Friday, January 24, 2020
Samsung moves India MD Hong to Latin America region
Smartphone growth slows to 7% in 2019: Counterpoint
Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann launches Byte, a Vine-like short-form video app, on iOS and Android, aims to start its partner program to pay creators "soon" (Josh Constine/TechCrunch)
Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann launches Byte, a Vine-like short-form video app, on iOS and Android, aims to start its partner program to pay creators “soon” — Two years after Vine's co-founder Dom Hofmann announced he was building a successor to the short-form video app, today Byte makes its debut on iOS and Android.
Apple gets its mojo back; may become leading premium brand as iPhone sales surge in India
Clayton Christensen, author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” has passed away at age 67
Clayton Christensen, a longtime professor at Harvard Business School who became famous worldwide after authoring the best-selling business book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail,” passed away last night.
The Desert News reported earlier today that the cause tied to complications from leukemia treatments that Christensen was receiving in Boston. He was 67 years old.
Clayton had suffered from ill health for years, always battling his way back. By the age of 58, Clayton — who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at age 30 — had already suffered a heart attack, cancer, and a stroke, telling Forbes in 2011 that he tried to view such setbacks as opportunities, even, apparently, when they involved intensive speech therapy, which he was undergoing at the time.
Indeed, the entire business world came to know Christensen after Intel cofounder Andy Grove brought him into the company as an advisor, then announced to the world that “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” published in 1997, was the best book he’d read in 10 years. (This was saying something, given Grove’s own considerable writing skills.) Yet Christensen came from modest means.
According to a 2012 profile in New Yorker magazine, he grew up on the “wrong side of the tracks” in Salt Lake City, in a Mormon household, collecting paper tray liners from fast food restaurants, and stuffing his 6′ 8″ frame into a 1986 Chevy Nova that he drove around town.
According to the profile, Christensen, an excellent student and a popular one (he was student body president), “wanted to go to Harvard or Yale, and got into both, but his mother wanted him to go to Brigham Young. Not knowing what to do, he fasted and prayed, and he discovered that God agreed with his mother. That wasn’t the answer he was looking for, so he fasted and prayed some more, just to make sure he hadn’t misheard or something, but he hadn’t, so he went to Brigham Young.”
There, he studied economics before and after a two-year leave of absence to serve as a volunteer full-time missionary for the LDS Church. Then it was off to Oxford, where he earned a master’s as a Rhodes Scholar, then Harvard Business School. After receiving his MBA, he landed at Boston Consulting Group, and after a few years in the working world, headed back to Harvard for a PhD so he could teach.
Throughout the course of his career, Christensen would write 10 books, though none were as ubiquitous as “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” which was timed perfectly in retrospect. It put forth a theory why people buy products that are often cheaper and easier to use than their more sophisticated and more expensive predecessors, and resonated widely as one incumbent after another — Xerox, U.S. Steel, Digital Equipment Corp. — stumbled while other companies began rising in their dust: think Amazon, Google, Apple.
Interestingly, according to the New Yorker, one of Christensen’s rare, bad calls was his prediction that the Apple iPhone wouldn’t be widely adopted because it was too fancy.
Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was a fan nevertheless. According to the Walter Isaacson biography of Jobs published in October 2011, just weeks after Jobs’s death, “The Innovator’s Dilemma” “deeply influenced” him.
If you’re interested in learning more, you might enjoy this conversation between Christensen and investor-entrepreneur Marc Andreessen; it took place in 2016 at the Startup Grind series.
CAIT seeks probe into business models of 16 online platforms, e-commerce firms
Google has started charging law enforcement agencies fees for legal demands of user information such as emails, location tracking information and search queries (New York Times)
Google has started charging law enforcement agencies fees for legal demands of user information such as emails, location tracking information and search queries — The tech giant has begun charging U.S. law enforcement for responses to search warrants and subpoenas.
Vine reboot Byte officially launches
Two years after Vine’s co-founder Dom Hofmann announced he was building a successor to the short-form video app, today Byte makes its debut on iOS and Android. Byte lets you shoot or upload and then share six-second videos. It comes equipped with standard social features like a feed, Explore page, notifications, and profiles. For now, though Byte lacks the remixability, augmented reality filters, transition effects, and other bonus features you’ll find in apps like TikTok.
What Hofmann hopes will differentiate Byte is an early focus on helping content creators make money — something TikTok, and other micro-entertainment apps largely don’t offer. The app plans to soon launch a pilot of its partner program for offering monetization options to people proving popular on Byte.
Staying connected with Byte’s most loyal users is another way Hofmann hopes to set his app apart. He’s been actively running a beta tester forum since the initial Byte announcement in early 2018, and sees it as a way to find out what features to build next. “It’s always a bummer when the people behind online services and the people that actually use them are disconnected from one another, so we’re trying out these forums to see if we can do a better job at that” Hofmann writes.
The big question will be whether Byte can take off despite its late start. Between TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and more, do people need another short-form video app?
LA-based commercial real estate marketplace CRExi raises $29M, says it had $700B worth of transactions on its platform (Jonathan Shieber/TechCrunch)
LA-based commercial real estate marketplace CRExi raises $29M, says it had $700B worth of transactions on its platform — Los Angeles is one of the most desirable locations for commercial real estate in the United States, so it's little wonder that there's something of a boom in investments …
After 3000 years, we can hear the “voice” of a mummified Egyptian priest
Enlarge / The mummy of Nesyamun, a priest who lived in Thebes about 3,000 years ago, is ready for his CT scan. (credit: Leeds Teaching Hospitals/Leeds Museums and Galleries)
Around 1100 BC, during the reign of Ramses XI, an Egyptian scribe and priest named Nesyamun spent his life singing and chanting during liturgies at the Karnak temple in Thebes. As was the custom in those times, upon death, Nesyamun was mummified and sealed in a coffin, with the inscription "Nesyamun, True of Voice (maat kheru)." His mummy has become one of the most well-studied artifacts over the last 200 years. We know he suffered from gum disease, for instance, and may have died in his 50s from some kind of allergic reaction. The coffin inscription also expressed a desire that Nesyamun's soul would be able to speak to his gods from the afterlife.
And now, Nesyamun is getting his dearest wish. A team of scientists has reproduced the "sound" of the Egyptian priest's voice by creating a 3D-printed version of his vocal tract and and connecting it to a loudspeaker. The researchers revealed all the gory details behind their project in a new paper in Scientific Reports.
"He had a desire that his voice would be everlasting," co-author David Howard of Royal Holloway University of London told IEEE Spectrum. "In a sense, you could argue we've heeded that call, which is a slightly strange thing, but there we are."
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Thursday, January 23, 2020
Sebi to keep a tab on social media to track market manipulations
Digital ad spends rose 26% in 2019: DAN report
Without merchant fees, Banks say they can't reimburse payment firms
TikTok Inks Music Deal With Merlin to Use Music From Independent Labels
Intel signals 2020 will be a turnaround year for chip industry leader
Sources: the US State Department ordered embassies to push back against foreign influence campaigns, as officials worry anti-US views are taking root worldwide (New York Times)
New York Times : Sources: the US State Department ordered embassies to push back against foreign influence campaigns, as officials worry ...
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The first project we remember working on together was drawing scenes from the picture books that our mom brought with her when she immigrate...
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Sohee Kim / Bloomberg : South Korean authorities are investigating a data leak at e-commerce giant Coupang that exposed ~33.7M accounts; ...
