Our Tech Innovation Wish List

Episode Notes

Transcript

The Kennedy-Mighell Report

Our Tech Innovation Wish List

08/26/2016

Intro: Web 2.0, Innovation, Trend, Collaboration, Software… Got the world turning as fast as it can, hear how technology can help, legally speaking with two of the top legal technology experts, authors and lawyers, Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell. Welcome to ‘The Kenney-Mighell Report’, here on the Legal Talk Network.

Dennis Kennedy: And welcome to Episode 174 of ‘The Kenney-Mighell Report’. I am Dennis Kennedy in St. Louis.

Tom Mighell: And I am Tom Mighell in Dallas.

Dennis Kennedy: In our last episode we discussed whether vacations from technology might be a good thing. Well, maybe not for me because I was already complaining to Tom about technologies I wished already existed or if they did exist someone would just point them out to me.

Tom, what’s all on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell: Well, Dennis, in this edition of ‘The Kenney-Mighell Report’, we are going to be sharing our lists and our thoughts on the ways that technology is currently failing us either personally or as lawyers, and the things we think could be done to improve it.

In our second segment, we pondered the very serious topic of why people are freaking out that the iPhone 7 might not come with a headphone jack, and as usual, we will finish up with our parting shots that one tip website or observation that you can start to use the second this podcast is over.

But first, we want to take a look at, I guess, we are going to call our technology wish lists and it’s not our wish list that we would do around the holidays, it’s a little bit different.

Dennis, I think you’ve found another esoteric topic that makes me really think hard to come up with something literate to say. You on the other hand are a big complainer and apparently have tons of ideas about how technology can be better than it is right now. Why don’t you give it a start and tell us why isn’t technology today good enough for you?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, just to comment because I got a laugh out of this topic because I suggested to you is like this totally simple topic and for audience knew you, they would know that I could suggest a topic something like the impact of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, on records archiving and retrieval and you go like, fine, we will record it on a normal day.

Tom Mighell: I can handle that, yeah that’s no problem.

Dennis Kennedy: And then on this one, I am going like, hey, let’s just come up with things like a technology that we wish existed and you are like, well, well, I need I need an extra day, we can’t record when we thought, I need an extra day to prepare. So that was kind of funny.

And I just thought it was like a real simple idea, and the reason that I thought about this topic was, I was driving the other morning to work and it’s crazy out there and I was watching the people in front of me and the highway was jammed with people going, let’s say 70 miles an hour and generally I’d say maybe like between one and three car lengths between each other and people just making shockingly aggressive lane changes and moves that were disturbing to me, but on the other hand were distracting me from the guy who was camped at about half-a-car length behind my back-bumper.

And people may know I was in a car crash a couple years ago, so I have been in and driving does make me nervous but I was sort of — may be think like, well, may be the time of the self-driving car really should be here because I’m fighting the urge just to pull off the road and curl up in a little ball and wait till traffic dies down a little bit, but the self-driving cars have to be — even at this point, have to be doing a better job than what I see out on a highway.

So I think that we are definitely getting closer to the self-driving thing, but I’m really intrigued by that and when I look back, I was thinking about this topic and we’re always seeing some of the self-driving things and I’m on the board on this and I see more articles about lawyers thinking about self-driving cars, and of course, they’re about like, who is the liability, who is going to be responsible for this, how this insurance work, who is going to be sued, all those — and really esoteric questions. I am like, God, it just has to be safer there, I am all in on the self-driving car.

And in my own crash I was thinking about that, so I remember most vividly from the police report was the driver who hit me said, I reached down for my coffee and the next thing I knew of — she was talking about my car, was spinning across the road in front of her and I spun across four lanes of the highway and hit the concrete median, and fortunately, it was okay except for being anxious about ever driving again, but I realized with the safety technology today with the sort of front-facing radar, the lane — the sensor that let you know that you are going out of your lane and the braking that can happen automatically. I don’t think my accident would actually have happened with permanent safety. I think I am really bullish on the self-driving car and also the evolution to it which are these new safety devices.

(00:05:14)

Now, Tom, as I recall, you have this, a newer car than mine and you have a ton of these safety features and I think for you it’s already starting to change the way that you drive.

Tom Mighell: Well, I would say, I don’t know that my car is newer than yours and I will say that it has some of the safety features that you mentioned, but the car I drive is certainly not new enough to have the front-facing radar. I have been in cars where if the car tends to drift to the other lane, I’ve seen it happen in two different ways. I have seen either sound go off or something on the dashboard or the one that’s kind of most — kind of jarring is your seat vibrates and you wonder why the heck the seat is vibrating until you realize you are drifting to the other lane.

I think all of those are good steps forward and ways that can help safety. I think that the self-driving car, I think the stories that you’re seeing just as we’re recording this week, there have been stories whether we believe them it’s true or not but we have I think two different stories of people who have either had a heart attack or some other type of medical problem and have used their self-driving Tesla or some other car that has self-driving features to help navigate them and help them get to the hospital.

So I think that we’re looking at a bunch of different ways in which the new technology for automobiles is going to be helpful in a number of ways. So I’m bullish on that too, I think that the whole notion of the self-driving car is something that to me is a little bit analogous to the idea of auto classification or a predictive coding that we have to get used to the idea that computers can do things as well or better as humans and driving may be one of the last places where that happens. So I still think that it’s an idea that will take a while to catch on but I am encouraged by all of that.

So Dennis, why don’t you try another item from your wish list and let me back-up and say, this is difficult for me not because I am thinking about things that can help with the ways that I think that technology can be better; it’s just that I don’t think about it in the moment, it’s rather I do think about it in the moment, I don’t think about it, I can’t just on demand say, well, here’s the list of things that I’ve been thinking about.

So for the listeners out there you will notice a decided difference that my stuff tends towards the personal, Dennis is actually reaching and stretching out there to how it’s useful to the legal industry as a whole. So we are kind of do in the micro and the macro as part of our wish list items. So Dennis, what have you got next?

Dennis Kennedy: Okay, so my next thing is, I don’t know whether it’s sliders or little dial buttons, but I love the idea of recommendation engines. So from Amazon to LinkedIn, people you may know, all sorts of things like that, I love when people say, if you like this, you’ll also like that or if you bought this, here are some other things or my library will go, here are some other books that you might like because you do that.

And to me, that’s the coolest idea that without having to think about it if somebody said, oh, you read these books by this author, here are these other books that people like you would also want to read. And so, the promise of it is so great, but the reality of it is, I always end up scratching my head, I am like, wait a second.

So recently without getting too personal here, but for travel a lot of people like the ExOfficio underwear which are really great for travel, they dry out really quickly, blah, blah, blah, you read the ads. So I ordered some for my wife before a trip and the next time I went on to Amazon and checked the recommendations, 20 of the first 25 recommendations for me were women’s underwear.

So that’s not exactly what I wanted, I mean, I made a gift and then sometimes you see recommendations were by a TV and then the next set of recommendations are like a bunch of other TVs, you go like, I just bought my TV.

So what I would like to do is, to have this way to really calibrate this stuff to say, hey, this was a gift so let’s dial it down and let’s dial this up so I can make the adjustments in those recommendations, and I see that like in LinkedIn like I said, the people you may know I would like to say I notice that there is a little bit of focus on who I have connected to recently as opposed to people I have been connected to for a long time, maybe I can dial those settings a little bit.

(00:10:03)

And so the notion of like, it should be like an easy thing, like a slider or a dial to kind of fine-tune that so recommendation engines can achieve the promise that I think they have and the people have always talked about, but in reality it seems like they ultimately disappoint you these days.

Tom Mighell: Well, and I am going to cheat off of yours and basically say that my wish list for this is similar to what you say is. I wish that recommendations would work the way that I think they ought to work and I will use three examples where I think that the results are much more disappointing than the promise.

And frankly, Amazon is the first, you had it, but for me, I think it should be a really simple matter for a recommendation engine to be able to — I mean, you have got all this information on me already, you should be able to look at my purchase history, and it happens all the time, I go and I look at — I go and look at about — I am researching a particular technology gadget that I want to get, I look at five or six of them, I choose one, I buy it, and then for the next week my recommendations on Amazon are all the same things that I looked at before. If you are interested in this maybe you are still interested in it. Well, no, I bought one, and you ought to be able to know that I bought one from the purchase history. So I don’t see why that wouldn’t be a hard fix to make.

TripAdvisor is another one. Whenever I want to check out a hotel I go on TripAdvisor just to kind of see what the ratings are, look at some photos that people have taken, to learn more about it, and I will tell you that I probably get three or four emails from TripAdvisor saying, time to make a reservation at that hotel you are interested in, and I think it assumes too much from what we see. I think there is another failure of recommendation engines.

The final one, and I know I am kind of cutting close to the bone here, Dennis, but you and I have had offline conversations about LinkedIn, and when you try to add people to your network, that people you may know, I look at my list, and sure enough, I know all of them, but it doesn’t go far enough to say, these are the people that are in industries that I want to connect in, and it might be that I know the administrative assistant of a lawyer that I used to practice with 20 years ago, but I don’t necessarily need to be connected with her or at least it doesn’t benefit me in the near term to connect with her on LinkedIn.

And so having that dial feature to say, hey, I want to connect more with people in this industry or less with people in this industry or find some way to fine-tune it, I think is a logical step in the next generation of recommendation engines.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, and as you talk about it, my notion of the dialing in could also be like just a direction on criteria. So from Amazon I only want recommendations that are four star or above or that it’s one of the three highest rated or one of the three most popular of its type, that to me is way more useful than — that would be more important to me than it might be to other people.

So my next one is a longtime wish of mine which is what I call a really great social media dashboard, and as I thought about this I realized that somewhat my wish list is really almost close to, Dennis needs to learn how to program and to do some scripting, because I want to really personalize a lot of things and have some functionality that maybe there isn’t a tool — it’s uncommon enough that there won’t be a tool that works.

So here’s my idea of a social media dashboard, it would work in two ways. So one is, it’s one-screen that would pull in all the feeds from all the different social media and allow me to act on those, and there are tools out there that do that. But sort of more important to me is I would like to have the dashboard for what I put out into social media. And in a way this is a content management system but I would like to say what I want to do is I want to write my blog posts and then I want to have it set up in a way that all the things I want to do in connection with that blog post can happen.

And so maybe I have a way of writing, it would be XML tags, frankly, but I might have a dashboard that said, here’s the blog post itself, here’s like a short description, here’s a way to grab the description, plus a graphic, that sort of thing. And then I could say — and then maybe some timing tools as well, and I could say, okay, when a blog post goes out, I have it set up so like once it hits my RSS feed, then just a short description goes out to Twitter, the short description plus a picture, it goes over to Facebook or LinkedIn, and these other things happen and it all takes place in one setting, and I don’t have to do these separate things, or I don’t have to figure out with some sort of script or automation.

(00:15:06)

And I think there are — we’ve talked about if, this and that, and other things like that, I think there are ways to make this happen, but it sort of reminds me of people who tell you, oh, this is easy to do this, it’s like all the WordPerfect 5.1, this is easy to do this, just do a little Ctrl+F8 here, you do this and then it’s a Shift+Ctrl+F7 and boom, you have it; and I just sort of want to have the all-in-one dashboard that reflects my actual behavior in social media, and especially in getting posts out to multiple outlets.

Tom Mighell: Well, I think this may not be helpful to you but those people who use WordPress blogs there are so many different add-ins, many of which may do exactly what you are talking about.

I know that my — I will say little used blog, I do have a WordPress blog that has a plug-in for Twitter, so that every time I have a post publish, whether I publish it immediately or whether I schedule it to post another time then it posts automatically to Twitter that I’ve got a new post and I can customize how I want that to have it be seen.

So I would imagine that with a little research you may find that someone may be coming up with that, now should that be part of the WordPress platform to begin with, there should be something that someone else is coming up with as kind of an all-in-one package, I think that’s probably a good question.

My next one is a wish list item that I think a lot of people have and it may sound like I am being unfair when I start it, but my wish list is that I want voice recognition to get good, and when I mean “good”, I mean really good, and I want it to be smart. To be fair, and I guess I should qualify and say, there is some voice recognition out there that’s really good. Some of the things I am going to talk about in a second are really good.

Dragon Dictation, if you use Dragon Dictation to dictate letters to do things, it’s really good, it can learn, has good accuracy when you want to dictate. But I think what I am thinking of is, not just voice recognition for the purpose of being able to capture what you have to say and put it in a text message or an email or a document or something like that, I want to talk about voice recognition for services that are actually going to act on that information and do something about it. I am talking about Siri and Google Now and Amazon Echo, and there is no question that their voice recognition is better than it used to be, but I still think that it’s hit-and-miss.

I use my Amazon Echo as an example, there are times when it kind of hears only what it wants to hear or that it only has a certain way of responding, and I think that part of that’s a problem with the smartness of the tool. They are pretty smart but I want them to be smarter.

Now give my example about the Echo. I frequently use the Amazon Echo to reorder things that I’ve previously bought on Amazon and one of these is a particular skin-care product that I use. I buy it in bulk because I don’t need to go buy it at the store and it’s a very simple process, and usually I can just say to the Echo, Please reorder this, it confirms it, I say, Yes, and it says, Order Placed.

Well lately, it tried to give me the wrong product and then when I — I told them that wasn’t the right one, the next one that it tried to give me was actually a book with the name of the product in it and it was a fictional book, a young adult fictional book which was not relevant at all, and I found out later that the product that I was trying to order was out of stock, it wasn’t available at all. And this is my wish list here, how hard would it be for Amazon to configure the Echo so that it would say, “This item is currently –” “the item that you ordered in the past is currently out of stock, would you like to order from a different source?” or something like that, I think that it doesn’t go far enough in being smart.

I like how smart Google Now has gotten where you can ask it to say, “Who is the 40th President of the United States?” And then once it answers you with Ronald Reagan, all you have to do is say, “Where did he go to college?” And it will pick up the context of that and answer that question.

I know we’ve talked about this in the podcast before, but this is where I think I’d really like to see the Amazon pick up its game and get smarter about things, and to a certain extent all voice recognition be able to not only understand the words that I am saying but also the context of what I am saying.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, I think you are right on with that one. I think let’s do a little lightning round here. So I have another sort of dashboard notion, but in this comes a time that you and I were trying to find, I guess it was page proofs for our collaboration book and we have realized that although they probably exist somewhere that we weren’t able to put our hands on it, and so, you realize that did we do that stuff in Google Docs, is that in — do I have copy somewhere in Gmail that was sent to me?

(00:19:59)

Is that in Dropbox, is that on like an archive somewhere or is it on a different computer? And so, I was thinking, you know what would be great is if there were a better way that I could look across all the places that I might store things, especially the Dropboxes, the Google Drives, the iCloud, all those sorts of things in addition to my backups and the local drives as well.

As it turns out I was talking to one of my friends at a company called Litéra that I have always liked and they were actually doing this that you can do in a business setting with some really cool controls where you can look and you can find documents that are both local and in the standard cloud drives, there’s tools called Ekta, and they are going to do an individual version as well, but I think in a business setting it’s kind of interesting because then I think you can drive your users to a certain, say Dropbox or other of the shared drive tools that you trust or that you like or you could kind of minimize and then people can see everything in one place and then you as a firm have control over what’s there.

So it’s kind of a cool thing where people are starting to bring into being the idea I have, which is, again sort of a dashboard for all my files, no matter where they are located.

Tom Mighell: And my next is, may be less technology and more just clothing. I am starting and we are going to talk in our second segment a little bit about wireless headphones but I find it very difficult to find a pair of wireless ear-buds that actually fit, and maybe this is a very personal item on my wish list but I’ve got to say I cannot find ear-buds that will fit my ear and I’m not going to go into a lot of detail but I will say that one ear-bud fits just fine, the other one feels like it’s going to fall out.

That’s an issue with my anatomy that I can’t fix, but I find that I’m usually going to the largest one and it never fits, it’s always falling out and it seems to me that there are high-end companies out there that will actually create a mold of your ear, they’ll custom-fit ear-buds to your liking and maybe it is hard to do that and mass-produce it and have it to where it’s something that you could buy, but I pay a couple of hundred bucks for a good quality ear-bud to be that custom-fit to have as it is I either get good quality ear-buds that don’t fit or I get low quality ear-buds that are custom-fit, I kind of would like them to meet somewhere in the middle and I just want to have some wireless ear-buds that fit.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, I think that custom things are more in the thousand dollar range these days —

Tom Mighell: That’s true.

Dennis Kennedy: — and boy, you’d hate to leave those on a plane or somewhere, which is sort of the tendency on ear-buds anyway.

My other one relates back to the other thing, and again, this is something where may be the answer is, Dennis needs to learn to code a little bit, but obviously, I don’t have the time to do that but I want super-simple data analytics tools. And this could be another WordPerfect 5.1 thing where people say, oh, all you need to do is to go into Google Analytics and do this and go down to this page and do these things, and pull these things and pull out into a spreadsheet, but what I would like to know is to just simple analytics like, if I am on LinkedIn, I want to know like if I send out invitations, how many of those come back, can I measure something like success rate, can I map that over time on my email or my things I want to map out or analyze, who’s interested the other day of like maybe I could rate some of the different companies about how many times I have to actually push Unsubscribe before the emails stop coming to me and Condé Nast, you know who you are. I think that number has to be somewhere around infinity, I don’t think I am ever going to be able to shut those off, but I think that kind of simple data analytics tool that I can turn on; some of the things that I have.

We talked a little bit about this time when we did the machine learning on a very simple basis, but it would be nice to do some of that for things we do on a regular basis where it would just be kind of nice to get some idea of numbers.

Tom Mighell: The next item on my list is, more tablet or touch versions of legal apps. I’m still amazed at the legal software developers that either don’t have their own tablet app or even an app that is touch-enabled. If we aren’t already there we are moving very quickly toward a mobile-first user preference and I just don’t think that a lot of the legal software providers are doing a great job of keeping up with that.

I think it took most of the cloud-based practice management providers years to come out with an iPad app. I kept asking where is the iPad app, where is it? I think that people are using mobile devices more often; iPads or phones and I think the e-discovery industry is another area where apps are sparse. Some review platforms have their own apps but you have to be a customer of that company to use them.

(00:24:56)

The ability to conduct a document review on a tablet or just to check on the status of a review on your phone I think is something that a lot of e-discovery lawyers would like to have a little bit more ability to do, and I think that the tools out there are just either too few and far between or too limited. I think some of the tools, the ones that are out there, actually are quite good, but you have to, again, be a customer of that company. I would like to see more start to develop tools for their own services.

Dennis Kennedy: And my last one, which I realized now may be the perfect lead in to our next segment is, because I may be talking about something that will soon be obsolete, but I use a DVR, and so I sort of capture programs and watch it in the way people normally do with DVRs.

And the thing that’s always bothered me is that I know there are certain movies I would like to grab or certain shows and I sort of have this, what I call like a 12-day timeframe that I can set things out. So I may see that a show is coming out in say like in a month or two, and then I have to remember to do that, or there might be some movie, and I just like to have this wish list, and then if it ever showed up where it could be recorded, the DVR would just record it.

As I am saying this, and I was thinking about this, I realized that ultimately the answer is going to be like, why are you using a DVR, you just need a wish list with an on-demand service and then just pick whatever you want, and so that issue may go away. But that is one that has always frustrated me, because it would just be nice to have that already in place, so I don’t have to fool with it.

Tom Mighell: Yeah, I was going to give you two words, either Apple TV or Roku; that’s three words I guess.

Anyway, my last one, I will go very quickly, because this wish list is something that I imagine a lot of people have and that’s really the elimination of passwords. And this is more than just a technology wish list item, but it has been a little bit more in the news lately, in that one of the password managers out there, Dashlane has entered into some type of partnership with Google to do what they call YOLO. You may think that is You Only Live Once, but it really in this context means You Only Login Once, and they are hoping to get other password managers on board. I am not sure exactly what that is, but the goal is to try and make passwords easier.

Google is also working on something they call the Trust API, which is a way of using a combination of factors, not just your fingerprint, not just your retina, but your location and facial recognition, your typing patterns, how you hold a phone, things like that, that in combination determine your identity and you get a trust score depending on what it was you were trying to log into, like a banking website or app would have a much higher trust score than other things.

I am really interested to see where this goes. I know that it’s going to be hard to get rid of passwords, but at least making them easier I think should be a goal of both the software developers as well as some of these platforms that we are having to use passwords on.

Dennis Kennedy: And to put in a good word for my employer MasterCard, watch what we are doing these days in that space.

So let’s wrap it up Tom, I think there was actually a lot more to talk about there, and maybe some topics we can revisit in the future.

Tom Mighell: I think so too. If any of you out there listening have anything on your wish list, give us a holler, we will give you the contact information at the end of the podcast, give us a holler and we will try to mention it on an upcoming episode.

But before we move on to our next segment, let’s take a quick break for a message from our sponsor.

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Tom Mighell: And now let’s get back to The Kennedy-Mighell Report. I am Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy: And I am Dennis Kennedy. Tom suggested, as you know, that we talk about the big, and I mean big negative reaction to rumors of Apple’s iPhone 7 not having a physical earphone jack. And I just saw a blog post today where people are talking about how tremendous the negative reaction was.

Well, when Tom mentioned this topic to me I actually laughed out loud and took off my Bluetooth headphones that I was wearing to think about it. Ha-ha-ha!

I think it is a serious topic for many. I think on a faster pace than ever before, traditional technologies do disappear. Tom, would you hand me a floppy disk please. I am not going to make you laugh tonight, I can tell. Is this an important development or just another sign of things to come that people are just going to have to get used to and then realize after a very short time they don’t even miss it?

(00:30:05)

Tom Mighell: So I think laugh all you want Dennis, but I will take you back to a time, what, has it been two years, two years, three years when Google Reader went away, and the despondence that I felt emanating from you was palpable. And I bet you don’t even miss it now, although that may be a subject of a further podcast or a further B segment.

But to catch everybody up real quick, the iPhone 7 is scheduled to come out, to ship in September, maybe October and the rumor mill has been very hot and heavy that it will come without a headphone jack. The thought is that it will come with earbuds that either fit into the lightning port of your phone or maybe earbuds and a dongle, regular earbuds fit into the dongle, the dongle fits into your lightning port, what would be clear is that you probably could no longer listen to something and charge your phone at the same time, unless you invest in some form of Bluetooth wireless speakers.

There has been a lot of uproar about this, believe it or not, a couple of obvious complaints; Bluetooth headphones are good, they are not great, I think that they still could be better. You may now have to buy headphones that only work on the iPhone and don’t work on anything else, which may or may not be a problem for you.

And then finally, the other complaint is, is anybody really asking for this, is this more of just an Apple grab that they want to grab. And I will say that the real issue Dennis is what you identified at the outset, no matter how much there is an uproar about this, technology changes, we either have to change with it or give up the technology or find another alternative to what we are doing. You and I both had to find alternatives to Google Reader. I don’t know about you; I have been happy with the change that I have made, and I don’t know or remember Google Reader that much anymore.

I made a smooth translation from the floppy disk, to the USB drive, to cloud services, and I think Apple has made a fortune making changes that nobody asked for. So I think embracing the change is not a bad thing.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting to look through all the things that we thought were so essential that now seem irrelevant are things we just are trying to get rid of; CDs, DVDs, all those sorts of things were really important at the time. So I think the headphone thing is sort of interesting to me, and I think one reason people do complain is, especially people who spend hundreds of dollars on really nice headphones, but typically if you are doing that, you probably don’t listen to MP3s on an iPhone anyway.

So there are some issues there about what you already have invested. It seems like every new technology there is going to be an adapter, so that doesn’t really seem like a big concern of mine. I think the move is toward Bluetooth and it is really nice wearing Bluetooth headphones, because they don’t get tangled up, you don’t get caught on something, if you are riding a bike or something. I mean the headphone wires or the earbud wires can be a real problem if you are riding a bike. So those are all good.

I would say the downside of Bluetooth headphones, super easy to misplace and lose, but we all learn how to deal with that. What’s kind of more interesting to me, and I don’t know enough about at this point, but it’s the use of the lightning port that is really interesting to me, because I think it allows more things to happen with the headphones.

And I sort of have always conceived of Apple’s Beats purchase as the headphones being like the second piece of wearables after the watch. And so using that lightning connector may allow more things to happen to your phone’s headphones, earbuds. And so as a platform it may make things really interesting, whereas the old earphone jack pretty does what it does.

Now, it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip, website or observation you can use the second this podcast ends. Tom, take it away.

Tom Mighell: So my parting shot is a little frivolous this week, but it is an app that has kind of — it started out with iOS and now moved over to Android and I think that the hype is justified. I have always looked at apps for your photos that it can apply a filter to it. I have looked at them very skeptically, making something look like a vintage or like a grunge photo; really didn’t do a lot for me.

But there is a relatively new app out there called Prisma, P-R-I-S-M-A and Prisma actually will turn your photo into artwork, depending on the style you want; whether you want to have it as an impressionist painting or you wanted something more modern. And it really does some interesting things with the pictures that you have. I have seen people post pictures that are just beautiful as paintings and it’s a really interesting app, with lots of filters that can do amazing things with your photos.

(00:34:58)

There is another app out there I have not tried called Artisto, A-R-T-I-S-T-O, that claims to do the same thing with your videos, will make it like a cartoon, something similar to that, but either of them, if you want to have a little bit of fun with your photos, Prisma or Artisto are I think definitely worth a download.

Dennis Kennedy: And I downloaded this week, although I haven’t had the opportunity to try it yet.

So, interesting development for me in 2016 is the email newsletter. And so I am really fond of an email newsletter called Farnam Street.

And then our friends, I like to call them our friends, because we talk about them all the time and read this site all the time, Cool Tools, have started an email newsletter, and the idea is there are sort of like six things, and I actually think I got the recommendation for Prisma out of Recomendo, which is the name of their newsletter, email newsletter, R-E-C-O-M-E-N-D-O. And it’s just kind of a nice six short paragraphs of some interesting tools in different categories and things to read, think about, try, and actually a very nice use of the email newsletter format after a time where I would have thought it was dead.

Tom Mighell: And even though I find myself very skeptical about the idea of email newsletters coming back, I raced right out and subscribed to Recomendo, and look forward to getting it and getting more information from them.

So that wraps it up for this edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. You can find the show notes for this episode at  HYPERLINK “http://www.tkmreport.com” tkmreport.com.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or on the Legal Talk Network site, where you can find archives of all of our previous podcasts as well.

If you would like to get in touch with us, please email us at  HYPERLINK “http://[email protected]” http://[email protected] or send us a tweet. I am @TomMighell and Dennis is @denniskennedy. So until the next podcast, I am Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy: And I am Dennis Kennedy. And you have been listening to The Kennedy-Mighell Report, a Podcast on Legal Technology with an Internet focus. Help us out by telling a couple of your friends and colleagues about the podcast.

Outro: Thanks for listening to The Kennedy-Mighell Report. Check out Dennis and Tom’s book, ‘The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together’ from ABA Books or Amazon, and join us every other week for another edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report, only on the Legal Talk Network.

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