UI/UX Articles and Interesting Tidbits of the Week
December//23//2022
Here are some interesting finds on UI/UX of the week!
1.
The Future of Podcasting. Interesting article from The Verge and author Ariel Shapiro on what to expect from the Podcasting market, both in terms of revenue, but also in terms of its own expansion. At a time where the amount of ad spending has either plateau’d or decreased, the article asks a series of questions and outlines scenarios on how that can impact what was otherwise an expectation for this particular media segment to continue its growth trajectory. Well worth reading through. Highlight of the article includes:
“During the boom time, companies like Spotify, Amazon, and SiriusXM invested hundreds of millions of dollars in podcast tech and content with the expectation that the sector would continue to grow. Even if investors are not thrilled with how much they spent (and their current podcast profit margins), they are in a better place to capture what ad dollars are flowing into the market. With the biggest podcasts on the market (Spotify and Joe Rogan, Wondery and SmartLess, SiriusXM and Crime Junkie) and most sophisticated tech stacks, they are in a better position to weather a downturn. Independent creators, who are already having a tougher time breaking out than they did a few years ago, will be left to pick up the scraps.”
2.
What to Expect from AI in 2023. From Kyle Wiggers and Tech Crunch comes this look at what to expect from the evolution of AI. This past year witnessed the viral expansion of apps such as Lensa from Prisma Labs, which further sparked the discussion on how AI can cannibalize the artwork from actual artists. It also further brings to mind the 5 factors that AI is supposedly going to disrupt the most: Understand users at a Scale, Identify New Opportunities, Predict and Personalize Features, New Interfaces and Optimization of Permutations. Highlight of the article includes:
“Examples of such community-focused efforts include large language models from EleutherAI and BigScience, an effort backed by AI startup Hugging Face. Stability AI is funding a number of communities itself, like the music-generation-focused Harmonai and OpenBioML, a loose collection of biotech experiments. Money and expertise are still required to train and run sophisticated AI models, but decentralized computing may challenge traditional data centers as open source efforts mature. BigScience took a step toward enabling decentralized development with the recent release of the open source Petals project. Petals lets people contribute their compute power, similar to Folding@home, to run large AI language models that would normally require an high-end GPU or server.”
3.
Looking Back on 2022. The Verge’s team looks back on some of the highlights which occurred during 2022. And that includes both superlative occurrences and also less than optimal performances. Among the list of what they emphasize positively is included: Android Smartwatches, iOS 16, Google Maps. On the other side of spectrum, the writers emphasize the challenges from Peloton, Intel and Nintendo. They also list interesting media releases which resonated strongly (films, TV Shows and Games), and have an interesting take on what took place with Crypto. Well worth reading through. Highlight of the article includes:
“Attempts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from crypto mining escalated this year in the US and Europe, where many miners moved following China’s ban on the practice in 2021. Lawmakers and environmental advocates in those areas started pushing for more transparency into crypto miners’ operations. Bitcoin is the primary target of those efforts now that Ethereum has voluntarily reined in its own greenhouse gas emissions.”
