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A Kenyan Startup is Showing Global Businesses How to Talk to Their Customers

Lily Kuo | Quartz | May 25, 2016

A florist chain in Argentina, a food delivery service in Hong Kong, and a Singaporean travel agency—these are a few of the companies relying on a Kenyan startup to help them talk to their customers on WhatsApp, WeChat, and other messaging apps. Ongair, a Nairobi-based startup, says instant messaging could and should replace the traditional channels of customer service—frustrating phone calls, inefficient e-mail exchanges, online chats that don’t work well on a smartphone, or SMS messages that costs businesses per text...

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Health Care Needs Some Spectacles

I've never written about Snapchat.  I didn't really get the point of its namesake app, the point of which was to post content that automatically disappeared.  I knew it was wildly popular among teens and celebrities, both of whom undoubtedly had more content they wished wouldn't persist than an old fogey like me, but it just seemed purposely trivial. With their recent introduction of Spectacles, though, I figured Snap Inc. (as the company renamed itself) deserves a closer look. The Wall Street Journal broke the story (as Business Insider also did) with an in-depth look at Spectacles.  It is not a new app, nor some new service on its existing app (which continues to be called Snapchat), but rather a piece of hardware: a pair of sunglasses that can record short videos.  Users can record ten to thirty second videos, taken from the sunglass's perspective...

How Bot That!

About a year and a half ago I wrote I Hate Apps, expressing my concerns that apps had outlived their usefulness due to how they are cluttering up our devices, and found I wasn't alone in this attitude.  Now Facebook is doing something about it, with their vision that they can use "bots" within their Messenger app to eliminate the need for many standalone apps. Indeed, as David Marcus, the head of messaging at Facebook, told Wired: "Everyone wanted websites when the web was launched. And then everyone wanted apps.  This is the start of a new era"...