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Minimalism is a way of living at the maximum of your potential.
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Anastasiya Kotelnikova
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The challenge, however, is that Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon do not publish their algorithms. In fact, the methods they use to filter the information you see are deeply proprietary and the “secret sauce” that drives each company’s profitability. The problem with this invisible “black box” algorithmic approach to information is that we do not know what has been edited out for us and what we are not seeing. As a result, our digital lives, mediated through a sea of screens, are being actively manipulated and filtered on a daily basis in ways that are both opaque and indecipherable.
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Marc Goodman (Future Crimes)
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The digital age is Heraclitus on steroids: change is a daily constant. In almost every professional environment, we are expected to use and master tools that did not exist a decade ago, or even last year. For better or worse (and frankly, it is often for worse), organizations have access, essentially, to infinite amounts of data, and what might as well be an infinite variety of ways to sort through and act on that data. At the same time, ideas can be turned into reality at unprecedented speed. The thing Amazon, Facebook, and no less hot firms, including Zara, have in common is they are agile (the new-economy term for fast).
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Scott Galloway (The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google)
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About a decade ago, Jeff Bezos declared that Amazon was “willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.” It was expanding from selling everyday goods such as books and brushes to selling “cloud services.” Talk about castles in the sky. What the hell did Amazon know about “Big Data”? The collective reaction was: “Stay in your lane, Bezos. Leave this brainy digital stuff to companies like Google and Microsoft and go back to selling lawn mowers.
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Chase Jarvis (Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life)
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But even though I loved being in water, I never enjoyed swim meets. It always seemed like they were imposing structure and stress on something that should have been freeing and fun. For example, going down a slide is awesome. But if you had to show up every day for slide practice at 7 A.M. and then compete against your best friend in slide competitions, while grown-ups screamed at you to slide better, until your friend won and you cried, slides would seem a lot less awesome. And yes, I cried after the 1994 breaststroke finals when the official said I lost even though technically I had a faster time. And yes, I was beaten by Steve Deppe. And yes, I just googled Steve Deppe and discovered he now runs a successful wealth management business in San Diego. And yes, his online corporate profile says, “As a former athlete, Steve continues to exercise daily, whether it’s lifting weights, running, swimming, or playing sports.” And yes, the fourth example he gave of “exercise” was “sports.” And yes, I just went out and bought goggles and a Speedo and went down to my local pool and didn’t leave until I “just went out and bought goggles and a Speedo and went down to my local pool and didn’t leave until I swam a hundred laps, hoping that would be more laps than Steve Deppe swam today. BUT REALLY, WHO EVEN CARES ANYMORE, RIGHT??? NOT ME!!! IT’S NOT A COMPETITION, EVEN THOUGH I’M NOT EVEN MARRIED YET AND STEVE IS ALREADY “THE PROUD FATHER OF HIS DAUGHTER, CAMRYN.” PLUS, HE’S “AN AVID SPORTS FAN, WHO NEVER MISSES HIS FAVORITE TV SHOW, SPORTSCENTER.” WE GET IT STEVE, YOU FUCKING LOVE SPORTS!”
Anyway.
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Colin Jost (A Very Punchable Face)
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The bigger threat to Google wouldn’t be measured in dollars, but in the philosophical challenge. Could it be that social networking, rather than algorithmic exploitation of the web’s intelligence, would assume the central role in people’s online lives? Even if that were not the case, Facebook made it clear that every facet of the Internet would benefit from the power of personal connection. Google had been chasing a future forged out of algorithms and science fiction chronicles. Did the key to the future lay in party photos and daily status reports?
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Steven Levy (In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives)
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For many citizens, libraries are the one place where the information they need to be engaged in civic life is truly available for free, requiring nothing more than the time to walk into a branch. The reading room of a public library is the place where a daily newspaper, a weekly newsmagazine, and a documentary film are all available for free. In many communities, the library's public lecture room is the only place to hear candidates for office comparing points of view or visiting professors explaining their work on climate change, immigration or job creation. That same room is often the only place where a child from a family without a lot of money can go to see a dramatic reading or a production of a Shakespeare play. (Another of these simple realities in most communities is that a big part of public librarians job is to figure out how to host the community's homeless in a safe and fair manner.) Democracies can work only if all citizens have access to information and culture that can help them make good choices, whether at the voting booth or in other aspects of public life.
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John Palfrey (BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google)
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After my return to Paris, one thing seemed obvious: To see Manhattan again, to feel as good about New York as Liza Minnelli sounded singing about it at Giants Stadium in 1986 (Google it), I had to start treating it as if it were a foreign city; to bring a reporter's eye and habits, care, and attention to daily life.
But as that was the sort of vague self-directive easily ignored, I gave myself a specific assignment: Once a week, during routine errands, I would try something new or go someplace I hadn't been in a long while. It could be as quick as a walk past the supposedly haunted brownstone at 14 West 10th Street, where former resident Mark Twain is said to be among the ghosts. It could a stroll on the High Line, the elevated park with birch trees and long grasses growing where freight trains used to roll. Or it could be a snowy evening visit to the New York Public Library's Beaux-Arts flagship on Fifth Avenue, where Pamuk wrote the first sentence of The Museum of Innocence. There I wandered past white marble walls and candelabras, under chandeliers and ornate ceiling murals, through the room with more than ten thousand maps of my city, eventually taking a seat at a communal wood table to read a translation of Petrarch's Life of Solitude, to rare to be lent out.
Tourist Tuesdays I called these outings, to no one but myself.
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Stephanie Rosenbloom (Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude)
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How Google Works (Schmidt, Eric) - Your Highlight on Location 3124-3150 | Added on Sunday, April 5, 2015 10:35:40 AM In late 1999, John Doerr gave a presentation at Google that changed the company, because it created a simple tool that let the founders institutionalize their “think big” ethos. John sat on our board, and his firm, Kleiner Perkins, had recently invested in the company. The topic was a form of management by objectives called OKRs (to which we referred in the previous chapter), which John had learned from former Intel CEO Andy Grove.173 There are several characteristics that set OKRs apart from their typical underpromise-and-overdeliver corporate-objective brethren. First, a good OKR marries the big-picture objective with a highly measurable key result. It’s easy to set some amorphous strategic goal (make usability better … improve team morale … get in better shape) as an objective and then, at quarter end, declare victory. But when the strategic goal is measured against a concrete goal (increase usage of features by X percent … raise employee satisfaction scores by Y percent … run a half marathon in under two hours), then things get interesting. For example, one of our platform team’s recent OKRs was to have “new WW systems serving significant traffic for XX large services with latency < YY microseconds @ ZZ% on Jupiter.”174 (Jupiter is a code name, not the location of Google’s newest data center.) There is no ambiguity with this OKR; it is very easy to measure whether or not it is accomplished. Other OKRs will call for rolling out a product across a specific number of countries, or set objectives for usage (e.g., one of the Google+ team’s recent OKRs was about the daily number of messages users would post in hangouts) or performance (e.g., median watch latency on YouTube videos). Second—and here is where thinking big comes in—a good OKR should be a stretch to achieve, and hitting 100 percent on all OKRs should be practically unattainable. If your OKRs are all green, you aren’t setting them high enough. The best OKRs are aggressive, but realistic. Under this strange arithmetic, a score of 70 percent on a well-constructed OKR is often better than 100 percent on a lesser one. Third, most everyone does them. Remember, you need everyone thinking in your venture, regardless of their position. Fourth, they are scored, but this scoring isn’t used for anything and isn’t even tracked. This lets people judge their performance honestly. Fifth, OKRs are not comprehensive; they are reserved for areas that need special focus and objectives that won’t be reached without some extra oomph. Business-as-usual stuff doesn’t need OKRs. As your venture grows, the most important OKRs shift from individuals to teams. In a small company, an individual can achieve incredible things on her own, but as the company grows it becomes harder to accomplish stretch goals without teammates. This doesn’t mean that individuals should stop doing OKRs, but rather that team OKRs become the more important means to maintain focus on the big tasks. And there’s one final benefit of an OKR-driven culture: It helps keep people from chasing competitors. Competitors are everywhere in the Internet Century, and chasing them (as we noted earlier) is the fastest path to mediocrity. If employees are focused on a well-conceived set of OKRs, then this isn’t a problem. They know where they need to go and don’t have time to worry about the competition. ==========
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Anonymous
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Within minutes, I received a response with punctuation I had never seen before. “Hello (((Weisman))),” wrote “CyberTrump.” Nothing more. Just that. I was sitting at my desk at work. I had some time on my hands as an editor at the Times, since my responsibilities then centered on domestic policy—economics, the environment, poverty—and with the nation consumed in this strange presidential campaign, not a lot of policy making was going on. “Care to explain?” I answered, intuiting that my last name in those triple parentheses must somehow denote my Jewish faith. “What, ho, the vaunted Ashkenazi intelligence, hahaha!” “CyberTrump” came back. “It’s a dog whistle, fool. Belling the cat for my fellow goyim.” With the cat belled, the horde followed. What I didn’t know was that I had unwittingly exposed what was known in the alt-right as “echoes,” those three parentheses that practitioners of online harassment wrapped around Jewish-sounding names on social media. Unbeknown to, well, just about everyone, alt-right anti-Semites had created a Google plug-in that could be used to search double or triple parentheses, since ordinary search engines do not pick up punctuation marks. Haters would slap these “echoes” around Jewish-sounding names of people online they wanted to target. Once a target was “belled,” the alt-right anti-Semitic mob could download the innocuous-sounding Coincidence Detector plug-in from the Google Chrome store, track down targets like heat-seeking missiles, then swarm. “You’ve all provoked us. You’ve been doing it for decades—and centuries even—and we’ve finally had enough,” declared Andrew Anglin, the creator and mastermind of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer. “Challenge has been accepted.” And swarm they did.
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Jonathan Weisman ((((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump)
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1Ian Potter Centre: NGV AustraliaGALLERY MAP GOOGLE MAP The National Gallery of Victoria's impressive Fed Sq offshoot was set up to showcase its extraordinary collection of Australian works. Set over three levels, it's a mix of permanent (free) and temporary (ticketed) exhibitions, comprising paintings, decorative arts, photography, prints, sculpture and fashion. Free tours are conducted daily at 11am, noon, 1pm and 2pm.
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Lonely Planet (Lonely Planet Pocket Melbourne (Travel Guide))
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hbtrl provide the way to earn thousands dollar’s daily with Google absence It provides a free direct access to over 4000 TV channels, The app is free It holds a great collection of Popular Movie Channels all easily accessible & you can know earn money ways & earn with google adsense so you can visit our website
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hbtrl
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Reading Plan • 30 minutes per day of Scripture time • 30 minutes per day reading on business and leadership • Google News daily • Read HBR and Fast Company monthly • Read twelve books on business and leadership this year
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Daniel S. Harkavy (Becoming a Coaching Leader: The Proven Strategy for Building Your Own Team of Champions)
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Who the fuck cares where you went to school or where you work? The question is: Is your everyday experience good, healthy, beautiful? Because I have to tell you, while it might be cool to work for a company like Google, Apple, or The New Yorker, if your job is stupid, stressful and your boss is an asshole, there is nothing good or prestigious about that. While it might seem right to go to a school like Berkeley, if classes are overcrowded and students are nervous, anxious, religious zealots from Orange County, are you sure you want to go there? What’s good about that? To believe in prestige is to privilege abstract, collective impression over palpable, daily experience. To which I say: fuck prestige. Do what serves your everyday vitality.
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Daniel Coffeen
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Rejecting the rules of late-stage tech-bubble venture-capital madness is a better, more resilient, and durable approach to business in a digital landscape. Who better to affirm this than one of the digital industry's most trusted news and analysis sources, PandoDaily.
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Douglas Rushkoff (Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity)
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If we think about the world techno-utopians are envisioning, it may be hard for the average citizen to have the freedom and autonomy to enjoy meaningful work. Would a life where your daily existence relied on driving four hours a day for Uber, serving as a concierge for your Airbnb guests in the spare room, and spending your evenings doing crowdwork on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk meet Epicurus’s test? And would you have any time to live an “examined” life? Is the goal of tech success freedom, or addiction?
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Jonathan Taplin (Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy)
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Prayer: This can be any daily silent practice or meditation. • Work: This becomes part of a balanced life. It cannot be the whole focus. • Study: This is when we read the wisdom of those who came before us. • Hospitality: This just means treating those around you with kindness; it can also mean breaking bread with friends. • Renewal: This is accomplished by taking one day a week to turn away from daily cares (and screens) and appreciate the natural beauty around us.
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Jonathan Taplin (Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy)
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قيل للسعادة أين تسكنين ؟
فأجابت في قلوب المؤمنين!
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Google.com (Daily Inspiration on Thefiringline1111)
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Fear ye not, stand still.… —Exodus 14:13 (KJV) Help, God! I’m overwhelmed! In the middle of creating a real estate brochure, my computer paused for what seemed an eternity each time I dropped in a new photo. “Hmm,” said the technician when my computer reacted to his touch like a really slow-moving snail, “let’s check your apps.” The technician tapped my home screen twice, and a stream of intriguing icons appeared at the bottom of the page. He swiped them with his finger. There were my mailbox, weather, news, Google, Mapquest, calendar, contacts, two word games, solitaire, a poetry book. On he swiped, past real estate, camera, some magazines, alarm clock, dictionary, Bible. “You haven’t turned off your apps in a while,” he said. “I didn’t know I was supposed to,” I answered. “If you leave them on, there’s too much information vying for space,” he explained. “Then everything slows down. A computer is like a person…can’t handle everything at once.” Hey, God, have You brought me here to tell me something? The tech showed me how to turn off the apps I didn’t need. Now my computer was brochure-ready and humming at full speed. As I left the store, I was humming too. Standing still, I turned off all the extra programs in my head and focused on the task at hand! Father, in a complicated world, You bring me back to what’s always true: “Be still” and know…one thing at a time! —Pam Kidd Digging Deeper: Prv 3:5–6; Is 40:28–31
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Guideposts (Daily Guideposts 2014)
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He is a very senior member of faculty; has an added degree in Computer Science; a supposed scholar; addicted to Google and the Internet; dislikes the library, but, I looked like a magician to him when in a twinkling of an eye I gave him a book from the trolley that contained 90% of what he couldn't get from the Internet for a long while, and ever since, he respects librarians and visits the library almost on a daily basis.
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David N. Ofili
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We are certain that for every one of these rock stars we meet in our daily work, there are dozens or even hundreds more who are doing their best to unseat us from our perch. Maybe all of them will fail, but probably not. Probably, somewhere in a garage, dorm room, lab, or conference room, a brave business leader has gathered a small, dedicated team of smart creatives. Maybe she has a copy of our book, and is using our ideas to help her create a company that will eventually render Google irrelevant. Preposterous, right? Except that, given that no business wins forever, it is inevitable. Some would find this chilling. We find it inspiring.
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Eric Schmidt (How Google Works)
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Groupon is a study of the hazards of pursuing scale and valuation at all costs. In 2010, Forbes called it the “fastest growing company ever” after its founders raised $135 million in funding, giving Groupon a valuation of more than $1 billion after just 17 months.5 The company turned down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google and went public in 2011 with one of the biggest IPOs since Google’s in 2004.6 It was one of the original unicorns. However, the business model had serious problems. Groupon sometimes sold so many Daily Deals that participating businesses were overwhelmed . . . even crippled. Other businesses accused Groupon of strong-arming them to sign up for Daily Deals. Customers started to view the group discount (the company’s bread and butter) as a sign that a participating business was desperate. Businesses stopped signing up. Journalists suggested that Groupon was prioritizing customer acquisition over retention — growth over value — and that it had gone public before it had a solid, proven business model.7 Groupon is still a player, with just over $3 billion in annual revenue in 2015. But its stock has fallen from $26 a share to about $4 today, and it has withdrawn from many international markets. Also revealing is that the company is suing IBM for patent infringement, something that will not create customer value.8 Many promising startups have paid the price for rushing to scale. We can see clues to potential future failures in the recent “down rounds” (stock purchases priced at a lower valuation than those of previous investors) hitting companies like Foursquare, Gilt Group, Jet, Jawbone, and Technorati. In their rush to build scale, executives and founders search for shortcuts to sustainable, long-term revenue growth.
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Brian de Haaff (Lovability: How to Build a Business That People Love and Be Happy Doing It)
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80 percent of success is showing up”? The phrase takes on a whole new meaning in the 21st century. If your restaurant just shows up on Google and its search partners when people type in the right phrase, a starving crowd will bust your doors down. They’ll fill every table and flood the kitchen with orders. If they like the daily special and the desserts, they’ll come back and eat again and again. There’s a feast going on—if you show up.
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Perry Marshall (Ultimate Guide to Google Ads)
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At the time of writing, most big recent successes (Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google) were started by people with skin and soul in the game and grew organically—if they had recourse to funding, it was to expand or allow the managers to cash out; funding was not the prime source of creation. You don’t create a firm by creating a firm; nor do you do science by doing science.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (Incerto))
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Data sources All these components give you feedback and insight into how best to configure your campaigns, although the data sources are often spread around in different places and sometimes difficult to find and interpret. Campaign types Search & Partner Dynamic Search Display Network Remarketing & Dynamic Remarketing Google Shopping for eCommerce Google Merchant Center Data feeds Google Shopping Campaigns Device selection PC / Tablets Mobiles & Smartphones Location Targets & Exclusions Country Metro State City Custom and Radius Daily Budgets Manual CPC Enhanced CPC Flexible Bidding strategies Conversion Optimizer (CPA) Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) Conversion Tracking Setup and configuration Transaction-Specific Conversion Tracking Offline Conversion import Phone call tracking - website call conversions Conversion Rates Conversion Costs Conversion Values Ad Groups Default Bids Keyword Themes Ads Ad Messaging & Demographics Creative Text & Formatting Images* Display Ad Builder* Ad Preview and Diagnosis Account, Campaign and Ad Group Ad Extensions Sitelinks Locations Calls Reviews Apps Callouts Ad Rotation & Frequency Capping Rotate Optimise for Clicks Optimise for Conversions Keywords Bids Broad Modified Broad Phrase Exact Destination urls Keyword Diagnosis User Search Queries Keyword Opportunities Negative Keywords & Match Types Shared Library Shared Budgets* Automated Rules Flexible Bid Strategies Audiences & Exclusions* Campaign Negative Keywords Display Campaign Placement Exclusions* NEW! Business Data and Ad Customizers Advanced Delivery Methods Standard Accelerated Impression Share Lost IS (Budget) Lost IS (Rank) Search Funnels Assisted Impressions & Clicks Assisted Conversions Segmentation Analysis Device performance Network performance Top vs Other position performance Dimension Analysis Days & Times Shopping Geographic User Locations & Distance Search Terms Automatic Placements* Call Details (Call Extensions) Tools Change history Keyword Planner* Display Planner* Opportunities* Scheduling & Day Parting Automated Rules Competitor Ad Auction Insights Reporting* AdWords Campaign Experiments* Browser Languages* *indicates an item not covered in this version of the book
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David Rothwell (The Google Ads (AdWords) Bible for eCommerce: How to Sell More Products with Google Ads (The Clicks to Money Series))
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Contrast this with the teams that eventually succeeded in competing with Facebook where Google+ failed. Snap famously grew within the high school segment before breaking out into the mainstream, and the ephemeral photos captured a whole unique set of content that had never been published—casual, unposed photos that were meant for communication. Early on, with fewer than 10,000 daily active users, Snapchat was already hitting 10 photos/day/user, several orders of magnitude more than equivalent services—showing it had mastered the hard side of the network. Twitch, Instagram, and TikTok innovated in a similar vector, giving creators new tools and media types to express themselves.
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Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
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PROVEN PATTERN #1: BITS RATHER THAN ATOMS Google and Facebook are largely software businesses that focus on electronic bits rather than material atoms. Bits-based businesses have a much easier time serving a global market, which in turn makes it easier to achieve a large market size. Bits are also far easier to move around than atoms, so bits-based businesses can more easily tap into distribution techniques like virality, and their ability to be highly networked provides more opportunities to leverage network effects. Bits-based businesses tend to be high-gross-margin businesses because they have fewer variable costs. Bits also make it easier to design around growth limiters. You can iterate more quickly on software products (many Internet companies release new software daily) than on physical products, making it faster and cheaper to achieve product/market fit. And
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Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
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Google was a company that’d made more money off advertisements than any other company in the history of the world, but it had been founded by people who were embarrassed by a business model dependent upon advertising lawn chairs, car insurance, and Viagra.
To deflect the embarrassment, the company cloaked itself in an aura of innovation and some old bullshit about the expansion of human knowledge.
Google maintained this façade by providing web and mobile services to the masses.
The most beloved of these services was the near daily alteration of the company’s logo as it appeared on the company’s website.
Almost every day, the Google logo transformed into cutesy, diminutive cartoons of people who’d done something with their lives other than sell advertisements. These cartoons were called Google Doodles.
They encompassed the whole spectrum of achievement, with a special focus on scientific achievement and the lives of minorities. In its own way, this was a perfect distillation of politics in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Whenever they appeared, the Google Doodles were beloved and celebrated in meaningless little articles on meaningless little websites.
They were not met with the obvious emotion, which would be total fucking outrage at a massive multinational corporation co-opting a wide range of human experience into an advertisement for that very same corporation.
Here was the perversity of Twenty-First-Century AD life: Native-American women had a statistically better chance of being caricatured in a Google Doodle than they did of being hired into a leadership position at Google.
And no one cared.
People were delighted!
They were being honored!
By a corporation!
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Jarett Kobek (Only Americans Burn in Hell)
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a system that serves 2.5M requests in a day with a daily availability target of 99.99% can serve up to 250 errors and still hit its target for that given day.
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Betsy Beyer (Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems)
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Today, on the day I’m writing this introduction, hundreds of millions of people will use these Apple products, and if you count the browsers on Windows and Google Android that use code based on the Safari browser I helped develop, then the number of daily users runs to well over a billion, perhaps it’s closer to two. Yet we never thought about such big numbers. We were too busy focusing on small details.
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Ken Kocienda (Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs)
“
Todo.ly is an online to-do list and task manager. The founders had a goal to reach millions of new users and make Todo.ly widely available as a web application. They succeeded in securing a partnership with Google Chrome and were able to leverage their 200 million user database to help them achieve their one-year growth goal in just three weeks: ● 1000% increase in average daily traffic ● 780% increase in user base ● 400,000 new tasks each month The key was that the Chrome platform was brand new and the Todo.ly application was submitted three to four months prior its launch date. As the Todo.ly app was exactly what Google was looking for to add to the Chrome Webstore, they have contacted the founders and asked for an integrated two clicks login through Google OpenID. Todo.ly has implemented that and became featured from day one. There was a huge marketing campaign around the Chrome Webstore, TV spots, prints, and press conference. Peter Varadi, the founder of Todo.ly, shared his advice based on his personal experience: “Look for new waves of technology, new platforms that are expected to be used by a massive number of people and try to be on that platform as one of first.” In Todo. ly case, it was clearly visible that Chrome had 200 million users already and when they launched their webstore, they would obviously put it front of all their users. Google needed web apps to fill their webstore for the launch and they opened the app submission process a few months earlier. That was a timely opportunity for Todo.ly to jump in. What could be your new wave and chance?
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Donatas Jonikas (Startup Evolution Curve From Idea to Profitable and Scalable Business: Startup Marketing Manual)
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Look, I’m not joking around. Smartphones are dangerous. Not because they may cause stress, anxiety, and even depression, but because they change your behavior. It seems like we can’t focus on one thing for more than 5 seconds. Why? Well, we can’t because our smartphone is constantly going off. Not because people are calling you (it seems like people are afraid of calling these days, but that’s another topic), but because you’re constantly getting notifications about THINGS THAT DON’T MATTER. Change Your Smartphone Behavior The same study I mentioned above also found something else: “Researchers asked participants to perform a concentration test under four different circumstances: with their smartphone in their pocket, at their desk, locked in a drawer and removed from the room completely.” The results are significant — test results were lowest when the smartphone was on the desk, but with every additional layer of distance between participants and their smartphones, test performance increased. Overall, test results were 26% higher when phones were removed from the room.” Sure, it’s just a study. And you don’t have to believe everything you read. But this is something I can personally attest. For the past two years, I’ve significantly changed my smartphone behavior. Namely: I have turned off ALL my notifications except messages and calls I’ve removed myself from all Whatsapp groups except for one with my closest friends I’ve removed all news apps (if something important happens, you’ll hear it from the people around you) I only consume music, paid journalism, articles from specific authors I follow, podcasts, YouTube videos (mostly to learn, but also for entertainment because I’m not a robot), books, and audiobooks on it For the rest, I use my phone to call, text, and to take notes, photos and videos Also, I’ve stopped immediately responding to notifications. That doesn’t mean I don’t value other people who try to reach me. It means that I refuse to be a slave to my phone. I control my phone. For most of us, it’s the other way around. In the past, Facebook, Instagram, Apple, Google, etc, all controlled my mind. Obviously, they still do because the only way to escape those idiots is to cut yourself off and run to the woods. That’s not realistic. I like my phone. But I don’t need it. The results have been great since I started using my smartphone in the above way. During the past two years, I got more things done than ever. And, I still have time to work out daily, hang out with my friends, have dinner with my family, and
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Darius Foroux (Do It Today: Overcome Procrastination, Improve Productivity, and Achieve More Meaningful Things)
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Ad-based growth teams should be optimizing pricing in a similarly fluid way. The largest advertising platforms, such as Google and Facebook, use an auction model to set the value of their ad inventory, which essentially means that when advertisers want to place an ad they set a bid price for what they’re willing to pay, then the site gives the ad space to the highest bidder (this is a dramatic oversimplification; the auction processes are dauntingly complex). When that bidder’s budget is exhausted, often by hitting a daily cap or other restriction, the next highest bidder is given the inventory, and so on, until all available inventory is used. These companies also use elements such as ad quality and customer response to factor into which
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Sean Ellis (Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success)
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I also pepper our sessions with reports of what I’ve discovered in my daily Google-stalking: the women Boyfriend must be dating (based on elaborate stories I create from social media Likes); how fabulous his life is without me (based on his Tweets about his business trip); how he isn’t even sad about the breakup (because he photographs salads in restaurants—how can he even eat?).
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Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed)
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When bored, many people seek excitement and turn to dramatic news headlines. When we feel overly stressed we seek calm, perhaps finding relief in sites like Pinterest. When we feel lonely, destinations like Facebook and Twitter provide instant social connections. To ameliorate the sensation of uncertainty, Google is just a click away. Email, perhaps the mother of all habit-forming technology, is a go-to solution for many of our daily agitations, from validating our importance (or even, simply our existence) by checking to see if someone needs us, to providing an escape from life's more mundane moments.
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Nir Eyal (Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products)
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When you have daily meetings, you spend less time in each meeting rehashing things that were discussed at the previous meeting, since everyone’s memory is still fresh.
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Eric Schmidt (How Google Works)