Zag To The Zig #34 :: Amsterdam Doughnut, Apple Glasses & Dark tracking/hacking
In the Tech Basement this week
This could as well go in the Ethics Corridor or the Economy Room, but Chinese messaging-cum-payment app WeChat is launching a credit rating score for its 600 million users. There are quite a lot of levels to this story, but the one that sticks out for me is the correlation between what you say and how (financially) trustworthy you are.
👀 On the flipside (?), this might be quite something. Facebook is rolling out a way to flag chat messages as potentially harmful (scams,…) without having to access the encrypted content of the message.
So glasses after all? Apple is apparently getting ready to launch a set of AR-enabled set of shades.
And, a-typical for ZTTZ, but I wanted to give a big shoutout to 2 Belgian companies, making their mark in the crypto-space. First one is the wallet-app Argent, which I was using without realising it was made by compatriots. They’re getting good kudos from the community on integrating all these DiFi apps. Some people call it crypto’s breakthrough Netscape moment.
And then there’s the long-awaited release of a new hardware wallet called NGrave. The difference with existing products like Ledger is that it can actually function without having to connect to the internet, thus making it even more safe. They call it ‘The Coldest Wallet’. ☃️☃️
Their IndieGogo campaign launches today (Tuesday) and the first 300 backers get the product at half price.
#goebezig
In the Ethics Corridor
I was really intrigued by the novel-like story of Marcus Hutchins, the young hacker who single-handedly stopped the WannaCry virus, but had a dark past. 🕶️🕶️
🍩🍩 Missed this, but wanted to flag this nevertheless. The city council of Amsterdam is formally adopting Kate Raworth’s alternative Doughnut Economy model to benchmark its decision-making (in-depth version on Raworth’s own website).
In the Office
Now a lot of us are defaulting to remote work, there’s -surprise surprise- an increase in employee tracking software. Managers = control. So good to see project management Basecamp telling those apps to get lost (and not connect to their API).
Even better, when Facebook announced they are looking to allow 50% of their employees work from home all the time, CJ Colclough simply raised these very simple, yet fundamental, questions. Good in theory, but optimisation begets unintended consequences.
In the Innovation Corner
From Wabisabi Learning, comes this useful cheatsheet for Critical Thinking. What are the questions one should ask?
If you’re a start-up, you know that getting those first users is a tad more difficult than that great idea of yours. This is how successful apps have climbed the 1000-user mountain. TLDR: the hard, and often not-so-digital way.
In the Guest Room
Friend of ZTTZ, Ines Vanlangendonck, wrote an opinion piece about how this post-Corona call for “business needs to be digital” should focus on a more sustainable way of doing business. (link to De Tijd, in Dutch - NL post here).
💪 Digital, sure, but for what purpose?
Random ZTTZ
What would an impressionist painting, picturing a lunch of then-fashionistas, look like in these tech-enabled times. Funny.