Notifications: An app love song to its users
A while ago I read Scott Belsky’s post. I loved it. It touched the exact pain point I’m trying to solve every day working for Neura. I even wrote a response. The smartphone can easily be a black hole of attention —mobile games, Facebook, Instagram, Snap, Twitter — their life line is dependent on multiple app […]
The Upside to Ingredient Brands
In a recent post, I explored ideas on ethical product design. Among other things, I talked about how apps and IoT device makers can engage users without compromising users’ well-being. As more stories come out like that of Samsung TVs recording people’s conversations and Bose headphones spying on customers, people will want assurance that the […]
Engage, Don’t Enslave
Exploring what it means to captivate app users in a healthy way. Addictions tend to leave people worse off than they found them. The same is true for digital addictions. A longitudinal study published by researchers at Yale and U.C. San Diego, “Associations of Facebook Use with Compromised Well-Being,” reveals that using Facebook harms our mental […]
Three Ways Machine Learning Will Drive Behavior Change in Mobile Health
Today’s most prevalent diseases/conditions are both preventable and manageable. In most cases, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and other conditions can be avoided and offset by healthy living. A healthy lifestyle often requires people to change certain behaviors. And, as we all know, behavior change is hard. People are adopting mobile health […]
Why Mobile App and IoT Companies Need to Get AI into Their Products Now
Personalization: not just a “nice-to-have.” Last week, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos shared with an audience in Washington, DC, about the pivotal role machine learning has played for the $430 billion company. While the firm’s AI pursuits have spawned intriguing devices like Alexa, a voice-activated assistant, Bezos insisted the real power of Amazon’s machine learning engine […]
Public Speaking: A Developer Evangelist’s Perspective
Public speaking is something I’ve always wanted to do and hoped I would do well. I’ve even had some chances to speak — introducing Neura at meet-ups/hackathons. Preparing for my new role of developer evangelist for Neura, where I’ve been working as a developer for the past three years, I wanted to get the best tips and […]
How Can We Trust AI Companies?
When building a company or a product, a lot of times you end up at a crossroads where your integrity and commitment to being a company people can trust is tested. If you’re in the medical or banking fields, you don’t even have a choice — there are regulations instead. Not all of them are perfect, but […]
Fix Your Notifications on iOS 10.3
TL;DR — Jump to the code sample section 🙂 Ever since iOS version 10.2, I’ve been getting unusual behaviors from my push notifications. In some cases, the notification actions tied to some categories stopped showing on push and local notifications. Being the lazy developer that I am, I marked it as an iOS bug and […]
Everybody Needs a Co-Pilot
How adding contextual AI to car systems will improve driver safety. Last week, a small R&D team from Neura attended an amazing hackathonhosted by Mazda in Tel Aviv Port. Our goal in the hackathon was to combine Neura’s world — understanding the user’s day-to-day life — and Mazda’s world, which centers on the life inside the car. Artificial Intelligence […]
The AWS Outage and the Need for “Offline” IoT
Thoughts on mobile offline machine learning in the wake of a “cloud” debacle. Apparently, when the Internet breaks, your smart home can break with it. That’s what we learned from the widespread Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage. A couple of weeks ago, Amazon’s cloud services platform failed, affecting hundreds of thousands of companies that depend on […]