Author: Nathan Taylor

When taxi-like service Uber (order a car instantly from your smartphone) first became successful, it created a trend for copy cats. These companies were marketed and mocked as “Uber for X“, e.g., Uber for flowers, Uber for shopping, Uber for laundry, Uber for pizza. You get the idea. But Uber’s explosive growth had another side. The company fought tooth and… Continue reading Blazing a path on machine learning and privacy, Google risks becoming “Uber for lawsuits”

With Apple’s announcements at WWDC and Google’s announcements at Google I/O, there’s a reasonable case to be made that 2015 will be looked back on as the year we transitioned from the mobile tech era into the machine learning era. To be clear, that’s a huge oversimplification. Smartphone mobile tech is still changing rapidly (watch versus phone)… Continue reading 2015 is a transition year to the (somewhat creepy) machine learning era. Apple, Google, privacy and ads.

Ben Thompson starts off his Peak Google post saying “Despite the hype about disruption, the truth is most tech giants, particularly platform providers, are not so much displaced as they are eclipsed.” By this he means old platforms and companies don’t fail or go away. They continue to dominate their old platforms. It’s just that new… Continue reading Talking computers pose a threat to current Apple versus Google market segmentation. Beyond Peak Google.

Even though it’s only April, it’s already clear 2015 will be looked back on as the year cord cutting (replacing cable TV with internet streaming) started going mainstream. HBO is finally allowing non-cable customers to stream HBO content without requiring a cable subscription. Apple is expected to launch a TV streaming service later this year. Existing internet streaming… Continue reading Cord Cutting: You know it’s all about UX, ’bout UX. No savings.

I’m a sucker for year-end lists and predictions. So here’s 5 for 2015 that I’ll scorecard next December.

I’ve always liked year-end lists and predictions. They help highlight where we’ve been, and where we might be going. That said, I consider tech predictions as fundamentally problematic, and not to be taken too seriously. In that spirit, I’m grading my predictions from last year.

This week CVS and Rite-Aid turned off Apple’s mobile phone payment system in their stores. Apparently this was because of contractual obligations to support a yet to be released mobile payments competitor called CurrentC, created by a consortium led by Walmart. The reaction to CurrentC from tech blogs and twitter has been brutal.

Update: Stephen Ballot pointed out on twitter this post should refer to “user input method” rather than “user interface”. Great point. With this clarification I’ll leave the rest of the post as originally published. Thanks for reading. If you analyze computing eras by circuit type you might get: vacuum tubes, transistors, ICs, microprocessors. By architecture: mainframes, minicomputers, microcomputers. By networking: ethernet, TCP/IP. That’s… Continue reading There’s a lot to be said for analyzing tech eras by user interface: Gaming, Oculus, Apple Watch.