Ads @ stackoverflow – Steve from Stackoverflow ad managment team explains their view about ads on the site. This is a very user centric approach along with strong branding and differentiating themselves. This approach is not scalable for a sites with many topics and diverse audience but it fits their niche.
https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2016/02/why-stack-overflow-doesnt-care-about-ad-blockers/
Serverless Python web applications – taking scalability and cost effective to the next level. Zappa is a Python web applications where the server is created using AWS Lambda function after an HTTP request came through AWS API Gateway. The python web framework under it is currently Django but it should be customizable to also support Flask, pylons, etc.
https://gun.io/blog/announcing-zappa-serverless-python-aws-lambda/
Slack @ Home – the interesting thing for me is the transformation between business tools and free time tools \ technologies. Can we use the knowledge, tools, methods we use in work at home and the other way around?
The first feature for me would be shopping – collecting easily the list of things I need to get in the supermarket, drug store, etc and updating it back to the slack.
Scheduling is also interesting but there a google calendar integration so I think it is pretty easy. And maybe integration with WhatsApp possibly for image backup and sharing.
Of course, it does not necessary have to be slack, any other equivalent, preferred open source tool is good as well.
http://labs.earthpeople.se/2016/02/my-family-uses-slack/
Towards an Open Banking API Standard – one can probably not underestimate this move. I believe that an open banking API will lead many technology driven progress in the personal banking. For example – aggregating data from several account, comparing fees, etc. It will be interesting to see how the banks will adopt this standard as banks are heavily lead by regulations and are slow moving organizations by their nature. This specific effort is directed to UK banking systems but it will be interesting to follow if additional financial organization in and outside of UK will adopt it as well.
http://jackgavigan.com/2016/02/10/towards-an-open-banking-api-standard/
3.57 Degrees of separation – as a matter of fact I find the idea ok six degrees of separation romantic and not very interesting. In the edge of social networks and big data we can actually check it, or evaluate it. This post by Facebook research tries to estimate it. The interesting part for me in this post was the mathematical background and the engineering effort of scaling it. Please note that data is mostly available for first world countries and therefore although it is an estimation it probably need another factor of distance.
https://research.facebook.com/blog/three-and-a-half-degrees-of-separation/
Tom Ron 