Why Amazon’s ‘1-Click’ Ordering Was a Game Changer

The 1-Click technology will be remembered as “a very important event in the history of e-commerce,” said Hosanagar. “First, it was a very simple and intuitive system and generated a lot of controversy — could something so simple and obvious be patented? Second, it became an important part of the experience that Amazon offered and became a flag bearer for the convenient shopping experience that Amazon came to be known for. And finally, it showed how e-commerce was as much about technology and data as it was about retail.”

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Knowledge@Wharton

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THE UBER DILEMMA

Nice analysis of Benchmark Capital suit against Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.

That almost assuredly changed Benchmark’s internal calculus when it came to filing this lawsuit. Does it give the firm a bad reputation, potentially keeping it out of the next Facebook? Unquestionably. The sheer size of Uber though, and the potential return it represents, means that Benchmark is no longer playing an iterated game. The point now is not to get access to the next Facebook: it is to ensure the firm captures its share of the current one.

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Stratechery by Ben Thompson

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The news – why do we subject ourselves to it?

How many times do you check your mobile feed for the latest news? And how many hours do you spend listening or watching to news. Speaking for myself, I don’t remember 99% of the news I read daily.

Rolf Dobelli, author of The Art of Thinking Clearly argues that consuming news has a darker side. He argues that the daily repetition of news about things we can’t act upon makes us passive. It saps our energy. It grinds us down. It impacts our ability to make good decisions and think clearly. It attacks our creativity. “I would not be surprised if news consumption at least partially contributes to the widespread disease of depression,” he writes.

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Antonia Case – New Philosopher

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This Tiny Country Feeds the World

Could not help but share this great piece from National Geographic about a small country doing wonders with its sustainable farming practices.

Seen from the air, the Netherlands resembles no other major food producer—a fragmented patchwork of intensely cultivated fields, most of them tiny by agribusiness standards, punctuated by bustling cities and suburbs. In the country’s principal farming regions, there’s almost no potato patch, no greenhouse, no hog barn that’s out of sight of skyscrapers, manufacturing plants, or urban sprawl. More than half the nation’s land area is used for agriculture and horticulture.

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Frank Viviano — National Geographic

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Every Minute, the Internet Goes Through an Incredible Amount of Content

How much stuff is getting added to internet every minute? Any guesses. The below picture gives us an idea and it does not mention Whatsapp!

For instance, the collective internet watches 4.1 million YouTube videos every minute, and users post over 46,200 images on Instagram (which must include an absurd amount of brunch photos on Sunday). And if you’re curious about something and head over to Google, you’ll contribute to over 3.5 million searches, which translates to more than 5 billion queries every day.

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The Magic of Innovation

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. – Arthur C. Clarke

The long history of driverless cars in science fiction and, increasingly, in reality neatly illustrates ‘magic as motivation’. Driverless cars are a response to the congestion, accidents, and drudgery that define driving cars. Driverless cars promise accurate and relaxing travel that is liberated from the imperfections of humans and their cities. The innovators behind driverless cars (and it’s not just Google) understand the current limitations of automotive technology and have used a magical imagination to inspire the re-invention of car travelling.

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Stripe Partners

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Eliminating the Human

Apps are eliminating messy human interactions. Ordering food, hailing cab, buying grocery – apps have completely eliminated the need for interaction between human beings for these activities. But, are we missing out on something?

We’re a social species—we benefit from passing discoveries on, and we benefit from our tendency to cooperate to achieve what we cannot alone. In his book Sapiens, Yuval Harari claims this is what allowed us to be so successful. He also claims that this cooperation was often facilitated by an ability to believe in “fictions” such as nations, money, religions, and legal institutions. Machines don’t believe in fictions—or not yet, anyway. That’s not to say they won’t surpass us, but if machines are designed to be mainly self-interested, they may hit a roadblock. And in the meantime, if less human interaction enables us to forget how to cooperate, then we lose our advantage.

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David Byrne — MIT Technology Review

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Using the Blockchain to Clean Up the Niger Delta

I have been hearing a lot about Blockchain recently. According to Wiki – Functionally, a blockchain can serve as “an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way.” Today’s needull is an example of Blockchain being used for social impact.

Kevin Werbach, a Wharton professor of legal studies and business ethics who has studied the blockchain, says there’s been an “explosion of blockchain-based applications and systems. It’s still very early. It’s still not as solid and reliable as where they need to be, but it is clearly where we’re going to see more activity.” He notes that the blockchain has been used in various social impact efforts. In May, the United Nation’s World Food Programme conducted a pilot that gave cryptocurrency vouchers to 10,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan that they redeemed at certain markets.

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Knowledge@Wharton

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Is Tesla Really Making Progress?

This needull presents both sides of the argument. Some look at Tesla as game changer while others are not that impressed.

Because that scenario seems like a real possibility, a car that doesn’t need fossil fuel to run does feel like a game-changer, contrary to Cowen’s argument. Even when accounting for the environmental impacts of manufacturing a Tesla and running it on electricity from a coal-fired grid, its zero-emissions feature still counts as progress, given it will help reduce both future climate impacts and localized pollution from urban traffic, which disproportionately affect communities of color.

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Brentin Mock — CityLab

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In praise of Facebook Instant Articles

Everything seems to be moving to Facebook these days. Journalism, Business, Activism.

Two years since the product’s launch, Instant Articles has been criticized for underwhelming monetization, the absence of robust subscription options, an inability for publishers to directly connect to their readers, the limited amount of user data returned by Facebook, and the lack of autonomy provided to publishers over their ad space. One publishing executive described them as “a public flop.”

But the Daily News still sees potential in courting a mobile audience. This represents a considerable shift in strategy in the past few months. The Daily News has always posted a high volume of articles on Facebook compared to other publishers—typically almost 100 per day. But the paper barely used Instant Articles; the strategy was all about driving back to nydailynews.com.

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Pete Brown — CJR

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