Weekend Edition: The Saturday routine that could change your life

How platform companies attracted their first 1,000 customers: Successful platform companies such as Uber, Airbnb, and Etsy had to understand and tackle a “chicken-and-egg” problem early on, Michael Blanding writes for Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge. To connect people on both the demand and supply side, they had to acquire both, Professor Thales Teixeira explains, giving three lessons. In the platforms’ case, the egg comes first; the companies had to get the service side of the equation first.

Lesson one: Think like a customer: You need to think like customers and where would they go to find service suppliers. Take Airbnb, they found some listings on Craigslist, “created software to hack Craigslist to extract the contact info of property owners, then sent them a pitch to list on Airbnb as well,” but it doesn’t stop there as you’ve got to give customers “something better than they had before.”

Lesson two: Create a better experience: You must be able to show that your service is better than competition. Uber, rather “than starting out with Uber Pool or Uber X, in which drivers use their own cars, the company started with black cars driven by professional drivers. That way, they could ensure that customers would have a great experience virtually every time they used the service.” Airbnb hired professional photographers to take more attractive pictures of their listings. Etsy attracted first-tier artisans by scouting craft fairs offline across the US. Next, is how to target growth strategies.

Lesson three: Sequencing is everything: You need to know when and where to expand to maximise success. “Since Uber’s main competition was taxi cab companies, the startup researched which cities had the biggest discrepancy between supply and demand for taxis. They then launched during times when that demand was likely to be the highest, for example during the holidays when people tend to stay out late partying.” In addition to capturing markets, this strategy also meant the startup wasn’t flagged as a threat as it only ate up excess demand. “By the time you have a foothold in the marketplace, it’s already too late for them to do anything about it.”

From there, the challenge becomes how to grow from 1,000 to 100,000,000 customers. Word of mouth might work for the first 1k customers, but the next level of growth could be propelled by targeted digital marketing. “Only after passing the millionth customer can you go into advertising on traditional media,” Teixeira says.

People, not algorithms, are the beating heart of the streaming music industry. If you’re a regular reader of Enterprise, you know our fondness for playlists on Apple Music and Spotify. Turns out, they’re not created by algorithms, but by “small teams of anonymous, hardcore music fans race to solve the record industry’s toughest problem,” writes Reggie Ugwu for BuzzFeed in the epic “Inside the Playlist Factory.” “We’ve come to expect that virtually all of our problems can be solved with code, so much so that we summon it unthinkingly before doing almost anything: from choosing what movie to watch, to finding a doctor … But what if music is somehow different? What if there’s something immeasurable but essential in the space between what is now called “discovery” and, you know, that old stupidly human ritual of finding and falling in love with a song? Algorithms excel at the former, but the latter is stubborn heritage: It’s your father’s old record collection, your sister’s stash of mixtapes, a close friend’s desert island soundtrack of choice.” (This story is brought to you by the Apple Music playlist “Behind the Boards: Butch Vig.”)

Yes, that last story is from BuzzFeed. And it gets worse: This next one is from the New York Post. Apparently, we’ve lost our minds here this morning, but the NYC tabloid’s “Everything we love to eat is a scam” is one of the most compelling things we’ve read in a while, a riff on Larry Olmstead’s book “Real Food, Fake Food: Why you don’t know what you’re eating.” That Kobe steak you just had in Dubai? It was probably Wagyu. The extra-virgin olive oil we consume has been cut by sunflower oil. Think you just ate salmon and white tuna sushi? “Your salmon is probably fake … Your white tuna is something else altogether, probably escolar — known to experts as ‘the Ex-Lax fish’ for the gastrointestinal havoc it wreaks.”

Much of the USD 800 mn spent on marketing fragrances every year is going to waste, says a new study from consultancy A.T. Kearney, according to Bloomberg. The reason? Largely a “one-size-fits-all”, non-personalised approach to marketing, with most shoppers purchasing the exact same scent over and over again. "They need to think about where the waste can be reduced," Nemanja Babic, a co-author of the report released on Wednesday. "Because at some point, it’s just not sustainable. It’ll just erode margins further." Shoppers largely ignore in-house advertising, TV spots aren’t even a blip on the radar (accounting for only 6% of purchases), in-store sampling is a waste of money and spritzers (may God smite them) are probably the most hated tactic, with customers looking for a more “individualized, guided way to purchase what is a very personal item.”

Enter niche perfumes, which are produced with better ingredients, in limited quantities and at much higher price points. The industry represents a USD 4 bn market in the US alone, according to data from NPD Group and the reason you haven’t heard about them much is because they largely do not advertise. Brand like Roja, Creed, and Nasomatto rely largely on word of mouth as customers follow perfume developers who break off from more mainstream brands, according to Reuters. Teresa Fisher, Senior Account Manager for UK Beauty at NPD Group, says niche fragrances are what’s currently the driver behind market growth. “In 2015, Niche fragrances represented 4 per cent of total Fragrance value sales, but contributed to 69 per cent of the growth,” she says, according to The Independent. “They have been continuously showing strong performance in the past few years: only last year, they added 28 per cent to previous year’s value sales.”

The science of “cute”: Do you think you’re cute? What about your girlfriend? Your husband? For a word that didn’t take on its current meaning until about 80 years ago, the concept of cute has taken off globally — and helped create industries worth bns of USD. The Guardian uses a creepy-cute Japanese bear-like character called Kumamon to get into The New Science of Cute.

Class wars in the air: The airlines industry appears to be dividing along the lines of two competing philosophies for growth in different parts of the world. While the European and American carriers are betting on austerity-minded, post-global financial crisis passengers, their Middle-East-based competitors are throwing their weight behind the elite. In the US the trend has been marked by the emergence of the “basic economy” class, first introduced by Delta back in 2014, and now joined by United and American airlines. Basic economy is just as what it sounds. A new steerage section, with amenities less than regular economy (few as they were). The trend toward low-priced tickets stems from competitive pressure, specifically from budget carriers like Spirit Air, Frontier and Ryanair in Europe, according to The Economist. And the proof is in the single-serving pudding, with Spirit and Ryanair being two of the most profitable airlines in the world.

On the flipside, Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar Airways have been competing for premium passengers with increasingly decadent seats, reports Bloomberg’s Eric Rosen. Leading the way was Etihad, which launched the three-room “Residence” and enormous first-class suites and “Apartments” on its double-decker Airbus A380s in the same year Delta’s basic economy class launched. With an exceedingly large mileage requirement and point-system which could run you around USD 32,000 for the airfare, this hotel in the sky is marketed to the jet-setting businessman with prices that are “astronomical but doable”. These widely different strategies possibly reflect the different attitudes to air travel in both markets, where one regards it more as a luxury than the other.

A nine-point guide to using stats to B.S. like a pro: The president-elect of the Royal Statistics Society sets out nine one-sentence maxims you can employ obfuscate with statistics as well as any politician — then backs each up with real-world examples from the Brexit debate. Read: “Our nine-point guide to spotting a dodgy statistic.”

How good are you, really, at playing FIFA? Premiership club Manchester City recruited 18-year old Kieran Brown to represent it in eSports. As an “employee” of the club, Brown will be tasked with qualifying for lucrative competitions, such as the FIFA Interactive World Cup (FIWC). Manchester City will use him as a promotional tool, “he will appear at the club’s home Premier League games and challenge fans to a game, as well as make videos for club’s website.” This is not as frivolous as it first appears considering that a “survey by Newzoo, a market-intelligence firm, estimated that advertising, merchandise and media revenue from eSports will rise to [USD 465 mn] in 2017, more than twice the level of 2014,” The Economist explains. Other football clubs are exploring opportunities by buying existing eSports teams. Germany’s FC Schalke 04 decided to buy a team that competes professionally at League of Legends, an online game played by more people than live in France. Vice News covered the growth of eSports last year with a five-part video series on gaming prodigies and how, in South Korea, this can either “make you rich and famous or land you in rehab.”

** You spend hours a day in traffic. It doesn’t need to be that way — not if business and government actually work together to create change in our beloved series. How? If you missed it yesterday, we suggest you start with part one of our five-part series on the future of our beloved capital, written by our friends (and sponsors) at SODIC, a leading Egyptian real estate developer. Subsequent instalments will appear each Thursday.

Twitter is turning blue: Twitter announced an online application process to request to verify your account – this blue badge famous people proudly carry on their account, according to PR Newswire. “We want to make it even easier for people to find creators and influencers on Twitter so it makes sense for us to let people apply for verification,” said Tina Bhatnaga, Twitter’s vice president of User Services. “We hope opening up this application process results in more people finding great, high-quality accounts to follow, and for these creators and influencers to connect with a broader audience.”

More high-quality accounts? Check the screenshot of The Next Web’s reporter who got his account verified and whose bio now reads: “Reporter at @thenextweb waiting for Twitter to delete my account once they find out I’m not a guru or ninja at anything.” Users could apply for verification before, but Twitter removed the feature a few years ago, “presumably due to the number of new and otherwise non-worthy (spam, parody, etc,) accounts seeking verification,” Clark writes in an article by The Next Web. The way it went since then was that Twitter would verify accounts manually and users could not request it, Clark writes. Now, only 187,000 of Twitter’s 320 mn monthly users are verified, according to The Telegraph.

It’s probably not on your bucket list, but a journey through the Darien Gap wouldn’t be complete without people smugglers, guerrillas, venomous snakes and actual human skulls on stakes posted as warnings to others not to make the overland trek from Columbia to Panama. “A Terrifying Journey Through the World’s Most Dangerous Jungle” in Outside magazine is some of the best adventure writing we’ve read in ages.

How renewable energy is blowing climate change efforts off-course: The New York Times’ Eduardo Porter explains how renewable energy is forcing nuclear power — one of the main sources of zero-carbon electricity —into bankruptcy, marking a real blow to the fight against global warming. Policymakers’ infatuation with renewable energy has left the nuclear industry in danger of shutting down, with a Bloomberg New Energy Finance analysis estimating that nuclear reactors that produce 56% of the U.S.’s nuclear power would be unprofitable over the next three years. Even Germany, which stands as a shining beacon of the potential that renewable energy holds, has most recently seen that its carbon emissions are actually rising instead of decreasing, proving that renewable energy might not be enough to combat climate change.

Ever wonder why even the snootiest of us enjoy Buzzfeed’s listicles on a certain level — or why even the most disorganized among us are compelled to make to-do lists that they never seem to follow? This short (but rigorous) piece from the New Yorker’s Maria Konnikova is your answer: “a list is perfectly designed for our brain. We are drawn to it intuitively, we process it more efficiently, and we retain it with little effort.” You’ll even finish the piece feeling comfortably smug that while you could have read a fast-food list about why we love lists, you opted for gourmet fare instead and read actual paragraphs…

Follow that up with (what else?) Business Insider’s list of 25 lists you should make today, from lists of recipes you want to try to your bucket list.

The most honestly useful list we’ve come across lately: “Six Simple [Saturday] Habits To Set You Up For A Productive Week.” Substitute “Saturday” for “Sunday” and “Sunday” for “Monday” to shift for our weekend and this is the ultimate guide to both getting the most out of hour weekend — and starting the workweek off with a spring in your step.

One of the most oddly entertaining stories we’ve read this week, having no particular interest in the movie industry: Meet Jonathan Kos-Read, “The American Who Accidentally Became a Chinese Movie Star.”

Being a successful Arab businesswoman: BCG partner and managing director Leila Hoteit describes in a TED Talk “Arab women of my generation have had to become our own role models. We have had to juggle more than Arab men, and we have had to face more cultural rigidity than Western women.” Hoteit, using her own success in the corporate world and as a parent, shares three of her lessons in detail. Amongst her keys to success is the ability to decide every day “to convert [redacted] into fuel, to work their life to keep work out of their life, and to join forces and not compete.” (Runtime 14:02)

When restraints inspire creative outbursts: Barnard College theoretical astrophysicist Janna Levin argues for Big Think that restrictions in science have played a big role in significant advances in the field. The examples she uses include Albert Einstein’s recently proven theory on gravitational waves, and Kurt Gödel’s theory of limitation that propagated the invention of the computer and artificial intelligence. (Runtime 4:50)

Why did commercial supersonic flight fail? The Concorde symbolised technological optimism and extreme luxury, but was grounded for good in 2003. There’s no straightforward answer, Vox explains in a video, “It happened due to a range of factors, from high price to manufacturing concerns to environmental worries. In concert, all of these negatives turned a technological breakthrough into a business nonstarter. But even if the Concorde failed, it looked beautiful doing so.” (Runtime 10:22)

Behind-the-scenes of the Panama Papers investigation: The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) Director Gerard Royle delivered a TED talk about the leak of 1.5 million documents from the Panama-based Mossack Fonseca law film. Ryle tells of how someone called John Doe had copied 40 years of records at the law firm — spreadsheets, client files, e-mails — then reached out to two journalists at German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung who then contacted the Washington D.C.-based ICIJ.

“Where do you even begin to tell a story that can trail off into every corner of the globe and that can affect almost every person in any language, sometimes in ways they don’t even know yet?” says Ryle. The challenge was how to make this huge number of documents searchable and readable and to store them in a secure location on the cloud. The ICIJ was joined by 350 reporters from more than 100 media organizations in 76 countries through a highly-secured virtual newsroom where they would collaborate to look for trends. The idea was: “Native eyes on native names.” (If you’re a Game of Thrones addict: Don’t miss a reference at 7:34. (Runtime 13:08)

Are you really a good listener? The Harvard Business Review doesn’t think so. You know how to look like you’re a good listener — it’s been drilled into you since you entered the workforce, or maybe since that smarmy finance prof gave your class a lecture in the first week of your MBA. Don’t speak when the person you’re listening to is speaking. Make noises that suggest you’re paying attention (“Mmm-hmm”). Puke back a phrase they uttered. Voilà. Not so fast, write Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman for HBR, who make a really compelling argument that a good listener isn’t a sponge, it’s someone who serves as a trampoline. Read: What Great Listeners Actually Do.

Star Trek Beyond continues disappointing legacy of the films: Looking forward to Star Trek Beyond (trailer, run time 1:07)? Maybe you should curb that enthusiasm a little, at least according to New York Post’s Kyle Smith. After the film began its release on Wednesday (IMBD says it should have hit Egyptian theaters yesterday), Smith treated readers to a particularly biting review in “For the love of God, stop making ‘Star Trek’ movies.” Smith calls it “‘Seinfeld’ in space: a blockbuster about nothing” and “Star Trek Into Drowsiness” adding that the 2004-2009 TV series Battlestar Galactica was far better on a fraction of the budget. “The farther into the universe it ventures, the more it feels like it’s stuck in its own driveway.” While it’s not exactly news that the films aren’t all that great, the New York Times’ A. O. Scott has slightly nicer words to say, basically calling the film more of the same but that’s “not necessarily bad.”

Is modern yoga the product of 19th century Scandinavian gymnastics? Modern yoga might not entirely be that “timeless Indian discipline” practitioners believe it to be, according a BBC documentary. “What’s becoming clear is that the yoga I practice every week is very different to what was regarded as yoga a thousand, or even one hundred, years ago,” The BBC’s Mukti Jain Campion discovered. The documentary notes that “a new generation of yoga innovators … transformed an obsolete and frowned-upon practice of Indian holy men” as “early 20th Century European ideas of health, fitness and the cult of the Body Beautiful became intertwined with Indian nationalism and the revival of Indian interest in its own traditions of physical culture.” (Runtime 29:45)

While overt discrimination in some markets are on the wane, women are still subtly penalized by all sorts of societal conventions. Freakonomics Radio looked into how those penalties can be removed “without burning down the house.” Harvard Economist, Claudia Goldin, says it women might be receiving lower pay than men for equal work in some cases, but by and large, it’s not that, it’s that men had monopolised the lucrative professions. Partly to blame are societal factors that still see men as “the supporters of their families,” but there was also willful exclusion in order to protect male privileges, and it also took “ too long for the feminization of the workforce to happen but not necessarily because of ill will.” Societal constructs were also to blame; “we’re processing language differently based on whether a woman or man is doing the speaking.” Host Stephen Dubner discusses some solutions that could be implemented to redesign the system, “so that success is not dependent on every decision being a good one.”(Runtime 36:29)

Turtles didn’t evolve shells for protection. A must-read for any science geeks out there looks the theory that suggests turtles evolved shells because “before turtles became impregnable walking fortresses, they were professional burrowers.” Evolution, exaptation and a video of a komodo dragon sauntering down a pier — who could ask for anything more in a story?

Your kids / little sister / intern loves this brand. “Supreme is the most influential streetwear brand in the world. You might have seen its white-on-red rectangular logo on Drake, Kanye West, or Tyler the Creator. Or noticed the lines that form outside its stores on Thursdays. Or caught a glimpse of a sticker on a city lamppost anywhere around the globe. Today, Supreme is the sacred sigil of young skateboarders as well as the go-to office wear of hipster ad execs and other would-be culture creators, all thanks to James Jebbia, the self-made millionaire many times over, who launched the company in 1994. How this happened is a complex story. It’s not just a matter of style, but art, hype, economics, and the internet.” Read: “Reign, Supreme” in Racked.

The more routers the merrier: Next-generation wi-fi is about creating a mesh of smaller routers that makes internet faster and cover the whole house through multiple access points, writes Geoffrey A. Fowler for The Wall Street Journal. They are more expensive, but Fowler advises to think of the perks of not worrying about dead wi-fi zones at home anymore. Fowler reviews a number of mesh systems: Eero, AmpliFi HD by Ubiquiti, Luma which belongs to an Amazon-backed startup, and Seamless Roaming kit by Linksys. He mentions Almond router by Securifi, a home wifi-network kit by D-Link, and routers by startup Plume. “Unlike traditional Wi-fi extenders, mesh systems create a single network that switches you to the strongest access point automatically as you wander.” he writes. For gamers, this does not make internet faster for you. But: “it makes Wi-Fi seamless and simple for most of us.” AmpliFi HD is the fastest and least expensive, but the author prefers Eero because the devices are more convenient to set up and look nicer. Here, Keish Shaw reviews Eero for The Network World and there, he reviews Luma: 5 stars for Eero, 4 stars for Luma, down from 4.5 after he reviewed Eero.

If you can’t beat them, join them: Visa debit card customers can now move money instantly on PayPal accounts, following the signing of a strategic partnership between the two competitors on Thursday, Techcrunch reported. PayPal digital wallet payment will also now be accepted across retail locations that facilitate Visa contactless payment transactions. The agreement ends a beef between the two firms, as Visa has long been accusing PayPal of encouraging its customers to use their bank accounts to fund their PayPal digital wallets through the bank-owned ACH network, cutting out the more expensive Visa as a result. “Any agreement of this kind may cause short-term pain by hurting profitability, but would provide long-term benefits if it prevents competitive moves from the larger credit-card issuers,” Bloomberg reported.

Four years ago, Microsoft posted its first ever quarterly loss: The mobile revolution had effectively defeated what used to be the most valuable company in the world, the Nokia acquisition was a big loss, and then CEO Steve Ballmer’s vision was in question, writes Klint Finley for Wired. Incoming CEO Satya Nadella chose to refocus the company on areas where growth was possibly, mainly cloud services and enterprise. Since then, Microsoft has posted four consecutive quarters of profits, doubled revenue from its cloud suite Azure, and occupies more than one third of internet searches if you add traffic from AOL and Yahoo who uses Microsoft’s Bing search engine. It recently made good with open software developers, opening up its software development platform to both Linux and Mac OS X users. A market cap of USD 419 bn puts Microsoft in third place behind Apple and Alphabet, but the days of 2012 are well behind it.

The most-clicked stories in Enterprise in the past week were:

• Why is your day in Cairo so hard — and what can we do about it? (Enterprise)
• Teflon Turk Erdogan bounces back from coup attempt; Egypt accused of using UNSC seat to confound resolution condemning coup. (Enterprise)
• One of the more disturbing photos of Donald Trump we’ve seen (image)
• Full text of the 2016-17 state budget (Official Gazette, pdf)
• Global Passport Power Rank 2016 (Passport Index)
• Why you will marry the wrong person (New York Times)

The market for conventional missiles is booming, despite the slowdown in global defence spending. “Mounting armed conflicts around the world, and the persistent threat of global terrorism, are partly responsible,” The Economist says, but missiles specifically are believed to reduce civilian casualties in warfare. “While traditional aerial-bombing tactics often kill more civilians than hostile combatants, missiles are much more effective at hitting their target without collateral damage. And as they can be launched … by drones controlled remotely by pilots often sitting back at their home bases in America or Britain, the risk of military casualties are minimised too. The growing sophistication of such weapons is also a boon for makers of them… Missiles are no longer just flying bombs. Many now contain more computer than explosive to help them find their targets autonomously.” Also on the conveyor belt of the race to global destruction: hypersonic missiles “that can travel at five or more times the speed of sound.”

If the stories of autonomous robots and advanced AI haven’t totally gotten you to build a fallout shelter yet, then programmable biological machines might. MIT engineers have developed biological computational circuits capable of both remembering and responding to sequential input data. Nathaniel Roquet’s team at MIT’s Synthetic Biology Group were able to implement within a living cell what’s known as a state machine, according to Vice: Motherboard.

Background: a state machine is a mathematical model that describes a machine which its internal states are matched with a machine input to create a new state. The process would manipulate DNA in a way that would “rewire” the behavior of a cell (in this case E. Coli) in a manner similar to a computer.

This is part of a growing field of synthetic biology, where living cells used as computers can be used to program complex biological functions. In effect, to engineer life. And as if to rub in that they have more than enough engineers, a separate MIT team have created a programming language that allows them to rapidly design complex, DNA-encoded circuits that give new functions to living cells. “It is literally a programming language for bacteria,” says Christopher Voigt, an MIT professor of biological engineering. “You use a text-based language, just like you’re programing a computer. Then you take that text and you compile it and it turns it into a DNA sequence that you put into the cell, and the circuit runs inside the cell.” for those excited by the potential this has as the next frontier of biotech, then these studies are definitely worth the read. For those seeing killer programmable Venus flytraps, back to driverless cars for you.

Warning: That which has been seen, cannot be un-seen: Meet Graham. He has no neck, a plump face, airbags between each rib, thicker skin, and knees that bend in all directions. Graham is what the Transport Accident Commission in the Australian state of Victoria believes humans would have to look like if they evolve to withstand the impact of car crashes. The interactive sculpture is “the only person designed to survive on our roads.” We wager he’d need at least three more airbags, a titanium exoskeleton and bones made of jello to be able to survive in Cairo traffic.