Weekly#507

  • Spot AI raises $40M to build smarter CCTV security camera tech
  • Qualcomm debuts latest flagship Snapdragon chip and a new AI platform
  • “…An estimated $3.37 trillion worth, or 21% of all global trade, transited through the South China Sea in 2016, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development…”
  • “…Prediction is only useful if it’s going to change something that you do. You wouldn’t check your weather forecast app every day if it didn’t help inform your clothing or routine. Prediction has to inform a decision…”
  • AI Tools Directory
  • A Lab-Grown-Meat Startup Gets the FDA’s Stamp of Approval
  • AWS Opens New Region in Switzerland
  • Ford CEO: 40% Less Labor To Build Electric Vehicles
  • Apple’s iPhone 14 Satellite Emergency SOS Is Live (WSJ)
  • Study: AirPods Pro are this close to being full-fledged hearing aids
  • Netflix gives account holders the ability to kick freeloaders
  • 5 New CNCF Projects To Watch In 2023
  • Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL) Ad hoc Protocol
  • Classic HCI Demos
  • Activate 2023 Report
  • State of the OpenCloud 2022 Report
  • German Mobile Banking App Review
  • Layoff Tracker
  • Fast-Fashion Juggernaut Shein’s Sales Close In on Zara, H&M…The company’s gross merchandise value is projected to grow 50% to $30 billion in 2022…Earlier this year, Shein completed a fundraising round that valued it at $100 billion (WSJ)

Weekly#506

  • Twitter reactivated the ‘Official’ gray check for accounts that are actually verified
  • Amazon introduces ‘Sparrow’ robotic arm that can do repetitive warehouse tasks
  • Amazon’s ad revenue surpassed the money it makes from Prime, Prime Video, and its other audio and e-book subscriptions combined…Successful sellers have to spend anywhere between 10 percent and 20 percent of their sales on Amazon ads.
  • Two Weeks of Chaos: Inside Elon Musk’s Takeover of Twitter
  • SoftBank Vision Fund Loses $7.2 Billion on Tech Writedowns
  • Debezium Releases Version 2.0 of Its Change Data Capture Tooldetails
  • Starlink announces 1TB monthly cap, users who go over will get slower speeds
  • Spotify is the first to launch non-Google Android billing in the US
  • …The latest Drewry composite World Container Index — a key benchmark for container prices — has fallen again to $2,773 per 40-foot container. That’s 73% lower than the peak rate in September last year
  • …Today, Spotify has more than 80 million tracks available to users to stream. In its most recent earnings report, the company touted its 456 million active users with 195 million paid subscribers across 183 markets
  • Apple’s Web Search Technology Chief Returns to Google
  • How reliant are banks and insurers on cloud outsourcing? (2020)
  • Chris Rock is set to be the first to perform live on Netflix
  • Meet Pineapple, the platform aiming to reshape professional networking for Gen Z
  • SoftBank, NEC, Sony, Toyota + more team up for Rapidus, Japan’s bid for next-gen chip domination
  • GitHub teases new Copilot feature that lets developers code with their voice
  • Apple limits AirDrop ‘Everyone’ option to 10 minutes in China
  • Elon Musk details his vision for a Twitter payments system
  • Consumer trends in digital payments
  • 2012 to 2022: What a decade of insights has taught us
  • High-Tech Cars Are Killing the Auto Repair Shop
  • 17 DevOps Metrics You Should Be Tracking
  • Studio Ghibli is teaming up with Lucasfilm

Weekly#505

  • BoF Insights | Gen-Z and Fashion in the Age of Realism
  • Jony Ive on Life After Apple (WSJ)
  • Pantone wants $15/month for the privilege of using its colors in Photoshop
  • HBO series ‘The Last of Us’ premieres this January
  • Wharton, Berkeley, NYU Offering Online M.B.A.s for the First Time (WSJ)
  • US Banks Reported $1 Billion in 2021 Ransomware Payments
  • Geo-Distributed Microservices and Their Database: Fighting the High Latency
  • Ocado shares soar on new South Korea retail partnership (FT)
  • JP Morgan executes first DeFi trade on public blockchain
  • WhatsApp officially launches its new discussion group feature, Communities
  • Port internal development platform gives visibility into DevOps architecture
  • Goldman Sachs Embeds Software Developers Deeper Into the Business
  • “...Goldman also tries to empower its own technology teams by changing up the process of product development. Rather than be told to code a product by teams further up the chain, developers and engineers write together with business development teams what the company calls a working-back memo, in reference to a product development philosophy used by Mr. Argenti’s former employer,Amazon Inc…
  • The science of resting (well)
  • Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1 billion
  • Rewind.ai

Weekly#504

  • Thoughtworks Technology Radar 27
  • “…With the big three — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — reporting earnings this week, we learned that the cloud infrastructure market topped $57 billion for the quarter, up $11 billion over the same period last year…”
  • Fintech Snapshot for Türkiye v1.5
  • Tesla Engineers Visit Twitter Office to Review Code for Musk
  • What will Elon Musk do with Twitter? (FT)
  • Shoppers made nearly $5tn in purchases on credit cards last year, according to the Nilson Report on the payments industry (FT)
  • GitHub has hit $1bn revenue and 90m users, says Microsoft CEO on 4th anniversary of acquisition
  • Tilia spins out of Linden Lab, gets minority investment from J.P. Morgan to do metaverse payments
  • The percentage of robots with touch that exist outside of academic settings is still in single digits (WSJ)
  • Due to a change in how Adobe licenses Pantone colors, old PSD files could start being filled in black
  • Mondrian painting has been hanging upside down for 75 years
  • Traffic jams are tied to lower birth weights, study finds
  • Honda sets up the first motorcycle battery swap station for its mobile power packs
  • Redditor acquires decommissioned Netflix cache server with 262TB of storage
  • AI-generated art sparks furious backlash from Japan’s anime community
  • Twitter will be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange on November 8
  • Xiaomi winds down financial services business in India
  • Shutterstock will start selling AI-generated stock imagery with help from OpenAI
  • AWS Well-Architected Framework (updated on October 20)
  • Students Are Using AI Text Generators to Write Papers
  • Meet the AInfluencers: 14 Creators Using Generative AI to Gain Big Followings
  • Quality Engineering Productivity at Spotify
  • US unbanked households reached a record low of 4.5% in 2021
  • Mastercard and Visa Q3 volumes lifted by stronger travel spending despite tighter economic conditions

Weekly#503

  • How Bayer used machine learning to predict cold and flu trends
  • “…The globe’s 4 billionth person was born in 1975 and now, in about a month, the 8 billionth person will probably be born…By the end of this century, the global population will have decreased by 1 billion people from its peak, according to a 2020 analysis by researchers at the Gates Foundation, and in the most extreme scenario, the population could decline by almost 2 billion from where it is today, to just over 6 billion…”
  • An unopened first-generation iPhone from 2007 still in its original box has sold for more than $39,000 at auction
  • Instacart, the food delivery company, is pulling its plans to go public in 2022
  • Tesla is now taking votes for its next Supercharger locations
  • 74% say connected cars and EV chargers need cybersecurity ratings
  • Apple will release macOS Ventura and iPadOS 16 on October 24
  • Amazon launches UK portal for buying insurance (FT)
  • Uber looks to accelerate revenue growth with new business division (FT)
  • Ecommerce Trend Line
  • A Simple Map for Innovation at Scale
  • “Microsoft in Advanced Talks to Increase Investment in OpenAI…Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019…OpenAI said more than 1.5 million users created over 2 million images a day using Dall-E 2 after it was released to the public this month” (WSJ)
  • SpaceX is now advertising Starlink Aviation, promising 350Mbps broadband with unlimited data for each airplane it’s installed in…Monthly service fees are $12,500 to $25,000
  • Five hours’ sleep is tipping point for bad health
  • Netflix confirms it’s looking to launch a cloud gaming service
  • There are between 400 and 600 commercial data centers in Britain, and they account for about 2.5% of the country’s electricity demand, according to the National Grid
  • Musixmatch launches a podcast platform for transcription driven by AI and community
  • Podcast Notes
  • Zapier extends its automation service with first-party database and UI tools
  • Google’s Android Go for entry-level phones is now on 250 million devices
  • Facing Threat From Apple, Google Tries New Hardware Playbook
  • The Rising Tide of Platform Engineering
  • Machine Learning for Fraud Detection in Streaming Services

Weekly#502

  • State of AI 2022
  • Microsoft Teams Premium arrives with meeting recaps and live translations
  • Five Istanbul Restaurants Win Michelin Stars for the First Time
  • Top 20 Draw.io Alternatives & Competitors for Cloud Architectures
  • Oracle VirtualBox 7.0
  • Wi-Fi spy drones
  • Apple’s Mixed Reality Headset to Offer Iris Scanning for Payments, Logging In
  • Netflix Plans to Launch $7-a-Month Streaming Plan With Advertising
  • Apple Card users could automatically deposit cash-back rewards into a high-yield savings account
  • The Friendship That Made Google Huge
  • Greg Zher, the de facto founder of Lab126  and inventor of Kindle has left.
  • Amazon to launch first of its Kuiper internet satellites on ULA rocket
  • Dune: Part Two is arriving earlier than expected
  • 22 new or updated open datasets on AWS
  • A16z Leads $14M Funding Round for New E-Commerce Platform From Twitch Co-Founder
  • Google’s ‘Incognito’ Mode Inspires Staff Jokes — and a Big Lawsuit


Weekly#501

  • “The new version of AlphaZero discovered a faster way to do matrix multiplication…It’s mind-boggling to see that there are at least 14,000 ways of multiplying four-by-four matrices
  • 3 insights about finance and inflation from Google Search trends
  • Peacock grows its paid subscriber base to 15 million
  • 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report
  • WhatsApp starts blocking screenshots in beta testing for view once images and videos
  • Google Expands Its Hardware With New Pixel Watch, Pixel 7 and 7 Pro Phones
  • EU votes to force all phones to use same charger by 2024
  • “…Washington also plans to limit U.S.-made microchips from being sold to China’s most powerful supercomputing and data center projects, the people said…”
  • YouTube is asking some users to purchase a Premium subscription to watch in 4K
  • Tesla now has 160,000 customers running its Full Self Driving beta
  • Every James Bond Movie, Ranked: The Best (and Worst) of Bond
  • Liquid Death Water Startup Valued at $700 Million
  • Jiko banks $40M in Series B funding to offer companies a way to park their cash in T-bills
  • Visa partners with FTX in a bet that shoppers still want to spend cryptocurrencies in a bear market
  • Adidas looking for a reboot after CEO Rorsted steps down next year.
  • Google will open its first data center in Japan in 2023
  • How JPMorgan Chase allots its $14B IT budget
  • UK Sky Stream on the Sky Glass Platform
  • Latin America Digital Report 2022
  • Musk says Pepsi to receive Tesla’s first Semi trucks in December


Weekly#500

  • Monese neobank announces a $35 million investment by HSBC
  • HSBC invests in Singapore’s customer intelligence and risk assessment startup
  • “…A study this year by professors at Columbia University and New York University estimated that lower tenant demand because of remote work may cut 28%, or $456 billion, off the value of offices across the US. About 10% of that would be in New York City alone…”
  • Amazon WorkSpaces Introduces Ubuntu Desktops
  • Mark Zuckerberg says Meta will freeze hiring
  • Chief Economists Outlook (World Economic Forum)
  • Uniswap Labs eyes over $100 million in new funding
  • 1st gen AirPods Pro users seeing ‘Adaptive Transparency’ option after iOS 16.1 beta update
  • Magic Leap’s smaller, lighter second-gen AR glasses are now available
  • “… Bloomberg Intelligence estimates it would take about eight years to move just 10% of Apple’s production capacity out of China, where roughly 98% of the company’s iPhones have been made ….. with China accounting for 70% of global smartphone manufacturing and leading Chinese vendors accounting for nearly half of global shipments…”
  • Introducing Spring Boot Migrator
  • JPMorgan Chase Is Phasing Out Safe Deposit Boxes
  • Pharma giant Pfizer has shelled out nearly US$120 million to acquire a small Australian company claiming to have developed a smartphone app that can accurately diagnose COVID-19 by analyzing the sound of a cough.
  • Netflix is building its own game studio
  • Cloudflare launches an eSIM to secure mobile devices
  • 7 Lessons on Dynamic Pricing (HBR)… 2017 WSJ article about dynamic pricing
  • Mapping the Unknown — The 10 Steps to Map Any Industry
  • Amazon’s Fall Device Event: Wi-Fi-Boosting Echo Speakers, a Kindle for Note-Taking and More (WSJ)
  • “…Global cloud spending is projected to reach $830.5 billion by the end of the year, up 17.5% from 2021, but slowing from last year’s growth rate of 18.3%, according to International Data Corp. It expects growth to drop to 16.3% next year…” (WSJ)
  • Microsoft says two new Exchange zero-day bugs
  • Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Banking Transformation

Weekly#499

  • 25% of Netflix subscribers planning to leave service
  • Amazon’s new unit aims to ease engineers’ frustrations with these 6 guiding principles
  • Amazon’s 2022 Echo and Ring Launch Event (Sep 28)
  • Google Maps Launches Eco-Friendly Fuel-Efficient Routing On App
  • Apple will sponsor Super Bowl halftime show starting in February
  • Investors are spending 24% less time looking at pitch decks in 2022, compared to 2021…investors give up in just 2 minutes and 13 seconds
  • “…According to analysts at Goldman Sachs, a decade ago Wall Street saw the move as mainly just a way to sell extra design software to Adobe’s existing 12mn-13mn customers: instead, user numbers for Adobe’s Creative Cloud — which includes Photoshop — have risen to more than 30mn….” (FT)
  • NY-based Stash is one of few neobanks to build its own core banking system
  • Alibaba Cloud enjoyed a 9.5% market share in 2021, trailing Microsoft (21%) and Amazon (39%), according to market research firm Gartner
  • France sets delivery fee for online book sales to help stores compete with Amazon
  • Chipmaker Qualcomm says automotive future business expands to $30 bln
  • Cloud kitchen startup CloudEats raises more capital to ramp up Southeast Asian expansion
  • YouTube’s Dislike Button Rarely Shifts Recommendations, Researchers Say.”…YouTube’s “dislike” button reduced similar, unwanted recommendations only 12 percent, according to their report, titled “Does This Button Work?…”
  • For Gen Z, TikTok Is the New Search Engine…Need to find a restaurant or figure out how to do something? Young people are turning to TikTok to search for answers.
  • Apple to move 25% iPhone production to India by 2025, 20% iPad and Apple Watch to Vietnam, analysts say
  • Salesforce aims for 25% operating margin in 2026 with more efficient spending
  • First look at dynamicSpot: Bringing Apple’s Dynamic Island to your Android phone
  • Virtual Threads: New Foundations for High-Scale Java Applications

Weekly#498

  • Software fees to make up 10% of John Deere’s revenues by 2030
  • Code 2022 Videos
  • New attack can unlock and start a Tesla Model Y in seconds, say researchers
  • Starbucks details its blockchain-based loyalty platform and NFT community, Starbucks Odyssey
  • For more than 20 years, Massive software has spawned armies of artificially intelligent crowds, from Lord of the Rings to Avengers: Endgame.
  • Apple’s iOS 16 is now available to download
  • Google closes $5.4B Mandiant acquisition
  • “…Internal Meta research: Instagram users spend 17.6M hours/day on Reels vs. 197.8M hours/day on TikTok; ~1/3 of Reels are recycled posts from other platforms…” (WSJ)
  • Towards the end of 2022, the human population on Earth is expected to reach eight billion
  • The electrolyser is expected to have an output of 1100 Nm3/h hydrogen at normal current density. This equals 100 kg of pure hydrogen per hour, which will set a new standard for the industry
  • SoftBank Considers Launching a Third Vision Fund…The successor Vision Fund 2 is now worth 19% less than the $49 billion it invested… (WSJ)
  • Zoom Readies Email and Calendar Products to Defend Itself Against Microsoft, Google (The Information)
  • Starbucks and DoorDash launch delivery partnership, will expand offering nationwide in 2023
  • Instagram is internally testing a new monetization feature for creators called ‘Gifts
  • SWIFT Financial-Messaging System Pilots Blockchain Project
  • “…one of the estimated one billion customers around the globe using neobanks, according to analysis by German strategy consultants Simon-Kucher…” (FT)
  • World Intellectual Property Report 2022 [PDF]
  • “…Starlink is now on all seven continents! In such a remote location like Antarctica, this capability is enabled by Starlink’s space laser network…”
  • QR codes
  • The Secret Life of Selfies: How a Beauty Tech Startup Is Using AI to Match Faces With Products