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ANDRÉ CRAMER

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January 2016

On AR/VR Impact: How The Growth Of Mixed Reality Will Change Communication, Collaboration And The Future Of The Workplace (Pete Sena)

Sci-fi tech, meet Wall Street.

A recent report from investment bank Goldman Sachs predicted that within 10 years, virtual reality hardware will be an $80 billion industry. This “base case” forecast assumed that adoption will be slow, as compared to that of smartphones and tablets, but, the report noted, “as the technology advances, price points decline, and an entire new marketplace of applications (both business and consumer) hits the market, we believe VR/AR has the potential to spawn a multi-billion dollar industry, and possibly be as game changing as the advent of the PC.”…

Source: How The Growth Of Mixed Reality Will Change Communication, Collaboration And The Future Of The Workplace | TechCrunch

Good one on THE topic for the next years: Digital Transformation Requires Total Organizational Commitment (TechCrunch)

By now you’ve surely heard that moving forward, every company will be a software company, and that shift is happening now as companies large and small scramble to transform into digitally-driven organizations.

Wherever you turn, businesses are facing tremendous disruptive pressure. What’s interesting is that the theory about how firms should be dealing with this massive change is itself in flux, transforming if you will, as organizations come to grips with the idea that the most basic ways they do business are being called into question…

Source: Digital Transformation Requires Total Organizational Commitment | TechCrunch

Impressive Q4/15 Reporting: Facebook Climbs To 1.59 Billion Users And Crushes Q4 Estimates With $5.8B Revenue. User Count for Core FB, WhatsApp, Instagram exploding (TechCrunch)

By courting users and ad dollars in the developing world, Facebook continued its growth streak. It hit 1.59 billion users today and crushed the street’s estimates in its Q4 2015 earnings with…

Source: Facebook Climbs To 1.59 Billion Users And Crushes Q4 Estimates With $5.8B Revenue | TechCrunch

Very readworthy: Guy Kawasaki On Startups, Entrepreneurship And The State Of Social Media (TechCrunch)

One of Guy Kawasaki’s recurring pieces of advice to entrepreneurs is to create a mantra, not a mission statement. A mantra is three or four words that captures the essence of your organization…

Source: Guy Kawasaki On Startups, Entrepreneurship And The State Of Social Media | TechCrunch

Great in-depth Assessment: Inside Facebook’s Ambitious Plan to Connect the Whole World (Jessi Hempel, WIRED)

The stern woman behind the press desk at the United Nations is certain I’ve made a mistake about the person I’m here to see. “Mr. Mark Zuckerberg?” she says. “Who’s he?” ¶ He’s an Internet executive, I tell her. He started Facebook. It’s the second week of the United Nations’ General Assembly. Several hundred reporters crowd into the press holding area. Nearby, on the main plaza, heads of state stroll by. In this place, it seems, Mark Zuckerberg might as well be Mark Smith.¶ She checks her dog-eared schedule, then makes a call, enunciating into the receiver: “ZOO-ker-burg. Mark ZOO-ker-burg.” Silence. “Yes, the Facebook guy.” More silence, during which it occurs to me the UN is like the opposite of Facebook. If it had motivational posters on the wall, they’d read: Move slow and break nothing. Finally, she hangs up and turns back to me. Zuckerberg is on the program after all, she concedes, speaking just before German chancellor Angela Merkel.

A short time later I slip into the back of a two-story amphitheater where Zuckerberg, dressed in a dark suit and a tie, has come to make the case that the Internet should be considered…

Source: Inside Facebook’s Ambitious Plan to Connect the Whole World | WIRED

WhatsApp’s official Opening-Up to a B2C Ecosystem is the logical next Step (André Cramer)

Facebook will remove the WhatsApp annual charge and introduce B2C features for brands to interact with their gigantic user base. This will make life more challenging for those service providers that have been exploiting loopholes and ambiguous terms & conditions to provide brands with communications channels to WhatsApp subscribers.

So now it’s official. The first significant news and updates from Facebook regarding the future of WhatsApp after the acquisition have been announced last week. WhatsApp will start removing its annual charge ($1 or local equivalent) across the different versions of its app. They also stress that in return for removing the annual charge there will be no introduction of 3rd party ads. Instead they open up their ecosystem and officially introduce business-to-consumer use cases. Continue reading “WhatsApp’s official Opening-Up to a B2C Ecosystem is the logical next Step (André Cramer)”

Great In-Depth Piece: 2016 will be the Year of Conversational Commerce – Interact with Businesses from Messaging Platforms (Chris Messina on Medium)

Nearly a year ago today, I wrote a post inventorying the forebears to what I believe has become the dominant trend of consumer computing apps in 2016, a trend that I dubbed Conversational Commerce and have tracked with the hashtag #ConvComm.

This trend best came to life in 2015 with Uber’s integration into Facebook Messenger

Source: 2016 will be the year of conversational commerce — Medium

Great Assessment of the FinTech Funding Situation: Is VC The Right Money For Fintech? (TechCrunch)

Financial technology has never been a more exciting or innovative category — especially in New York City. Oddly, tech is not the driving force in many of these ventures. The Blockchain and…

Source: Is VC The Right Money For Fintech? | TechCrunch

How mobile is reshaping the entire shopping experience (Jeff Huckaby)

The mobile mega-trend is impacting both consumers and retailers in a big way, and it’s happening both in stores and out of them — especially when mobility and analytics collide.

Source: How mobile is reshaping the entire shopping experience | VentureBeat | Mobile | by Jeff Huckaby, Tableau

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