Linked List: January 2, 2016

Saturday, 2 January 2016

Fred Wilson’s Predictions for 2016  

Fred Wilson:

One of the big four will falter in 2016. My guess is Apple. They did not have a great year in 2015 and I’m thinking that it will get worse in 2016.

Anything is possible, but when your link supporting the statement that Apple “did not have a great 2015” is Gizmodo clickbait, it does not inspire confidence that Wilson understands Apple any more than he did in 2009, when he sold all of his Apple stock for (split-adjusted) $13 a share. Today it’s at $105.

Bitcoin finally finds a killer app with the emergence of Open Bazaar protocol powered zero take rate marketplaces. (note [sic] that OB1, an open bazaar powered service, is a USV portfolio company).

“Next year is the year for Bitcoin” is the new “Next year is the year for desktop Linux.”

Slack will become so pervasive inside of enterprises that spam will become a problem and third party Slack spam filters will emerge.

I don’t think Fred Wilson is very good at predicting things.

TrackR Atlas 

My thanks to TrackR for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote the Track Atlas. Atlas is a system for keeping track of where your stuff is: your keys, wallet, purse, pets — almost anything. You plug small Atlas plugs into outlets throughout your home and they create a map. Then just attach a small tracker tag to everything you want to keep track of. If you forgot where an item is, see its location on a floor plan or via voice search. You can even see a history of where an item or pet has been and get alerted when an item leaves an area.

Check out their website for a video showing just how simple it is. TrackR Atlas is an Indiegogo project that’s already raised over $200,000 from over 1,400 contributors.

The Website Obesity Crisis 

Maciej Ceglowski on why the modern web is so bloated and slow, and why it matters:

These comically huge homepages for projects designed to make the web faster are the equivalent of watching a fitness video where the presenter is just standing there, eating pizza and cookies.

The world’s greatest tech companies can’t even make these tiny text sites, describing their flagship projects to reduce page bloat, lightweight and fast on mobile.

I can’t think of a more complete admission of defeat.

Amen.