Our News Roundup this week covers BlackBerry’s announcement that it will stop making its own hardware; Twitter’s announcement that the creation of Moments is now open to everyone, in addition to the ongoing rumors of a Twitter acquisition; and Elon Musk’s plans to colonize Mars in the coming decades through his SpaceX company.
Our Question of the Week is “What is Snapchat?” We’ve discussed Spotify once or twice before on the podcast, but this is a deeper dive than we’ve done before, and seeks to address this question from at least a couple of angles, namely Snapchat as an app, and Snapchat (now Snap Inc.) as a company. We discuss how Spotify actually works, and how its features have evolved over time. But we also talk about the company’s evolving conception of itself, and the way its founders have described the app and the company since its launch five years ago. And of course we do all this in the context of the launch of Snap’s Spectacles over the weekend.
Our third segment is a discussion of a series of related moves by what are ostensibly consumer technology companies into the enterprise. We talk about Apple’s new partnership with Deloitte around business process transformation, as well as Facebook at Work, which is expected to be released more broadly next week, and why these companies seem to feel the pull to participate in the business world.
Our Weekly Pick is a series of books 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.
As ever, you can also find the podcast on iTunes, in the Overcast app, or your own favorite podcast app. Here is the RSS feed for the podcast if you want to add it manually to your app of choice.
Show notes:
Here are some useful links relating to this week’s episode:
- Various articles we mentioned during the course of the episode:
- Jan’s post on BlackBerry from two years ago
- Jan’s post on Twitter from last week
- New York Times piece on Elon Musk’s Mars plans
- Jan’s post from Monday on the Snapchat news
- Jan’s press comment on the Apple-Deloitte partnership.
- Aaron’s Weekly Pick was a series of books from author Trenton Lee Stewart, whose works you can find on Amazon and iBooks among other places (affiliate links).
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