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Snap's drop and the crypto-worm, while Citymapper launch a bus
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Hi there

Welcome to your weekly digest of digital media and technology news and opinion.

This is the last email for three weeks: next week I am in Paris, and the fortnight after (until the election!) I am in Malaysia. Google IO is this week, so maybe if it's super exciting I might have a small update from Paris to ease the length of the first one back.

If you have any comments or questions do reply to this email. I love any and all feedback.
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$SNAP blamed seasonality for their advertising revenue lull, which is truthful for the case of the market, but a stretch for a company that boasts as being enormously attractive and growing. But another slow growth count shows that Facebook's preventative measures may be working. 

Everything on the ransomware worm you could ever want to know is in Troy Hunt's blog post, and this wonderfully modest piece from a malware researcher who accidentally-on-purpose registered a domain name hidden in the source of the worm that effectively acted as a kill-switch and prevented its spread. Incredible work. The followup from Microsoft's president is here, commenting on their calls for a Digital Geneva Convention and the painful situation they are in with legacy customers.

Taking a tweet-sized survey and making into a cute piece of crowd-sourced interactive journalism is what the NYT did with this 'Which tech giant would you drop first' survey, with some interesting personal results. You would not think how fast you would drop Facebook until you see what it's paired against.

The NYT will focus on the readers it has in the three languages it already supports: English, Chinese and Spanish, before it looks to grow into other linguistic avenues, says this from Poynter. Their strategy to double digital revenue by 2020 means converting their casual international readers to subs, and the paper is making heavy investments in areas from which it is seeing casual traffic such as the UK and Australia.

It was bound to happen, but last week Citymapper finally launched their own bus route. For two days the CMX1 freely bustled London commuters in a beautiful square. Citymapper must be sitting on mountains of scraped records and user data determining how people in some of the world's most populous cities get around: fascinating to see how far they can take this, and how quickly. (And all because they spent time building an app with nothing other than a UX focus and open APIs from the government).

Sky have it that a US investment group are looking to purchase a stake in Vice which would value the site at $5.25bn, an increase of over $1bn since its last public investment/valuation in 2015.

It's the app with 200 million MAUs, with 64% of them aged 13-24 and 75% female: Musical.ly, built for hosting lipsynced dance moves of your friends is partnering with brands like Hearst to produce video content for teens on the platform

Some fantastic graphics, firstly in taking readers through how basic information compression works, and then applying that to music in this piece from The Pudding: Are pop lyrics getting more repetitive? Spoiler alert: for Taylor Swift, yes.
 
Copyright © 2017 Matt Taylor, All rights reserved.


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