🎄Special Christmas Issue — Gift ideas, Apple refused to buy Tesla? UMO Design School and Hand picked bytes

UMO Design
6 min readDec 25, 2020

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I had to put the Christmas tree icon there in the headline! It’s that time of the year where temperatures drop, people start relaxing and slowly easing into the next year! Finally in just a week we put all the 2020 madness behind and move on. At the same time I would urge you not to be reckless in your celebrations as COVID still strongly prevails. It’s great news that we are getting closer to making the vaccine a reality but it is going to take a while. Until then let’s keep this virtual remote thing going! Rocking the remote gig is now a new norm I guess, surely it’s working out well for most. It sure worked out well for us last week with UXI20 ;)

Alright, this is not just another email wishing you a merry Christmas! Btw Merry Christmas! 🎄 Here I go with the tree again! We are taking a new shape for a new beginning, our focus at UMO is now drifting closer and closer to the Design School where we aim to create purpose driven designers and bring in design awareness at a grass root level. We are very excited to be offering courses from Jan 2021. We are so looking forward to the see how attendees of the school will go on to create loads of impact on our society.

With that said, let’s jump in, we have crafted some amazing stories for you in this issue of Xabytes!

P.S: If you missed out on attending the UXI20 conference, we’ve got you covered — you can purchase it now at a highly discounted price! Scroll to bottom.

Hand-picked bytes for you

Hand picked bytes finally makes a comeback after many weeks of UXI20 content. If you are new here, in hand picked bytes we pick up some very interesting articles on various areas not just design and we try to write about it from a design perspective or at least provoke a thought.

Xabytes — (Xa)Bytes get it?

Honk messaging app without a send button for iOS!honk.me

Honk is the all-new way to chat with your friends in real time, with messages shown live as you type.

What a new interesting messaging experience to offer users, you send messages and react to messages in real time!

How Bad Is Your Spotify?pudding.cool

Pudding’s sophisticated A.I. judges your awful taste in music. A.I. trained by Mike Lacher & Matt Daniels.

As Spotify wraps up 2020 with interesting stories of ‘How you listened’ do you dare to take this? I’m stumped by the answers I got! It seriously judges your taste in music.

Sony is pulling Cyberpunk 2077 from the PlayStation Store and offering full refunds

www.theverge.com

Sony is pulling Cyberpunk 2077 from the PlayStation Store and offering full refunds for anyone who bought the game from the digital storefront. The move comes days after Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red said people unsatisfied with their purchase should request a refund, but many were unable to get refunds from Sony.

You should also note that recently Sony and Microsoft both rated Cyberpunk to be one of their top games! Meanwhile, CD Projekt Red’s stock price has lost a third of its value since the day reviews of players having seizures who suffer from photosensitivity went live.

What kind of a use case is this? Crazy!

Tim Cook refused to take a meeting with Elon to buy Tesla?

How much more crazier can this get? Is this a mistake of the century or a big apple style business move? If you didn’t know this- there are many rumours that apple will release a self driving capable electric car next year and launch it by 2024. Elon claims the rumoured battery tech which apple is supposed to use in their car is already in use at Tesla. While we are on the subject of Tesla, in other news- Tesla gets into the infamous S&P 500 index making Elon richer by billions of dollars over night.

Tesla and Apple both are widely regarded as design/product centric companies. What can we look forward from them in the future? Surely exciting times for designers ahead!

On a related note, also read about the privacy war between Apple and Facebook!

Opinion | Facebook’s Tone-Deaf Attack on Apple

www.nytimes.com

The company declared in newspaper ads that it was “standing up to Apple.” It’s a desperate ploy that’s unlikely to work.

What’s your stand on this privacy war between Apple and Facebook. Whose side are you on? Apple claims it should be very easy for user to decide all the tracking applications do on their devices, I hope you saw that long list. It’s really long! On the other hand, Facebook claims with this iOS update it’s going to effect small business and make it more expensive for them to use the internet!

Gift Ideas for you!

10 CEOs on the books they’re gifting this holiday seasonwww.fastcompany.com
From celebrity memoirs to timely reads on social justice to entrepreneur essentials, these are the books executives are eager to share this year.

The ultimate 2020 Christmas gift guide for artists and designers www.creativeboom.com
Some of us might not be able to see our family and friends this Christmas, thanks to a little damn virus that’s going around, but we can still treat t…

2020 Holiday Gift Guide: The most creative, unique giftswww.fastcompany.com
The annual Co.Design gift guide is here to brighten up your holiday shopping in the strangest of all years with 43 creative and unique ideas.

📖 This is the time of the year when many sure like to spend their holiday reading a book. This holiday I will be reading ‘Psychology of Money’ by Morgan Housel. It’s been highly recommend by some avid friendly book worms of mine! It is a huge leap from what I usually ready but I reckon any lesson about Money is a good lesson! In the next couple of newsletters I will try and sum it up if you are interested in that sort of thing. Tweet to us what you are reading this holiday!

We’ve got Jobs for you!www.umo.design

Find your dream job, its been curated to post suitable jobs! It’s absolutely free. Recruiters can post jobs as well!

UX Focused Organisations which participated in UXI20

www.ux-india.org

Check out organisations which participated in UXINDIA 2020. Was your org part of it?

School — UMO Design Foundationwww.umo.design

UMO Design School courses and masterclasses help individuals and teams build their innovation and design muscles through cohort and experiential learning experiences that result in real impact.

Courses start in Jan 2021. Have you signed up yet?

UXI20 — Purchase recorded talks

Buy UXI20 Replay videoswww.umodesign.school

UXI20 — International Conference on User Experience Design (Virtual), so we’re making the six days of enthralling 50 talks: keynotes, career talks, storytelling sessions, and movies on ‘empathy’ available on-demand for you at a highly discounted price!

Registered attendees will get free access to watch presentations at their own pace. On-demand content will remain available for viewing for three months!

What you’ll get:

  • 6 days of content
  • 50 talks from design leaders
  • Panel Discussions
  • UX in emerging tech, Design Systems, Processes, UI, Social Impact etc.

Wishing you a safe and a joyful Christmas! See you next week with another special for New Year.

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UMO Design
UMO Design

Written by UMO Design

UMO Design Foundation, UMO is a non-profit org, working towards design awareness and exchange of design sensibilities through interactions. www.umo.design