What a great week to be interested in tech! Google held their annual conference and showed off some sweet new tech that will be released… someday… Honestly, it felt more like an awesome TED talk than an actual product announcement, but it was still cool! Matthew also visited the Maker Faire and TechCrunch held their conference in New York. All the stories are below.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, published a 5,800 word article (12 pages if typed out) on the future of Facebook. Basically, he wants to go beyond simply connecting everyone and build communities that are supportive, safe, informed, civically engaged, and inclusive. It’s a lofty goal that’s still a little fuzzy. Functionally, it means you’ll see less sensationalized (ie. fake) news on the site. The rest of the stories are below, including a really cool one about future telescopes.
We started things out mourning the loss of a great piece of Facebook tech. We then looked toward the future, and how to educate it. Things nearly careened out of control for a little while, but we avoided an accident. We wrapped it all up with a nutritious machined made burger. We also mentioned HTC spinning off their VR department, Spotify getting testy with Apple and Google increasing the bandwidth to Japan.
Google IO happened this week and it’ll blow your artificially intelligent mind with their news cluster bomb. Below are all the notes of everything they announced along with our hot takes in the podcast. Enjoy!
Alphabet passes Apple to become the new king of the stock market hill. In this podcast we dissect everything about it. We also talk about TrueBill, Eagle snatching drones, and Elon Musk’s awesomeness.
We round up all the coolest CES news in this episode. Despite James’ downer attitude last week, CES proves that the future is bright, smart, and automated. The show notes below contain a huge laundry list of all the different products Matthew looked into. And yes, we talk about every single one. Think of this show like CES: a whirlwind of stories that’ll be mostly forgotten in a month.
We cover a ton of news this week because so much of it is interrelated. If you take away one concept from this week, let it be this: Artificial intelligence continues to expand it’s capabilities and is aiding on the road, in the classroom, and on your face. AI will struggle to make surprise moves that turn out to be genus, and we need to often ask ourselves if it’s worth it.
The internet browser is under attack! Google is killing Chrome! Countries can shut down TLDs! It’s chaos! Thankfully, the solution already exists: Apps that are basically highly specific browsers.
We come to an inescapable conclusion in this episode: Elon Musk is a Super Villain. Think about it. He’s publicly stated that humanity will die in 20 years. He’s working on his own escape to another planet. And he’s creating autonomous robots (cars) that look sleek and people inherently trust. This is how it happens people!
The sharing economy is dead. The biggest reason has to do with trust. With the potential for fake reviews and broken products/services, it’s easier to simply rent/subscribe to a bigger company.
See below for all the notes and links on the topics we covered.