Breaking Smart:

In the 21st century, both book smarts and street smarts are obsolete concepts. What would you call great Google-Fu skills? What about reputation on a site like Stack Overflow. Or a when-to-use-snopes instincts? These skills combine book smarts and street smarts and go FAR beyond. This is stream smarts. As we wind down 2015 and gear up for 2016, I bet many of you are making high-minded resolutions to read worthwhile books and/or acquire worthwhile real-world practical skills, perhaps via an unpaid internship or hobby project. Let me recommend refactoring those old-fashioned aspirations into “stream smarts” aspirations. Here’s how.

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10/ Amazon data shows that very few people made it past page 20 of Piketty. For most, quitting Piketty at page 20 is the stream smart thing to do, why?

11/ Because you can never hope to individually grok such a complex issue, addressed in a big fat book by an expert, by yourself.

12/ For most people, the smartest way to “read” Piketty is to read the dozens of expert reviews/summaries and participate in online conversations about inequality.

13/ Of course, to be valuable, these conversations have to include diverse individuals applying book and street smarts. Stream smarts is a meta thing.

Indeed.

This is an older piece which I just ran across at Forbes from March of this year. But I found the direct comparison, and Googles dishonest approach, interesting.
Forbes:

According to Google, Nearline offers slightly lower availability and slightly higher latency than the company’s standard storage product but with a lower cost. The “time to first byte” of approximately 2 – 5 seconds was held up by most commentators, myself included, as a real game changer. (..)

So, if a customer stores 1TB of data within Nearline, their download will start within 2 – 5 seconds, and then promptly take 73 hours to complete (assuming they are downloading 1TB at 4 MB/second).

Comparing the same 1TB case with Amazon Glacier. AWS will have that object available to customers in approximately 3 – 5 hours. Four hours into their download, a Google Nearline customer would be 5% complete on downloading their 1TB of data with approximately 69 hours to completion.

In short:

So it seems that Google has purposely muddied the message here and AWS, whose retrieval time looks slothful, is, in fact, faster than that of Googles.

“Google – We’re better at marketing than at cloud”

Wall Street Journal:

But new data out Thursday from eMarketer shows that cord-cutting is accelerating, driven by a rapidly expanding panoply of digital video services.

The number of pay-TV households will fall at an accelerating rate for at least the next four years, reaching a 1.4% decline in 2019, eMarketer estimates. By that year, eMarketer estimates that almost 23% of U.S. households won’t pay for traditional TV.

The rise of online video providers like Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant Video that makes this possible will also completely change (and destroy a lot of) the local TV industry in countries like Germany.

The Guardian:

when you look at the top of the tech market, the very top, Europe is lagging a long way behind.

The continent has plenty of perfectly decent technology startups: in May this year, technology investment bank GP Bullhound counted 40 founded since 2000 with a valuation of over $1bn, 17 of which come from Britain. But the combined market value of all those companies together was just $120bn – less than half that of Facebook’s $273bn market cap alone.

The problem Galbraith is highlighting isn’t one of financial returns, though: it’s an issue of power. “If you look at Europe now, we’re in the equivalent stage of being in, let’s say, 1920, with no car companies. No Citröen, no BMW, no Rolls Royce, no Fiat, nothing.

“This is as big a deal as the industrial revolution. You’re moving from the agrarian to the industrial to the digital age, and you’re seeing the digitisation of everything. Industries which weren’t considered to be digital are being transformed by some of the methodologies and the processes of the digital age. Take Tesla – we think of Tesla as being a ‘startup’, but it’s the same size as Audi.” Both companies are valued at around $30bn.

Devastating.

Wired:

Many of these displaced people rely upon smartphones to find safe passage. Maps and GPS help chart the best course. Messaging apps provide a lifeline to loved ones. Apps of every kind help find a place to sleep, translate foreign languages, offer guidance on what to pack, and help manage money. Almost every need is met with mobile.

But not all have access to this technology. It is no surprise that the refugees carrying smartphones are those who could afford them back home. And holding onto the device during so arduous a journey is no easy feat. Border patrol guards often confiscate cellphones at government checkpoints. And even those who have phones don’t always have access to the Internet, or to apps and services that might help them.

The tech sector has taken note of these issues, and is attempting to address them.

Neil Rimer from Index Ventures:

It is not uncommon for us to come across a one-year old startup that has yet to release its product, in which the angel investors already own 60% of the company, three founders (together) own 40% and there is no option pool.

What the hell.

Neil Cybart:

In reality, the iPad was a victim of its own success. The combination of a very popular iPad 2 (decent weight, okay screen, and good battery) and the launch of a smaller iPad mini (with a low price) led to a boom in sales that resulted in iPad sales growth peaking only three months after the iPad mini went on sale.

In retrospect, the iPad mini served as a great precursor to the phenomenon known as larger screen iPhones. There was likely significant demand for an iOS device larger than the current iPhone at the time (iPhone 5’s 4-inch screen) but a bit less bulky than the 9.7-inch screen iPad. Soon, all of these reasons began to be wiped away with new, larger iPhones and thinner iPads. While the iPad mini’s low price meant the device was the more popular iPad for gifting around the holidays, which is likely still true today, the need for an iPad mini was increasingly being met by the iPhone and larger iPads. 

The most important aspect on how to look at iOS (and tablets in general in a smartphone world):

The iPad mini’s declining sales provides clues as to iOS form factor trends. Instead of looking at the iPhone and iPad as separate product categories, I like to think of them as existing on the same iOS spectrum but occupying different screen size segments. The fact that iPhone and iPad rely on the same mobile operating system makes this view reasonable.

Benedict Evans:

Finally, this is a case study of open and closed approaches. Games consoles’ closed ecosystem delivered huge innovation in games, but not in much else. The web’s open, permissionless innovation beat the closed, top-down visions of interactive TV and the information superhighway. The more abstracted, simplified and closed UX model of smartphones and especially iOS helps to take them to a much broader audience than the PC could reach, and the relative safety of installing an app due to that ‘closed’ aspect enables billions of installs and a new route to market for video. It’s not that open or closed win, but that you need the right kind of open in the right place. 

Om Malik on the new WordPress.com:

I should have the ability to keep a copy of what I create. To stay relevant, WordPress.com has to become not only a publishing tool but also a means for me to route my sharing. Its role is that of an information router. I am looking forward to what talented developers do with the new capabilities of WordPress.com.