This week the Michael’s are together again, after a quick holiday break. A fun and exciting show based on a bit of a journey from the Security Now podcast and Steve Gibson’s discussion of the website IP Vikings. We have loads of fun viewing attacking on the internet in real time,while discussing bots, botnets, eliza and personal assistants. We then look at some really cool personal assistant apps, and how you can game your contacts. What games are you playing?
Comments Off on 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 to believe it works? Isn’t that what big data is all about?)
Foursquare can uniquely identify you with only four checkins!!!
Google makes glass available in the United Kingdom. How long will you hold out? Does google have the privacy aspect appropriately addressed to expand into Europe? We discuss glass and it’s tie to privacy. Is there a game here?
Home automation has been around for a long time, does Nest and iOS HomeKit change the game? How about tying it to wearables and augmented reality? What does Nest’s data sharing policy mean for Google? Have they gotten it right? We discuss how opt in should be the right way to drive privacy and transparency, is this good enough? Michael tries to drive a “fun” business game for home automation. How about a bidding war that squeezes out some value, if a business can identify your patterns? How much are you worth as a consumer?
We also define a games as something you voluntarily agree to play. We end with a bit of discussion on the games we are currently playing – Michael R. Is playing the Powerpoint game, do you play it???
Comments Off on 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 be recombined in a way to allow for games and play — how quickly the same exact functions can be reorderd and recombined to create innovative ways to deliver new sets of function from the same component parts.
Michael thanks @AltonBrown for his ‘unitasker’ design language, and Berke Breathed for giving us Opus and the Turnip Twaddler.
A very happy Father’s Day to all the Dads listening in to the podcast!
