2018 is off to a great start with the launch of world’s strongest rocket, SpaceX Falcon Heavy with Tesla Roadster as a payload into space. It’s a technological miracle, and also a stepping stone to build even more powerful reusable rockets to send humans to mars.

Okay, you ask how does someone predict future. Here’s a simple quote that answers your question:

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

You guessed it right, that’s what Elon Musk does with:

1. Tesla (Electric Cars)
2. SpaceX (Reusable Rockets)
3. OpenAI (Artificial General Intelligence)
4. Boring Co (Solving Road Congestion)
5. Neuralink (Brain Computer Interface).

But, what’s the easiest way to predict the future?

The easiest way to predict the future is to look for people who are creating it now.

Apply that principle and you will find trends!

(Spoiler alert) Almost all the trends you will see in the future will be powered by deep learning technology ;)

These are the top 10 tech trends in 2018:

UPDATE: Added Initial Security Offering and removed Private Coins to the list of top trends.

#1 Autonomous Driving

2018 is going to be a great year of autonomous driving industry.

An autonomous car and unmanned ground vehicle is a vehicle that is capable of sensing its environment and navigating without human input — Wikipedia

In the past few years, Autonomous driving technology went from “how can you imagine?” to “it’s a toy” to “very possible” to “all auto manufacturers announcing their plans for self-driving cars”. That’s how technology will impact individuals and companies.

If you have used driver assistance, lane control assistance or remove controlled parking assistance then you have experienced rudimentary levels of autonomous driving.

In fact, there are exactly five levels of autonomy driving. First level is driver assistance; second level provides semi-autonomous driving assistance systems like lane control assistance; third level is highly automated driving which only works under certain conditions like highway; fourth level is fully autonomous driving, where your car handle most complex driving situations; fifth level autonomy (aka Full Automation) means, the vehicle can completely drive itself in all scenarios without any human intervention. In fact, you don’t need a driver’s license at that point.

Autonomous driving technology is powerful and impactful because it can potentially save millions of human lives from accidents, also save 250+ million hours of commuting time per year. It makes cities save space on parking because the vehicles can drive themselves, moving someone or something from one place to another all the time.

Autonomous driving market is so huge (~$83 Billion by 2025, ~3 Trillion by 2035) that every car manufacturer, ride hailing company and big technology companies wants in. You can see the list of companies who are invested in this space here.

Autonomous driving technology uses combinations of LiDAR, Radar and cameras to sense and track objects around the vehicle to navigate. Under the hood, you have deep learning algorithms running on GPUs installed in the vehicle, using the data collected from those sensors to analyze and make decisions.

#2 Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality is a technology that superimposes a computer-generated image on a user’s view of the real world, thus providing a composite view.

Augmented Reality (AR) is one of the hottest areas in tech industry and it’s already ready for 100s of millions of consumers to use and experience. Snapchat Lenses, Pokemon Go were the first ones to introduce working Augmented Reality to the world.

Last September, Apple announced its plans to bring AR to the world through the release of ARKit, a software development kit for iOS developers. After Apple’s announcement, Google announced similar plans to bring AR into Android devices through ARCore dev kit. This enables developers all around the world, to bring new experiences based on AR to everyone.

ARKit blends digital objects and information with the environment around you, taking apps far beyond the screen and freeing them to interact with the real world in entirely new ways — Apple

AR needs accurate mapping of your surroundings to place digital objects. Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) technology enables the application to accurately track the world around you. VIO fuses live camera data with motion data (accelerometer, gyroscope etc.,) to sense how the user moves within a room with a high degree of accuracy. All of this is only possible because of advancement in computer vision and availability of high performance mobile CPU and GPUs to analyze and render 3D digital objects onto your mobile phone in real time.

While mobile AR is great for consumers and developers, it can’t provide persistent, collaborative and immersive experiences yet. Companies like Magic Leap, Microsoft and MetaVision are building special hardware and holographic technology to power immersive and real-world blending experiences through head mounted devices.

If you want to know how we compute in the future, check Magic Leap One, a creator edition from the most hyped AR company, Magic Leap.

#3 Robo Advisors

Robo-advisors or Robo-advisers are a class of financial adviser that provide financial advice or Investment management online with moderate to minimal human intervention — Wikipedia

If you are using Wealthfront or Betterment then you already know or using robo-advisor(s) . Robo-advisors help you handle sophisticated tasks, such as tax-loss harvesting, investment selection and retirement planning. Robo-advisors is a huge industry with an explosive growth. It is estimated that client assets managed by robo-advisors hit $60 billion at year-end 2015, and is projected to reach $2 trillion by year 2020.

Unlike human advisors, robo-advisors are scalable, available 24/7 and service every consumer who wants to optimize and invest better. Robo-advisors can analyze trends, data and news about your portfolio in milliseconds using AI technology.

With robo-advisors, you can configure risk appetite for your investment and relax while your portfolio turns green 🤑🤑🤑

#4 Initial Security Offering

ICOs (Initial Coin Offering) are old news and SEC is going to come for you if you do (did) an ICO in US and not register as a security offering with them: https://www.sec.gov/ICO

It’s bad news for scammers ☠️ ☠️ but it’s a great news for people who registers their Initial Security Offering (ISO — yes a new term coined by me) and comply with existing security laws and work with SEC.

3 months into 2018, and it is turning out to be a great year for adoption and recognition of cryptocurrencies. SEC, CFTC, Congress, G20 members and many government bodies.

Pomp 🌪 on Twitter

2018 Security Token predictions: - Large, iconic piece of real estate gets tokenized - Private, profitable company "goes public" via token offering - Multiple debt funds tokenized - 3+ Security Token exchanges launched - Regulators continue to encourage security token ICOs

Things moved so fast that a prominent hotel is selling their NYC hotel ownership to accredited investors for 400 Million $$$ possibly through Ethereum smart contracts. If you buy their security token, then you own part of the property/company. This is an example of Initial Security Offering (ISO) backed by real assets like real estate property.

Kevin O'Leary: NYC hotel wants to use a $400 million cryptocoin offering to sell ownership like a stock

If this experiment is not a catastrophe, then we will see more and more real estate companies selling their ownership and liquidating very quickly in 2018.

ISOs are not limited to selling real estate property, literally anything and everything can be tokenized including:

1. Bonds — https://www.trusttoken.com/
2. Debts — https://dharma.io
3. Real estate assets — https://harbor.com/
4. Venture Capital — https://www.polymath.network/
5. Equitites — https://www.tzero.com/

Tokenizing real assets is going to bring lot of liquidity to the market and increase adoption, reduce fraud, lower fees (no middleman), access to global market etc.,

US City Plans to Sell Tokenized Bonds in 'Initial Community Offering' - CoinDesk

#5 AI doctor

Due to recent advancements in deep learning and computer vision, AI software is able to detect and diagnose many kinds of diseases/illness better than best human doctors.

At the time of writing this post, Alphabet’s Verily announced that they have developed a new AI algorithm which can accurately deduce an individual’s age, blood pressure, and whether or not they smoke just by looking at scans of patient’s eye. Doctors may potentially use that data to analyze a patient’s cardiovascular risk without needing a blood test.

You should think AI doctors as personal AI assistants to doctors, helping them save time, analyze faster, make less mistakes while diagnosing a patient. For example, Arterys is the first FDA approved AI cloud software to be used in a clinical setting, for liver, lung and Cardiac MR image analysis.

A number of private and public companies are working very hard to solve health using AI and make it accessible to everyone with mobile device with a camera. Medical futurist did good job listing most of tech companies working on AI health.

If you are curious about this space, checkout recent AI health report from JASON advisory group (elite scientists who advises U.S government).

#6 Voice Editing

Goal of any technology should be making things cheap, efficient and accessible to everyone. Voice-editing is one such technology. You can think voice-editing as “Photoshop-for-Voice”. It will allow you to instantly alter voice recording to include words or phrases the original speaker never uttered, in what sounds like their voice.

We are on the verge on creating computer generated audio completely indistinguishable from a real human’s voice. This has huge implications to the society, journalism, authenticity of an audio evidence presented in a court, voice IDs and lot more.

This technology, powered by deep generative neural networks (see this quora post to understand what it is in simple terms) saves lots of human hours spent on correcting and redoing the audio recordings for voice-over artists, podcast creators and audio book recorders.

Products with Voice-editing technology: Lyrebird (in beta), Deepmind’s WaveNet (not accessible to everyone) and Adobe’s Voco (potential release in 2018).

#7 Photo Synthesis

This is not the photosynthesis we all know (i.e., a process used by plants and other organisms to convert light energy into chemical energy).

Photo synthesis we discuss here artificially generates high-quality images/photos from a text description. You can think of this as Google Image search, except image shown to you is not a “real” image captured by a camera but one that looks real enough for your eyes.

It is powered by generative AI algorithms called GANs or Generative Adversarial Networks. GANs are used for generating “fake-but-realistic” data from real data. Facebook’s AI research director Yann LeCun called GANs — “the most interesting idea in the last 10 years in ML.”

Here’s a realistic fake image generated by GANs from a text description:

Retail industry spends huge amounts of money on photo shoots for each new run of clothing. This involves hiring a professional photographer, models, and a studio. With this technology, retailers can automatically generate images of the garment on a person of any size, shape, or wearing any kind of shoes, given only a picture of the garment laid out on a plain surface. Vue.ai is an Indian AI company backed by Sequoia already selling this technology to retailers like Macy’s and Levis. If you are into modelling business, you should worry about your job!

#8 Fake videos & Propabots

By now, you must have realized the power of generative learning (aka Generative Adversarial Networks). Now, using same foundational technology, we can generate realistic fake videos and images. And this is just the beginning of “fake news” and you should worry.

Here’s a fake video of obama generated by AI

Technology is scary. You’re going to have negative consequences. But the positive potential far outweighs the bad.

For example, a company called Pinscreen has created a technology (similar to iPhone X Animoji) to generate your face in 3D from a single still selfie image. The same technology can be used in CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) to slash huge animation and production costs.

#9 AI building AI

Tech companies like Google, Facebook and OpenAI are investing and betting heavily on a technology called AutoML because of shortage in AI experts (only 10,000 available to hire).

This technology enables non-tech companies and individuals without AI experience and/or background build machine learning models easily (see AutoML from Google Cloud) without much help from AI scientists. Almost all products we use everyday is powered by Machine Learning(ML): Google’s Search, Facebook’s Face Detection, Apple’s Siri etc., Machine learning models behind those products are built by top AI scientists. Most of current machine learning models are based on Neural Network architecture. AI building AI (or learning to learn) technology runs a neural network algorithm to scan for best neural network to build a custom model that works for your data.

This is how AI technology will be democratized.

#10 Decentralized Crypto Exchanges

Crypto exchanges allow you trade one cryptocurrencies with the another. Almost all crypto exchanges that exist today are centralized. Centralized exchange provide liquidity, maintain order-books, enforce AML (anti-money laundering) and KYC (know your customer) rules on customers depending on jurisdiction.

Centralized exchanges are easy to access and use, and provide advanced tools and trading functionalities such as margin trading, stop loss and lending.

However, centralized exchanges pose a risk for your funds because you don’t own the private key of your funds/wallets. People have lost millions worth of their cryptocurrencies like bitcoin due to hacking attacks. Just last month, hackers hacked 500 million dollars worth of cryptocurrencies from Coincheck exchange (Japan).

Welcome to Decentralized exchanges, these are exchanges with no central authority, so there is no censorship (i.e., nobody can freeze your funds) and are trustless by nature (you stay control of your money). Decentralized exchanges allow users to trade peer-to-peer (P2P), so those trades occur directly between users via bitcoin-like blockchain, so anyone can lookup and validate a trade on blockchain.

Decentralized exchanges are the future of crypto trading. 0xproject, OmiseGo, AirSwap are some building it.

[REMOVED] #11 Private Coins

“Bitcoin is anonymous”, “Bitcoin is only used by criminals and for illegal activities” are myths. Bitcoin offers same level of privacy that you get if you buy something using cash in a store where no one recognizes you. In this scenario, your transactions are anonymous, but the transaction amounts can easily be traced. And if someone is able to determine your identity, all privacy quickly evaporates. So Bitcoin is pseudo-anonymous in nature.

All Bitcoin transactions are stored publicly and permanently on the network, which means anyone can see the balance and transactions of any Bitcoin address. However, the identity of the user behind an address remains unknown until information is revealed during a purchase or in other circumstances. This is one reason why Bitcoin addresses should only be used once. Always remember that it is your responsibility to adopt good practices in order to protect your privacy — bitcoin.org

If you are a business owner and thinking of using Bitcoin/Litecoin as method of payment, you should reconsider because your competitor or literally anyone could see your account balance and transactions using your Bitcoin public address on Bitcoin’s public ledger.

Stanford’s Applied Cryptography Group is working on a new proposal called Bulletproofs to make Bitcoin transactions anonymous and confidential. It is going to take a while for researchers and bitcoin developers to implement this technology on Bitcoin. Bitcoin community may take even longer to reach consensus without a hard-fork (if there is chance of hard fork at that time, it would be popcorn worthy to watch the Bitcoin upgrade). Hard fork happens when majority of miners in Bitcoin don’t agree to protocol upgrade (a la Bitcoin Cash).

Private/Anonymous coins are cryptocurrencies that have public ledgers, but transaction information is obfuscated in varying degrees to protect the privacy of users.

You may heard that some websites are using user’s computers to mine cryptocurrency called Monero. At the time of this writing, it was discovered that a hacker injected a crypto script (aka cryptojacking) into LA times website to mine Monero.

Monero is one of the most popular private coins.

Monero uses Ring Signatures to make it difficult to trace the parties involved in a transaction because transaction signatures are shared by a large group of people; as a result, associating specific users with a transaction is very difficult. It also provides additional privacy by obscuring transaction amounts.

Zcash is relatively new (created in 2016) cryptocurrency that can fully protect the privacy of transactions using zero-knowledge cryptography.

Because of the untraceability property, no one can blacklist units of currency due to their association in previous transactions. One downside to it: If an exchange gets hacked, and hacker steals private cryptocurrencies, there is nothing that can be done to stop hacker from selling or transferring.

Private coins are already receiving adoption from Musicians, Shopify, WooCommerce etc.,

This blog post turned out to be longer than I expected. If you are reading this line, my mission is accomplished! Stay excited for the future ;)

Originally published on The Tech Fusion

Top 10 tech trends in 2018 — Issue #3 was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One such protocol that I discovered recently is ‘Origin Protocol’ — (https://originprotocol.com)

The website says “Origin is a protocol for creating sharing economy marketplaces using the Ethereum blockchain and IPFS”

Think of this as a platform enabling AirBnB like business on blockchain without any centralized company controlling the marketplace and also removing 20–30% middleman fees.

Currently, next AirBnB, Ebay etc., is being built on top of this protocol.

If you want change the world and give power back to the users (also reward them while you do all this): this is one such protocol to look at while building your next decentralized marketplace!

Decentralized Marketplaces was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Phone calls make it easy to reach a person in a quick and reliable way. Phone calls are going to stay here and people are going to rely on it in the future.

Because of its synchronous nature, phone calls are disruptive and cause interruption to what you are doing.

When a person calls you, they have no idea what you are doing, whether you are in a meeting, or driving, simply busy doing your work.

When you receive a phone call you have no idea how important it is, so you end up taking the call only to realize it is from a credit card company, trying to sell you their credit card.

You might know this famous phrase “Time is Money” — first quoted by Benjamin Franklin. Here is nice article about importance of time in the modern world: link.

An excerpt from the article linked above that I liked: “Time becomes the capital of trading, professional, or businessperson. The more efficient that we are with our time (the quicker that we can get our projects done), the more money we can earn.”

So, why not get paid to answer the phone calls you receive?

Idea is basically earn.com but for phone calls. According to Pew Research Center, an average adult cell phone owner makes and receives around 5 phone calls per day. If you get paid 20 cents per call, that’s 30 dollars per month!

It is not just about getting paid to answer phone calls, it is about making others value your time, thus reducing unwanted calls you receive.

But, how does it work?

Users who want to get paid, would install the app. They are then given a free phone number and asked to setup cryptocurrency or USD wallet [Cryptocurrencies are very good candidate for doing micro payments].

Whenever somebody calls the free phone number you are given, their wallet balance is deducted accordingly or prompted to setup a wallet to fund the call. Once payment is succeeded, the call is forwarded to you! Otherwise, the call can be sent to your voicemail :)

If you need this, please subscribe on ProductHunt or on fonepays.me website!

Originally published on The Tech Fusion

FonePay: telephone calls and micro-payments was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I will try to describe a way for Uber to make rides significantly cheaper for riders, increasing pay for drivers and make profit.

Idea is very simple. Grab user eyeballs (just kidding). Add engaging advertising content to the Uber app like YouTube but go beyond what YouTube can do.

YouTube charges 0.03 — 0.10$ for 15 — 20 seconds non-skippable Ads.

How much does advertising on YouTube cost?

Let’s take median of what YouTube charges: 0.07$ for 20 secs ~ 0.21$ per min (and max being 0.3 — 0.4$).

For sake of comparison, let’s find out the price of UberX for San Jose, CA UberX (San Jose): $0.22 per min.

Uber San Francisco - Price Models & Historical Rates

So, Uber can make you watch bunch of cool videos while you ride to your destination at no cost or minimal cost to you. As Uber has you signed in the app and knows your location and where you are going — they can target with better ad content. This is huge online-to-offline opportunity for Uber.

In addition to video ads, Uber can work with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, YouTube Red to unlock their exclusive content for user for sometime.

What Uber is doing

• Uber & Visa launch Local Offers, a rewards program offering free rides for spending at nearby businesses
• Where to?

They launched local offers and Google Now inspired cards (FourSquare recommendations, Snapchat custom filter, etc.,) in the Uber app for the user to browse and make actions.

How Businesses can integrate with Uber

When you order food, groceries, products etc., online to pick up at a local store or book tickets for local concerts, business can charge you additional amount for discounted Uber ride.

How Businesses are integrating with Uber

UberRUSH Now Delivers The Same Day From Nordstrom, Rent the Runway, Other Big Retail Stores

So the part of the delivery charge you pay to product you are buying goes to Uber when the business uses UberRush.

• Introduce GOLD color (users are going to buy this apple product as an ornament/status symbol). Also other colors like black, silver, red etc.,
• Make an iOS selfie AR app for users to check how AirPods look on them and option to place on order from the app itself.
• Find My AirPods feature is helpful when you are close to your lost AirPods. It will also show the last location of AirPods when they are connected to your phone. Now imagine if you lost your AirPods in public transit like Subway. Your best bet in that case is forgetting your old one and getting a new one. “Find My AirPods” is a cure which doesn’t work in reality. What I propose is a simple prevention method that works in almost all scenarios: Use existing motion-detecting sensor in AirPods and ML to recognize that one or both AirPods have fallen off or manually taken out of their ears by the user and notify user with notification beat on their iPhone. In cases where only one AirPod has fallen of your ear, Siri can alert the user from left AirPod saying “Hey, your right AirPod has fallen off your ear, please find it”. Never fear of losing AirPods again! As you all know that losing expensive AirPods is one biggest fears of buying AirPods.

If your AirPods are missing

• Apple has done amazing job in designing tiny wireless stable smart ear pods. But, lot of users ended up not liking nerdy design part of AirPods. In the long term, it doesn’t matter when everyone starts using it but in short term it is going to matter because weirdness is only weird if it is seen in small group of people, not weird when seen in significant number of people. So, its time to “Make AirPods Great Again” by redesigning it (by adding some curves)?

Ideas for Apple AirPods was originally published in ART + marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Just Kidding.

Just like how F8 movie is packed with action scenes, Mark’s F8 keynote is packed with lot of information. If you are wondering what F8 is, it is Facebook’s annual developer conference.

Mark Zuckerberg

If you don’t have time to watch F8, you can read about what Facebook launched and revealed at F8 in the links below (if you haven’t).

• Everything Facebook launched at both days of F8 and why
• Here's Everything Facebook Announced at F8

If you want to know why Facebook released the products it released at F8, read this post :)

Mark recently wrote a 6000 plus word letter on developing the social infrastructure for building global community of tomorrow. That letter is more about describing the problem communities currently face and why he wants to build next Facebook.

Building Global Community

Most interesting part is he is going to build global community with the help of Augmented Reality (aka Camera) platform (lost opportunity for Snapchat 👎).

He explains Augmented Reality is going to help people in providing a sense of social purpose. It is going to create social incentives (similar to Facebook Likes) to participate in the world around them and interact with the world.

Just like how Pokemon Go made everyone go out to capture a new virtual Pokemons on camera on local streets, parks, restaurants etc.,. Augmented Reality enhances happiness or satisfaction associated with everyday and occasional experiences like playing with your dog or donating blood.

Augmented Reality is not about immersion it’s about experience.

Proof: I would have never imagined myself playing with paper napkin.

Sriram Bhargav Karnati

I agree that we are going to look crazy to others while we experience AR but as time progresses and adoptability grows, this will be new normal.

I’ll explain why there is so much value for Facebook in creating Camera platform. Camera filter platform is their baby step towards building umbrella camera platform for personal, work and social life.

Just like how Apps killed (and still killing) lot of real products (MP3 player, calculator etc.,) and traditional businesses (Call Taxi, DVD stores etc.,.), AR apps are going to kill lot of real products (Desktop workstations, TV etc.,) and businesses (ex: HP, LG etc.,).

Watch video below for proof:

Facebook thinks AR has 3 important use cases:

1. Informational: The ability to display information like directions, notifications, messages etc., (remember Google Glass?).
2. Digital Objects: The ability to interact with digital objects like chessboard, TV, wallpaper etc.,
3. Enhancements: The ability to enhance physical objects like building, face etc.,

Facebook’s AR baby step is building camera filter platform because that’s what Snapchat generation cares. Targeting Snapchat generation (18–34 years) is very important for Facebook, because they are future users of AR applications! It is very easy to realize now why Facebook copied Snapchat in all its Family of apps.

Overview - Facebook for Developers

Facebook is also laying technological foundation for building real AR apps (watch F8 video from 10:54):

1. Precise Location —Localizing Digital objects to real world using SLAM (Simultaneous localization and mapping). A technique that is also used in self driving cars for real time location mapping.
2. 3D Effects — Capture the world in 3D with high precision and interact.
3. Object Recognition — Real time visual understanding of context to display augmenting content. Pinterest platform currently helps you buy the item(s) in the picture you capture.

Fast forward to 14:31 sec to take a look at cool AR use cases from Facebook’s perspective.

I’m sure that Evan Spiegel will innovate and add new features that cannot be easily replicated by copycats. But Snapchat can’t keep adding ton of features into their app, because it can overwhelm users.

Here are some TechCrunch articles about potential Snapchat features:

• Imagining Snapchat’s Future: https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/13/imagining-snapchats-future/ (focus on UI and discovery improvements)
• This article is a must read: https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/17/the-bull-case-for-snapchat/ (Snap Shop, Places, Games, Spectacles 2.0)

Here are some TechCrunch articles about interesting launches/experiments:

• Snapchat Tries Our Stories For Locals Only: https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/13/local-our-stories/
• Snapchat Launches Collaborative Timelines Based On Events: https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/17/snapchat-launches-collaborative-timelines-based-on-events/

Idea 1: Group Stories

This idea is inspired from collaborative timelines based on events (check the link above).

When we travel to a place together with friends or family we take of snaps (selfie + groupie + scenic) and share them on our stories separately. As a result, our mutual friends will end of seeing snaps of same place in multiple stories. If only there is a way in Snapchat that allows friends to create a common story they can share, the problem would be solved.

Here is how it works:

• User creates a group story and adds her friends who will contribute to story.
• Once her friends accepts the group story request, they can start sharing snaps to that story.
• At the end of the day, everyone who is part of the story can download all pics shared in the story to their camera roll.

Update: There is some traction for Group stories already: https://catch.team/.

Idea 2: Local Stories

This idea is similar to idea 1. You will share snaps about a location with people in that location. Here is how it works:

• User finds something interesting at a local store and takes a snap.
• Snapchat auto-suggests tags like #GreatMall, #NikeStoreSanJose etc., for user to add to her snap.
• User can simply tap those tags and share her snap to multiple local stories at once.
• Users can search for local stories and view ones they are interested in. Snapchat also choose to show top local stories to users nearby.

Idea 3: Streams

People like to share different kinds of stories. They are not always the same. Story can be about your vacation or technology or politics or your baby or fitness etc.,.

Two things:

• As a follower, user might be interested into subscribing to specific type of stories from a person. For example: Only view their technology related content but not their cat snaps.
• As a content creator/influencer/celebrity, user gets the benefit of sharing with content with the right audience. Having a single Facebook timeline, single Snap Story is too restrictive.

Snapchat Streams is significantly different from Google+ Circles. Streams are created based on the type of content unlike circles (which is based on type of relation user has).

Here is how it works:

• User creates 3 streams (Fitness, Technology, Fun).
• Her friend subscribes to only Fitness and Fun streams.
• Her follower subscribes to just Technology stream because they are not interested in other streams.

Basic version of this idea #3 (Streams) is discovered with my friends: Abhishek Shrisvastava (Co-founder at EventsHigh), Sumit Ranjan (PayPal) and Sai Kumar Arava (Adobe Systems).

Ideas for Snapchat was originally published in ART + marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.