Episode 87 – Squeezing out some value

Attempting to get back into a bit of a pattern for recording shows, we return with the Michaels to talk about tech, games and innovation. We go deep on how social networks are being gamed to provide deep data for businesses to sell to you. Is it appropriate for developers to leverage social games to pull data from users for advertising or nefarious purposes? Has Microsoft gotten it write with Cortana? Has FourSquare lost it’s game with Swarm? Do you accept random friend requests in your social checkin applications? Does sharing everything solve the problem? (Are we really that naive … Continue reading

Episode 86 – App Granularity & Gamification

Sandy, Phaedra and Michael R. are traveling, on vacation or otherwise engaged in important work, so Michael M. takes a shot at a solo show to explore some thinking on how a number of major apps are breaking down their function into smaller bite sized bits and deploying them as individual apps. Examples of this are FourSquare, with its Swarm app, Facebook, with the Messenger app, alongside some of the recent acquisitions like Instragam and WhatsApp. Linking to the Gamification theme of this podcast, Michael muses on how this application functionality breakdown allows for smaller component pieces of functionality can … Continue reading