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”:
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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)

John Gruber on Google Duplex and Google in general:

I maintain that Google is wrong for the way it presents in-the-works not-yet-ready features. I think like Microsoft of old (and Apple of ancient times), Google, institutionally, is only excited about things that are in the works, not the things it’s actually shipping. But unlike Microsoft of old, Google presents concept videos without labeling them as concept videos.

But I think the other problem is with the media, that, time after time, buys into Google’s demo claims unquestionably — and then never circles back to them when they don’t ship.

This is spot on.

MG Siegler:

Take Bright, for example. By almost all critical accounts, it’s a bad movie. But while this might matter if it were released in a traditional movie theater, it turns out that this doesn’t actually matter on Netflix. Well, to be fair, it probably does matter at least somewhat, but it matters far less. Because at the end of the day, critical response is still subjective, even in aggregate. As such, it’s not all-encompassing. There will always be people who disagree with an assessment and will enjoy a movie that others did not — or, at the very least, will want to see it. Netflix just lowered the barrier to make this happen.

Going to a movie theater is a complicated and increasingly expensive process. If you hear a movie sucks, you’re probably not going to bother. (And that’s even more true if the theater itself sucks.) But if it’s playing at home, on a service you’re already paying for… […]

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Seven years ago (!), I offered up the idea of Netflix using its unique model to “save” cancelled cult hits. Arrested Development happened. Twin Peaks happened (though on Showtime). Firefly? Not yet. But many others have. Including Full House. Which is somehow a hit again.

But it’s not actually “somehow”, it was inevitable.

Next, what if Netflix convinces top-tier content to think outside the format? The Avengers movies are great, but given the sheer number of characters now involved, they’re getting too elaborate and convoluted for the two-hour film format. What if instead, they were five, 90 minute-long episodes? Who wouldn’t want to watch that? Who wouldn’t pay to watch that? Who wouldn’t pay a small premium on top of what we already pay Netflix to watch such content? No one. And Netflix has to know that. (Certainly Disney does!) The data is already there in the form of box office receipts.

The point is, it’s a combination of great content (or even less-than-great content), mixed with Netflix’s willingness to experiment with new formats and methods of distribution that is truly changing Hollywood’s game.

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I am waiting for some while now for more experimentation in formats on Netflix. Right now, Netflix still does TV (seasons) and cinema (movies) with scripted content. It won’t be long until they stumble upon genuine on-demand streaming formats. Especially the shared universe comic book route screams for a more free flow approach to time length of installments.

WIRED:

The problem, Nohl points out, is worse than vendors merely neglecting to patch older devices, a common phenomenon. Instead, it’s that they tell users they install patches that they in fact don’t, creating a false sense of security. „We found several vendors that didn’t install a single patch but changed the patch date forward by several months,“ Nohl says. „That’s deliberate deception, and it’s not very common.“

Troubling, fascinating new aspect of the modularity of the Android platform.