Email is basically LL Cool J
Yesterday Hubspot announced it will acquire The Hustle, hot on the heels of Twitter acquiring Revue - Email is making a comeback. Not really surprising given that it's probably still the best way to communicate 1:1 with your customers. Email gives you the opportunity to communicate on a massive canvas, in a time where people are spending more time out of their traditional inbox (either on Slack, Zoom, Miro, Google Docs etc). Email ISPs have focussed on and improved filtering so much that there's less noise in those inboxes when they are interacted with - so if you're doing a great job of producing and maintaining quality content. That's easier said than done and one of the main reasons email marketing gets a bad rep, no I don't want to download that whitepaper or read your latest pr puff piece...I think this is one of the most interesting spaces to watch in the coming year. The rise of Substack in the last 18months has been further evidence that people not only still want great content delivered to their inbox but are willing to pay for it, with 250,000 paying subscribers and the top 10 publishers earning $10m. If I could have a Substack subscription that would combine all of my paid subs, that would be great and be a pretty decent B2B product. Just saying.
“When I told her that I was working on the Dyatlov mystery, for the first time my wife looked at me with real respect,”
I'd never read about the Dyatlov Pass mystery but I did see this meme on Twitter and so I wanted to know what it was about.
Turns out the Dyatlov Pass is one of the great mysteries of our time and has been the focus of a ton of conspiracy theories over the years from Soviet military experiments, to Yetis and even extraterrestrial contact. Turns out surprisingly it wasn't any of those things.
The mystery was essentially that nine Russian hikers died in the northern Ural Mountains 62 years ago, in uncertain circumstances. The group of experienced trekkers, had made camp on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl, in an area now named in honour of the group's leader, Igor Dyatlov. During the night, something caused them to cut their way out of their tent and flee the campsite while barely dressed for the heavy snowfall and freezing temperatures. The bodies were discovered all over the place, with a variety of causes of death and injuries sustained - cracked skulls, missing eyes, tongues and eyebrows.
Some strong meme action when news broke about the Dyatlov pass mystery being solved
Enter Johan Gaume, head of the Snow Avalanche Simulation Laboratory at EPFL (the job we've all been dreaming of) who was determined to solve this 60 year old mystery. Whilst watching the Disney film Frozen in 2013 Gaume was struck by the accuracy with which the snow fell - so he went and met the team responsible, asked to borrow their code and then used this to model simulations. They could model the snow but what about the impact it would have on humans? Well for that the used some data GM had put together in the 1970's - taking cadavers, breaking their ribs by hurling weights at different velocities at them. GM had run the experiment to calibrate seatbelt safety but Gaume was able to use it to help his model demonstrate that an avalanche had been the cause of the Dyatlov Pass mystery.
Tech giants just want us to be healthy...
Example of Styku body scan technology could be available for everyone soon.
Yesterday Google announced that it had developed a series of features that would allow users of the Google Pixel phone to monitor vital health stats using just the camera of their smart phone.
Typically taking these kind of measurements has taken expensive, specialised equipment. Advancements in computer vision and the improvements in phone cameras mean that these measurements are now available to everyone. So you can now monitor your respiratory rate and heart rate.
It's clear that tech giants are very much interested in health data - Apple has dedicated more and more resource to this over the years - both Google and Apple have dedicated health teams working to improve their technology.
Another exciting possible use case for smartphone cameras will be measuring body composition - currently the options for this are limited. At one end of the spectrum are BMI, Tanita scales or calipers to measure bodyfat % or at the other end are DEXA machines or Styku cameras.
But developments in camera technology and volume of accessible data mean that it could soon be possible to get accurate body fat % measurements and muscular composition by taking a couple of photos of ourselves in our pants. The potential use cases for this type of technology are wide ranging - from elite sports people, to gym users and even creating custom real life gaming avatars based on ourselves.
And the rest...
A great long form article in the Atlantic about how the pandemic has wiped out entire categories of friends
Google threatens to AUXIT from Australia if plans to compel them and others to pay publishers for showing news stories in its SERPs
Taboola are set to go public, raising $545m through a SPAC - valuing the business at $2.6bn (you can also find their pitchdeck online)
The aptly named Extraordinary meeting of the Handforth Parish council Planning and Environment Committee is truly a masterpiece of modern cinema.
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