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- Will's Weekly Roundup
Will's Weekly Roundup is a weekly newsletter of curated tech, business, and startup news.
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Business
The business headlines you missed (or need to see again)...
Mother’s Day - Americans spent nearly $36 billion on Mother’s Day gifts this year, a $4 billion increase over 2022. Mother’s Day sees a 37% uptick in phone calls, making it the busiest calling day of the year at 122 million calls. LINK
Vice - Vice Media filed for bankruptcy after failing to find buyers for its assets. LINK
Twitter - Elon hand-picked Linda Yaccarino, the former chair of advertising sales at NBC Universal, to replace him as Twitter CEO. LINK
Shake Shack - Shake Shack made $3.2M per store, which is more than Chipotle and even McDonald’s. However, the company is nowhere as profitable as the other two companies. With nearly 460 global stores, it’s also much smaller than Chipotle’s 3.2K and McDonald’s 38K. LINK
S&P 500 - 92% of the S&P 500 has reported Q1 earnings. 78% and 75% of companies have beaten analysts’ estimates on earnings and revenue, respectively. LINK
Bitcoin - The number of Bitcoin addresses holding 1 BTC or more has reached 1 million (1 BTC = ~$27K as of Sunday). LINK
Lululemon, Alibaba, & GE - The NY state pension retirement fund sold significant positions in Alibaba, Lululemon, and General Electric. LINK
Beans - A bean shortage is driving up the cost of a cup of coffee, including the robusta variety used in instant coffee, espressos, and ground blends. LINK
Target - Target is actively seeking to make the lives of parents easier by offering a one-year return policy on children's clothing, regardless of condition (ripped, stained, etc). Returns without a proof of purchase are limited to $100 per year per customer, while items with a receipt or purchased through Target enjoy unrestricted returns. I’m curious about what the economic impact is for a policy change like this. LINK
Hiring - Elon Musk told Tesla employees that he wants to approve every new hire at the company personally. It’s a surprising move for a company hiring about 30,000 people per year. LINK
Disney - Disney is scrapping plans to build a nearly $1 billion corporate campus in central Florida that would have housed 2,000 employees. LINK
Betting - Fanatics bought the US operations of PointsBet, an online sportsbook operator, for $150 million. LINK
Subpoenaed - Elon Musk is being asked to turn over documents as part of a civil lawsuit by the US Virgin Islands against JPMorgan over the bank’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. LINK
Travel - Memorial Day travel is projected to reach pre-pandemic levels. LINK
Ireland - Ireland plans to set up a sovereign wealth fund (government-owned investment fund) next year. LINK
Tech
The tech headlines and insights you missed (or need to see again)...
ChatGPT Mobile - OpenAI released the mobile version of ChatGPT, and it is better than the regular web version. It has text-to-speech capabilities, which means we can finally say bye to Siri. If you want the official app go to the OpenAI website or use the provided link. Watch out because there are a lot of copycat apps with scarily similar logos and names. LINK
AI Regulation - OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman testified in the Senate Judiciary Committee about oversight and governance of AI. My takeaways from the testimony: (1) Altman told Congress what they wanted to hear. (2) Altman has zero equity in OpenAI. Here are the video highlights. LINK
Debugging Code - Web traffic to Stack Overflow, the dominant coding Q&A site, is down by 14% as people switch to ChatGPT for answers. LINK
GPT-3.5 v GPT-4 - It is roughly 50 times cheaper for developers to use GPT-3.5-Turbo than GPT-4 because GPT-3.5 is a smaller model that uses significantly less data than GPT-4. LINK
Chips - Meta is making its first custom chip specifically for running AI models. LINK
EVs - Here’s an interesting article describing why all the arguments against electric vehicles are wrong. LINK
Air Taxis - The FAA, the US aviation regulator, published a position paper on flying cars. LINK
Project Starline - Project Starline is a new video chat technology from Google that creates a lifelike, 3D image of the person you're talking to on a TV/monitor screen. It’s definitely a more realistic upgrade to video conferencing than Zuckerberg’s metaverse meetings, but the tech is still too expensive and difficult for most people to access. Watch a quick demo here. LINK
Sam Altman - OpenAI's Sam Altman secured close to $100 million in funding for the Worldcoin crypto project, aiming to establish a worldwide identification system using iris "eye-ball" scans to grant access to a universally accessible digital currency. LINK
Oculus - Palmer Luckey, the founder of the VR-headset company Oculus who sold the company to Facebook for $2 Billion back in 2014, said in a Tweet recently that the soon-to-be-released Apple headset is "so good." LINK
Warren Buffett - I think Buffett was right when he recently equated AI to nuclear weapons, saying that it is an incredibly powerful technology, whose genie you can't put back in the bottle and whose 99.9% of use cases are generally quite societally positive, but the 0.1% of use cases destroy humanity. LINK
Social Apps - When a social network or app gains popularity, it is not solely due to the introduction of new features, but rather due to a shift in privacy policy. Facebook revolutionized the concept of using one's real name on the internet, Twitter challenged the notion of needing to be friends to follow someone, and Snapchat introduced the idea of private, self-destructing photos. Based on this principle, one would have expected the app Povio to have taken off 4 years ago, but it didn’t. Povio is like BeReal but your friends could request you to take front and back camera POV photos an unlimited number of times in a day. LINK
Watchlist
Startups and companies I’m keeping an eye on…
Sanctuary AI - Sanctuary AI is building the world's first humanoid general-purpose robot that is 5’ 7,” weighs 155 lbs, and can carry up to 55 lbs. LINK
Rewind - Rewind is a macOS app that lets you find anything you've ever seen, said, or heard on your computer. It works by recording everything that happens on your screen and then allows you to search back through it like a text document using "Control F" find. LINK
BlackWolf - BlackWolf is a ride-hailing app like Uber but all the drivers are armed and trained to use firearms in the event of an emergency. It’s a fascinating idea, but I’m not sure if there's a large enough market for this protective Uber alternative to survive. LINK
AceTrader - AceTrader lets you invest in physical land like stocks. LINK
Descript - Descript is a video editor that lets you edit videos as if they are text documents. This is a piece of software I can’t live without. LINK
Outside Interests
Interesting internet finds…
TED - Here’s the best way to answer “So what do you do?” This 12-minute TED Talk is a must-watch. LINK
Elon Musk - Musk is a hard character to describe because he's so many things all at once. Walter Isaacson recently released a new biography on him and does a good job of explaining who he is, saying Musk is "the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter." I haven't read the biography yet, and I don't think I will. LINK
Montana Bans TikTok - Montana has become the first state in the US to ban TikTok, citing concerns about data-sharing with the Chinese Communist Party. The law forces app stores to bar making the app available to download in the state after January 1st of next year. LINK
Government Cows - Here's a straightforward and funny explanation of the differences between communism, socialism, fascism, and other political ideologies using cows. This made more sense than any history course I’ve ever taken. LINK
Branding - Here’s a fascinating 12-minute video clip that breaks down how to build a successful brand. LINK
Book Summaries - This website lets you summarize any book using Vision AI & GPT-4. LINK
Visuals
Three visuals worth taking a look at...
Category leaders and their closest competitors.
The rich and the poor work a similar number of hours per week.
Most tech companies are still in the red.
Wisdom
Two quotes of wisdom...
"Never leave a bathroom without high-fiving the person you see in the mirror." ― Mel Robbins
"The reason most people fail instead of succeed is they trade what they want most for what they want at the moment." ― Napoleon Bonaparte
I’m feeling generous this week…
BONUS TWEET #1: What is the male equivalent of a sundress? LINK
BONUS TWEET #2: Some of my favorite AI-generated images (feat. Trump, Ronald Mcdonald, Captain America, Musk, and Biden). LINK
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