March, 2016 | Furthr

Africa’s largest phone company is in trouble

March 31, 2016

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Nike, Adidas and Under Armour are now repositioning themselves as fitness technology companies in a play-off to the death

March 31, 2016

Jeans are dead. Well, not dead exactly, but their popularity has now been eclipsed by active wear.

(That’s tracksuits and the like to you and me.)

Yes, indeed, Athleisure sales are booming. Nike and Adidas lead globally, but Under Armour’s rocketing US sales are beating Adidas’s turnover in the US.

( Under Armour grew by 30.5% last year, compared to Nike’s 11% growth and Adidas’s 4.9% growth.)

Meanwhile, Boston-based Under Armour’s E commerce sales are at 10%, whilst Nike’s and Adidas make up just 3% of their overall sales.

But all that is changing. The Big Three are jostling for position as the leading fitness technology company.

Under Armour started this arms race. They spent $700m buying Apps MapMy Fitness, My Fitness Pal and EndoMondo, then smoothed them together under the banner Record Platform. It’s a top 30 health and fitness app in the US.

In March this year Nike followed suit, by announcing plans to consolidate its most popular apps and throw in some functionality like in-app commerce.

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The secret of UConn’s success: focus, attention to detail, unselfishness

March 31, 2016

The undefeated University of Connecticut women’s basketball team cruised into the Final Four last week with a 21-point win over Texas.

The game, played days after a 60-point thrashing of Mississippi State, was by far their closest in this year’s NCAA tournament.

With the win, UConn advances to face Oregon State in this weekend’s Final Four, their ninth consecutive appearance, where they will play for a trip to the NCAA championship game for the fourth year in a row.

This type of dominance is almost unheard of in sports. And earlier this week, sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy suggested in a tweet that UConn’s dominance is bad for women’s college basketball.

What’s UConn’s magic formula? A few key threads consistent across all of the program’s successful seasons: focus, attention to detail, and unselfishness.

Mindfulness practitioners will realize that they are also cornerstones of meditation practice, leading people to fuller and more enriching lives.

A large body of research shows that meditation changes brain functioning in ways that improve focus, sharpen attention to detail, and promote empathy and altruism.

By enhancing these traits and deepening their spiritual lives, more and more meditators are quietly having their own unheard-of successes.

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Facebook continues to eat the world: now with live streaming

March 31, 2016

Media companies are swooning over the possibilities of posting live video to Facebook, a feature made widely available two months ago.

For years, companies have searched for ways to unlock three tough questions: How do you attract people to live online videos? How do you reach people on their mobile devices? And how do you get more out of Facebook’s 1.6 billion users, says The New York Times.

Live streaming could be the answer.

The feature, called Facebook Live, has largely lived under the radar so far. But it is one of the company’s highest-priority projects and a pet project of Mark Zuckerberg’s.

Facebook plans to announce a suite of new features and partners in early April and at F8, Facebook’s developer conference in San Francisco later in the month.

The Huffington Post has tested live video across many of its 79 Facebook pages, with broadcasts from the campaign trail, celebrity interviews and live music events.

But will it make money for media companies? Companies that spent much of last year producing original video for their Facebook pages have yet to see significant revenue, despite assurances from the company.

But one benefit is clear: Live broadcasts display higher in users’ feeds — a prioritization Facebook has acknowledged publicly. That’s good news for companies whose posts are lost in many users’ news feeds.

Facebook’s ability to convene large audiences will help Live compete with Twitter’s Periscope, an app that helped popularize mobile live streaming last year.

YouTube, the largest online video site, is in the early stages of making its own mobile live video app.

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Social media = chaos theory, says new book

March 30, 2016

Social media is making politics and collective action more “chaotic”, argues a new book called “Political Turbulence”.

It’s a fascinating theory and it runs like this.

Social media success does not depend on the subject matter—similar posts often fare quite differently—but the personality of potential participants, says The Economist.

Extroverts are more likely to get involved with petitions because they are sensitive to “social information”: seeing that others have already signed and knowing that their endorsement will be seen too.

As a result, if a petition’s initial audience includes enough people with the right mindset, it can quickly take off.

Politics in the age of social media is thus better understood by chaos theory than by conventional social science.

Collective action online is a bit like the weather: small events can have a big impact.

The authors see the emergence of a “chaotic pluralism”, in which mobilisations spring from the bottom up.

One day, say the authors, it will be possible to predict, and perhaps even trigger such social-media surges.

Who has access to data and the resources to sift through it all? Online giants, such as Facebook and Google, and governments.

So social media, like other forms of technology, will cut both ways in politics: they are making societies more democratic, but will also provide those in power with new tools of control.

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This developer has Airbnb-hopped for the last three years

March 30, 2016

A developer who has Airbnb-hopped for the last three years. “He sets a monthly budget of roughly $1,400 to $1,500 for the Bay Area… the median rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in San Francisco was $3,500, the highest in the country, according to apartment-listing site Zumper.” Read more.

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Spotify just launched in Indonesia, the new battleground for streaming music

March 30, 2016

Spotify launched in Indonesia. The world’s fourth most-populous country is a new battleground for streaming music, with Spotify and Apple Music facing off against several local services. The company is reportedly also looking at entering Japan and India.

2015 was a milestone year for streaming music in the US.

For the first time, streaming was the largest component of music industry revenues, comprising 34.3% of the market, just slightly higher than digital downloads.

Overall, music biz revenues in 2015 were up 0.9% to $7.0 billion.

Flat, in other words. So let’s try Indonesia! Yay!

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