on product

2021-07-01 22:28:16 > “I’ll see you in the theaters,” the actor and director John Krasinski said in a video message before a new trailer for “A Quiet Place 2” (the movie opens on May 28). “Marvel movies are made to be seen on the big screen,” Kevin Feige, Marvel’s chief executive, reminded audiences before showing footage of new films.

> The box office for April hit $190 million, up 300 percent since February. That’s a welcome relief to the South African director Neill Blomkamp, whose new horror film “Demonic” from the indie outfit IFC will debut only in theaters at the end of August. “This brings me joy,” he said in a video message. “I want people to be terrified in a darkened theater.”

> [J.J. Abrams] sought [to remind] that going to the movies is different from watching TV. (...) “The relationship with the TV is you’re the parent and the TV is the child,” he said. “It’s in your house. It’s smaller than you, you can turn it off, change it and control it.” When you go to the movies, Mr. Abrams said, “You’re the child and it’s the parent. You look up to it. It controls you and it is taking you where it wants to take you. I think we all want to be kids again.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/business/media/movie-theaters.html Открыть/Комментировать

2021-07-01 22:25:23 > “Innovation isn’t always a planned activity,” said Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple, about post-pandemic work. “It’s bumping into each other over the course of the day and advancing an idea you just had.” Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said working from home “doesn’t work for spontaneous idea generation, it doesn’t work for culture.”

> The notion that spontaneous interactions in the office would spur creative thinking was a driving force behind (...) the Johnson Wax headquarters. (...) Silicon Valley companies began offering snack stations and on-site haircuts to foster impromptu gatherings. (...) Yet Professor Bernstein found that contemporary open offices led to 70 percent fewer face-to-face interactions. People didn’t find it helpful to have so many spontaneous conversations, so they wore headphones and avoided one another.

> People who study the issue say (…) [that working in person] may even hurt innovation, because the demand for doing office work at a prescribed time and place is a big reason the American workplace has been inhospitable for many people. (...) People who are shy; who need to live far from the office; who are productive at odd hours; or who were excluded from golf games or happy hours.

> “One of our big fears is that if we don’t get this right, we create this two-tier employee reality — who’s in the room, who’s not, who’s playing the politics, who’s not,” Mr. Spaulding at Zillow said. “We believe humans want to connect and collaborate. But do you need to do that five days a week, or can you do that once every three months?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/upshot/remote-work-innovation-office.html Открыть/Комментировать

2021-07-01 22:21:00 > Both at Facebook, they knew they had a good thing going ever since they were paired on a project, with Sachin as product manager and Alex as designer. "We both have unique interests," says Alex. "Sachin had certain books on his desk that made me think, 'Oh, you're just as weird as I am.'" Now they wanted to see if they could start something of their own.

> If they were going to leave their secure jobs and take a leap into the unknown, they needed to find the right idea — something they'd be excited to think about for years, twenty-four hours a day. So they started writing letters to each other, even before they quit.

> "We're building what looks like a niche consumer [social app]," says Sachin. "We needed to communicate our hypotheses at a deeper level. On top of that, we were pre-launch. We didn't have a lot of numbers or charts to share yet." A Powerpoint pitch deck was out of the question. So they sent investors a Notion doc instead.

https://www.notion.so/blog/cocoon-runs-on-notion ← писать круто Открыть/Комментировать

2021-07-01 22:12:58 > SEO had been our primary lever to get U.S. growth into good shape after our initial strategy of leveraging the Facebook Open Graph stopped working. I was asking Luc whether we should prioritize different tactics to make international SEO work like international link building, localizing our URL structure, or making sure only content in local languages showed up on a page. His response was basically, “Dude, you do ALL of it.” We could figure out which one mattered the most after we’re successful.

> This is the approach we took at Eventbrite when the pandemic went into effect. (...) We helped creators pivot online through virtual events; we published information on how to apply for loans; we built a bulk refunds tool, (...) and an easy postponement tool. We fired every bullet we had at the pandemic problem. We did not prioritize. (...) We released things that would not meet our normal quality bar. (...) We later learned other companies were doing the same.

> That doesn’t mean firing every bullet in upside situations is wrong; it’s just not as clear of an answer as in the extreme downside scenario. Quibi did everything to grow for its launch and burned through $100 million. It might have been better to do a smaller launch and iterate on content to find stronger product/market fit. Uber burned through billions for many years to try to both accelerate the size of their market and their market share within it, and it’s almost a $100 billion company.

https://caseyaccidental.com/fire-every-bullet/ Открыть/Комментировать

2021-07-01 22:12:56 Открыть/Комментировать

2021-07-01 21:58:09 > Сначала мы все устареваем в чем-то одном, например в понимании технологий и изобретений. Потом перестаем интересоваться социальными изменениями. И наконец бронзовеем окончательно.
> Что сделать, чтобы отсрочить процесс устаревания и так ли он неизбежен?

https://vas3k.club/post/10689/ (в комментах замечательно) Открыть/Комментировать

2021-07-01 21:43:00 См. также: https://twitter.com/ballmatthew/status/1410009736666353665
(https://www.roundhillinvestments.com/etf/meta/full-holdings) Открыть/Комментировать

2021-07-01 21:41:18 Virtual Platforms
> Today, the most popular virtual platforms are Roblox and Minecraft [and] Grand Theft Auto Online and Fortnite Creative Mode. (...) The ability to richly customize items and then sell or trade them does not mean a game is a platform. (...) According to [Bill Gates], a “platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it.” Tim Sweeney argues “something is a platform when the majority of content people spend time with is created by others.”
> Hong Kong International Airport was famously designed in Unity. (...) Unity could not only render a not-yet-real environment, but realistically stress-test it for fire, a flood, a power outage, backed-up runway, and for the flow of humans in an emergency. (...) It becomes possible to interconnect previously independent simulations. (...) What’s key to Omniverse is that it can do this irrespective of the file formats. (...) In other words, everything doesn’t have to be on Unity, or Unreal, or AutoCAD.

Interchange Tools & Standards
> Today’s internet was built through a variety of consortiums and informal working groups. (...) Anyone with an internet connection could build a website in minutes and at no cost using pure HTML, and even faster using a platform like GeoCities. (…) And a single version of this site was (or at least could be) accessed by every device, browser, and user connected to the internet.
> It’s not hard to imagine how the internet might differ if it had been created by [AT&T or AOL]. (...) Fortnite needs to use Microsoft’s DirectX for Xbox, and Sony’s GNMX for PlayStation, Nvidia’s NVM for Nintendo Switch, and Apple’s Metal for iOS. (...) [These] challenges listed above are at risk of becoming harder, or worse, in the Metaverse era.
> Epic Games unveiled Epic Online Services (EOS), (...) ‘Fortnite live services in a box’. (...) Developers can plug directly into Discord. (...) But, historically, the majority of development tends to take place on standards that the leading platforms support. (...) And today’s leaders know this. Which is why they are spending billions of dollars funding independent creators, buying numerous game developers and platforms. (...) Just as you can’t easily import all your Instagram photos and likes into Twitter or TikTok or Snapchat. Открыть/Комментировать

2021-07-01 21:39:29 Hardware
> Bitmoji, Animoji, and Snapchat AR [depend] on fairly capable CPUs/GPUs. (...) and are enriched by powerful face-tracking camera. (...) iPhone 11 and iPhone 12 (...) create extensive RADAR maps of everything from your home, to your office, and the street you’re walking down — and place you within these maps, relative to other local devices, down to a few centimeters. (...) All of this is possible through standard consumer-grade hardware.
> [Oculus Quest 2] had 1832×1920 per eye (thoughly equivalent to 4K). Palmer Luckey, one of Oculus’s founders, believes more than twice this resolution is required for VR to overcome pixelation. (...) While humans can see an average of 210°, Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 display covers only 52° (up from 34°). Snap’s forthcoming glasses are only 26.3°. To take off, we likely need far wider coverage. These are primarily hardware challenges, not software ones.

Networking
> Microsoft Flight Simulator (...) includes 2 trillion individually rendered trees, 1.5 billion buildings and nearly every road, mountain, city and airport globally. (...) [It] requires over 2.5 petabytes of data (...) [and] is a live service that updates to reflect real-world weather (...) and air traffic. (...) By sending rendering data on an as-needed basis, games can have a much greater diversity of items, assets and environments.
> The biggest challenge in networking is also its least understood: latency. (...) It doesn’t matter if it takes 100ms or 200ms or even two-second delays between sending a WhatsApp message and receiving a read receipt. (...) The most immersive AAA online multiplayer games, however, require low latency. (...) Latency, in other words, determines whether you win or lose, kill or end up killed.

Compute
> Google Stadia and Amazon Luna (...) process all video gameplay in the cloud. (...) Another thesis suggests that we’re better off betting on advances in local compute, rather than remote supercomputers that must then contend with unreliable networks. (...) Consumer processors improve much faster than networks as they’re far more frequently replaced and aren’t literally fighting the speed of light.
> The insatiable need for processing — ideally located as close as possible to the user, but even near industrial server farms — invariably inspires notions of decentralized computing. (...) Anyone who installs solar panels at their home can sell excess power to their local grid (and, indirectly, their neighbor). Elon Musk touts a future where your Tesla earns you rent as a self-driving car when not in use. Открыть/Комментировать

2021-07-01 21:37:54 > The iPhone feels like the start of the mobile internet because it united and/or distilled all of the things we now think of as ‘the mobile internet’. (...) [It] accessed 3G networks via chips made by Infineon that connected via standards set by the ITU and GSMA, [deployed by] AT&T on top of wireless towers built by tower companies. (...) The iPhone had “an app for that” because millions of developers built them.

> Sometimes the Metaverse is described as a virtual user-generated content (UGC) platform. This is like saying the internet is Yahoo!, Facebook, or World of Warcraft. (...) Fortnite and Roblox feel like the Metaverse because they embody so many technologies and trends into a single experience that, like the iPhone, is tangible and feels different from everything that came before. But they do not constitute the Metaverse.

https://www.matthewball.vc/the-metaverse-primer Открыть/Комментировать