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What’s Next for the App Economy 2017

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Re: What’s Next for the App Economy 2017

#2
Kudos to these app experts. The dude I'd probably listen to most is Paul Kemp, known for The App Guy Podcast. He had an influencer on his show last year talking about Blockchain technology. I guess we'll have to wait (yet) another year to see if this prediction comes true.

Re: What’s Next for the App Economy 2017

#3
post #2

Kudos to these app experts. The dude I'd probably listen to most is Paul Kemp, known for The App Guy Podcast. He had an influencer on his show last year talking about Blockchain technology. I guess we'll have to wait (yet) another year to see if this prediction comes true.

Seems like "the year of the blockchain" is the new "the year of the Linux desktop".

Re: What’s Next for the App Economy 2017

#5
post #2

Kudos to these app experts. The dude I'd probably listen to most is Paul Kemp, known for The App Guy Podcast. He had an influencer on his show last year talking about Blockchain technology. I guess we'll have to wait (yet) another year to see if this prediction comes true.

Talking about using "the blockchain" doesn't qualify. Rather the opposite. The real value will be on the fringes of that ecosystem and has little or nothing to do with chaining blocks: secure multiparty computation, testing the potential of synergies in data with bloom filters and differential privacy.

Source: running an ethereum meetup since 2014 and (very likely) writing the world's first crowdfunding contract in LLL.

Re: What’s Next for the App Economy 2017

#6
post #4

I'm not really seeing the chat-bot aspect they seem to have a crush on. What am I missing?

Chatbots are awesome for two reasons

1. Moves away from emailing a company. Just think how many people today are messaging the facebook pages of companies instead of writing these long formal emails to get something. Conversational explaining just ends up being much faster and more convenient for many people.

Look at the overall shift between phone calls -> text and internal business emails -> im/slack

2. Most non-technical people have trouble even being able to interact with a computer (somewhere between 60% - 80% of people still don't know how to google what they want and get it on the first try), moving to a conversational system (if it works right) can rapidly increase the amount of people you can interact with.

Re: What’s Next for the App Economy 2017

#7
post #4

I'm not really seeing the chat-bot aspect they seem to have a crush on. What am I missing?

Chatbots are awesome for two reasons 1. Moves away from emailing a company. Just think how many people today are messaging the facebook pages of companies instead of writing these long formal emails to get something. Conversational explaining just ends up being much faster and more convenient for many people. Look at the overall shift between phone calls -> text and internal business emails -> im/slack 2. Most non-te…

>> if it works right

this is the crux. Current-era chatbots, and chatbots for the forseeable future (barring some radical breakthroughs in the understanding of intelligence and natural language), are all the same terrible APIs people grapple with now, with an added layer of indirection because at least you can look up an API spec. Just because you can type out full sentences doesn't mean it's a conversation; it's still precisely the problem of API design, i.e., trying to imagine your user's use cases and writing brittle dialogue trees to accomodate them. Except now, the interface layer (Natural Language) is an extra layer of noise.

Your analogy to business communication does not hold, because there's still a human being on the other end of the line in all those communication forms. At the very least, it's someone to scream at when you repeat the same thing 30 times and they don't understand. Instead of a steady refrain of "I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that; could you rephrase it ;)?"

Re: What’s Next for the App Economy 2017

#8
post #4

I'm not really seeing the chat-bot aspect they seem to have a crush on. What am I missing?

Chatbots are awesome for two reasons 1. Moves away from emailing a company. Just think how many people today are messaging the facebook pages of companies instead of writing these long formal emails to get something. Conversational explaining just ends up being much faster and more convenient for many people. Look at the overall shift between phone calls -> text and internal business emails -> im/slack 2. Most non-te…

Yes, but these are the benefits of chat/messaging. Not the benefits of bots.

What value will bots add? Will the bots be autonomous agents, acting as a person on the other end?

Re: What’s Next for the App Economy 2017

#9
post #2

Kudos to these app experts. The dude I'd probably listen to most is Paul Kemp, known for The App Guy Podcast. He had an influencer on his show last year talking about Blockchain technology. I guess we'll have to wait (yet) another year to see if this prediction comes true.

Talking about using "the blockchain" doesn't qualify. Rather the opposite. The real value will be on the fringes of that ecosystem and has little or nothing to do with chaining blocks: secure multiparty computation, testing the potential of synergies in data with bloom filters and differential privacy. Source: running an ethereum meetup since 2014 and (very likely) writing the world's first crowdfunding contract in L…

Are you planning something like Lighthouse?

Re: What’s Next for the App Economy 2017

#10
post #4

I'm not really seeing the chat-bot aspect they seem to have a crush on. What am I missing?

Yeah, I'm with you. If I can't get done what I want with an app after half a dozen taps, the app has already failed.

The last thing I want, especially on mobile is to be typing out sentence long inquiries.

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