The Next Consumer Wave
According to my friend Brian — It feels like there might be another consumer wave coming.
Yesterday Google and Apple announced they will be offering Airpod alternatives.
The Amazon/Google news is great because the Airpods are fantastic, but too expensive for most of America. Both Brian and I think this will lead to a lot of new creative consumer applications and services.
I am beta testing 3 really amazing consumer apps right now myself.
I just read this good piece on trends shaping Europe at the moment titled The Rise of the Experience Generation. My son Max just submitted a college English essay on the Electronic Dance Genre (EDM -a genre he loves)
Connie Chen at Andreesen Horowitz agrees and has a good post titled ‘When AI is the Product: The Rise of AI-Based Consumer Apps’. The gist:
There’s a new era of AI consumer-based apps spreading around the world, though starting from China.
TikTok, a short-form mobile video app, was downloaded on Apple’s App store more than 104 million times during the first half of 2018 — making it the world’s most downloaded app in that period. In fact, installs in the United States in the month of October [or more specifically, between 09/29/18–10/30/18] were higher than Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube, reaching a whopping 42.4% of downloads among those already popular apps. Yet much of the coverage on TikTok either compares it to Facebook’s direct competitor (Lasso), or incorrectly labels it as a lip sync app for teenagers. It’s more.
Not only is TikTok a China-based company whose product is winning hearts in the U.S. and around the world, it is, more importantly the first mainstream consumer app where artificial intelligence IS the product. It’s representative of a broader shift, where AI is transitioning from the discovery phase to the implementation phase.
Americans have been busy ‘passive’ investing, me too’ing products and yelling at each other on social media while the young Chinese focus on getting rich building consumer applications.
I think that will change, but either way, the next wave of consumer applications is coming.
Originally published at Howard Lindzon.
