elproducto 0.6 👉 a weekly round-up of Tech and Product goodness for humans
4 min readFeb 12, 2017
Google’s AI, Real-time info on Maps, New iPhones, Making sense of complex systems, Snapchat’s lessons on innovation & 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
- Priceline acquires Momondo Group (Momondo.com and Cheapflights.com) to operate under Kayak, aiming to get more presence on flight search & booking following Ctrip’s acquisition of Skyscanner just few weeks ago.
- Google develops an AI system capable to generate clearer pictures from highly pixelated images; the process is able to take an 8x8 pixel image and generate a new 32x32 picture
- Paypal launches slack bot for P2P payments.
- Microsoft starts testing new Office version for Mac including touch bar features. Excel users can select from recently used formulas, pick charts or color cells; in Word, users can format text and change fonts and in Powerpoint they can reorder slides. Available for Office Insiders.
- Google’s answer for Facebook’s push on live video. Youtube opening up Mobile live streaming to creators with +10k subscribers. Also launching Superchat, which gives viewers the option to purchase highlighted and sticky chat messages on the live stream.
- Google is also making Maps more alive by providing real-time commute info on its new Android version. Users can access to curated lists of services (eg. restaurants or shops) around the destination area. This potentially enables Google for further integrations with 3rd party services (as we have seen with Booking.com or Uber) thus better monetization of Maps.
- Alexa becomes technically available to any car by partnering with Logitech’s ZeroTouch. Amazon is also opening up Alexa to a wider range of devices in UK and Germany with the release of Alexa Voice Service in those markets
- More info on upcoming iPhones and their very likely astronomical price. Apple also plans to manufacture iPhones in India. The price gap with local competitors is still quite large, but Apple has also thought about that and is pushing to sell refurbished phones in that market.
- Meanwhile, Uber understands that driving in India, well, is not as predictable as in most of Europe and US, to put it mildly, and will start offering a new up to 12-hour hire service.
- Last in India; will Tesla be ready for it? Seems to be getting there by summer. But will India be ready for Tesla?
- Snapchat keeps pushing for original content ahead of it’s upcoming IPO. Partnering with BBC on 6 Snapchat exclusive Planet Earth episodes.
- Pinterest introduces Lens, a visual search tool that recognizes objects in the real world and suggest related items.
- Make Europe Great Again! European Commission agrees on a Digital Single Market strategy that will allow travellers to access their subscribed services and content (e.g. Netflix or Spotify) anywhere within the EU. This comes just a week after the announcement of roaming charges dropping by June 2017.
📚 Good reads
- Five models for making sense of complex systems by Christina Wodtke. A handy brief guide with practical examples to help making sense of the complex world of ideas.
- Snapchat’s lessons on innovation. Sam Gerstenzang highlights few of the reasons why Snap is often ahead of other Social Media giants on Product Innovation.
- Meet the technology that power Superbowl’s synchronized drones. Wired talks about Intel’s Shooting Star drone system.
- Predictive UX and Anticipatory Design. Joël van Bodegraven looks at current challenges and trends in User Experience in order to give us some hints on how to be ahead in this ever evolving field.
- Are you Data-Puker or an Insights Provider? My favourite Data Science Guru, Avinash Kaushik, in a brief but sharp answer to the question of constant Data-Pukes vs Providing Ideas.
- Half of the internet traffic doesn’t come from humans. Incapsula’s Annual Bots report with plenty of insights on how Good and Bad bots are already accounting for more than 50% of the web traffic.
🎥 Visuals
- The evolution of Modern Product discovery. Teresa Torres looks at Product Discovery in retrospective, before talking about current frameworks and giving us a sneak peek of the future.
- Let the data speak. Inspiring article by Nathan Yau with 25 ways to visualize the same dataset.
🖲 Tools & features
- Learn languages while browsing the interwebs. Flipword is a new Chrome extension that will help you practising languages by integrating keywords and voice cues in your usual browsing activity.
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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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