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Weekly#122

  • Better Than Waterproof: Gadgets That Float
    Amp up your poolside fun with floating speakers, cameras and walkie talkies: the Monster SuperStar BackFloat, JVC Everio GZ-R320 and Cobra CXT 1035R FLT (WSJ)
  • Apple’s Mac is now the only major PC brand that’s growing
    • Mac shipments reached 5.1 million during the second quarter, according to research firm IDC, representing 16% year-over-year growth.
    • Apple was the only of IDC’s top six global PC makers to grow shipments last quarter.
    • Overall industry shipments declined 12% to 66 million, according to IDC.
      Lenovo, the global leader, increased its share to 20%.(QZ)
  • PC Sales Continue to Fall
    Worldwide PC shipments saw their sharpest decline in nearly two years in the second quarter of 2015, dealing continued damage to retailers and makers of computers, chips and PC software.Shipments fell 9.5 percent, year on year, to 68.4 million units, according to the research firm Gartner. Rival researcher IDC, which doesn’t include tablets in its tally, tracked an 11.8 percent drop, year on year, to 66.1 million shipments during the quarter. Both firms released PC sales reports on Wednesday.(WSJ)
  • From Twitter (Abraham Thomas)
    • 0/ Ever wonder who built/owns the self-driving pods in Minority Report? Uber finally shows us how we’ll get there from here.
    • 1/ Unlimited, on-demand basic resources (food, shelter, transport) have long been a characteristic of science fiction.
    • 2/ The power of the “sharing economy” is that it offers a capitalistic (and hence realistic) model of how to deliver these.
    • 3/ With sufficient network density, sharing algorithms unlock dramatic economies of time, space and scale.
    • 4/ The efficiency gains at scale are large enough to subsidize network participants *and* pay the owners of the algo platform.
    • 5/ That’s where Uber, Airbnb, Sprig and their ilk come in. They get paid to coordinate the usage of otherwise idle resources.
    • 6/ Software is eating the world: this is the breakthrough that eluded every previous top-down resource allocation method (eg socialism).
    • 7/ Localization + computing power + increasing returns from network effects solves Hayek’s information problem. Moore’s Law wins.
    • 8/ People focus too much on the micro aspects of resource-sharing (labor policy, taxation, unit economics). They’re missing the macro.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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