14. Robots Remake the Workplace: The Photo Gallery—Pictures from our April 11 forum on the new roles robots are playing in warehouses, hospitals, offices, factories, and other settings.
15. Google’s Anti-Aging Startup, Calico, Snags Big Names: Barron, Botstein—A breaking-news report from Xconomy’s national life sciences editor, Luke Timmerman, on key hires at the ambitious new Google-funded biotech initiative.
The Top 10 Stories of 2013 at Xperience
1. I’m Returning My iPad Mini. These Pictures Show Why.—Before the second-generation iPad mini, released this November, there was the first-generation mini, whose low-resolution screen made it unusable, from my point of view.
2. Where Have All the Gadgets Gone?—For this photo feature, I gathered every device I own that contains a microchip in my living room and snapped a picture. I then compared the image to a similar photo taken in 2005. My conclusion: You can do a lot more today with a lot fewer gadgets.
3. What Makes an App Awesome? A Case Study with Mokriya Craigslist—Sunil Kanderi, CEO of mobile app development studio Mokriya, gave me a behind-the-scenes look at how his company developed its popular app for browsing Craiglist.
4. Don’t Panic, But We’ve Passed Peak Apple. And Google. And Facebook.—In this controversial column, I argued that it’s unreasonable to expect any more big, groundbreaking innovations from these three iconic companies.
5. Please, Keep Paying $80 a Month for Cable So I Can Enjoy Cheap TV—This tongue-in-cheek letter to cable subscribers tried to make a serious point: if you’re unhappy with the outrageous bills from your cable provider, you can always vote with your feet and switch to Internet-only video viewing experiences.
6. Battle of the Bluetooth Speakers: Big Sound in Small Packages—I reviewed six different portable Bluetooth speaker products, from Boombotix, Outdoor Tech, BOOM, Jawbone, Native Union, and Definitive Technology.
7. Do You Need an Extended Warranty? Do the Math, Says SquareTrade—A feature on SquareTrade, which is trying to reverse the poor reputation of the extended-warranty industry through lower prices and better customer service.
8. 11 Reasons Why Flickr, Not Facebook, Is the Place to Put Your Photos—Friends don’t let their friends use Facebook as a long-term photo storage solution. Flickr, where I’ve been storing thousands of photos since 2004, had one foot in the grave, and this piece looked at the changes this year that brought it back.
9. How Lytro is Shifting our Perspective on Photography—A look at the revolutionary light-field camera from Lytro, which not only allows you to refocus pictures after they’ve been shot, but captures information that lets you reconstruct a scene in three dimensions.
10. Knowledge When You Need It: Lynda.com and the Rise of Online Ed—A feature on Lynda.com, which started building a vast online archive of training and education videos long before “edtech” and MOOCs became cool.
