BITS OF OCTETS

Hi, my name is Nicolas. I'm an internet enthusiast, working as product manager / digital strategist at the business hours.

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Four Things Working at Facebook Has Taught Me About Design Critique — Facebook Design

Critique is an important part of any design process, whether you work within a diverse team or independently. The feedba…

Good ways and ideas to shape your projects up design-wise.

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Why Messaging Is the Future of the News Brand

Messaging apps have already overtaken social networks in terms of global popularity.

Quartz is five years ahead on this one.

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Inside Facebook’s Decision to Blow Up the Like Button

Chris Cox wants to mess with Facebook’s secret sauce.

“Near the end of the meeting, he wonders aloud how to get other Facebook employees to start thinking about the particular challenge of building features that will work on yesterday’s mobile networks, still in use around the world. Someone proposes switching everyone at the company to a 2G connection once a week. Cox loves the idea. “This is our tool for empathy,” he says. “Happy Wednesday, you’re in Delhi!” Two weeks later, the company implements 2G Tuesdays.”

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Design is a conversation - Inside Intercom

As conversational UIs continue to rise, messengers and bots are presenting with us a fundamentally new way to interact with computers.

The new interaction model : the messaging thread.

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Spotify is getting unbelievably good at picking music — here’s an inside look at how

We learn how Spotify works and why the streaming giant has what it takes to go head to head with Apple Music.

Incredible challenge : how to properly map all variables impacting on music taste and design accordingly related recommendations.

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Automation in the Newsroom

Philana Patterson, assistant business editor for the Associated Press, has been covering business since the mid-1990s. Before joining the AP, she worked as a …

Rich, and documented story about computers holding the pen in newsrooms. Automation systems and broader applications of AI are coming to us much faster than we think.

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Inside the Design Labs Where the iPhone's Coolest New Feature Was Built

How Apple created 3D Touch.

The story behind a single Apple feature. Loads of engineering, prototyping and time to refine things. “Done is good enough” doesn’t apply here.

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A Roadmap for a World Without Drivers

Recently, a number of analysts have written thoughtful pieces about the future of mobility in a world of self-driving ca…

A great read if you’re looking for a weel sourced summary listing the mobility changes coming ahead.

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My Worst Tech Decision: Xbox, Apple Watch, PSP, Windows Phone, Sonos And More

We've all made them: choices to buy that great product or service we believed would be life-changing, but wasn't. IBTimes is sharing our Worst Tech Decisions. What's yours?

There is actually no such thing as “bad tech”. The technical features and possibilities offered by a device or service is only a small part of the equation. In many cases, superior standards were ignored when compared for inferior ones. Other contextual factors have to be taken into account, like club effects, better distribution or marketing, or simply, the “cheap but good enough” factor.

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What does it mean for an algorithm to be fair?

In 2014 the White House commissioned a 90-day study that culminated in a report (pdf) on the state of "big data" and related technologies. The authors give many recommendations, including this cent...

Algorithms were not designed to be fair, but supper efficient. They have little regard for things as geo and racial profiling. For machines, human fairness is just a tough bias to figure out and add to the equation. Fascinating subject.  

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Viacom Is Having A Midlife Crisis

Why nobody wants their MTV

Media networks face many issues right now, and this piece about Viacom is perfect to learn about the difficulties of a TV based media group. To sum it up :

- Global audience is harder and harder to measure and quatify

- Investments are closely tied with ratings

- People are fleeing ad-based media

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Why agencies shouldn't lead on innovation

Labs are seen as potential cash cows but too often end up as wastelands of misadventure

Agencies should not inovate. They should craft stories, and better know technologies to hack them to tell meaningful stories, not coneive and develop elaborate products and services. They don’t have the time, people, processes and resources to do so.

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How mobile internet killed off cyber cafés in Nigeria

Most cyber cafés in big Nigerian cities have closed shop as the mobile internet use has grown

One more proof that mobile is shaping Africa in a deep way, and very fast.

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Facebook tweaks its news-feed algorithm with time spent on stories

Social network has realised that just because you didn’t like, share or comment doesn’t mean you weren’t interested

After selling likes, comments and shares for almost a decade, Facebook realizes there are not really the ideal engagement metrics. Time spent on content should be taking into better account now.

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Hit Counters: The Analytics Tool of the Early Web

Hit counters tracked how many views a web page ever had. They were ugly, hackable, and shallow. But they were also the predecessor to present day web analytics.

A dive into history of the proto-web analytics tools, that are deeply connected with the internet DIY culture (like most of the things we can see online actually)

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The Dark Web as You Know It Is a Myth

The dark web actually has promise. In essence, it’s the World Wide Web as it was originally envisioned.

“That space is nothing like the fairy tale that has been concocted around it; that of a colossal ocean of digital stores selling exclusive products, where criminals are free from prosecution. That characterization is not true.

Instead, the dark web is a small collection of sites that reflect the limited number of good, bad, and downright weird humans that use it.”

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iPhone Killer: The Secret History of the Apple Watch

The inside story of the Apple Watch: the people who made it, why it's important, and just how much the world's largest company has riding on it.

The unknown history behind Apple’s latest piece of hardware, created by ... a former Adobe employee.