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Gary Edwards

Evernote founder Phil Libin creating incubator for bots - Business Insider - 0 views

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    "he's found the most exciting thing he's seen since the iPhone emerged: bots. Specifically, chat bots that interact intelligently with people as they use apps, providing useful information before they even know they want it. "In 2007, I had this vision when I first touched my very first iPhone where I kind of understood what the next five years would bring, and I haven't had that kind of clarity since," he told us in a conversation at Y Combinator's demo day on Tuesday. "And now, I have the same kind of feeling about bots, about conversational UIs." Bots are at the heart of how Facebook, Apple, Google, and smaller companies like Atlassian and Slack are transforming how messaging works. These leaders are beyond sending simple text messages, and evolving chat into a whole tech platform almost like an operating system, where others can plug their own apps in and create entirely new functions."
Gary Edwards

Dan Grover | Bots won't replace apps. Better apps will replace apps. - 0 views

  • The key wins for WeChat in the above interaction (compared to a native app) largely came from steamlining away app installation, login, payment, and notifications, optimizations having nothing to do with the conversational metaphor in its UI.
  • Indeed, the cornerstone of whole experience is effectively a common, semi-hierarchical stream of messages, notifications, and news with a consistent set of controls for handling them. It’s no stretch to see WeChat and its ilk not as SMS replacements but as nascent visions of a mobile OS whose UI paradigm is, rather than rigidly app-centric, thread-centric (and not, strictly speaking, conversation-centric).
  • This term – “app” – is rather old, yet only entered common parlance with the proliferation of smartphones. This is no coincidence. The app paradigm introduced on smartphone OSes circa 2007 was a radical improvement over what we’d had on the desktop. For the first time, software was easy to install, even easier to delete, and was guaranteed to not totally screw with your system (due to sandboxing/permissions models).
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  • Though some apps indeed are mini-desktop apps that make full use of the supercomputer I carry in my pocket, well over half fall into another category. These apps are just a vessel for a steady stream of news, notifications, messages, and other timely info ultimately residing in a backend service somewhere. They don’t really do much on their own. It’s much like how a tortilla chip’s main value is not so much in its appeal as a chip but as a cheese and chili delivery mechanism.
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    "A LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION, A LITTLE MORE ACTION I don't know about you, but here's what I want to see happen. I want the first tab of my OS's home screen to be a central inbox half as good as my chat app's inbox. It want it to incorporate all my messengers, emails, news subscriptions, and notifications and give me as great a degree of control in managing it. No more red dots spattered everywhere, no swiping up to see missed notifications. Make them a bit richer and better-integrated with their originating apps. Make them expire and sync between my devices as appropriate. Just fan it all out in front of me and give me a few simple ways to tame them. I'll spend most of my day on that page, and when I need to go launch Calculator or Infinity Blade, I'll swipe over. Serve me a tasty info burrito as my main course instead of a series of nachos. The next time I'm back stateside, I want my phone to support something like Chrome Apps, but retaining a few useful properties of apps instead of being big, weird icons that just link to websites. I want to sit down at T.G.I Friday's4 and scan a QR code at my restaurant table and be able to connect to their WiFi, order, and pay. Without having to download a big app over my data plan, set up an account, and link a card when it is installed. Imagine if I could also register at the hospital or DMV in this fashion. Or buy a movie ticket. Or check in for a flight. As a user, I want my apps - whether they're native or web-based pseudo-apps - to have some consistent concept of identity, payments, offline storage, and data sharing. I want to be able to quickly add someone in person or from their website to my contacts. The next time I do a startup, I want to spend my time specializing in solving a specific problem for my users, not getting them over the above general hurdles. I don't actually care how it happens. Maybe the OS makers will up their game. Maybe Facebook, Telegram, or Snapchat can solve these pr
Gary Edwards

Windows comes up third in OS clash two years early | CIO - 0 views

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    "Microsoft's Windows, which in 2015 fell to third place among the world's operating systems, will continue to lose share this year to both Android and Apple's combined OS X and iOS, Gartner said today. Download the March 2016 digital issue Inside: What you need to know about staffing up for IoT, how cloud and SDN set Veritas free & much more! READ NOW Not until 2017 will Windows begin to recoup some of the losses it's sustained since 2013, Gartner said in its latest device forecast. The continued decline of Windows makes Microsoft's job of pivoting to explorations of cross-platform opportunities all the more pressing. And it goes a long way to explain Redmond's drumbeat of new strategies, including this week's announcement that it will pursue a "conversations as a platform" initiative that aims to put automated assistants, or "bots," front and center on not just Windows, but also Android and iOS. According to Gartner, which provided Computerworld with its forecast broken out by operating systems, Windows will power about 283 million devices shipped in 2015, a 3.4% year-over-year decline. The 283 million represents 11.7% of the total of 2.4 billion devices shipped, over 80% of that number smartphones, and the majority of those smartphones running Google's Android. Six months ago, Gartner's forecast had pegged Windows in 2016 at 308 million devices, or 12.9% of the total. Gartner regularly downsized its estimates of both total devices shipped and Windows' portion of those shipments throughout 2015. The trend continued into 2016. In fact, last September, Gartner predicted that Windows would not slip behind Apple's combined OS X and iOS until 2017. But according to the research firm's latest data, Windows dropped to No. 3 in 2015, thanks to Apple shipping 297 million OS X/iOS devices -- 4 million more than Windows -- and grabbing the second spot behind way-way-out-there Android and its leading 1.3 billion devices. In Gartner's current forecast, Windows will dip 3
Gary Edwards

Gigaom | 'Work Processing' and the decline of the (Wordish) Document - 0 views

  • Chat-centric work management, as typified by Slack-style work chat, is getting a tremendous surge in attention recently, and is the now dominant form of message-centric work technology, edging out follow-centric work media solutions (like Yammer, Jive, and IBM Connections).
  • Workforce communications — relying on a more top-down messaging approach for the mobile workforce — is enjoying a great surge in adoption, but is principally oriented toward the ‘hardwork’ done by workers in retail, manufacturing, transport, security, and construction, and away from the ‘softwork’ done by office workers. This class of tool is all about mobile messaging. (Note: we are planning a market narrative about this hot area.)
  • Today’s Special Advertisement Today, I saw that David Byttow’s Bold — a new work processing app — has entered a private beta, with features that line it up in direct competition with Google Docs and the others mentioned above. Bold raised a round of $1 million from Index Ventures in January 2016. Advertisement The competition is hotting up.
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  • Work Processing Will Be The New Normal Advertisement What I anticipate is the convergence on a work processing paradigm, with at least these features: Advertisement Work processing ‘docs’ will exist as online assemblages, and not as ‘files’. As a result they will be principally shared through links, access rights, or web publishing, and not as attachments, files, or PDFs, except when exported by necessity. Work processing apps will incorporate some metaphors from word processing like styling text, manipulating various sorts of lists, sections, headings, and so on. Work processing will continue the notions of sharing and co-editing from early pioneers (Google Docs in particular), like edit-oriented comments, sharing through access-control links, and so on. Work processing will lift ideas from work chat tools, such as bots, commands, and @mentions. Work processing will adopt some principles from task management, namely tasks and related metadata, which can be embedded within work processing content, added in comments or other annotations, or appended to ‘docs’ or doc elements by participants through work chat-style bot or chat communications.
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    "I've been exploring a growing list of web-based tools for the creation and management of what most would call 'documents' - assemblages of text, images, lists, embedded video, audio and other media - but which, are in fact, something quite different than the precursors, like Microsoft Word and Apple Pages documents. The big shift underlying these new tools is that they are not oriented around printing onto paper, or digital analogues of paper, like PDF. Instead, they take as a given that the creation, management, and sharing of these assemblages of information will take place nearly all the time online, and will be social at the core: coediting, commenting, and sharing are not afterthoughts grafted onto a 'work processing' architecture. As a result, I am referring to these tools - like the pioneering Google Docs, and newer entrants Dropbox Paper, Quip, Draft, and Notion - as 'work processing' tools. This gets across the idea that we aren't just pushing words onto paper through agency of word processing apps, we're capturing and sharing information that's critical to our increasingly digital businesses, to be accessed and leveraged in digital-first use cases. In a recent piece on Medium, Documents are the new Email, I made the case that old style 'documents' are declining as a percentage of overall work communications, with larger percentages shifting to chat, texting, and work media (enterprise social networks). And, like email, documents are increasingly disliked as a means to communicate. And I suggested that, over time, these older word processing documents - and the use cases that have built up around them - will decline. At the same time, I believe there is a great deal of promise in 'work processing' tools, which are based around web publishing, web notions of sharing and co-creation, and the allure of content-centric work management."
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