📡 Your most valuable asset 👀
Welcome to the 40th Pulse!
Coming to you from a closed Costa in a Tesco Extra while I’m waiting for my car to get washed on a rainy day to pick up my wife from airport! Yeah! That’s how important you and Pulse are to me!
Oh, and by the way, by popular demand and 💯% Yes to last week’s poll, News section is back - although very brief.
- Ben from Perspective IX
📰 News
iX News, our automated tech news channel on Telegram, turns 3 tomorrow! About 53000 posts in two years! 🤯 By the way, you can now preview Telegram Channels on your browser, and connect a group as a discussion board to your channel.
Apple wipes iTunes pages on Facebook & Instagram, begins moving away from iTunes links ahead of tomorrow’s WWDC, which you can watch live here on June 3 at 10 a.m. PDT.
In an open letter to GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), 47 signatories including Apple, Google and WhatsApp have jointly urged the UK cybersecurity agency to abandon its plans for a so-called “ghost protocol” that plans to eavesdrop on encrypted messages.
Google Maps adds ability to see speed limits and speed traps in 40+ countries: 🇦🇺🇧🇷🇺🇸🇨🇦🇬🇧🇮🇳🇲🇽🇷🇺🇯🇵🇦🇩🇧🇦🇧🇬🇭🇷🇨🇿🇪🇪🇫🇮🇬🇷🇭🇺🇮🇸🇮🇱🇮🇹🇯🇴🇰🇼🇱🇻🇱🇹🇲🇹🇲🇦🇳🇦🇳🇱🇳🇴🇴🇲🇵🇱🇵🇹🇶🇦🇷🇴🇸🇦🇷🇸🇸🇰🇿🇦🇪🇸🇸🇪🇹🇳🇿🇼
🧠 Insights
Focus - Credit: Stefan Cosma on Unsplash
The Attention Economy Crisis: The Future of Content, Commerce and Culture
“What unites people? Armies? Gold? Flags? … Stories. There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it.” – Tyrion Lannister, “Game of Thrones”
People understand the world through stories. Shared stories create brands, shape culture and fuel politics. But a story only has power when it is given attention. The competition for people’s attention is called the “Attention Economy.”
The global economy runs on top of the Attention Economy. What people choose to work on — or even where they live— is influenced by stories that capture people’s attention. When did you first decide what you wanted to be when you grew up? Maybe SimCity motivated you to become a city planner, or X-Files sparked your curiosity in a STEM career, or the raves of a favourite aunt inspired you about the quality of life in Texas. These are all stories, but they can only shape us if we pay attention to them.
Read more on REDEF.
📊 Statistics
Top Language Apps Worldwide for April 2019 by Downloads
The most downloaded language app worldwide for April 2019 was Duolingo with more than 4.6 million installs, up 26 percent year-over-year from April 2018. The countries with the most Duolingo app installs during this period were the United States at 24 percent of its total downloads and Brazil at 10 percent.
Read more on SensorTower.
Top Language Apps Worldwide for April 2019 by Downloads
Fake accounts; real battles - Credit: Statista
Facebook’s Battle with Fake Accounts
Last week, Facebook published its third Community Standards Enforcement Report which shows the efforts the company is making to curb and remove controversial content. Between October 2018 and March 2019, Facebook said it removed 3.39 billion fake accounts, twice the number detected and removed in the previous six-month period. It is also more than a billion more than the 2.37 billion people who actively use Facebook each month.
Facebook is trying to fight mass account creations using a combination of AI and human monitoring. Facebook claims that the vast majority of fake accounts disabled within minutes of their creation.
Read more on Statista.
📱 Tools & Apps
Flextime: Troll your friends and fake FaceTime with real celebs, like LeBron James, Kim Kardashian, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and more… 😂
Tweepsmap: Twitter analytics and publishing, now without ads.
The End of Cookie Banners: A beautiful replacement for cookie banners. I’ve started using it on our own website!
SEO Analyzer by Neil Patel: Free analysis and report.
🎧 Audio Stimulation
Away: Jen Rubio : NPR
In early 2015, Jen Rubio was racing through an airport to catch a flight when her suitcase broke, leaving a trail of clothing behind her. She tried to replace it with a stylish, durable, affordable suitcase — but she couldn’t find one. So she decided to create her own. In less than a year, Jen and her co-founder Steph Korey raised $2.5 million to build their dream travel brand: a line of sleek, direct-to-consumer suitcases simply called Away. Jen’s hunch that the brand would emotionally resonate with young, jet-setting customers paid off. Today, Away has become a cult luggage brand that has sold more than one million suitcases.
Listen to How I Built This and tweet to them. The usually reply 😉👇
Driving back to #Manchester, listening to @Away's @jennifer on @HowIBuiltThis with @guyraz. https://t.co/TynxmWRbVM
🐦 Tweets of the Week
Twitter’s turned into a troll! That’s why they need a ’Tweeter-in-Chief!’
FYI: there IS an edit button. (In your brain)
And so has Apple…
wow, so much browser competition on iOS...
*checks notes*
....where every browser is forced to use Apple’s rendering engine AND the default browser can’t be changed https://t.co/mWDmGmFrGT
🎮 Fun Stuff
At least now Siri won’t hear him right! Right?
Absolutely shaken by the way this man on Muni is wearing his AirPods https://t.co/Dt57QuzDu5
Maybe Apple should be more like IKEA…
Wonder how Ikea came to the decision to include this disclaimer. https://t.co/rHr5srpA24
This is not goodbye...
This is a big thank you for being part of Pulse community and then see you next week!
By the way, why not follow me on Twitter? It’s @PulseNewsletter; obviously!
Ciao!