Blog


ex-machina
  • December 4, 2015

Humane Artificial Intelligence?

An oxymoron or the holy grail of AI design? The tendency to anthropomorphise things we create is deeply embedded in human nature. However, to create robots which resemble and emphatise with us, we need to first define ‘human’. And that in itself is quite a tricky subject, it seems. For starters, if we want humane AI, […]

megan
  • December 1, 2015

Twitter and Megan Phelps-Roper

This is such an incredible story of how Megan Phelps-Roper, a former prized daughter of the loathsome Westboro Baptist Church, came to see the absurdity of her beliefs, lost her faith, left the church and her family, and completely changed the course of her life. The trigger behind this conversion? Twitter. As Phelps-Roper continued to tweet, she […]

footprint
  • November 29, 2015

Why We Can’t Solve Big Problems

A question that I have been mulling over: why are the biggest innovations in the past decade so pathetically meaningless? Is Facebook or Snapchat the best we can do? Peter Thiel says it best:  “We wanted flying cars—instead we got 140 characters.” We are living in the best of times for innovation, at least theoretically: no […]

Ethical cars
  • November 26, 2015

Why Self-driving Cars Must Be Programmed to Kill

Sounds ominous, doesn’t it? In actual fact, it makes perfect sense. It is a classic case of choosing between two evils: should a self driving car drive into a group of school kids or ram into a wall (potentially killing the driver)? Would you buy a car that could potentially kill you? This reminds me […]

www
  • September 20, 2014

Things I Learn from the Internet – 10

Note: Things I Learn from the Internet is a series of post containing snippets of wisdom collected from stuff I read on the WWW which do not warrant a post in itself.  Peek: a user testing tool: order a test, a real person test your site, result sent to you in a video. (nice website […]

binary
  • August 28, 2014

Digital Physical Mashups

The example given by the author to illustrate the great divide between the digital and the physical worlds which some companies still struggle to bridge hits home for me. I have came across many such baffling instances myself. People experience disconnects like this one all the time. Here we are, a quarter century into the […]

753c7f6e-00ae-431d-a93c-816f5017f097
  • August 6, 2014

Smartphones and Journalism

If you were to assume that the dawn of the mobile era means people are giving up reading actual article and are just snacking instead, you’d be wrong. The Atlantic recently reported that a gorgeously illustrated 6,200-word story on BuzzFeed—which likewise gets about half its readers through mobile devices—not only received more than a million […]

gender
  • August 1, 2014

Tech’s Ugly Gender Problem

There has been many instances where people around (or even close to) me wave off the notorious ‘sexism in tech’ problem as ‘all in the woman’s head’. The worst thing is, these are intelligent people. They argue that talking about sexism won’t solve the problem, that we cannot avoid it from happening (and thus need […]

startups
  • July 11, 2014

Jerktech

The tech startup scene in Silicon Valley can be pretty fucked up. There is a term for it now: #JerkTech. Source They’re emblematic of a compassionless new wave of self-serving startups that exploit small businesses and public infrastructure to make a buck and aid the wealthy. Case in point: ReservationHop and Monkey Parking. The latter […]

basics
  • July 9, 2014

Back to Basics

At a certain point in the startup journey, a founder might pause and ask him/herself this question: “What a minute. Am I doing the right thing?” It is so easy to jump right into the process of building an MVP without properly validating the need for the solution. In the heat of the moment when […]

www
  • July 7, 2014

Things I Learn from the Internet – 9

Note: Things I Learn from the Internet is a series of post containing snippets of wisdom collected from stuff I read on the WWW which do not warrant a post in itself. SnapEngage: Live chat tool for customer engagement Joomag: digital publication tool (create digital magazine) Outbrain, Sharethrough: create In-feed ads Slack: Team communication tool, chat and […]

www
  • July 6, 2014

Things I Learn from the Internet – 8

Note: Things I Learn from the Internet is a series of post containing snippets of wisdom collected from stuff I read on the WWW which do not warrant a post in itself. RedPen: Feedback tool. Get your point across, click and comment on a visual image. SnapEngage: Live chat tool for enterprise to engage with customers LawBite: […]