Hungry unicorns, activist interfaces, deaf sound artists, &c
The past month or so has been all doom and gloom if you read the trendy startup news. Sam Lessin (disclosure: friend and advisor to Beme) has declared that Uber owns transportation, Facebook owns attention, Google owns information, and the rest of us are screwed. Top VCs are recommending we prepare to grow potatoes in our own feces, that’s how much investment is going to dry up!
Is the flow of unicorn gravy slowing down? Yes, but that had to happen. Great products will still break through, though fewer will be ones that need their own networks. I’m also selfishly bullish on video: With 5.5 hours of daily TV still the American average, there’s more than enough room for startups. (Returns to putting head down on the next release of Beme.)
And please, let me know what you think of this first link-and-brain dump. Love it? Hate it? Things you’d like to see more or less of? Please drop me a line.
Macro
12 apps with a billion users - Om Malik
There are a dozen tech platforms as large as the Catholic religion, which has been building for a couple millennia. Android got there in 5.8 years. Will we soon see platforms or apps or ideas or celebrities grow to 1 billion in a matter of weeks?
Audio: Facebook built the bridge, crossed it, then set it on fire
Jason Goldman & Ian Ownbey, early Twitterers, irreverently explain how Facebook came to dominate the market for attention and leave smaller players begging for scraps.
Micro
Too Sensitive — Sara Ann Marie
A healthy reminder that interfaces are pretty much all designed for straight white men, something that needs to change.
A Mobile App for Safer Streets: Speed Camera
Activist app concept by my friend Travis Eby. Speed Camera aims to make streets safer by letting anyone with a smartphone record and measure traffic speeds, and share them with elected officials.
Self-promotion
Portal 2 Taught Me Everything I Know About Onboarding
The team has been revamping everything about onboarding in the Beme app. We botched things royally the first time around, so I dissected one of the greatest onboardings of all time for tips and principles.
Inspiration
Christine Sun Kim: How We Listen Determines What We Hear
Sound artist/educator/badass who is herself pre-lingually deaf. Did the radio piece in Greater New York, if you saw it.
Diversion
Animated, episodic, semi-interactive VR story. Think episodic could be really fruitful for VR, if only to give people reason to dust off their headsets from time to time.
Long read
Critique of Violence - Walter Benjamin [PDF, sorry]
Inspired the title of this newsletter, so I am including here in the first edition. If you’ve ever heard someone (like say, Ta-Nehisi Coates) use violence to mean not bodily harm but a broader kind of power, the roots of that thinking are in this essay.
Benjamin makes a haunting argument that violence is foundational and inextricable from the state and its law. It is a dense but extraordinarily rewarding read, doubly relevant in the time of Drumpf.
By Matt Hackett
I'm an entrepreneur and engineer, currently in exploration mode. Subscribe to follow along.
This newsletter is for people who, like me, believe making mass technology and serious critique are not mutually exclusive. Product design, philosophy, management, book and app recommends, queer art, etc.
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