When it comes to the mobile web, the technology industry seems to be split between two camps - native apps and HTML5 web-based apps.
Apple has always been, and always will be, a hardware-first company. It produces beautiful devices with elegant designs and humane operating-system software.
Twitter is short-form, real-time, and text-based. It's built for instant alerts and rapid consumption. It is an ideal system for delivering sips of information from an abundant stream.
The marriage of computing and connectivity without the shackles of being tethered to a location is one of the biggest disruptive forces of modern times.
Computers in general, and software in particular, are much more difficult than other kinds of technology for most people to grok, and they overwhelm us with a sense of mystery.
In 1947, Porsche began work on its 356. In many ways, it was like the original iPhone. It wasn't perfect. It was underpowered. But it was streamlined and aerodynamic.
We are splintering what was the 'camera' and its functionality - lens, sensors, and processing - into distinct parts, but, instead of lenses and shutters, software and algorithms are becoming the driving force.
Mindfulness is natural when you do not need to think about minor daily problems like making a living!
In cities like New York, it is common to find taxicabs with wireless-enabled card readers.
Why don't we face up to the fact that many of us in Silicon Valley are living lives that involve telling ourselves a lot of lies.
Most of the stress we feel here in Silicon Valley is self-inflicted.
My definition of media? 'Anything which owns attention.' This could be a game or, perhaps, a platform. Ironically, the media tends to associate media with publishing - digital or otherwise - which, in turn, is too narrow a way to consider not only the media but also the reality of the competitive landscape and media-focused innovation.
The funny thing is that I used to be a blogger, but it wasn't known as 'blogging' at that time. This was in the '99/2000 time frame.
From analog film cameras to digital cameras to iPhone cameras, it has become progressively easier to take and store photographs. Today, we don't even think twice about snapping a shot.
Living a 24-hour news life has come at a personal cost. I still wake in middle of the night to check the stream to see if something is breaking, worrying whether I missed some news.
Some media companies that rely on advertising revenue are tying journalist compensation to the traffic their story generates. It doesn't work because it de-prioritizes writing.
For the longest time, computers have been associated with work. Mainframes were for the Army, government agencies, and then large companies. Workstations were for engineers and software programmers. PCs were initially for other white-collar jobs.
Pokemon Go, which involves trying to 'catch' Pikachu or Squirtle or other creatures with your smartphone, is an inherently social experience. You need to be walking around - on the streets, in public places - to catch the Pokemon.
Writing works when publications are writing and serving the best interest of their users; numbers are good yardstick but not a way to compensate a person.
Camera companies, like traditional phone manufacturers, dismissed the iPhone as a toy when it launched in 2007. Nokia thought that the iPhone used inferior technology; the camera makers thought that it took lousy pictures. Neither thought that they had anything to worry about.
By now, we all know that our every move online can be tracked and traced, and that, ideally, services learn from and adapt to customers based on an artful deployment of that data.
QR codes have always been a kind of half-measure, a useful but inelegant transitional technology; the ultimate goal is augmented reality.
Snapchat works because using a selfie is way easier than texting or tweeting. Stories should adapt to the medium and do so without cheapening the story.
Looking back, Google's success came from the fortuitous timing of being born at the cusp of the broadband age. But it also came about because of the new reality of the Internet: a lot of services were going to be algorithmic, and owning your own infrastructure would be a key advantage.
Business, much like life, is not a movie, and not everyone gets to have a storybook ending.
For me, stories are like Lego blocks. If I don't put one down, I can't put the next one down.
Echoes of the iPhone are everywhere. Xiaomi's phones and Google's new Pixel are designed to fool you into thinking that they just might be an iPhone.
Our ubiquitous mobile access has made time and location important data points in how businesses can now be built and managed.
Facebook has gone from a nice-and-boring social network to becoming an identity layer of the web. It is where nearly a billion people are depositing the artifacts of civilization in the 21st century - photos, videos, and birthday wishes.
Many companies that become verbs actually end up modifying our behaviors, and companies that modify behaviors end up becoming behemoths.
Most competition in Silicon Valley now heads toward there being one monopolistic winner.
Uber, like Google, is taking a highly disorganized business - in its case, private transportation such as taxicabs and private limousines - and ordering it neatly.
Just as two people can have similar personalities, two companies can have a remarkably similar approach to business.
The lightbulb, the most humble and illuminating of all technologies, when combined with a network connection, transforms itself from being a bulb into a wake-up alarm, a mood alteration mechanism, and in some cases, a cupid's assistant.
If you look at something like Spotify, many record labels are investors in the company. So from that standpoint, the money is all going back into the labels.
A platform is essentially a business model that thrives because of the participation and value added from third parties with only incremental effort from the owner of the platform.
I like the muted sounds, the shroud of grey, and the silence that comes with fog.
People pay little attention to banner ads - in fact, everyone dislikes them - and that leads to infinitesimally small click-through rates that make marketers unhappy.
A lot of what people are calling 'artificial intelligence' is really data analytics - in other words, business as usual. If the hype leaves you asking 'What is A.I., really?,' don't worry, you're not alone.
In a way, digital cameras were like very early personal computers such as the Commodore 64 - clunky and able to do only a few things.
Our economy, for a long while, has been transitioning from one reliant on industrial strength to one based on digital information. The next step in this transition is a digital economy shaped by connectivity.
When I look at Kickstarter, I see small businesses that have been funded by their customers. I see the acceleration of this shift away from the industrial manufacturing ideology to more of a maker economy. And I also see an idea so powerful that the company name has become a verb.
While in the early days of networks, growth was limited by slowness and cost at numerous points - expensive telephone connections, computers that crashed, browsers that didn't work - the rise of the smartphone has essentially changed all that.
I don't think I had a role model. I just was very inspired by an article which I read in Forbes magazine around the information superhighway and the Arpanet and stuff like that. To me, that intuitively made sense, and when I decided to come to the U.S., I knew exactly what I wanted to go and write about.
Sure, we all like listening to music on vinyl, but that doesn't mean streaming music on Spotify is bad.
Our entire society is rooted around the idea of more, and longer has become the measure of success.
In the digital realm, companies are free from the friction of producing physical goods, and as a result, we see companies like Google go from zero dollars in revenues to billions at a much faster rate.
Ideally, Facebook would take all our clicks and information and would magically give us everything we want, without us even knowing we want it.
Everybody's trying to repeat the past with the new network, with new devices and new tools. Why not make something brand-new?
