Hi friends,
This is Congxing Cai. Greetings from Mountain View.
A lot is happening. I took a step back and looked into some of the changes in the product landscape this week.
Happening Now
👯♀️ The Collab House of TikTok-era depicts a story of the new kind of content house that hosts a collective of young popular TikTok influencers in Hollywood.
To answer a glaring question: No, collab houses don’t really make any money.
They are meant to be a gateway to become a reality TV stardom like the Kardashians. However, the line between “serious business” and “a group of friends renting a house together” can be quite thin. A fascinating story to read.
🛍 Pinduoduo and the Rise of Social E-Commerce Pinduoduo found room in e-commerce, not as a competitor to search-based websites like JD, but as a new e-commerce platform focused on interactive and social shopping experiences online. Many people believe this gap is to be filled in US as well. Right now, Amazon is the Google of e-commerce, while we are still missing the Facebook of e-commerce. Maybe it is Facebook itself.
🎃 Halloween during pandemic offers some creative ways for parents to prepare Halloween for kids this year. According to the National Retail Federation, Americans shelled out about $8.8 billion last year on Halloween items like costumes, candy, and decorations. Halloween 2020 was projected to be even bigger, thanks to a full moon, a Saturday holiday, and daylight saving time kicking in at midnight. Pandemic changed all of that.
📶 America’s internet wasn’t prepared for online school The report shows how badly rural America needs broadband for remote learning. Part of the problem for rural areas is income. This is also compounded by nature — hills, lakes, rivers, forests, and other terrain can both interfere with wireless signals and present challenges to laying infrastructure in the first place. For online eduction, we have both a product problem and an infrastructure challenge.
Learnings of the Week
💰 Debt: The first five thousand years Anthropologist David Graeber took a new look at the history of debt in his book. It explores the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the social institutions that form the nowadays so-called “human economy”. It also argues that money did not originally appear in the cold, metal, impersonal form of cash and barter transactions, but as in the form of a measure, an abstraction, and a relation of debt and obligations between human beings. The essay and the book offers an alternative history of virtual money, and provides a lot of questions for us to think about the current era of credit money.
Credit systems seem to arise, and to become dominant, in periods of relative social peace, across networks of trust, whether created by states or, in most periods, transnational institutions, whilst precious metals replace them in periods characterised by widespread plunder.
📺 The 100 Sequences That Shaped Animation presents a list of 100 important sequences in the animation history that demonstrate the invisible magic between frames. It is fascinating to watch through how this technique improved over time and the way story telling helped to shape its direction. A long piece but fun to read for a weekend. 🍿
📹 Why media formats (like Snapchat Stories and TikTok music videos) become hits? The post maps different kind of media formats into the two inversely correlated dimensions: storytelling vs simplicity. It didn’t delve into the format of Stories, but reviewed the evolution from the looping micro video (Vine) to lip sync video (Music.ly) and then the music backed video (TikTok). While the complexity killed Vine, Music.ly simplified it with lip sync but optimized for storytelling by evolving to music backed videos that are now popular on TikTok.
💬 And, Slack is launching stories soon.
Quote
Knowledge is not only cumulative, it grows exponentially. Those with a rich bases of factual knowledge find it easier to learn more – the rich get richer. – Daniel Willingham
Thanks for reading!
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