Are Parents Really Naming Their Kids After Pokemon Characters?!
Every Monday morning at 7:10 am, I am a guest contributor on CHOM 97.7 FM radio broadcasting out of Montreal (home base). It’s not a long segment – about 5 to 10 minutes every week – about everything that is happening in the world of technology and digital media. The good folks at CHOM 97.7 FM are posting these segments weekly to SoundCloud, if you’re interested in hearing more of me blathering away. I’m really excited about this opportunity, because this is the radio station that I grew up on listening to, and it really is a fun treat to be invited to the Mornings Rock with Terry and Heather B. morning show. The segment is called, CTRL ALT Delete with Mitch Joel.
This week we discussed:
Terry and Heather are away on vacation. I’m sitting in with Pierre Landry.
Can we have a week when we don’t talk about Pokemon Go? What about this: It turns out that parents are so inspired by Pokemon Go, that they are naming their babies after Pokemon characters. No joke. All of this via the good people at BabyCenter. Apparently, names like Roselia, Eevee and Onyx for girls, along with Ash, the trainer of our generation, for boys. Other trainer names rising in popularity include Ivy and Shay.
It was a crazy week of big companies reporting their numbers. Amazon shocked the markets with some pretty impressive numbers (another quarter of profits, mostly due to their AWS – Amazon Web Services – cloud business). Alphabet (the new Google master company) also surprised the markets with strong numbers (mostly due to advertising). Alphabet’s is valuded at more than $500 billion. Twitter was a disappointment with their stock plunging more than 10% the day after their earnings. Apple did pretty great as well, which vaulted the stock to its highest levels since April, with revenue of $42.4 billion and a market cap of close to $560 billion. Everyone, with the exception of Twitter, just keeps on impressing.
With all of these trillions of dollars, we’re going to need faster mobile devices. Well, fear not, 5G is coming! It was announced this week that “a broad set of technology advances is poised to transform what today’s smartphones and other wireless mobile devices can do — ushering in high-resolution video and fully immersive, 3-D environments. At the NYU Wireless lab in Brooklyn, students are testing prototype equipment — forerunners to next-generation phones — that are able to transmit a blazing 10 gigabits of data per second, all while moving around crowded courtyards. And Samsung recently showed how a car traveling at 25 kilometres per hour could maintain a gigabit-per-second connection as the car moved in and out of range of mobile transmitters called base stations.” What does this all mean? 5G will be about 100 times faster than what current commercial mobile phone technology can do. Meaning, having Internet services at home, may also soon be a relic of the past.