Medley 35: True but misleading, intralingua, and pre-Uber

Hello hello! I'm back from Antarctica, and I have to say, it was hands down the most amazing trip I've ever taken. I'm going to write up a post about it soon, but in the meantime, you can follow my re-creation of the highlights of the trip on my Instagram.

New Article : "True but Misleading"

Marketing, personal branding, and even daily conversations are littered with little statements that are true but misleading. You can pick them out if you're familiar with the domain, but if it's foreign to you, it's easy to get tricked into being impressed by something not-so-impressive.

Google Translate Invents a Language (sorta) : This article summarizing a recent Google Translate advancement discusses how the neural net machine learning magical computer thingy sorta invented a language in order to translate between two languages it hadn't been trained to translate between before (by using a third intermediary language). Now, as someone points out in a reply that's not really what was happening, but it's still extremely cool.

10 Years: Today is the 10 year anniversary of the original iPhone announcement. How many companies that we rely on today wouldn't exist, or wouldn't be nearly as good, without that original major leap forward in mobile computing? A few I initially thought of: Uber, Slack, Airbnb, Trello, Dropbox, Evernote, Amazon, every dating app, every airline app, Venmo, Periscope, Twitter, Facebook, Audible, the list goes on and on.

Speaking of Uber : I stumbled on Travis Kalinak's (Uber CEO/founder) original WordPress blog after it was mentioned in an article by my friend Neil. It's fun to look at humbler beginnings of someone with such massive wealth and power, and especially to see how quickly he made that leap. Inspiring for anyone who gets intimidated by the grandiosity of some people's achievements.

Have a great week :)
Nat