This week’s News Roundup covers YouTube’s announcement of the appropriately named YouTube TV service, which will offer a bundle of broadcast and cable channels from four major companies for $35; rumors that Apple would replace the Lightning connector on iPhones with USB-C in the fall; and Snap Inc’s debut on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday.
Our Question of the Week is “What is AWS and why are so many people so dependent on it?” Naturally the prompt here is this week’s AWS S3 outage, which caused many sites and services to go down for several hours on Tuesday. We talk through what AWS is, the major products and services that are part of it, how big this is, and the details of Tuesday’s outage, in terms of both the causes and the impact, and whether it’s healthy that so much of the Internet depends on one company.
Our Third Segment is a discussion of some of the phone announcements made at Mobile World Congress this week, from Nokia, BlackBerry, Oppo, LG, and Motorola, and what they tell us about the state of the smartphone market.
Our Weekly Pick is a life hack of sorts recommended by Aaron.
As usual, you’ll find some links to related content as well as other ways to listen to the podcast beneath the embedded Soundcloud player below.
We invite listeners to submit questions for subsequent weeks in the comments below, on Twitter (@jandawson, @aaronmiller), or via email (jan at jackdawresearch dot com). We also have a dedicated Podcast Twitter handle at @BDPcast.
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Show notes:
Here are some useful links relating to this week’s episode:
- News Roundup (links are to Tech Narratives comments on each item):
- YouTube TV launch
- Apple USB-C rumors (and subsequent debunking)
- Snap’s NYSE debut
- Question of the Week:
- AWS home page, which lists all products and services under the “Products” menu tab
- AWS customer case studies
- Official explanation for Tuesday’s outage
- BI piece on the impact of the outage on retailers
- MWC announcements (Tech Narratives links):
- Aaron’s Weekly Pick was the life-hack-enabling Wilton squeeze bottles, available in various sizes and configurations on Amazon (affiliate link).
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