A tale of two coffee shops and their respective mobile experiences. One is a literal business school case study in how to do it, while the other is slightly less so.

Google is almost 20 years old. The domain Google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. Given that 20 years is an eternity in internet years, it's actually amazing that it's stood up as well as it has for the past two decades. Whether Google's naysayers care to admit it or not, that's due to Google's almost religious devotion to the quality of its search results. That devotion extends to advertising. Google has always paid a lot of attention to the balance between user experience and monetization. But it's not the presence of ads that has led to this perceived decline …

Is it time for tech to shift its focus and begin to actively manage the balance between free speech and hate speech? Yes, according to Shahak Shapira, who spray-painted actual messages of hate available on Twittter, on the sidewalk outside Twitter's German headquarters in Hamburg. Twitter promptly removed the comments IRL but not virtually.

The agency holding companies continue to find themselves the pariahs of the industry, implicated in dubious media-buying practices, non-transparent digital media processes - and now by murky advertising production practices as well.

In the 1970s and '80s, agencies would seek to fulfill client business and marketing goals on TV by grouping prospects into broad descriptions of desired gender and age, say "women 18-45" for a new laundry detergent, with which they could negotiate with any one of the three -- then four -- broadcast networks. Frankly, although data has become the new lingua franca, this process is still very common. This must change. Here's why:

Many companies in data and analytics are hanging their hats on identity and the promise of connecting people across multiple platforms in an effort to further deliver "people-based marketing," which might be the buzziest buzzword of 2018. The core concept is solid, but identity connection is at best one area of tactical requirement to implement a true strategic effort. A strategy for people-based marketing requires scale in recognizing the people you are trying to identify, accuracy across all the channels where your audience might be, and integrations to activate that audience.

One week ago today, John Flannery took over as the new CEO of General Electric. He's only the third person in the past 36 years to have held the role. GE has been around for a long time. It actually predates the Dow Jones Index by four years (having been founded in 1892) and is the only one of the 12 original companies listed that still exists. It -- perhaps more than any other company -- serves as a case study for the evolution of the multinational mega corporation. But GE is in trouble. Share prices are down. It's struggling …

In the past few years, I've been on the lookout for virtual reality experiences that cross the line into believable experiences. I've demo'd Microsoft HoloLens and explored Vive, Oculus, and Samsung Gear. They all have their place, but none of them took me out of this world, and into another -- except one. Two years ago, I was one of the first people to demo a new technology platform called The Void at the TED conference in Vancouver.

It's the age of machine learning, they say. Thanks to algorithms, we can finally eliminate bias. There was no subconscious prejudice -- the decision was made by a computer. After all, computers don't have a subconscious. Except, of course, they do. When we build machine learning algorithms using historical data, we effectively build these biases and injustices into the model.

Recently, a consortium of ecosystem players announced something so sensible it's amazing it wasn't done sooner: a standard, anonymous way to understand peopleby transcending media channels and publishers with respect to identity. The opportunity is for any media company to be able to see a unique consumer as one (anonymous) identity rather than many, without using the expensive and unreliable tricks required to do that today.