Strictly Curious Newsletter №67

Monday! [Toots horn.] Hope you had a terrific weekend, everyone :)

News

Predictions: ARK’s Big Ideas 2020 deck is here — a year of research packed into 80 slides covering AI, robotics, autonomous, genomics, bitcoin, and more. Link

Tech: The Evil List. Which tech companies are really doing the most harm? Here are the 30 most dangerous, ranked by the people who know. Link

Interesting startup: The making of Mojo, AR contact lenses that give your eyes superpowers. Using a display the size of a grain of sand to project images onto the retina, this startup could help everyone from firefighters to people with poor vision. Link

E-Marketing: Gen Z is reinventing social media marketing. As Gen Z consumers show unique online behaviour, brands should evolve their marketing strategies and reconsider platforms to reach younger audiences. Key takeaways: a) The rise of “dark social”, b) Social media is entertainment, c) Gaming is gaining prominence. Link

VC Funding: Britain’s tech industry shrugs off Brexit fears with a record £10bn startup investment. Asian and US investors now account for 45% of all funding for UK startups. Link

IPOs: London IPOs fall to decade-low in a year of geopolitical uncertainty. Link

Teamwork: How coworkers impact the value of your skills. New research uncovers the importance of teams and coworkers in shaping productivity, earning potential, and stays of employment. The research analyzed data from Sweden. It found that to earn high wages and returns on education, workers must find coworkers who complement their own skills rather than duplicate them. Link

Gig & Sharing Economy: The Passion Economy and the future of work. The top-earning writer on the paid newsletter platform Substack earns more than $500,000 a year from reader subscriptions. The top content creator on Podia, a platform for video courses and digital memberships, makes more than $100,000 a month. And teachers across the US are bringing in thousands of dollars a month teaching live, virtual classes on Outschool and Juni Learning. Link

Venture Capital: How the VC pitch process is failing female entrepreneurs. Link

Entertainment: Quibi raises $400 million to make more bite-sized shows (To be launched in April 2020). Quibi, which is short for “quick bites” of video, aims to sell subscriptions to millennials and tell stories in bite-size chapters in 10 minutes or less. Its videos are an eclectic mix, including long-form narratives distributed in short chapters, reality programs, documentaries and food shows, as well as daily news programs targeting millennials from NBC News. In its first year, Quibi expects to roll out 175 shows and 8,500 episodes. Link

Music: The man who’s spending $1 billion to own every pop song. Music mogul Merck Mercuriadis raised hundreds of millions of dollars to buy the rights to hits by Taylor Swift, Timbaland, and Bruno Mars. Is he insane? Link

Science: Of ants and men: Ant behaviour might mirror political polarization. Division of labour and political polarization may be driven by the same processes, say computational biologists. They found that two forces — ‘’social influence’’, the tendency of individuals to become similar to those they interact with, and ‘’interaction bias’’, which leads us to interact with others who are already like us — are both necessary for the division of labour and polarized social networks to emerge. Link

Music: The hip-hop touring business is broken. More rappers will pursue alternatives to the costly, risky, and exhausting business of touring. Link

Venture Capital: Billionaires make our lives cheaper by 10–30%. Link

Blog Posts

Multitasking: Multitasking seems to be a human paradox — we’re compelled to do more than one thing at a time, but most of us just aren’t that great at balancing multiple tasks. And in the modern age, there can be serious consequences. Texting while driving can incapacitate drivers as much as alcohol. Even phone calls can pose a dangerous distraction. Most of us overestimate our multitasking ability, and people who multitask more often are generally worse at it. Link

Psychology: Go ahead and complain. It might be good for you. A mantra to embrace: “This sucks I’m unhappy with what’s going on.” Link

Interesting Numbers

Wearables: 21% Americans use a smartwatch or fitness tracker. Link

E-commerce: What’s Amazon’s market share? 35% or 5%? Link

Food products: Almost one in four food products launched in the UK in 2019 labelled vegan. In the past two years, the proportion of Britons who have eaten meat substitutes has risen to 65%. Link

E-commerce: New research shows live chats, very popular at e-commerce sites, can increase sales by nearly 16%. Link

Video: 2,000 drones light up night sky in Shanghai to welcome new year

Detours

AirB&B: Airbnb users pay more to stay with attractive hosts. In peer-to-peer marketplaces such as Airbnb and Uber, where buyers and sellers interact directly with one another, first impressions are particularly important. New research confirms that such online platforms are, in part, beauty contests. Link

Psychology: It’s a profitable time to be an Introvert. In general, globalization, financialization, and the rise of tech have favoured certain personality traits above others. Link

Retail Therapy

Tesla is now selling a t-shirt commemorating Cybertruck shattered window flub. Link

Contemplation

“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”
(William James)