📡 Can we forget and let 🤖🤖 remember?
Welcome to this week’s eggcelent Pulse!
It’s another long weekend here in the UK - and it’s sunny - and I still managed to keep Pulse coming! Can you believe it? 😎
Here’s a couple of exciting stories of last week:
In early 2018, Mark Zuckerberg set out to fix Facebook. Here’s how that turned out: Scandals. Backstabbing. Resignations. Record profits. Time Bombs. [Wired]
Epic banned over 1,200 ‘Fortnite’ World Cup players for cheating. [Engadget]
Listen to never-ending AI generated death metal livestream on YouTube.
Now, let’s dig in!
- Ben from Perspective IX
My thoughts and prayers are with everyone who’s been affected by the tragedies of today in Sri Lanka.
🧠 Insights
Credit: Roman Mager on Unsplash
How much can we afford to forget, if we train machines to remember?
When I was a student, in the distant past when most computers were still huge mainframes, I had a friend whose PhD advisor insisted that he carry out a long and difficult atomic theory calculation by hand. This led to page after page of pencil scratches, full of mistakes, so my friend finally gave in to his frustration. He snuck into the computer lab one night and wrote a short code to perform the calculation. Then he laboriously copied the output by hand, and gave it to his professor.
By Gene Tracy, chancellor professor of physics at William & Mary, Virginia, on Aeon.
📊 Statistics
Average Time Spent on TV vs Mobile - Credit: Snap Inc.
The Evolution of Video
As the definition of TV becomes increasingly fluid, mobile has opened additional opportunities to provide viewers with high-quality content—where they want it, when they want it and how they want it. As of August 2018, mobile phones have become the dominant device for watching online video, surpassing computers and other internet-connected devices.
2019 is shaping up to be an inflection point for video. It is forecasted that mobile will surpass traditional TV entirely as the medium attracting the most entertainment minutes in the US.
Read more on Snap. Download the report. [PDF]
Snapchat is quite sticky! - Credit Verto Analytics
The Old Tech Giants Do NOT Control the Next Generation
According to Verto Analytics, among teens, Snapchat is the top social service, and Facebook is number five (among adults, these stats are almost the opposite).
Mobile apps and all-inclusive services/platforms have a significant impact on everyone: An equal number of monthly users watch videos on the Facebook App and on the YouTube app (however, only 21% of total Facebook mobile app time is about video usage versus 84% for #YouTube).
Read more on Verto Analytics.
👻 add me on Snapchat: perspectiveix
Banks: Traditionals vs Challengers - Credit: Apptopia
Challenger Banks in the UK
Banking is an unbearably dry topic, except in the UK, where the traditional incumbents are stuck in a pitched battle for survival with a swathe of new app-only “challenger banks.” Without a doubt, the most famous of these is Monzo. Data from Apptopia paints a rosy picture of the company’s growth, with monthly downloads of the company’s flagship app growing 211% in 12 months and 347% since January 2018.
While the traditional banks have a good edge on downloads over the past 12 months, their monthly figures are fairly static. Monzo and its fellow challenger banks are on a marked growth spiral.
It’s worth mentioning that downloads of the legacy banks don’t necessarily translate into new customers. It’s entirely possible to use a legacy bank without an app. I’d wager many of those downloads belong to existing customers, either installing the software on a new phone, or using app-based banking for the first time.
Read more on Apptopia.
Top Social Media Apps in the U.S. for Q1 2019 by Downloads
The most downloaded Social Media app in the 🇺🇸 for Q1 2019 was TikTok with nearly 13.5 million installs, up 184% over 1Q18. The full top 10 ranking of Social Media apps in the U.S. by downloads for Q1 2019 is above.
Instagram was the second most installed Social Media app in the U.S. last year with more than 10 million downloads. Facebook, Snapchat, and Pinterest comprised the remainder of the top five most installed apps in the category.
Read more on SensorTower.
📱 Tools & Apps
SwiftCV: Create beautiful & responsive web resumes in minutes.
Backlinks by Neil Patel: A backlinks research tool for competitive intelligence
🎧 Audio Stimulation
💤 Driftin' Off on Spotify
🐦 Tweets of the Week
Every time I see someone share a Tik Tok video I remember that Twitter had basically the exact same product in Vine, which was enormously popular, and shut it down
🎮 Fun Stuff
Lose Some Weight Man! - Credit: System32Comics
This is not goodbye...
This is! 👋
See you next week 🙂 Meanwhile, if you like Pulse, share it with a friend. You can use this link.