Dozen Worthy Reads 📰 (No. 149)
This week : Apple's rumored subscription, Solutions for AI's long-tail, API markets, Pinduoduo, Financial Accounting and intangible assets, Why Shopify rules, Barmageddon, SKAdnetwork changes
Hi All,
This week I’d like to start off with some nostalgia. You can now do a sleepover at the very last BLOCKBUSTER. I never grew up here but we had similar corner stores in India and Friday nights were movie nights and the most exciting part was going to the store to see what movies are available to watch. Most of these stores use to pirate the movies with strict rules on returns (video cassettes HAD to be rewound. So if you are Deschutes country you should give the last Blockbuster store a whirl even if its only to watch your fav NFLX show but I highly recommend going retro with the bad boys above if available!
This past week I wrote about Apple’s subscription bundle - rumored to be called Apple One. I hope you like it and feedback, comments are appreciated!
As always, click the little blue button and support me :)
Hey Deschutes County residents! Dust off those membership cards for a sleepover inside the world’s last BLOCKBUSTER. When you call dibs on this stay, you’re booking a night back in the 90s, but this time you won’t have to beg your parents to rent the latest horror flick–we’ll give you the keys to the entire store!
Oh and if you don’t know what “rewound” means see below :) Yep, just dated myself
Rewound:
Not Rewound :
Regulation and TikTok
I’ve been thinking about regulation a lot these days given TikTok, content moderation, regulation and how the internet is playing out. CDA230 and the impact of future changes. The fact of the matter is that tech regulation is looking more and more inevitable and here are the finest reads on the topic
Would breaking up 'big tech' work? What would?
Banning TikTok: Are We Reproducing the Chinese Internet in America?
U.S. Faces Bumpy Antitrust Road Despite Big Tech’s Emails, Memos
On Trademarks
Recently Apple took legal action against Prepear (a cooking app) because their uh well pear shaped logo looks the same as the Apple logo???? Go figure!
The founders of Prepear go on to emphasize that they are a very small company with only five staff members. The legal fight with Apple has already cost “many thousands of dollars,” and they’ve been forced to lay off one team member due to the added burden of the legal costs. Nonetheless, Prepear says they feel a “moral obligation” to take a stand against Apple’s “aggressive legal action.”
Products this week
MealMe allows you to compare prices and delivery times across a bunch of meal delivery providers based on your order size. Interesting and I wonder how they have access to the API’s. I haven’t tried it so beware if you do use it : MealMe - All food delivery apps in one Compare prices and times!
Charts this week
From Visual capitalist : The best and worst pension plans
Which Are the 20 Most and Least Profitable Companies Per Employee? The infographic was too large so I didnt add it here but definitely interesting!
Jerry Hargrove (AWSGeek) has put together every product release on the above link. Very cool!
Tweets this week
Average Sleep Scores in NYC:
COVID related reads this week
The Pandemic's Biggest Mystery Is Our Own Immune System
Worthy reads this week
This read on API businesses was great. The author breaks down lock-in, opportunity cost of building (is it CORE and necessary) and hard to get this to work? What are the legal challenges of getting this done (think payments) as reasons for some businesses to succeed. There is alo definitely an early mover advantage : Why do some API infrastructure startups become massive businesses?
From the article:
Startups that build APIs for problems that have a high opportunity cost to solving in-house relative to the risk of depending on a vendor have the highest chances of breaking out to become massive companies. Low opportunity costs mean your customers can easily build the same infrastructure in-house, and a low risk of lock-in means they can always switch you out. The sweet spot lies in providing infrastructure that’s hard to migrate from, resulting in a high risk of lock-in, but provides substantially more value than the opportunity cost of building in-house.
What is the ideal age to retire? Never, according to a neuroscientist
I think I’d definitely be bored if I retire but I do agree. If you have enough $ then contributing time or skills back to the community is a great way to spend retirement. I do think that contributing back to society should not just be a retirement thing but rather from one’s growing years.
A16z on healthcare disruption. The dynamics : Lack of transparency, huge spend, huge tectonic shifts (from the article). This isn’t the only industry. All large overly regulated (old school) industries will start to see the shift (Real Estate, Insurance, GovTech)
A complete history on Pinduoduo from Turner Novak. Turner has broken down the origin, the market they played it, how they scaled and where they are currently beautifully ...Hard to distill it down to 1-2 insights. You should read the whole article! Pinduoduo and Vertically Integrated Social Commerce
Need Monday Motivation? Author Robert Glazer Reveals the Secret
From the article:
That’s why I defined capacity building as having four interdependent elements:
Spiritual: who we are and what we want; our purpose and core values
Intellectual: how we plan and execute; learning, goal-setting, habits
Physical: our health and well-being; how stay energized even in challenging situations
Emotional: how we manage our emotional reactions and build positive relationships
We need to attend to all four of these in order to keep moving forward—if you are weak in one of the four, it will impact the other areas and hold you back.
The Costco of luxury brands. I am totally missing the point here. The sole purpose of an expensive/luxury good is signaling status. By making them “at cost” they reduce desirability. Luxury goods are Veblen goods : This brand wants to sell you luxury goods at cost
Others are interested in the status that comes with wearing a designer label. So the fact that Italic focuses on value may be an obstacle for some. But Cai believes there are some people who are more interested in craftsmanship and durable materials. “We wanted to see if we could bring the Costco model to the internet,” says Cai.
Financial accounting is broken. Adam Keesling on Intangible Assets: The Invisible Value Driver
Physical equipment and property not only used to be a larger proportion of investment, but also represented a real competitive advantage. Nowadays, assets like software, business processes, patents, and human resources have more investment and are more important. Notably, they are all intangible assets.
A good read from Packy McCormick on Shopify : Shopify and the Hard Thing About Easy Things
All of a sudden, my current and potential customers have four choices: three sunglass companies and a visor company. We’ve all built the same value chain, and we can all move just as quickly. I add new colors, they add new colors. I drop my prices, they drop their prices. I plug in Affirm so customers can buy my sunglasses on credit at a 0% interest rate, theyfollow suit.
This is Entropy Theory to a “T”. Shopify and the ecommerce infrastructure tools create chaos, and that chaos will reign until a company comes in to wrangle it. This is what Shopify’s Shop app may try to do, and certainly what Amazon does on a larger scale.
A very interesting read on one of America’s favorite pastimes - Imbibing in alcohol : Will American drinking survive COVID Barmageddon?
The quality of the booze that people drank during Prohibition was highly suspect at best, so that led — as you can read in Wayne’s book — to the popularization of such things as rum and coke, or even gin and tonic. You know, tonic had been used as an anti-malarial in India for the British. Suddenly it became a way to make really rotten liquor taste decent.
In-depth analysis of skAdnetwork and the IDFA changes. What this means for advertisers and marketers. Read if you are even remotely interested in privacy. Apple touts privacy and this is is another change in favor of privacy that affects everyone else except Apple. I mean would you really say yes to being “tracked” LOL
Guide to SKAdNetwork and iOS 14 Privacy Changes – RevenueCat
TLDR: Apple has effectively killed the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) by forcing developers to request permission for tracking before accessing it. This will undoubtedly impact Facebook, Google, and other players in the mobile ad ecosystem that have built their businesses around targeted ads, but is also likely to affect the apps that rely on those services. Apple seems to have created SKAdNetwork to soften the blow. While the prospect of Apple providing a better source of truth for attribution is enticing, the current implementation of SKAdNetwork leaves a lot to be desired.
Another brilliant read from a16z on “Taming the AI tail”
Taming the Tail: Adventures in Improving AI Economics
From the article:
The most immediate impact is on the raw cost of data and compute resources. These costs are often far higher for ML than for traditional software, since so much data, so many experiments, and so many parameters are required to achieve accurate results. Anecdotally, development costs – and failure rates – for AI applications can be 3-5x higher than in typical software products.
However, a narrow focus on cloud costs misses two more pernicious potential impacts of the long tail. First, the long tail can contribute to high variable costs beyond infrastructure. If, for example, the questions sent to a chatbot vary greatly from customer to customer – i.e. a large fraction of the queries are in the tail – then building an accurate system will likely require substantial work per customer. Unfortunately, depending on the distribution of the solution space, this work and the associated COGS (cost of goods sold) may be hard to engineer away.
Even worse, AI businesses working on long-tailed problems can actually show diseconomies of scale – meaning the economics get worse over time relative to competitors. Data has a cost to collect, process, and maintain. While this cost tends to decrease over time relative to data volume, the marginal benefit of additional data points declines much faster. In fact, this relationship appears to be exponential – at some point, developers may need 10x more data to achieve a 2x subjective improvement. While it’s tempting to wish for an AI analog to Moore’s Law that will dramatically improve processing performance and drive down costs, that doesn’t seem to be taking place (algorithmic improvements notwithstanding).
A case for going back to the good old “cowboy” days of the internet where protocols ruled and Eudora was a cool email client. The internet introduced toxicity at scale and even if we build out protocols for social exchange these platforms continue to exist. If I want to see something abusive or inclusive I can join a whatsapp group or in the future any new “communications” front end via the “communications” protocol. The problem is the past has been discovering like minded people which is a solved problem today. Find you on Facebook, connect with you, and then go “offline” to a protocol based software. In the halcyon days of the internet this was probably ok, but today everyone is connected and this is a problem! Not sure I agree! Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech
From the article
Some have argued that this approach would actually make some of the problems regarding abusive content online even worse. The argument is that allowing abusive individuals—whether mere trolls or horrifying neo-Nazis —to have any ability to speak their minds is going to be a problem. And to take it a step further, they would argue that by allowing for competing services, you’d end up with cesspool areas of the internet, where the worst of the worst would continue to gather unimpeded.
While I am sympathetic to this possibility, this does not seem to be inevitable by any stretch of the imagination. One point against this complaint is that we already have those people infesting the various social networks, and nothing so far has been successful in getting rid of them. But the larger point is that this would likely quarantine them to some extent, as their content would be less likely to get into the most widely used implementations and services on the protocol. That is, while they would be able to be vile in their own dark corners, their ability to infect the rest of the internet and (importantly) to seek out and recruit others would be severely limited.
Given that this edition already has some nostalgia already, here is the email client that Mike Masnicks is referring to in the above article
Thank you for reading. Stay safe. Be well!