Adam Lashinsky

With innovative companies and products like Tencent's WeChat messaging service and novel approaches to artificial intelligence and various business models, China rapidly is becoming an innovator in its own right. ”

As a new Googler, Porat spent some time learning the words that describe the Googley people who work in those buildings. ”

Amazon is pursuing something called Amazon Key, which lets its couriers unlock Prime customers' doors and deliver packages. It's pairing the service, which it plans to make available in 37 cities next month, with a camera so users will have intelligence inside and outside their homes, presumably boosting trust and lowering creepiness. ”

Apple is a military-like command-and-control organization where people lower down in the organization manage up. They are constantly preparing their boss who may be preparing their boss and their boss for a presentation to the CEO or to the executive team. ”

AIM started in 1997, and I remember when I started using it in earnest, in 1999, when I joined TheStreet.com from 'The San Jose Mercury News'. We digital journalism pioneers communicated obsessively by AIM, and as a newbie, I recall being amazed that the whole newsroom was 'chatting' this way. ”

I confess that, like public figures from bygone days or an entertainer that hadn't been heard from in eons, I didn't know AIM, as we all called it, still existed at all. ”

AIM was so quaint, it organized users around 'buddy lists.' In a time before smartphones, AIM was powerful and intoxicating, a way for a generation that once had called people on the phone to communicate in quick bursts from their computers. ”

Apple does a very good job of not letting its competitors know what it is working on, and Apple does a very good job of not confusing customers by causing them to anticipate what the next new thing is going to be and then causing those customers not to buy the products that are on the shelves now. ”

I stopped using AIM years ago - I can't remember exactly when - and so its demise shouldn't mean much to me. ”

As the finish line for 2017 begins to come into focus, I'm beginning to wonder what an Uber turnaround would look like. ”