Samira Stalks — the ‘mind your business’ edition
Snapchat and Facebook playing ping pong. Fintech serving the ‘unbanked population’ and the latest mindfulness craze to improve productivity.
News(ish)- Snapchat stalks Facebook and vice versa
As these social networks become an indispensable part of our lives, its good to know what they’re up to. Snapchat launched ‘Memories’ last week, allowing users to save photo snaps. It’s risking the one thing it had going for itself (apart from the flower halo headbands)- its ‘capture the moment’ authenticity of disappearing photos- in hope of appealing to a wider demographic. The launch of ‘Stories’ was its first deviation from its original promise, with 24 hour availability of curated snaps and now with Memories, users can expect more poses, pouts and food porn, or even worse brands trying to become your friends. Rumoured a couple of months ago to be raising another $200m in its Series F round, it’s valued at $20bn, having cracked the under 25 year market, it seems to be positioning itself for mass adoption.
On the other side, the incumbent Facebook is toying with the idea of launching Secret Conversations — yup messages that disappear. They’ve worked with cyber security experts Open Whisper Systems on encryption technologies to make it available on one device with only the two people in the conversation having access to the data. It’s limited to text only (not video for now) and claim the main use cases are for communicating health and financial information- at least that’s how they’ve convinced themselves…
A competitive spirit is healthy- up to a point.
The best entrepreneurs I’ve interviewed have sought to try to turn competition into collaboration and veterans know full well, channelled in the right way, it can be used tactically to grow a market. Mark Jenner from Beeline spoke about how he publicly backed a rival cycle navigation company which launched a Kickstarter campaign at the same time as them as ‘more people cycling in cities is a good thing’. Being an avid tennis player, gamesmanship has been impressed upon me from a young age- even Serena clapped that backhand down-the-line winner from Kerber in the Wimbers final over the weekend. P.s. for reference my competition is Silicon Real, a techy spin-off of the London Real YouTube channel and TED talks (obvs). I’ve reached out to both…
Startup stalk corner (Companies I like.)
Sheel Mohnot (fintech entrepreneur/ 500 Startups VC partner) mentioned in his interview, the ‘unbanked population’ (a third of the world’s population) is massively underserved and untapped, representing a new wave of growth in both the developed and emerging economies. I got excited when I watched Shivani Siroya’s TED talk on how InVenture is providing modern credit in emerging markets through mobile. The company is defining new credit metrics for people with a limited financial history and can access an array of social data on the borrower’s mobile, such as how involved someone is in their local community, to determine credit worthiness and provide microloans. Anyone knows anyone (ad infinitum) that knows her — would love to have her in the studio (aka my parents lounge over Skype)!
I would love to hear your suggestions as to who I should be stalking- know any reckless dreamers? Drop me a line — y’all know the drill about self-promotion…
Goal seek… increased productivity
Sort your attitude out
Mindfulness and meditation aren’t just a craze or for hippies- it’s desperately needed in the world right now as our race seems to be turning against itself! Arianna Huffington’s book Thrive harps on about the need to reconnect with intuition to make decisions and Apple announced its introducing a breathing app in its next release. I GIFd seven reasons to meditate on Insta here.
I use the (free) Calm app for 10 mins a day, a short guided meditation and interviewed the founder Alex Tew a couple of weeks ago to talk about why it helps and how they’ve managed to bring it to over 5m people in the West. He’s a smart kid and was the annoying uni teen behind the million-dollar homepage (made $1m off £50 in 4 months). Business Insider put it best when they claimed ‘The hyperactive weirdos of Silicon Valley are going crazy for this site that calms them down’. It’s my latest stress buster hack and demystifies what ‘being in the present’ means!
Digi-stationary for the pencil case
If you’re thinking about an online venture, I follow Neil Patel’s marketing and SEO advice — his free analyser tool informed me my site is the 10,354,471st most popular website in the world (solid effort) and has simple suggestions to implement SEO tactics and what not. I made a pretty website, not one riddled with metadata- lesson learnt…don’t make the same one!
Shower thoughts (contributed via Reddit)
1. “Wish I were a little kid so I could take a long nap and everyone would just be proud of me”
2. “If you pay for something entirely with pocket change, it kinda feels like it was free”
3. “If you turn the hourglass sideways, the time stops and it looks like an infinity sign”
There’s more? Parting words…
Lastly, (if you’ve made it this far) — pls forward this link to encourage your homies and work colleagues you vaguely smile at- for kudos points- to sign up to this mailing list (below) and listen to the interviews here!
http://eepurl.com/bQheMj
I (cheekily) signed up some of my pals (siblings pals count as my pals) as I read by somewhere it was “better to ask for forgiveness, than permission”- so pls do forgive me and you can opt out/ break my heart below. Any form of feedback is so welcome right now lol!
Next interview out this Sunday 17 July with a guy trying to build the digital version of Disney in Africaaaaa!
Have a great week and stay curious!
SS
