Dominik Vacikar measured growth signals for 4,000 companies, then searched for historical correlations between those signals and stock market performance. His research lead to some interesting results that he plans to turn into an interest product. This reminded me of my work on a Hacker News scraper, a project I hope to revive soon.
Back in April I linked to Rich Stevens’ announcement of a new newsletter he planned to begin publishing once or twice a week focusing on “A little business, a little gadgetry, a little art and writing, and a few dick jokes.” Since then I have enjoyed his seventeen posts immensely, and the latest was no exception: in Nerd, Decentralize Thyself1 Rich Stevens spoke to the recent trend towards relying on platforms such as Tumblr and Twitter, and how despite liking both he would never forfeit ownership of his website. He went on to call for more people devoted to pointing out great work in order to solve the discoverability problem those aforementioned services aim to obviate as a way of decreasing our reliance on third parties to do great work and, hopefully, make building a website back into something cool again. If you find this description at all interesting, subscribe to the newsletter; you will not be disappointed.
Around minute 44:33 of Cube’s latest episode, Ben Bajarin theorized that Google’s motivation in selling Motorola to Lenovo while Samsung simultaneously agreed to scale back their customization of Android could have come about as a result of Samsung desiring access to a concrete feature road map which they could build to in the future. In my last article, Retroactively Planning, I talked about how Samsung’s backwards strategy in which rather than approaching future product creation with a long-held guiding philosophy they must now scramble to infer one from existing successful products is ultimately doomed to failure. Ben’s theory fits nicely into this picture as a move Samsung could be taking in an attempt at having greater control over their destiny. However, without an underlying theory guiding the decisions they say yes and no to throughout the creation process, I stand by my original idea: I feel this newfound knowledge will change little with regards to Samsung’s future.