Cat sushi. Genius.
I’m visting my parents in Sweden so naturally they are keeping me up to date with the latest Nigerian hits.
A Hong Kong VC fund has just appointed an algorithm to its board.
Deep Knowledge Ventures, a firm that focuses on age-related disease drugs and regenerative medicine projects, says the program, called VITAL, can make investment recommendations about life sciences firms by poring over large amounts of data.
Just like other members of the board, the algorithm gets to vote on whether the firm makes an investment in a specific company or not. The program will be the sixth member of DKV’s board.
Fascinating.
Naspers’ astonishing progress is in stark relief to the plight of the New York Times, laid out in turgid, repetitive detail in the leaked 97-page memo, apparently six months in the making, that concludes with the breakthrough idea that the organization should “consider a task force to explore what it will take to become a digital first newsroom.”
Naspers is so overlooked as a media company. If it was in the US then every single media exec would have been there the last five years.
isoscope
A map that shows how far you can get in 10 minutes depending on the city, time or weekday. It reminded me of an old talk that I once did about connectivity beating proximity for importance.
Kids Rule in Toca Town
Two lovely teaser videos for the upcoming Toca Town.
Just sit in a cafe — any cafe in San Francisco — and you hear stuff that makes you want to poke your eyes out. Founders, instead of trying to forge relationships, are getting into a pattern of expecting funding without much effort. After all, if it doesn’t work out, no harm done and there is an acqui-hire around the corner. There is an expectation that even if they don’t build an interesting product, they deserve a nice exit for trying anyway: which is troubling as far as I am concerned.
Why the preference for digits over letters? It mostly has to do with ease of memorization. To a native English-speaker, remembering a long string of digits might seem harder than memorizing a word. But that’s if you understand the word. For many Chinese, numbers are easier to remember than Latin characters. Sure, Chinese children learn the pinyin system that uses the Roman alphabet to spell out Mandarin words (for example, the word for “Internet,” 网络, is spelled wangluo in pinyin). And yes, Arabic numerals (1-2-3) are technically just as much a foreign import as the Roman alphabet (A-B-C). But most Chinese are more familiar with numbers than letters, especially those who didn’t go to college. To many, “Hotmail.com” might as well be Cyrillic.
Here’s me looking like a real speaker for once.
(via Top Digital Toy Creator: Why It’s Important To Do Your Homework Before You Build – PSFK)
Here’s me looking like a real speaker for once.
(via Top Digital Toy Creator: Why It’s Important To Do Your Homework Before You Build – PSFK)