I am starting a new kind of post on this website. I realized I share a bunch of interesting stories every day on Twitter and decided to curate a collection of the best ones in here. I will try to write this every week, so stay tuned.
This week’s main event was Google I/O, of course. But not only that happened. Here are my highlights.
Google I/O
I have already written a full commentary about the Google I/O keynote on Wednesday. Here are the main points:
- Google’s strategy is clear: Android everywhere. In addition to what we had already seen on wearables with Android Wear, they announced Android Auto for cars, Android TV and Android apps for Chromebooks. I think this move is correct and is crucial for their core business in the following years, as the world shift more and more towards mobile and IOT. It is a big hit.
- New version of Android — Android L — which incorporates, among new features, a new cross-product design guideline called Material Design. The new design is somewhat good looking, but I’m afraid Google will not really enforce this on the Google Play apps, creating more UI/UX fragmentation.
- Android Wear and smartwatches. I particularly don’t like this approach of a notification center on the wrist, since notifications are annoying, distracting and make people slaves of their gadgets. A watch is something that we wear today because we want to, not because we need to, and it is also a reflection of one’s personality and style. I am not sure if I want to wear something that looks like a Casio watch from 1980 with a color LCD on it.
- On the engineering side, the GMail API seems very promising and the new Cloud Dataflow service is a clear competitor of Hadoop and Amazon’s Kinesis.
You can watch the full (very long) keynote here.
Samsung Galaxy Tab S
Samsung announced a new tablet, the Galaxy Tab S, to compete with the iPad. Here are the reviews:
- Walt Mossberg, for Re/Code
- Lance Ulanoff, for Mashable
- Dieter Bohn, for The Verge
- Joanna Stern, for The Wall Street Journal Digital
Business, management and career
Some interesting articles:
- Index Ventures’ Saul Klein: Big British Firms Still Don’t Get IT, The Wall Street Journal
- How to help an underperformer, Harvard Business Review
- Cloud security is not an oxymoron, O’Reilly
Not really from this week, but while catching up my reading backlog, I came across these two gems from MIT Sloan Management Review:
- Combining purpose with profits, by Julian Birkinshaw, Nicolai J. Foss and Siegwart Lindenberg
- Own your time, boost your productivity, by Leslie Brokaw