Mike's Industry View - Issue #154
AI / Creativity
Someone Used Neural Networks To Upscale An 1895 Film To 4K 60 FPS, And The Result Is Really Quite Astounding — digg.com The Lumière Brothers' 1895 short
How My Doorbell Betrayed Me — marker.medium.com
Amazon’s Ring kicked off a dark new era of shapeshifting products
Business/Marketing/Adv
The Money Men Who Enabled Adam Neumann and the WeWork Debacle — www.wsj.com A host of veteran executives and financiers helped fuel WeWork’s spectacular rise and fall, pouring in capital while ceding control to its founder, despite mounting problems.
Dry January boosts low-alcohol sales for UK supermarkets Food industry estimates 4.2 million Britons took up the challenge of cutting out booze
Interestingness
How a hotel chain is reinventing loyalty with at-home perks — www-phocuswire-com.cdn.ampproject.org
Since October, Nordic Choice has invited a small set of members of its Nordic Choice Club loyalty program that live near the Clarion Hotel Amaranten in Stockholm to have housekeeping services in their homes with duvets, sheets, pillows, towels and luxury bathroom products provided by the hotel.
A Pennsylvania Court Tried To Force Ancestry.com To Open Up Its Database Of 16 Million DNA Profiles To The Police — www.buzzfeednews.com A Pennsylvania court’s move to issue a search warrant to Ancestry.com sets off a legal struggle that could go all the way to the Supreme Court.
Wellness
What We Want Doesn’t Always Make Us Happy — www.bloomberg.com A basic principle of economics keeps getting turned on its head.
Platform News
Vine successor Byte will share all its ad revenue to lure early creators — www.engadget.com
Now that Byte has had a chance to reel in some users, the team is outlining another part of its Vine revival: how it'll pay its stars.
Instagram Brings In More Than a Quarter of Facebook Sales — www.bloomberg.com Instagram, the photo-sharing app Facebook Inc. acquired for $715 million in 2012, generated more than a quarter of the social-media company’s revenue last year, according to people familiar with the matter.
Snapchat hits 218M users but big Q4 losses sink share price — techcrunch.com
Snapchat added 8 million daily users but still isn’t profitable nearly two years after its IPO. In Q4 2019, Snap lost $241 million on $560.8 million in revenue that’s up 44% year-over-year.