The last couple of weeks have been a bit strange in the Alexa development community. My previous post talked about the Alexa Accelerator, and in a way that could be seen as a positive indicator of the state of the platform/space. There's a flipside to a having a vibrant platform, though, which is that it is inevitably going to attract people who see its popularity and its position in the zeitgeist as a vector for shortcutting to some end goal. And indeed, we've been seeing our fair share of that lately as well, and we'll show a few examples of this sort of behavior...

​Last week I had the pleasure of attending Demo Night for the Techstars Alexa Accelerator 2019 cohort. I wanted to share some thoughts on what I saw, not so much in the sense of whose pitch was most on point or which groups I'd expect to be successful, but rather to look at trends that arose (or maybe even more conspicuously - didn't arise) during this year's class.