Note

The Art of Persuasion

First Round Review keep putting out excellent articles, but every now and then one of them is a must read. The post Master the Art of Influence — Persuasion as a Skill and Habit is definitely in this category - especially when you’re pitching or selling something. This article gives a great overview with concise and concrete examples on how to persuade people for your ideas, companies, views or products.

Why -> How -> What = How Great Leaders Inspire Action

The TED talk “How Great Leaders Inspire Action” is a classic but I came across it quite recently. You could substitute leaders with organizations or companies. The end result is the same. When there is a clear defined WHY, it’s easier to persuade people on your HOW and WHAT. This applies to defining, building and selling your product through hiring members for your team. If you can’t clearly define WHY, then HOW and WHAT does not really matter. It will never be as convincing.

20% Of Customers Bring In 50%+ of Revenue

Second Measure analyzes credit card transactions. In their analysis they found that just 20% of customers were responsible for more than 50% of the revenue for the top 1000 companies they have transaction data available. The average top 20 customer spends 8x more than the average bottom 80% customer.

The Evolving Economics of Bitcoin, Gold and Fiat Currencies

An excellent article explaining bitcoins place in the world, its shortcomings and potential without divulging into speculative or irrational arguments. The base argument is that the deflationary aspect of bitcoin fixed money supply is hampering the ability to support deferred payments. 

The Future of Free Expression

Protecting free speech is not something we do because we agree with all of the speech that gets protected. We do it because we believe that no one—not the government and not private commercial enterprises—should decide who gets to speak and who doesn’t.One of the better and more balanced articles written on this topic.Today, we're right and perhaps tomorrow we are self-righteous.

Instagram Photos Reveal Your State of Mind

Apparently we can't hide who we are and how we feel on the internet. Also (machine learning) software can outperform humans in analyzing state of mind based on social media photos.

Notes week 27 – 2017

A new type of spam is emerging on different services. This week an analysis on how "artists" hijack common search queries on music services to get more plays while reducing overall feel of quality. Much like spam on search engines back in early 2000s. W3C has approved a new standard for proprietary media extension for delivering DRM content. Nothing new here since everyone was doing his own DRM thing since forever but now it has some standard support.

Notes week 26 – 2017

This week's news brought major alliances being forged in autonomous vehicle industry. Hertz and Apple are teaming up and Avis teams up with Google. The car industry is gearing up towards a major paradigm shift and it's going to be interesting. In other news, the push back on ad blocking seems to be working, Facebook is joining Twitter and Snap with a new focus on TV and EU commission fines Google for unfair competition in the shopping aggregation sphere.

Notes week 25 – 2017

Summer time slows down the news cycle, but there was lots of PR around Apple's iPhone because of its 10-year anniversary. This week also a great interview with Stripe's COO on how to build and scale a fast growing organization. We crossed the 50% barrier of cable subs who also have a streaming subscription. It's only a matter of time that cable TV as a service becomes irrelevant. And there was lots of talk about ICOs this week and many of them run on top of Ethereum. This has moved significantly moved up the Ethereum's valuation.

Notes week 24 – 2017

Amazon buys Wholefoods and Verizon finalized the acquisition of Yahoo. Bancor ICO raised $153M and Apple finally confirmed they're working on autonomous driving software.