Month: July 2019

Weekly#334

  • 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

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)