinese zodiac, exactly? Most Westerners think of Greco-Roman zodiac, the signs divided into 12 months. The Chinese zodiac is different. It's a 12-year cycle labeled with animals, starting with a Rat and ending with a Pig, and has no association with constellations. For example, if you were born in 1975, you are a Rabbit. Can you see your zodiac sign there? Our Chinese ancestors constructed a very complicated theoretical framework based on yin and yang, the five elements and the 12 zodiac animals. Over thousands of years, this popular culture has affected people's major decisions, such as naming, marriage, giving birth and attitude towards each other. And some of the implications are quite amazing.

1:57 The Chinese believe certain animals get on better than the others. So parents choose specific years to give birth to babies, because they believe the team effort by the right combination of animals can give prosperity to families. We even refer to the zodiac when entering into romantic relations. I'm a Pig; I should have perfect romance with Tigers, Goats and Rabbits. Chinese people believe some animals are natural enemies. As a Pig, I need to be careful with a Snake. Raise your hand if you are a Snake. Let's have a chat later.

Hello, World!

Will China Cloud Companies coming to the USA be a Greenpeace target?

Who Greenpeace will target its environmental campaign at is an unknown.  I guessed at first it would be Dell.  Then with Facebook's move to use coal power in Oregon it became a target.  Facebook, Apple, and Google have all figured out how to escape being the primary target of Greenpeace.

If I were to guess who is Greenpeace's next target I would say Amazon, but with the moves of China Cloud companies into the USA I could be wrong again and Tencent, Alibaba, Huawei could be targets.  Datacenterknowledge posted on Huawei's latest announcement to expand.

“Chinese IT giant Huawei announced plans to invest $1 billion to grow its cloud services business, according to reports.

It is one of several major Chinese technology companies to announce a big investment program to expand cloud services. Tencent said in February it would spend $1.57 billion to grow its cloud business, and Alibaba announced a $1 billion cloud investment in July.”