We’ve rounded up the most interesting and entertaining news, stories and posts we’ve been reading at Simpleweb HQ this month. Expect stories from the startup-sphere, a dive into the future, the latest developer news and a playground of apps, tutorials, podcasts and more…
Startup / Business
The UK wants to give startups £400 million to prevent foreign buyouts
The Chancellor of the Exchequer has pledged over £400 million of government finance to make its way to startups as venture capital via the British Business Bank in an effort to prevent British startups from moving abroad.
Breaking Bad: We Rebranded Our Startup Because We Finally Learned Our Story
A frank review of one company’s reasons for rebranding.
Future of tech
What does it mean to be human in an age of machines?
A pragmatic description of the implications of an increasingly robotic world. Not quite Skynet just yet, but we’re going to have to adapt to having more ‘relationships’ with technology sooner rather than later.
Google explores how machine learning could navigate the history of art
In a new ‘Experiments’ project from Google, artists and creative coders use machine learning to explore the history of art and culture. “If the Renaissance had perspective and paint innovations and the de Medici family as patrons, now we’ve got algorithms as medium and Google as the patron.”
Neural Network Learns to Identify Criminals by Their Faces
Are we entering a future whereby we could be arrested based on how we look? An interesting look at what technology can tell about us from our photos.
Code
Webhooks do’s and dont’s: what we learned after integrating +100 APIs
A webhook is a way for web service to provide other services with near real-time information using HTTP POST requests. This post highlights the need to make them useful otherwise the developer has to callback for more information.
Keyframes: Delivering scalable, high-quality animations to mobile clients
Keyframes is a Facebook-created library that is able to export and playback After Effects animations, built to address the constraints the Facebook team faced when developing reactions. This post explains how and why they developed it.
Native Apps are Doomed
This developer has quit developing native apps in favour of progressive web apps – “web applications which are designed to work even more seamlessly on mobile devices than native mobile apps.”
Animate React Native UI Elements
A course to learn and demonstrate the basic concepts of the React Native Animated API.
Playground
Quick, Draw!
A game by Google where you draw pictures and a neural network tried to guess what you’re drawing. Amazing, fun and worth wasting some time on.
Episode 49 – Bit Podcast
The Bit Podcast team (including Simpleweb front-end developer Ben) discuss the new MacBook Pro, the Surface Studio and the news of Red Dead Redemption 2.
/Sessions – Pusher
A new app from regular Simpleweb Challenge sponsors, Pusher, which offers recordings of talks given at developer meetups.
