Rolandt

Gardner Campbell looms large in educational technology. People who have met him in person know what I mean. He is brilliant. Compassionate. Passionate. And a rare visionary. He gives more than he takes in interactions with people. And he is years ahead of where technology deployment current exists in classrooms and universities.

He is also a quiet innovator. Typically, his ideas are adopted by other brash, attention seeking, or self-serving individuals. Go behind the bravado and you’ll clearly see the Godfather: Gardner Campbell.

Gardner was an originator of what eventually became the DIY/edupunk movement. Unfortunately, his influence is rarely acknowledged.

He is also the vision behind personal domains for learners. I recall a presentation that Gardner did about 6 or 7 years ago where he talked about the idea of a cpanel for each student. Again, his vision has been appropriated by others with greater self-promotion instincts. Behind the scenes, however, you’ll see him as the intellectual originator.

Several years ago, when Gardner took on a new role at VCU, he was rightly applauded in a press release:

Gardner’s exceptional background in innovative teaching and learning strategies will ensure that the critical work of University College in preparing VCU students to succeed in their academic endeavors will continue and advance…Gardner has also been an acknowledged leader in the theory and practice of online teaching and education innovation in the digital age

And small wonder that VCU holds him in such high regard. Have a look at this talk:

Recently I heard some unsettling news about position changes at VCU relating to Gardner’s work. In true higher education fashion, very little information is forthcoming. If anyone has updates to share, anonymous comments are accepted on this post.

There are not many true innovators in our field. There are many who adopt ideas of others and popularize them. But there are only a few genuinely original people doing important and critically consequential work: Ben Werdmuller, Audrey Watters, Stephen Downes, and Mike Caulfield. Gardner is part of this small group of true innovators. It is upsetting that the people who do the most important work – rather than those with the loudest and greatest self-promotional voice – are often not acknowledged. Does a system like VCU lack awareness of the depth and scope of change in the higher education sector? Is their appetite for change and innovation mainly a surface level media narrative?

Leadership in universities has a responsibility to research and explore innovation. If we don’t do it, we lose the narrative to consulting and VC firms. If we don’t treat the university as an object of research, an increasingly unknown phenomena that requires structured exploration, we essentially give up our ability to contribute to and control our fate. Instead of the best and brightest shaping our identity, the best marketers and most colourful personalities will shape it. We need to ensure that the true originators are recognized and promoted so that when narrow and short-sighted leaders make decisions, we can at least point them to those who are capable of lighting a path.

Thanks for your work and for being who you are Gardner.

“What? I can’t hear you,” you shout, annoyed at your friends’ sudden universal tendency to mumble. Has everyone lost the ability to speak clearly, you grumble, realizing that you sound like a crotchety old fogy. Before you assume it’s everyone else, ask someone you trust: “Is it my hearing?” And be prepared for the answer. It might be. This doesn’t mean you are old. This is a modern problem. One in five teenagers suffers from hearing loss simply because they grew up wearing headphones.

Don’t wallow in regret. There is time to prevent further damage. First step: Switch to better headphones. These studio-grade, over-ear headphones from Puro Sound have a volume-monitoring system that tells you when the levels are safe or when they’re loud enough to harm your hearing. They deliver high-quality sound, which means you won’t have to turn up the volume to hear what you’re missing. They’re Bluetooth wireless, so you can listen without getting tangled up — they also connect with wires, if you prefer.  And they are deliciously absent inscrutable Bluetooth button-press codes or other oblique interface designs. They have cute, but clearly marked,  buttons. Best part? They are super cute, with soft leather wrapping, that don’t make you look like an urban-teen-wannabe or complete dork. I have a pair on my desk. I use them frequently, look cute doing it, and love them every time. 

On, no. Wait! The best part is the deal I got you on the Puro BT5200 over-ear headphones for adults. Go to Puro Sound Labs, drop a pair in your cart, and use the code GeekGirl15 at checkout. You will get 15 percent off the $130 price. Hurry. This code expires in two weeks.

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Google touts its brains but once again ignores the elephant.

• Google launched some interesting innovations at its developer conference, but once again declined to address the elephantine problems that it has with software fragmentation and software distribution.
• Many of the announcements were merely bringing Google into line with competition, but what I liked was the promise that the Google versions would be much better.
  • Google Assistant. This is effectively an update to Google Now but with some key differences.
  • First. Google Assistant will be everywhere across all devices and services and will be the lynch pin that keeps the experience consistent no matter where the user is or what he is doing.
  • Second. It will be backed up by Google’s best in class AI (see here) which promises to offer a far more intuitive, contextual and useful experience than the competition.
  • It was clear even from the demonstrations, how much ground the competition have to make up just to get close to what Google is offering.
  • If I was building a bot to help with communicating to my customers, I would choose Google’s AI without any hesitation.
  • Google Home is Google’s answer to Amazon’s Echo and is powered by the same AI that runs assistant.
  • It is also able to control other compatible devices such as Chromecast, Nest, light switches and so on.
  • Echo is also capable of doing this but not in a seamless and easy to use way.
  • It remains to be seen how good the user experience is, but my initial impression is that this will be far better than Echo (see here).
  • Chat apps. Google returned to messaging with two new apps that compete directly with WhatsApp (Allo) and Skype / Facetime (Duo) with some funky bells and whistles aimed at getting users in.
  • Google is very late to the messaging game and I think that almost all of its ecosystem users are already using Messenger or WhatsApp.
  • Consequently, I think that Google will have to use its AI to provide a superior experience and attempt to draw users in that way.
  • Even with great AI, this is going to be a tough sell.
  • Google has started to get serious with virtual reality offering software on phones to make them able to run VR as well as a reference design for others to build a headset and a controller.
  • Google has also extended Google Play such that users can buy and download apps directly to the unit.
  • Android Wear 2.0 was launched which looked very much like a housekeeping update but did show signs of much improved sharing of data between services to the benefit of the user.
• It is clear from these announcements that Google has played its trump card when it comes to enticing users to spend more time with its services.
• Furthermore, just from the launches it is clear that Google has fully embraced the importance of data sharing (RFM Law of Robotics No. 5) and data integration (Law of Robotics No. 6).
• In my opinion this puts Google even further ahead in terms of evolving its ecosystem to offer the deeper and richer experiences to its users to keep them out of Facebook’s clutches.
• As far as I am concerned, the biggest threat to Google currently is Facebook because if Facebook is able to fulfil its ambitions and grow into a $40bn revenue company, a lot of that will come from Google’s pocket.
• When it comes to AI, Facebook ranks dead last (see here) and by setting a gold standard for how intelligent these services need to be, Google can make Facebook’s new services look very dim indeed.
• This is the key challenge for Facebook in my mind, and so far I have not seen any sign that it is really stepping up to really address this issue.
• While Google did well to push its AI into everything that it does, it failed to address the endemic fragmentation of Android, it inability to update Google Ecosystem devices and its attempts to address security where perfunctory at best.
• I still think that Google will have to take complete control of Android in order to fix these problems and I think we may see this begin to happen at I/O 2017.
• Until then, Google’s innovations in Android such as its security updates will be irrelevant as it will be four years before they make it into the hands of the majority of its ecosystem users.
• Google is trading around fair value making me fairly indifferent to the shares where I would prefer Microsoft, Samsung or Apple.

Mac Power Users co-host David Sparks has released his latest MacSparky publication:
The Hazel Video Field Guide. Hazel is one of my favorite automation tools, and was recently updated to version 4. I bought it before I even downloaded the new version. That’s how great of a tool it is.

As David says: “The thing I love about Hazel is the way it can turn mere mortals into automation gods. Anybody can do this. You don't need a lick of programming knowledge.” He’s right. Hazel is easier than Folder Actions, and a lot more powerful too. If you can write Mail.app rules, you can automate your Mac with Hazel.

But what if you’ve never used Hazel and want to jump right in and learn the best of what it has to offer? That’s where David comes in. In almost 2.5 hours of video, David will walk you through Hazel, showing you everything from the basics to more advanced features using AppleScript. I’ve been using Hazel for years and would call myself a power user, but I learned some new tricks from David in this guide.

David’s guide shows you more than 30 different uses for Hazel, ranging from moving files to renaming them based on the contents of the file, and more. There are 35 chapters (a full list is below). For $20, you are getting the equivalent of having David sit down with you and show you how to do what he does. Need to re-watch a segment? OK. Not ready for some of the more advanced tips yet? Get started with the easy ones, and come back to it later. I don’t know what hourly rate David bills at, but you can believe that it’s way more than $10/hour!

The Hazel Video Field Guide assumes you have never used Hazel before, so it’s perfect for beginners, but by the end it will show you how to do advanced techniques including home automation via Hazel. One of the workflows, for instance, shows the viewer how to automatically lock their Mac when they leave their home or office using a combination of IFTTT, a simple AppleScript, and Hazel. Even if you don’t use those tips specifically, it’s a great way to learn what Hazel can do.

Not ready to commit? Check out his sample video to get a taste of what’s in store. To learn more, go to macsparky.com/hazel.

Here is a full list of the chapters in the video guide:

• Why Hazel
• Getting Started
• Our First Hazel Rule
• Triggers and Actions
• Name-Based Filing
• Content-Based Naming
• Getting Dates from Documents
• Hazel and Tags
• Hazel and the iPhone
• Organizing Your Download Folder
• Organizing Your Desktop
• Send Music to iTunes
• Send Images to Photos
• Organizing Photos in Folders
• Archiving Media
• Sending Documents to iPad
• The File Kill Switch
• Using URLs in Hazel
• Auto-create Subfolders
• Sending Email
• Making Hazel Talk
• Creating OmniFocus Tasks with Hazel
• "Overdue"
• Conditional Rules
• Spotlight Integration
• Smart Folders
• The Action Folder
• Lock Your Mac Remotely, Part 1
• Play Music When You Arrive Home
• Lock Your Mac Remotely, Part 2
• Manage Your Trash
• Hazel App Sweep
• Hazel Rule Syncing
• Hazel Settings
• More Resources

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Quantified Selfie is a project to find narratives in an individual’s personal dataset. It’s not about optimization or self-improvement. It’s about facets of the everyday, which is my favorite kind of personal data collection. In the most recent addition, peek into a woman’s rocky move from San Francisco to New York, through the lens of her music listening habits over a year. [via Waxy]

Tags: music

Today Readdle updated PDF Expert for the Mac and iOS with two new features - Apple Pencil support for the iPad Pro and file transfer between the Mac and iOS. In my initial tests, Apple Pencil worked well in most circumstances and file transfer may come in handy for some people, though it's a little cumbersome compared with saving PDFs to a cloud storage service.

PDF Expert for iOS has added Apple Pencil support for marking up PDFs on the iPad Pro. Apple Pencil support allows you to easily highlight a document or take notes in the margins. Both features work well and are great for anyone who marks up PDFs.

I ran into one small snag highlighting a PDF with the Apple Pencil. In my tests I tried highlighting Readdle’s PDF Expert user guide. The experience was great until I hit an image of an icon surrounded by text as seen in the screenshot below. Highlighting wouldn’t skip over the image unless I proceeded to drag down to the next line of text. It’s a small issue that most people shouldn’t run into regularly, but it was an irritating interruption when I was in the middle of highlighting the document.

PDF Expert highlighting cannot skip over inline images.

The second feature is dubbed Readdle Transfer and lets you hand off PDFs you are working on between a Mac and iOS device. For Readdle Transfer to work, PDF Expert must be open on your iOS device and Mac and connected to the same WiFi network. When you are ready to transfer, the process is easy. On the Mac, an iPhone button will appear in the upper righthand corner of the toolbar of PDF Expert. Clicking on the button reveals a dropdown list of open PDFs on your iOS device that can be pulled onto your Mac. On an iOS device, the sidebar list of PDF sources will include a ‘Mac’ entry if PDF Expert is open on your Mac. Tapping on ‘Mac’ will display a list of open PDFs on your Mac that you can pull onto your iOS device.

In my tests, the transfer of PDFs was fast and worked well. It is important to note, though, that this is not a real-time sync system. If you transfer a PDF from your Mac to an iOS device you can make edits to the PDF on iOS that will cause an alert to open on your Mac telling you that changes have been made to your PDF and offering to reload the PDF on your Mac to view the changes. When you close the PDF on your iOS device, you will be given the choice to save a copy to your iOS device, save back to your Mac, or discard the edits. If PDF Expert is no longer open on your Mac and you try to save back to your Mac, you will get an error telling you that you need to open PDF Expert on your Mac. The process works the same way in reverse if you have transferred a PDF from your iOS device to your Mac.

Support for the Apple Pencil on PDF Expert for iOS is a welcome addition to the app. Despite the occasional hiccup when I tried to highlight over an image, the drawing and highlighting are both smooth and attractive, which is a nice for anyone who marks up a lot of PDF documents. Readdle Transfer works as advertised, but requiring the apps to be open on your Mac and iOS device to transfer documents and save changes is cumbersome and of limited value when you could save to iCloud Drive or another cloud-based service instead, unless, of course, that is not an option due to restrictions imposed by your employer.

PDF Expert for iOS is available on the App Store for $9.99 and PDF Expert for the Mac is on the Mac App Store for $59.99.

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For the transit nerds and planners:

A few days later, hundreds of emails started arriving from overjoyed users. “This is amazing.” “I want to partner with you.” She said they received literal love letters: “I love what you’re building.”

What indispensable tool had Chu and her colleagues created? A simple drag-and-drop map to plan bus routes.

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More here at curbed.

Apple has quietly updated their iOS Security Guide. iOS will ask for your passcode under these conditions:

The passcode has not been used to unlock the device in the last six days and Touch ID has not unlocked the device in the last eight hours.

The knowledgebase still has the old rule:

When more than 48 hours have elapsed from the last time you unlocked your device

The new rule will make it much harder to force you to unlock your phone. You just have to wait it out for eight hours and then only your passcode will work.

More >

[Thanks, Abdelkader]

Last month I wrote a report for a client about the future of work. In my contract is a clause that says that, apart from anything commercially sensitive, my work for them is shared under a Creative Commons license.

I’m therefore sharing a much shorter version of the 23-page report I researched and wrote for them. There was some really interesting stuff I turned up in my research around organisational structure, culture, and retention, but that section was too intertwined with the client’s plans to be able to easily and effectively separate out.  

Introduction

“Your best practices won’t save you.” (John Cutter)

The main trends around the future of work seem to be broadly twofold:

1. Empowering individuals and teams to make their own decisions around technology
2. Democratising the process of deciding what kind of work needs to be done

These two mega themes (taken from ‘uber empowered’ quadrant of the above Harvard Business Review digram) can be broken down into four, more practical, sub-themes:

1. Demise of hierarchies
2. Re-thinking the location of work
3. Workplace chat
4. Mission-based work

The following posts in this series expand and explain each of the above points. The original report made some recommendations for the client. Given I don’t know your context, I’m going to refrain from appending a conclusion to this series.

1. Demise of Hierarchies

After predictions of its demise, the traditional office structure is crumbling. Only 38 percent of companies in a recent survey say they are ‘functionally organized’. For large companies with more than 50,000 employees, that number shrinks to 24 percent. (Bloomberg)

(image taken from this post)

The buzzterm at the moment is around holacracy, an approach in which “authority and decision-making are distributed throughout a holarchy of self-organizing teams rather than being vested in a management hierarchy”. This governance model has been adopted by Zappos, Precision Nutrition, and (until recently) Medium.

Self-organising is taken to its extreme, or logical conclusion, with Valve, the company best known for the Half-Life game series and ‘Steam’ store. Their handbook for new employees explains that they hire people rather than roles, meaning people are “hired to constantly be looking around for the most valuable work [they] could be doing.” Hiring, firing, and new projects are all managed via a completely flat structure.

Metaphors are important in organisational structure, and many futurists use the idea of the network to explain their ideas. Esko Kilpi, for example, states that “the architecture of work is not the structure of a firm, but the structure of the network. The organization is not a given hierarchy, but an ongoing process of responsive organizing.” In a post examining why employees become disengaged, Stowe Boyd coins the term ‘circumvising’ to explain the shift from ‘supervising’ to a form of work where, “instead of a manager you report up to and who directs the work of those below, the social context…will constrain and support the worker from all around.”

2. Rethinking the Location of Work

(image taken from this post by Tanmay Vora)

We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us. (Winston Churchill)

One trend of recent years that is universally slated in both the popular press and by futurists is that of open-plan offices. According to Stowe Boyd,

More than 40% of the respondents to a recent Berkeley survey reported that workplace acoustics make it harder for them to do their job, while other factors, like lighting, air quality, seating, etc, were rated as making it easier to work.

The assumption is that open-plan offices enable more serendipitous connections to take place. However, this is often at the expense of ‘deep work’ as noted by Cal Newport in his recent book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. It often leads to more introverted employees using headphones in order to concentrate and feel more comfortable.

Home working solves some of these problems and, indeed, many organisations have a ‘remote working’ policy, meaning some (or all) of their employees are based from wherever they happen to live. This, of course, requires a certain type of worker, with particular expectations around flexibility, availability, and digital skills. Implementing this kind of policy without training and explicit expectation-setting (for both office-based and remote workers) can lead to unnecessary misunderstanding and anxiety.

3. Workplace chat

So this is one megatrend: the widespread adoption of tools based on the chat design metaphor across the board in personal and work life. Chat is the new normal for communication, displacing both email and social collaboration tools. (Stowe Boyd)

The hot new technology that everyone is talking about is Slack, a ‘workplace chat’ tool with APIs meaning it integrates with everything. It is already a billion-dollar business, and this is for at least two reasons. The first is a desire for employees in most organisations to get out of their inbox. Another is that it supports the move away from a static org chart and is more responsive to the true power dynamic within organisations.

There have been many posts about the relative merits of workplace chat apps. Most futurists believe that adopting such tools is not a panacea to current workplace problems, but rather a way to demonstrate in a concrete way how teams can interact in a different way. For example, the theory of social crowding suggests that workplace chat is at its most effective when used by small teams of less than 10. This ensures that those who are doing the chatting are also the ones doing the work.

4. Mission-based work

Today, all companies need a constitution. No company should operate on implicit cultural rules that are based in a shadowy way on oligarchic myths. (Stowe Boyd)

Often cited as a something particularly important to ‘Millennials’ (those who reached young adulthood around the year 2000), futurists see mission-based work as key to ensuring employee fulfilment at any age. Loyalty these days is often to the job rather than to the organisation — so long as the job matches the ‘mission’ that the employee feels is central to their existence.

Graduates are queuing up to work for brands who match their outlook on life, often foregoing higher salaries elsewhere to do so. Recent research from Gallup included a survey of almost 50,000 business units which showed that employee engagement is a key indicator of business success. This is an important trend to consider.

Further reading

I put together an epic Google Doc of links and images to help with my research for the original report. You can access that here.

Banner image CC BY-NC-SA Daniel Foster

Questions? Ask in the comments and I’ll go into more detail about any of the above.

If you’d like my help in a consultative capacity, please get in touch: hello@nulldynamicskillset.com

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Google’s rise is that it is almost entirely attributable to having the best technology. That sounds like it should be the normal state of affairs, but in truth there are an untold number of research projects and startups that had superior technology but never became viable businesses; perhaps there was no business model, or an inability to build a requisite ecosystem, or most commonly, an inability to find a viable market and/or reach consumers who might be interested.

Great Companies Versus Great Technology

For example, look at the other technology giants, all of whom got their start on the basis of more than pure technology:

• While Bill Gates and Paul Allen built Microsoft’s first product (Altair BASIC), the company’s dominance was established via a business development deal with IBM to provide an operating system for the nascent IBM personal computer; the actual OS (MS-DOS) was acquired from a company called Seattle Computer Products. And while Microsoft would go on to develop all kinds of technology, everything that followed rested on the leverage from that IBM deal.
• Amazon started out as a primitive website that was differentiated by its selection and ability to deliver anywhere in the U.S. And while the company has certainly invented a lot of technology when it comes to web services and logistics, its advantage remains rooted in its scale.
• Facebook’s technology was so basic that Mark Zuckerberg’s first employee — his roommate Dustin Moskovitz — didn’t even know how to program; he would go on to be Facebook’s first Chief Technical Officer. What got the site off the ground was the way it digitized pre-existing offline networks — it started from its market and worked backwards.
• Apple’s strategy has certainly been predicated on having the best products, but that does not necessarily mean the company has always had the best technology. The Mac GUI was famously “inspired” by Xerox PARC, the iPod was hardly the first MP3 player, and while the original iPhone was certainly a technological marvel, it not only was built on everything that came before it but also required huge investments in distribution to become the juggernaut it is¹

To be clear, all of these companies had great technology, but it wasn’t enough — it rarely is.

Google = Best

Google stands in stark contrast: relying on links and a lot of math to rank sites was a technological breakthrough of the first order — and no company wanted to buy it, despite the fact it was very much on sale. And yet, usage grew exponentially thanks to word-of-mouth: Google’s search was so startlingly better — and the cost of trying it was simply typing in a URL — that the product grew like wild fire without business development, distribution, or marketing. By the time Google did their first distribution deal, with Yahoo in 2000, Google was already handling millions of queries a day simply because they were superior; Yahoo only hastened Google’s inevitable domination.

The focus on being the best became a core piece of Google’s identity, and the biggest factor in how they hired. Steven Levy wrote in In the Plex:

The founders also knew that Google had to be a lot smarter to keep satisfying users—and to fulfill the world-changing ambitions of its founders. “We don’t always produce what people want,” Page explained in Google’s early days. “It’s really difficult. To do that you have to be smart—you have to understand everything in the world. In computer science, we call that artificial intelligence.”

Brin chimed in. “We want Google to be as smart as you—you should be getting an answer the minute you think of it.”

“The ultimate search engine,” said Page. “We’re a long way from that.”

Page and Brin both held a core belief that the success of their company would hinge on having world-class engineers and scientists committed to their ambitious vision. Page believed that technology companies can thrive only by “an understanding of engineering at the highest level”…

“We just hired people like us,” says Page.

So many of Google’s successes — and failures — is wrapped up in this sentiment. So, too, is their future.

The Google Assistant

Yesterday at the Google I/O keynote the dominant theme was the very real progress Google is making on genuine Artificial Intelligence that goes far beyond search. Sundar Pichai said in his opening remarks:

It’s amazing to see how people engage differently with Google. It’s not just enough to give them links. We really need to help them get things done in the real world. This is why we are evolving search to be much more assistive. We’ve been laying the foundation for this for many, many years through investments in deep areas of computer science. We’ve built the knowledge graph — we today have an understanding of 1 billion entities, people, places, and things, and the relationships between them and the real world. We have dramatically improved the quality of our voice recognition…Image recognition and computer vision, we can do things we never thought we could do before…We even do real-time translation.

Progress in all of these areas is accelerating, thanks to profound advances in machine learning and [artificial intelligence] (AI), and I believe we are at a seminal moment. We as Google have evolved significantly over the past ten years and we believe we are poised to take a big leap forward in the next ten years leveraging out state-of-the-art capabilities in machine learning and AI, we truly want to take the next step in being more assistive for our users. So today, we are announcing the Google assistant.

There is little question that Google is far ahead in artificial intelligence. Late January, in a humorous juxtaposition that was almost certainly coincidental but telling all the same, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted about the social network company’s progress in building a computer that could play the board game ‘Go’, long thought unbeatable by computers. Mere hours later Demis Hassabis, the head of Google’s DeepMind division, revealed in a blog post that Google had done exactly that: their machine learning-based program, called AlphaGo, had defeated a three-time European champion, and would soon take on the best Go player in the world (AlphaGo would go on to win that match 4–1).

To be sure, this is a single example, but any time spent using the increasing number of Google products that rely on machine learning-based artificial intelligence — translation, voice and image recognition, and yes, search — quickly make it obvious just how much better Google is, and, thanks to the copious amount of data at the company’s disposal, how much better they are likely to become. The problem is that in today’s world being the best may not be enough.

Open Versus Closed

While describing how Google search grew by word-of-mouth, I snuck in one line that looms very large when it comes to thinking about both Google’s past and its future: “the cost of trying it was simply typing in a URL.” Google’s initial success was not just because they were superior at search: thanks to the fact that the interface with Google was a web page, the company had instant access to every person on earth with a PC and a functioning Internet connect — and they didn’t have to pay a dime. On the flip-side, if you heard about this amazing new search engine, you didn’t need to go buy a CD or even download a program: you simply typed “Google.com” and the results spoke for themselves. Make no mistake: the brilliance of Larry Page and Sergey Brin was only perhaps surpassed by the brilliance of the people they hired, particularly in the early days, but the company’s success was very much intertwined with the openness afforded by a browser and the world wide web.

Today, though, the PC is fading in relevance, and the browser along with it: what matters is mobile, and the means to connect with users is to either be embedded into the phone or have an app where people live. And while Google has a massive foothold thanks to Android, a huge number of its best customers are on iOS, and nearly all its customers live in Facebook.

The implications of this are obvious — just look at maps. Google Maps is widely regarded as being the superior product to Apple Maps, yet the latter is used three times as often on iPhones; such is the power of defaults and being “good enough.”² Similarly, while Google’s voice recognition far outpaces Apple’s Siri, the fact that Apple sets the rules means that Google’s Gboard keyboard for iOS cannot include dictation.³ More broadly, on iOS the only way to use the Google assistant that Pichai announced yesterday will be to open a Google app (or go to a search field in, you guessed it, a browser): using Siri will always be much easier and frictionless.

The situation is even more challenging when it comes to social networks broadly and messaging specifically, which is to mobile as the browser was to the PC: a meta-OS where people spend the vast majority of their time. The problem for Google is that while the browser was an open platform that not even Microsoft could control — sure, they killed Netscape, but Google built its audience from within Internet Explorer — social networks and messaging services are not only closed but nearly impossible to compete with. No matter how great of a messaging service Google may build — another I/O announcement was a messaging service called Allo, which heavily features the Google assistant — the most important feature of any messaging service is whether or not your friends use it, and nearly every geography in the world is locked up by a competitor.

There is a new arena — the home, the one place where talking is usually better than pecking away at a phone no longer in your pocket — but here Google is behind Amazon. The latter, thanks to the failure of its own smartphone efforts, was freed from the smartphone obsession that resulted in Google wrongly identifying the smartphone-dependent Nest as its connected home offering, instead of a voice-focused standalone device like the Echo. There is almost certainly time to catchup, but it’s telling that Google’s announced competitor — Google Home — is still months away.

Google’s Go-to-Market Challenge

The net result is that Google has no choice but to put its founding proposition to the ultimate test: is it enough to be the best? Can the best artificial intelligence overcome the friction that will be involved in using Google assistant on an iPhone? Can the best artificial intelligence actually shift human networks? Can the best artificial intelligence win the home in the face of a big head start?

That the answer may very well be “no” (or mixed, at best), is at the root of my 2014 piece Peak Google. That piece was about business relevance, something that goes beyond the collection of cash or the creation of superior technologies. The question I was asking was which companies are the best equipped to build new businesses going forward, and here Google’s outlook is far cloudier than it was back when the company was, for all intents and purposes, invented.

The problem is that as much as Google may be ahead, the company is also on the clock: every interaction with Siri, every signal sent to Facebook, every command answered by Alexa, is one that is not only not captured by Google but also one that is captured by its competitors. Yes, it is likely Apple, Facebook, and Amazon are all behind Google when it comes to machine learning and artificial intelligence — hugely so, in many cases — but it is not a fair fight. Google’s competitors, by virtue of owning the customer, need only be good enough, and they will get better. Google has a far higher bar to clear — it is asking users and in some cases their networks to not only change their behavior but willingly introduce more friction into their lives — and its technology will have to be special indeed to replicate the company’s original success as a business.⁴

1. To put it another way, the technology at the heart of Apple’s products — OS X and iOS — has its roots in NeXT, a business failure
2. By most accounts Apple Maps is indeed “good enough” in the U.S.; from personal experience, though, it very much falls short in many other countries
3. Google does deserve a lot of credit for finally remembering that Android exists to serve Google, which should be focused on all users, not its own platforms
4. Which itself is under threat: to fully leverage Google assistant in Google search will almost certainly deepen Google’s antitrust troubles with the European Union

After the City of Mississauga voted unanimously to ban Uber last week, many people were surprised to find that they could still Uber to and within the city.

Now, Mississauga Mayor Bonnie Crombie has given Uber one week to pack it in. According to the mayor in an interview with the Toronto Star, she believes that the response the city received from Uber following the announcement is a sign of good will.

Crombie has become known in Mississauga as an advocate for ride-sharing, and has regularly supported Uber in the past. However, many of her fellow councillors don’t share this view, as they’ve often demonstrated a distaste for Uber and similar ride-sharing companies.

As of last week, Uber and other ride sharing companies were forced to leave the city of Mississauga unless they followed the same rules as the city’s taxicab industry. Though the vote was unanimous, councillors left the door open to potentially considering a ride-sharing pilot program in the future. It seems that the offer is conditional upon Uber’s exit from Mississauga by the end of the week.

The Star goes on to report that Uber already has 100,000 daily riders and 5,000 drivers, which leads officials to believe that exiting the city might be easier said than done. Crombie acknowledged that Uber would need adequate time to consider shutting down in order to prepare a pilot program for by September.

Mississauga councillors indicated that a ride sharing pilot program in the city would likely mimic those of cities who have passed ride sharing regulations. Furthermore, it’s likely that the pilot will be limited to a small number of vehicles.

Related reading: Mississauga bans UberX and other ride sharing services

José Picardo, The Synapse, May 22, 2016

Useful article with some good examples to explain why those studies that appear to refute the premise that technology is useful in classrooms do nothing of the sort. I think he captures an aspect of the problem, based on the idea that the experiments say one thing, while people interpret them as saying something else. And he points out how this is used irresponsibly by technology critics like Daniel Willingham. But I wish he had taken a slightly different tone with the article, tried to be a bit less airy, and a bit sharper in his critique.

Notes based on Setting Up a Python Development Environment with PyCharm for setting up PyCharm editor (I use the free Community Edition) to work with EV3. Requires passwordless ssh into the brick and the brick on 192.168.1.106.

We’re going to go round the houses with git checkins to move stuff from the Mac and the PyCharm editor to the brick.

Get into the brick and do some minimal config stuff:

[Mac] ssh robot@192.168.1.106

[EV3] sudo apt-get update
[EV3] sudo apt-get install git
[EV3] mkdir -p /home/robot/demoproj
[EV3] mkdir -p /home/robot/demoproj/.demoproj.git
[EV3] git init --bare /home/robot/demoproj/.demoproj.git

Now use the nano editor on the brick to populate the demoproj dir with the files we push, setting them to be executable.

[EV3] nano /home/robot/demoproj/.demoproj.git/hooks/post-receive

In the nano editor, change the file to:

#!/bin/sh
git --work-tree=/home/robot/demoproj --git-dir=/home/robot/demoproj/.demoproj.git checkout -f
find /home/robot -iname \*.py | xargs chmod +x

The chmod on the py files makes them executable, so as long as you hashbang the first line of any python files (with #!/usr/bin/python), they should be runnable from the file browser menu on the brick.

Then ctrl-x to exit, saying Yes to save the file on the way out and accepting the default file name. Now make that hook executable:

[EV3] chmod +x /home/robot/demoproj/.demoproj.git/hooks/post-receive

Should we prepend hashbangs as well? This will add one to start of all py files not containing one:

grep -rL '^#!/usr/bin/python$' /home/robot/demoproj/*.py | xargs sed -i '1i #!/usr/bin/python'

In PyCharm, VCS->Check Out From Version Control to create a new project, selecting git as a the checkout target (so you’ll also need git installed on the Mac…).

The VCS Repository URL is: robot@192.168.1.106:/home/robot/demoproj/.demoproj, the Parent Directory (for example, /Users/me/projects) and Directory names (e.g. testProj – note, this must be a new folder) specifying the location on the Mac where you want to keep a local copy of the project files.

Say yes to all the crap PyCharm wants to create, and Yes when it prompts if you want to open the newly created directory. Create a new python file containing the following test program:

#!/usr/bin/python
#The shebang above runs this file with the python shell
from ev3dev.auto import Sound
#Make a short sound
Sound.tone(1000,10)

Save it, press the VCS /UP ARROW/ button top right in PyCharm to commit, add a commit message, then bottom right Commit and Push.

This should commit the file locally and also push it into the git repo on the ev3; the commit hook on the ev3 will copy the file into the demoproj folder and, if it’s a .py file, mark it as executable.

You should now be able to locate it and run it from the ev3dev file browser.

See also: Using IPython on Lego EV3 Robots Running Ev3Dev and Running Python Programmes on the Lego EV3 via the EV3 File Browser.

PS to enable autocompletion in PyCharm, check what Python shell the project is using (in the settings/preferences somehow though I’m damned if I know where to find them; I HATE IDEs with a passion – way to cluttered and over complex…). Then using the same Python shell:

git clone https://github.com/rhempel/ev3dev-lang-python.git
cd ev3dev-lang-python
python setup.py install
cd ..
rm -r ev3dev-lang-python/

Run the programme in PyCharm (or at least, the import lines) and autocompletion should be enabled. The complete code won’t run properly though, because you’re not running it in an ev3dev environment…

I only have two basic moods accounting for most of my waking hours: one marked by mild to severe ennui, and the other by a rushing energy. Refractory state and burst state. I seem to have largely random-walked through an accidental life so far, imposing barely any discipline on this basic, ungoverned, binary life process. I have no thoughtfully constructed scaffolding of habits and rituals in my life, just a few accidentally set ways. My biggest adult achievement in that department is learning to floss regularly.

I do have a rare third state though, one that only seems to appear only when I am in certain kinds of places, like off-season beach resorts. Like Cannon Beach, on the Oregon coast, a couple of weeks ago. Or the Outer Banks several years ago (which inspired my 2009 post, How to Think Like Hercule Poirot, a personal favorite).

By definition, off-season means most humans don’t like these places during these times. Most waterfront businesses are closed. There are no peak-season activities on offer. You’re out on a mostly empty, slightly chilly, grey, and cloudy beach. It’s a satisfyingly atemporal environment.

Something about such outings deeply relaxes me. And after years of doing such trips, I think I am beginning to understand why. I think it is because my natural home state is being peacefully lost. Going to a place that, temporarily, doesn’t know what to do with itself,  is one good way to be at peace with being lost. An environment that doesn’t know what to do with itself, and is in no particular hurry to find out, is an an environment that doesn’t know what to do with you. And much of the stress of being lost, after all, comes from the environment pestering you to do stuff.

I like not knowing where I am, where I am going, why, or how I am going to get there. And I like it when the environment leaves me alone in that state.

***

We aspire, in mostly unconscious ways, to relate to the world through certain preferred emotional states. We consciously cultivate intelligence and work to develop the prowess to take on the world, but we don’t think too hard about cultivating a specific emotional stance towards the world. Until we’ve already developed one that is.

Some aspirational moods are recognized even by teenagers. The dream of being a fighter pilot is partly a dream of relating to the world with ice water in one’s veins. The dream of being a musician is partly a dream of relating to the world through a mood of euphoric exhilaration. I am guessing here of course, since I am neither.

Some — perhaps actors are an example, I wouldn’t know — aspire to a great breadth and depth of emotional experience, spanning a whole tapestry of moods.

Most people though, prefer just one state, or a cluster of related states. I made a speculative inventory of emotional states people seem to aspire to:

• Accepted: 33%
• Loved: 21%
• Winning: 12%
• Fun: 10%
• Right: 5%
• Satisfied: 9%
• Striving: 4%
• Content: 2%
• Onenesss/Nothingness: 1%
• Other: 3%

Of course, people spend most of their energy denying their real aspirational state and pretending to pursue another. But that’s neither here nor there.

Being lost as a preferred state is some small fraction of Other. Yes, I think I’m a rare precious snowflake that way. I have not met many others who enjoy being idly lost.

Not GPS-lost. Life-lost.

As we get better acquainted with ourselves over the years, and accumulate, consciously and unconsciously, the behaviors that eventually come to define us, we also begin to develop a slowly deepening relationship with our emotional home state. We learn how to approach it from various other states, orbit it through our rituals, restore it after unexpected disturbances, and so forth. A big part of growing up is learning emotional self-regulation, and a big part of that is recognizing the home state you preferentially regulate to. Our adventures are defined as departures from, and returns to, the home state. I suppose this is what it means to stay grounded.

None of this works very well though, if you want to organize your life around being lost. For starters, want and organize are ways to stop being lost.

***

To be lost is to have a destination but not know how to get there. To be deeply lost in the way I like to be is to not have a destination. To make that deeply lost state your home is to be willing to linger wherever you are indefinitely. So long as it is not too smelly or otherwise viscerally unpleasant to all humans of course.

The distinction is the one between ambiguity and uncertainty. If you don’t know where you ought to go, that’s ambiguity. If you don’t know how to get there, that’s uncertainty.

One good way to remember the deeper definition of being lost is the line, no matter where you go, there you are. 

I first encountered the line, in its joke form, as Oliver’s Law of Location, in Arthur Bloch’s classic compilation of mordant witticisms, Murphy’s Law.

I next encountered it in visual form: a cartoon of an emanciated man stranded in a vast, featureless desert, dying of thirst, crawling up to a large billboard. The billboard is a map showing a large, featureless desert, with a marker labeled, You Are Here. 

It was my favorite joke for a long time.

Then I discovered that a bunch of annoying meditation types had appropriated Oliver’s Law with high gravitas, and turned it into some sort of profundity about mindfully living in the moment. Meditators ruin everything.

Chilly and grey off-season beach resorts are places that happen to be temporarily lost in the negative space of the hurly-burly. Wherever you go, there you are. So long as you go in the off-season. Otherwise you’ll probably end up wishing you’d never gone ziplining.

It took me a long time to understand that being deeply lost is a very anxiety-provoking state for most people. That it can be a preferred home state is a thought that I suppose strikes most people as insane. It is a state that most people like to deny. They even take umbrage if you suggest they might be lost. No, I am not lost! Of course I know where I am going! Of course I know how to get there. To remark that someone seems lost is to accuse them of incompetence at life.

Speaking of jokes, I used to really like this joke as a kid:

Q: What was the camel doing in Alaska?

A: It was lost!

Getting deeply lost is an achievement. Camels in Alaska deserve congratulations.

I don’t like the line not all who wander are lost. The implication is that being lost is an undesirable state. Looking back at my life, the important turning points have been my successful attempts to lose myself and stay lost. The main point of wandering is to get lost. Feature, not bug.

Getting lost, by the way, can be a cunning plan to not get won, even though that’s just a side effect of the state. People spend way too much time worrying about winning and losing. They should worry more about being won and being lost. In a finite game, it is better to win than to lose. In an infinite game, where the goal is to continue playing, it is better to be lost than be found. Because being found is often the same as being won by somebody else in some annoying game they’re playing.

The opposite of there you are! is are we there yet? The question of the child in the back seat who has tired of playing punch-buggy and I-spy.

It is ironic that I spent almost a decade of my life studying the question, are we there yet?, since I’ve hardly ever asked it of my own life. I studied the question for years, in the guise of control theory, with healthy doses of subjects like planning, scheduling, command and control, path-finding, and mapping.

With hindsight, it all seems like anxious over-compensation and denial of truer motives. I thought I wanted to be in control, and was in denial about the fact that I actually wanted to be lost.

I am not one of those people who has a lot to say to his younger self, but I suppose I’d have at least a clever  and useless one-liner for 21-year-old me, just as he was making the choice to specialize in control theory: do you even Jung, man? I am pretty sure 21-year-old-me would have told almost-42-year-old me to get lost. And I’d will have won the exchange decisively with already there! before vanishing in my time machine.

If my psyche were a country, it would mostly be an ungoverned anarchy. Except for a brief period of three years, between 2002-05, when I was autocratically telling myself what to do and actually kinda doing it, I haven’t really been governing myself.

I am not entirely incompetent as an adult. I can put on my GTD space-suit, put things on my calendar, put on a social mask that presents a neat, well-governed, and useful API to others, and head out into the harsh outer space of Knowing Where I Am Going.

But it does drain me. Fortunately, I seem to be getting by fine spending only small amounts of time in my personal behavioral outer space.

***

To not be lost is to know where you’re going, why, and how you’re going to get there. To not be lost is a sensible state. It’s a state you can optimize. You can figure out better ways to get wherever you’re going. You can consciously design your habits and rituals. You can track your moods, and figure out cunning plans to spend more time in your preferred emotional states.

But you cannot do these things if your preferred state is a state of being lost. You cannot plan to get lost. All you can do is crash out of whatever plan you’re pursuing at the moment. You cannot consciously design habits and rituals around being lost. All you can do is let your habits and rituals unravel.

To be deeply lost is to be disoriented, without a defined sense of direction, a destination, or a scheme of values with which to relate to your environment. This is a state in which you actually can see the world around you. Because you are not unconsciously pre-processing it into obstacles and ways, on-track and off-track, useful and useless, before it even hits your awareness. I like being lost primarily because I like seeing where I am much more than I like knowing where I am going.

This isn’t a deep or subtle point. It is not a big insight that hits you after your tenth day of disciplined meditation practice (yet another example of meditators ruining everything). So you have to work really hard to not understand it. Fortunately, much of the world, with the exception of off-season beaches, is set up to help you fail to understand it.

One of the most interesting conversations I keep repeating with people concerns the orientation element of Boyd’s OODA loop. The other three elements form a closed loop: observe-decide-act. It’s a basic feedback control scheme. An abstract machine to operationalize are-we-there-yet? Soon the kids will be able to ask Siri that question in a driverless car. Basic rocket science.

Orientation though, is fundamentally an ungoverned recognition: there you are! To switch orientations is to jump from one feedback-controlled O_DA regime to another. But the jump itself is not generally governed by a feedback loop. It’s what we highly trained experts call an open-loop process.

You can create well-behaved “outer loops” from such open loops under specific controlled conditions, but there’s no such thing as a general re-orientation method. If that outer loop becomes very predictable, and you can guarantee re-orientation within a predictable time (transient under thirty minutes, or your OODA-pizza is free!), then you’re really just creating a more complex orientation, not re-orienting.

The idea of re-orienting quickly, through what is known as a fast transient, is very appealing. You could even define the maturation of any sort of expertise as the gradual speeding up of transients.

But it isn’t true re-orientation unless there is a non-zero probability that you might end up in an arbitrarily slow transient. An open-loop process is a process that can get you lost indefinitely. Which means you have to be prepared to enjoy that state. Assuming of course that you don’t get lost to death.

***

The funny thing is, being truly at home in a lost state makes it very easy to see how to not be lost. It becomes obvious where you ought to go. The right ways to organize activities, plan, execute, and monitor progress all become obvious without much hard thinking. The moment that you truly accept being lost is often the moment you reorient in a flash of insight.

See, it’s not being lost that makes all these things hard, but the fact of not accepting the feeling of being lost. The impulse to get away from the lost state becomes so overwhelming, the state becomes a trap.

This phenomenon, I think, has been at the heart of everything I’ve been able to do for others. I get lost in the company of people who need to, and because I personally enjoy it enough to linger, it seems to slow them down long enough that they can re-orient faster.

When I first began doing executive coaching work, it bothered me that the activity seemed so close to therapy. I don’t see myself as a therapist type. I am not a great listener. I am not particularly talented in the compassion and emotional labor department. I don’t have deep, rich emotional reserves with which to backstop the traumas, negative energies, and toxic emotions of others. I am not deeply interested in others’ early childhood stories for their own sake. I snap at people. I’d be a lousy line manager.

I can’t recall when I began using the term sparring partner to describe what I do, but now that I’m a few years into doing it, I understand how it is nothing like therapy. My friend Jane pokes fun at me by calling me a “pet philosopher” to my clients, and that’s not entirely inaccurate. Being a sparring partner is mostly like being one of those annoying Disney sidekick characters who hops around, talking way too much,  getting sidetracked, dashing down random bunny trails, creating unnecessary trouble, and generally derailing the action while the hero or heroine is trying to stay focused on doing hero/heroine stuff.

There is the Hero’s Journey, and then there is the Annoying Disney Sidekick’s Journey. The latter is mostly about enjoying being lost, and helping others enjoy the state too. Or at least productively visit it for a bit.

With hindsight, a great deal of my writing seems to have been an extended exploration of how to get lost, enjoy the state, and perhaps linger there a heartbeat longer than you think you want to. Crashing, escaping, going feral, chasing wild thoughts, being an illegible person, forming accidental connections: these are all aspects of the art of getting, and staying, lost.

***

The last 14 months or so have been a bit brutal on me. I have been less lost than almost any other time in my adult life, and it’s not an entirely pleasant experience for me. One part of it, oddly enough, has been travel, which I used to associate with getting lost.

The last year has been the most intensive travel year of my life: Chile, Switzerland, London, New York, Colombia, Dallas. I’ve been larping globe-trotting mover-and-shaker. With the exception of a quick trip to Hawaii and the recent getaway to Cannon Beach, it was all  very purposeful stuff, doing Breaking Smart workshops.

The workshops themselves have been demanding work, 99% O_DA, only about 1% _O__. All are we there yet, very little, there I am!

Before 2015, I almost never repeated a talk, let alone refining a day-long workshop over multiple iterations, so it was a new experience for me. Living an anarchically ungoverned life is not exactly the same as living a random life (it’s very hard to live randomly; believe me, I’ve tried), but conscious repetition and deliberate improvement of a behavior is definitely not a state of being anarchically ungoverned.

So even though it has been a rewarding year financially, it has not been exactly relaxing. I have not had as much time to be lost as I am accustomed to.

It struck me, as I returned from Dallas after the most recent workshop last week, that this year of globe-trotting, despite much of it being paid for by others, and comfortably business class, is in some ways the opposite of the kind of travel I scrounged and saved for two decades ago.

I remember saving aggressively to fund a summer backpacking trip to Europe in 1998, on a shoestring budget (which I bragged about for years after). Then there were the years and years of road trips, short and long, criss-crossing the US multiple times.

Those were good times. Peacefully lost wandering times. As close as you can get in the real human world to hitchhiking the galaxy, armed only with a towel.

It is becoming harder and harder to get and stay lost these days, even though I’ve even made it part of my job now. Not least because, after a couple of decades of neglect, it has finally become impossible to ignore the things that suffer if you enjoy getting lost a little too much, such as health, retirement savings, fat losings, and good posture.

So grudgingly, I have to admit. I am no longer the cheerfully lost illegible nomad I once was. The lost wanderings are slowing, and things that look disturbingly like clear goals and straight paths are starting to show up in the trackless desert that I’ve been treating as my home for years. The accidental life is turning into a somewhat more purposeful one.

Life after nomadism is, unfortunately, beginning for me.

I’ve had a good run though, and there’s still a grey, empty beach a few hours away from me most of the time.

At its I/O 2016 keynote, Google announced a new messaging, chatbot-enabled app called Allo. In the aftermath of Allo’s reveal, a furor of controversy erupted surrounding how private the new messaging platform’s sensitive conversion data really is.

It’s easy to be impressed by Allo. The app features a slick user interface, custom sizing for text and emojis, and is Google’s first chat application to offer a form of end-to-end encryption, a positive step in the right direction for privacy-concerned Android users.

Google's decision to disable end-to-end encryption by default in its new #Allo chat app is dangerous, and makes it unsafe. Avoid it for now.

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) May 19, 2016

What’s important to note, however, is Allo’s end-to-end encryption is only present when using the app in incognito mode, something Google touted during its I/O’s keynote, resulting in the overall messaging platform not being as secure as some might assume.

The main draw of Allo is Google Assistant, a Siri, Cortana and Alexa competitor that gives users personalized answers to questions, and is also closely integrated with Google Home, the Mountain View, California tech giant’s recently revealed, always-listening Amazon Echo competitor.

Allo’s most interesting feature, which drew cheers from the crowd of journalists and developers attending I/O’s keynote, is its ability to utilize Google Assistant to offer customized, suggested replies to friends and family members. In order for this feature to work, however, Allo is always reading every user’s messages, carefully analyzing the contents with machine-learning algorithms in order to create canned responses that make sense.

This means that when using Allo, Google has access to conversations and messages at all times, a point Motherboard staff writer Jason Koebler also makes in a recent story.

Some will likely point out that Google’s Allo also features an incognito browsing mode focused on privacy, a feature many Android and mobile enthusiast websites have written about since the app’s initial reveal. Many have lauded Google for including this feature in Allo, because, in theory, hackers, government officials and law enforcement will not be able to access conversations within the app. But what Google didn’t make clear during its I/O keynote, is this encryption only exists when incognito is active.

The average Allo user likely won’t take this additional step when using the new messaging app, similar to how most people aren’t aware it’s possible to browse Chrome, as well as other browsers, in incognito mode. In fact, Google is probably hoping most users won’t take advantage of this feature given Allo is designed to be used without incognito mode turned on (this is how the canned messaging system works). While we don’t know for certain yet, data gathered through Allo will probably be used to target the chat app’s users with advertisements, similar to Google’s popular Chrome browser.

Following Allo’s announcement, Open Whisper Systems released a blog post detailing its recent work with Google to bring the company’s Signal Protocol to the Allo’s incognito mode. This indicates that the same encryption technology powering WhatsApp is also behind Allo, though only the Google-developed app’s incognito mode.

In comparison, all WhatsApp messages feature end-to-end encryption and do not ask users engage a specific incognito mode. To be clear, however, Allo is far from the only chat app to suffer from encryption-related issues.

Allo is slated to launch later this summer. Pre-registration for the new messaging platform is open now, though not to Canadians.

As per the announcement made at Google I/O 2016, users no longer need a compatible car or third party program to use Android Auto.

Google confirmed that in an update coming later this year, Android Auto is capable of running entirely from an Android smartphone, while offering the same features as if it were built into a car.

This means that drivers will be able to use its voice-recognition software to answer calls, play music and navigate their smartphone’s user interface.

Furthermore, Google says the app is able to respond to “Ok Google” commands, rather than having to push a button on the console first. It was also announced that Waze map integration will be coming to Android Auto as an alternative to Google’s navigation app.

In addition, as long as the ride is Wi-Fi enabled, the app will beam the in-car interface to any mobile devices in the same vehicle.

Automotive manufacturers have also been invited to participate. Google has asked automakers to develop brand-specific features for Android Auto that drivers can access without leaving the app.

Honda and Hyundai will be releasing their own Android-Auto-compatible software, making them the first two car manufacturers to do so. According to Engadget, these integrated apps will likely include services such as roadside assistance and monthly service reports.

Last year, Hyundai became the first company to adopt Google’s automotive software by making it available in the 2015 Sonata sedan.

An exact date for these updates wasn’t announced, but it’s expected that the rollout will begin sometime later this year.

Related reading: Waze will make its way to Android Auto later this year

It’s been said that chat bots are the way of the future. Microsoft certainly believes this to be true, as they’ve developed a Bot Framework that will allow anyone to create a bot for them and their customers to use.

It was recently announced that alongside Skype, Slack, SMS and other programs, Kik has also been launched as a channel on the Microsoft Bot Connector.

The Bot Framework was revealed to developers during Microsoft Build. The program is unique in that it allows developers to write one set of code that can be displayed across multiple channels.

According to a report by The Verge, Microsoft launched the Bot Framework in the hopes that bots will eventually replace web and app interfaces. The company demonstrated this program by developing a chat bot on stage for Dominos to show how a conversational interface could eventually replace ordering forms.

Kim’s channel has been in production for a month. According to a statement sent to MobileSyrup, over 40 percent of teenagers use Kik in approximately 230 countries world wide, which total 275 million users. The Canadian-based messaging app was developed by a group of University of Waterloo students in 2009 and ha grown to employ over 100 people.

This isn’t the Canadian company’s first dive into chat bots. Earlier this month Kik launched a bot shop that featured 16 bots from a variety of partners including Funny or Die, Sephora and the Weather Channel.

The app is available for download on iOS, Android, Windows Mobile and Amazon.

Related reading: Kik opens a bot shop with 16 chat bots

After 70 hours testing five projectors, we’ve concluded that the BenQ TH670 is the best cheap projector. It offers the best contrast ratio and the best color quality of everything we tested, as well as 1080p resolution, low input lag for video games, integrated speakers, plenty of lumens for any size screen, a backlit remote, and up to 10,000 hours of life from a single bulb. It also provides the best selection of image adjustments, with settings that are easy to understand, so it gives you more control over the displayed image than its competitors do.

Tony Bates, online learning and distance education resources, May 22, 2016

Tony Bates minces no words when talking about the negative impact of tuition fees and the model for learning being adopted in the UK. "The Conservatives seem to have a completely wrong concept of education, based on set curricula, repeated testing of content, highly selective ‘ weeding out’ of students who do not fit this paradigm, and governance by unelected trusts or corporations, a model of education that  is clearly influenced by the British public boarding school system from which most of the Conservative government ministers have graduated. The current English education system is in a time warp that seems to belong more to the 1920s than the 2020s." What do you do when your government lives in the previous century?