5 trends disrupting communication

Since the beginning of time, humans have strived for ways to communicate with each other. As time progressed, we started seeking the ability to communicate with others close and afar.

When the telephone was invented in the 1870’s, it was a major disruption to the way people communicated with each other. With the telephone, it made it much easier to communicate with just about anyone who had the access to. It made talking to others close by and far away easier, and thus made phone calls much more frequent in nature.

Fast forward to today, and we can see there have been several other disruptions to the ways we communicate. From IRC to the invention of the cell phone,  we have a wide variety of ways to communicate with anyone we want from anywhere in the world.

With all that we have access to for communicating with each other, what are some of the major trends currently disrupting the way we communicate?

Email

Although email was invented in the 1970s, it didn’t become widespread until internet service providers started providing service in the 1990’s. When people signed up for service, they were often given an email address for their use.

Soon after, email services such as Hotmail made it much easier to get an email address outside of an ISP. Since then, email has taken over as a major way we communicate with either other professionally and personally.

Email isn’t anything new, but the way we use email today is different. We rely on email often as our main avenue of communication. We’ve moved from using the phone to talk to others to simply sending off an email.

It’s also not uncommon for us to have multiple emails for different purposes, more so now than in the past. We have an email address for our work lives and our personal lives. We also may have a few more for other various reasons (such as a side business).

The reliance on email today is disrupting the way we communicate mainly because it is our preferred method of communication. How many times have you ended a phone call or in-person discussion with “You can email me any time”?

Social Media

Social media is one of the biggest disruptors to the way we communicate with others. There are many social media networks out there, and most often the average individual is a member of at least three to four of them.

The fact that we signed up for and are members of several social media networks at the same time disrupts the way we communicate in that these networks provide a way to talk to each other without giving out details like a phone number.

If you’re like me, you know quite a few people that only communicate via social media, be it Facebook, Twitter, or another network. Many have never talked to each other through any other means (such as a phone call).

Always Connected

Thanks in large part to cell phones, we are always connected to a mobile device of some sort (cell phone, tablet, or laptop). This means we are always available to communicate with each other no matter where we are.

We often answer emails on our phones when we are away from the office, receive notifications from social media about interactions, and make calls while on the go.

This “always connected” way of life has disrupted the way we communicate because it allows for near instant communication. We no longer wait until we get to the office or home to check up on email or missed messages. We have the access right in our pocket and get notifications to such right away.

We also expect to receive answers and be able to get in touch with anyone quickly, sine we know they are always connected as well. We expect to get things handled right away instead of waiting for them to return to their work or home before hearing back.

Multiple Avenues

Much like having several different email addresses and being members of several different social media networks, we often have multiple ways we can be contacted in addition to email and social media networks.

If someone needs to contact us, they often have various options – mail, call, email, text, direct message on social media, tweet, send a chat, video message, along with many others. The ways to contact us are becoming more numerous as we subscribe to these various channels.

Having different avenues to communicate with each other helps to accommodate others that may prefer certain technologies. Some people may like Skype more than email, while others may prefer a text message over a phone call. Having all of these avenues allows anyone and everyone to contact us the way they want.

This trend in having multiple avenues to communicate with each other is disruptive and helped along with the fact that we are always connected and have our phones and computers with us at all times.

Emerging technologies

You can kind of get a sense of the different technologies available to us in the above trends, but technology for the ways we communicate have come a long way since the telephone.

Things like instant chat, text messaging, video messaging and the like have made communicating with each other in different ways possible.

Disruptive technologies like Facebook and social media, smartphones and text messaging, Skype and video messaging, and now Slack and instant messaging, have all changed the way we communicate with each other on the daily basis.

It’s no doubt that the next emerging technology will also disrupt the way we communicate as well, just like the ones that have come before it. Technology moves fast, so the next technology to disrupt communication may already be in development.

Conclusion

The ways in which we communicate with each other have changed drastically over the decades, and with new technologies being introduced often, those ways will constantly be disrupted by the next best thing.

Source :The Next Web 

Read More

Common battery myths that you need to stop believing

If you're following some long outdated battery myths, you;re doing it all wrong. Batteries are everywhere. So it's no surprise that so many theories about how they work and what you should do with them have made the rounds. 

For instance, you've probably heard that you should store batteries in the fridge , or that you should let them completely die before charging them up again. Or my favorite is to be careful not to overcharge them.

Well none of these things are actually true. Most batteries in smartphones and laptops are smart enough to know when to stop charging. So once they're completely charged, Power will be cut off. And what about letting your battery die completely before charging it up again. Actually if you let your batteries drain everyday, you'll reduce their effectiveness over time. 

Finally, you don't need to fully charge a device the first time you get it. This came from the olden days when fully charging a device helped the battery calibrate. Today most batteries calibrate themselves. So, you can go ahead and fully charge, but you're mostly just wasting your time. And now you're doing it right. 

Read More

Benefits of using a phone verification API

Phone number verification is the process of verifying that a phone number is valid, reachable and accessible by the user. It is also a popular measure that can be applied to any service or application looking to achieve an extra layer of security.

Phone number verification is often used as a form of two-factor authentication for certain online accounts. By using SMS, only the owner of that particular phone number gains access to a PIN code, sent in real time, allowing them to log into the application with their password and verify their identity with the correct PIN code. Since phone numbers are universally available and no further hardware is required, phone number verification makes for a globally accessible and relatively inexpensive solution to ensure security.

The importance of phone number verification shouldn’t be understated. By using this method of security, spam attacks by bots, fraud and account takeovers can be prevented. Aside from security, phone number verification can also identify unreachable users due to stale or incorrect information meaning your database consistently has up-to-date contact information.

The problem with phone number verification is that it can be a tedious process if done manually. First of all, merely checking that a phone number is valid would entail getting in touch with the carrier to see if the number is genuine rather than fake. However, ensuring that the phone number is reachable and accessible by the user simply entails pinging the number and the user inputs a response that they’ve received the message.

Further complications can also be encountered in verifying phone numbers such as:

Delivering PIN codes reliably

If you are working on a global database of phone numbers to verify, it’s difficult to ensure that the PIN codes are delivered in a time sensitive manner. Unless you are on the same carrier network, the message will get passed along various aggregators until it reaches one that has access to your recipient’s phone. The longer it takes for the user to receive the PIN, the less likely they will enter it and successfully verify the number.

Varying requirements per country and carrier

Since you’re dealing with various carriers in different countries, you need to keep track of the myriad of regulations regarding SMS. This may vary from country to country and even from carrier to carrier within different countries. For example, some countries may require alphabetic sender IDs while others might require numeric. Some carriers do not support unicode formats while some filter messages with certain keywords. This is important to keep in mind as your messages will fail to reach the intended recipient if it doesn’t comply with local regulations.

Localizing the user experience

You cannot use the same template when you are verifying phones internationally because, whilst English might drive conversions effectively in some regions, using the local language in other regions drives better conversion rates. Also, some preferences may be taken into account for certain countries such as if the PIN is better placed at the start or end of the message.

Security

When generating a PIN to send to your users, industry standard algorithms such as RFC62381 need to be followed. This generates time-based, one-time passwords (OTPs) which you can determine the window of validity. When deciding on the validity period, you need to make sure it is long enough for the PIN to not expire when it reaches the recipient, but you want to make it short enough so that it will expire if the user has not entered it within a reasonable time frame.

With these huge management and operational costs as well as various scenarios to think about, there are certain benefits that come to mind when using a phone verification API instead of building up the capability in-house.

Instant global verification

The provider’s solution would eliminate the need to connect to and sign agreements with every carrier in the world. The provider should also have carrier connections that automatically ensure reliability and low latency, as well as having automatic retry and failover to voice to save developers from having to create retry logic when the first message containing the PIN doesn’t deliver. This also eliminates the need for building the system to deliver PIN codes from scratch.

Only pay for successful verifications

The provider should only charge for successful verifications – failed attempts shouldn’t cost a thing. The solution must absorb risk on your behalf so you can focus on securing your user base and predicting your costs rather than implementing this very important but tedious task of verifying people.

Country-specific compliance

The provider must automatically take care of how to work around the hundreds of ever-changing carrier and country regulations, which might otherwise hinder the verification process. This eliminates your need to distinguish from the local guidelines surrounding SMS for each country and multiple carriers.  

Built-in Analytics

The provider should provide a dashboard for real-time analytics to measure verifications.

Using a phone verification API will aid you in reliability as the provider should ideally have a relationship with various carriers across the globe leading to a short latency time which increases conversions. It will also be more cost effective as you only pay for successful verifications and reduce the resource overhead of keeping up to date with the various country or carrier specific requirements. Finally, you will be able to measure your verifications and figure out where you went wrong as you will ideally be able to scrutinize the reports in real time.

In short, why do in-house what someone else can do better? Spend your money and time on perfecting your company’s vision, not on the tasks that take you away from them.

Source :The Next Web 

Read More

How Fast Does Your PC Really Need to Be?

You may have heard of something called Moore's Law with regards to computing power. The most simplistic way to describe this is that computing power doubles roughly every year to year and a half. This prediction has pretty much held up fairly well over the last thirty years. Now, with computing power doubling over every year and a half over thirty years means that today's computers are roughly a million times faster than the first personal computers.

This may seem like a great thing to have a PC that is extremely fast but if you look a bit more closely at how the average PC is used, much of this performance is wasted as the system sits idle for more than 95% of the time. With the processor sitting idle, it isn't generally necessary for a consumer to buy the most powerful system out there.

Instead, it is generally better to buy a more affordable option that will give you roughly the same overall level of experience in the software you will be running. After all, you don't need a massive eight core processor if your PC is going to be used just to play minesweeper. This article takes a look at how the average PC is used and then tries to point buyers to what would best suit their computing needs.

The Most Common PC Tasks And Why They Don't Need Much Power

The average PC is used primarily for internet connectivity. This would consist of things such as email, browsing the web, using social networks and streaming video or audio. Some of these tasks were fairly demanding a few years ago but have be greatly improved through more efficient programming and better standards.

Additionally, many of these tasks may be restricted by the speed of your internet connection. After all, most processor are much faster at processing data than the data can be transmitted over your broadband connection.

Following internet connectivity, the next most common use of a PC is for productivity.

This would include things such as writing up documents in a word processor, editing a spreadsheet or putting together a presentation for either a class or business. These tasks are primarily done either by business users or students. These are some of the earliest forms of computer software for personal computers and has been greatly optimized over the years. Often the speed of these programs is limited more by how fast you can type or enter the data.

Media viewing was somewhat mentioned in internet connectivity when it comes to streaming but a lot of people use their computers for watching movies or listening to music that is stored either on physical media (CD or DVD) or digital files (mp3s, mpeg video, etc). Even with high definition video that is now available on PCs, the hardware has pretty much been optimized to handle the various standards that very little computing power is actually required to watch something like a 1080p high definition video.

In all of these cases, pretty much any modern personal computer should be able to deal with these quite well. There may be a few specific hardware requirements such as a Blu-ray drive to watch movies on this physical media but the hardware requirements are still quite low. Below are some suggestions for good options for people looking at a PC for any of these types of tasks:

What Really Requires The Most Performance

Now, most people don't require a lot of high performance computers but there are still a few items that can bring a budget system to a dead stop. The task that many consumers will likely run that requires some serious computing power isvideo editing. Video in general can be very taxing but editing video has to do some serious work, especially with the rise of HD video recording. The reason is that video editing requires that the PC calculate all the various frames one by one and then stitch it together along with an audio track. All of this has to be done and then put together in a video format that can be played via PC, DVD, Blu-ray or video device. As a result, a faster machine will reduce the amount of time it takes to generate the resulting edited video. After all, wouldn't you rather wait five instead of twenty minutes to see if your fifteen minute video turned out alright?

In addition to video editing, graphics creation and more specifically computer animation can also be quite demanding. It takes a fair amount of time to build a 3D model with all its polygons that comprise it. If you are then going to render those 3D models into a final image or scene, it takes a lot of time especially for some modes of rendering. There is a reason why a company such as Pixar has huge banks of computers to produce its spectacular animated movies. Just like with video editing, the faster the PC, the shorter the time needed to render a scene will be.

Another demanding task that is fairly rare in the consumer PC market is called computer aided design or CAD. This is software that is used to build the designs for a wide range of products and buildings. It is demanding because it has to do a variety of computing dealing with the physical and material aspects to ensure that the design will function when it is finally assembled. This can involve a great deal of high level math involving calculus and specific scientific formulas to ensure accuracy. As a result, a faster PC can help reduce the time it takes to verify a specific model.

Because each of these computing tasks can require a large amount of computing power, I recommend that buyers look at high performance systems or workstations if the PC will be used primarily for these tasks. Here are some recommended desktops and laptops to handle these jobs:

The PC Gaming Power Myth

PC gaming has traditionally been something that has been very demanding of PC hardware. All the 3D graphics, audio and AI can add up on a PC. The issue is that programming all of these items has become much more complex such that the hardware has outpaced what the developers have been able to put together. There are still some specific hardware requirements for the graphics in order to play many PC games, but frankly there are many affordable options that can achieve the most common PC resolution of 1920x1080 just fine even with laptops that tend to have restricted performance from power constraints.

There are still some instances where gamers would require a fair amount of performance in order to achieve an acceptable gaming experience. One such instance is running multiple monitors to get a larger high resolution display or brand newUltraHD (4k) displays. Gaming across three 24-inch monitors can be quite impressive but the hardware costs for setting it up are beyond what most people are even willing to spend on a single system.

For those looking to use their PC for gaming but aren't looking to do a really incredibly stressing setup and would like to save some money, there are a number of options. Below are some suggestions for desktops and laptops. If you are looking at these lists, make sure to check out the graphics hardware to make sure they meet the requirements for PC gaming:

Chromebooks and Tablets

Chromebooks are a popular alternative to a full PC these days thanks to their low price. The thing to remember is that these systems often have less performance and capabilities than a traditional computer. They are primarily designed for internet connectivity like browsing the web, email and online applications. If you only need these capabilities without the need for compatibility with Windows applications, then it might be a suitable alternative but I highly recommend trying one out before buying it as they have limited potential for upgrades as well.

Tablets are also another alternative to a full computer. Their small profile and easy to use interface make them perfectly suited to tasks such as internet connectivity and media watching. They generally are not as well suited for productivity purposes as a traditional laptop because of their touch interfaces. The best part is that they don't have the legacy software of the x86 architecture used by most PCs making them much more efficient. Performance is still a bit of an issue because of their limited resources. Because of this, going with the least expensive tablet is not always the best choice, instead, I recommend that people look at how they will be using a tablet and then check out my suggestions for the Best Tablets to find one that matches their needs.

Conclusions

Overall, most computers are overpowered for what the average user will be doing with them. Because of this, it is important to take a hard look at what your PC will be used for before you end up buying one. This can help save you a lot of money on your purchase and yet still give you a completely functional and pleasant computing experience.

Source :about.com 

Read More

The Future Of Coding Is Here, And It Threatens To Wipe Out Everything In Its Path

APIs — the rules governing how software programs interact with each other — not user interfaces, will upend software for years to come.

When Intel CEO Brian Krzanich doubled down on the Internet of Things at the company’s annual Developer Forum in August, he emphasized what many of us have already known — the dawn of a new era in software engineering. It’s called API-first design, and it presents a tremendous opportunity for developers who adapt — not to mention a major risk for developers (and companies) who don’t.

Intel isn’t the only heavyweight recognizing the value of APIs. IBM recently got into the world of API management with IBM Bluemix, which allows companies to discover how other developers are using their APIs and design around that feedback. Then Oracle extended its API management suite in June to capitalize on growing revenue opportunities. Other players have been stacking the deck in preparation for API-centric software development for years.

Typically, when people design new products and capabilities, they’re asked to design the UI screens and show how the user experience will look. There are plenty of reasons this approach took off with developers. Touchscreens unleashed a new generation of computing, and fundamentally changed the ways we interact with hardware.

Apple and Google have proven that ease of use is both a consumer and enterprise priority. What’s more, the emergence of Augmented and Virtual Reality platforms prove people are constantly exploring new ways to experience content. But as devices proliferate, system-to-system interactions will dominate people-to-system interactions. Systems don’t need pretty interfaces, they need well-defined contracts. They need APIs.

Just in mobile, one can think of 10 different interfaces. Then there are web, client-server and thin client — it can be overwhelming. The only way to gain control is to focus on the API layer; it’s not even worth thinking through the fragmentation of the interface layer, especially if one is providing a service. Take Netflix, for example. How can a video streaming service with such a simplistic user interface scale to more than 63 million users accessing their video library from hundreds of device types from all across the globe? Excellent APIs.

The Internet of Things (IoT) — which will soon be at the center of the tech universe, according to Business Insider Intelligence — is really driving this paradigm shift. This proliferation of devices is sealing the deal on a trend already gaining steam.

As devices have outnumbered people, the systems we use to connect them have become incredibly complex. APIs are the foundation of these connections: the mortar between our digital hardware. This complexity has set the stage for a tectonic shift away from full-stack engineering toward building pieces on top of existing layers within larger ecosystems.

Other tech giants like Apple and Google are driving the same API-centric future. The emergence of new interconnected product categories — wearables like the Apple Watch and Google’s driverless cars, to name two prominent examples — signal the growing importance of APIs in our daily lives. When the smartest people in the room get behind something new, it’s best to pay attention. This doesn’t mean computers and screens are going away, but it does signal a whole new world of opportunity for developers.

The consequences of failing to move to API-centric development are as real for individuals as they are for the companies that employ them. Developers who fail to adapt their talent around APIs run the risk of rapidly devaluing their skills and decreasing their job security.

For companies, the consequences may be magnified. Startups that fail to embrace this technological revolution could become less competitive. They could make inferior products. Some startups could wither away, altogether. Companies that don’t live on the edge of innovation will become pieces of a shrinking pie.

As we move into a more interconnected world, amazing new possibilities emerge. Developers like to consume “bite-sized” stuff. Amazon popularized this approach — they told developers what the system does and got out of the way. For tech companies, the “telling” will be handing over APIs. It’s no wonder we’ve moved toward microservices that enable best-of-breed platforms to thrive.

Connected devices, driverless cars and advanced health tech are just a handful of the new technologies API-first design will enable. For these innovations to happen, they must be built on a solid foundation. That means starting system design at the foundational layer — APIs.

Source :TechCrunch 

Read More

Two humans link their brains to play 20 Questions

University of Washington graduate student Jose Ceballos wearing the EEG cap to transmit answers. University of Washington

If you could eschew the telephone, and instead wear a cap that allowed you to share your thoughts with someone else, very far away, would you? It may be a moot point now, but there may come a time in the not-too-distant future when it isn't, largely due to the work of and his team at the University of Washington's Institute of Learning & Brain Sciences.

In this latest round of Stocco's research, two people were successfully able to transmit their thoughts to each other over the Internet, completing a game of questions-and-answers.

"This is the most complex brain-to-brain experiment, I think, that's been done to date in humans," Stocco said. "It uses conscious experiences through signals that are experienced visually, and it requires two people to collaborate."

As with previous experiments conducted by Stocco and his team, the experiment takes place between people in separate locations.

One person, the responder, was shown an image on a screen. The other participant, the inquirer, then sent yes or no questions by clicking on them with a mouse. The responder, wearing an EEG cap that monitors, captures and translates brain activity, answered by staring at one of two flashing LEDs attached to the monitor, which flashed at different frequencies.

These answers were captured, translated and sent via the Internet to the inquirer, where a it was transmitted to their brain using transcranial magnetic stimulation via a magnetic coil positioned behind their head. By using TMS to stimulate the visual cortex, the inquirer was able to see a flash of light known as a phosphene for "yes" answers. For "no" answers, the inquirer sees nothing and is therefore able to proceed.

The experiment was conducted in two dark rooms almost a mile apart, with five pairs of study participants, each of which played 20 rounds of the game, 10 real games and 10 control rounds. Each game consisted of eight objects, with three questions for each object that would solve the game if answered correctly. For the control games, an undetectable plastic spacer was placed between the magnetic coil and the inquirer's head to block the TMS.

Making sure to correct for any possible means of cheating, such as blocking the test subjects' hearing, and repositioning the magnetic coil for each round, the participants were able to successfully able to guess the correct object for 72 percent of the real games, compared to 18 percent of the control games.

There were several reasons for the incorrect guesses in the real games, the most likely of which was interpreting the phosphene as something not seen with the eyes, but the brain. The responder not knowing the answers, hardware problems, or focusing on both flashing lights rather than one could also account for errors.

University of Washington postdoctoral student Caitlin Hudac seated in front of the TMS coil. University of Washington

With a $1 million grant awarded to the team last year, they have been able to broaden their research. Another area they are looking into is transmitting brain states, such as from an awake person to a sleepy one, or from a focused student to one who has ADHD.

"Imagine having someone with ADHD and a neurotypical student," said co-author Chantel Prat, a faculty member at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences and a UW associate professor of psychology. "When the non-ADHD student is paying attention, the ADHD student's brain gets put into a state of greater attention automatically."

This also feeds into the notion of "brain tutoring", which the team is also exploring. This could be simply transferring information from teacher to student, but it also could involve transferring signals from a healthy brain to one that is developmentally impaired, or affected by a stroke.

"Evolution has spent a colossal amount of time to find ways for us and other animals to take information out of our brains and communicate it to other animals in the forms of behavior, speech and so on. But it requires a translation. We can only communicate part of whatever our brain processes," Stocco said.

"What we are doing is kind of reversing the process a step at a time by opening up this box and taking signals from the brain and with minimal translation, putting them back in another person's brain."

The paper on this latest round of experiments can be found online, published this week in the journal PLOS One.

Source : CNET 

Read More

The Internet's Vanishing Point?

Welcome to the future of the internet, where the web has disappeared.

Technologies only become truly integrated into society when they move from requiring forethought to becoming an afterthought. It's the progression of all innovations and it's now happening to how we experience of the internet.

What was once a deep system to search has slowly evolved into a system that pulls personalized, ambient information to a single layer we skim.

We've moved from surfing and searching to glancing. This will be the experience of the next web, where information is aggregated propelled by API's and deep linking — and it's going to

The Three Eras Of The Web

Broadly speaking we've had three eras of the web defined by three distinct behaviors.

The first era of the consumer internet was the era of portals — the internet as a web based magazine. We simply took the information that had once been printed on paper and placed it on screen, saving it as documents and arranging information in directories much like filing cabinets.

Editors and journalists were in control, little in information architecture changed from the old world, except distribution. Content became directory-led, portals became the front page of the internet. We'd taken pre-digital world structures and replicated them.

The second era was one of search, the search bar as the new gateway to the internet. For the first time we were now in control, Microsoft asked “Where do we want to go today?” and PageRank from Google became our guide.

Information wasn't pulled through to us, we had to go find it, but everyone could contribute and the popularity and depth of what was available exploded. This was the era of the deep web, content hidden in messy structures, but pulled up from the depths based on complex search algorithms. The Internet in this era became surfing, where we swam amid waves of information, swooping down with the right wave to ride.

Today we're living in the third era, a hybrid, which includes a curious mixture of Web 2.0's promise of scraped content pulled from various deep sources (with search as the homepage) and augmented by social and algorithmically driven curation via Facebook, Twitter and Google. Furthermore, on mobile we've apps, which are best described as micro-portals extracting personalized information and presenting it to us in a closed ecosystem.

The Fourth Era Will Be The “Thinternet”

Technology is driving behavior change; mobile phones have become the default screen for web access and apps have shifted to become our primary consumption mode.

The next era of the web stems from this environment. It will be a time where ubiquitous connectivity, and universal digitization, presentation, and aggregation take place in parallel and cross-pollinate to produce an entirely new web experience.

Universal Connectivity And A Disappearing Web

Ask 30-year-olds how much time they spend online and it's a big number, ask 18-year-olds and it's greater still, but ask 12-year-olds and they can't tell you, because, for them, there is no concept of online.

From Wifi in transatlantic aircraft, to 5G and Wi-Max, to Africa going online via smartphones, to ever smaller, cheaper, more abundant connected sensors, we're entering a world where it seems literally everything is connected to everything — with rapid, always-on, cheap, abundance. The internet moves into the background, becoming a connective tissue to everything.

Everything Is Digital And On Display

For years, media was distributed on discrete, physical devices and each was aligned to an industry vertical and assigned a media channel. You watched TV on a TV, from a TV company paid for in part by TV ads, consumed a full range of news in a Newspaper, listened to the radio on a radio from a radio transmitter with radio ads.

Now everything has risen and is converging on the Internet. Channels become meaningless. The notion of TV becomes video. All screens are now black mirrors, but they're proliferating, and becoming smarter. Car-based screens, wearables, tablets, phablets, photo frames: they're all hyper connected offering interactive material pulled from the internet. Nouns like “Television” become as limiting and inappropriate as the smartphone is to the telephone.

All About Aggregation

As screens proliferate, verticalization (the hallmark of content before the Internet era), becomes a thing of the past. The Thinternet offers horizontal splicing. Content creators now see material navigated only at the aggregation layer. FromApple News to Facebook Instant, to Google Now, content is pulled to you. TV channels unbundle before deep-linked search selects material like Siri on the Apple TV. Welcome to a time where owning the thin customer interface becomes paramount, and content itself threatens to become a dumb pipe.

Internet As Service

Glass screens become layers onto which personalized information is exhumed and projected. Browsers for devices become secondaryor vanish, apps become the primary navigation. Information becomes presented in thinner ways, and the notification layer becomes a key place for simple interactions. For deeper interactions the internet is pulled through and personalized through a web of apps.

Source : TechCrunch 

Read More