elproducto 0.5 👉 a weekly round-up of Tech and Product goodness for humans
4 min readFeb 4, 2017
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WhatsApp new features, SpaceX reusing rockets, Free roaming in EU, Design is never done, #deleteUber, Design for the Zs & more in this week’s edition of elproducto
Welcome to a new week full of fresh ideas and innovation at elproducto!
📰 Seen on the news
- WhatsApp testing 3 new features: “undo” for recently sent messages, 24h-disappearing stories and live location tracking for group chats.
- Starbucks starts testing a virtual assistant that will let customers order via voice or chatbot
- Google puts Hands Free payment pilot on hold. The service used wifi, bluetooth and geolocation data to detect if the user was in a participant store, and allowed users to pay by just providing name or initials to the cashier. Google says will now work on scaling up the project after positive feedback.
- While preparing for their upcoming IPO, Snap (Snapchat) is working on new AR smart lenses.
- Facebook working on new TV Apps, including Apple TV and other set-top boxes, aiming to drive video consumption. They also expressed intent in funding original content. These initiatives perfectly fit with recent efforts on monetizing video content.
- Google Chrome makes reloading 28% faster by reducing the amount of validations and simplifying the reload behaviour.
- EU will finally drop roaming costs across member states on June 2017.
- SpaceX plans to launch its first reused rocket in March.
- GitHub makes it easier to explore common themes with the launch of Topics, a machine learning powered search tool to explore repositories.
- And GitLabs shares live how they try to recover from a major backup failure. A great example of transparency in handling such a massive incident:
- Uber has to automate their account deletion process due to high demand after using surge pricing during protest against Trump’s migration ban. Their open cooperation with the new government (from which Kalanik retracted later) didn’t help. A little too late?
- Uber also took part together with Microsoft, Facebook, Apple and other tech companies in the open letter sent against migration ban sent to Trump administration. If anything good is to come out of all this, it will certainly be the escalation of donations by multiple tech executives to American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC), International Rescue Committee (IRC), UN High Commissioner for Refugees / UN Refugee Agency (UNHR) and other organisations that the unfortunate order has triggered.
📚 Good reads
- Why your opinions are terrible predictors of success. Andrew Chen shares some questions we should all ask ourselves when thinking about new products in The Bad Product Fallacy.
- How to design for the first true digital native generation, the Zs. InVision gives us some tips on how to make design engaging for the upcoming young users.
- Shall we agree we should disagree? Liane Davey writes for HBR on why and how to embrace productive conflict.
- Good things happen when a Product Manager pairs with a UX Researcher. The emphasis that Alëna puts on collaboration got me nodding few times. From a Product perspective, I couldn’t agree more on the need to involve PMs in research process.
- Design is never done. Tim Brown from Ideo introduces to use The Circular Design Guide, a toolset of design methods and mindsets to encourage product creation in closed loops.
🕶️ Tools & features
- Ever wondered how much Facebook knows about you? Now you can find out what they automatically tag on you photos with the Facebook Vision Tags Chrome extension.
- A feature that Apple should make native: see, test and share your wifi without even unlocking your iPhone with WiFi widget.
📼 Visuals & audios
- Culture codes: a beautiful aggregation of values and missions from few major tech companies.
- Serial entrepreneur Noah Kagan presents his experience on how to come up with business ideas.
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elproducto is a curated selection of Tech&Product happenings within the last few days from a curious and frequently skeptical Product Manager’s perspective.
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