elproducto 0.4 👉 a weekly round-up of Tech and Product goodness for humans
4 min readJan 29, 2017
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A curated selection of Tech&Product articles and happenings within the last few days from a curious and frequently skeptical Product Manager’s perspective.
Welcome to a new week full of fresh ideas and innovation at elproducto!
📰 Seen on the news
- Hyperloop getting closer to reality after the announcement from Hyperloop Transportation Technologies that will be opening up facilities in Toulouse. And they seem pretty serious about the idea of connecting several European cities.
- Live stories everywhere. Facebook is testing Stories in Ireland, the feature that its owned Instagram replicated from Snapchat. The feature works exactly as Instagram’s, aiming to get users to share more & more often by taking a prominent location on top the News Feed screen and playing with the concept of volatility (stories disappear after 24h). A good way to get around recent scandals of having to delete live videos, and a better way to monetize live sharing, as Facebook is also testing in-story ads. They have also shown intent on monetizing Messenger by testing Ads within their standalone App.
- Facbook is also updating the algorithm that prioritizes videos on your feed by adding more weight to longer but completed videos (based on sessions viewing the whole length of a video). This should help giving more visibility to longer but popular videos, thus eventually sticking users longer to the site.
- Specs on upcoming Samsung Galaxy S8 are slowly being unveiled, including iris scanner and infinite display.
- Voice paid search? Amazon could soon attempt to leverage Alexa to monetize voice search.
- More voice news: the upcoming Apple Watch Os update will include 3rd party App control via Siri. With this Apple aims to make the watch a device to be used more proactively (despite the small screen estate), rather than an “alerts” device. The potential for voice assistants in wearables is huge:
- Nokia has also announced voice assistant called MIKA, focused on telecom engineers. Interesting first steps towards adding professional value to voice assistants.
- Apple getting serious about AI by joining efforts with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and IBM on Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society (yep, that’s the official name). And despite sales slowdown, Apple’s shares are soaring due to rumours of upcoming iPhone X.
- More Apps getting offline mode. Following last week’s announcement of Google Search offline mode for Android (pretty much just saving the search for when you get online), Whatsapp and Trello are also adding offline functionality.
📚 Good reads
- Storytelling as a leadership skill. From raising money at early stages of a startup, to keeping a cohesive corporate culture, great storytellers have a great competitive advantage in leadership.
- The startup idea matrix. An inspiring piece of work on market opportunities by Eric Stromberg from Google.
- A brief guide to mobile testing. For all of us working on mobile products, testing properly is a thorough and complex process, but a more than needed process that will ensure the quality that customers will get out of our products. This guide by Tubik Studio walks us through different types and levels of mobile testing.
- The case for interface layers. Scott Belsky brings us fresh insights on how companies focusing on the layer between users and the underlying services can succeed by aggregating services and removing friction.
- Digital Trends 2017. Despite we are well entered into 2017, good yearly reports keep coming out. This time We Are Social brings us a global overview of Internet, social media and mobile trends in 2017.
- Thinking interludes. Taylor Pipes from Evernote walk us through Albert Einstein’s approach to optimize the creative process.
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