📡 You can't take it back.
Welcome to this week’s Pulse - making up for last week as well!
So… First of all, sorry about last week. I was really - and I mean really really - short on time with a critical deadline and couldn’t send out Pulse to you guys. I do hope you missed me though! But did you?! 🤔
Anyways, I’m back; and we need to catch up on a lot! So, let’s dive in, shall we?
- Ben from [ perspective ix ]
📰 News
Attackers are exploiting a SIM card flaw to spy on people [TNW] - and it’s pretty f*cking bad.
Uber lays off 435 people across engineering and product teams [TechCrunch] - that’s about 8% of the organisation.
Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 3 may include a new 15-inch model [Verge] - the event is on 2 October, and it will be streamed live.
Here’s everything Apple announced today at the iPhone 11 event [TechCrunch]
Welcome to Instagram, Twitter! - Twitter takes a shot at Instagram with a petty post about screenshots and creates a fun account in the process [Verge].
🧠 Insights
Something's cant be fixed - Credit: chuttersnap on Unsplash
This week’s insight is a podcast I have really come to love, and strongly suggest you listen to - at least this episode. It’s something I wrote about almost 6 years ago in this blog post.
Here’s the podcast summary:
Social media sites offer quick and easy ways to share ideas, crack jokes, find old friends. They can make us feel part of something big and wonderful and fast-moving. But the things we post don’t go away. And they can come back to haunt us. This week, we explore how one teenager’s social media posts destroyed a golden opportunity he’d worked for all his life.
From NPR’s Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam.
📊 Statistics
Contribution of Mobile Industry to GDP in 2018 - Credit: Statista/GSMA
How Our Mobile World Powers the Global Economy
The mobile revolution has completely changed our lives, and as data from GSMA shows, it has had the same effect on the global economy. Last year, 4.6 percent of global GDP came from the mobile industry - equating to $3.9 trillion. The APAC region contributed the most to this total, with $1.6 trillion generated. In terms of regional dominance though, mobile is the most important to the economy in West Africa, accounting for 8.7 percent of total GDP. The situation is very similar in Sub-Saharan Africa, too, where the proportion is 8.6 percent.
Looking back over previous years, it is also clear how this importance is increasing around the globe. In 2014, the global economy had the mobile industry to thank for 3.8 percent of GDP. In 2022, GSMA forecasts this to have reached 4.8 percent.
via [ statista ]
Where People Listen to Podcasts - Credit: MarketingCharts/Adobe
About 1 in 4 Consumers Say They’ve Made A Purchase After Hearing A Podcast Ad
The US population has embraced podcasts, with the majority of Americans over the age of 12 years listening to them on a weekly basis. And, per a survey [slideshare] by Adobe, more than half (52%) of these podcast enthusiasts are listening to podcasts while commuting to work or while they are working.
Among the nearly three-quarters (72%) of respondents who report having heard an ad while listening to a podcast, 1 in 3 say the ads are more engaging than on other formats and 2 in 5 say they are less intrusive. This could be due to the type of ads heard on podcasts, as the majority of ads are still host-read, which aids in maintaining continuity within the podcast.
Read more on [ marketingcharts ]
👆 can be a result of 👇
Instagram post by Twitter
Top Apps Worldwide for August 2019 by Downloads - Credit: SensorTower
Top Apps Worldwide for August 2019 by Downloads
TikTok was the most downloaded non-game app worldwide for August 2019 with close to 63 million installs, which represented a 6 percent increase from August 2018. The countries with the most installs of the app during this period were India at 44 percent of its total downloads and China at 8 percent.
Read more on [ sensortower ]
📱 Tools & Apps
Zenly: Best Friends Only; by Snap Inc, it’s a super fun messaging app focusing on communication and location [iOS | Android]
Subcolor: Generate colors between two colors (to me, it’s ‘colour,’ but let’s get passed that! 😁)
🎧 Audio Stimulation
Geekout with Matt Navarra - Twitter's Sara Haider
Twitter’s Director, Product Management, Sara Haider chats to hosts Matt Navarra and Martin SFP Bryant. We find out the latest on the much-requested edit button; the state of play with Twitter’s verification program; how product design can aid positive mental health; Martin pitches Sara his idea for a standalone DMs app, and Matt tries his hardest to uncover Twitter’s Konami code (they must have one, right?).
🐦 Tweets of the Week
The more it matters who said it, the less it actually matters.
With Instagram stories, you can get bored hearing about your friends’ vacations while they’re still on vacation
ME IN EMAILS: Hi there!! I was hoping you might be able to, when you get a sec, let me know about those questions. Sorry, I know you're busy and my last 3 emails might've gotten buried. Let me know if you have any questions for me!!! Thanks!
OLDER PERSON: ok. Sent from my iPhone
Apple: Woz has said the idea that it was founded there is "overblown."
Google: Had over $1m in VC funding before they rented that garage.
Amazon: The 'garage' was a recreation room when Bezos moved into the three-bedroom house.
Disney
That one's true. https://t.co/zqPOo6uYhF
Ok they’re about to do a bunch of performance demos so lemme just take this opportunity to say “slofie” out loud for the first and last time ever in my life. Thank you.
🎮 Fun Stuff
In keeping with the THPS 20th anniversary, here is our motion capture session from 1999. We didn’t end up using any of this data because there wasn’t enough time to program it into the final game, but at least I got to do a bunch of hard tricks while wearing an embarrassing suit. https://t.co/pHw09SX3tg
"The hero we all needed"
Elliot Tebele (@fuckjerry) on Instagram 😂😂😂
This is not goodbye...
This is me asking you a favour: share pulse with someone you like.
Thank you. This time, next week?