elproducto 👉 a weekly round-up of Tech and Product goodness for humans

New year, new challenges! Welcome to the MVP of elproducto.

Very simple. A curated selection of Tech and Product articles and happenings within the last few days from a curious and frequently skeptical Product Manager’s perspective. Find the why at the bottom of the page.

📚 Good reads

• 2016 in Experimentation. Insightful review of happenings in Experimentation world during 2016 by Mats Einarsen.
• Fascinating facts and projects. Fun and interesting read on 52 learnings by Tom Withwell from Fluxx.
• Profound and touching read on embracing simplicity by James Altucher. As I type these lines, I am about to re-read it for a 3rd time.
• Your brain has a delete button. How mindfulness (and the occasional nap) can boost your brain performance.

📰 Seen on the news

• Is 2017 the year of Alexa? As recently seen at CES2007, more and more devices will be integrating Alexa from factory. Speakers, home hubs, fridges and cars by different manufacturers are already announcing their products.
• New players stepping in the self-driving car game. It is starting to become easier to count the car manufacturers without plans to build self-driving cars, than to mention the ones pursuing the autonomous drive dream. Last ones to share more details about their plans have been Audi (in partnership with Nvidia), Honda (also trying to get a piece of the hail-sharing cake), Toyota and Mercedes. Renault and Nissan, despite not chasing self-driving capabilities, are partnering with Microsoft in eg. sensors and voice-control via Cortana. But the car everybody has been talking about this week comes from a less known manufacturer, Faraday Future. FF boasts having received 65k reservations for their just announced FF91, despite not even having a price tag yet. Meanwhile, Tesla doesn’t seem too much worried about the increasing competition, as its stock price has been steadily soaring for the last 30 days:

• You can now measure your body fat via your phone. The Chinese company Changhong has built a phone wth a molecular sensor, able to detect eg what’s the sugar content in your food.
• Apple missed it’s 2016 sales targets and Tim Cook will cut his salary as consequence. App store keeps breaking records but hardware sales seem to be far from its best days.

🔬 Things I’m testing right now

I am enhancing my Amazon Echo’s capabilities with my recently acquired Samsung Smartthings. So far I’ve managed to automate few lights when I arrive home and it’s dark, make sure lights and some appliances are off when I leave home, and my favourite one, to switch on few lights in the living room together the Kettle at the shout of “Good morning”. Now I’m trying to set few more automations via IFTTT and some mobile Apps. It’s kind of useless, but I’m happy as a kid in a candy store.

🤔 Why?

Every week I spend an unhealthy amount of time reading books, magazines, newsletters, Medium articles and random media suggested via my multiple social media streams. While I am a big fan of some of the newsletters and aggregators, I haven’t yet managed to find a single source for all things I like, find interesting and would like to share with the world.

What if I would just do it myself? Being honest, it doesn’t take me much time to save those articles, distil them and share them here. I will be very happy if I manage to help any curious minds with similar interest. Moreover, I hope I will learn something along the way. This is how I came to make this little experiment, a Minimum Viable Product for something I’ve been thinking about for a while already.

💁 Want to contribute in making elproducto awesome?

You can help me by providing your feedback at the comments section. What would you like to read more about? And less? What do you think about the format? Emojis overload? Missing kittens? Any kind of feedback will be happily welcomed.