#CASEY NEWTON SAN FRANCISCO SOFTWARE#

#CASEY NEWTON SAN FRANCISCO SOFTWARE#

That job led to a move to San Francisco, where she worked in customer support at a data analytics start-up, then at a start-up that focused on software development. In 2013, Wiener left an assistant job at a New York literary agency to work for an e-book start-up run by young men who were uninterested in reading books. Technology journalist Wiener looks at Silicon Valley life in this insider-y debut memoir that sharply critiques start-up culture and the tech industry.

We’ll discuss how working at fast-growing tech startups changed her perspective on privacy, social networks, and the city she lives in. Visit podcastchoices.New Yorker writer Anna Wiener’s new book “Uncanny Valley” is a brilliant memoir of a half-decade lived in San Francisco as tech changes the community for better and for worse. It’s a show that’s easy to win, but not impossible to lose - because, in the final round, I finally get a chance to play and score a few points of my own. They’ll need someone to build the automation that works on these channels.” McCabe lays out his thoughts on the future of bots on the season finale of Converge, an interview game show where tech’s biggest personalities tell us about their wildest dreams. “They’ll need someone to build workflows for the people inside these companies to help them collaborate and be efficient. “What the world will need is one platform to band these multiple channels together,” he says. Another service is needed in the background to organize a company’s communications. But those are just endpoints, McCabe says. That’s an approach that’s different than a company like Facebook’s, which similarly hopes to offer a popular front end for business conversations through its Messenger and WhatsApp services. McCabe says the company has grown because businesses are looking for a single platform to help them organize their communication tools across every platform. The company is valued at nearly $1.3 billion. As part of the announcement, Intercom - which is based in McCabe’s native Dublin, with additional headquarters in San Francisco and London - said it had raised another $125 million from Kleiner Perkins and Google Ventures. In March, the company announced that it had 25,000 customers and was powering 500 million conversations a month. (In these ways, it’s a direct competitor to Salesforce.) While public interest in bots waned, Intercom has continued to invest in the technology. Since then, Intercom has added machine learning to automate more of those conversations, along with various other tools for generating and managing sales leads. The idea was that a website should say hello to customers the same way a barista might when you enter a coffee shop - and then sell you on something available for purchase. (Intercom released a tool to let businesses build custom chat bots earlier this month.) Founded in 2011, Intercom’s first product was a (human-powered) chat box that popped up when you visited a company’s website. And as Intercom’s own story has shown, businesses’ appetites for the automation they enable is only increasing. More automated messaging can be found on companies’ websites and apps than ever before. “Have there ever been any super destructive, sexy technology innovations that haven’t actually worked that way?” he says. “You’re just never going to be able to perpetuate that excitement for the amount of time it actually takes for actual innovation to actually take hold in a market.” In other words, the bots never really went away they just became invisible. Eoghan (pronounced “Owen”) McCabe, co-founder and CEO of the fast-growing marketing startup Intercom, says the collapse was predictable. And so bots largely receded into the background as another Silicon Valley innovation that arrived before its time. It turned out that typing into text boxes - often while trying to guess the appropriate commands - felt frustrating compared to the visual interfaces people were used to. The advantages of conversational interfaces paled next to their drawbacks. But when bots became available the public, the public largely shrugged. Facebook and Microsoft announced major investments into conversational user interfaces, and Slack launched a fund to capitalize on the bots hoping to build on its platform.

The hype cycle for bots exploded in 2016 as developers poured time and money into the dream of personal digital assistants.

Casey newton san francisco