Rishi Taparia - Issue #96
This week we explore restaurants attracting parents with special babysitting for their kids, 7/11’s payment struggles, Jony Ive’s decision to leave Apple, power companies paying customers for their energy, servants without masters, the USWNT gold medal and more. Enjoy!
Commerce and FinTech
Fancy Restaurants Offer Fancy Babysitting to Attract Fancy Families
Restaurants are catching on to the needs of parents (and as dad to a now mobile 10 month old, I am thrilled). Granted, I’m not trying to go to places as upscale as the restaurants described here where while Mom and Dad eat, the kiddos take Watergate tours, manners classes and feed turtles so parents can eat in peace. Honestly, what I’d really love is for movie theaters to have some kind of childcare…my wife and I haven’t gone to the movies in over 10 months because paying $125+ to go to the movies including the cost of the sitter doesn’t make sense. I just want to know what happens in the Avengers!
Sources: J.P. Morgan working on a secretive digital banking project based out of London
Finally, an AWS for banking? A number of incumbent banks are known to be developing new digital-first products in a bid to keep the new wave of challenger banks at bay. Now, according to multiple sources, it appears J.P. Morgan is doing the same. The bank has begun recruiting for a secretive skunkworks project in London, looking to hire full time employees who are sworn to secrecy by NDA to build something that could be a competitor to Goldman’s Marcus or the AWS like infrastructure of financial services. We’ll have to wait and see.
7-Eleven Japan shut down its mobile payment app after hackers stole $500,000 from users
This product launch definitely has a few postmortem reviews coming. On Monday, 7-Eleven Japan launched a payments feature in its mobile app that allowed users to scan QR codes or barcodes from within the app and immediately pay for the item. On Thursday it suspended the feature. Why? Hackers stole $500k after exploiting a flaw that allowed third parties to make bogus charges on hundreds of customer accounts.
Sapphire Reserve Strains JPMorgan’s Ties With United Airlines
Chase’s Sapphire Reserve card was a hit with consumers since it launched three years ago, with its terrific rewards and metallic heft. The problem? That customer is also the target of airlines looking to push their own credit cards. A big airline that has a partnership with Chase? United, which wants those same customers to sign up for and spend on the airline’s credit cards. According to this article, “United executives have told JPMorgan they believe the Sapphire Reserve card is competing directly with the airline’s cards and siphoning off customer spending, according to people familiar with the matter.” Why is this a problem? Because over the next five years half of airlines’ cash earnings will come from the sale of miles to card issuers and frequent fliers. Channel conflict anyone?
Technology
Apple Design Chief Jony Ive to Depart, Ushering in New Era
The Jony Ive era at Apple has come to an end. The departure of the company’s ingenious chief design officer leaves Tim Cook as the last man standing from the triad of design, creative genius and operations. Ive will leave this later year to form an independent design company. It’s first client? Apple.
What Happens After Amazon’s Domination Is Complete? Its Bookstore Offers Clues
“Being a tech monopoly means you don’t have to care about quality.” Popular novels, technical tomes, summaries describing the original and self-published books are pirated and sold on Amazon. That may actually be helping the company extend its grip on the book business as the company “assumes that everyone on its platform operates in good faith until proven otherwise.” This is a great piece on the consequences of no policing on the world’s largest marketplace.
Climate and Energy
Power Companies Want to Tap the Tesla Batteries in Your Home
Power companies are being forced to adjust to a new world where consumers are taking control of their energy generation and consumption, installing solar panels on their roofs and batteries in their homes. These utilities seem to have found a new way to pay their customers - tap electricity from their power-storage systems. National Grid has enrolled 40 customers who have installed batteries in their homes in a new program, allowing the company to use the customers’ stored energy during times to peak load in order to offset the utilities’ generation costs. National Grid is targeting 280 customers across the two states by early next month.
Why the Polar Bear Is an Indisputable Image of Climate Change
Michele Moses writes about the response to an image of a starving polar bear in Norilsk, Siberia, and what it says about our moral reckoning with climate change and other forms of environmental damage.
The presence of an animal that we are accustomed to seeing in pristine natural beauty makes the whole setting seem even bleaker and more corrosive. Yet to see a line of cars stop to observe a creature whose habitat their emissions are destroying is like an instance of restorative justice—the culprit and victim encounter each other face to face. It provides a rare opportunity for us to confront the far-reaching moral consequences of our seemingly benign actions, like driving.
The Gregor Letter
Gregor Macdonald is a freelance journalist who covers cities, climate, and energy. Gregor is the author of the recently released Oil Fall: How Wind and Solar Will Jalbreak the Powergrid, and Find Their Way into Global Transportation. His Gregor Letter is a must subscribe, full of tremendous analysis and predictions - I strongly recommend.
Random Tidbits
Servants Without Masters
Having grown up in Indonesia, I found this piece fascinating. The author writes of his (common) experience as an American in Singapore encountering his host’s family maid. The author goes on to (rightfully) recognize that in the US they have “blithely accepted the service of servants” when “framed as business transactions with dehumanized service workers.” A terrific writing, he articulately declares “what individualism has bought us is not the end of servitude, but merely the cloaking of masters…a sort of inverse Confucianism – a system where authority can only be exercised by people who deliberately do not engage in one-on-one superior-inferior relationships.”
Hundreds of aftershocks follow Ridgecrest earthquake, California's strongest in 20 years
Southern California suffered a massive earthquake this week, the strongest of them registering at 7.1 on the Richter scale. The Fourth of July California earthquake was followed by hundreds of aftershocks rumbling near Ridgecrest, the epicenter for the magnitude 6.4 quake that struck first.
USWNT vs. Netherlands score: USA soccer captures back-to-back Women's World Cup titles as Megan Rapinoe scores again
A major congratulations to the US Women’s Soccer team who won the World Cup final today in a terrific game against the Netherlands. It’s a record fourth title and second in a row for the American team that should go be recognizable as one of the all time great teams in sports.
Quote I’m thinking about: “Those who stand for nothing fall for everything.” - Alexander Hamilton