Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi: “No, no, no. We’re not gonna go vertical. Just like Amazon sells third-party goods, we are going to also offer third-party transportation services. So, we wanna kinda be the Amazon for transportation, and we want to offer the BART as an alternative. There’s a company called Masabi that is connecting Metro, etc., into a payment system. So we want you to be able to say, “Should I take the BART? Should I take a bike? Should I take an Uber?” All of it to be real-time information, all of it to be optimized for you, and all of it to be done with the push of a button.”

stratechery.com/2018/ubers-bundles/

Uber’s Bundles

Uber had a good strategy, but its crisis meant Lyft had new life and the strategy was no longer workable. Now the company is pursuing something new, even though it is more complicated.

“All of the critical ways we define ourselves are being changed by our relationship to technology. To suggest that technology must be designed strictly around what people want is missing the central theme of our time: We crave experiences that are driven by technology. And from this, technology has become inseparable from who we are, and from any notion of what we want.”

www.fastcompany.com/90208681/the-myth-of-human-centered-design

The myth of human-centered design

The conventional interpretation of human-centered design wildly oversimplifies the relationship between people and technology. It’s time for a more nuanced approach, writes argodesign’s Mark Rolston.

В последнее время много движа / исков / законов / турбулентности в области gig economy. То, что изначально маркетировалось как “свобода выбирать свое время”, “удобный график” и “работай когда и где хочешь”, постепенно стало гонкой на выживаение. Компании делают гиг-экономику максимально эффективной, но без ожидаемых социальных благ и гарантий. Financial Time сделало игру, в которой можно попробовать выжить в современном мире будучи водитлем Лифта или Убера. У вас получится?

ig.ft.com/uber-game/

The Uber Game

Can you make it in the gig economy?

🇷🇺 минутка анонсов. G8 - международный фестиваль креативных индустрий, где работы участников оценивают профессионалы международного рынка. Самое классное в этой затее - подать работу на конкурс стоить не сотни долларов, а всего лишь $1. Дедлайн по подаче - 1 сентября. В этом году буду в жюри конкурса.

2018.ggggggggfest.com/ru/nominations

G8

Международный фестиваль digital. Самые известные профессионалы зарубежного рынка оценивают ваши идеи. Стоимость участия – $1.

Have you noticed you don’t get as many likes on your news feeds when you post something? It has a very tangible reason:

“That’s the thing about Stories, though: while more people may use Instagram because of Stories, some significant number of people view Stories instead of the Instagram News Feed, or both in place of the Facebook News Feed. In the long run that is fine by Facebook — better to have users on your properties than not — but the very same user not viewing the News Feed, particularly the Facebook News Feed, may simply not be as valuable, at least for now.”

stratechery.com/2018/facebooks-story-problem-and-opportunity/

Facebook’s Story Problem — and Opportunity

Snapchat is losing users, and it seems clear the biggest reason is Instagram Stories: that is a win for Facebook, but the pain in advertising may be substantial.

“Can entire societies succumb to infantilization? Frankfurt School scholars such as Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm and other critical theorists suggest that – like individuals – a society can also suffer from arrested development. In their view, adults’ failure to reach emotional, social or cognitive maturity is not due to individual shortcomings.”

theconversation.com/the-infantilization-of-western-culture-99556

The infantilization of Western culture

Our social institutions and politics suffer from a collective arrested development – and our relationship to technology has only exacerbated this trend.

“If I had to single out a particular bias as the most pervasive and damaging, it would probably be confirmation bias. That’s the effect that leads us to look for evidence confirming what we already think or suspect, to view facts and ideas we encounter as further confirmation, and to discount or ignore any piece of evidence that seems to support an alternate view. Confirmation bias shows up most blatantly in our current political divide, where each side seems unable to allow that the other side is right about anything.”

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/cognitive-bias/565775/

The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your Brain

Science suggests we’re hardwired to delude ourselves. Can we do anything about it?

“Today, Daskalakis’ contributions have been recognized with the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize, which is awarded every four years and is considered one of the highest honors in theoretical computer science. The award cites his “powerful body of results” that explicate core questions in economics about how rational players behave in games and markets, as well as his more recent work in machine learning.

“I really can’t think of anyone else who has been a leader and influencer in so many areas,” said Éva Tardos, a computer scientist at Cornell University. “It’s amazing and it’s impressive.””

www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientist-constantinos-daskalakis-wins-nevanlinna-prize-20180801/

A Poet of Computation Who Uncovers Distant Truths

The theoretical computer scientist Constantinos Daskalakis has won the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize for explicating core questions in game theory and machine learning.

↑ On poetic computation

That one time explaining a joke is actually more awesome than a joke itself pudding.cool/2018/02/stand-up/

The Structure of Stand-Up Comedy

The genius of Ali Wong’s Netflix special.

“Apple’s $1 trillion cap is equal to about 5 percent of the total gross domestic product of the United States in 2018,” said David Kass, professor of finance at the University of Maryland. “That puts this company in perspective.”

www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/apple-is-the-first-1-trillion-company-in-history/2018/08/02/ea3e7a02-9599-11e8-a679-b09212fb69c2_story.html

“Whereas previous generations were allowed to simply play after school and form close social bonds, many kids today are raised by fearful and overworked parents who insist their kids either attend a regimented afterschool program or stay behind lock and key at home.

We shouldn’t be surprised when the confinement kids find themselves in today often yields behaviors we don’t understand and don’t like. Games satisfy psychological needs other areas of life are not satiating.”

www.nirandfar.com/2018/07/kids-video-game-obsession.html

Kids’ Video Game Obsession Isn’t Really About Video Games. It’s About Unmet Psychological Needs.

Fortnite has created concern about technology addiction. However, when people say they are addicted to chocolate, they are generally not addicted.

“for all of the company’s travails and controversies over the past few years, [Facebook’s] moats are deeper than ever, its money-making potential not only huge but growing both internally and secularly; to that end, what is perhaps most distressing of all to would-be competitors are in fact this quarter’s results: at the end of the day Facebook took a massive hit by choice; the company is not maximizing the short-term, it is spending the money and suppressing its revenue potential in favor of becoming more impenetrable than ever.“

stratechery.com/2018/facebook-lenses/

Facebook Lenses

Facebook was down dramatically after its last earnings; to decide if it is justified it is worth looking at the company through many different lenses, both financial and strategic.

Meet Telegram Passport – a unified authorization method for services that require personal identification. telegram.org/blog/passport

“In his 2001 book Rational Ritual, the academic Michael Suk-Young Chwe argued that advertising solves what economists call a “co-ordination problem”. It helps us to see the world as others see it, and adapt our behaviour accordingly. If I know that a particular beer brand is associated with “quality” in the eyes of most people in the bar, then I will find it easier to drink it in public, regardless of my own personal preference, presuming I even have one. That wouldn’t be the case if I didn’t know that those people have seen the same ads as me. Being able to solve a problem like that is highly valuable for a brand, which is one reason why the cost of Super Bowl TV advertising has risen so steeply in the era of the internet: a 30-second commercial in 2018 cost about $5m, up from $1m in 1995. Messages can be microtargeted, but meaning has to be mass-produced.”

www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/internet/2018/07/death-don-draper

The death of Don Draper

Advertising, once a creative industry, is now a data-driven business reliant on algorithms. The implications are deeply sinister – not only for the consumer but for democracy itself.

“There’s three job opportunities coming in the future,” says Avi Goldfarb, coauthor of Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. He divides them up into people who build artificial intelligence, people who tell the machines what to do and determine what to do with their output, and, finally, celebrities. This last category comprises actors, sports players, artists, writers, and other such luminaries surrounding the entertainment industry.”

www.fastcompany.com/40585503/how-to-prepare-your-kids-for-jobs-that-dont-exist-yet

How to prepare your kids for jobs that don’t exist yet

Artificial Intelligence will rule the jobs of the future, so learning how to work with it will be key. But the skills needed might not be what you expect.

“Understanding how much your customers actually use and depend on your product is the best indicator of happiness. Engaged customers are more likely to renew their contract — which helps to keep your retention numbers steady. They’re also more likely to tell others about their experience with your product, which improves top-line growth.”

techcrunch.com/2018/06/19/why-startups-cant-afford-to-ignore-customer-retention/

Why startups can’t afford to ignore customer retention

Venture-backed companies must walk the line between fast growth and efficient growth. Even as VCs value high-quality revenue, companies are still held to a minimum growth rate. To achieve sustainable growth, maximizing customer lifetime value is an important component and one that is often underestimated.

“Fall in love with the problem…

…and not with the solution. This may sound like something repeating and cliche, but still, too many companies are missing this step. You should focus all your energy on the outcome and not on the output. The outcome is your focus. And usually, it comes as an inspiration from your customer. Trying to make their lives better on a daily basis is an outcome. But trying to give them a faster Internet speed is another output that can be matched by your competitors with almost no effort.”

uxplanet.org/product-vision-for-product-managers-da4539065753

“91 percent of potentially recyclable plastic in the U.S. ended up in landfills – or worse, in the oceans. Europe does a little better, with only 70 percent getting tossed.

Why such terrible rates? Partly because some changes that were supposed to make recycling simpler ended up making it almost impossible.

University of Georgia engineering professor Jenna Jambeck said that indeed, part of the reason China is now refusing to process American and European plastic is that so many people tossed waste into the wrong bin, resulting in a contaminated mix difficult or impossible to recycle.”

www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-06-27/plastic-recycling-is-a-problem-consumers-can-t-solve

The Recycling Game Is Rigged Against You

Even if you put everything into the right blue bins, a lot of plastics will end up in landfills and the ocean. Consumers can't solve this problem.

«The researchers find that, contrary to popular thinking, the best entrepreneurs tend to be middle-aged. Among the very fastest-growing new tech companies, the average founder was 45 at the time of founding. Furthermore, a given 50-year-old entrepreneur is nearly twice as likely to have a runaway success as a 30-year-old.» / via @addmeto

insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/younger-vs-older-tech-entrpreneurs

How Old Are Successful Tech Entrepreneurs?

A definitive new study dispels the myth of the Silicon Valley wunderkind.

Many startups focus all their energy on growing as rapidly as possible. By contrast, Slack focused on growing steadily. Each time the company received new feedback on Slack, they would not only address or implement changes based on that feedback, but they also invited more large teams to try the product. This iterative approach to development helped Tiny Speck build a solid product based on how people were actually using it and progressively expand its userbase.

producthabits.com/how-slack-became-a-5-billion-business-by-making-work-less-boring/

How Slack Became a $16 Billion Business by Making Work Less Boring

Slack isn't just the fastest-growing SaaS startup in history. It also accomplished the seemingly impossible in just five short years: Slack made work fun.

“There's also the issue of why they do this. At a base level, it is money. They want you to feel a positive association with their "brand" so that you will spend money with them.

They are hijacking your emotions. Nothing new here - the half-naked woman on a billboard trying to get you to buy car insurance, the catchy pop-song designed to make you pick one brand of cola over another, the ruggedly handsome man telling you how white your shirts can be…

But in the airline example, there is a sinister asymmetry. They know everything about you - and you know nothing about them.”

shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/06/personalisation-is-asymmetric-psychological-warfare/

Personalisation is Asymmetric Psychological Warfare

Another privacy nightmare. An airline wants its cabin crew to know your birthday and favourite drinks order, to better personalise its service to you. My first instinct is to recoil in horror. It s…

“Ultimately, the new study finds limited support for the idea that being able to delay gratification leads to better outcomes. Instead, it suggests that the capacity to hold out for a second marshmallow is shaped in large part by a child’s social and economic background—and, in turn, that that background, not the ability to delay gratification, is what’s behind kids’ long-term success.”

www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/marshmallow-test/561779/

Why Rich Kids Are So Good at the Marshmallow Test

Affluence—not willpower—seems to be what’s behind some kids’ capacity to delay gratification.

“Mr. Griffin looked at the flow of digital tokens going in and out of Bitfinex and identified several distinct patterns that suggest that someone or some people at the exchange successfully worked to push up prices when they sagged at other exchanges. To do that, the person or people used a secondary virtual currency, known as Tether, which was created and sold by the owners of Bitfinex, to buy up those other cryptocurrencies.”

www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/technology/bitcoin-price-manipulation.html

Bitcoin’s Price Was Artificially Inflated, Fueling Skyrocketing Value, Researchers Say (Published 2018)

A University of Texas team found evidence that a cryptocurrency boom may have been largely due to manipulation.

“We are a small company in one of the toughest and most competitive industries on Earth, where just staying alive, let alone growing, is a form of victory (Tesla and Ford remain the only American car companies who haven’t gone bankrupt). Yet, despite our tiny size, Tesla has already played a major role in moving the auto industry towards sustainable electric transport and moving the energy industry towards sustainable power generation and storage. We must continue to drive that forward for the good of the world. — Elon”

[…]

“A source familiar with the matter said that Tesla grew its workforce by over 10% this year alone so it is technically only setting them back in terms of the size of the workforce by a few months.

At the end of 2015, Tesla had just over 14,000 employees. As of March 2018, Tesla reported over 37,000 employees.”

electrek.co/2018/06/12/tesla-layoffs-workforce-restructure/

Tesla is laying off about 9% of its workforce as it restructures the company

Last month, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced a vague plan to flatten management and restructure the company in order to achieve profitability during the second half of the year. Following the announcement, Electrek has now learned of a round of layoffs currently ongoing at Tesla, which could see as much as 9% of the workforce […]

“I was just not sure what a ‘feature’ looked like … so I was thumbing through a symbol dictionary and I came across this symbol (⌘). In the back of the book, it said it was for an ‘interesting feature’ at Swedish campgrounds. I thought it was maybe a little abstract, but it worked.

[…] Years later I went to Sweden … it was awesome to be on the ride form the airport and to see the Command key all over the place!

[…] The thing is I always thought it was maybe a little too abstract. It went against my general notion of that things should have some meaning because then there’s a little visual mnemonic to help you remember what it is. Then a few years ago, someone emailed me from Scandinavia and said ‘You know it really isn’t abstract, it’s a castle seen from above and those are the turrets’. I thought it was wonderful that after all these years it really is something concrete!”

“I learned a lot about the cumulative value of attention to detail from Steve [Jobs], and about pushing the limits of a medium. I still think about his philosophy of not showing too much information at once and the value of simplicity in visual messaging.

[…] The happy Mac came from my love at 14 years old of those buttons with the smiley face. We had permission to be friendly. That was part of the brief. I love to make things friendly and humane—I find that so pleasurable.”

milanote.com/the-work/the-story-behind-susan-kares-iconic-design-work-for-apple

Milanote - the tool for organizing creative projects

Milanote is an easy-to-use tool to organize your ideas and projects into visual boards. Add notes, images, links and files, organize them visually and share them with your team.

“Interestingly, scooters and their closely-related cousin, e-bikes, may give Uber a second chance to get this right. Absent two-sided network effects, the potential moats for, well, self-riding scooters and e-bikes are relatively weak: proprietary technology is likely to provide short-lived advantages at best, and Bird and Lime have plenty of access to capital. Both are experimenting with “charging-sharing”, wherein they pay people to charge the scooters in their homes, but both augment that with their own contractors to both charge vehicles and move them to areas with high demand.

What remains under-appreciated is habit: your typical tech first-adopter may have no problem checking multiple apps to catch a quick ride, but I suspect most riders would prefer to use the same app they already have on their phone. To that end, there is certainly a strong impetus for Bird and Lime to spread to new cities, simply to get that first-app-installed advantage, but this is where Uber has the biggest advantage of all: the millions of people who already have the Uber app.

To that end, I thought Uber’s acquisition of Jump Bikes was a good idea, and scooters should be next (an acquisition of Bird or Lime may already be too pricey, but Jump has a strong technical team that should be able to get an Uber-equivalent out the door soon). The Uber app already handles multiple kinds of rides; it is a small step to handling multiple kinds of transportation — a smaller step then installing yet another app.”

stratechery.com/2018/the-scooter-economy/

The Scooter Economy

Scooters are everywhere, and the use case is amazing. What is not so clear, though, is how scooter companies can build strong businesses, which means consumers are the real winners.

“In “Bullshit Jobs” (Simon & Schuster), David Graeber, an anthropologist now at the London School of Economics, seeks a diagnosis and epidemiology for what he calls the “useless jobs that no one wants to talk about.” He thinks these jobs are everywhere. By all the evidence, they are. His book, which has the virtue of being both clever and charismatic, follows a much circulated essay that he wrote, in 2013, to call out such occupations. Some, he thought, were structurally extraneous: if all lobbyists or corporate lawyers on the planet disappeared en masse, not even their clients would miss them. Others were pointless in opaque ways. Soon after the essay appeared, in a small journal, readers translated it into a dozen languages, and hundreds of people, Graeber reports, contributed their own stories of work within the bullshit sphere.”

www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-bullshit-job-boom

The Bullshit-Job Boom

For more and more people, work appears to serve no purpose. Is there any good left in the grind?

While Facebook gets smashed for its privacy practices, Google is working hard on making sure it doesn’t get in trouble for how it uses (and plans to use) its machine learning algorithms. Fascinating read on the direction of the company: blog.google/topics/ai/ai-principles/

AI at Google: our principles

We’re announcing seven principles to guide our work in AI.