Volume 1 Issue 3: 20 May 2016
A look back, to learn what’s next. By Augur.
The tech world is naturally attracted to novelty. But all too often, this makes it easy to lose perspective. How can we understand the importance of the events of today without considering those that got us here?
Every seven days, we take a look at this week’s news in previous years to see what we can learn. Feedback to augur+lookback@augur.london
2011
Not featured in this piece: the fact Amazon has run this story in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012.
Five years later, Feb 2016 saw the stock plummet on poor forecasts — but by April, it was on a PR offensive again,
Just goes to show the change of scale with social networks now. She’s at about 60M on Twitter now, 17M on Instagram — and 61M on Facebook.
2012
From the time: “The challenge is this will sully the long-term brand of Facebook, and in five years time people will look back on the IPO and have a negative connotation and none of that is good for the Facebook brand and the Facebook service itself.”
The stock has climbed to nearly 3x that opening day now.
2013
One revealing trend for this exercise is that these tax issues are coming up year after year, week after week. First with rumblings in these more distant years, then with concessions from the tech giants more recently.
4/5 stars. “The effect is so uncool as to make a cynic wonder if Glass is somewhat over-hyped. But Google’s idea is obviously the future — the web should be more of a part of all our lives. Those who are scared of it will, I think, find it becomes ever more present because it is obviously useful and it in reality poses very few new threats. But this design is not yet small enough or quite fit for mass market consumption.”
Shows how hard it is to “review” radically different consumer tech.
2014
“Why is Google selling this part of Motorola for a fraction of what it had spent on the whole company, given it bought it for $12.5 billion?
Lenovo quite rightly assumed that Google had bought Motorola purely for its patents, so decided to show its interest in the hardware side just in case a sell-off was on the cards.”
2015
This has become the way we create the template for the Lookback every week.
1891
The first public display of Thomas Edison’s prototype kinetoscope.
You have been reading The Lookback, by Max and Sam at Augur.
If you enjoyed it, think about recommending this post below or sharing it with the wider world. With your help, we can build something cool.
