Soundcloud’s laying off 173 employees, including Matthew Liam Healy who had just sold his belongings in Scotland and moved to Berlin for his seemingly dream job. “This is the story of his week as a SoundCloud employee.” As he said, “I love my (Apple) Watch, but it’s not a great way to find out you’re losing your job.” Anyways, if you’re hiring top dev talent, you should message him now as he’s already had 80+ companies reach out to him.
Amazon is taking over the world. Will its strategy of acquiring companies across completely different industries — like Twitch, Zappos, and Whole Foods — scale? Founder & Investor Anshu Sharma argues that Jeff Bezos has successfully created a company where General Managers avoid the corporate tax that has hindered other tech giants, and are capable of growing their divisions at rates that rivals independent rocket ships. As he puts it, ‘The Company with a 100 CEOs Cannot Be Stopped.”
COOs make big moves by saying “NO.” Kate Keough, the COO of PaintNite, turned a 10 person job title-less company into a 100 employee company, hosting 6,300 events, and generating $65M a year in revenue. As Founder Collective put it, “Kate’s secret isn’t throwing everything at the wall, a la Jackson Pollock, but rather embracing the minimalism of Mark Rothko.”
Artificial Intelligence is becoming an enterprise virus. Lyra CEO Liam Hänel ♛ has compiled a list of the “276 most viable AI technologies for businesses today.” This industry agnostic list covers audio, business intelligence, analytics, conversational interfaces, customer relationships, cyber security, data science, marketing, sales, text analysis and more. It’s a sequel to the wildly popular, AI tools for personal use.
Toy Story, the movie, could hold the secrets to the deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT). One of the main themes of Toy Story is the arrival of the new toy (Buzz Lightyear) that does not fit in. Dan Gärdenfors asks — what happens when the next smart object meets the existing IoT devices? How will it fit in? Read these “Toy Story lessons for the future of IoT.”
Backdoors are a threat to the security of the entire world. As soon as we cripple encryption with backdoors, says Daniel Jeffries, we’ve built a ticking time bomb, sacrificing real safety for the illusion of safety, something we’ve gotten very good at as a society. Truth is: “There is No More Encryption Debate: Backdoors Threaten the Whole World.”
The Future Belongs to Those Who Build
Sick of these trending tech stories and just want some help for how to built cool shit? Here’s 12 posts to help you build better tech:
- ES8 was Released and here are its Main New Features 🔥 by Dor Moshe
- Creating insanely fast image classifiers with MobileNet in TensorFlow by Matt Harvey
- Three Ways to Generate Ideas for Programming Side Projects by Sam Jarman
- Speech to text transcription in 40 lines of Bash by Sara Robinson
- WebGL needs a Home by Rocco Balsamo
- Why you need a framework with your WebSockets by Jonathan Gros-Dubois
- An Application Developers Perspective of AWS CodeStar by Steve Domino
- A guide to TDD a React/Redux TodoList App — Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. by Sanjay Purswani
- Programming with JS: Recursion by Alexander Kondov
Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted.
Kind Regards
David Smooke, Hacker Noon (of @AMI)