- “…SARS-CoV-2 has a mutation rate of less than 25 mutations per year, compared with influenza’s mutation rate of almost 50 mutations per year, according to an analysis by computational biologists of the Nextstrain consortium…” (WSJ)
- EU data portal launches to support COVID-19 research
- Apple Mobility Trends Reports
- Google Mobility Reports
- “…In general, emerging use-cases for 5G can be classed into two groups: those requiring a low latency round-trip time between device and application service (e.g. cloud gaming, server-side video rendering and deep learning) and those characterized by localized/site-bound application deployment (e.g. Industry 4.0, controller software for machines, sensors and actuators in factories)…”
- It’s time to build by Marc Andreessen
- 15.77 million paid net additions. That brings Netflix’s total paid subscriber count to 182.86 million
- AWS and Facebook launch an open-source model server for PyTorch
- How Covid-19 is making millions of Americans Healthier
- Air quality is way better in nine major cities after coronavirus confinement
- What future do airlines have? Three experts discuss
- Five EU countries call for 100% renewable energy by 2050
- Peloton May Feel the Recessionary Burn (WSJ)
- Bill Gates: The first modern pandemic & the scientific advances we need to stop COVID-19.
- Germany’s COVID-19 contacts tracing app to link to labs for test result notification
- First version of Apple and Google’s contact tracing API should be available to developers next week
- AWS launches Amazon AppFlow, its new SaaS integration service
- “...Airbnb’s home page is suddenly very focused on three things — online experiences, monthly stays and what you’re calling “frontline,” which is an area for hosts to offer housing to healthcare staff and first responders…“
- Telegram hits 400M monthly active users
- “…Amazon’s private-label business encompasses more than 45 brands with some 243,000 products, from AmazonBasics batteries to Stone & Beam furniture… …39% of U.S. online shopping occurs on Amazon, according to research firm eMarketer……The majority of Amazon’s sales—58%—come through third-party sellers, primarily small and medium-size firms that list their items for sale on Amazon’s Marketplace platform.”WSJ (Paywall)
- The World Bank predicts global remittances will fall by 20% this year
- Google’s Flutter: 2 million developers
- Boston Dynamics open-sources health care robotics toolkit for telemedicine, vitals inspection, and disinfection
Weekly#372
- How COVID-19 Has Impacted Media Consumption, by Generation
- A global view of how consumer behavior is changing amid COVID-19
- Luke Wroblewski: Covid-19 Global Impact Charts
- The Coronavirus Economic Reopening Will Be Fragile, Partial and Slow (paywall)
- 100 Things a UX/UI Designer Should Know
- Verizon is buying B2B videoconferencing firm BlueJeans
- Amazon Retools With Unusual Goal: Get Shoppers to Buy Less Amid Coronavirus Pandemic (paywall)
- Instacart is expanding Costco pharmacy deliveries nationwide
- How Artificial Intelligence Will Shape Design by 2050
- Google Meet video calls are getting a Zoom-like layout
- For the Foreseeable Future, U.K. Parliament May Meet in Cyberspace
- 70 coronavirus vaccines in development, 3 candidates already undergoing human trials: WHO
- Coronavirus: Raspberry Pi-powered ventilator to be tested in Colombia
- The Supermarket After the Pandemic
- Assessing Coronavirus’s Impact on Your Business Model
- Goldman predicts 36% drop in iPhone shipment
- New Jersey needs volunteers who know COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language
- Stores try to stay relevant while their doors are closed
- COVID-19 Pivot examples
- Trendwatching: COVID Innovations
- Leaked pics reveal Google smart debit card to rival Apple’s
- Smart lifts, lonely workers, no towers or tourists: architecture after coronavirus
Weekly#371
- How coronavirus is shifting consumer behaviour and attitudes in China
- FT: Yuval Noah Harari: the world after coronavirus
- Pinterest makes it much easier to buy what you see
- Walmart Grocery app sees record downloads amid COVID-19, surpasses Amazon by 20%
- Pepper, a platform for restaurants and suppliers, pivots to deliver food to consumers
- Disney+ has more than 50M subscribers
- Airbnb rolls out new features aimed at its next big bet: longer-term stays
- Google expands AI calling service Duplex to Australia, Canada, and the UK
- Apple, Google team up on coronavirus contact tracing
- Microsoft says video calls in Teams grew 1,000% in March
- People Are Open-Sourcing Their Patents and Research to Fight Coronavirus
- White House advisor Dr Fauci says handshaking needs to stop even when pandemic ends—other experts agree
- iOS 14: Apple developing ‘Clips’ feature for using apps without requiring full downloads
- The Humble Phone Call Has Made a Comeback…”…Verizon said it was now handling an average of 800 million wireless calls a day during the week, more than double the number made on Mother’s Day…”
- All Microsoft events will be digital-only until July 2021
- “…And in the long run, the firms that survive will have to master a new environment as the crisis and the response to it accelerate three trends:
- an energising adoption of new technologies
- an inevitable retreat from freewheeling global supply chains
- a worrying rise in well-connected oligopolies…” (paywall)
Weekly#370
- Google Maps Community Mobility Reports (Thanks to Önder)
- Spotify and Warner Music Group have renewed their global licensing partnership
- Mobile app spending to double by 2024, despite economic impacts of COVID-19
- Our Post-Covid World
- WSJ: Instagram Encroaches on Amazon With New Shopping Feature (paywall)
- How Many Jobs Can be Done at Home?
- Apple’s iOS 14 may turn iCloud Keychain into a true 1Password and LastPass competitor
- Ford, GE plan to produce 50,000 ventilators in 100 days
- 775 per cent increase in usage of Microsoft Azure cloud services
- Modern meteorology was born 60 years ago today
- SoftBank is letting internet satellite company OneWeb file for bankruptcy
- Scott Kelly on isolation
- The US Army’s Virus Research Lab Gears Up to Fight Covid-19
- Coronavirus Ended the Screen-Time Debate. Screens Won
- Apple buys weather app Dark Sky
- Ikea acquires AI imaging startup Geomagical Labs to supercharge room visualisations
- Apple accidentally confirms the existence of an unreleased product, AirTags
- Peloton launches an Android TV app
- In a depressing turn of events, one group of hosts still receiving bookings through Airbnb are those offering properties close to hospitals. FT (paywall)
- “...An epidemic poses special challenges to face-to-face retail…In normal times, “60 cents of every food dollar spent in New York City is spent in restaurants,” he says. “Let me say that again: 60% of the food eaten in New York is made by restaurants…There will be the next generation of packaging…” WSJ (paywall)
Weekly#369
- Citymapper Mobility Index
- WhatsApp has seen a 40% increase in usage due to COVID-19 pandemic
- Jupe is a new startup aiming to address hospital room shortfalls with modular, mobile space
- Airbnb to provide free or subsidized housing for 100,000 COVID-19 healthcare workers
- Coronavirus home test delivery gives Amazon key move towards UK healthcare dominance
- Sony Spins Off Camera Business Into Separate Company
- Apple releases final iOS 13.4, iPadOS 13.4, macOS 10.15.4, tvOS 13.4, and watchOS 6.2
- Amazon’s Prime Video Cinema hub to corral new theatre releases
- Coronavirus Will Change the World Permanently. Here’s How.
- London Business School: The economics of a pandemic: the case of Covid-19 [PDF]
- WSJ: Online Grocers Are Getting a Preview of Their Future (paywall)
- FT/LEX: Apple: 5G-shock (paywall)
- How 3M Plans to Make More Than a Billion Masks By End of Year…The company has in two months doubled global production of N95 masks to about 100 million a month, and it’s planning to invest in new equipment to push annual mask production to 2 billion within 12 months.
- Duke University uses vaporized hydrogen peroxide to clean N95 face masks for reuse
- How the Pandemic Will End…“…We realized that her child might be one of the first of a new cohort who are born into a society profoundly altered by COVID-19. We decided to call them Generation C…”
- WSJ: A Real Digital Infrastructure at Last (Eric Schmidt) (paywall)
- WSJ: Europe Tracks Residents’ Phones for Coronavirus Research (paywall)
Parenting in 2019: stop staring at that screen. Parenting in 2020: have you done your online math, science, art, reading, writing, and music classes? Ok, now go FaceTime with your friends.
— Luke Wroblewski (@lukew) March 26, 2020
Weekly#368
- McKinsey: COVID-19: Implications for business
- How execs at Twitter, Slack and Box decided to send everyone home
- Amazon to Hire 100,000 Warehouse and Delivery Workers Amid Coronavirus Shutdowns
- Nokia adds 5G to worldwide IoT network, lets carriers test new sensors
- “Microsoft Corp’s Teams chat and conferencing app gained more than 12 million daily users in one week, a 37.5% jump as more people worked from home during the coronavirus outbreak, the company said on Thursday…Teams had 44 million users as of March 18, Microsoft said, more than double the 20 million daily active users that the software maker reported in November. Teams users grew from 32 million to 44 million in the period between March 11 and March 18 alone, as many more U.S. companies asked employees to work from home, Microsoft said.”
- Netflix urged to slow streaming to prevent breaking the internet
- Ford releases a data set to accelerate autonomous car development
- iPadOS 13.4 lets iPads use trackpads
- Here’s everything new in Android 11 Developer Preview 2
- Can Astronauts Use GPS to Navigate on the Moon? NASA Scientists Say Yes
- PlayStation 5 will feature a 10.2-teraflop GPU and a speedy custom SSD
- E-commerce sales surpassed 10% of total (US) retail sales in 2019 for the first time
- WSJ: Square Gets Green Light to Open a Bank (paywall)
- Closer than ever: It is 100 seconds to midnight
- Italian hospital saves Covid-19 patients lives by 3D printing valves for reanimation devices
- Pandemic Erodes Gig Economy Work
- Coronavirus will change the grocery industry forever…”A third of consumers said Sunday that they had purchased groceries for online pick up or delivery in the past seven days, according to a survey by analysts at Gordon Haskett Research Advisors. Around 41% said they were buying groceries online for the first time.”
China's #WechatPay generates 1 billion+ payment transactions per day. That's more than Visa and Mastercard combined 🤔
— Matthew Brennan (@mbrennanchina) March 19, 2020
Verizon says that video gaming traffic was up 75% week over week across its network. General traffic was up 20% WoW. Video streaming up 12% WoW. Social media usage was flat. The increase is primarily due to lockdowns and self isolation keeping people at home due to COVID-19 pic.twitter.com/Bbb1ehmPhY
— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) March 18, 2020
fascinated by Pre-Covidian Era & Covidian Era views of the World. pic.twitter.com/u7HoG368we
— Luke Wroblewski (@lukew) March 18, 2020
Weekly#367
- OECD AI Policy Observatory
- Why you sometimes need to break the rules in data viz
- Harvard to Make All Classes Online March 23, President Says
- 2014: Sequoia’s Investment Memo on YouTube
- Huawei expects 20% drop in Android smartphone sales this year
- Amazon is now selling its cashierless store technology to other retailers
- Amazon is secretly working on a cure for the common cold
- What Office Life Might Look Like in the Year 2030 (paywall)
- Coronavirus Conference Gets Canceled Because of Coronavirus
- Augmented-reality startup Magic Leap reportedly considering selling itself
- Hackers are jumping on the COVID-19 pandemic to spread malware
- AT&T Suspends Broadband Data Caps During Coronavirus Crisis
- Gsuite 2 billion monthly active users
- Europe’s Deliveroo and Glovo switch on contactless delivery during COVID-19 pandemic
- Coronavirus Forces World’s Largest Work-From-Home Experiment
Weekly#366
- Amazon makes its same-day delivery service faster in select U.S. cities
- “…British online grocer Ocado warns of “exceptionally high demand” as coronavirus spreads…Ocado suggests placing grocery orders two to three days in advance and booking a weekday delivery slot…Ocado’s stock rose more than 6% in late afternoon trading on Monday…”
- Facebook Messenger on iOS is now twice as fast and a quarter the size
- Alibaba says AI can identify coronavirus infections with 96% accuracy within 20 seconds
- Apple now lets apps send ads in push notifications…Apple single sign-on coming next month
- Google’s self-driving biz Waymo eyes expansion with $2.25B cash injection…this is the first time the company has welcomed external investment. Investors included VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, auto part maker Magna, and American auto retailer AutoNation
- Alipay owner Ant Financial takes minority stake in Klarna…”…Klarna said its technology is being used by more than 200,000 retailers and e-commerce platforms globally at this point, including AliExpress, H&M, ASOS, Expedia Group, IKEA, Farfetch, Adidas, Spotify, Samsung and Nike…Last year it said it added over 75,000 new merchants …It claims a base of 85 million shoppers...”
- Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference will now be online only due to coronavirus concerns
- Earth may have been a ‘water world’ 3bn years ago, scientists find
- FT:Operators will spend about $1tn on kit to enable them to offer the latest generation networks (paywall)
- GM reveals ‘Ultium,’ the heart of its EV strategy…Using a single architecture for such a wide variety of vehicles provides much-needed scale and capital-efficiency to what has been a small-volume and profitability-challenged EV market
- NASA accepts applications for astronauts for the first time in four years
- Clearview AI is operating a sister entity called Insight Camera that’s been experimenting with live facial recognition
- Electric vehicles are changing the future of auto maintenance…Tires and glass emerge as dominant consumables of the EV era
- Nvidia acquires data storage and management platform SwiftStack…a software-centric data storage and management platform that supports public cloud, on-premises and edge deployments.
- Sequoia Capital sent a memo to its portfolio companies on Thursday.
- Twitter is testing ephemeral tweets in Brazil and calling them ‘fleets’
Weekly#365
- “…Google is placing new restrictions on which Android apps can track your location in the background, with a new review process that will check whether an app definitely needs access to the data…”
- Intuit confirms that it is buying Credit Karma for $7.1B in cash and stock
- Revolut raises $500 million at a $5.5 billion valuation
- “…Amazon will open the doors to a 10,000 square-foot Amazon Go Grocery store in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighbourhood, less than a mile from the tech giant’s downtown Seattle headquarters. It’ll be stocked with 5,000 different products…”
- Global telcos join Alphabet, SoftBank’s flying cellphone antenna lobbying effort
- WSJ: Teens Are Deleting Instagrams Almost as Fast as They Post Them (paywall)
- FT/LEX: Tier/e-scooters: ride at your own risk…Competition in the sector is as crowded as the cities catered for — expect consolidation (paywall)
- FT: Mastercard announces new chief executive (paywall)
- PDF: The Future of the Last-Mile Ecosystem (World Economic Forum)
- The a16z Marketplace 100: Index and analysis
- YouTube has more than two billion monthly users around the world, and 500 hours of video uploaded every minute.
- Softech 2020 Tech Report (in Turkish)
- Walmart is quietly working on an Amazon Prime competitor called Walmart+
- The first protein to be discovered in a meteorite.
- Gmail: Improving Malicious Document Detection in Gmail with Deep Learning
Weekly#364
- AWS acquired Datarow
- Morgan Stanley Is Buying E*Trade, Betting on Smaller Customers…Investment bank will pay $13 billion for the e-broker (paywall)
- In 2020, Amazon will deliver more packages in the United States than FedEx…Amazon to deliver 3.5 billion packages through own network in 2019
- Apple is considering letting users change default email, browser, music apps in iOS
- Battery charging meets machine learning
- DoorDash, Grubhub and others are weighing tie-ups or looking for funding…“…DoorDash Inc., Postmates Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc.’s Eats have each discussed merging in various combinations last year, according to people familiar with those talks. None resulted in a deal…” (paywall)
- Elon Musk’s Boring Company Finishes First Tunnel for 155mph Vegas Loop
- China Turns to Health-Rating Apps to Control Movements During Coronavirus Outbreak…Tech giants such as Alibaba and Tencent tapped to develop color-coded systems to classify people based on their health conditions and travel history (paywall)
- Twitch to top 40 million US viewers next year, forecast says
- Why DNA tests are suddenly unpopular
- Google launches the first developer preview of Android 11…Currently, the release schedule calls for monthly developer preview releases until April, followed by three betas and a final release in Q3 2020.
- Etsy Accelerates AI Experimentation Thanks to Cloud (Paywall)
- How ‘The Mandalorian’ and ILM invisibly reinvented film and TV production
- Powerful antibiotic discovered using machine learning for first time
- A group of ex-NSA and Amazon engineers are building a ‘GitHub for data’
- Almost half of connected medical devices are vulnerable to hackers exploiting BlueKeep