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We're All Just Making Content for Google
How did Google get so big?—60 Minutes - CBS News
Jeremy Stoppelman: If I were starting out today, I would have no shot of building Yelp. That opportunity has been closed off by Google and their approach.
Steve Kroft: In what way?
Jeremy Stoppelman: Because if you provide great content in one of these categories
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Chapters and the Beautiful Modularity of Podcasts
Ben Brooks had some choice words for chapters in podcasts in his post today about Castro 3.0.
Listeners (and this was literally news to me today) also use chapters to jump about in the podcasts to skip over the boring bits.
Isn’t the entire point of a podcast that the entire podcast is
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I Have One of Those Floaty APKs: My Return to the BYOD Podcast
I love talking to Greg and Nathan on the BYOD Podcast and they were gracious enough to ask me to come on this week to talk about what else: Android.
Matt Birchler joins us to talk about "Micro Podcasts", and dive into Google I/O talking about: How good has Google Assistant became,
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Duplex Shows Google’s “Build it First, then Apply Ethics” Attitude
Duplex shows Google failing at ethical and creative AI design | TechCrunch
Yet despite all the thoughtful ethical guidance and research that’s already been produced, and is out there for the reading, here we are again being shown the same tired tech industry playbook applauding engineering capabilities in a shiny bubble, stripped of human context
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Being Yourself is Differentiating (appearance on the Unco podcast)
I was honored to be invited onto the Unco podcast, Timothy buck’s excellent podcast about everything unusual in technology. We talked about building an audience online, the value these internet side-projects provide, and how the definition of “privacy” has changed over the years and where it’s headed.
It was a pleasure to
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Living that #DongleLife all the Way Back in 1998
From The New York Times' review of the original iMac in 1998: Who Said Computers Have to Be Square?
Apple contends that the 1.44-megabyte, 3.5-inch disk drive is a thing of the past and that putting one in the iMac would have made it last year's machine instead
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Where Your Data Lives
Who Has More of Your Personal Data than Facebook? Try Google
Everyone has different opinions on Google and data, and I’m not going to litigate that here, but this bit about how Google still tracks you even when you elect not to opt into any of their services is depressing.
Google Analytics is far
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A Quick Note on Bitcoin
Bitcoin Is Ridiculous. Blockchain Is Dangerous - Bloomberg
That all of this adds up to money is ridiculous, and we should probably mock it more than we do. Consider Bitcoin a grand middle finger. It’s a prank, almost a parody of the global financial system, that turned into a bubble.
…
Still, I can’t help
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The Real Problem with Apple’s iCloud Storage Options (hint, it’s not price)
The thing about iCloud storage | Beardy Guy Musings
Enough. If I can afford a $400 or $600 or $1,000 iOS device that also requires fees for monthly internet and apps to be useful, I can also afford a monthly .99 or 2.99 a month for added iCloud.
When we buy our wash machines
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For the Umpteenth Time, Google Swears They’ve Fixed Messaging
Exclusive: Chat is Google’s next big fix for Android’s messaging mess - The Verge
The worse news is that carriers aren’t fond of strong encryption and don’t have a great history of pushing back against government demands for information.
”RCS continues to be a carrier-owned service, so legal intercept and other
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Hey Siri, What do People Like Least About the iPhone?
Ben Bajarin and crew published this study of iPhone X users and how satisfied they are with their latest’s phone. This graph they created is eye opening.
You should read the whole thing to see all the results, but this chart really sums it up pretty well. Fortunately, it also lines up pretty well
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Factory Resets are a Terrible Fix
You should never have to reset any software, so why do we need to reset our phones? - Android Central
Phone running badly? Factory reset it to fix things.
Pardon my interrobang moment, but that's ridiculous. Not that it's bad advice because it can often fix things, but it's a
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#OpenWeb
#OpenWeb is a new website from Michael Rockwell, and I think it’s a really great resource. The site essentially amounts to a collection of indie, solo bloggers who focus on Apple. You can either go to the site and check out links there, you can download the OPML file which will subscribe you to
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Voice Interfaces like Alexa and Siri are a Revolution for the Visually Impaired
Alexa Is a Revelation for the Blind - The Atlantic
Maybe he doesn’t know how to interact with a machine pretending to be human—especially after he missed the evolution of personal computing because of his disability. Watching him try to use the Echo made me realize just how much technology forms the basis of
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Apple's New AI Guru
Apple Hires Google’s A.I. Chief - The New York Times
Apple has hired Google’s chief of search and artificial intelligence, John Giannandrea, a major coup in its bid to catch up to the artificial intelligence technology of its rivals.
Giannandrea will be in charge of “machine learning and A.I. strategy” at Apple
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It's Time to Look at RSS Again
RSS Readers Are Due for a Comeback: Feedly, The Old Reader, Inoreader | WIRED
Anyone weary of black-box algorithms controlling what you see online at least has a respite, one that's been there all along but has often gone ignored. Tired of Twitter? Facebook fatigued? It's time to head back to