Articles

Affichage des articles du décembre, 2016

Series are like books a century ago.

Series are like books a century ago. You don’t watch series, you get into it. For dozens of hours, hundreds of hours. You don’t just spend a good time with series, you learn, you live things, you build yourself with them. Just like with books before, and still today.

Machines replace humains... or let them do more human things?

When I take the metro, humans are now here to help to regulate the traffic. The voice speaking in the microphone is no longer a recorded voice, it's a real human talking. When I go shopping, I scan products by myself. A human is here, just to help, just to say hello, goodbye. When I go to the post office, automatic machines allow me to do all I need. I can still ask humans some advice, help. When I buy some bread. I pay contactless or through a machine taking my coins to give me back change. The staff member is here to advise me, not much. Airbnb. We book places. No transaction. Just human relationship. Free bike service. Fully automated. I just call people to solve issues with them when some happen. I buy on Amazon marketplace. I don't buy to a huge multinational powered by machines. I buy to a local bookshop in a small city in France. Let's be optimistic. Let's hope we'll do more human stuff in the future and less alienating things.

The day we'll have bigger mailboxes, we'll buy more on Amazon

Amazon is the reflex for most of the products we buy. And what happen is that people deliver products you buy at home. And you're not here. And they can't put them in your small mailbox. So they drop it at the post office. So you have to go there. Or they come back tomorrow, and it's the same story. Mailboxes are too small. The day we'll have bigger mailbox, we'll buy more on Amazon

Uber is making mainstream customer rating. It will change human interactions drastically

Uber staff rate customers. They don't hide it. They want customers to know it. Some drivers event propose to trade a 5 star to you vs. a 5 star for them.  The fear of getting a 1 star make drivers ultra polite. And what about you knowing you're rated? Of course, you don't behave like a "rated version of you a lot nicer" in Uber car.  Of course... It's well known that rating and judgment don't change behavior. It will be a lot of fun when every interaction we'll have will mean a mutual rating and we'll all have scores. Better not be too rude...

Anti-homeless urban spikes, one of the things I hate the most

These things should not be allowed. We ignore them all day long, none of our leaders actually seize the problem. That's already a shame. But... putting spikes or other inventive stuff to just not let them sleep in places not too exposed to the wind and passersby, that's just outrageous. You can sign here if you agree: https://www.change.org/p/anne-hidalgo-et-si-on-interdisait-le-mobilier-urbain-anti-sdf-et-inhumain-%C3%A0-paris

The iPhone collapse and the Apple pivot

People spend 90% of their time on 4 apps. Do you need an iPhone to use 4ish apps? No. People will see it. People will save money on phones. Google just released a very expensive phone. It's too late. The era of 800 dollars phones is over. Apple is making most of its money on iPhone. They failed to make money with something else. Watches and tables are flat to down. Without the iPhone, it’s done. It will have to use its mountains of cash to make acquisitions and pivot. Cars? IoT? Tesla? Uber? General Electric? Our cars and homes are so dumb. There is room for improvement. 

What you mean when you watch a screen while a person talk to you

You mean that what happen behind the screen is more important than what you say. You mean that you prefer talking to the guys pinging you than talking to her. Worst, you say you prefer checking your social feeds and inboxes event if nobody's pinging you. It's not considered as a terrific lack of respect for now because people use smartphones for 10ish years and cultural codes take more time to structure interactions. But in 10 years, we'll consider it as super rude.

I see TripAdvisor dying, except if...

If Google wants to display the menu of restaurants and their top 3 best dishes on SERPs. They'll just issue some guidelines asking restaurants to optimize indexation of their online menu and put on their website with the right tag their 3 best dishes. All website developers will make it because it's Google. Now if TripAdvisor wants to do the same thing. They’ll invite restaurant owners to put in their Tripadvisor page their menu. Retyping everything. Low chance to succeed. They’ll invite restaurant visitors to put some dishes names and their favorite one. A Very uncomprehensive result is to expect. Tripadvisor is stuck in this low quality, very easy to fake rating system. In the end, TripAdvisor has 3 alternatives to avoid dying: - spend money on human resource who will enrich restaurant qualification and just like Michelin guide, have a mix of professional rating and reviewing and user rating.  - give money to restaurant owners to updates their TripAdvis

Connexion overload => autoreply for chat & sms

People will soon get sick of being constantly connected and reachable. As the phone is the device to book a taxi, book a table, pay, gps you, carry your loyalty cards, flight ticket, etc. it’s pretty difficult to just let it at home. As a result, phones will soon have a feature to: Minimum Viable Product: Switch off and hide social apps from phones for a determined time.  Cool additional feature: Autoreply on chat apps and SMS to say to the person reaching you that you won’t answer before a determined hour because you’re off. Just like what people do for pro email!  Apple letting you "VIP" some people on your phone when you're on no-disturb mode is going this way.