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Twitter de-emphasises follower count… by making the font 2px smaller…?
From The Verge: Twitter has made follower counts appear less prominent on its iOS app by making the font size smaller in a new redesign effort, according to a Twitter spokesperson. The change comes after CEO Jack Dorsey repeatedly said that he wants to rethink how the company could prioritize “meaningful” conversations over numbers like…
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Innovation in tech is just getting started, says Benedict Evans
When we look around and see the absolute domination of companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook, it’s easy to assume that the technology boom is over, and that these companies took all the profits. But a16z’s Benedict Evans has a different take: he argues that tech is only just getting started. He calls it…
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Companies microchipping employees is real – and we should be scared
I just finished reading The Circle, the dystopian view of a world when the next Facebook completely abolishes privacy once and for all. The scariest thing about the book is how real – how possible – it all seems. The world is a few decisions away from being set on that path. I read today…
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How Marty Cagan measures Team Empowerment
Marty Cagan was in Berlin recently and did a talk about why teams are not truly empowered, and what teams might do about that. He shared his “True Test of Empowered Teams”: 1. The team is staffed with competent people with the necessary range of skills. 2. The team is assigned problems to solve, and…
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Printable sketch sheets for wire-framing by hand
I have always believed that the best place to start when designing a new feature or product flow is with a pen and a piece of paper. I think if you go to quickly to screen/UI design, it’s harder to take a step back to focus on the actual user problem. Instead, you immediately start…
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Software engineers are more valuable to companies than money
CNBC posted an article last week that really resonated with me. From their article: A recent study from Stripe and Harris Poll found that 61 percent of C-suite executives believe access to developer talent is a threat to the success of their business. Perhaps more surprisingly — as we mark a decade after the financial…
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Branch, a deep linking SDK, is now a unicorn
From TechCrunch: Branch, the deep-linking startup backed by Andy Rubin’s Playground Ventures, will enter the unicorn club with an upcoming funding round. The four-year-old company, which helps brands create links between websites and mobile apps, has authorized the sale of $129 million in Series D shares, according to sources and confirmed by PitchBook, which tracks…
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Apps caught sending location and other data to advertising companies
From ZDNEt: A team of security researchers behind a popular mobile firewall app say they’ve identified tens of iOS apps that are collecting location data from iPhone users, data they later pass on to monetization firms. In all cases, researchers say, the collection occurs via packaged tracking code monetization firms provide to developers to embed…
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On Strategy…
I came across this quote in a fantasy novel* I was reading: “Strategy is just a fancy word for a special kind of common sense, the ability to see options, to make them where there were none. It’s not about knowing the rules. It’s about knowing how to break them.” When it comes to building…
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Distribution-centric beats product-centric product companies
There is a lot of gold in this interview with Marc Andreessen. The key insight for me was the notion that a superior product can easily be beaten by an inferior product with superior distribution. “The general model for successful tech companies, contrary to myth and legend, is that they become distribution-centric rather than product-centric.…