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The Year of the Smart Speaker and More on CHOM 97.7 FM

Every Monday morning at 7:10 am, I am a guest contributor on CHOM 97.7 FM radio out of Montreal (home base). It’s not a long segment – about 10 minutes every week – about everything that is happening in the world of technology and digital media. The good folks at CHOM 97.7 FM are posting these segments weekly on i Heart Radio, if you’re interested in hearing more of me blathering away about what’s going on in the digital world. I’m really excited about this opportunity, because this is the radio station that I grew up listening to, and it really is a fun treat to be invited to the Mornings Rock with Terry DiMonte morning show. The segment is called, CTRL ALT Delete with Mitch Joel.

This week we discussed:

The big hit over the holiday season was (no surprise) smart speakers. These interactive voice devices are taking over. Smart speakers grew by 78% in 2018. Nearly one in ten people got a smart speaker over the holidays. There’s close to 120 million of them in circulation in the US, according to my friends at Edison Research and NPR. For comparison: smartphone shipments shrunk 6% globally in the third quarter of 2018. Amazon and Google hold about 85% of the market. What this means? 21% of the US population now own a smart speaker. In Canada, we’re at close to 6 million smart speaker users, which is over 18% of Internet users. Welcome to the mass market.
Do you love this idea or hate it? A dad in the UK was so fed up with his kid’s lack of communication and response time, that he decided to develop an app called ReplyASAP. The app allows users to send an urgent message that cannot be ignored without the sender knowing it. When the recipient receives a message from the sender, an alarm goes off which can be shut off by choosing one of the options – either snooze or cancel it. The recipient cannot close the app without choosing one of the buttons. It then sends the response back to the sender, who is informed of the button that was pushed. It’s only on Google Play for now (and has been downloaded close to 100,000 times).
App of the Week: Remove.bg. Remove.bg allows you to remove backgrounds from almost every image (for free).

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.