📡 Ask and you shall receive. And then, don't stop.
Welcome to the 🎄🎄🎄 Pulse!
First of all, sorry about being late! It’s that time of the year again - busy busy busy!
So, quick question: do you want to get another Pulse next Sunday (30th December) or should we go for 2019? If you want it next week, give this email a 👍 (at the very end of the email), if not, give it a 👎 - I won’t take it personal!
Anyways, I would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
- Ben
📰 News
Ask and you shall receive! Twitter relaunched the reverse chronological feed with a sparkle button - and iOS users will get it first! Now, we’re just waiting for the edit button.
China built a tower that acts like ‘the world’s biggest air purifier,’ and it actually works. [BusinessInsider]
Dual-booting into Microsoft Windows on a Chromebook looks to be ready soon.
Uber reaches tentative settlement with drivers arbitrating over employment status and expense reimbursement. [TechCrunch]
UK police arrest two in connection with Gatwick Airport drone shutdown. [TheVerge]
🧠 Insights
What are you paying for with you attention? - Credit: rawpixel on Unsplash
Attention is not a resource but a way of being alive to the world
We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.’ Those were the words of the American biologist E O Wilson at the turn of the century. Fastforward to the smartphone era, and it’s easy to believe that our mental lives are now more fragmentary and scattered than ever. The ‘attention economy’ is a phrase that’s often used to make sense of what’s going on: it puts our attention as a limited resource at the centre of the informational ecosystem, with our various alerts and notifications locked in a constant battle to capture it.
Read more on Aeon. It’s a very interesting piece by Dan Nixon, a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Sunday Times, The Economist and The Guardian, among others.
When you’re done, if you haven’t already, go listen to NPR’s TED Radio Hour episode called: Attention Please.
📊 Statistics
2018's Highest Grossing iPhone Apps - Credit: Statista
2018’s Highest Grossing iPhone Apps
Netflix was by far the highest grossing iPhone and iPad app in 2018, bringing in 790 million dollars. Tencent’s video streaming app was the second highest earning iOS app, grossing 490 million dollars. Netflix blew the other top ten apps out of the water, racking up 62 percent more revenue than second-place iOS app, Tencent.
While Netflix outperformed Tencent, video streaming and sharing applications did well overall, dominating the top ten list. Seven out of the ten highest grossing iOS apps were video streaming or sharing applications. Notably, half of the apps were owned by Chinese companies like Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba.
via Statista.
App vs Web in e-Commerce - Credit: VertoAnalytics
e-Commerce App vs Web Engagement
Using the top four e-commerce brands, here, Verto dives into what form of traffic was driving the majority of their visits. Unsurprisingly, Web (including mobile & desktop) continues to dominate e-commerce reach and time spent. 179 million unique monthly visitors access #Amazon at least once via Web which is 97% of Amazon’s user base for September 2018; only 53% of those users, 98 million, access it via the application. Even in terms of engagement, the average user on Amazon spent slightly more than 5 hours on web browsers compared to slightly under an hour on the app.
Read more on VertoAnalytics.
📱 Tools & Apps
remove.bg: Remove the background of any image 100% automatically. 🤔RIP Photoshop!?
CSS Gradient: A simple, colourful gradient generator.
🎮 Fun Stuff
Just be careful when trying to take the perfect shot - Credit: sirjoancornella
This is not goodbye...
This is a vote for the date of the next Pulse! Get involved!
See you… when you wanna see me 😁
Ciao!