Tumblr
‘Nobody at Yahoo understood Tumblr’: Why Marissa Mayer’s big bet on Tumblr never panned out – this all sounded eerily familiar. I was at Yahoo! when it put together really interesting pieces of web 2.0 and social services. The piece on Tumblr was so reminiscent of Flickr, del.icio.us experience in many respects. Flickr was breaking even by the time it went to Yahoo!. Del.icio.us was a service that was run out of home server room in Joshua Schacter’s apartment that was really his coat cupboard. Like Tumblr, both had their finger on something. Yahoo! did early work on mobile; and the fumbled opportunity again looked like Tumblr. In all of these cases, the problem at Yahoo! seems to be process and senior management mindset rather than technology. Tumblr was just on a bigger scale in terms of cost; if not opportunity cost. – Despite Yahoo! growing through strategic acquisitions, it surfed a lot of waves a little too early; yet had a very late wave mentality (boring heavily from an analogy in Bob Cringely’s Accidental Empires). I hope that there is a better future for Tumblr. More related content here.
Business
Common Sense: Did the Jack Welch Model Sow Seeds of G.E.’s Decline? | New York Times – interesting read, I wonder whether this will discredit other parts of ‘Neutron’ Jack’s legacy
How to prevent the UK’s self-destruction | HKEJ Insights – Jim O’Neill on the state of Britain
In Pakistan, China presses built-in advantage for ‘Silk Road’ contracts – Reuters – China’s advantage isn’t IP, price or product but willingness to deploy cheap capital fast. Huawei isn’t bought because its better, but because its cheaper. A lot of the discount comes down to negative interest vendor loans provided by Chinese state banks to mobile networks rolling out Huawei equipment and services
FMCG
Nestle mulling sale of its nearly US$1 bn confectionary business in the US | SCMP – really interesting move that shows Nestle following a trend that PepsiCo tried to go down a number of years ago
Aldi fires $3.4 billion shot in US supermarket wars | RTE – really interesting move with huge potential impact for FMCG brands
Gadget
Tech Fix: New iPad Pro Inches Toward Replacing PC, but Falls Short | New York Times – I still think of the iPad as predominantly a content consumption device. Whilst it can be great with apps for specific work, it isn’t a general purpose device like a Mac
Luxury
Women have no idea what to wear to work today — Quartz – ironically they are too illiberal for men’s clothing
Media
Dentsu Aegis Second Big Shop To Downgrade 2017 Ad Expansion | Mediapost
Security
Busting Thieves One Dyetonator At A Time | ogilvy.com
US intelligence agencies are beginning to build AI spies | Quartz – not surprising they would want to hand off first line analysis on data to machines. Machine learning works really well on things like counting the number of cats in a photo, so it would work really well for agencies like the NRA – national reconnaissance office
Software
WWDC 2017 — Some Thoughts – Learning By Shipping – interesting analysis – Steven Sinofsky was a senior executive at Microsoft
Telecoms
Nokia Touts NPU for Internet’s Next Chapter | EE Times
Web of no web
Indoor GPS could stop us getting lost – and make us spend more money | CityMetric – indoor navigation still feels clunky
Wireless
7 of the top 10 smartphone suppliers headquartered in China | Electroniq
Q&A with Connie Chan | Techinasia – Connie works at A16z and really gets the Chinese eco-system better than anyone else on Sandhill Road