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Your Ideal Home Companion

As robots evolve, homes will need fewer R2-D2s and more C-3POs. Which one would you rather have cooking your dinner – a bleeping trash can or a tall shiny-metal figure with arms and legs?

Dozens of robots turned up at the CES 2018 tech show in Las Vegas. If you spotted a humanoid robot, especially one with legs, it was probably a toy. The larger, more useful robots were mostly on wheels, with short, stocky bodies. These guys are designed and programmed to patrol parking lots, deliver room service, greet shoppers. They’re close relatives of the robo-vacuums we already know.

That’s set to change in the next decade. While the service droids will stick around, toiling in their niches, the robots we bring home will be more versatile. They won’t be vacuums – they’ll use our vacuum cleaners, plus all our other appliances and tools, says Ian Bernstein, co-inventor of the popular Sphero toy robot ball and founder of a startup called Misty Robotics. Continue reading “Your Ideal Home Companion”

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Facebook’s 2018 Fall From Grace in a Nutshell

Ever since it was founded on 2004, Facebook has been on an endless upward surge. Year after year, it almost completely destroyed competing social media platforms and absorbed the rest. If you were to ask a random stranger what would be the final social media platform for humanity’s foreseeable future, they would point at all apps owned by Facebook.

But like the story of David and the Goliath, all that is big will eventually fall. Things were far from perfect behind the doors of 1 Hacker Way. Facebook has been trying to fix the mass of problems starting to surface, which then turned into a giant nuclear fallout early this year. Continue reading “Facebook’s 2018 Fall From Grace in a Nutshell”

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Tips on Increasing Facebook Page Reach for 2019

If you have been noticing that Facebook has been feeding you more of your friends’ content rather than that of Pages you follow, you are not losing your marbles. Facebook has been actively pushing the reach of Pages and brands lower down the priority list in exchange of your peers’.

The initial reason for this was because the people at Menlo Park realized that user engagement with posts have been drastically dropping of late. So in the spirit of ‘bringing people closer together and building relationships[1]’, Facebook made post from Pages disappear almost entirely from your Newsfeed.

So here are some campaigns you can adopt for your Page to adapt to the new Facebook Order. Continue reading “Tips on Increasing Facebook Page Reach for 2019”

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Will IGTV Swim or Sink

On the 20th of June 2018, Instagram launched a new and ambitious move to rival video streaming giant YouTube, but with a twist. Instagram was going to start a new wave of long-form vertical video format, which at first glance appeared to be a sensible evolution seeing most content are already consumed in mobile devices being held vertically. The name of this new platform was IGTV, short for Instagram Television.

IGTV was already the most celebrated kid on the tech block on the very first week of launch. It received a red carpet premiere, something Instagram has not done since 2013[1]. Their launch efforts also included having influencers and celebrities create and share their own videos[2]. Continue reading “Will IGTV Swim or Sink”

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Home Robot Assistants

LG said that Cloi had been deliberately designed to appear cute.  Image credit: LG

At the recent CES, a number of keynote presentations and demos featuring robots designed to help at home didn’t exactly go as planned. How far are we from having fully functional robot assistants?

THE CES ROBOTS

Almost every year at CES, potentially the greatest gathering of visionaries and ideas that push technology forward, one would see a robot walking, rolling or sliding down an aisle. Occasionally, one of these robots would even pop up during a company’s presentation, as was in the case of LG’s Cloi (which is pronounced Kloh-ee) during the recent show. The machine was described as being the “ultimate in simplicity when managing your smart home,” when it was presented on stage by David VanderWaal, LG’s US marketing chief. Continue reading “Home Robot Assistants”