While the US is talking about breaking up big tech, the Chinese government acts. This week, there was one highly anticipated IPO - the BIG ONE. It looks like it ain't going to happen anytime soon.

Apple won’t be able to compete head-to-head with Google in search overnight. But the fact that it is trying? This is the interesting move, for a company known more for its brilliantly-designed products. Just as interesting is the answer to “why now?”

The US Department of Justice moved against Google because of a perceived monopoly as a search engine. A monopoly is not the real problem with Google - or Facebook, or Amazon, etc. There is a much serious issue, the lack of transparency. If the government was going to make a move, it should have been on that basis.

The US Defence Department is finally going all in on digital transformation. With a budget of 738 billion USD supporting 3.2 million people and as the largest employer in the world, the US army is now calling itself a “data-centric organization.”

The IT goliath has announced that as of next year they’ll split into two public companies. “IBM” will pivot to a cloud services company by the end of 2021 -- with a focus on hybrid clouds. Their older IT services will remain under a new company called “NewCo.”

I was talking with Eric Siegel, PhD., founder of Predictive Analytics World, a conference about machine learning and predictive analytics. We began by talking about the importance of data and predictive analytics, while trying to separate what’s real from the hype.

Machine learning is rapidly expanding across the business world -- but in special industries like self-driving and medical imaging, it is especially making leaps and bounds via "deep learning". How do these two arenas compare and relate? And how do we bring the human element into the field of machine learning -- which is itself the ultimate endeavor in automation?

There is a 30 to 40 percent chance that you’re fat.

How do I know that? Most readers of this newsletter are in North America and based on the available data, more people are getting fat than are getting slim -- all the time.

I dislike buzzwords. For me, AI is one of the top contenders as an example of that -- a marketing term that isn’t just inaccurate, but actually unreal (or as Eric Siegel puts it, a big fat lie. I strongly suggest you watch that video).

To realize how good we have it, it is good to look in the past to remember how we used to do things.