Innovation

(Originally posted on Medium) Social network is not the most interesting part. The keynotes and highlights of the conferences were other parts — Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. Facebook, like Apple is doing a great job of disrupting itself, mainly through acquisitions. Yes even Messenger was an acquisition Facebook’s 10-year road map “Facebook’s 10-year roadmap is basically lasers, bots and VR” — Napier Lopez The Bots are Coming Facebook released Chatbot API’s making it easy to create Bots without native Apps. Additionally the Wit.ai’s Bot Engine enables natural language communication in both text and speech. By feeding the engine new information, new tasks, and new data, it will understand more situations and will become smarter over time. Facebook already uses state-of-the-art AI in moments and in curation of News Feed. ...

(Originally posted on Medium) Based on photo from https://www.flickr.com/photos/jdlasica/12338690004 Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers Ben Horowitz is the cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) and one of Silicon Valley’s most respected and experienced entrepreneurs. In ‘The Hard Thing about Hard Things’ he shares his experience of being a founder-CEO and the hard decisions he has had to make — offering advice on managing tough problems as a leader, which business schools do not cover. While most management books focus on doing things correctly, Ben offers insights into what you must do after you have screwed up. ...

(Originally posted on Medium) Design Thinking and the Art of Innovation I have always believed that everybody can increase their creativity if they put their mind to it, and the recent course at Stanford University on Design Thinking and the Art of Innovation (XDES400–019) provided the essential tools to do just that. I was inspired to take this course after watching David Kelley’s TED talk on How to build your creative confidence. The class was led by Bill Burnett, the executive director of d.school who has worked in both start-ups and Fortune 100 companies, including seven years at Apple. Here are my key takeaways from the course. ...