Linked List: August 14, 2015

Friday, 14 August 2015

Comcast Launching YouTube Competitor Named Watchable ★

“Hot damn, let’s do a shittier version of it and put it in our terrible set top boxes.”

I love all my sponsors, but this week’s DF RSS feed sponsor is really cool. Bold Poker isn’t online poker, or a poker game you play solo — it’s a way to play real Hold’em poker with your friends using your devices instead of an actual deck of cards. An iPad serves as the board. Each player holds their own hand on their iPhone or Android device. Host or join a table with a single tap. It could not be simpler or easier.

You save time on shuffling and thus play more hands. It’s like having a personal dealer right at the table. Bold Poker is my favorite type of app: a simple, original, useful idea, implemented with exquisite taste and attention to detail. The artwork and animation are drop-dead gorgeous. They even pay attention to the math behind the shuffling algorithm.

The latest version even includes VoiceOver support:

Starting today, VoiceOver users can connect their headphones at the table and have their cards read out to them. There will still be rough edges as we weren’t always sure how verbose we want VoiceOver to be but we consider this to be a solid start of a larger effort in being more inclusive. We would love to hear your feedback (especially if you’re visually impaired).

That is just so great. If you play poker and haven’t tried Bold Poker yet, do yourself and your friends a favor and check it out.

The Guardian: ‘Documents Confirm Apple Is Building Self-Driving Car’ ★

Mark Harris, writing for The Guardian:

Apple is building a self-driving car in Silicon Valley, and is scouting for secure locations in the Bay Area to test it, the Guardian has learned. Documents obtained by the Guardian show the oft-rumoured Apple car project appears to be further along than many suspected.

It sure looks like Apple is getting ready to test drive a car, but I didn’t see anything in this report that justifies the assumption that it’s a self-driving car. Did I miss something?

Finding iPad’s Future ★

Neil Cybart, writing at Above Avalon:

The tablet market is in complete disarray. Only five short years ago, the iPad helped jumpstart the category, ushering in multi-touch computing and the modern-day app revolution to large-screen devices. Today, there has never been a time when the tablet market faces so much unknown.

A quick look at iPad and tablet shipment data would show that things have gotten bad in recent quarters. However, in reality, things are much worse than quarterly shipment data would suggest. The seasonality found in the tablet segment makes it difficult to see these long-term problems. A much better way at understanding what has been taking place is to look at the year-over-year change in shipments on a trailing 12-month (TTM) basis, highlighted in Exhibit 1. This smoothing effect highlights that the iPad and tablet have been on the decline for years and things continue to worsen with the overall tablet market hitting negative territory for the first time. All momentum has been lost.

Periscope, by the Numbers ★

Periscope, on why their primary metric for growth is “time watched”, not daily or monthly “active users”:

Optimizing for DAU/MAU doesn’t properly motivate our team to create a product that people love. Here’s why: if we were motivated to grow DAU, we’d be incentivized to invest in a host of conventional growth hacks, viral mechanics, and marketing to drive up downloads. This direction doesn’t necessarily lead to a better product, or lead to success for Periscopers. We hold ourselves accountable to Time Watched as an organizational measure because it reflects the kernel of our product, and our core values.