Messaging app wars – a redux of the browser wars

Messaging apps are definitely posing a challenge to mobile OSes, particularly in countries where open web access is limited and consequentially browsers have lower utility. However, this time around the competing platforms are working on incompatible standards unlike the browsers in the 90s which largely adhered to some form of specs. Plus the user bases have a lot more zeroes to them and are heavily entrenched.

It also makes it pretty clear why Facebook has been doubling down on Messenger and their acquisition of Whatsapp. Possibly a matter of time before the two start talking to each other. The really interesting things will happen if they ever start talking to other messaging platforms.

Link: Dan Grover | Bots won’t replace apps. Better apps will replace apps.

What are the similarities between Arvind Kejriwal and Bernie Sanders?

Question on @Quora: What are the similarities between Arvind Kejriwal and Bernie Sanders?

[LinkBlog] The Uncanny Valley of a Functional Organization – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

How organizations can falter on the road to transformation and scaling up
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[LinkBlog] Public speaking the TED way

A pretty nice way on the different approaches to public speaking with a funny comic strip explaining the TED way (not!) of preparing.
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The power of defaults

This’ll be even more important when bots start giving out default responses to queries:

So back in 2002, when MaxMind was first choosing the default point on its digital map for the center of the U.S., it decided to clean up the measurements and go with a simpler, nearby latitude and longitude: 38°N 97°W or 38.0000,-97.0000.

Source: Internet mapping turned a remote farm into a digital hell | Fusion

[LinkBlog] The Largest Ever Analysis of Film Dialogue by Gender: 2,000 scripts, 25,000 actors, 4 million lines

A really cool study putting the gender imbalance anecdotes to the test. And yes, things are really imbalanced overall. E.g. Minions is a gender balanced movie and so is Terminator, but not Alien.
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What’s a few hundred megapixels between shots

Kill the green screen maybe, but take datacentres to a different level:

The Lytro Cinema camera gathers a truly staggering amount of information on the world around it. The 755 RAW megapixel 40K resolution, 300 FPS camera takes in as much as 400 gigabytes per second of data.

Source: Lytro’s 755 megapixel Cinema light field camera is going to kill the green screen | TechCrunch

Power efficiency of AlphaGo’s victory

So another decade maybe before it achieves power parity?

Lee Sedol used about 20 Watts of power to operate. By contrast, AlphaGo runs on a whopping 1920 CPUs and another 280 GPUs for an estimated power consumption of approximately 1 MW (200 W per CPU and 200 W per GPU). That’s 50,000 times as much power as the amount of power that Lee Sedol’s brain uses and the two are not quite evenly matched but it is close enough to use for comparison.

Source: Another Way Of Looking At Lee Sedol vs AlphaGo · Jacques Mattheij