Category: Mobile

3 things I didn’t know about the Apple Watch

After one week wearing the Apple Watch, I can reaffirm my comments on why I believe it will be a success. It may not be the first smartwatch to reach the market, nor the most complete in terms of features, but one thing is clear: Apple has done what it does best, create a simple but delightful experience with a product category that other competitors have already tried mastering.

I had read tons of articles and reviews before getting an Apple Watch of my own, and yet this first week I discovered a few things, good and bad, that surprised me. These are the top 3:

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What Periscope needs to become the future of social media

Yesterday, I took an Uber ride somewhere in Utah, accompanied a startup in Austin during their lunch break and left San Francisco by ferry. All thanks to Periscope, a new app from Twitter.

Periscope allows anyone to share what they see and hear, using real time video. It’s personal, easy to use and incredibly addictive (hello reality TV of the future), but is it here to stay?

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I bought a smartwatch as an experiment, and I liked it

Smartwatch sales are set to explode by 2020, according to a NextMarket Insights report from 2013. And according to a more recent CCS Insight’s global forecast, “by 2018 over 250 million smart wearables will be in use, 14 times more than in 2013.”

That’s a lot of people and a lot of wearables. What will these gadgets do? A lot of things apparently:

Let’s reflect on one aspect: “50% of wearables sold by 2018 will be smartwatches.” That’s impressive, considering that most people today don’t even know what to do with a smartwatch. The cultural change is going to be massive.

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On-demand delivery startups and local economies: interview with Sergio Treviño, Co-Founder of BrewDrop

On-Demand Delivery, Instant Gratification… if you’re not used to hear these words already, you will be soon. The fast-changing space of on-demand economy is filled with startups that will bring anything to you, almost instantly.

Uber, Airbnb, Caviar, PushForPizza, Munchery, Doordash, Postmates, SpoonRocket, Sprig, Instacart, Shyp, TaskRabbit; all of them are great examples of this fascinating trend, and today we are interviewing Sergio Treviño, Co-Founder and Lead Technical Architect of BrewDrop.

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The curious case of the expanding smartphone

It all started like this: mobile phones were big, heavy and difficult to hold. Fortunately, my first mobile phone was a Motorola that looked a lot like this one and it was small enough to fit in my pocket; however I still remember how uncomfortable was to walk with it given its bulky antenna and thick body.

As time passed by, mobile phones got smaller, lighter and more powerful. Any phone today is more powerful than the computer that brought us to the Moon. It felt like the microscopic mobile phone was closer than ever. That was the dream, those were the good times.

Then the world went crazy… and this happened:

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3 lessons to learn from Flappy Bird’s success

You’re probably tired of reading about Flappy Bird, right? Nobody blames you. The game became the #1 free app on the iOS App Store with 50 million downloads. Dong Nguyen, the developer, reportedly earned $50,000 per day through banner ads. In fact, it was so popular that the developer got apparently overwhelmed and removed it from the App Store.

The situation is specially interesting given that there isn’t any big game corporation behind; it’s just an indie developer that created a simple and addictive game. These are the 3 key lessons we can learn from it.

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Will Paper kill the original Facebook app?

Facebook announced yesterday a new standalone app: Paper. I’ll admit that I was skeptical at first: another reading app? what can Paper provide that Flipboard or Pulse don’t already? But then I looked at all the possibilities that Paper actually has and, well, now I think that Facebook could be on the verge of cannibalizing its main app.

 

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4 ways I’d change Windows Phone 8

This is a follow-up post to a comparison between the Lumia 920 and the iPhone 5s and you can also find a similar list of opinions about the iPhone 5s and the iOS ecosystem here.

Windows Phone 8 is a great product, there is no doubt; unfortunately, there are several issues that might drive people like me to try other mobile environments. The following list is a compilation of personal opinions about what things I’d change from the Windows Phone 8 ecosystem.

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4 ways I’d change the iPhone 5s

Some of my beloved friends at Microsoft mentioned that the comparison of the Nokia Lumia 920 and the iPhone 5s wasn’t fair because I compared a 2012 device with a 2013 device.

Well, I disagree. The 920 happens to win and loose in exactly the same categories that the Lumia 1020, which is a 2013 device: it’s still bulkier and heavier than the 5s and it still has a much better camera than the 5s.

However, I’ll go a step further and expand the comparison with a list of things I’d change from the iPhone 5s and the iOS ecosystem.

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