Each week, we share the top five articles that caught our attention. Here are your must-reads, published here and abroad, for the week of December 12th 2016.
Augmented reality or virtual reality?
It’s hardly a secret that virtual reality (VR) is really exciting right now. And this technology is even overshadowing its rival, augmented reality (AR). But as specialist Mark Rosner, Chief Risk Officer at AppLovin, points out, AR may be more profitable than its virtual cousin—as evidenced by its success with Snapchat and Pokémon GO.
→ Read it on Venture Beat Pocket
UX in 2017
User experience design (UX) continues to evolve, both in trends and methodology, so how can we predict how it will change in the future? The team behind the uxdesign.cc blog have trawled through countless UX-focused publications, interviews and newsletters looking for clues. What does 2017 hold for UX?
→ Read it on uxdesign.cc Pocket
Smart cities and data industrials
For the last decade, smart city projects have spread across the world. Up until now, there has been two visions of what a digital city should look like: the top-down smart city, which is most embraced by the civic-minded, paternalistic movement, and the bottom-up city favoured by civic hackers, which relies on small businesses and citizens to build digital services. This duality is now being challenged by a third group, the data industrials, like Google, Uber or Waze.
→ Laboratoire d’innovation numérique de la CNIL (in French) Pocket
Is the smartphone immortal?
Smartphones have been adopted more quickly than any other gadget in tech history. This trillion-dollar industry is expected to reach more than six billion users in the next four years, so the news of the smartphone’s demise is vastly exaggerated. But how will it evolve in coming years?
→ Read it on Wired Pocket
Pantone for you, you and you
Each year since 2000, Pantone has announced a ‘Color of the Year’ that’s selected by a team of experts. The company, which has been helping design professionals for the last 65 years, seems to be reaching for a new target audience with its recent advertising campaigns in publications such as TIME, Vogue and the Washington Post. How and when, exactly, did Pantone become a consumer brand?
→ Read it on Glossy Pocket
Le Code Québec: Understanding ourselves better to export ourselves better
#Sponsored
This updating of our cultural code is well-timed, arriving just as something new is emerging in Quebec: a new entrepreneurial current that is modern and connected. At the Le Code Québec conference, presented by The Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal on December 6th, we interviewed two of the three authors of the book and a few attendees. Stéphane Mailhiot, Vice President of Strategy at Havas, has stepped in to explain the seven differences that make the Quebecois a truly unique population in the world.
→ Read it on the CCMM blog Pocket
In your earbuds: Layout
Kevin Clark and Rafael Conde, the design leads at Shopify and Netlify (respectively), host this series of podcasts about design, technology and programming. Each week, the duo shares their observations about current industry trends and news.
→ Listen to it on Layout.fm
This week’s favourite thing
What is your GIF collection missing? Some NASA memes, obviously. Even the most solemn astronauts can get silly, as these GIFs clearly show. Who knew that a planet or rocket launch could so truly express all your feels?
