Welcome to this week’s Between the Bytes where we’re not as smart as your average nerd I’m Arash Bakhshandehpour this is Gary Arnold. You forgot we’re not on break? I’m fine Gary, thank you.
This we’re going to be talking about some t-mobile plans that are being introduced, cryptocurrency updates, and then a little bit more robot mishaps.
Tech News
To kick off our tech news we have an announcement from t-mobile. T-mobile with noticing in the carrier world that there wasn’t a lot of options for seniors. They just announced that there’s going to be a new plan available to seniors 55 and older. The plan gives you unlimited text unlimited data unlimited calls all and two lines all for $60 a month. Heck of a deal. Only 30 years away. I can’t wait to get older.
Next we have an update in the cryptocurrency world. Bitcoin has now reached an all-time high in valuation at $3,500 per Bitcoin. They recently just split up into Bitcoin Cash as well. It’s been mentioned that the trend of growth is only going to continue for cryptocurrency.
Our next bit of news is about the Google pixel. This is their flagship phone and really great phone and they’ve announced that it is going on sale. The pixel 2 will be released in the next couple months and in anticipation of the new phone they’ve dropped the prices on their current phones. So you can get the Google pixel and pixel XL for 150 to 200 dollars off. Heck of a deal, go check it out.
Michelin has just released their plans to to build a 3D printed tire made of all recycled materials such as metal, hay, and molasses. It’s both for a wheel and an airless tire and these things are currently a proof-of-concept for sustainability. Nothing has been launched yet but they making great progress. Funky looking things. Yeah blue tire. Yeah, probably not the fashion statement you want to make. Maybe better if they were red, go Utes!
Another bit of news we have comes from the AI and robot world. Yeah, we love to cover the artificial intelligence, but we love even more when they mess up. So this was a robot from Boston Dynamics, who we’ve covered before here on Between the Bytes. They have a robot named Atlas, you’ve probably seen it before. It’s the robot that can pick up boxes, it can walk around all by itself. Well in a recent demonstration, the robot had a little bit of a mishap and while exiting the stage, fell off. Yeah, just fell right off. Didn’t make the autonomous driving to correct itself. So I think our robot overlords just took a step back from taking over the world and I think we’re a little bit safer than we were before. I’m still very pro robot failure. What do you think of that Alexa? No answer. Power nap.
A little more news from a Utah company. Canvas the education system tool now has an Alexa integration skill. You can link to your campus account and you will get information about grades assignments and course material and syllabus type information. It’s really cool. Instructure has been making a lot of progress in the industry.
Product Highlight
This week on Between the Bytes product insider we’re going to be discussing the portable Bose Bluetooth speaker called the Soundlink color. First thing you want to do is go ahead and download the Bose connect app so you can synchronize it with your speaker. Next, make sure your phone’s Bluetooth is on and then it connects. Now a cool feature that is that the app has is that you can connect multiple Bose Bluetooth speakers to split the sound and kind of give your house of surround sound type quality. It’s water-resistant and the quality is superb. And one of the last really cool features that it has here is you can call and use it as a speaker on phone calls. That will do it for this week’s product insider.
Featured Guest
Welcome to our featured guest section on Between the Bytes. Today we have with us Russ Page, special guest from Fifty Studio. He’s here to talk to us a little bit more about marketing.
BtB: To start off a little bit tell us about what you do and all about your company.
Page: So Fifty Studio has been around about ten years. I started it with a couple of friends right when the economy when bad. That was a little over ten years ago and we all found ourselves without a job. We thought that we could do this ourselves so that’s what we did it and now we’re in the process of rebranding to be named DVLP software. It will be a structural change.
I manage business side and the market digital marketing business. A lot of times firms will say they’re full service. We are in the sense that is digital. So you won’t see us doing brochures and identity and all kind of things. But digital marketing, web development, web design, that’s where we are specialized. It’s been a big benefit for us to buckle down and focus on that.
BtB: Another thing we wanted to ask you, is if there is a tip or something that a business owner could do to help improve their marketing today?
Page: Yes actually, my tip is a book called Weapons of Influence by Robert Cialdini. I read that book about two years ago. The reason why I go back as we’re talking about marking is the author is a professor at Arizona State one of the Arizona’s down there by the university. It’s literally just studies of human behavior and marketing action in the world. I look at it as it’s not some blogger that got fame and wrote a book. These are actual studies of what works and how humans will react. Just one example he talked about how doctors and dentists offices, those kind of things, they struggle with people keeping appointments. They did a study where rather than fill out the appointment card at the desk, if you had the patient do it themselves this increased that the appointments kept by twenty percent. So the book is fascinating to me because he uses those and I think it’s five or seven principles that really state what it is. One is the law of reciprocity for example. It talks about all these laws, they’re applicable in life, relationships, with marketing you can apply them in an IT world. It doesn’t matter what your business these things are applicable and they’re backed by real science which is interesting to me. Persuasion, Weapons of Influence would be my recommendation.
BtB: We really appreciate you coming out today.
Page: Thanks for having me thank you
Tech Tip
We’re back! Drink? Please. Yeah nothing like some Gatorade to quench your thirst. Not an actual sponsor. But if you’d like to sponsor us, that would be great. This week’s tech tip we’d like to refer you to our Executech blog that was published last week with seven chrome plugins that everyone needs to know about. These will make it a lot more user friendly. There are things that make it more convenient and efficient for you when using Google Chrome. You can find it on our Executech LinkedIn or Facebook pages or on our blog page. It’s going to be posted in the description for this video. It’s been a great episode we appreciate you watching don’t forget to like, subscribe and check us out on Facebook. We’ll catch you next week.
