The Feed: Tech News You Probably Missed (Aug 11-15)
Tech news and commentary for the week ending August 15, 2004.
Daimler, the German automaker, has a rather strict vacation email policy: any emails you get during your vacation are deleted, and the sender is directed to your alternate contacts you specify in your out-of-office message. On one hand: harsh. On the other, it plays on a hard reality: many backlogged vacation emails don’t get handled, so the sender is left in the cold. Daimler’s logic says to route the sender to a new contact right away, and tell them ahead of time their message will not get a response from the original recipient. Link.
Here’s a memo from the Deputy Editor of Entertainment at The New York Daily lauding his writers on using SEO techniques while covering Robin Williams’ death. Yes, journalism is a competitive business, but sometimes you don’t want to see how the sausage is made. Link.
A report recently bashed ridesharing service Uber for ordering and then quickly canceling thousands of rides from its competitor Lyft. Well, turns out Lyft does the exact same thing. Welcome to competition in a young market with high stakes, I guess. Link.
WIRED’s Mat Honan conducted an experiment: he liked everything he saw on Facebook for two days. What happened? It’s a really long story that you should read, but the bottom line is that Facebook showed Honan almost all brand content thereafter. Meaning: his friend’s content stopped showing up. Yuck. Link.
Nice touch: in Apple’s iOS8, if you use Maps to find a business and the call the business, the business name will show up in your recent calls, making it nice and primed for an easy contract entry. In iOS7, the phone number digits were shown, which made them easy to confuse and forget. Sweat the details. Link.
Microsoft has released an iPhone app called “Snipp3t” that allows you to “follow and track your favorite celebrities.” This, from Microsoft? Hard to believe. Link.
Speaking of Microsoft, they’ve made three new 30-second Surface Pro 3 ads. In a bizarre twist, they all mock the MacBook Air, the world’s far-and-away most popular ultralight notebook. This isn’t clever, this is desperate. Gain foothold, then take swing at market leader – not the other way around. Link.
Thanks for reading, everyone, and see you next week.
