Four short links: 14 May 2018
Ridesharing Suburbia, Dunbar's Number, Event Sourcing, and Product Failures
- Uber and Lyft Change Where People Live (Business Insider) — Today, in our Uber-tech world, I [can be] in the back of a car with my iPhone, and I’m not losing out on anything. That has changed [commutes] dramatically. Your commute time is not lost productivity. When public transportation doesn’t serve your suburb well, there’s always Lyft.
- Are My Friends Really My Friends? (NY Times) — One may presume that boasting thousands of social media friends or followers would inflate Dunbar’s number, but Dr. Dunbar said that is “absolutely not at all” the case. In a recent paper analyzing Facebook and Twitter data, and another one looking at mobile phone calls, his team determined that people still “showed the same frequencies of interaction as in face-to-face relationships” for the corresponding layers of intimacy, he said.
- Kickstarter’s Simple Event Sourcing — the four components of a minimal event sourcing system: Events to provide a history; Aggregates to represent the current state of the application; Calculator to update the state of the application; Reactors to trigger side effects as events happen.
- Product Failures — 116 of them, briefly named. Many in FMCG, but plenty enough in tech. I’m struck by how many of the tech products were just too early, rather than Just Plain Bad ideas like Cocaine, Redux Beverages (2007). Pulled from shelves in 2007 for marketing itself as an alternative to illegal street drugs, this over-the-top energy drink has 2.5 times the caffeine of Red Bull.
