Deutsche Welle: DW.com – Business:

yes, please

Bradley Berman Electrek:

“The impacts of the pandemic are unpredictable. It’s concerning that Chinese car buyers are switching from public transit to personal vehicles.

However, that process was already underway. Now it appears to be accelerating. This is occurring just as production of new EVs from Tesla, Volkswagen, Byton, General Motors, and others, are ramping up. They are the best crop of long-range EVs ever offered in China.

If global auto sales rebound, the shift to electric vehicles could be faster than anybody predicted.”

Inoreader Inoreader blog:

This is a great idea.

Reuters: Business News:

“Audi said it would cut up to 9,500 jobs, or 10.6% of its total staff by 2025, saving 6 billion euros ($6.61 billion), but also create up to 2,000 new positions in the areas of electric mobility and digitalization.”

Ben Thompson (paywall):

Nadella’s point is that by virtue of Tier 1 workloads increasingly running in the cloud, Microsoft (and AWS, etc.) can naturally participate and be paid for workloads that it previously didn’t participate in at all; it’s just like SQL Server being something an enterprise might pay for along with SAP’s offering, but now it applies to everything.

There is an even easier way to understand this analogy though: just as Windows was the foundation of user-facing applications previously, the cloud is the foundation of user-facing applications today, and also the entire data and processing layer that sits underneath those applications. It’s a bigger market than Windows, and while Microsoft doesn’t have the same dominant position, the opportunity is so large that it might not matter.

Think about what this means for the market leader, AWS. It’s hard to fathom where cloud computing will stand in 5 or even 10 years time. It’s going to mindboggingly massive. This is the central building block for the modern economy.

Think about the potential breadth of those cloud offerings by starting with counting the current AWS APIs and their growth in numbers over time.

Also, I just had to think of Volkswagen cooperating with AWS to build its “Industrial Cloud”:

Volkswagen Industrial Cloud will combine data of all machines, plants and systems from all the facilities of the Volkswagen Group

Significant productivity improvements at the plants are the objective

Integration of the global Volkswagen supply chain in Industrial Cloud in the long-term – more than 30,000 locations of over 1,500 suppliers and partners throughout the world

Open industry platform: possibly to be used by other partners in the future

TechCrunch:

You’re not going to use Coda, which was founded in 2017 and received funding from VC heavyweights like Greylock, Khosla Ventures and NEA, as a full-blown low code/no code service. It’s still a bit too limited for that. But you can use it to build your own custom inventory system, for example, or to build a basic CRM or to-do app that fits your specific needs. Or you could just use it as an online text editor and then slowly add features like third-party integrations with the likes of Slack or Figma as needed. All of that is easy enough for anybody who has ever used a function in Excel or Google Sheets.

This looks neat. Like GoogleDocs or Quip on Steroids.

An egg is the most popular photo on Instagram. What’s that worth? – Recode:

Lachtman thinks @world_record_egg could rake in as much as $250,000 to run a single ad to all of its followers if it decides to sell out. Others, like Sean Spielberg at Points North Group, an influencer marketing analytics company, think it could be even more.

“I think [they could sell an ad for] close to a million dollars,” Spielberg said, adding that normal rules around how much an influencer can usually charge per follower doesn’t apply to a viral sensation like the Instagram Egg. “[The rules] break down in an example like this where the account has over four million followers, but it’s clearly reached many, many multiples of that many people.”

O_O

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal REVOLUTION, “Marginal REVOLUTION”:
>

Earther:

The project in question is the Eagle Shadow Mountain Solar Farm, which will begin operating in 2021. The farm will have a generating capacity of 300 megawatts, enough to power about 210,000 American homes. But it’s the price part that’s eye-popping. It will operate at a flat rate of $23.76 per megawatt-hour over the course of a 25-year power purchasing agreement (the term for a contract between an electricity generator and utility who buys it). On the surface, that price may not mean a lot to you if you’re not an energy nerd, but it’s a huge deal.

“On their face, they’re less than a third the price of building a new coal or natural gas power plant,” Ramez Naam, an energy expert and lecturer at Singularity University, told Earther in an email. “In fact, building these plants is cheaper than just operating an existing coal or natural gas plant.”

There’s a 30 percent federal investment tax credit for solar projects that helps drive down the cost of this and other solar projects. But Naam said even if you take away that credit, “these bids, un-subsidized, are still cheaper than any new coal or gas plants, and possibly cheaper than operating existing plants.”

New York Magazine: “Vice Media Was Built on a Bluff”:

If the modern version of Vice has a born-on date, it may have come in the spring of 2010, when the company landed a meeting with Intel, the computer-chip-maker, which wanted more young people to care about Pentium processors. Vice was still running on a shoestring, and Intel promised access to a $2 billion annual marketing budget. “Shane’s whole thing was, ‘We can’t let them think we’re these poor kids,’ ” says one former employee. (A number of current and former Vice employees, many of whom signed nondisclosure agreements, requested anonymity in order to talk about the company.) According to multiple employees who worked at Vice at the time, Smith went to the architecture firm across the hall from Vice’s Williamsburg office and asked how much it would cost to get them to move out ASAP. Vice’s 50 employees then worked around the clock for several days setting up the new space to look like it had been Vice’s all along. Vice constructed a glass-enclosed conference room to host the Intel meeting, and late one night, an employee answered a buzz at the door to find a plumber who’d come to install a fancy Japanese toilet.

On the morning of the Intel meeting, Vice employees were instructed to get to the office early, to bring friends with laptops to circulate in and out of the new space, and to “be yourselves, but 40 percent less yourselves,” which meant looking like the hip 20-somethings they were but in a way that wouldn’t scare off a marketing executive. A few employees put on a photo shoot in a ground-floor studio as the Intel executives walked by. “Shane’s strategy was, ‘I’m not gonna tell them we own the studio, but I’m not gonna tell them we don’t,’ ” one former employee says. That night, Smith took the marketers to dinner, then to a bar where Vice employees had been told to assemble for a party. When Smith arrived, just ahead of the Intel employees, he walked up behind multiple Vice employees and whispered into their ears, “Dance.”

What a story.

Make sure to read all of it. Vice has always been odd -how are they this successful with that content? for example-, and this explains a lot of why that is. (or was)