Month: July 2017

Categories
Newley's Notes

đź’Ż Newley’s Notes 100: Grab, Mobike Scoops; teleporting photons; gorgeous goats

Newleys notes 1 440x330

Edition 100 — yes, 100! — of my email newsletter, Newley’s Notes, went out last week.

To subscribe, simply enter your email address at this link. It’s free, it’s fun, it’s brief, and few people unsubscribe.

Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest issue of Newley’s Notes, a newsletter in which I share my Wall Street Journal stories, other writings, and links about tech and life.

Amazingly, this is the 100th edition of Newley’s Notes. The first one went out on Feb 15, 2015. Time flies! Thanks, as ever, for reading.

❤️ Note: If you like NN, please forward this to a friend or click at the bottom to share on Twitter and Facebook. #SharingIsCaring

đź“ť What I Wrote in The WSJ

— Uber Rival Grab in Talks for Up to $2 Billion from SoftBank, China’s Didi – a scoop with my colleagues Liza Lin and Julie Steinberg. Singapore-based Grab is set to get a new influx of cash, fueling its quest to win Southeast Asia. The story was followed by many outlets.

— China Bike-Sharing Titan Mobike Sets Sights on Washington, D.C. – another exclusive with my colleague Liza Lin.

đź’¬ What I Wrote at Newley.com

  • New: Get iOS Alerts for My WSJ Stories – Want to get an iOS alert whenever my new stories go live? Of course you do. Click on the link to find out how. (TL;DR: select the plus sign next to my byline from within the new iOS app.)

📲 5 Must-Reads in Tech

  1. The untold story of Google’s academic influence. A piece by my colleagues Brody Mullins and Jack Nicas based on public records requests showing ways the search giant finances research papers to “defend against regulatory challenges of its market dominance.”

  2. Will “beam me up” one day be possible? Scientists in China have for the first time teleported a photon particle from earth to a satellite.

  3. U.S. folks: You stoked for the upcoming total solar eclipse? Here a handy map to find out where it’ll be most visible. It happens on Aug. 21.

  4. Can Google, Facebook and Amazon be stopped? In a much-discussed WSJ essay, author Jonathan Taplin says powerful U.S. tech giants are remaking the economy and the nature of work, and are now poised to dominate artificial intelligence. Will the government or others do anything about their power?

  5. J. M. Coetzee once wrote poems in computer code. The Nobel Prize winning South African novelist was a programmer in the 1960s, and a researcher at King’s College London made the discovery while examining his papers.

đź’« 1 Fun Thing

  1. A photographer took formal portraits of goats. And the pics are effing amazing. “They’re treated as if they were customers in a small-town photo studio,” said the Langley, Washington-based photographer. (Thanks, Anasuya!)

What’d I miss? Send me links, rants, raves, juicy news scoops and anything else. Thanks for reading, amigos.

Fist bump đź‘Š from New Delhi,
Newley

Categories
Journalism

New: Get iOS Alerts for My WSJ Stories

IMG 1870

Last week we launched a new version of The Wall Street Journal iOS app. (If you don’t have it yet, just update it in the App Store from your device.)

One of the cool new features: the ability to receive alerts for new stories from specific reporters (ahem, like me, or any of my colleagues!).

To sign up, just click on my name in the byline of a story.

To do that, open up the new app and:

  1. search for “Newley,”
  2. click on one of my stories
  3. scroll down to my name in the byline
  4. click the plus sign

Once you do that, the screen will look like this:

IMG 2045

Then you’ll get an alert like the one at the top of this post whenever one my new stories goes live.

Enjoy!

Categories
India Journalism

International Students Avoid Red States

2017 07 10books

That’s the gist of a story I wrote with my colleague Doug Belkin in Chicago. It begins:

International students accepted to U.S. schools are planning to enroll at a similar rate as last year in most areas except the southern part of the country, especially Texas, according to data from 165 U.S. colleges and universities.

I spoke with one student here in New Delhi, as you’ll read, who said he really wanted to apply to Rice University in Texas. But his parents would’t let him — due to the state’s liberal gun laws.

You can also hear me on our What’s News podcast discussing the piece.

Categories
India Journalism Tech

Our Facebook Live Video On Apple and India

Last week my colleague Eric Bellman and I conducted a live Facebook chat on Apple’s big gamble on India.

The video is embedded above and on The WSJ Facebook page here.

Eric and I discuss India’s promise as the second biggest smartphone market after China (hundreds of millions of people are getting online for the first time on low-cost smartphones), what Apple’s been doing to make strides here (assembling phones locally for the first time, working to open its own official stores, trying to boost the iOS ecosystem, etc.) and the challenges it faces (the biggest: price).

Enjoy.

And for more, see a couple of our recent stories: