- Burgernomics: The Big Mac index was invented by The Economist in 1986 as a lighthearted guide to whether currencies are at their “correct” level.
- Apple Dominates App Store Search Results, Thwarting Competitors…Searches for ‘music,’ ‘audiobooks’ and other categories rank company apps first, a process some developers find unfair; Apple says algorithm doesn’t give own products an advantage…(paywall)
- YouTube probably generates $16 billion to $25 billion in annual revenue, making the video service big enough to crack the top half of the Fortune 500.
- AWS Well-Architected Labs
- Apple’s spending $1 billion to buy most of Intel’s 5G modem business
- Moon has more water ice than previously thought…UCLA study suggests that there may be enough water to sustain a future lunar settlement
- Carbon nanotube films created at Rice University enable method to recycle waste heat
- AT&T loses nearly 1 million TV customers after raising DirecTV prices
- Netflix thought it would have 5 million new subscribers this quarter. Instead it added 2.7 million
- Unity, now valued at $6B, raising up to $525M
- AWS yearly run rate is $33 billion…Google Cloud’s run rate is now over $8B
- Why Innovation Labs Fail, and How to Ensure Yours Doesn’t
- Stackery lets AWS Lambda developers debug their serverless programs locally on a laptop
- AWS gets a chatbot
- SoftBank Rolls Out Second Tech Megafund, With Apple Among Top Investors…Japanese banks and Microsoft are among those that have committed to $108 billion Vision Fund 2 (paywall)
- Tesla says its new self-driving chip will help make its cars autonomous
July 2019
Weekly#333
- Patreon raises $60M Series D, targets international growth and more customization
- Scooter Wars at TC Sessions: Mobility
- Instagram will now hide likes in 6 more countries
- Netflix thought it would have 5 million new subscribers this quarter. Instead it added 2.7 million.
- Some 14 percent of Netflix users are using a password from someone outside their household, while 11 percent of Hulu | 6 percent of Amazon Prime video
- Microsoft Word hits 1 billion installs on Google Play
- Electric Vehicle charge points to be installed in every new UK home
- The First Complete Brain Wiring Diagram of Any Species Is Here
- Electric car models to triple in Europe by 2021
Weekly#332
- Airbus Poised to Overtake Boeing as Biggest Plane Maker /paywall
- Nintendo announces a handheld Nintendo Switch Lite for $199
- Virgin Orbit performs a successful drop test of its LauncherOne rocket launch system
- Google’s internet balloon project is about to start its first commercial trial
- China Internet Report 2019
- It takes seven to ten years to get to real liquidity in a portfolio of early stage venture investments.
- Waymo has now driven 10 billion autonomous miles in simulation
- Growing number of car-sharing users don’t rent cars for driving
- The future of autonomous vehicles runs off roads and on to farms, construction sites and mines
- Surgeons perform first bioengineered blood vessel transplant in military patient
- German banks are moving away from SMS one-time passcodes
- Microsoft Teams overtakes Slack with 13 million daily users
- Scientists 3D-print human skin and bone for Mars astronauts
- New CRISPR platform expands RNA editing capabilities
- The United States is headed for a battery breakthrough
- Will Your Job Still Exist In 2030?
- The Geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence
Weekly#331
- Apple Music Hits 60 Million Subscribers
- Bill Gates at Economic Club of Washington, D.C. Video
- Boeing’s 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers
- Google and Facebook Are Sucking the Brains Out of Europe…Europe is too worried about protecting old metal-bashing industries and not nearly enough about the exodus of deep-tech startups to the U.S…
- Amazon introduces computer vision into warehouses (FT: paywall)
- WeChat wants to own tourism…MyHelsinki is a first stab at intermediating Chinese tourism dollars
- Apple’s iOS 13 update will make FaceTime eye contact way easier
- According to a new report from Sensor Tower, the iOS App Store and Google Play combined brought in $39.7 billion in worldwide app revenue in the first half of 2019
- Bitcoin’s energy consumption ‘equals that of Switzerland’…around seven gigawatts of electricity, equal to 0.21% of the world’s supply…That is as much power as would be generated by seven Dungeness nuclear power plants at once.
- GPS on the Moon? NASA’s working on it
- NASA’s Dragonfly Will Fly Around Titan Looking for Origins, Signs of Life
- The consulting firm Moody’s Analytics says climate change could inflict $69 trillion in damage on the global economy by the year 2100
- After the Honeymoon Ends: Making Corporate-Startup Relationships Work (BCG)