In many ways, 2016 has been a year of disappointments for the tech industry. Many of the disruptive technologies that were hyped this year fizzled out after failing to generate significant consumer interest. In retrospect, I think it’s apparent that the industry has become spoiled by the attention garnered by a once-in-a-lifetime product — the smartphone.
As the pace of smartphone improvement has slowed, tech companies eager to capitalize on their newfound position as the center of attention have raced to replicate it’s success and scale, resulting in products that have been both overhyped and unfocused. The Apple keynote address has become a genre unto itself, subject of both imitation and parody. While Silicon Valley in particular has always loved to spout their “change the world” rhetoric about technological disruption, the newest iteration of the Apple TV doesn’t have to come with a grand pronouncement that “the future of TV is apps.” It’s alright for it to just be a better way to watch TV. Not every product will, can, or even should attempt to revolutionize (and democratize) technology to the degree that the pocket supercomputer did.
Steve Jobs crystalized this idea at the end of his 2010 introduction of the original iPad when he positioned Apple as existing at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.
The reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. To be able to get the best of both. To make extremely advanced products from a technology point of view, but also have them be intuitive easy-to-use, fun-to-use, so that they really fit the users. The users don’t have to come to them, they come to the user. And it’s the combination of these two things that I think has let us make the kind of creative products like the iPad.
There has been too much technology for technology's sake this year. In 2017, I hope that technology companies (including Apple) take Jobs’ advice and focus on building products that improve people’s lives again.
Jobs’ astutely positioned Apple at the intersection of technology and culture. This site exists there as well. In the case of the latter, it’s been a year packed full of highly anticipated releases with plenty of highlights. These are the albums, apps, and games that I enjoyed in 20161.
Music
Apps (iOS)
Apps (Mac)
Games
After just about a year of being hosted on Typed, bytesized.co is now statically generated and hosted on S31 — and it’s generated with Swift!
For the static generator, I’m using a fork of the open source engine that powers the Spelt blogging software by Niels de Hoog. It’s lightning fast and offers some nice features like local preview with auto-regeneration. It’s also easily customizable if you’re familiar with Swift. Under the hood, Spelt uses Kyle Fuller’s Swift template language Stencil to provide Mustache-style templating. If you’re curious about what this looks like in practice, I’ve published the source for the new version of the site on GitHub.
The combination of the Spelt CLI and the AWS CLI make updating the site painless. No more copy and pasting articles into a rich-text web editor, hoping the formatting doesn’t get mangled. No more worrying if the site can parse the flavor of markdown I’m writing in. When an article is ready to be published, I just save the .md file to the _posts directory and run this script:
cd ~/Sites/bytesized.co/
spelt build
cd _build
aws s3 sync . s3://bytesized.co/ --exclude "*.DS_Store*"
Spelt builds the site and any changes are synced with the S3 bucket they’re served from.
Now that I’ve spent a few days refreshing the technical side of the site, I’m looking forward to trying to write more regularly. Moving into the new year my goal is to write at least one post a month — so if you notice that I’m slacking, remind me.
The Amazon Echo is a certified hit. Voice now seems obvious as the natural interface for devices within the confines of the home—and the Echo looks like a glaring miss for Apple, Google, and Microsoft—companies that have mature digital assistants and the hardware expertise to produce an Echo-like device. Spurred on by an increasing number of open APIs Amazon has been adding functionality at a rapid pace—you can now order an Uber, control your thermostat, stream music from Spotify, and more1 from the Echo. It feels like the beginning of the smart home revolution that tech companies have been promising since Bill Gates laid miles of ethernet and fiberoptic cable in his Seattle mansion in the late 1990s. Competitors are already starting to arrive, but it’s a market that’s still in its infancy—and one that Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Apple will want a piece of. As the Echo is showing us, these digital assistant-powered devices are primed to be the smarts behind the smart home.
Microsoft’s digital assistant is named Cortana and is built into Windows 10. While Cortana is relatively new and unrefined compared to the competition, Microsoft has the necessary technologies to compete in this space with their impressive cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence framework. They also have existing products like the Kinect and the HoloLens that could enable interesting complimentary experiences.
Over in Menlo Park, Facebook is building a text-based assistant with it’s “Facebook M” project. Built into Facebook Messenger and powered by Facebook’s own AI, Facebook M is currently in closed beta. An acquisition or partnership with the well received digital assistant application Hound would make for an interesting software-focused play for Facebook, especially given SoundHound’s Houndify platform initiative.
Google has had Google Now, their digital assistant technology, since it was released with Android 4.1 (“Jelly Bean“) in 2012. Their “Ok, Google” phrase activation is better than the competition, and given their interest in the smart home, expertise in server infrastructure, and artificial intelligence prowess2, this seems like a natural product area for the company. They already have a product that sits in the home with the Google OnHub. It has a speaker, but no microphones and none of the software functionality that makes the Echo so useful. One possible reason for this is that Nest, a Google acquisition focused on smart home products, has been tainted by it’s association with “creepy Google”3. An anonymous source inside Google acknowledged as much to Recode:
Senior executives at Nest had considered making a product similar to Echo, a voice-activated personal assistant, according to sources. But the plans were never hatched, largely out of concern that consumers would be too reticent of such a device tied to the search giant.
“At the end of the day, it’s Google,” said one source familiar with the situation. “There are trust issues.”
It’s clear that at least some people feel that an always on, always listening device from an Alphabet (née Google) company may not be welcome in people’s homes.
Finally, famously first and not always first to market in a given product category, Apple is uniquely poised to make a play in this space. Their big advantage is their existing mobile operating system, iOS. iOS is an absolutely massive platform with over 1.5 million applications available for download. Apple could leverage this platform to create a peerless experience by opening up the API that allows applications to register a vocal command interface with Siri in their upcoming release of iOS, iOS 104.
Much of the technical work for this has already been done—in iOS 8 they introduced extensions, allowing third-party applications to safely interact with the system; in iOS 9 they introduced the Core Spotlight Framework, allowing applications to register information as searchable by the system; and assuming the rumors that Siri is coming to the Mac this summer are true, the architecture has already been untied from the iPhone. Apple’s home speaker hardware (iPod, anyone?) would talk to your phone wirelessly5 and offer any Siri integrations for apps you already have on your phone in addition to it’s built-in functionality—tight integration with Apple Music and Apple’s other services. No need to hassle with yet another App Store6. By leveraging the work developers had done to support Siri with their iOS apps, Apple could debut their product with tens of thousands of integrations, all available on day one.
While there are hurdles—like Siri’s general usefulness and reliability7—Apple has long prided themselves on offering high quality products differentiated by their ‘whole widget’ approach of building both the hardware and the software. With their legendary industrial design team, Apple’s ability to create a beautiful object is beyond doubt. If they can nail the software as well, they have legions of fans already invested in the iOS ecosystem waiting to give them a foothold in the smart home.
The concept of the “Open API”1 has held various levels of esteem and support over the previous decade. It emerged as a fundamental building block of the Web 2.0 movement, with services like Flickr and Google Maps launching officially supported APIs a short while after launching themselves. The social giants Twitter and Facebook followed with APIs of their own. By the end of 2006, it seemed like an open API was a prerequisite for a successful launch.
But support for these APIs started to wane as the early Web 2.0 companies started to mature and focus on growing revenues and owning their platforms. For Twitter in particular, the appeal of following Facebook’s lead and creating a ‘walled garden’ was too great. They (in)famously began to restrict access to their API in 2012. Some critics of the company see this change as the root cause of some of the major issues facing Twitter today, such as the stagnation of user growth and a lack of meaningful platform innovation.2
Twitter was far from the only major company to make such a change however—by the end of 2015 Netflix, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and others had shut off open access to their APIs. These API shutdowns didn’t just have a negative impact on developers. As the drawbridges went up, users started to feel the negative effects. People began to lament the end of the open web.
Recently however, open APIs have been having something of a renaissance. This has been driven in part by the explosion of messaging—Facebook Messenger, Slack, HipChat, Telegram, LINE, WeChat, and others all offer open, well documented APIs that allow developers to build integrations for their platforms. The hope of these companies, and one that has been largely rewarded, is that developers will build applications on top of their messaging platforms, increasing the overall value. Slack has even started a $80-million dollar venture capital fund for companies who are building integrations for their platform.
For these new messaging platforms, it’s an important part of their value proposition—both to their investors and their users. But it isn’t just a one way street. We’re seeing more and more companies with open APIs that allow developers to tie together various platforms and services in a way reminiscent of the early days of Web 2.0 and the ‘remix culture’ that produced sites like HousingMaps and WeatherBonk.
Companies like Uber don’t care how you call an Uber, just that you do—and their API makes sure that it’s as easy as possible for developers to enable just that. Payment startups Square and Stripe don’t care where the payment is taking place or what’s being paid for, just that they process it. For smaller startups, it can be a great way to expand reach without the overhead of a business development team. There are even startups popping up that do the hard work of connecting various products and services for you.
Messaging’s emergence as the central interface paradigm on mobile and the resulting explosion of messaging platforms has companies building open APIs again, and that’s a good thing. For developers, being able to tap in to a rich ecosystem of existing building blocks allows for rapid prototyping, iteration, and increased focus on what makes their product or service unique. In turn, app-weary customers are rewarded with applications that are integrated where appropriate to provide the best experience, instead of having services walled off from each other. The open web is dead—long live the open web!
Happy New Year! After looking back at the end of 2015, now it’s time to look forwards to the year that will be. Here are the albums and the games I’m looking forward to in 20161.
Music
- Animal Collective - Painting With
Single: FloriDada music spotify
- Beck - TBD
Single: Dreams music spotify
- Bloc Party - Hymns
Single: music spotify
- Drake - Views From the 6
- Frank Ocean - Boys Don't Cry
- Gorillaz - TBD
- James Blake – Radio Silence
- Japandroids - TBD
- Kanye West - Swish
Single(?): FACTS Soundcloud
- M83 - TBD
- Radiohead - TBD
- The xx - TBD
- Vampire Weekend - TBD
Games
