Pisco Sour

Recuerdo estar en SxSW en el 2015 escuchando a uno de los diseñadores principales de Uber hablando sobre el futuro de las interfaces conversacionales. "El 2016 será el año del comercio conversacional", decía, emocionado por cómo el procesamiento del lenguaje natural y la popularidad de las plataformas de mensajería iban a crear una nueva categoría de interfaces. La promesa era que ya no íbamos a necesitar apps. Robots inteligentes en nuestras aplicaciones de chat nos ayudarían a interactuar con todo tipo de servicios.

Michael Lynton, CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, said, 'I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet, period.' Why? Because people 'feel entitled' to have what they want when they want it, and if they can't get it for free, 'they'll steal it.'

In other words, if President Barack Obama wants to foster a recovery, a good way to do so through the private sector is to focus on creating and supporting new companies. The current approach of pouring money into decrepit, poorly managed companies is actually a way to reverse job and productivity growth in the U.S.

Creating community is not as simple as turning on comments ... That is not a community; that's a public toilet.

McKinsey & Company released a report, “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing,” yesterday that claims that large corporations could lose money through the adoption of cloud computing. The report paints cloud computing as over-hyped and maintains that cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) overcharge large companies for a service the companies could do better on their own. The study also says that while cloud computing is optimal for small and medium-sized businesses, large companies will spend less if using traditional data centers. Virtualization is the optimal way to go, says McKinsey, and by implementing virtualization in-house, corporations can reduce costs when factoring in depreciation and tax write-offs. Virtualization, which McKinsey says can boost server utilization to 18% from 10%, lets you treat one machine like many, by carving the servers into many virtual engines, so that software can maximize power from one machine and add scalability. Not only is this cost-effective for companies, but cloud computing takes advantage of virtualization. The report makes some thought-provoking points but neglects to address a few key trends that are occurring in cloud server services. Innovation is rapidly changing in the cloud. The space is still very much a work in progress and big cloud computing services, like AWS, Google, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft, are regularly coming out with different products. As these companies throw their hats into the “cloud computing ring,” AWS will face increased competition in the market and could cause prices to go down to fight for market share.

In this particular case, a couple of Domino’s employees have filmed themselves doing gross things to food that’ll probably get served to customers, and posted it to YouTube. Due to reactions and some quite clever investigative work of appalled viewers, both were promptly fired. For the rest of us, it sadly shows that these things (hopefully, very rarely) do happen in restaurants. It also shows that, luckily, people who are dumb enough to do something like that are also incapable of understanding that posting something on YouTube means that the entire world can see it. Kudos to that.

So here's my question: What exactly is this? What do you call MadV's project? It isn't quite a documentary; it isn't exactly a conversation or a commentary, either. It's some curious mongrel form. And it would have been inconceivable before the Internet and cheap webcams—prohibitively expensive and difficult to pull off. This is what's so fascinating about online video culture. DIY tools for shooting, editing, and broadcasting video aren't just changing who uses the medium. They're changing how we use it. We're developing a new language of video—forms that let us say different things and maybe even think in different ways.

So what does everyone think — has Twitter officially jumped the shark now? Larry King is offering to devote a show to a fake race to a million followers — a good majority of which are probably spammers or fake accounts — on a service that sends 140 character messages. It’s nice to see all these big time names using the same services we all use, but come on guys, surely there’s some real news going on out there

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