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    What hardly anyone’s spending on is pollution—even though it’s the most lethal force on the planet, killing nearly 8.9 million people in 2012, the last year for which there was data.
    Did you know?

    Some politicians seem to act as if “terrorism” means a terrible crime committed by someone who doesn’t fit the speaker’s own racial & religious profile. Just because something induces terror in some or many people, that doesn’t make it terrorism. That diminishes the concept as well as grouping routine crime – for which society has millennia of experience and solutions – into the same bucket as a more subtle and serious phenomenon that preys on the meshed society.

    Terrorism isn’t just performing a terrifying act. It’s provoking society’s immune system into attacking itself, making its defence systems attack the values and people they are supposed to be defending. Terrorism is an autoimmune disorder of democracy. You don’t fight terrorism by attacking the virus; you fight it by strengthening the immune system.

    Uber was founded in 2009, in the immediate aftermath of the worst financial crisis in a generation. As the ride-sharing app has risen, so too have income disparity and wealth inequality in the United States as a whole and in San Francisco in particular

    Leo Mirani, arguing for Quartz that Uber’s success lies in wealth inequality. He talks about his youth in Mumbai where he could have a single can of coke delivered to his doorstep, long before Uber for X startups existed.

    The same is true for many poor countries, including Lebanon.

    For the entrepreneur, stop obsessing about your MVP. Your first question, before HOW and WHAT, has to be “FOR WHOM?”
    The intellectual reason we build a case, or give context, to a difficult decision before announcing it is because we want to convey that the decision is well-thought out, rational, and an inevitable conclusion to the facts. But since the listeners don’t know what decision is being made, they have no context for the context and it all feels meaningless.
    HBR with how to start a conversation you’re dreading. The advice is to start with the punchline. Don’t procrastinate.
    my friend found a table with a chess board on it and sat down
    and noticed bob dylan leaning against the rail and looking at the water.
    at first nobody noticed him but eventually he started to get surrounded.
    my friend got up and walked right up to him and said
    “bob we got the chess board you wanted”
    and bob saw his chance and took it. my buddy got to play silent chess with him
    the whole trip and as long as bob seemed engaged people seemed to
    leave him alone.
    A collection of stories from Todd Snider about people (randomly) meeting Bob Dylan.
    Remember, the three key things about an intuitive navigation system is that they tell you where you are, and they show you where else you can go. Hamburger menus are terrible at both of those things, because the menu is not on the screen. It’s not visible. Only the button to display the menu is.
    And in practice, talking to developers, they found this out themselves. That people who use their app don’t switch to different sections very frequently when they use this menu. And the reason for that is because the people who use their app don’t know where else they can go. Right? They don’t know because they can’t see the options, or maybe they saw it at one point in time, but they have since forgotten.
    And if you use this control, you have to recognize that the people who use your app may not realize the full potential of your app.
    Apple’s advice to designers: don’t use the Hambuger menu. The rest of the article is worth the read, it’s a transcript from the WWDC Designing Intuitive User Experiences session.
    The app links up with the Rotten Tomatoes API, and at the moment its algorithms make suggestions based on film titles you input. You could also use actors, directors, genres and other parameters.
    Movie Night, an app developed at TC Disrupt hackathon enables you and your friends to collaboratively decide on a movie to watch. You know, in order to avoid the endless debate. Does it work in real life scenarios I don’t know. But I sure would like to give it a try.
    White privilege is the right of whites, and only whites, to be judged as individuals, to be treated as a unique self, possessed of all the rights and protections of citizenship. I am not a race, I am the unmarked subject. I am simply man, whereas you might be a black man, an asian woman, a disabled native man, a homosexual latina woman, and on and on the qualifiers of identification go.
    Brilliant piece which cleverly sums up the issue.
    The app clocks the time guests spend in the restaurant and uses a ranking system to reward them for their loyalty
    On the verge of the iBeacons revolution.
    Imagine the popular transit planner Citymapper fused to a cycle hire service and a taxi app such as Uber, with only one payment required, and the whole thing run as a public utility, and you begin to understand the scale of ambition here
    How Helsinki will make automobiles obsolete. Cool stuff!
    Are we all doing the illustrations for the Twitter pics now or are we back to real headshots?
    Funny stuff by startup anonymous.
    Product-market fit is best measured by observing how customers react to your product. Better yet, observe them interact with your product. You know you’ve achieved product-market fit when the customers intuitively understand what need the product fills for them, and they have no trouble using it, in fact they enjoy using it… in fact they start telling their friends about it, maybe even telling the world about it on Twitter or other places. That’s how you know if you’ve got product-market fit.
    A founder’s notebook is the best blog of all time.
    In the future, he believes every device will conform to your identity the moment they are unboxed.
    Soleio giving an interview to First Round Review. Makes me think of No Man’s Sky, this game where everyone has a different starting universe. Interesting comments altogether.
    There’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product
    Steve Jobs back in 1995.
    During a dim sum lunch with staff, someone asked Koum why he wasn’t crowing to the press about it. “Marketing and press kicks up dust,” Koum replied. “It gets in your eye, and then you’re not focusing on the product.”
    How Whatsapp was born, a very interesting read.
    Twitter is fantastic in broadcast mode, but terrible in consumption mode.

    Spot on analysis by Frédéric Filloux for the Monday Note. Twitter is great because broadcasters (heavy users) say so. But it’s still unfathomable for non-heavy users and those with very little following, like myself.

    Twitter announced good numbers last week but it is failing in user growth. With a new interface, which could spawn a new approach to the product, Twitter can get its growth mojo back.

    So Twitter product designers, solve this problem.

    I look at myself as an artist if anything,” Mr. Jobs said. “Sort of a trapeze artist.

    In 1983, Steven Levy interviewed Steve Jobs for hours about his recent breakup and the birth of the Mac.

    At some point, Levy asked Jobs what he saw himself as. To which Jobs replied “Sort of a trapeze artist”.

    It’s funny that no one noticed this is the exact one liner Bob Dylan used while interviewed in Austin in 1966:

    Reporter: What do you consider yourself? How would you classify yourself?

    Bob Dylan: Well, I like to think of myself in terms of a trapeze artist.

    Now, now, Steve, everyone is going to call you a thief again. 

    Specialization might give you a temporary boost in productivity, but it comes at the expense of overall functional cohesion and shared ownership. If only Jeff can fiddle with the billing system, any change to the billing system is bottlenecked on Jeff, and who’s going to review his work on a big change?
    David from 37signals shares some interesting thoughts on specialization in a startup. Everyone needs to do (at least a little bit of) everything.
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