Weekly Roundup Series January 2021
Happy New Year 2021. Wishing the readers of this blog a warm and joyful 2021. Continuing with the weekly round up series in 2021 as well.
List of interesting content that I read on the internet for the week ending 31st Jan,2021
1. Apple Privacy Change May Cost Facebook, Google $25 Billion Over Next 12 Months
“Google could lose $17 billion in revenue over the next 12 months. Facebook has perhaps $8 billion at risk. The cause, according to mobile marketing professionals? Apple’s new privacy changes. Last year Apple announced that the Identifier For Advertisers (IDFA) would become explicitly opt-in in its next mobile operating system update, iOS 14. The IDFA helps advertisers measure ad effectiveness as well as track devices and people”
2. Rise of Amazon’s Private Label Brands
Amazon’s Private Label strategy could backfire on them with an overall lack of trust with the platform and its strategy. Using seller data to find out hot and trending products, launch competing products at less cost with higher visibility is never going to land well with other business, especially small business.
The rise & rise of Amazon Private Label Brands: A short thread 🧵
— Nitish Singh (@realnitsin) January 30, 2021
As of the year 2020, Amazon has been offering over 22000 products from 111 of its own private labels brands on its marketplace, which is triple of the numbers from 2018! (1/7) pic.twitter.com/QRpQDY5Lh9
3.Exploring Truth About Ourselves
“Fighting Feedback is Our Natural Inclination” — Reed Hastings
We avoid self-reflection because the truth is often painful. We prefer to stay trapped in our illusions, a world where nothing can go wrong. Learning how to untangle and sort through experiences is the key to overcoming barriers. For entrepreneurs, this, ability to create meaning from experiences is crucial to ongoing growth and development.
4. Amazon vs Future Retail bitter saga continues
| Amazon vs Future Retail | Amazon is going all out to create ruckus: Kishore Biyani |
Future Group Chairman Kishore Biyani on January 29 wrote a letter to his employees, saying that US-based e-commerce giant Amazon is going all out to create a ruckus, reported CNBC-TV18. Biyani, while referring to the Amazon-Future Retail deal, said this was a corporate battle being fought for supremacy over Indian customers. “Immense resources are being deployed to influence Indian society’s mindset,” Biyani said in the letter. “The stated and evident policy of vexatious litigation and harassment makes one wonder about the similarity in ruthless ambition to scorch the earth akin to the Greek Alexander - after all, they are inspired to name their product as Alexa,” Biyani wrote.
5.Shorting the shorts. How GameStop that has caught the imagination of the world
THREAD: The story of the week in finance is how a group of retail traders at @wallstreetbets, with assists from @ElonMusk and @Chamath, took down the establishment short sellers at GameStop.
— Sahil Bloom (@SahilBloom) January 27, 2021
A thread on the underlying mechanics of the $GME saga... pic.twitter.com/0TP9rst17A
6.Inside Youtube’s content creation engine
Over last three years, Youtube has apparently paid more than $30Bn to creators, artists, & media Cos (would love to see a split though). Since its founding 15 years ago, no other company comes close to the information & misinformation scale of Youtube!
That’s all for this week folks
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List of interesting content that I read on the internet for the week ending 24th Jan,2021
1.Alphabet is shutting down Loon, its internet balloon company
Launched with a lot of promise as one of the biggest bet of Google X, it is sad to see Project Loon biting the dust after Google Glass.
2.Elastic vs AWS fight over Elastic Search Open Source project
The tension between Open Source and Cloud Providers have no end in sight at the moment? Changes to licensing terms and using Open Source to build a profitable business could be a recurring challenge. On the other side, Cloud Providers are trying to build products on top of Open Source offerings as a Managed Service thereby squeeing any little money that Open Source maintainers were planning to make from maintaining the project. All this makes the relationship very messy.
3.Repository of many workshops created by AWS
“This website lists workshops created by the teams at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Workshops are hands-on events designed to teach or introduce practical skills, techniques, or concepts which you can use to solve business problems. “
4. Context switching costs more than we give it credit for
“When I was a junior engineer, one of the best advice I got from a seasoned principal engineer was to batch things, stack rank them in preferred order (by time, size, impact, or priority), and execute. And, be careful when batching them. Batching them by function increases productivity as it minimizes context switching cost.”
5. Serverless Adoption: Is Cost Still The Main Factor?
“Serverless has successfully won many businesses over within its relatively shorter existence. As a technology, several use cases have proven the versatility of serverless. A plethora of new use cases is being built with confidence and comfort every day. Its cost centered typecasting is changing.
The challenge, however, is to maintain its simplicity amidst all the sophistication. The simplicity is what makes it convenient for everyone to build solutions faster.
Perhaps it is time for a new tagline for serverless. Let Convenience Computing be that one as serverless confidently marches ahead in the right direction into the future!”
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Here are the list of interesting content that I read on the web, for the week ending 17th January 2021.
1. Forty and Still a software developer?
“Many of us live this horrific nightmare. The fear is being put out to pasture. Has the industry knighted young people as the stewards of technology? It’s natural to doubt yourself and wonder if you can do this any longer.
Management rewards heroic late-night efforts, but what about productive output? What about the experiences you bring to the table? You want to compete, but not at the expense of your family. And how do you compete with colleagues who sleep at the office?”
2.Business schools do not teach the fundamental problems of business
“That’s pretty bad, right? What they teach are finance, what they teach is marketing, they teach us HR. As the greatest management thinker of all time, Peter Drucker said, “There are no marketing problems, there are no finance problems, there are no accounting problems, there are only business problems.” These are problems that sloppily span across a bunch of domains and business education has abdicated, doesn’t even try to teach how you think across domains.”
3. Tesla is coming to India
Good news. It does not matter even if 99.9 % of people in India cannot afford a Tesla :)
4. Bjyu’s to buy Aakash, the leader in entrance exams coaching
Wow, whattaey wow :) Amazon calling e-commerce and then gobbling up offline stores. Same with Bjyu’s calling online education as the future and now going after the offline coaching centre model. Omnichannel coaching, I wonder?
5. Kunal Shah, CEO of Cred on why big tech has got it all wrong with India
While Big Tech comes to South Asia for the elusive “next billion” users, India’s tech guru says his latest app caters to the 1%
6. The trap of “I want to do something important”
“One common trap for smart people is “I want to do something important”. In reality, most world-changing things happen not because we planned and anticipated them but because our passionate efforts in seemingly unimportant projects evolved to make those projects important.”
1/ One common trap for smart people is "I want to do something important". In reality, most world changing things happen not because we planned and anticipated them but because our passionate efforts in seemingly unimportant projects evolved to make those projects important.
— Sridhar Vembu (@svembu) January 12, 2021
7. Trendspotting 2021: Inside India’s Great Digital Reset
“A new set of winners and losers are poised to emerge from the ashes of the pandemic. And a wall of foreign capital is pouring in to fund a slew of digital startups. A peek into what 2021 portends”