Category Archives: Smartwatches

Week 112 News Roundup – Nest Announcements, Apple Reviews, Google-HTC

This week’s News Roundup episode focused on three news stories. We kicked things off with a discussion of Nest’s biggest set of announcements in recent memories and what it means for the smart home market. Next, we discussed the various reviews that came out for Apple’s new products this week. And lastly, we talked through Google’s investment in / acquisition of part of HTC’s smartphone business.

As always, you’ll find links to these stories and other things we discussed underneath the SoundCloud player embedded below.

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 (Tech Narratives links unless otherwise stated):

As ever, we welcome your feedback via Twitter (@jandawson / @aaronmiller), the website (podcast.beyonddevic.es), or email (jan@jackdawresearch.com).

Please leave us a comment or get in touch via Twitter to give us feedback. We’d love to hear from you. You can reach the individual hosts on Twitter (@jandawson@aaronmiller), or via email (jan at jackdawresearch dot com). We also have a dedicated Podcast Twitter handle at @BDPcast. And we’d love it if you would leave a review of the podcast on iTunes or in your podcast app of choice.

Episode 73 – Apple Structure, State of Smartwatches

Our News Roundup this week covers three topics. First, two stories about home assistants, with a report that Amazon will make an Echo with a screen, and another that Microsoft will add features to Windows 10 to allow PCs to serve as ambient voice assistants. Secondly, two pieces of news from the digital video market, with AT&T launching the long-awaited DirecTV Now service, and Netflix announcing a download feature. Lastly, we discuss Bloomberg’s report that Apple will begin using drones for mapping data.

Our Question of the Week is “Should Apple change from a functional organization to a divisional structure?” Aaron talks us through the differences in these two organizational structures and the conventional wisdom on which is better for different kinds of businesses, and then we discuss how these arguments apply (or don’t) to Apple. We don’t come to a firm conclusion one way or another, but hopefully you’ll be better armed to make up your own mind about this topic by the end of the discussion!

Our third segment is a conversation about the state of smartwatches, in which we talk about Fitbit’s reported acquisition of Pebble, Motorola’s announcement that it won’t be making any more Android Wear watches in the near term, and the Apple Watch, including Aaron’s recent experience trying one for a while.

We wrap up with our Weekly Pick, which this week is a book recommended by Jan.

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:

Please leave us a comment or get in touch via Twitter to give us feedback. We’d love to hear from you. Also, we’d love it if you would leave a review of the podcast on iTunes.