The Biggest Tech Industry Buzzwords, Defined for Normal People

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The tech industry loves catchy phrases, but the truth is that most of them either don't mean anything or they're just complicated ways to phrase simple ideas. With that in mind, let's dig into what sayings like "the internet of things" or "disruption" means to us normal people.

We've already covered the most useful tech terms worth knowing, but it seems like every day we see articles mentioning a ton of nonsense marketing words and phrases. Some of these terms are useful, but most are just confusing. Let's demystify a few of the more common.

Acqui-Hire

At its most obvious, acqui-hire is a portmanteau of acquisition and hire, and means just that. In the world of technology it's often used when one company buys another just to hire on talent. The New York Times described it like so:

Companies like Facebook, Google and Zynga are so hungry for the best talent that they are buying start-ups to get their founders and engineers — and then jettisoning their products.

So, "acqui-hire" is when a big company buys another smaller company just to get the people who work there.

Augmented Reality

Augmented reality is when you use a computer or phone to add computer generated information to the real world. Typically, this is an overlay on a camera screen. Think of it like having a video game-style HUD up at all times—when you point a camera at something, artificial information displays in real time in front of you. For example, someday you might have a car window that makes it possible to see through other cars. You'll find plenty of examples of current apps and services with augmented reality right now, but few are useful.

The Cloud

The cloud is one of those obnoxious overused terms that's hard to tell what exactly people are referring to. But at its core, the cloud is just the internet. It's when a bunch of computers get networked together and you can access that network from anywhere. For example, "cloud storage" refers to online storage like Dropbox, SkyDrive, or Google Drive. Storing other data in "the cloud" just means it's available online so you can get it on multiple devices.

Crowdfunding

As the name implies, crowdfunding is when an inventor asks the public to fund a project. These projects range from comic books to apps. The idea is that you give someone money so they can finish a project. When it's done, you get a reward. This funding comes through services like Kickstarter or Indiegogo. The problem is that it's often difficult to gauge whether something is worth funding, but we've put together a guide if you need some help.

Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrency, in overly simple terms, is basically internet money—the most popular form of which is Bitcoin. In more complicated terms, it's a decentralized digital currency. That means a network of users keep a public transaction ledger so everyone knows where people spend them, trade them, or move them. It still works like real money, but the transaction is publicly recorded for everyone to verify, and impossible to counterfeit. If you're interested, we have a more in-depth explanation of Bitcoin here.

Disruptive

Disruptive might be the most overused term in tech these days. In tech, the word marks when a piece of technology changes the landscape of an industry. This means it either creates a new market by displacing an old one, or improves a product so exponentially that the old versions are barely recognizable. Historically, the terms is for innovations like the Model T or the MP3. Nowadays people use it to describe pretty much every app that does something even slightly different, even though a calendar app that imports your Facebook events isn't disruptive like the iPhone was disruptive.

Gamification

Gamification seeks to turn everything you do into a game, to incentivize you to do more. For example, an app might push you to complete your to-do list and give you a reward for doing so. The psychology behind it is a little iffy, but you'll still find a ton of examples of gamification in fitness, habits, and more.

The Internet of Things

When you see the words "Internet of Things" it's referring to objects we're not used to seeing have internet access with internet access. This might be thermostats, fridges, coffee pots, and whatever else someone decides to stuff a Wi-Fi card into. The Internet of Things is going to change everything, but we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

Startup

A startup is a new business. That's it. In the tech industry, a startup may not every even make anything, it might just be a simple piece of intellectual property that gets sold off before it's even used. The word startup is also becoming an increasingly negative term describing a culture of young entrepreneurs who start companies at a rate that rivals the dot com era.

Quantified Self

Quantified self refers to the idea that you can use technology to track data about your personal daily life and use that data to make your life better. For example, a pedometer tracks your steps. You could use the data from a pedometer with a journal to see how exercise affects your mood. The term "quantified self" has been around for a while, but as it's gotten easier to track data it's become more in fashion in recent years.

Wearables

Wearables is a goofy way of referring to any and all wearable technology. It's a computer you wear. This includes things like smartwatches, fitness trackers, Google Glass, and just about anything else you'd wear that has technology inside of it.

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Savioke Gets $2M To Build A ‘Services Industry’ Robot

Savioke, a robotics startup out of Sunnyvale led by the former CEO of the now-defunct but influential Willow Garage robotics startup, is announcing a seed round of funding today, $2 million from Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures, Google Ventures, Morado Venture Partners and other individual investors. It is planning to use the money to develop and build its first robot, an as-yet unnamed piece of hardware that will be focused on the services industry.

Why the services industry? CEO Steve Cousins says that he and his team see a “huge untapped opportunity” to target that vertical. “Hospitals, elder care facilities, hotels, restaurants, office services all provide large opportunities for robots to take on dirty, dull and dangerous work, improve process efficiency, reduce cost, and most importantly free up people to help other people,” he says. “We see the services industry as the next logical step for robotics, moving out from behind the fences in factories and out from research labs to provide value around people, where we live and work.”

I asked, but was told that there are not yet any models, names or other details available for the new services robot. What we do know is that it will be built on the open source robot operating system ROS, which was originally developed at Willow Garage under Cousins. Savioke says it plans to begin customer trials later this year.

Indeed, Cousins was at the startup at a significant time. In addition to creating the ROS, Willow Garage spun off some eight startups — Suitable Technologies (maker of the Beam remote presence system); Industrial Perception, Inc.; Redwood Robotics; HiDOF (ROS and robotics consulting); Unbounded Robotics; the Open Source Robotics Foundation; the OpenCV Foundation and the Open Perception Foundation. Two of those spinoffs, Industrial Perception, Inc. and Redwood Robotics, were eventually acquired by Google in 2013. It also created the PR2 robot as well as the open source TurtleBot.

Savioke, founded in 2013, was not strictly a spinoff, but it is nevertheless a Willow Garage off-shoot, with not only Cousins at the helm but a number of other staff also coming over (in fact, everyone but one of Savioke’s full-timers and an intern are ex-WG). Even its name seems to be a hat-tip to Willow Garage’s arboreal theme, pronounced “Savvy Oak.”

What’s interesting about the concept behind Savioke is that it’s a signal of how the robotics world, and those developing for it, are trying for more targeted products as the space continues to mature. “There’s a unique entrepreneurial excitement surrounding Silicon Valley’s robotics industry today, and much of that is due to the efforts of the team at Savioke,” noted AME’s Jerry Yang in a statement. “As the market for service robots continues to grow, AME is pleased to offer our support to Savioke.”

And, in a world where robotics are equal parts exciting and challenging businesses (the demise of Willow Garage is direct enough evidence of that) Cousins’ track record feels like a good bet for investors.

“As the lines continue to blur between industrial and personal robotics industries, Google Ventures is thrilled to be working with an exceptional group of people at Savioke,” noted Andy Wheeler, a general partner at Google Ventures. “Steve and his team already have had a lot to do with moving the robotics industry forward. The next act promises to be even more revolutionary.”

T-Mobile’s growth in the US mobile industry is amazing

JeepersMedia

In the United States, the cell phone industry is one of the hardest duopolies to break. AT&T and Verizon have secured around 75% of the smartphone market. Yet, T-Mobile has done just about the impossible and shown remarkable growth in 2013 and promise for 2014.

At the end of 2012, T-Mobile was down 9.8% and coming off their worst point of revenue growth along with being the only major company not offering the iPhone. Fast forward one year and T-Mobile has grown 8.5% to approximately 46.7 million customers. To put that in perspective, you will not find any other company growing that much in the same time frame. In fact, AT&T has been hovering at the 4% mark, Verizon around 8%, while Sprint is staying at approximately 0.5%. So, while other mobile companies had service revenue staying stagnant, T-Mobile showed positive results.

T-Mobile did it by ending early-termination fees for those switching to another carrier, allowing users to upgrade their smartphone anytime they want (in their “Jump” plan”) and with their Value Plans. Even with revenue increases of 10.3% to $6.83 billion, T-Mobile has received a mild response from Wall Street which had multiple agencies predicting revenues above $6.90 billion.

Either way, T-Mobile’s customer growth was fantastic with a reported 1.6 million net customer additions in the fourth quarter and gross customer additions up 80 percent in 2013. If we include the acquisition of MetroPCS Communications, T-Mobile added 4.4 million total customers in the fourth quarter of 2013. Citigroup’s Michael Rollins has noted that because T-Mobile had added 1.65 million subscribers in the Q4 of 2013, it was their “best branded postpaid performance in eight years,” at 869,000 net additions.

By the way, does anyone remember the doomsday scenarios that AT&T and their paid minions stated would occur if T-Mobile didn’t merge with AT&T under the $39 billion dollar deal?

“Customers will be harmed and needed investment will be stifled.” – AT&T after their announcement that the merger with T-Mobile was dead”

Well, this week we learned that T-Mobile’s valuation has been recently raised to around $49 billion. Funny what happens when a company actually invests in improving their network and rethinks their strategy in the wireless marketplace.

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Has Google just taken over the wearables industry?

I like what I’ve seen from Android Wear and the Moto 360. As a bit of a wearables sceptic, I’m not blown away, but I’m optimistic about where Google’s improvements could take the market in the not too distant future.

The Cue Cards interface probably has the most potential, it seems like a very functional way to interact with and respond to your notifications, reducing the number of interactions that wearers are likely to have to make with their handset.

My biggest concern with wearables is the need to keep going back to the smartphone at some point. What I really want from a smartwatch is the ability to interact efficiently and accurately from just the watch itself. Google’s Cue Cards and voice commands are certainly on the right track, now we just need to see about hardware manufacturers offering up small enough modem packages.

So, does Android Wear make other developers obsolete? Not at all. For example, Samsung’s Gear 2 offers up some equally impressive improvements on the first generation of smartwatches, including similar voice command features. The biggest game changer, for me, is that Android Wear will hopefully make the technology more accessible to both hardware and software developers, which can only mean better looking designs and improved software features in the future. The Moto 360 looks nice, but I bet that experienced watchmakers could design something even better.

I still probably won’t be completely sold on the wearables market until I can ditch my phone completely and take calls, messages, etc just from my wrist, even then I’m not sure that would be preferable to a phone. Android Wear seems to be the push that the market needs to eventually make this a reality. The wearables industry is only in its infancy, and I can’t wait to see where it goes next.

Up until now, I’ve looked on the wearable market with curiosity, but none of the devices offered have had the “wow factor” required to make me consider wearing a watch on my wrist again — something I stopped doing about ten years ago.

So does Android Wear have what takes to win me over? While the jury is still out, I admit Google has my attention, and the Moto 360 in particular looks like one heck of a device.

I love the idea of Google’s clean UI driven by a combination of Google Now-like cards and voice commands. It seems very organized and easy to use. At the same time, I often find the type of notifications I get alerted to on my Nexus 5 to be more than a bit distracting. Would I want that same level of distraction on my wrist? It really depends on how good of a job Google does at prioritizing what notifications get through to my smartwatch and what doesn’t.

Bottom-line, I will certainly keep a close eye out on Android Wear devices like the Moto 360. As for existing solutions like the Pebble and the Gear family? Although Android Wear is more my cup of tea, many of the existing smartwatches have their own special features and abilities that set them apart and make them worthwhile, even in the light of Google’s smartwatch platform announcement.

As an example, the Gear series of watches adds a kitchen-sink worth of extra features like a camera and more, while the Pebble is minimalistic and relatively cheaper than most other smartwatches. That said, Android Wear certainly does raise the bar on what we’ll expect from smartwatches going forward.

Bogdan Petrovan

The concept videos are definitely impressive – seeing them for the first time, I had a moment of “is this real life?”. But doing nice concept videos is easy; there are still huge challenges ahead, and the pressure is not on Google, but on hardware partners like HTC, Samsung, Motorola and LG.

I am really curious to see if Motorola will be able to make the 360 work as good as it looks. Leaving software aside for a minute, a good smartwatch must have great battery life, work smoothly, sync flawlessly, and have great gesture and voice recognition. Samsung, with its huge resources and engineering prowess, failed to bring all these qualities together in one cohesive product. Will Motorola, LG or the other Android Wear adopters do better?

Until we see the first real products, it’s too early to write any competitor off, but it’s very tempting to do so. Let’s face it – Pebble, Gear, Sony Smartwatch, they look like they were created in another decade compared to what we saw in those concepts.

Strategically, Google dealt a big blow to Apple this week. By the time the rumored iWatch comes out, there could be several competitive Android Wear smartwatches on the market, and dozens more in the planning. Google will have the first mover advantage and the cachet that comes with it.

What I am really excited about is the avalanche of wearables that’s coming in the next months and years. Now that Google is giving away an excellent software platform, the barrier of entry for wearables has been lowered tremendously. I expect dozens of manufacturers to throw themselves in this new arena, echoing the evolution of smartphones, but at a far faster pace. Exciting times ahead.