THE BYTE

Welcome to the BYTE, where we serve up the latest home and tech news from the last week for you to sink your teeth into.

This week we’re taking a BYTE out of the market’s power, a big player finally entering the IoT game, AI, new energy alternatives, and the 2017 top cities. Dig in!

Generally

Staying Put
Millennials have arrived in the housing market and not only that but are the largest group of home buyers.

You Don’t Say…
Not only were millennials the largest home buying group this year but they have actually been the largest for the last four years, according to NAR’s yearly reports. This time around millennials were 34% of the home buyers compared to baby boomers at 30%. Millennials also used a real estate agent about 90% of the time and 73% tried to negotiate with the listing agent for a lower commission compared to the 44% of Gen-Xers that tried. Short story shorter, millennials are buying homes and they are haggling their way through.

That Time Of The Year

Shiny New Apple
Apple had its big convention this past week, WWDC, and actually announced some pretty exciting things. One of the biggest announcements is Apple’s new smart speaker the HomePod. The HomePod is much pricier, at $350, than the other smart home competitors such as the Amazon Echo. They also announced updates to Siri to power your phone and new HomePod. What may have been one of the underplayed but possibly most influential feature down the line is its AR app on the new operating system. It is a smart Augmented Reality app that will help power the future AR apps coming to your phone, such as PokemonGo. With over 1 Billion iPhones having AR apps/capabilities, we could see AR take off in the very near future.

Take Notes

The Robots Are Coming
People much smarter than us at MIT and the University of Oxford have projected when Artificial Intelligence is going to better than humans at pretty much everything. Some jobs are projected to be taken over in the next 15 years, such as retail salespeople, other jobs such as an AI researcher won’t be taken over for at least 75 years. Now granted all of these are just estimates, but things seem to change every day now so maybe these projections aren’t all that off…

Shocking
Alternatives for power are popping up all over the place, whether it be solar panels and off grid home batteries or this new start up, Drift. Drift cuts out the middle man by connecting power producers with residents in New York. They claim it will save consumers 10%-20% while still providing consistent reliable power, without ever having to get the power company involved. They hope to take off in New York and then power the world.

Top Cities
ATKearney released the list of Top Disruptive Innovative Cities. The top three cities on the index were New York, London, and Paris. On the Global Cities Outlook list, San Francisco took the top spot followed by New York and Paris. Paris jumped high in the rankings this year because of improvements in economics within the country as a results of a large growth in foreign direct investments.

Totally Unrelated

My Brain Doesn’t Work
This little baseball fan feels your pain after winning an ICEE drinking competition.