IFA 2014 in Berlin
Last weekend a couple of colleagues and I went to Berlin to visit IFA 2014 and to attend some events in the Berlin Startup scene.
IFA Berlin Logo
Saw nothing completely mindblowing at IFA. TVs and Smartphones get better incrementally. Smartwatches were a little more mature than the year before.
Liked the UI/UX of LG smart TV webOS interface. Way more elegant than the Samsung Smart TV stuff.
Oculus Rift Logo
The longest visitor lines could be found everywhere the Oculus Rift was available for testing. Will be interesting how much virtual reality will take off. I believe it could be huge.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick Interview at Techcrunch Disrupt
Another event that took place last week was Techcrunch Disrupt SF. I watched a couple of the videos put up by TechCrunch and found the interview with Uber Founder and CEO Travis Kalanick very interesting.
Especially his vision of making Uber cheaper than owning your own car.
Another fascinating part was the economic situation in China, which is filled with taxis, where Tencent and Alibaba battle over the taxi app market by spending tons of money.
iWatch and iPhone 6
Obviously the biggest event in the last two weeks was Apples announcement of the new iPhones, the Apple Watch and Apple Pay.
The new bigger iPhone is an obvious move to compete with the big premium Android devices.
Apple Pay is very interesting, because it could finally allow NFC payment technology to break into the mainstream. If the consumers get used to this payment behavior this could blaze the path for a lot of even more disruptive things, like paying via Bitcoin.
Finally the watch shows that Apple has the ability to think things more through than the competition. I love the UX solutions for the tiny screen from what I have seen. As an Android guy it will be interesting how Google will react. I will probably wait before buying a smartwatch though, especially because of the low battery life.
Web Dev Ressources: Build a browser engine
Cool blog post series on how to build a simple browser engine by Matt Brubeck. Knowing how browsers parse and render HTML is very interesting for web developers who seek a deeper understanding, especially regarding performance. I already learned a lot from it.
Check it out:
http://limpet.net/mbrubeck/2014/08/08/toy-layout-engine-1.html