It’s time for our annual postdictions of 2015. James nails is and Matthew… We’ll… Let’s just say there’s room for improvement. We start off recapping the big stories of the year and then dive into how well we called things. Enjoy the show!
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Postdictions of 2015 Notes
Major Trends
- AI stuff
- The idea of the Four Horsemen
- Star Wars
- self-driving cars
- USB-C
- the internet became a utility
- Taylor Swift took on the Music Industry & Adelle helped
- Uber became a lightning rod
- China Stumbled a bit
- We got a new suit of baby sound effects to add into the podcast, that used to just include keyboard sounds, train sounds and eating sounds.
CES
- Lots of IoT Things
- Some early VR Stuff
- Better 3D Printers
Apple
- The MacBook
- They tried to make a car
- Apple Music gets launched as Beats gets killed
- iWorks got all free for everyone
- The cheaper Apple TV before the better Apple TV
- HBO Now, an untethered service
- Matthew got an Apple Watch
- the open source Swift 2
- iOS 9 had newish stuff, but mostly refining, like passport became wallet and Siri got better
- the iPad Pro with it’s very own Pencil
- iPhone 6s with 3D touch… on subscription
Alphabet
- Got serious about Music on Youtube. It started with Music Key turned into Red… With subscriptions!
- Started talking about their AI endeavors
- Project Fi
- Youtube 360 video
- TAG and Intel made an Android Wear Watch
- Google Moderator Shutdown
- Matthew was wrong about Google Cardboard
- Seriously, how did we not see Alphabet coming? (April 15th)
- Just weeks before Google became a conglomerate, we were arguing that Apple should become a conglomerate. How did we not see this coming?!
- Android for the IoT
- Google Photos
- Google becomes a subsidiary of Alphabet
- 360 video in the news feed
- hosted content is working
- messenger becomes a platform
- free VOIP calling over everything. And it works in Singapore
- For the record, so does FaceTime and Hangouts
- Facebook M is here to help!
Amazon
- Started Making Movies
- The Amazon Dash button
- The $50 Tablet
Microsoft
- Launched Windows 10, and It was pretty neat
- Gave up on IE after revealing Edge
- Unveiled the HoloLens
- Surface Pro 4 and the Surface book
- The year to open source stuff
- .Net is open source
- Visual Studio is freeish
- Periscope and Meerkat
- Jack Dorsey returns
SnapChat added publisher content
Tinder
- started to mature by figuring out how to charge
- IPO baby!
FitBit
- The IPO went pretty well
- They seem undeterred by Apple.
Gaming
- Nintendo Launched New 3DXL
- Nintendo made money this year!
- Sony Announces PSVR will launch in 2016
- The Vivie is no slouch either
- Oculus got a launch date range and a price range
- Guitar Hero looked, and is awesome.
Elon Musk Stuff
- Got us scared about AI
- Built batteries for your house
Ebay & Paypal broke up
Drones
- DJI made it more difficult to fly in to no-fly zones
- Drones got in the way of firefighters. Firefighters weren’t happy.
- FAA decides to make you register your drone
Medium and Tumblr
- Tumblr tried to get people to long form write to compete with Medium
- Medium tried to get people to short form write to compete with tumblr
- Yahoo didn’t have a great year.
- DropBox didn’t have a terrible year, but it wasn’t sunshine either
- RadioShack had a bad year.
- Ashley Madison had a bad year too
- Tidal’s year was the worst.
Weird stuff
- A blue, black, gold and white dress.
- A jump drive that can blow up your computer.
- Keurig started being dumb. Later they stopped being dumb.
- Verizon bought AOL. AOL still makes a bunch of money off 56K lines people forgot they are paying for