📡 Can people ever change? 🤔
Welcome to another Pulse, this time from an after-heatwave-pretty-cold-and-rainy Manchester!
It’s been a tough week. My car spent most of its time getting fixed, so it was a week full of Uber-ing, tram-ing, and walking - and it still is 😐 [getting used to stuff sucks].
This week I realised I’ve been given early access 😎 to Story Pins on Pinterest, so I created a couple and they’re doing really good in terms of impressions. I think Pinterest is showing them to more people than usual. You can take a look here, preferably, do it on the Pinterest mobile app: Story Pin 1 and Story Pin 2.
- Ben from [ perspective ix ]
PS. Make sure you scroll to the end. There’s something you can download - for free.
📰 News
Facebook confirmed a new FTC antitrust investigation after posting strong earnings, beating Wall Street’s expectations, and a $5 billion settlement with the FTC over Facebook’s privacy practices [Verge]. Revenue: $16.89 billion, up 28% YoY; Daily Active Users: 1.59 billion, up 8% YoY; Monthly Active Users: 2.41 billion, up 8% [BusinessInsider].
Snap overtakes its IPO debut price after posting stellar 2Q19 numbers [TechCrunch]: $388 million in revenue (compared to $360 million estimated), and 13 million new users. This is the most users Snap has added in a single quarter in three years [AlexHeath].
Twitter added 5 million daily users in 2Q19, bringing the company to 139 million in total. That’s the highest the number has been since Twitter started reporting daily usage statistics earlier this year (instead of monthly active users stats), and it represents the highest annual growth in almost two years [Verge]. Twitter made $841 million (compared to $829.1 million expected) in overall revenues, up 18% YoY [CNBC].
AWS reported some slippage in its cloud earnings growth numbers today, dropping from 49% growth last year at this time to 37% this year. Total revenue increased from 2Q18, from $6.105 billion to $8.381 billion in 2Q19. Today’s report puts the company on an astonishing run rate of more than $33 billion — just for AWS [TechCrunch]
Apple is acquiring most of Intel’s smartphone modem business in a $1B deal to control its 5G destiny [Wired].
The Samsung Galaxy Fold is coming back for September – at least in some places [TechRadar].
Microsoft is dumping $1 billion into Sam Altman’s OpenAI research group [TechCrunch].
SoftBank announces AI-focused $108 billion Vision Fund 2 with LPs including Microsoft, Apple and Foxconn [Reuters].
🧠 Insights
Do you want the change? - Credit: Daniel Jensen on Unsplash
(Unless they want to)
Humans are unique in their ability to willingly change. We can change our attitude, our appearance and our skillset.
But only when we want to.
The hard part, then, isn’t the changing it.
It’s the wanting it.
🔗 from Seth Godin’s Blog.
📊 Statistics
TikTok Global User Spending by Month - Credit: SensorTower
TikTok User Spending Set New Record in June, Climbing 588% to More Than $10 Million
ByteDance’s short video social app TikTok continues to experience impressive growth in user spending, hitting a new record of $10.8 million last month.
TikTok’s gross revenue from in-app purchases of virtual currency (known as Coins) was up 588 percent year-over-year from $1.6 million in June 2018. Spending in the app increased 19 percent month-over-month from $9 million in May.
This increase in spending has been most pronounced during the first half of 2019 and is being driven primarily by users in China, where gross revenue for the app has increased 271 percent since January. By comparison, TikTok’s revenue from IAP last month was down 16 percent from January in the United States.
🔗 Read more on SensorTower.
📱 Tools & Apps
Every Second: Visualise all the amazing things happening every second around the world.
TLDR This: Automatically summarise any article or webpage in a click. [Chrome Extension]
Block Website Notification Requests [Chrome Extension]
Chrome extensions now work on Brave as well.
And something I made this week. Hope you find it useful 🙃 ↓
The Ultimate Social Media Image Size Guide for 2019
Check them out on our Instagram 😁
🎧 Audio [and Video] Stimulation
The Modern Struggle - Naval Ravikant
🐦 Tweets of the Week
i know you don't vote for PM, you nerd
More people in the UK voted for the Peanut Butter Kit Kat Chunky to be made a permanent product in 2012 than for our current prime minister.
listening to a podcast in public:
pros:
- good for anxiety
- feels like you're with friends
- keeps your mind active
cons:
- when you laugh you look like a fucking lunatic
And by the way, how do you feel about Twitter’s new design on the web? Love it or hate it? Either way, here’s a browser extension to simplify the new interface for you. [Mozilla Firefox | Google Chrome]
🎮 Fun Stuff
Take care of your pens, people! - Credit: Reddit/u/DylBaines1911
This is not goodbye...
If you scrolled this far, you deserve something extra!
So, I made a couple of colour palettes to go on our instagram highlights cover, like this:
[ highlights ]
Made these three sets, and you can download them here. Buying me coffee is much appreciated, but you can download them for free using these codes:
Set 1: 4306
Set 2: 5014
Set 3: 7963
Thank you!
Now, this is 👋 until next week!