February's Essential Reads

You can pay a company $100,000 to clone your pet, it’s sometimes surprising that simpler tech falls short of expectations – or doesn’t yet exist (how can cars drive themselves but robotic hoovers have not yet reached a point of mass adoption?).  

Anyway...

The next big tech platform

If you read one thing this month, have a read of Kevin Kelly’s piece in Wired on AR’s next big tech platform. A ‘mirror world’ where every physical object will have its own digital twin.

Trying out ‘digital minimalism’

A great piece in GQ from Cal Newport, the author of the brilliant book Deep Work, on ‘why we’ll look back at our smartphone likes cigarettes’. His 30 day digital detox seeks to provide antidote to prevalent FOMO.

Merging messengers

If you haven’t already heard, Zuckerberg is integrating the tech stack for Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram (something he promised no to do at point of acquisition). The New York times had the best coverage, IMO.

‘Errand paralysis’ and Post Office anxiety

Millennials, largely, unfairly (?) seen as a highly-strung generation with a minimal attention span, may not make it to the end of this rather long article about millenials. Highly-strung and with a short attention span. But this genuinely makes for a really good long read from Buzzfeed (surely Buzzfeed is supposed to listicles and bite-sized digests for Millenials with a short attention span?)

Have you tried turning it on and off again?

And for a bit of humor, The Atlantic covered the inexplicable glitch in Samsung TV’s that rendered thousands of recent models unworkable. It seems that apps preinstalled have the ability to cause a glitch in the core TV functionality sending the boxes into an irreversible loop.

TVs, don't try and be more than you are. Imagine if our self-driving cars mysteriously bugged out….the consequences would no doubt be worse than missing an episode of Casualty.