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.
Amazon showed off their new echo: Echo Show, which comes with a display to augment Alexa’s voice control. Think of it as a video conference landline, which the possible potential to be MUCH more. At $320, it isn’t going to be for everyone, but if you have the right use case, it’s a great product. The rest of the stories are below.
This week Microsoft announced a new Surface Laptop and Windows 10 S. The laptop is meant to compete with the MacBook Air and Windows 10 S only allows you to download apps from their store. Personally, I think the new hardware looks cool, and as long as the app store has the apps I want, I’d welcome the extra security. The rest of the stories are below.
When the movie titanic first came out, it wasn’t very popular: it took a few weeks to become the sensation we know it as today. The Nintendo Wii was the same way: people needed to play Wii Sports before realizing how fun the system was. In effect, the Wii was Nintendo’s Titanic.
The Switch, on the other hand seems much more straight forward, and therefore the initial sales are much higher. Personally, I still want to buy a Switch. :)
The rest of the stories are below.
Snap become a publicly traded camera company this week. It’s the largest IPO since Facebook and is based purely on expectations of future growth and advertisements. Matthew and I don’t totally get why they insist on calling themselves a camera company, but I guess that’s because we’re not cool.
A ton of other cool things happened this week as well. See below for the whole list.
Congrats to Amazon on the Oscar nominations. They’re proving that streaming companies can make just as good of movies and traditional studios. Exciting times! Twitter, on the other hand, has not received as high of marks for their recent update with the “explore” tab. Oh yeah, and Elon Musk is building a tunnel from SpaceX to LAX. That guy…
This week Tesla and Samsung deal with disasters that happened last year. A report showed that Tesla’s vehicle did everything it could to avoid a fatal accident. Samsung’s report showed that their batteries were the cause of the explosion and they have a new 8-point safety check to avoid it in the future.
We also talk about the improvements of the Raspberry Pie computer, how micro-software companies are the future, Airbus getting into flying cars, and how Google discovers malware. See below for all the stories.
Did you know that Pineapple Express is a non-technical term for describing a deluge of rain? It’s usually associated with the Hawaiian Islands, hence the pineapple. Since this is CES week, we got a deluge of consumer tech.
There were a few trends this year. For example, Amazon’s Alex played a huge role in helping make devices smart. Just wait – you’ll be able to talk to everything in the future. 4K TVs are normal now and the next big battle ground is over HDR content. PCs are also making a comeback with some really interesting options. One gaming PC has 2 screens that slide out to give you 3 screens at once! Cars are also getting smarter and automated driving creeps closer to reality.
See the whole list below of the cool products from CES this year.
BTW, the picture is the tripod thing Matthew was talking about during the show.
To kick off 2017 we spend over 3 hours talking about our predictions for the year. We cover the big guys: Apple (big expectations for the 10th anniversary of iPhone) Alphabet (AI. AI. AI.), Facebook (VR & M), Microsoft (keep kicking butt and taking names) and Amazon (Echo refresh, something crazy and new). Then we move into the smaller companies like Uber, Twitter, HPI, Tesla, Space X, and Snapchat. We then talk about broader topics like gaming, AI, IoT, AR/VR, and autonomous vehicles. It’s a jam packed show!
There aren’t any show notes to go with this show. So sit back, get comfortable and enjoy.
This in special year-end episode we look back at what happened during the year. Specifically, we look back at our predictions for the year and grade ourselves. Honestly, it’s shocking how well we do. Below is a reference for all the events we covered from 2016. It was a busy year!