I was recently in Tokyo for work. Living in Japan for over 18 years, it was great to be back in the capital city where I lived for a period of time. Visiting Tokyo after a long time, I wanted to go about finding places to eat that I had not been before. So I did the smart thing and called up my friends who have been living in Tokyo ever since graduating college.

Ginza Sato Yosuke

I was staying in Ginza for work so the first place I visited was Ginza Sato Yosuke. The restaurant owner continues a 7 generational long tradition…

For the past year Facebook has been embroiled in multiple back-to-back scandals. However, despite that, the stock has continued to do well and user numbers continue to grow. This is probably because their retention numbers are so strong. People like Walt Mossberg are few and rare.

From my own personal experience, I believe these retention numbers are strong because of the network effects inherit in its product. There are few platforms in the world that are close to replicating the friend graph I have on Facebook. And those few have been acquired by Facebook: Instagram and Whatsapp.

I value…

I am a software engineer; a millennial; an immigrant. Hence the internet is something of great importance to me. It allows me to FaceTime my family halfway around the world, in Japan. It allows me to chat with my friends from high school who are scattered all over the world. It pays my bills and allows me to do a job that I love.

The first taste of real internet connectedness I experienced in my life was during the year 2004. John Kerry was running for President. Fahrenheit 9/11 was coming out. I was attending Harvard Summer School (regular nerd…

How relevant or useful a news notification is to someone depends a lot on the content — are you interested in this political outcome, game result or breaking local news? It’s usefulness also depends on the action it lets you take — can you read an article, share an infographic, watch a live stream or set a reminder? In addition to the content and utility of an alert, there was another factor we thought was getting overlooked to make a news notification relevant or useful: the user’s current location.

Why ‘current location’ matters to notifications

One way to think about how someone’s location matters when receiving…

We recently launched HERE for Local Journalism — an app that tests an idea that people want local news alerts as they approach the place a story was written about. The hypothesis is that that these notifications will be highly relevant and engaging.

We decided to test the idea by building an application that does this on the iOS platform because Apple provides the UserNotifications framework, which in theory makes it easy to create location-aware alerts. Here is an example of code to trigger a location-aware notification:

// Define the content of the notification
let content = UNMutableNotificationContent()
content.title = place.title
content.body =…

The other day, I was reviewing the website of one of the startups I am currently advising. I have been involved in product design for almost 6 years now, so could immediately see a few problems. But as an advisor, I wanted to find the best way to communicate, without sounding like I am just preaching predefined truths. I wanted them to easily apply my teachings to future websites and products they build.

One extremely useful tool that analysts have used over the years has been heat maps. There are many different types of heat maps, but in the context…

Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.

As artificial intelligence gets more advanced, a significantly larger number of jobs will be eliminated than created.

The topic of a universal basic income has become trendy among various elite tech circles in the Bay Area. Many of those individuals argue that artificial intelligence will…

I have never been a particular fan of standardized tests. But the one thing that I do think there is value to is their testing of vocabulary.

I was born and brought up in Japan, to Indian parents, while going to an international school (that taught in English). Hence I was exposed to many languages. Today I can speak and write Japanese and English fluently, and speak some broken Hindi. However, one of the disadvantages of being multilingual is that your vocabulary tends to be much shallower than your counterparts.

This was something that caused resentment when I was a…