Sent as an email newsletter Sunday February 2.
👋 Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes, a weekly newsletter containing my recent Wall Street Journal stories, must-read links on tech and life, and funny dog videos.
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🆕 🎧 My latest story, just out: Spotify, Apple Music Trail Little-Known Rival in Music-Obsessed India. It begins:
The most popular music streaming service in India, the world’s biggest untapped digital economy, isn’t from Spotify Technology SA or Apple Inc. Instead, it is a local rival little known outside the country.
Noida, India-based Gaana, named after the Hindi word for “song,” has used a hyperlocal approach and cut-rate pricing to beat the competition and attract 152 million monthly users. That is more than half of Spotify’s global user base, double Apple Music’s global count and far more than YouTube Music and Amazon.com Inc.’s music services.
Here are ten items worth your time this week:
🏈 1) Special preview: Super Bowl LIV [Axios]
“The Super Bowl isn’t just a football game. It’s the halftime show; it’s the ads; it’s the seven-layer dip; it’s the fact that, for four hours on Sunday night, nobody is expected to be doing anything else.”
And:
“With the Patriots absent for the first time since 2016, Super Bowl LIV feels like the dawn of a new era. Patrick Mahomes leads a pass-heavy Chiefs attack against the NFL’s best defense, while Jimmy Garoppolo leads a 49ers offense that has run the ball on 71 of its last 88 plays.”
Bonus links:
- The regional angle: Rooting for the Midwest to Win Super Bowl Glory [WSJ]
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The business angle: Ratings up, future bright: NFL rebounds off troubled seasons [AP]
🦠 2) Interactive: Tracking the Coronavirus [WSJ]
“The coronavirus in two months has sickened thousands in China and reached more than a dozen countries”
📹 3) Facial Recognition Is Only the Beginning [Public Books]
“…beyond any specific attributes of the technology, there is a particular group of actors that benefits from the idea that measuring and computationally analyzing the world affords access to knowledge – and those actors also have the power to enact and legitimize their knowledge claims.”
⚖️ 4) Mark Warner Takes on Big Tech and Russian Spies [Wired]
“…in Donald Trump’s Washington, Warner has evolved into Capitol Hill’s most reluctant and thoughtful tech critic, grilling Facebook, Twitter, and Google executives, lashing out in private and public over their intransigence, and pressing the companies to confront the role their platforms have played in undermining democracy.”
🛍️ 5) Russia’s Google Will Bring You Groceries in Just 15 Minutes [Bloomberg News]
“Russia’s largest technology company, Yandex NV, is getting groceries to Moscow homes within a quarter of an hour, free of charge. Its new online service, called Lavka, has spread small warehouses across the capital stocked with about 2,000 items and uses bike couriers to deliver orders.”
📚 6) In U.S., Library Visits Outpaced Trips to Movies in 2019 [Gallup]
“Visiting the library remains the most common cultural activity Americans engage in, by far.”
✍️ 7) Author Mary Higgins Clark, ‘Queen of Suspense,’ dead at 92 [AP]
“Mary Higgins Clark, the tireless and long-reigning “Queen of Suspense” whose tales of women beating the odds made her one of the world’s most popular writers, died Friday at age 92.”
📊 8) Map of the week: Home Price-to-Income Ratios, 1980–2017 [Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies]
📱 9) Google Maps Hacks [Simon Weckert]
“99 second hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps.Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic.”
🐶 10) Dog video of the week: Teamwork makes the dream work. [Twitter/@GillOshaughness]
💡 Quote of the week:
“Every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.” – Albert Einstein
👊 Fist bump from New Delhi,
Newley