In today’s day and age, the one thing we all share in common, no matter who you are or what you do, is a network. As a result, a fundamental pillar of doing business in 2017 is asking and receiving intros to members of other peoples’ networks.
There are three types of people, those who love Casey Neistat, those who don’t get Casey Neistat, and those who live under a rock and have never heard of Casey Neistat.
This post is long overdue. It is 2017, and yet, on a daily basis, I get tens of irritating and ineffective messages on LinkedIn. But wait, we’re getting ahead of ourselves…
So much has been said and written about the absurd world of entrepreneurship and startups, A whole TV show has been created that depicts most of the absurdities pretty accurately.
It’s time. Time to write the inevitable post about Snapchat. I wrote it about Twitter here. I wrote a whole lot about Twitter here. I wrote it about Facebook here. It’s time for Snapchat. In case you have not noticed, Snapchat has become one of the most significant platforms on the social web and definitely the fastest growing.
“What a strange title. This guy is going to teach me how to do something I’ve been doing my whole life?”
Yes. And you are going to disagree with many of my points thinking they don’t apply to you. If you are not a fan of differing opinions, we can part now as friends.
Well, this sure is a blog post long overdue. You see, in my line of work, which is a combination of CMO/Co Founder of a startup (ZCast), tech blogger (on this blog and many others like TechCrunch, Business Insider, The Next Web, Huffington Post, Venturebeat, The Street, Mashable, and GigaOM to name a few), startup advisor (working in an advisory role with some of Israel’s leading startups), and mentor at pretty much all of Israel’s accelerators, I see a LOT of startups. Like an obscene amount of startups.
Yesterday was the much anticipated Apple iPhone event. Yes, I am getting the iPhone 7 Plus, no I do not intend on talking about all the announcements and why, iPhone aside, all the other announcements almost put me to sleep.
Let me just get this right out of the way, the DJI Phantom 4 is the best drone I’ve ever owned. Now to be clear, I’m not a professional droner (Is that a thing?) and I’ve only taken interest to this insanely fast growing industry in the past few years. If you want to buy one, go for it! If you do not, keep reading.
By: Hillel Fuld (@Hilzfuld)
I am writing these words on an Apple iPad on my way back from a Huawei event in Shanghai. No one disputes Apple’s superiority in certain areas such as tablets and other consumer technologies. However, even the mighty Apple, the most valuable company on earth realized long ago that me writing blog posts on the plane using their tablet is not where the growth is. Want to know where the future lays? One word: Enterprise.
Yes, Huawei is no laughing matter in the consumer space. The company, without the US market, is the number three largest phone manufacturer worldwide after Apple and Samsung. The Huawei P9 sets the standard for mobile devices in 2016. Simply put, it is phenomenal. More on Huawei consumer technology here. But again, consumer? Meh.
Consumer < Enterprise
Huawei is single handedly dominating the mobile enterprise world and has been laying the infrastructure for our future connectivity around the globe for years now. You think your LTE is snappy? 5G is to LTE what LTE was to dial up, and that is a huge understatement. The speeds speak for themselves.
If you are an American consumer, you’ve perhaps seen the Huawei logo enough times to recognize it if I showed it to you, but if I asked you to pronounce the name of the company? That is where the conversation ends. Here’s the thing, that is going to change fast.
Huawei, in many markets, like the one I am flying over right now, the Chinese monster of a market dominates the way BlackBerry once dominated the business world. One small difference? Huawei is learning from some of the casualties of the mobile market, like BlackBerry and Nokia, and the company is innovating faster than anything I’ve ever seen.
Big data, 5G, automotive, virtual reality, and global connectivity are just some terms I heard thrown around over the past few days from the leading Huawei execs. This company isn’t playing around and while the US market has traditionally been strangely suspicious of Huawei, the company has basically said “No US? No problem. They’ll come begging when they realize that Huawei technology is running through the veins of all the leading technologies American consumers and businesses are using.”
The group of key opinion leaders Huawei brought to Shanghai
Will Huawei have the brand recognition that Apple is so well known for? Nope. Does it matter? Absolutely not. If anything, the opposite is true. Apple, through its recent partnerships with IBM and others clearly realizes that it has to start making a dent not only in people’s pockets but in the enterprise world as well, because that is the future.
Also? The iPhone 7 is a few weeks away and the leading rumor of what we expect to see in Apple’s next flagship? Dual lenses for better pictures. Where have I seen that again? Oh yes yes, the Huawei P9 in my pocket.
Listen, we all talk about the connected car, autonomous vehicles, and other technological dreams that are slowly becoming a reality but let me ask you a question…
When your autonomous connected car senses an obstacle on the road and notifies the system to brake, would you prefer that that communication take place over existing 4G/LTE technology that still causes your kids’ Barney videos on YouTube to buffer or would rather it take place over blistering fast 5G technology of which Huawei is the provider? Yea, that’s what I thought.
You might not yet know how to pronounce Huawei or know quite what to make of this company, but if you are interested in what’s coming and what will shape our future, then repeat after me:
Hooo-waaa-waaaay.
Instagram stories, Snapchat, yada yada. So much has been said about Zuck’s repetitive and systematic ripping off of Snapchat so I will not be adding to that echo chamber. Before I talk about how the launch of Instagram Stories affected my personal usage of both platforms, I would like to talk a little bit about the phenomenon of copying. It sucks. No, really. Speaking as someone who has been plagiarized and blatantly copied, it royally bites.
