📡 Fake stuff hurting real people - for real 😳
Welcome to another Sunday evening Pulse!
Are you ready for Monday?! 😉 Hope you had a great weekend and are recharged for the next week.
There’s a lot in today’s issue, and I still have my cold and can’t stop coughing; so, I’ll let you dive straight in.
- Ben from [ perspective ix ]
PS. Hit me with some feedback. You can easily do it by replying to this email! 👋
📰 News
Facebook built an app that allowed employees to identify their colleagues and friends who enabled facial recognition by pointing their phone cameras at them. The app was developed in 2015-16, but never released publicly, according to Facebook [BusinessInsider].
Tesla has received over 146,000 reservation orders for the Tesla Cybertruck, pulling in some $14.6 million in deposits just two days after the company’s CEO Elon Musk unveiled it [TechCrunch] - and Here’s why it’s looks so weird [TechCrunch].
Netflix to start hardening its stance on password sharing [TechDirt] - feeling 😦?
Twitter finally ditches SMS for two-factor authentication [TNW], and rolls out ‘hide replies’ feature to everyone worldwide [TechCrunch] - a little safer we are on Twitter.
Amazon lost a $10 billion Pentagon contract to Microsoft. Now it’s blaming President Trump directly [Verge] - and filed a legal claim to protest “interference” in the DoD’s decision.
PayPal acquires promo code-finder Honey for $4 billion, betting that the Chrome extension and mobile product will give them a leg up in deal discovery [Verge].
TikTok hits 1.5 billion downloads, with 614 million downloads so far just this year [Cnet], while its Chinese owner company, ByteDance, is in talks with music labels - like Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music - for its new music streaming service [Reuters]. In the midst of all these, U.S. Army cadets were told this week not to use TikTok in uniform amid concerns over the app’s handling of user data [Reuters].
And now… Watch Sacha Baron Cohen skewer Zuckerberg’s 'twisted logic’ on hate speech and fakes 👇
ADL International Leadership Award Presented to Sacha Baron Cohen (2019)
🧠 Insights
Fake Stuff Hurting Real People - Credit: Max Muselmann on Unsplash
Fake Stuff Hurting Real People
Getting bamboozled by online misinformation can be like trying to charge your smartphone in a microwave: embarrassing, expensive, and mildly explosive. A dubious, highly edited clothing hack leaves you with shredded, unwearable garments. Hot glue, bereft of editing software and careful lighting, turns out to be ill-suited to making sandals. It can also get much, much worse, and the dangerous lies that spring to mind most readily—4chan’s bomb-making instructions, racist conspiracy theories that seem designed to whip people into homicidal fury—aren’t the only ones going around the internet.
Read more on Wired.
✅ Go check a fact-checking website: Snopes.
📊 Statistics
Instagram is the place for gift inspiration for Gen Z - Credit: Statista
Gen Z College Students Use Instagram for Gift Inspiration
When it comes to holiday gifts, Gen Z college students are most likely to turn to Instagram for inspiration. In an October poll of more than 1,000 Gen Z college students, the National Retail Federation discovered 46% will use social media to spark creativity during the holiday season.
82% of college students will use Instagram. Second most popular is YouTube at 48%, followed by Pinterest at 44%. Snapchat is in the middle of the list with 35%. Toward the bottom are Facebook and Twitter, which fell at 34% and 33%, respectively.
At 10%, TikTok is the least popular form of social media to use for inspiration. The video-sharing app is widely popular among Gen Z. It has been downloaded more than 1 billion times worldwide and was one of the most popular apps of 2018. TikTok’s popularity continues to grow, especially among the younger generations. Retailers and brands aren’t popular on the platform yet, though companies like Guess and Chipotle have tried to create one of their own viral marketing campaigns to potentially tap into Gen Z’s propensity to participate in viral challenges.
via Statista.
The Top 1% - Credit: SensorTower
The Top 1% of App Publishers Generate 80% of All New Installs
New data from Sensor Tower’s Store Intelligence platform reveals that the top-performing 1 percent of publishers globally accounted for 80% of the 29.6 billion app downloads in 3Q19, leaving just 20% —6 billion— for the remaining 99% of publishers to fight for.
There were more than 3.4 million apps available globally across the App Store and Google Play in 2018, an increase of 65% from the 2.2 million apps available in 2014. However, the percentage of apps that have been downloaded at least 1,000 times has decreased over the same period, from 30% in 2014 to 26% in 2018.
In other words, in a continually growing market where most publishers are competing against the publishers controlling 80% of all new user acquisition, standing out among the competition is more crucial than ever.
Read more on SensorTower.
📱 Tools & Apps
Spark Mail: Love your email again! My favourite email client got a design update on iOS! [iOS | Android | macOS]
mynameis: Ridiculously expensive video calls-on-demand to pitch anything to anyone anywhere. [iOS | Android]
illlustrations: Open source illustrations library for design projects.
🎧 Audio Stimulation
The Spectacular Rise and Fall of WeWork
It was one of the most valuable start-ups in the United States, with bold plans to revolutionise how and where people worked around the world. Today, we look at how the dream of WeWork crumbled — and explore the story of the man responsible for the wreckage.
🐦 Tweets of the Week
Being in tech is just saying "I'm moving to SF" and "I'm moving to New York" a bunch of times and then you die
Data science, but for predicting who’s going to get locked out of their house “accidentally” based only on LinkedIn posts. https://t.co/rlYWuJPWxa
I wrote an article two years ago about a Facebook security vulnerability and I'm still paying the price
@CrapOnLinkedIn https://t.co/KBBElGKEEg
🎮 Fun Stuff
12 yo Steve Jobs called Bill Hewlett...
Watch it. It’s just 1 minute.
The proper use of VR
😂😂😂😂
Light & Shadow Woodwork: WOW - Credit: Reddit/u/g3mstone
Incognito Mode - Credit: SkeletonClaw
This is not goodbye...
This is a big thank you for letting me in your inbox every week!
Ciao 👋