#157 Gary Larson, Canceled Celebrities, and Palantir’s IPO - Sat, Jul 11 2020

The story of the Coronavirus, at least in the US, has swung between a number of rhetorical tics now common to all of our discourse. Called a “hoax,” then given several racist nicknames and dismissed as a “nothing…

Clo Willaerts Watching the virus spread, and kill, over the past six months hits much harder than reading the dry facts.

As anyone without their head in the sand knows that coronavirus numbers are skyrocketing (especially in states that pushed to reopen despite warnings that it would spike disease transmission). More than 800,000 new cases were reported in June, led…

Clo Willaerts “Texans shouldn’t despair, though! Based on this graphic, it is still safe to shoot guns in the air (at least with respect to #COVID__19 complications), do outdoor line dances in rigid six-feet distance grids, and ride the open range.”

Artificial Intelligence (AI) worldwide As the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) opens today in Shanghai, this infographic highlights the extent to which tech's Big Five have been trying to conquer the high-potential market over the…

Clo Willaerts Google has been slowly injecting AI into many of its products and services but as this infographic shows, it's Apple that is leading the way in terms of acquisitions. According to numbers compiled by CB Insights, Apple has acquired 20 artificial intelligence startups since 2010, more than any other company.

Cancel culture — withdrawing support for public figures when they do or say something offensive — has become so widespread it was Macquarie Dictionary's 2019 word of the year. A practice where people come together to remove the…

Clo Willaerts About Cancel Culture: “Fandom is deeply rooted in identity and values, and fans are likely to “cancel” people who violate norms of justice and moral responsibility.”

With a pen and notepad in hand, Elizabeth Akinyi approaches the entrance of a corrugated-metal home in Mukuru Kayaba, an informal settlement across the highway from Nairobi's industrial area. She is wearing a cloth face mask she sewed a couple…

Clo Willaerts Can cryptocurrency keep local economies afloat? Kenya is trying to find out with Sarafu, a new digital currency that aims to protect small communities during major economic downturns. This is interesting. I’m going to follow this story.

Enter I don't want to mislead anyone here. This corner of the website—“New Stuff”—is not a resurrection of The Far Side daily cartoons. (Well, not exactly, anyway—like the proverbial tiger and its stripes, I'm…

Clo Willaerts Cartoonist Gary Larson has been retired for a while now. But recently he got himself a tablet. “So here goes. I’ve got my coffee, I’ve got this cool gizmo, and I’ve got no deadlines. And—to borrow from Sherlock Holmes—the game is afoot.”

US-China trade tensions and the Covid-19 pandemic are reshaping China's internet landscape…

Clo Willaerts China’s technology scene has been in for a wild ride over the last year. From the US-China tech war to the Covid-19 pandemic, the landscape has been changing fast. The South China Morning Post’s third China Internet Report is an annual look at the state of the country’s tech industries. Read SCMP’s overview of the report’s main conclusions on working and learning from home, 5G and other trends before downloading the whole thing.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Palantir Technologies Inc. today announced that it has confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) relating to…

Clo Willaerts Peter Thiel’s Palantir has filed to go public. I can’t wait to finally figure out more about Palantir’s specific type of big data sorcery.

Every year, I produce a big presentation digging into macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. This year, ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants' looks at what it means that 4bn people have a smartphone; we connected everyone, and now…

Clo Willaerts Analyst Benedict Evans published an updated version of his macro-trends deck, with a condensed section on the big shifts but also some thoughts on where we are now, months into the pandemic. There's some great (new) charts in here around the disproportionate impact of COVID, forced experimentation, and accelerated digital everything.

Privacy regulations such as the GDPR say that you need to seek permission from your website visitors before tracking them. Most GDPR consent banner implementations are deliberately engineered to be difficult to use and are full of dark patterns…

Clo Willaerts I am not surprised with these results: “If you implement a proper GDPR consent banner, a vast majority of visitors will most probably decline to give you consent. 91% to be exact out of 19,000 visitors in my study.”