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Spent hours boiling down 120 links into just 24, each with a summary and personal comment on its importance so you don't have to actually click them (I'm destroying my own click through rate 🖱 along with my free time 🌴).

 

“We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.”

John Dewey  

Happenings

1️⃣ Starbucks is trying out a mobile order-only store; 2️⃣ "Traveler" and "Bon Appétit" magazines join "Billboard" in using the iPhone 7 Plus Portrait Mode to shoot their covers, claiming it's indistinguishable from Pro cameras for the 99.9%; 3️⃣ Apple added some interesting iOS remote management capabilities (incl. remote reboot/shutdown), brought Live Photos to the web (community is important) and expanded App Store ads internationally, 4️⃣ ✨Facebook stole the week✨ by making AR more accessible to creators and a perceived commodity for consumers:

  • AR Camera Effects Platform, similar to Snapchat's World Lenses but open to artists/developers, reaching far more users (2B vs 160M) and situations (Facebook/Messenger/Instagram/WhatsApp). Effects range from static stickers to interactive AR (which you can look at from different positions with your phone - basic Inside-out Positional Tracking), associated with faces/places/time/objects (e.g. plant, coffee);
  • Mobile Computer Vision: "Caffe2" for recognizing images/videos/sound/text on low-power devices (e.g. on raspberry pi, mobile phones - likely powering AR Camera Effects);
  • Facebook's Assistant (dubbed "M", released to all of the US last week and powered by wit.ai natural language processing) understands food ordering intent in group chats and offers its help to order and pay (Food Ordering is also available by talking to directly M);
 

AI and ML





Chatbots

Design



Health

Reality



Research

Stats

  • 1200M Facebook Messenger MAUs (up from 1B in July 2016) - source
  • 375M Instagram Direct MAUs (Instagram overall has 600M MAUs, Snapchat has 167M DAUs) - source
  • 1 in 5 Facebook videos are live - source
 

Strategy

Voice UI


Blast From The Past

"Before thermometers: philosophers mocked the idea of temperature ever being measurable, with all its nuance, complexity and subjectivity"

Bias in Mental Testing, Arthur Jensen, 1980.