Hi All! Just another week in the tech world. This week’s biggest news was Masa Son admitting his mistake of investing in WeWork. I have to say, I appreciate the candor and upfront honesty rather than trying to save face. Hope you all have a great week!
This week’s reads starts with what I like to call “Chinapologize” (a portmanteau of China and Apologize. This link contains all the international brands that have had to apologize to China. Take a look, you will be pretty surprised at not just how many companies have had to apologize. It is hard to be completely aware of cultural sensitivity but I would assume that such large companies with massive budgets should not struggle with this so much! (I am not saying that I agree with companies actually apologizing, to be clear)
You know those buzzwords you hear? This article has a good list that really separates the wheat from the chaff. A few (of our favorite) companies are learning this the hard way …
Influencer marketing is at a point where things are becoming more formalized. From the article “Now that influencer marketing has become an established part of the marketing playbook, we are in phase three: tools to help influencers further monetize their influence, like Cameo, and then manage their lives.”
How ants avoid traffic jams. TLDR: They optimize for the group and not for themselves as human beings do
Go Grow or Go Slow? Ben & Jerry v. Amazon companies. This is a great read on how a company must think about scaling. We are so attuned to hearing the word “growth” but there are a lot of amazing companies out there that go slow and do well. Nothing wrong with being either; just know which one you intend to be upfront
Occams Razor (With the presence of competing options choose the simplest). This article talks about gotchas with using Occam’s razor
An interesting read on immigration history and policy. As an immigrant I wholeheartedly support immigration but this brought to light some challenges
The power of QR codes and online/offline interactions. I always could never figure out why QR codes never took off in the US.
Google buys fitbit speeding up the journey into ambient computing. Most news articles talk about the “how” Google will integrate these product missing the forest for the trees. The question to ask is why does google care about a watch/watchos/fitness device/wearables. The answer is Google’s focus on assistant. The “how” part is still interesting. Hardware/Software play? Which software? Which hardware? What does google do with the user data? Another interesting point of view on why nothing can save WearOS
The rise of an opponent will make you do worse. Psyche matters so much!
A good primer on customer research for research noobs
A well written read on how people die. The interesting thing is that recency bias and the news causes us to think otherwise