Product Musings In The Library
Finals week! It’s that time of the year when all the libraries are filled with students and cups are endlessly filled with coffee.
I like working in chunks of time. The chunks can vary from 15 minutes to 2 hours. I get super focused during each chunk with whatever task is at hand. Doesn’t matter whether it’s studying or doing projects or being on Twitter or doing group study with friends.
I do set aside chunks for catching up on Twitter and browsing Product Hunt. I come across at least one new product almost daily. But, today was especially interesting. I have some thoughts on a lot of new things I came across throughout the day. Wanted to summarize my thoughts here.
Amino Apps’ $19 Million Series B: Our Plan To Shape The Future of Online Communities
Most social and communication products suffer from the cold start problem. You wouldn’t use a social app if your friends don’t use it. Or, to put it in the context of what Amino Apps does, you wouldn’t use an app to communicate with like minded people if there are not enough people to talk with to begin with. This team has figured out the formula for solving the cold start issue innumerable times.
Their vision via M.G. Siegler’s blog —
Our vision is to own the interest market and become the best way to experience your interest on mobile.
Google Home
Two interesting launches on Google’s new home product —
- Jelly — I have written about Jelly before. It’s a new kind of search engine. You get answers from people as search results. Not links. Makes total sense for it to have a voice channel or a voice instance as Matt Hartman might put it.
- Lonely Planet — Assist, where I intern, launched built the voice service for Lonely Planet.
Bold
Bold is a new publishing platform. Here are my thoughts —
It’s founder David Byttow on the launch —
Think of it as long-term memory for your organization.
Super Mario Run
Mario was a big part of my childhood. I was a hardcore gamer. I was very much looking forward to this it’s launch on iOS. I was disappointed with the on-boarding flow for sure. The look and feel seem great. But, that’s probably because of how familiar most of us are with Mario games. If this game did not have Mario’s IP, I don’t think I ll be happy with it with the same gameplay and dynamics.
I agree with them —
60dB
This app has been on my list of promising products. I think they have nailed the feel of radio.
I wrote about it a while ago ->
You know how we listen to Radio? We almost don’t put in any effort to start listening. We press a button. And, thats it. We don’t really consciously jump through hoops to get to listening while driving. That experience is so archaic but it still works with an overwhelming majority of the American population. Every design decision made by 60dB is geared towards recreating that feeling with a podcast app. The subtleties of their design is worth paying attention to.
They got some updates today —
One Small Step for NASA, One Giant Leap for GIFs
I love how an institution as scientific and serious as NASA is embracing something as fun and social as GIFs. The headline really captures the news well.
Part of NASA’s official mission is to educate the public, and the agency has been using new media to accomplish that task for more than half a century, even as the cutting edge has shifted from the TV screen to the computer screen.
HyperScience and the Enterprise AI Opportunity
Great news for NYC tech scene and usage of AI in enterprises.
Matt Turck has a great piece on this —
While it may not be as immediately sexy as consumer stuff, the enterprise offers a very rich vein of opportunities for AI startups. A lot of Global 2000 corporations and government institutions around the world have tremendous amounts of data, and clear use cases where entire processes can be automated or augmented through AI, resulting in an obvious ROI that justifies large contract amounts. The traditional technology vendors that serve those large corporations haven’t ramped up their capabilities in AI as of yet, with arguably the exception of an IBM Watson. The large Internet companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) do have very significant AI resources and talent on board, but their key target are consumers, not large enterprises. Finally, there’s not much “homegrown” competition — large corporations are not going to be able to deploy AI themselves, because they’re generally not software companies, and most importantly, because they’re not going to be able to recruit enough qualified machine learning engineers, who are in very obvious shortage around the world and tend to prefer to work elsewhere. This leaves the enterprise AI opportunity very open to AI startups like HyperScience.
The design world has had some awesome updates. I haven’t looked at these resources properly yet but I am sure they are great and worth sharing —
Some thoughts on Medium’s and Slack’s design choices —
Some thoughts on new kinds of search engines —
