There's a wave of companies trying to find new ways to make software for work, building bundles of workflows and networks that capture the spreadsheets, emails and phone calls of some industry or profession and turn them into structure, automation and time.
Read MorePhones are boring now, so how does Apple use accessories and services to expand and defend the iPhone business? And does TV matter at all?
Read MoreWe worry about face recognition just as we worried about databases - we worry what happens if they break, and we worry what happens if they work too well.
Read MoreLike Sky before it, Netflix is a television company using tech as a crowbar for market entry. The tech has to be good, but it’s still fundamentally a commodity, and all of the questions that matter are TV questions. The same applies to Tesla, and indeed to many other companies using software to enter other industries, especially D2C - what are the questions that matter?
Read MoreAmazon is so new, and so dramatic in its speed and scale and aggression, that we can easily forget how many of the things it’s doing are actually very old.
Read MoreComputer vision turns imaging into a universal input - it lets computers see. So what kinds of things will become vision problems, and how does that change Google or Instagram?
Read More5bn people have a mobile phone now, and 4bn have a smartphone. Time to stop making charts.
Read MoreMachine learning is the new centre of tech, and like all big new things there are issues. ‘AI bias’ is much-discussed right now: machine learning finds patterns but sometimes it finds the wrong one, and it can be hard to tell.
Read MoreInternet platforms are mechanical Turks - they can only understand things by finding a way to leverage vast numbers of humans. They’re distributed computers where all of us are the CPUs. How does that affect how we think about abuse, and how might machine learning change this?
Read MoreApple’s talk about services got specific with a bunch of news subscription services. Most of them are sensible and worthy iteration, but the company still hasn’t explained exactly what it plans with its push into commissioning billions of dollars of premium TV (Spielberg! Oprah!). Maybe all of this is about trust: the old Apple promise was that you don't have to worry if the tech works, and the new promise is you don't have to worry if the tech is scamming you.
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