Month: August 2018

FB Stories

Stories potentially have significant value for Facebook beyond strategic positioning. First and foremost, the fact that users find Stories even more engaging than the News Feed suggests there is at least the possibility to create even more engaging advertising as well. This is in fact another way to look at that chart about the top 200 advertisers: the biggest spenders are brand advertisers, and while it is to Facebook’s credit that they serve the long tail, there remains a significant opportunity the company has mostly not tapped into, and oh-by-the-way, those are the advertisers best equipped to spend the money to make an effective Stories ad; after all, they’re already spending the money on TV.

Android fork consequences

Those modifications lead to headaches, though, including the well-established problem of delays in shipping security updates. They can also, as Stavrou and his team have uncovered, result in firmware bugs that put users at risk. “The problem is not going to go away, because a lot of the people in the supply chain want to be able to add their own applications, customize, add their own code. That increases the attack surface, and increases the probability of software error. They’re exposing the end user to exploits that the end user is not able to respond to.”

Ancient Greece colors

Once upon a time, long before wars, natural disasters and erosion took hold of the ancient Greek statues, these ivory gems vibrated with color. Ancient Greek sculptors valued animated and pulsating depictions as much as they valued perfection and realism, and it has finally become fact that these artists utilized color in their creations. The stark white Parthenon once breathed in blues, yellows and reds, and—though it took 1000s of years for this to be solidified in art historical circles—now, scholars are finally able to display the ancient world with the same rainbow vitality it once possessed.

Owning elections

Last week at DEFCON 26 in Las Vegas, 11-year-old Emmett Brewer hacked into a replica of Florida’s state election site and changed the voting results. That’s scary enough. What’s even scarier is that it took him less than 10 minutes. An 11-year-old girl was able to hack into the same site in ~15 minutes. And more than 30 kids were able to hack into replicas of other states’ sites in less than 30 min.

Intangible Assets

The portion of the world’s economy that doesn’t fit the old model just keeps getting larger. That has major implications for everything from tax law to economic policy to which cities thrive and which cities fall behind, but in general, the rules that govern the economy haven’t kept up. This is one of the biggest trends in the global economy that isn’t getting enough attention.

If you want to understand why this matters, the brilliant new book Capitalism Without Capital by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake is about as good an explanation as I’ve seen. They start by defining intangible assets as “something you can’t touch.” It sounds obvious, but it’s an important distinction because intangible industries work differently than tangible industries. Products you can’t touch have a very different set of dynamics in terms of competition and risk and how you value the companies that make them.

Haskel and Westlake outline 4 reasons why intangible investment behaves differently:

It’s a sunk cost. If your investment doesn’t pan out, you don’t have physical assets like machinery that you can sell off to recoup some of your money.
It tends to create spillovers that can be taken advantage of by rival companies. Uber’s biggest strength is its network of drivers, but it’s not uncommon to meet an Uber driver who also picks up rides for Lyft.
It’s more scalable than a physical asset. After the initial expense of the first unit, products can be replicated ad infinitum for next to nothing.
It’s more likely to have valuable synergies with other intangible assets. Haskel and Westlake use the iPod as an example: it combined Apple’s MP3 protocol, miniaturized hard disk design, design skills, and licensing agreements with record labels.

None of these traits are inherently good or bad. They’re just different from the way manufactured goods work.

more of the economy is moving to intangible assets

Kopitiam

Kopitiam, an all-day Malaysian spot counters that narrative. A full meal here can cost less than a typical order of avocado toast. This is where you go for milk toast sandwiches: crustless white bread as airy as angel food cake and spread with a layer of green pandan-coconut jam that’s thicker than most burgers. The cost is $5, and the bread doubles as a dipping agent for a soup of soy sauce-spiked soft boiled eggs.

What killed the Dinosaurs?

The greatest area of consensus between the volcanists and the impacters seems to be on what insults to sling. Both sides accuse the other of ignoring data. Each side dismisses the other as unscientific: “It’s not science. It sometimes seems to border on religious fervor, basically”. Both sides contend that the other is so stubborn, the debate will be resolved only when the opposition croaks. “You don’t convince the old people about a new idea. You wait for them to die,” jokes Courtillot, the volcanism advocate, paraphrasing Max Planck. Smit agrees: “You just have to let them get extinct.”