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🗞 News
Google found a group of websites that infect any iPhone that visits them with malware, giving them access to pretty much everything on the device. iOS has historically been far more secure than other mainstream operating systems, and while there were always ways in, they were generally hard to use and expensive, and so limited to high-value targets. Websites that infect any phone that visits them are a new threat. It appears that the culprit was China, and it was targeting Uyghurs. Link
'Rent is the new customer acquisition cost' - a D2C retailer called Le Tote bought a US department store, 'Lord & Taylor', for $100m. Everything that the internet did to media is happening to retail. Link
Anthony Levandowski now faces criminal charges over Google's allegation that he stole confidential technical information on its autonomy efforts when he left Waymo and started a company (that he then immediately sold to Uber). This follows a (settled) civil case last year. Link
The Ring story keeps coming: it says it doesn't use facial recognition, but it has a 'head of face recognition research'. Ring (doorbell camera with 10m users now owned by Amazon) has been trying to avoid being squashed by pure commodity cameras by building network and a software story, but that story (neighbourhood watch, mostly) comes with privacy issues. Link.
Buzzfeed has a story that Amazon's delivery drivers are being hired too fast, being pushed too hard, and are causing a lot of accidents. Link
Megvii, a leading Chinese face recognition company, filed for IPO. A big and very-fast-growing part of its business is 'smart city IoT' - that is, cameras recognising people on the street. Lots that's interesting in the documents (I will write more about this). Link (PDF)
🔮 Reading
FT profile of AppearHere, a platform to pop-up retail. Filling a gap between suffering retailers (and hence landlord with vacancies) and online D2C brands thinking about the next step... Link ($)
Amazons CTO Werner Vogels on how AWS builds platforms. Link
Interview with former Facebook CSO Alex Stamos on platforms' preparedness for the next US election. Link
'The Drone Bubble Bursts'. Link
China's spies are expanding their ambitions, and using LinkedIn. Link
How retailers are thinking about Google now that half of searches (apparently) end on the Google home page. Link
More on Amazon's last-mile delivery platform. Link ($)
😮 Interesting things of the week
Commerce Cream - a showcase of D2C branding. So, so many... Link
Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet. Link
Goose Creek Tower. Link
📊 Statistics
The European Series A landscape. Link
Where art comes from in America. Link
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