Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?
My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, Solve For Interesting, the author of Complete Web Monitoring, Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks and Lean Analytics), Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, LibriVox, iambik and co-author of Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see”.
Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another:
- What $50 Buys You at Huaqiangbei, the World’s Most Fascinating Electronic Market – NewCo Shift. “Last December, when I was in Shenzhen, I visited Huaqiangbei (pronounced “wah jong bay”), a multi-storey electronics market. There are cramped stalls that sell one specific kind of power adapter; projector vendors beaming dozens of images; knock-offs from Kickstarters that haven’t even been funded yet. Outside, a little kid zooms about on fire-prone Hoverboards, selling them at a deep discount. It’s a crush of lights, sounds, people, and commerce, an over-exposed Blade Runner. The dirty secret is that it’s actually a showroom for manufacturers with factories around the city, so it’s cheap, from vendors who hope to sign up a mass-market customer. My friend Jesse, who’s building the world’s greatest keyboard, decided to find out what $50 gets you, including guaranteed fake SD cards and tamper-evident stickers. And really good spicy noodles, it turns out.” (Alistair for Hugh).
- Tiny Hand Will Be Your New Comic Sans – BuzzFeed. “I prefer my politics with a slice of absurd, which is why I’m a fan of the Tiny Hands font, designed to mimic Donald Trump’s handwriting. I somehow suspect Clinton’s font would be Menlo 11 point regular (I’ll leave the explanation of that to the reader). And it’s a sign of the mainstreaming of tech that font creation has become political satire. Anyway, I know what my new favorite font is — it makes everything tremendous!” (Alistair for Mitch).
- China Deal Watch – Bloomberg. “China is now the biggest corporate shopper in the world, having bought more international companies than the US did for the first time. Buying doubled in 2016, and the 2015 shopping bill was almost double it’s 2014 tally. The curve is sure going up and to the right.” (Hugh for Alistair).
- Will Ferrell: Bush & Bush – YouTube. “Such sweet, innocent times we used to live in.” (Hugh for Mitch).
- IBM’s Watson Is Everywhere–But What Is it? – MIT Technology Review. “In my presentations, I often talk about the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence in relation to how it will truly revolutionize a marketing organization’s ability to understand consumers and how to best target them. I get a lot of blank stares. To many, access to this type of technology seems many years away. Of course, it’s here now. When people speak of what IBM‘s Watson is, they’re often not really sure. Well, here’s a great primer.” (Mitch for Alistair).
- Pocket’s Next Frontier: Solving The Internet’s Clickbait Problem – Fast Company. “If there’s one app that I can’t live without, it’s Pocket. I can save anything and everything there, and – best of all – tag it to find it later. It works across all of my devices, and the offline reading feature is a lifesaver during intense travel periods. In short: love! Well, it turns out that they’re not just a modern version of Delicious, after all. I’m betting that they can pull this off too!” (Mitch for Hugh).
Feel free to share these links and add your picks on Twitter, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.