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Latest Podcast

2013

  • The Tragic Beauty of Google+

    Harry McCracken has a pretty good articulation of the conventional wisdom about Google+: Google+ is exuberant. It’s fun to use. And yet I’m pretty positive I won’t spend remotely as much time in it as I will in Facebook. You might have already guessed why: My friends, family and acquaintances are all on Facebook, where […]

  • The Android Detour

    Google is at its best when its product focus follows its business model; for too long Android was a detour.

  • As of today, every major mobile competitor… also makes apps for iOS

    Rene Ritchie: A few minutes ago BlackBerry announced BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) for iOS. With that announcement, every single one of Apple’s major mobile competitors now makes apps for iOS. Follow the money: Apple makes it on hardware, so there is precisely zero benefit to supporting other platforms. Google and Microsoft, on the other hand, make […]

  • Facebook phones and the future of mobile communication

    Frank Meehan, who built integrated communications platforms at INQ Mobile/Three in the mid-2000s: We had a lot of early success…because in 2008/2009 most people just used a handful of key internet communication centric services. Facebook, MSN Messenger, Skype etc dominated. So integrating just those services was such a useful step that people loved what we […]

  • The Facebook Flop

    I’ll admit it: I’m rather enjoying the Facebook Home/First flop. First off, it’s always fun to say “I told you so.” Specifically, pre-launch I questioned Mark Zuckerberg’s assertion that people, not apps were the center of our smartphone experience in Apps, People, and Jobs to be Done: Apps aren’t the center of the world. But […]

  • The Week in Review – May 5-11, 2013

    The Week In Review is a weekly digest of what I found interesting in tech over the last week. It consists of the story of the week, a summary of stratechery articles and links, a huge collection of links that I found noteworthy (plus commentary), and my favorite tweets of the week. I post this […]

  • Facebook in Talks to Buy Waze

    Reuters: Facebook Inc is in advanced talks to acquire Israeli mobile satellite navigation start-up Waze for $800 million to $1 billion, business daily Calcalist reported on Thursday. Due diligence is underway after a term sheet was signed, Calcalist said, adding that talks began six months ago. Waze uses satellite signals from members’ smartphones to generate […]

  • What LinkedIn is Good For

    Ben Evans is annoyed with LinkedIn: LinkedIn fails to hit absolutely basic product features that should have been in there 5 years ago, both on mobile and desktop. Instead, the core features get buried under successive layers of mediocre non-core products, the latest being a flood of me-too news aggregation that’s creeping through the product […]

  • Change for Change’s Sake

    iPhone OS was, but for copy-and-paste, a perfect OS (bear with me here – assume this is true). It handled every function the iPhone was expected to do in an incredibly elegant and polished way, and it’s not an accident that much of the core functionality has gone unchanged for six years. The tech press […]

  • Adobe’s Subscription Model & Why Platform Owners Should Care

    It’s difficult to overstate the significance of Adobe’s announcement that all of their products will be solely available through Creative Cloud. No longer can you buy packaged version of Photoshop, for example, that are yours forever. Instead you can subscribe to different individual apps or suites. What makes this so interesting is that while companies […]