📡 How do you feel about 👽👽 dropping by?
Welcome to this week’s Pulse!
Don’t know about your week, but it’s been another super-busy week around here.
Quick question: is it just me, or prioritising stuff is becoming more challenging every day? Is there a tool that helps you with it? I’d love to know about it. Just reply to this email and Let me know please.
Now, this is a pretty long issue, so let’s dive in!
- 𝕭𝖊𝖓 𝔣𝔯𝔬𝔪 [ 𝖕𝖊𝖗𝖘𝖕𝖊𝖈𝖙𝖎𝖛𝖊 𝖎𝖝 ]
🗞 NEWS
GSMA’s Mobile World Congress (MWC 2020), the world’s biggest phone show, has been canceled due to coronavirus concerns [Verge].
Amazon is ‘biggest advertiser on Earth’ as adspend hits $11bn [Campaign] - almost 2% of global ad expenditure!
Apple has now returned $430 billion to shareholders [Apple] - and still has $99 billion net cash!
Someone used neural networks to upscale an 1895 film to 4K 60 FPS [Digg] - and the result is 🤯
Facebook to allow influencers to produce sponsored content for US politicians and political campaigns, if the posts are clearly identified as paid partnerships [Verge] - triggered by Mike Bloomberg’s meme drops [TechCrunch]!
HQ Trivia, the company behind the once popular live mobile trivia game, is shutting down [CNN] - was fun while it lasted.
Sony PlayStation 5’s manufacturing costs may be around $450 per unit [Bloomberg] - apparently some of the parts are pretty scarce and quite costly!
Andy Rubin’s Essential Products, which raised $330M to build smartphones and was valued at $1B, says it is ceasing operations [NYTimes]
Snapchat is testing a big new redesign [Verge] - coz the last one went so well 😂
Google brings emoji mashup stickers to Gboard on Android [Verge] - meanwhile, as I’m writing this, Gboard on iOS crashes as soon as it comes up 🙄
🧠 INSIGHTS
Credit: Dino Reichmuth on Unsplsh
Deep Space Signal May Be From Alien Civilisation
Earlier this month, Canadian researchers announced they’d discovered a powerful radio signal, emanating from a distant galaxy in bursts every 16 days.
And Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard University’s astronomy department, told Futurism this week that he thinks one possibility is that the signals are coming from an alien civilisation.
Read more on Futurism.
→ Meanwhile, if you wanna become an alien, try my 👽Snapchat lens!
📊 STATISTICS
Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube Ad Growth - Credit: MarketingCharts
YouTube & Instagram Account for a Growing Share of Their Parent Companies’ Ad Revenues
In recent years, marketers have spent increasing sums on online video. So for Google and Facebook, prior purchases of YouTube and Instagram (the latter of which has pivoted increasingly to videos and Stories) appear to be increasingly wise decisions. In Q4 of 2019, figures from the latest report by Merkle reveal that YouTube accounted for 26% as much ad spend as Google Ads, while Instagram accounted for 27% of total Facebook ad spend.
Read more on MarketingCharts.
How Couples Met - Credit: Statista
How Couples Met
Today’s daters are taking matters into their own hands. Seemingly no longer satisfied with the potential partners that life throws at them at work, in school and in their circle of friends, an increasingly large number of heterosexual daters is opting to meet their partner online.
Surveys carried out and analysed by Stanford University show that between 1995 and 2017 the number of heterosexuals who met their partner on the internet rose sharply from 2% to 39%. With the help of dating apps like Tinder and eHarmony, but also through social networking sites like Facebook, daters reconnected with old friends and acquaintances (8 percent of couples who met online), were introduced to someone (11%) or – in the majority of cases – met someone completely new on their own (81%).
Read more on Statista.
Here's what 1 minute of card payments looked like across the U.S. today. https://t.co/xGR4qfkp3h
📱 TOOLS & APPS
Invite Codes: Find and share invite/referral codes for apps and services.
Coronavirus Tracker: Track the coronavirus outbreak and travel safe.
Linguix Grammar Checker: Check grammar instantly in real-time on your favourite sites [Chrome | Brave].
🔍 SPOTTED
Instagram is working on “Latest Posts” feed for catching up feed posts
This sounds like the chronological feed people are asking for. Similar, but not the same 👀 https://t.co/AUMwlZGtUr
🎧 AUDIO STIMULATION
The End of Privacy as We Know It? - The Daily
A secretive start-up promising the next generation of facial recognition software has compiled a database of images far bigger than anything ever constructed by the United States government: over three billion, it says. Is this technology a breakthrough for law enforcement — or the end of privacy as we know it?
🐦 TWEETS of the WEEK
Interesting 🧵👇
Dear lazyweb,
Reddit in its early days famously had fake users posting content to make it seem like there was more activity than there really was - as a means of solving the chicken and egg problem in building a network
Know if any other examples like this?
“No technique of the mind will free you from the mind.”
We don’t let 1 person control the water for 2.5 billion people.
We don’t let 1 person control electricity for 2.5 billion people.
Why do we let 1 man control the information seen by 2.5 billion people?
Facebook needs to be regulated by governments, not ruled by an emperor! https://t.co/o4hNRFNpgt
Sacha Baron Cohen tweets 👆 Elon Musk replies 👇
@SachaBaronCohen #DeleteFacebook It’s lame
god: did you give the dinosaurs more muscle like I asked
angel: wait what
god: I told you to make them meatier
angel: oh MEATier
😂 FUN STUFF
So relatable - Credit: Reddit/u/s00126
Just found out my mom has been using this as a headphone adapter for a year https://t.co/SwsTVBwxVR
That's all for this week...
See you next week.
Same time, same place.
Ciao