It should be holiday season by now, but the Christmas and Summer holidays productivity downturn seemed to cease two to three years ago (I’m basing this on my experience in the UK).

This is what I’ve read recently:

Banks could be sheepdogs (like Apple) – A great article describing how banks are utilities, but could become extremely important in the Identity revolution

Drone shooting: US home-owner faces charges – BBC News – A surprising story about a man who shot down a drone in the US, which flew over his house several times

Google Adds 8 Carriers To Its Android For Work Partner Ecosystem – I don’t know why we’re still obsessed with separating personal and professional digital lives

What Gartner’s Bimodal IT Model Means to Enterprise CIOs | CIO – We’ve talked a lot about Bimodal IT at work recently. This is a good introductory article

3D Xpoint memory: Faster-than-flash storage unveiled – BBC News – Interesting article on how to get faster memory

Windows 10 Tip: Move Apps Between Multiple Desktops – I’ve been using Windows 10 for more than 6 months and hardly used multiple desktops until I read this article

Google’s immersive storytelling app launches on iOS – Google Cardboard just keeps improving. We downloaded a 360 movie and it’s really good, up until you’re looking for where the main story is happening!

10 VC Firms Betting Big on Bitcoin and the Blockchain – You can choose whether to believe this story or not

MIT Technology Review’s 50 Smartest Companies 2015, from Tesla to Uber | MIT Technology Review – A great browsing page, with some clever companies in here

Reinventing Performance Management – HBR – A work colleague showed me this and it’s a refreshing change

How the ‘invisible’ Wimbledon sponsors used digital to make their mark | Marketing Magazine – Wimbledon would prefer the term clean than invisible, but the point is, sometimes sponsorship looks nicer when it’s not cluttered

Why The Apple Watch Is Flopping | Co.Design | business + design – My favourite article about Apple Watch sales. I bought more Apple shares recently

Doc Searls Weblog · The Giant Zero – A brilliantly thought out article about navigating around the Internet, and some good discussion in the comments section

Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Tech Trends for 2015 – Nothing new, but a quick (20 seconds) presentation on what Gartner thinks are important

Finextra: Finextra news: Greeks flock to Bitcoin – No sooner had this article appeared when counter stories started appearing

Data Science Insights – Building Brains: Learning from data – YouTube – I went to this lecture and found it so interesting. I wish I was back at university.