Sometimes a product requires a new look or feature. Sometimes the change is seen as a disruptive innovation and people love it. Sometimes it’s seen as a tone deaf redesign that inspire people to write petitions agains the change. This week we look into the latest changes from Snapchat and talk about it in the context of other changes like the Facebook timeline, Digg v4 and and iOS change. The show notes are below.
This week we explore the unintended consequences of decisions different tech companies, and their leaders, make. For example, Strava published a cool map of user activity and accidentally showed secret military bases. IKEA flat packed furniture to save money, which turned out to increase customer love for their products.
We then look at decisions made last week that will probably also have unintended consequences. For example, will raising the fee music steamers have to pay impact how Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and Google strike deals to musicians. Will Elon Musk’s new compensation plan cause him to play short-term gain plans? Will Snapchat’s decision to open their walled garden doom their company? We look at each of these in this week’s show. The details for each are in the show notes below.
It’s our seasonal finale where we review our predictions for the year and review what happened. There’s a lot packed into the 45 minute show (the prediction show, #275, was 3 hours!) Each of the predictions are captured below.
We’re back after a summer break and we have a new format: shorter shows with one topic.
This week we’re talking about Snapchat and asking if the company and/or app is doomed. Their recent Q2 earnings didn’t go well and they don’t seem to have a clear path forward. Can they figure it out before they lose too much investor confidence? We discuss in this 30 minute episode. The show notes are below.
Question: Is your personal interest in Snapchat raising or lowering? Why? Leave a comment below.
Facebook held their F8 developers conference last week and they continued to build out their platform. The big focus was creating a camera effects platform where developers can create their own filters for people. They also created more bots for Messenger and showed of some new VR spaces. Facebook continues to demonstrate that they’re a technology company and not just a social media website. The rest of the stories are below.
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!
Machines are already smart and getting smarter. One way they’re getting even smarter is by putting cameras on everything so they can easier track us. Don’t get scared! This is actually a good thing. The show notes are below with lots of examples of how companies/machines are getting smarter.
Last week we experienced the biggest failures of Big Data with the polls. We dive into why they couldn’t accurately predict the outcome and what that might mean for future elections. We also talk about drones and VR (of course). See below for all the show notes.
“To Error is Human. To Really Foul Things Up Requires a Computer.” This was quote on our grandpa’s computer, and it strikes us as just as true today, especially with automation and virtual reality. We dive deep into both those subjects – including with Matthew’s new Sony Playstation VR. All the rest of the show notes are below.