What I wrote last week
Book Review – The Body: A Guide for Occupants
Business
Why Apple’s iMessage Is Winning: Teens Dread the Green Text Bubble. “Among U.S. consumers, 40% use iPhones, but among those aged 18 to 24, more than 70% are iPhone users, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners’s most recent survey of consumers.” I think some reading this article may get it backwards: folks use iMessage because they like iPhones first and foremost. They don’t buy iPhones because of iMessage. It’s frivolous that competitors demand Apple to open up iMessage to Android for the sake of open communication. Think about it this way: if you own a restaurant and have a secret recipe that is the appeal of the place, will you want to openly share it with your competitors just so that they become more knowledgeable and the food culture becomes richer?
Is Clubhouse dead? Not if you are in South Asia. To be honest, I didn’t have it in me to imagine that South Asia would be the saving grace for Clubhouse. Would it ever reach the valuation that venture capitalists dreamed of? I don’t know, but if I had to bet, the coin wouldn’t go that way. Being popular is one thing, making money is another. We’ll see
How Shein beat Amazon at its own game — and reinvented fast fashion. “Through its manufacturing partners on the ground in China, Shein churns out and tests thousands of different items simultaneously. Between July and December of 2021, it added anywhere between 2,000 and 10,000 SKUs — stock keeping units, or individual styles — to its app each day, according to data collected by Rest of World. The company confirmed it starts by ordering a small batch of each garment, often a few dozen pieces, and then waits to see how buyers respond. If the cropped sweater vest is a hit, Shein orders more. It calls the system a “large-scale automated test and re-order (LATR) model.” The secret is Shein’s internal software, which connects its entire business from design to delivery. “Everything is optimized with big data,” Lin said. Each of Shein’s suppliers gets their own account on the platform, which spits out information about what styles are selling well and can also quickly identify which might become future hits. “You can see the current sales, and then it will tell you to stock up more if you sell well and what you need to do if you don’t sell well. It’s all there.””
Fintech Startup Checkout.com Scores $40 Billion Valuation in Latest Share Sale. “Checkout.com plans to use much of the new capital to fuel an expansion into the U.S. Last summer, the company hired Céline Dufétel, chief financial officer at money manager T. Rowe Price Group Inc., to do the same job for Checkout.com. Many of the company’s top executives and investors now reside in the U.S. It also plans to enlarge its business catering to cryptocurrency companies. Exchanges such as Coinbase Global Inc. and wallets like Novi from Meta Platforms Inc. use Checkout.com to move customers’ money into and out of digital currencies. Crypto and financial-technology transactions account for more than half of Checkout.com’s payments volume, Ms. Dufétel said”.
Netflix Needs New Subscribers. Its Korean Playbook Is Its Secret Weapon. “Bound by certain social taboos and rules on what could be shown on public broadcast TV, mainstream networks in Korea typically passed on most of what they got pitched. The resulting flow of rejected ideas created an opening for Netflix. Because it is a paid private service, Netflix enjoyed more leeway in terms of what it could show its viewers. Netflix began harvesting ideas considered too edgy for the broadcasters and building a slate of programming that leaned into sex and violence, as well as prickly themes, such as social inequality and politics. In 2020, the company turned its first annual profit in South Korea while reporting sales of $356 million. South Korea is now one of Netflix’s largest markets in Asia, trailing only Australia and Japan. The company has more than 5 million subscribers in South Korea, according to Media Partners Asia. To date, Netflix has spent more than $1 billion on programming in Korean, one of its largest content investments outside the U.S. Along the way, Netflix’s status has flipped. Once shunned by the local creative community, Netflix is now courted.“
Other stuff I found interesting
My first impressions of web3. “We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure. This means architecture that anticipates and accepts the inevitable outcome of relatively centralized client/server relationships, but uses cryptography (rather than infrastructure) to distribute trust. One of the surprising things to me about web3, despite being built on “crypto,” is how little cryptography seems to be involved!”
The Architecture of Tomorrow Mimics Nature to Cool the Planet. I am at loss for words to describe my support to integrate our civil architecture and planning into nature. A city without trees or nature is lifeless and frankly unappealing to me. Why not integrating nature into our architecture? Well, if you haven’t noticed, nature has been here long before our buildings ever have
This Ad-Free Google Search Alternative Is Actually Worth Using. It’s actually pretty good on iOS. The ad-free experience is refreshing
Another masterful article by Morgan Housel. It’s full of interesting short stories with wonderful punchlines and wisdom in the end
Stats
Apple Books has 100 million users each month.
Global mobile ad spend is forecast to reach $350 billion in 2022
“There are now 110 million monthly active Android TV devices in the world”
Minh Quang Duong 