el producto #52 đ a weekly round-up of Tech and Product goodness
Spotify ready for IPO, iPhone leading mobile sales, Amazonâs âblended realityâ mirror patent, Prime growth, Observations on Product Management & more.
Welcome to the first el producto of 2018!
đ° Whatâs going on
Spotify confidentially filed for IPO at the end of December; Spotify plans a direct US listing, apparently in Q1 2018; previously raised more than $2.7B.
Spotify reveals via tweet (since deleted) it has 70M paid subscribers, up from 60M in late July; also claims 70M free subscribers for a total user base of 140M; Apple Music claimed over 30M paid users in late September.
Facebook is letting Instagram users cross-post Stories to WhatsApp; the pilot test presents the Stories as a WhatsApp Status, which disappears after 24h; follows similar move to let Instagram post Stories directly to Facebook
Appleâs battery replacement program could cost them $10B in iPhone sales; Apple launched the battery replacement program after confirming that iOS adjusts peak processor performance according to battery health.
Amazon files a patent for a âblended realityâ mirror that lets users see what they would look like in various items of clothing; the filing describes a system of cameras, displays, lights, and projectors that overlay the userâs reflection with responsive digital clothing.
Intel is pushing out fixes for the Meltdown and Spectre security flaws affecting most processor chips; Intel says 90% of processors released in the past five years will see patches by the end of next week.
Netflix releases âAlphaGo,â a 2017 documentary about the AI designed by Googleâs DeepMind to defeat human champions at the strategy game Go.
Link As You Go (iOS) lets users open links by taking a picture of a URL; the app makes use of OCR tools to identify and interpret printed text.
đ Stuff to think about
Observations on Product Management by Airbnbâs Director of Product. Dan Hill presents a list of principles / observations on the craft of building products.
đ The week in figures
The iPhone was by far the bestselling tech product of 2017, approx. 223M units sold; next bestsellers were the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Note 8 at 33M, Echo Dot at 24M, Apple Watch at 20M, and the Nintendo Switch at 15M.
Apple recorded $890M in App Store sales from Dec 24 to Jan 1; the store saw $300M in purchases on New Yearâs Day alone; in 2017, iOS developers earned $26.5B, an increase of more than 30% YoY; the App Store now features more than 2k titles with ARKit integration.
Amazon saw more new Prime members globally in 2017 than in any other year; total membership and new signup numbers undisclosed; the company shipped more than 5B items via Prime in 2017.
Mobile data usage has increased 25% from 2016, with the average smartphone user now using 31.4 GB each month; streaming video accounts for 83% of consumption; proliferation of unlimited data plans contributes to this rise, with those with such plans using 67% more data.
đ©âđ #off-product
Neurotechnology, Elon Musk and the goal of human enhancement. Brain-computer interfaces could change the way people think, soldiers fight and Alzheimerâs is treated. But are we in control of the ethical ramifications?
đ„ Quote of the week
âWe donât see things as they are; we see them as we are.â â AnaĂŻs Nin
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el producto is a curated selection of Tech&Product happenings within the last few days from a curious and frequently skeptical Product Ownerâs perspective.
