The Second Annual Mostly Random What It All Boils Down To Awards, 2018 Edition

Building on the unprecedented success of last year’s awards (well, they were the first) I wanted to come up with the 2018 version. It shouldn’t be difficult as, according to the new “digital wellbeing” app, I use my phone over 5 hours a day, so I must be doing something on it. So here goes, …

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The Gartner hype cycle: a personal take

It’s time for my annual look at Gartner’s hype cycle, where I pick out the technology trends that interested me and how they’ve played out in Silicon Valley and outside it. I love looking at this analysis first and foremost because it adds perspective to the often subjective opinion of leading edge tech that we …

Why is watching live sports still a challenge for cord cutters? Can it change?

Sporting events are widely considered final bastion of must-see-live TV. Even back in 2015, the live audience for sports was 95%, compared to 66% for dramas. This figure is probably even lower today as dramas are more often time-shifted. It’s not only that viewers watch sports live, but they garner the largest live audiences by …

Why isn’t voice shopping working?

When the Echo launched back in 2014, it was assumed that it would be more than just an assistant, that it would become Amazon’s new store front: “its driving force, the beat in its heart, will be to accept your money as efficiently as possible.” As recently as this March, a a market research report …

Can tech be better? What can we do as PMs to be more critical and ask more questions.

A vacation away from Twitter and Silicon Valley usually serves as healthy step back and usually allows me to take a higher level look at how tech is perceived by outsiders. The unpleasant truth is that tech is no longer the shining light it once was (once being a scant few months ago) and people …

Digital Wellness on Android: a second look

I got a chance to look at Google’s digital wellness feature on a developer’s version of Android P and it was interesting but also a bit disappointing. As I said in my previous post last week, just having access to this data is helpful and enlightening. I opened up the dashboard at around 5:00pm and …

Digital Wellness: the future of mobile app development or a passing fad?

The data is out: we’re addicted. We’re spending almost six hours a day online and of those 3.3 hours are on mobile devices. We are officially addicted to our phones.  The conversation around addictions often focuses on the addicted “just stopping” whatever it is they’re addicted to. Yet an entire industry built on gum and …

It’s time for a smarter shopping mirror – says everyone who hates trying on stuff in stores

Earlier this month, at the Google Pay sandbox at I/O, Google demoed a “smart mirror.” From what I saw in the demo, the mirror currently has the ability to track and display on the mirror products brought into the dressing room via an RFID tag on each item, show the item’s size and color and …

Five product trends that were showcased at Google I/O

I was lucky to attend Google I/O last week and after the excitement around the announcements had died down, I was left with five intriguing product trends that not only show where Google is headed but also, in some ways, the rest of the industry. These do not by any means include all the announcements …

Google Maps is creepy. It’s time to think differently about user data collection and use

We’re in a period of heightened user privacy concerns, amidst users' growing understanding of the breadth and depth of the personal data collected about them. One would think, as a product manager, that this might be a time for being more respectful of user privacy and to be less blatant about how much sensitive data …