Bits & Pixels #20175— Odds and Ends for Week 25

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Bits & Pixels

2 min readJun 25, 2017

#UBER WTF

It’s no secret that Uber ultra aggressive style, while great for growth, had started to land the company and its leadership in the press on what was becoming a weekly occurrence. But on Tuesday June 20th, Uber’s CEO, Travis Kalanick handed in his resignation after it was demanded by 5 of Uber’s biggest investors. Kalanicks shadow however will remain on Uber has he still holds a board seat with voting rights. It’s hard to fathom a world without Uber, but competitors like Lyft are doing just that.

Amazon the behemoth is perhaps the biggest mysterious company that exists. With each new product or announcement analyst and the press try to read the tea leaves leading to world domination. This acquisition is no different. While some analyst look at this purchase as not only the acquisition of physical retail space, other see it as the acquisition of valuable brands especially in the organic vertical. An interesting minority perspective is that this acquisition was really about Amazon purchasing its first grocery customer. Indeed with scaling challenges that are different than say the book market (city vs national scale), this acquisition allows them to develop a grocery supply chain at scale and yes, physical location and great brands.

While the Apple events of the past always had a standout star or headline, as of late Apple has packed a lot of small improvements and new product announcements in their events. And this year’s annual developer conference was no exception.
While some people might think the only noteworthy new feature of the iPad was its increase screen size, the real story is a radical rethinking of the iPad experience and how we interact with it. Drag and drop between multiple apps (true multitasking) will make a huge impact.
Another big announcement was the Apple HomePod which was taken immediately as a competitor to Amazon Echo and Google Pixel. The truth however probably lies between the Amazon Echo and a Sonos Speaker. A musicologist as Apple calls it.
Another announcement to note was the introduction of CoreAR, an API for Augmented Reality. The iPhone uses the cameras and sensors to enable really solid positional tracking ie it can recognize a flat surface and project an object on it, that is really stable no matter how you look at it or rotate your phone.

An AI that will turn your sketches into photorealistic images? This neural network experiment isn’t quite that just yet, but you’ll waste a few hours or an afternoon playing with it, seeing what it does with your sketches.