• Atlassian to Buy Trello for $425 Million
• Facebook to Test Mid-Roll Video Ads
• Amazon Echo -> 4% of American households… Apple’s Siri handles over 2bn commands a week, and 20% of Google searches on Android-powered handsets in America are input by voice (Economist)
• 7 bot trends to watch in 2017
• Just one autonomous car will use 4,000 GB of data/day.. vehicles will generate and consume roughly 40 terabytes of data for every eight hours of driving.
• All electric trains in the Netherlands now run on wind energy
• Google quietly shut its internet drone project last year
• Fitbit reportedly held talks to acquire Jawbone
• iOS revenue to surpass $1 trillion this year
• Why Norway is killing FM radio
• Deep Learning at Gilt
• Amazon Web Services has opened a London region
• Netflix’s content boss explained the reason he bet big on ‘The Crown,’ its Golden Globe winner
• Apple captures more than 40% of wireless headphones market in the US.
• An average of 2,700 (!) apps were released daily in the Google Play Store, compared with 1,800 in the Apple App Store.
• Amazon Web Services quietly buys cybersecurity startup Harvest.ai to bolster cloud protections
• An Essential Guide to WeChat Mini Apps
• For Non-Tech Companies, if You Can’t Build It, Buy a Start-Up
• Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager
• The mobile app gold rush may be over

 

• The Robotic Grocery Store of the Future Is Here
• 5 Big Predictions for Artificial Intelligence in 2017
• Apple Confirms $1 Billion Investment in SoftBank’s $100 billion Vision Fund
• Tesla sold a total of 76,230 cars and sport-utility vehicles last year.
• A Third Of Consumers Say They Would Exchange Personal Info For Content
• Holiday Spending on Mobile Games Nears $1 Billion
• Hyundai Shows Off Wearable Robots to Help Paraplegics, Elderly
• SpaceX Launch Video : Team, Passion, Culture (Youtube)
• Google’s A.I. is training itself to count calories in food photos
• Bose is building ride-smoothing tech for autonomous cars
• PlayStation 4 sales surpass 53M, Uncharted 4 moves 8.7M
• Alexa: Amazon’s Operating System
• Amazon delivered over 2 bn items globally in 2016
• Minecraft has now sold over 25 million copies on PC and Mac
• A.I. Downs expert human fighter pilot in dogfight simulation
• Insurance firm Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance is making 34 employees redundant and replacing them with IBM’s Watson Explorer AI
• Ford plans to take Amazon’s Alexa for a ride
• Apple’s App Store Sales Top $28 Billion
• Amazon Brings Fire TV Experience to Third-Party TV Sets
  (In a move mirroring Roku TV, Amazon is partnering with lower-priced TV brands including Seiki and Westinghouse)
• Wind power overtakes coal for first time in UK

Twitter

• Transparent Video
• The avg Web page size today is equal to installing Doom back then

• Amazon patents show flying warehouses that send delivery drones to your door
• 14 busy tech leaders share their tips for managing everyday work and life
• Volkswagen acquires PayByPhone, a parking payment app used by 12.5M users in 300 cities
• Tencent invests in mapping company to serve driverless cars (Autonomous cars requires centimeter detailed maps)
• Five industries under threat from technology
  (Travel agents, manufacturers, insurers, advisers and car repair garages face strain)
• The Best Podcasts for Self-Improvement
• AT&T Blocks Robocalls Before They Ring, If You Have the Right Phone
• A pre-CES 2017 look at the state of autonomous vehicles
• Volvo integrates Skype for Business in its 90 series vehicles
• The new Microsoft under Satya Nadella is still looking good on Wall Street
• This Robot Is Better Than Most Humans At Foosball (Twitter)
• Mining 24 Hours a Day with Robots
• The 2016 WeChat Data Report

• Mobile eating the world, Ben Evans
• Japan’s SoftBank Invests $1 Billion in Satellite Startup OneWeb
• The Tesla Advantage: 1.3 Billion Miles of Data, Silicon Valley and Detroit can’t keep up with Elon Musk’s trove of real-world metrics.
• Scientists Have Officially Entered the Weird World of Bacteria-Powered Batteries
• Konami Climbs as Smartphone Soccer Game Downloads Hit 4 Million
• DeepMind signs up second NHS trust to health app, Artificial intelligence company hopes to alert doctors to patients at risk
• Honda and Alphabet Talk Driverless-Car Partnership, Under proposed partnership, companies would test Waymo’s sensors, computers and software in Honda’s vehicles
• AT&T’s DirecTV Now Gets Off to a Bumpy Start
• What was the most important technology of 2016?
• Vodafone eyes role in traffic control for drones
• Canada sets universal broadband goal of 50Mbps and unlimited data for all
• Ten people to get NHS bionic eyes
• Here’s what 22 tech stars have on their home screens
• Voyager 1, at a distance of 137 AU, is headed toward the Ophiuchus constellation in the north, while Voyager 2, 113 AU out from the home star, is speeding toward the Pavo constellation in the south.
• How YouTube is Shaping Content and Culture
• YouTube in the Living Room – Online Video Becomes Part of the Furniture

• Tencent: Inside China’s ‘killer app’ factory
• Instagram hits 600m user milestone
• Ikea’s smart home (source)
• Live on Twitter: Broadcasting Video From the App
• GE’s Software Future Starts With Selling Computer Hardwaret o help industrial customers move data between their equipment and its cloud services
• General Electric to Buy Two Tech Startups for Its Digital Business
  GE is acquiring Wise.io Inc., a machine learning firm, and Bit Stew Systems Inc., which enables the ‘ingestion’ of masses of data for industrial applications
• Let’s build an Airport – How to estimate large scale projects
• Apple, Spotify Face Upstart Rival in Streaming Music: China’s Tencent
  (Joox music-streaming service)
• Amazon reportedly building app to connect truckers with shippers, possibly putting pressure on Convoy
• ‘Super Mario Run’ Jumps to Top of App-Store Charts
• Azure in the car: Microsoft and TomTom partner on location services for U.S. automakers
• Subscriptions offer a more stable base of recurring revenue than traditional licenses, but Adobe hasn’t simply been replacing one form of sales for the other.
• Another one bites the dust: Cisco discontinues its $1B cloud initiative as AWS, Azure and others expand
• Air-launched rocket puts eight CYGNSS microsatellites in orbit to study hurricanes

2017 Trends

• The Future 100, emerging trends for 2017 [JWT]
• Fjord Trends 2017
• PSFK Forecast 2020

• Over the past 18 months, Accenture estimates that it has automated 17,000 tasks and roles, saving it around 20m hours of work per year
• Amazon Go Video (Youtube)
• Uber in Artificial-Intelligence Drive After Buying Startup (Geometric Intelligence)
• Bill Gates On His Five Favorite Books Of 2016
• Charlie Rose : A look at virtual reality with Brendan Iribe, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Oculus.
• Charlie Rose : A look at artificial intelligence with John Kelly, senior vice president of cognitive solutions and research for the IBM Corporation.
• New Nordstrom mobile chatbot is ready to help shoppers find the perfect holiday gift
• Amazon Web Services expands with its first Canadian region
• Moving to the cloud requires (and attracts) scarce, expensive talent, say 3 big AWS users
• Microsoft just completed its $26B LinkedIn acquisition: Here’s what they’re going to do first
• Magic Leap is actually way behind, like we always suspected it was
• AngelList Buys Product Hunt, a Marriage of Two Beloved Silicon Valley Sites
• The Hierarchy of Engagement
• 2017 Google will reach 100% renewable energy for global operations
• Google Opens its Digital Assistant to Developers in Race Against Amazon’s Alexa
• Google Asisstant API
• Facebook Messenger Platform v1.3 Features
• Amazon Alexa API
• Apple Music Hits 20 Million Paid Subscribers
• Fast Path to a Great UX — Increased Exposure Hours

Twitter

• @cdixon : Steve Jobs: “there is a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product.”
• @cdixon :
  2016 League of Legends finals: 43M viewers
  2016 NBA finals: 30.8M viewers
• @morellimarcp : #Robotics market 2015 by @BCG ($ 26B)
• @lukew: “no one will ever…”

• Rise of the robot music industry : AI is transforming music streaming, talent spotting, promotion and even composition
• The Next Fashion Trend: Weather Forecasting
  At a recent class at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, students were asked—and promised a Dunkin’ Donuts gift card for the right answer to—the question: When should a Los Angeles store stock swimsuits?
• Twitter Names Keith Coleman as Product Chief
• Fitbit Set to Acquire Smartwatch Maker Pebble (Fitbit interested in Pebble’s operating system, intellectual property, will likely shut down brand)
• AWS re:Invent 2016 Keynote: Werner Vogels (Youtube)
• AWS re:Invent 2016 Keynote: Andy Jassy (Youtube)
• AWS re:Invent 2016: From Monolithic to Microservices: Evolving Architecture Patterns (ARC305)
• AWS re:Invent 2016: How JPL Leverages Alexa to Further Space Exploration (ALX301)
• GeekWire re:Invent Special Coverage
• How Amazon Gets Its Holiday Hires Up to Speed in Two Days (Touch screens and robots help to prepare new hires for warehouse jobs)
  ... shrink the time it takes to train new hires to as little as two days, compared with up to six weeks for a conventional warehouse job …The shorter training period saves Amazon money, and could give the company room to offer higher wages as it seeks to expand its workforce about 40% by adding 120,000 temporary workers at its U.S. warehouses for the peak sales season that runs roughly from November through December.
• Netflix Now Lets You Download, But Many Top Shows Are Off Limits
• Atlassian has opened an engineering office in Mountain View in a bid to attract talent from the area’s tech giants.
• Indian Startup Plans to Land on the Moon in January 2018
• Meet Starbucks’ next CEO: Here’s what former colleagues say about tech vet Kevin Johnson (…$84 billion global coffee corporation prioritizes new technology opportunities at more than 25,000 stores in 75 countries…)
• Starbucks has more customer money on cards than many banks have in deposits
• Forget personal assistants, The real battle is for voice UIs
• “We are as much a tech company as we are a pizza company,” he told the audience, pointing out that of the 800 people working at headquarters, fully 400 work in software and analytics“
• Twitter: @justinshanes : Amazon thinks my recent humidifier purchase was merely the inaugural move in a newfound hobby of humidifier collecting.
• On Writing Product Specs

• Between 2011 and the third quarter of 2016, the percentage of tech deals with Chinese investment grew from 1.7% to 4.1%
• Airbnb in Talks to Buy China Rival Xiaozhu
• Amazon in Talks to Buy Dubai’s Souq.com in $1 Billion Deal
• Skyscanner acquired for £1.4 billion by China’s Ctrip
• Twitter: The % of mobile-only shoppers is astonishing. 50%+ for many of the top 15 retailers.
• Twitter: Two-thirds (CEOs) said they believe technology will create greater value in the future than their workforce will, and 44% believe that automation, artificial intelligence and robotics will make people “largely irrelevant” in the years to come.
• Twitter: Friday through Dec 25, estimated 1,500,000,000 packages will be delivered in the US by UPS+FEDEX+USPS (source: @parcelpending via @CNBC)
• Stripe Inc., whose software is used by businesses to accept and track digital payments, will be valued at $9.2 billion in a new funding round that is being completed, the company said.
• Universities’ AI Talent Poached by Tech Giants (Google, Baidu, Facebook lure away top computer science researchers responsible for training students)
• Google Brain AI is now using its own language to translate between languages
• Apple raked in a record 91 per cent of all smartphone profits in the third quarter
• Japan plans supercomputer to leap into technology future
• In the future, will farming be fully automated?
• Tesla hires HoloLens designer, second Microsoft employee from the augmented reality program
• Voice search has created a huge vulnerability at the heart of Google’s business

• Samsung Charges Into Auto Tech With $8 Billion Deal for Harman
• Jaguar Shows Its Concept for a Luxury Electric SUV
• Siemens to Buy Mentor Graphics Amid Push to Digitize Heavy Industry
• China Internet Giant Tencent’s Profit Jumps on Games Gains ($1.55 billion net profit in latest quarter)
• Airbnb moves beyond accommodation into tours and immersive trips
• Airbnb’s share of London lets triples in a year, agents say 7.6% of overnight stays in capital now via gig economy website
• Skype Users Make Around 3 Billion Minutes Of Calls Every Day
• You’re probably shopping for the most nutritious produce in the wrong aisle
• Amazon is going to sell cars onlineAccording to Reuters, Fiat Chrysler will sell three models — the 500, the 500L, and the Panda — on Amazon’s Italian site at a price that is up to 30% cheaper than other dealerships. The service will only be available in Italy.
• Tesla, SolarCity Merger Gets Shareholder Approval, Here’s everything you need to know about the solar roof Tesla plans to build with SolarCity
• Amazon Challenges Netflix by Taking Video Service Global
• Starry, an internet service provider (ISP) that promises to deliver super-fast internet access wirelessly, launched its first closed beta in the Boston area this week.
• Apple has a secret team working to make the iPhone’s camera a portal to augmented reality
• French technology group Sigfox, which is building a wireless network for connected devices, has launched a new funding round to raise €150m for further international expansion.
• “The feeling when you realize the robots will steal your job.”