Weekly Links & Thoughts #79

Here is this week’s edition of meshedsociety.com weekly, loaded with thoughtful opinion pieces, interesting analyses and significant yet under-reported information bits from the digital and technology world. Published and annotated every Thursday (CET), just in time so you have something good to read over the weekend.

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Length indicator: 1 = short, 2 = medium, 3 = long

• A Nihilist’s Guide to Meaning (3)
  
  Kicking things off in a bit different way this time, with an accessible philosophical longread; a quite thought-provoking, stimulating one. After having read this you will realize how the age-old question about the meaning of life is also relevant in the context of the current acceleration of technological progress.
• Artificial Intelligence Is Setting Up the Internet for a Huge Clash With Europe (2)
  
  There is quite a conflict arising on the horizon: The European Union wants everyone to be able to understand computer algorithms they are exposed to, but deep learning is creating computer systems that no one fully can understand.
• Why Europe’s largest economy resists new industrial revolution (2)
  
  Meanwhile, Germany struggles with implementing the changes necessary to adapt to a digital world – in part fueled by a perceived lack of urgency thanks to a booming economy.
• AR will be startup-dominated, VR will not (2)
  
  A reasonable prediction. Also worth noting: AR and VR are very different things with very different use cases.
• The Tragedy of Pokémon Go: What it takes for good ideas to attract money (2)
  
  I wouldn’t call it a “tragedy” but yes, for culture, sequels rule. Or…
• Nailing It (1)
  
  …as Fred Wilson puts it: Nailing something which nobody has nailed before is how to achieve success.
• Uber Is Experimenting With a Service in Manhattan That’s Cheaper Than the Subway (2)
  
  The cynical response: Tempting people to abandon environmental-friendly public transport in favor of individual cars. Way to go, Uber. The optimistic one: Subway riders will keep using the subway, but some people will refrain from taking a seat in their own car and instead use UberPool (which aims at transporting several individual Uber riders in one car to their various destinations).
• Uber to pull out of Hungary (2)
  
  I have my issues with Uber but I also have my issues with governments protecting old, inefficient industries.
• Foursquare President: ‘Huge’ Industry Developing Around Location Intelligence (2)
  
  An interview worth reading. According to the President of Foursquare, check-ins are at an all-time high. Also, the company certainly seems to have found a lucrative niche in which it feels comfortable. Nevertheless, I still expect it to get acquired very soon.
• Looking Forward to 2025 (2)
  
  A enjoyable post promoting the long-term perspective of startups and business.
• Tesla Autopilot Crash: Why We Should Worry About a Single Death (2)
  
  If it wasn’t already clear before, this text illustrates the huge ethical challenges that come with autonomous cars.
• 15 Driver Behaviours In A World of Autonomous Mobility (3)
  
  But let’s say we’ll actually get to a scenario with widespread autonomous mobility, a lot of things would change.
• The Economic Lessons of Star Trek’s Money-Free Society (2)
  
  Maybe we actually can learn a bit from Star Trek.
• The emergent religion of Silicon Valley (1)
  
  A post written by a “believer”. Make of that whatever you want.
• How technology disrupted the truth (3)
  
  The Guardian’s editor-in-chief Katharine Viner outlines the connection between fact-ignoring populist movements, the rise of social networks and self-reinforcing filter bubbles as well as the crisis of journalism. Impressive and at the same time gloomy read. See also this interactive WSJ demonstration of the filter bubble in action.
• Pew: Most news sharing remains low-tech, offline (1)
  
  To those who basically “live” online, this might come as a surprise: By a large margin, American’s share news by spoken word-of-mouth.
• As Online Video Surges, Publishers Turn to Automation (2)
  
  Not sure this is good news, from a quality point of view.
• “23andMe is Monetizing Your DNA The Way Facebook Monetizes ‘Likes’”
  
  That’s what I call a powerfully deterrent comparison.
• 61 Glimpses of the Future (3)
  
  A bunch of informative and inspiring insights from a person who traveled 7000 through Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan’s GBAO region and China’s western provinces.

Recently published on meshedsociety.com

• Facebook, Snapchat and others must hate Pokémon Go
  
  The immediate large-scale success of the new AR/mixed reality smartphone game Pokémon Go is fascinating from many angles. One of the especially significant ones: the effects on the attention economy and what that kind of sudden redistribution of user time means for the large social media companies.

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Here is this week’s edition of meshedsociety.com weekly, loaded with thoughtful opinion pieces, interesting analyses and significant yet under-reported information bits from the digital and technology world. Published and annotated every Thursday (CET), just in time so you have something good to read over the weekend.

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• Are We at the Start of a Tech World War?
  
  Whether exaggerated or not (hopefully it is): With massive changes happening in the geopolitical, social, economical and technological sphere all at once, 2016 certainly has brought up a whole new set of worries about the future.
• Behind Silicon Valley’s Latest Push: To Create A New Kind Of City
  
  Ironically, the Silicon Valley with its urban sprawl and dull car culture must be one of the worst advisors when it comes to building livable, pleasant cities. And neighboring San Francisco doesn’t look like a role model either.
• How AWS came to be
  
  Informative profile of Amazon’s cloud infrastructure division which nowadays is a world leader in its field, but which initially only was built for Amazon’s own scalability needs.
• A South Korean Copy of Snapchat Takes Off in Asia
  
  Nobody should be surprised: No young tech company can focus on each market of this planet at once, and Asian users traditionally have particular needs which often are neglected by Western services – at least inititally.
• Ghost in the machine: Snapchat isn’t mobile-first — it’s something else entirely
  
  Snapchat’s distinctive usability and functionality keeps astonishing the tech crowd and leads to all kind of almost philosophical analyses, circulating around the question: What is Snapchat? Indeed, it’s not easy to answer.
• Putting a finger on our phone obsession
  
  Incredible numbers and statistics about people’s smartphone usage.
• The 16GB iPhone may finally be going away soon
  
  This news appears two days after I decided to give up on my iPhone 6+ 16 Gigabyte and to purchase a 6S+ with 128 Gigabyte. After the release of the 6 I tried to save some money by getting the 16 Gig-version. Huge mistake. Apps are growing bigger and bigger and video and interactive content (like Snapchat) is requiring an increasing amount of cached space. Over the past weeks my iPhone couldn’t even hold my podcast library due to a lack of storage. I mean the meta data, not the audio files itself. The situation became so unbearable that it eventually chose to purchase an iPhone just months before the release of the next version – which I of course might hate myself for in a few weeks (and the WSJ really thinks it is a bad time to buy an iPhone but whatever). So yes, I agree with that the 16 Gigabyte version needs to go.
• Chinese smartphone brands are dying off fast as market consolidates
  
  In China, 136 different Chinese smartphone brands died over the course of 2015. 309 have survived (but some of them are probably gone by now).
• Robot War and the Future of Perceptual Deception
  
  After the fatal crash of a Tesla on active “Autopilot” feature (naming it like this probably was a mistake) most of the reactions have been predictive and uninspired, considering that something like this HAD to happen. However, this writer really found a clever angle: What if the software flaw that caused the crash could be turned into a feature to be utilized in a future scenario in which an hostile autonomous vehicle/machine needs to be deceived?
• Tesla Solar Wants to Be the Apple Store for Electricity
  
  Tesla’s very exciting strategy behind the bid to buy the biggest U.S. rooftop solar installer, Solar City.
• Now that tech more or less owns the news distribution system
  
  Thought-provoking short take: News publishers usually have a publication’s voice/an ideological stance. Today, tech company’s are pretty much owning news distribution. But they don’t have an editorial voice, so no one knows what they are standing for. That’s part purpose (“the algorithms decide”), but it also can lead to problems.
• Facebook tries to overcome language barriers with new multilingual composer tool
  
  A fantastic initiative by Facebook: Trying to avoid situations in which a user sees a status update in a language he/she does not understand. As some one who alternates between posts in German, English and Swedish, I am longing for language-specific targeting. Not only on Facebook but also on Twitter.
• How Facebook Live Streams to 800,000 Simultaneous Viewers
  
  This is heavy technical stuff but nonetheless pretty interesting.
• How Apple Music And Tidal Transformed Streaming (And Why Apple May Be Buying Tidal)
  
  A knowledgeable look at Apple’s performance and strategy in the music subscription sector.
• Why this CEO is worth almost $1 billion but lives in a trailer park
  
  Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is undoubtedly a very special type of person.
• Twitch now lets you watch people eat
  
  The South Korean trend of eating in front of a webcam and streaming this “experience” to the world is being picked up by Amazon’s live-video gaming streaming platform Twitch.
• 52% blamed EU for their problems, blame social media for yours
  
  By now everyone interested in tech is aware of the theory of filter bubbles in social media which are said to lead to a perpetuating, reinforcing confirmation bias and make people completely blind for opposing perspectives. The dynamics of the Brexit referendum look like a giant show case for this issue.
• Why elections are bad for democracy
  
  Reading this was eye-opening for me, which is why I link to it here even if it has little to do with technology. Or actually it does, because the Internet must be seen as one underlying cause for the growing issues with current election practices.

Recently published on meshedsociety.com

• Mobile platforms and retail – comparing Apple(s) with Oranges
  
  The mobile platform market with its two sole global players Apple and Google (Android) is historically unique. That means that as tempting as they might be, analogies and comparisons to other sectors of commercial life will lead to wrong conclusions.

Podcast episode of the week

• Exponent Episode 85: Ballots Versus Guillotines
  
  Brilliant, intelligent exchange between Ben Thompson & James Allworth about Brexit, Trump, inequality, the Internet and how everything is connected. Don’t get discouraged by the initial small talk about the weather.

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Here is this week’s edition of meshedsociety.com weekly, loaded with thoughtful opinion pieces, interesting analyses and significant yet under-reported information bits from the digital and technology world. Published and annotated every Thursday (CET), just in time so you have something good to read over the weekend.

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• The Brexit Possibility
  
  A true must-read, about systems thinking, Brexit, and the role of technology companies in a changing world.
• Are cities the new countries? (repost)
• The Rebirth of the City-State
  
  The results of the Brexit referendum showed a discrepancy between attitudes of people living in cosmopolitan cities and industrial/rural areas. Similar differences can be witnessed regarding many other polarizing political debates, in many countries. It’s possible that we currently are seeing an escalating conflict between city and rural populations. These two articles have been published before the Brexit referendum but are more relevant than ever.
• Less Than 1000 Brits Googled “What is the EU?” After Referendum
  
  On the day after the Brexit referendum, you probably saw headlines from major news outlets claiming that Google searches related to the consequences of a Brexit exploded. They did, but on a very small scale. Yet another example for why large parts of today’s digital news media are almost completely useless and nothing but a huge time-thief, unfortunately.
• Why Should You Care About Virtual Reality? Because It’s a Source of Hope
  
  If you are looking for some arguments supporting the concept of Virtual Reality, this piece will provide you with plenty of options. Admittedly, it is hard not to be optimistic about the potential of VR.
• The Winner in Mixed Reality Will Be…Snapchat
  
  Great article, highlighting Snapchat’s advances in the field of mass-market Augmented Reality, and explaining why Snapchat is more likely to succeed in that area than Facebook.
• The three ages of digital
  
  A smart take describing the process with which digital changes the world, from a business perspective.
• The Phenomenon of Contextual Parity
  
  A post on a corporate blog, but a really good one: about consumers’ increasing expectations on digital services. When it comes to a banking app for example, consumers don’t just compare its features to apps of other banks, but to the best tech they’ve seen anywhere. This is true for most areas of business and private life, and it means that in the end, every (consumer) company to some extend competes with every other company.
• The Moral Economy of Tech
  
  A plea to the movers and shakers in tech to stop treating today’s technology as something unprecedented in human history, and to not lose those values out of sight that brought us to where we are today.
• What if you could live forever?
  
  Trying to imagine a world in which people do not die is unbelievably hard.
• How Google is remaking itself as a “machine learning first” company
  
  Not all longreads about tech companies are worth their thousands of words, but this one is. Very informative.
• The New Censorship
  
  Meanwhile, Google has risen to become a powerful global gatekeeper that created all kinds of rules about people’s access to information. This is an extensive overview about Google’s various black lists.
• Cannes Lions is the ad industry’s rowdiest week of the year
  
  When the tech industry meets the ad industry, excess is guaranteed.
• “Medium’s team did everything”: How 5 publishers transitioned their sites to Medium
  
  Medium, the popular publishing platform founded by Twitter creator Evan Williams, is offering publishers to give up on their own web sites and to run a customized site hosted on Medium instead. 5 publishers who tried it describe their experiences and learnings. Pretty interesting.
• How This Unknown Livestreaming App Jumped to the Top of the Apple Charts
  
  The makers of the very popular lip synching app musical.ly have launched a new live streaming app called live.ly, which instantly made it to the top of the download charts. That’s remarkable considering the intense competition in that field. It shows how a company can leverage one of its apps to promote another one, and it is proof that even in 2016, this can even be accomplished if you are an inexperienced startup.
• Encryption for the people: Telekom and Fraunhofer unveil ‘Volksverschlüsselung’
  
  The German telecom giant Deutsche Telekom has teamed up wit researchers to develop a software which is supposed to enable average Joe and Jane (or Horst and Hannelore) to encrypt their emails.
• Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family
  
  Back to the roots.

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If you like what you read, you can support meshedsociety.com on Patreon!

Here is this week’s edition of meshedsociety.com weekly, loaded with thoughtful opinion pieces, interesting analyses and significant yet under-reported information bits from the digital and technology world. Published and annotated every Thursday (CET), just in time so you have something good to read over the weekend.

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• What If There’s No Next Big Thing?
  
  Unlike what the title suggests, this essay does not try to argue that one day we’ll be out of new things. But it questions some of the seemingly self-evident assumptions of a culture of technological progress and hypes. Makes you think.
• I have found a new way to watch TV, and it changes everything
  
  I know of people who listen to podcasts with 1.5 or even 2 times the regular speed, but apparently, the same practice also works for TV shows and videos. Interesting account including a look back into the past on how the spoken word and the rise of the written word impacted people’s ability to gather information quickly.
• How ISIS Became The World’s Deadliest Tech Start-Up
  
  That’s quite a catchy metaphor.
• Saudi princess defends Uber: “Change often happens slowly in our ancient kingdom”
  
  If a Saudi Princess argues that the presence of Uber in the country has a massive positive effect on women’s ability to get around and to start working then one probably should listen. Not because she is a Princess but because she is a Saudi woman and probably knows the reality of women in the country better than people outside. Her final remark is especially noteworthy: “I have no doubt that one day Saudi women will be able to drive off into the sunset. We’ll Uber in the meantime.” That’s the astonishing thing about human cultures: Sometimes, impending changes are widely considered inevitable, yet it is impossible to jointly and through consensus speed up the process to get there.
• Kickstarter Just Did Something Tech Startups Never Do: It Paid a Dividend
  
  Gotta love Kickstarter for breaking the norms of the tech industry.
• Europe’s $1 billion tech companies are starting to outperform their Silicon Valley counterparts
  
  As an Europe-focused investment bank, one could argue that GP Bullhound is biased. But the comparison of the average yearly revenue certainly looks interesting.
• Phones without headphone jacks are phones with DRM for audio
  
  Rumors about Apple’s plan to remove headphone jacks from the next iPhone persist. The move is not in the interest of consumers.
• Amazon Echo and Alexa really matter
  
  A bunch of good arguments for the significance of Amazon’s smart-speaker Echo and its personal assistant Alexa.
• Europe’s robots to become ‘electronic persons’ under draft plan
  
  “Electronic persons”. Even if this draft won’t lead to further measures right now, this is a fascinating and possibly inevitable idea.
• Buffer News and Updates Tough News: We’ve Made 10 Layoffs. How We Got Here, the Financial Details and How We’re Moving Forward
  
  Buffer is the tech industry’s most transparent company and thus always a guarantee for highly educative and informative insights. This post is no exception. A must-read for everyone affiliated with the startup world.
• Google helps you self-diagnose with its new symptom search
  
  Sounds like a heaven (or nightmare) for every hypochondriac. But that aside, there is demand. Apparently about 1% of Google’s searches are symptom-related.
• The Sausage Index: Which Dating Apps Have the Most Dudes?
  
  An informative (US-centric) look at the online dating landscape featuring various graphs.
• Any song on SoundCloud can be pressed to vinyl thanks to new service
  
  From a sound quality perspective, this cannot be good. But the idea itself is amusing. We have gone from digitizing music from analogue recording to putting all music productions online as playlist to pressing the digital songs from these playlists onto analogue recording mediums.
• Instagram’s growth is astounding, if you ignore the US
  
  A short post pointing out the two general themes related to Instagram’s milestone of 500 million active users: The app is growing rapidly everywhere except in the U.S. – where Snapchat increasingly outperforms Instagram. Sooner or later, the same will happen elsewhere.
• Why I think TheDAO is a Success
  
  Two weeks ago I linked to a piece focusing on The DAO, a crowdfunded investor-directed venture capital fund based on the Ethereum Blockchain and run completely autonomous, made possible by so called “smart contracts” – code that defines the possible actions and rules for everyone participating. Turns out that a flaw in the code allowed for unintended exploitation, which inspired one individual to empty out more than 2 million ether (about $40 million). Now the tricky question: If smart contracts which a group of people have accepted as “rulebook” enable undesired actions, would that be wrongdoing or not? This is what the DAO community has been debating over the past days, following the “hack”. It might sound like geek problems, but in fact one might consider it a crucial philosophical question for the information and computer age: Should code govern organizations/groups instead of decision making committees comprising of humans, and if so, how can this be done in a way consistent with the underlying principles of autonomy yet without becoming unable to adjust the contract if necessary?
• Sam Altman takes a break from Twitter
  
  Sam Altman, the president of the Silicon Valley’s famous startup accelerator Y Combinator, is taking a break from Twitter because the platform “rewards negativity”, is “extremely addictive” and makes him “feel worse after using it”. Many others have expressed similar thoughts before.

Recently published on meshedsociety.com

• The optimal broadband speed
  
  When your broadband download capability increases from 1 Mbits to 50 Mbits, it’s a game changer. But if you upgrade from a 250 Mbits to 500 Mbits connection, there basically is no difference in the user experience. Doesn’t that dynamic sound familiar? Yes, it’s pretty much the same as with money.

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If you like what you read, you can support meshedsociety.com on Patreon!

Here is this week’s edition of meshedsociety.com weekly, loaded with thoughtful opinion pieces, interesting analyses and significant yet under-reported information bits from the digital and technology world. Published and annotated every Thursday (CET), just in time so you have something good to read over the weekend.

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If you want to make sure not to miss this link selection, do like more than 200 other smart people (as of June 2016) and sign up for free for the weekly email. It is sent out each Thursday right after this post goes live, including all the links. Example.

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• The truth about the blockchain: It’s not ready
  
  Whenever I try to fully understand new ideas built on the Blockchain, my head keeps spinning and I wonder how developers in this field ensure to not completely get lost in the complexity of this topic. Reading that even a Blockchain developer can feel that way is comforting. The whole piece is very worth reading and offers some welcome realism to a very hyped topic.
• A Thought on Thoughts About the Future
  
  People tend to take dystopian depictions of the future much more seriously than utopian ones. Imagining an utopia is harder and usually gets you less respect and appreciation by others. A thought-provoking take.
• The Tech Story Is Over
  
  John Battelle asks a relevant question: Now that digital technology is mainstream, ubiquitous and at the core of each social issue, what is the next big thing?
• What is Differential Privacy?
  
  Whether one was disappointed by the lack of cutting-edge innovation presented at Apple’s most recent keynote or not, one has to give that to the company: It rather unexpectedly managed to popularize a fairly new privacy concept: Differential privacy. This text offers a comprehensible and critical explanation of what differential privacy means and why it would be interesting to Apple. It’s too early to say whether it mainly has to be seen as a marketing ploy or whether Apple is serious about it as a new USP to compete with Google, Facebook and other companies in the age of AI.
• The End of the Apple Man
  
  Good observation: Apple seems to have stopped considering affluent white men in their 40s as the (ideal) prototype user for its products.
• Snapchat Launches a Colossal Expansion of Its Advertising, Ushering in a New Era for the App
  
  A long, detailed and very informative piece describing Snapchat’s rapid expansions of its ad business. It pretty much was non-existent 2 years ago but is now expected to generate $1 billion in revenues next year.
• With LinkedIn, Microsoft will know us all too well
• With LinkedIn Purchase, Microsoft Not Learning Lessons of the Past
  
  Microsoft announced its plan to buy LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. As one can expect, the opinions on this giant acquisition differ. These two takes are very different. One suggests that through LinkedIn, Microsoft will get vast amounts of valuable user data, whereas the other paints a picture of Microsoft repeating the mistakes it did with Skype. Bonus links: Salesforce should be worried, and it is getting likely that Google might respond with an acquisition of struggling Twitter.
• How Yahoo derailed Tumblr
  
  If we are at discussing acquisitions which turned out to be failuxres, this one should be mentioned.
• How 26 Tweets Broke My Filter Bubble
  
  Escaping one’s filter bubble leads to personal growth, valuable insights and an improved understanding of the world. But it requires quite some effort, as described in this instructive text.
• Starbucks has more customer money on cards than many banks have in deposits
  
  Remarkable. Maybe large consumer companies are turning into the new banks?
• German Rail aims for driver-less trains in 5 years
  
  Recently, the German Rail faced a sequence of large-scale strikes by train drivers. These might have encouraged the management to search for alternatives.
• The Venmo Request: A New Wrinkle in Modern Dating
  
  As someone living in Northern Europe the practice of splitting the bill after a date does not appear strange to me. Now the peer-to-peer payment app Venmo seems to shaken up the behavioral norms surrounding dates in the US.
• The Mistrust of Science
  
  A worrying trend.

Special reading

• The Future According to Women
  
  A free mini book in PDF format presenting what over 40 women from various industries expect from and hope for the future. Considering that usually men are dominating the discourse about the future – especially in technology – , this is an important contribution.

Podcast episode of the week

• a16z Podcast: Apple and the Widgetification of Everything
  
  Insightful talk about Apple’s latest news, focusing among other things on the different approaches of Google and Apple to bring Artificial Intelligence to users.

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If you like what you read, you can support meshedsociety.com on Patreon!

Here is this week’s edition of meshedsociety.com weekly, loaded with thoughtful opinion pieces, interesting analyses and significant yet under-reported information bits from the digital and technology world. Published and annotated every Thursday (CET), just in time so you have something good to read over the weekend.

======

If you want to make sure not to miss this link selection, do like more than 200 other smart people (as of June 2016) and sign up for free for the weekly email. It is sent out each Thursday right after this post goes live, including all the links. Example.

======

• No One Wants to Be Apple
  
  What an incredible turn of events. All this pessimism about Apple can’t be justified. Or can it?
• Movie written by algorithm turns out to be hilarious and intense
  
  So much about the claim that computers lack creativity.
• The Internet as Conspiracy Theory
  
  A captivating text about the Internet as an instrument to spread conspiracy theories and about what this says about the Internet itself.
• There’s a pretty crazy Snapchat conspiracy theory going around
  
  Here we have a rather recent conspiracy theory suggesting that Snapchat’s facial recognition feature (which is widely used to apply filters to faces) could be a way to amass millions of peoples’ faces, possibly by the FBI. The likelihood of this to be true probably lies somewhere between 0 and 1 percent. However, reading this made me think about the feature a bit more. I can see why some people might be skeptical. Performing a frequent face scan with an Internet enabled app to create funny, modified face shots requires quite a level of trust into an organization and its data security measures. On the other hand, average profile photos are already enough to identify faces in most cases, as shown by Russia’s app success FindFace app. So in the end, as long as one’s photo is available somewhere on the Internet, using Snapchat’s facial recognition should not make things worse.
• Social Media App Usage Down Across the Globe
  
  With third party statistics like these there is always the chance of inaccuracies. But assuming the measured reduction of time spent by Android users with the 4 leading social apps in most (big) markets is accurate, it would be a big deal, and it leads to the question whether we are witnessing the beginning of the end of social media the way we know it.
• Ground Control To Silicon Valley
  
  Critical take on Recode’s Code Conference where tech billionaires are being celebrated for their visions of a future. Criticism aside, the talk with Jeff Bezos was definitely interesting. You can watch the whole 80 minute thing here.
• Inside Uber’s Auto-Lease Machine, Where Almost Anyone Can Get a Car
  
  How to get more Uber cars on the road? By providing those who cannot afford a car but would like to drive for Uber with (accessible but expensive) car leases.
• Uber’s No Good, Very Bad Deal with Saudi Arabia
  
  Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund has invested $3.5 billion into Uber. Considering the pecularities of this country, I share the author’s criticism of the deal. And in case you are wondering what motivated Saudi Arabia to pour money into Uber, you should read this analysis. It won’t be the last investment of its kind.
• The most interesting tech IPO of the year
  
  Many leading Internet and tech companies are relying on the services of Twilio whenever they send SMS to their users/customers. WhatsApp’s SMS identification alone represents 17 % of Twilio’s revenue. Now the US company is preparing for an IPO. According to Quartz its the most interesting tech IPO of the year.
• Why It’s Time to Take Google’s PC Operating System Seriously
  
  Google’s Chrome OS indeed has not been taken too seriously by most, but as the WSJ notes, it’s time to change that.
• Video is the new HTML
  
  In an (in my opinion) unnecessarily elaborate blog post Benedict Evans points to something interesting: How video in all its various forms and shapes (including Gifs, short clips, “native” content formats) is becoming an increasingly common container for all kinds of online content, rivaling HTML.
• Twitter’s anti-Semitism problem is exactly why Twitter has a growth problem
  
  Not sure everyone is aware how different Twitter and Facebook approach the verification of new users: Facebook has some rudimentary verification steps as part of the signup process, Twitter has none. Facebook’s real name and email verification requirements do not fully lock out trolls and trouble makers, but it puts at least some obstacles in their way.
• Voice Assistant Anyone? Yes please, but not in public!
  
  A new study confirms what I have been pointing out in my articles and Twitter discussions about Amazon Echo: Most people are not comfortable talking with voice assistants in public, but they like to do it in private spaces such as the car and the home.
• 93% of phishing emails are now ransomware
  
  It’s amazing how adaptive online criminals are. Once a new method of scamming delivers positive results, everyone quickly jumps on the bandwagon. No complacency and resistance to change to be seen.
• Kevin Kelly on Soft Singularity and inevitable tech advances
  
  Kevin Kelly is out with a new book called “The Inevitable”. I have not read it but based on the interviews with him (in which he pretty much says the same thing every time), the trivial message is that the major technology trends that excite us these days are inevitable, and that’s how it always was and always will be. This conclusion is so obvious to me and also feels like what his previous book “What Technology Wants” was partially about, so I do not understand how one can fill yet another full book about it. But who knows, those who are not too involved with the tech circus might find it eye-opening. Certainly we are far from a general public consensus about the inevitability of certain developments.
• How the Internet works: Submarine fibre, brains in jars, and coaxial cables
  
  This is a long and quite heavy explainer for those who are wondering how data packets travel from the US to Europe.
• The Broken Window Theory In Design & Product Development
  
  The Broken Window Theory is a very useful concept from social sciences which can be applied not only to local urban environments and social settings but also when it comes to creating software products.

Recent article on meshedsociety.com

• Forget Facebook: Twitter looks to Snapchat for Inspiration
  
  Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey finds his own service to be more confusing than Snapchat. That’s an astonishing comment considering how especially people older than 30 seem to struggle with getting used to Snapchat’s user experience. Young users however might agree with Dorsey. And it’s them who he cares about the most. Get ready for the Snapchatification of Twitter.

Podcast episode of the week

• Exponent.fm: We Have Always Been at War with Amazon
  
  In my favorite tech podcast, Ben Thompson and James Allworth talk about the future potential of Amazon and explain why they are more bullish on the company than on Google, Apple or anyone else.

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