10 Things In Tech You Need To Know This Morning
1. Amazon will announce a smartphone today. Why? Because Amazon wants to control its destiny. We're in Seattle for the announcement, so stay tuned to our site all day for updates.
2. The Amazon smartphone will be an AT&T exclusive.
3. Tesla is now the world's most important auto company. It's changing everything, and everyone else in the auto industry is talking about Tesla.
4. Facebook released a new Snapchat-like app called "Slingshot." There is one major twist, and it's not clear that it's a good twist. To open photos sent to you, you have to send out a photo. Kind of weird.
5. Marissa Mayer spoke at the big ad festival happening in Cannes, but it didn't go over all that well. People on Twitter said it felt canned and forced.
6. A review of what it's like to have one of the cheap 3-D printers in your house. Sounds a lot like the early days for computers. It's pretty neat, and can be really fun for creative people, but there's no killer app that makes it a must have for normal people.
9. The New Yorker has a long story debunking Clayton Christensen's "disruption innovation" theory. We haven't read it, but everyone was talking about it yesterday.
10. Udacity, the online education startup from ex-Googler Sebastian Thrun, is partnering with AT&T on something called a "nanodegree." For $200/month over a 6-12 month period, the nanodegree teaches certain post-high school skills that AT&T wants in new employees. It has reserved 100 openings for people with the nanodegree, and will accept the nanodegree as a credential for entry-level jobs.