Rishi Taparia - Issue #97
This week we explore the upcoming Amazon Prime Day, Google Translate getting one step closer towards becoming the universal translator, the end of climate predictability, how The Lion King script should have been written, why Wakanda may actually live forever and more. Enjoy!
Commerce and Fintech
Amazon Prime Day Starts Monday And Is Shaping up To Be a Payments Bonanza
Amazon Prime Day kicks off on Monday July 15th and this year is expected to be the online shopping event of the year, with $5.8bn in projected sales across the two days, over 60% of which are likely to be US based. Now, while Prime Day pales in comparison to Alibaba’s Singles Day (which last year did a staggering $25.6bn in sales!) it still marks an estimated 50% increase over last year’s sales. Taking place in 18 countries, I’d say it’s time to get your Prime on and see if you can snag yourself a deal!
Lululemon just opened a sprawling, 20,000-square-foot store in Chicago with workout classes and a restaurant — here's what it looks like
Retailers nationwide have been shutting down stores, with 20% more closures to year date than the entirety of 2018, and no signs of slowing own. That said, not everyone is shying away from physical space. This week Lululemon opened its biggest store ever, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago (Chicago, by the way, is on the up an up - amazing stuff happening in that city!) And for those of you wondering what the heck you’d do in an apparel store that measures the size of 4 basketball courts put together, well, Lululemon has the answer.
It includes a restaurant serving smoothies, salads, burgers and beer, workout studios, meditation space and one-of-a-kind merchandise inside.
Talk about next generation ‘retail’. Oh, and the company also announced this week this would be the first of many such locations so keep your eyes peeled for a Lululemon gym/store/restaurant/wellness center near you!
WhatsApp Pay is ready to launch in India
WhatsApp has been attempting to enter India with a payments product for over a year, shoring up the talent and building the relevant infrastructure. Last year the Indian government placed (overly, in my view) burdensome restrictions and requirements on payments companies operating in country. WhatsApp has now finally created the necessary data storage facilities in India to introduce WhatsApp Pay to the chat app’s entire Indian user base. Easier said than done, but given the time they have had to plan, expect nothing less than a full court customer acquisition press when they go live later this summer.
Technology
A hospital introduced a robot to help nurses. They didn’t expect it to be so popular
There’s a massive nurse shortage in the country. Moxi is a robot designed by Austin-based Diligent Robotics to make nurses’ lives easier. Implemented at hospitals around the country, the robot “isn’t trying to act like a nurse…[instead] designed to run the approximately 30% of tasks nurses do that don’t involve interacting with patients, like running errands around the floor or dropping off specimens for analysis at a lab”, in a great example of robot supported work. The interesting thing has been how the friendly bot is turning out to be a welcome presence for some patients, too. A lot of tremendous design learnings in this piece, including how valuable seemingly superfluous, small gestures can be toward user satisfaction.
Google Translate’s camera can now automatically detect languages
The universal translator from Star Trek is one of those technologies that, with a magic wand, would create. The ability to communicate with an individual in a language they are comfortable with illuminates so many nuances about culture, background, and personality that simply don’t come across with a simply rudimentary understanding of language. This week Google Translate’s camera and computer vision today got support for 60 new languages and automatic language detection capabilities. If you haven’t tried it you should. It might not be a universal translator, but it’s pretty amazing, and the only magic wand you need is your phone.
Amazon plans nationwide broadband—with both home and mobile service
Dominating Earth isn’t enough for Amazon. The company now wants to own the skies. Amazon is looking to roll out satellite based, national broadband service across the country over the next six years, offering both home and mobile service to customers.
Climate and Energy
This Summer's Weird Weather Is the Death of Predictability
This summer the world is experiencing the most abnormal weather ever recorded, from “hottest June in Europe since people started keeping track” to the Mississippi River in the midwestern United States is still dealing with floods on a scale unseen since the catastrophic levels of 1993.” Generally, when faced with adverse conditions we adapt, adjusting to life in the new normal. As Adam Rogers points out in this Wired piece, “if you’re looking for a new normal, you’re not going to find it. There isn’t one. And that’s going to be the hardest part about life on a climate-changed world.” We usually look historically to understand how often something is going to happen in the future. However, given the drastically shifting nature of the world’s weather due to climate change, “scientists who study emerging infectious diseases, crop survival, air pollution, sea level rise, and extreme heat all warn that past performance may no longer be indicative of future results”. Old approaches just won’t work.
Ford-VW alliance expands to include autonomous and electric vehicles
It’s a speed race in the EV space, with partnerships being formed all across the industry in the hopes of lowering costs and accelerating innovation in the market. Frenemies Ford and Volkswagen are growing closer. In a widely anticipated move, Ford and Volkswagen announced Friday their plan to expand their seven-month-old alliance to include autonomous and electric vehicles. As part of the deal, VW will invest a whopping $2.6bn in Argo AI, the autonomous vehicle startup based in Pittsburgh that Ford invested $1bn into in 2017. Volkswagen is betting big on its MEB platform, which will serve as the basis for the 15 million electric cars it hopes to eventually sell. Ford has said it plans to spend $11.5 billion on electric car development and production over the next few years, including bringing an EV to Europe in the next few years.
It’s New York vs. California in a New Climate Race. Who Will Win?
Two states on opposite ends of the country are competing to see who can get to net-zero emissions, both aiming to do so over the next three decades. Both major economies (even on a global scale), in doing so California and New York would accomplish something no other economy in the world has achieved. While the goal is the same, the approach being taken by both states is quite different. Both can serve as models for other states and countries around the world.
Random Tidbits
Where’s Simba’s mom? In real life, female lions run the pride.
With the live-action remake of Disney’s famed Lion King hitting theaters this week this piece on how the movie script really should have been written is awesome and hilariously written. First off, the movie should be called The Lion Queen and Nala and Sarabi should be the focus. Mufasa and Scar wouldn’t fight, and in fact would be really close, with Mufasa (as the alpha) would actually be the one with the black mane. Simba wouldn’t have come back to Pride Rock and instead, when Nala was old enough Sarabi would carve out land for her to rule over. Amazing!
On a totally separate note - critics are split on the remake, but having not seen it I simply don’t understand why it’s called ‘live-action’ when the thing is all CGI but that’s just me…
In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything
Those who work behind the scenes are often the ones who know the most about us. In this excerpt from New Yorker writer Peter Hessler’s latest book on the Arab Spring, the author writes about his stay in Cairo and “the lives of a neighborhood, seen through the trash” by the garbage collector Sayyid. A great long read.
Sayyid functioned as a kind of neighborhood lost and found. Whenever somebody moved or died, it was understood that the objects in the trash belonged to Sayyid, but otherwise he double-checked with residents if he turned up something suspiciously valuable. He alerted people if something seemed amiss in the neighborhood, and he was a reliable source of local information.
Newly-Discovered 'Vibranium' Fish Named in Honor of Wakanda
Wakanda forever! Or at least in the biology books. A new fish, discovered off the coast of Zanzibar, with a bright purple hue has been dubbed Cirrhilabrus wakanda, the Vibranium fairy wrasse.
Game of Thrones-themed tourism is coming - Shame! Shame! Shame!
Yearning for some more Game of Thrones? Well, now you can live your best, south-of-the-wall self. All you have to do? Head to Dubrovnik, Croatia, aka King’s Landing. The main location for filming, you’ll be able to recreate your favorite scenes no problem - just don’t hold your breath on the dragons.
Quote I’ve been thinking about: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither new victory nor defeat.” - Theodore Roosevelt