What the F&*k is Pokémon Go?

Launch your startup in France: The French Tech Ticket startup competition is back for its second edition. The expanded program has slots for 70 startups, up from 23 last year, offering the chance to join one of France’s top 41 incubators. Applications are open until 24 August. Winners get an EUR 45k grant per project, fast-tracked residence permits for team members and their families, and a “soft landing pack” to help you relocate easily to France. They will also get a 12-month incubation period from January 2017 as well as tailored acceleration program. Who is eligible? Startups in the creation or growth phase founded by 2-3 people, with a maximum of one French national on board. The entire program will be in English and teams must be ready to live in France for a year and devote 100% of their time to their business.

…One of the 23 winners of last year’s competition was Egypt’s dairy farm management technology solutions company Farminal, founded by Waleed Sorour. Our friends at the Economic Department of the French Embassy in Cairo also told us that Egypt was in the top five globally in terms of the number of applications submitted and are hoping that even more members of Egypt’s “fascinating entrepreneurial scene” apply this year. Also in the top five: The United States, India, Russia and Brazil.

Speaking of France: How much for a French passport? EUR 10 mn and a five-year waiting period, to be exact. More and more countries have joined the “game” of offering citizenship to high-paying individuals, the IMFdirect blog notes. For small Caribbean islands, offering citizenship in return for investment has been a “win-win,” but now the scheme is not just limited to countries you only hear of when reading about tax havens or watching the track and field events at the Olympics: It includes a number of European countries as well as the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. According to a list presented on the blog, citizenship will cost you a measly USD 100k in Dominica, whereas you could become a citizen of Cyprus or Malta for USD 2.5 mn or EUR 1.15 mn, respectively. Invest EUR 500k in Ireland, Spain, or Portugal and you’ll be granted residency there, or half of the amount for residency in Greece or Hungary. Other options include USD 500k for US residency, GBP 1 mn for UK residency, and AUD 5 mn for an Australian permit, mate. The price list can be viewed here and for a better “shopping experience” here’s the 2016 Global Passport Power Rank. (Yes, the Dominica passport is ranked significantly higher than Egypt’s. Don’t get us started…)

John Hanke, the genius (yes, genius — get over it) behind Google Earth and Pokémon Go: Before delving into a profile of John Hanke, we’ll first quickly run through the essentials behind understanding the global phenomenon of Pokémon Go.

What? Pokémon Go is a mobile app game that costs nothing to play (but allows for in-app purchases of game currency) and has so far only been officially released for the iOS and Android in Australia and the United States less than a week and a half ago, the EU last Wednesday, and yesterday in the UK. Despite not yet being officially released in Egypt, players here have already cracked the app and are playing (the countdown to arrests for playing Pokémon Go begins now). The augmented reality game overlays cartoon Pokémon characters in the real world around you by using smartphone cameras. The characters appear, or spawn, at set coordinates, which players find using their phone’s GPS.

Ok. So? Despite being released officially just nine days ago, the game has been downloaded at least 7.1 mn times (and those figures are from Monday, so expect the current figure to be much higher) and is generating USD 1.6 mn in daily revenue. The game is responsible for doubling gamemaker Nintendo’s stock price, adding about USD 9.3 bn in market capitalization for the company in the past week. However, is that exuberance for Nintendo justified? Lianna Brinded from Business Insider points out that many analysts are still recommending Nintendo as a Sell. Brinded quotes Jay Defibaugh, an analyst at Asian investment bank CLSA, as saying: “We think that the economic benefit to Nintendo from the title is unclear. The title is not associated with Nintendo and DeNA’s partnership in-app games, so the success of Pokémon Go has no direct positive read-through for DeNA… Nintendo receives royalties for Pokémon titles but surprisingly little direct profit.” The game’s developer is Niantic, an internal startup at Google whose CEO and founder is John Hanke.

Wait, before you get to Hanke, why has this game struck such a nerve? Our guess is twofold: First, the game is capitalizing on millennial nostalgia — the children of the ‘90s are the young adults of today, and they’re finally getting to not just play something Pokémon-themed, but to recreate what the game and cartoon series was actually about — physically collecting Pokémon characters and using them to battle other Pokémon players. The way you may like Star Wars, Star Trek, or whatever it was you grew up with, millennials have finally found their own nostalgia. Secondly, the game is wildly successful because it accomplishes what Hanke explicitly set out to do— get people out of their house, running around outside and exercising, and meeting and socializing with real people. How many other video games can make the same claim?

Ok, fine whatever, I’m still bitter. So who’s this John Hanke? He’s just the dude who created one of the first ever MMOs (massive multiplayer online) games, helped create this little thing called Google Earth, and now Pokémon Go. For a good profile on the man, see this piece by his alma mater Berkeley, where in text and video he recounts that on his application in 1996, he stated he wanted to create games using geospatial visualization that would get people outside and socializing. (Read The Man Behind Pokémon Go: John Hanke, MBA 96)

Egypt is one of the “10 emerging markets of the future,” Business Insider writes, picking up on a study by Fitch’s BMI. The original story is here, but you have to register (and provide your telephone number, meaning you’re getting a sales call) if you want to read it.

Work until you die? Gen X was the first to realize it would never have the retirement security the Baby Boomers have largely enjoyed (that little thing called the Great Recession notwithstanding), and for the past couple of months ‘foreverwork’ has become something of a meme for millennials. First came the “Many millennials expect to work until they die” stories back in May, prompted by a study by a global HR company. Now, the media tide is turning. Witness: “Retirement is making people more miserable than ever before” (MarketWatch) and “Millennials will work forever–but they may be happier for it” (Quartz). Despite its lousy headline, this piece by upstart men’s rag Mel is the first to make us think that maybe never retiring isn’t such a bad thing. Mel uses 72-year-old reporter, rights advocate and professor Leon Dash to make a pretty good case that working ‘til you die isn’t such a bad thing as long as you love what you do — and don’t live only for work.

Oh, and the notion that there’s no job security left in the world? That’s B.S., writes the New Yorker, admittedly in an American context: “…our collective nostalgia misrepresents historical job security so completely that it gets it close to backward. We imagine a past where everyone had thirty-year careers (or, less pretentiously, jobs), tapering off into a work twilight and then retirement. This memory is surprisingly at odds with the data: the typical worker now stays at a job six months longer than the average worker did a decade ago. Taking an even longer-term view, the typical worker has stayed at the same job for more than four and a half years, versus just three and a half years in 1983.

Damnit: Admit it — there’s little more satisfying than scarfing-down a couple spoonfuls of raw chocolate chip cookie dough when you and the kid are baking on a weekend afternoon. Until now: The FDA is warning us that it’s not (just) the raw eggs that will kill you — it’s the pathogen-laced flour, too. The New York Times has the story, and the original FDA warning is here.

Silicon Valley leaders issue open letter condemning Donald Trump’s candidacy: Following an open letter signed by thousands of Wharton students, faculty and administration published last week, in which they called upon Trump to stop name-dropping that he went to Wharton as they did not wish to be associated with the virulent bigotry surrounding his campaign, almost 150 leaders from Silicon Valley have followed suit. Yesterday, some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent business leaders and company founders published their own open letter in which they wrote: “We believe in an inclusive country that fosters opportunity, creativity and a level playing field. Donald Trump does not. He campaigns on anger, bigotry, fear of new ideas and new people, and a fundamental belief that America is weak and in decline. We have listened to Donald Trump over the past year and we have concluded: Trump would be a disaster for innovation.” Check out the list of signatories, which includes founders of companies that make products we all use in our daily lives. Trump supporters would likely reply to the criticism by saying that the US tech industry is primarily concerned with protecting or expanding the H1B visa regime, employing foreign nationals in the US tech industry and displacing Americans from work.

Speaking of Trump: “For Whites Sensing Decline, Donald Trump Unleashes Words of Resistance” is a nuanced look at how the Republican candidate has “freed [white] Americans … to say what they really believe.” The story has it all: political correctness, trigger warnings and safe spaces, the corrosive effects of rapid de-industrialization, one of America’s more eloquent racists, Islamophobia…

Golf in the Olympics is becoming a farce: Six of the top ten golf players in the world — including top four Jason Day, Dustin Johnson, Jordan Spieth and Rory McIlroy — have pulled out of the Rio Olympics citing Zika virus fears. Golf is returning as an Olympic sport this year in Rio for the first time since 1904 and the International Golf Federation has released the final list, topped by American Bubba Watson, of the 60 men eligible to participate. Without the top players, the Olympic event is “no bigger than a middle-of-the-road PGA Tour or European Tour event,” Alex Miceli writes for Golf Week. “Making the case towards the International Olympic Committee that male golf should continue in the Games beyond the existing point of 2020 has never looked more difficult,” Ewan Murray writes for The Guardian. Murray’s gender distinction there is on point: Only one female golfer has ruled herself out so far, although he concedes that retaining the sport as a women-only event is farfetched.

It all comes down to the money, The Economist suggests. Male golfers are shunning the Olympics because to them, unlike in other sports, a gold medal is not the sport’s ultimate prize, especially when compared to winning a major. More importantly, “flying all the way to Brazil means missing the John Deere Classic, a [USD 5 mn] tournament in Illinois, feeling jetlagged for the equally lucrative Wyndham championship the next week and, if they get sick, missing the Ryder Cup … For female golfers, Olympic golf is a better deal. Because far fewer people watch women’s golf tournaments, they are not nearly as well-paid as their male peers.”

World number three Rory McIlroy has delivered the “most withering” criticism of golf’s inclusion in the Olympics, saying the sport is irrelevant to context of the games and that he is not sure he will even be watching it.

It’s the beginning of the end: An artificially intelligent robot escaped in the Russian city of Perm after an engineer forgot to shut the lab’s gates, BBC reported. Fortunately, the robot, Promobot IR77, wasn’t able to go far in its quest to dominate the world and turn us all into an subservient species — its batteries died out after covering a distance of 50 metres and after having spent 40 minutes at large. This was Promobot IR77’s second escape attempt. Minutes earlier, it was “was undergoing mobility testing and was assigned to move freely about a room for an hour, then return to a designated spot. But early in the test, IR77 slipped through an open door, only to be caught and returned to the room by a programmer,” The Washington Post notes.

Now, Promobot, the robot’s manufacturer, is considering killing IR77 off: “a robot gone AWOL is by definition a ‘faulty’ robot, and that’s dangerous in the same way a wild tiger is dangerous.” The end of Promobot IR77’s trip, after its batteries ran out, was recorded by a passerby as it stood there in the middle of a road blocking traffic (runtime 01:15). Wait until the next the escape-artist robot learns to recharge itself.

We spent Ramadan Googling mosalsalat, kunafa: Egyptians were obsessed with Googling mosalsalat during Ramadan, according to data from Google Trends. Wamda’s Rachel Williamson writes that 13 of the top 15 searches in Egypt were for mosalsalat, topped by The Legend (Al Ostoura), Hani in the Jungle (Hani fil Adghal), and Father of the girls (Abu Banat). The only non-TV related searches were for the Ramadan calendar and, of course, “how to make kunafa.”

Binge on: Suits. Seasons one through four of the witty, well-acted and awesomely written corporate law drama are finally available on Egyptian Netflix. Also on the local edition of Netflix, if you’re looking for something a bit darker: All five seasons of Breaking Bad.

Skim, and remember when he was funny: Bassem Youssef’s ‘Democracy Handbook’ now on YouTube: Bassem Youssef’s US series The Democracy Handbook is now available without charge online.

While waiting in line for your morning coffee: If you thought we were bad drivers, you’ve never been to Russia. Watch: “This Is The Most Incredible Russian Dashcam Video Of All Time” (run time: 0:27) from the inimitable ‘Only in Russia’ Twitter feed.

Bonus: The Dude who inspired the Dude from the film The Big Lebowski is actually a real dude named Jeff Dowd, and he also goes by the nickname ‘the Dude’ in real life. (Watch, running time: 7:12)

In the global food market, big-name brands are losing ground to the little guys: Global food conglomerates including Danone, General Mills, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble and Unilever are being out-maneuvered in the industries they dominate thanks to the ever more discerning palate of the consumer. In everything from beer to yogurt smaller firms — boasting more natural, organic, less processed and “crafted” goods — are chipping away at the profits of the big players. Many factors besides changing consumer trends have led to this shift which is taking place in both developed economies and emerging markets. Consolidating factories have left big firms prone to currency fluctuations, according to The Economist. This comes at a time when television advertising is losing firm ground to social media. Barriers to entry faced by smaller companies are falling as they can outsource production while advertising, selling and building a reputable brand online. While some of the giants are responding by cutting costs, others resort to acquiring and backing the upstarts. Conventional wisdom of a bn-USD brand remains the dominant strategy. However, many executives surveyed by consultancy EY feel that this is outmoded and that larger firms must do more to adapt to a changing market.

From the Canadian Propaganda Department: An epically long New York Times piece is resonating with U.S. liberals terrified at the prospect of a Trump presidency, prompting some to hold Canada out on the Tweeter as a model for the rest of the world to follow. The surprisingly nuanced “Refugees Encounter a Foreign Word: Welcome,” digs into “How Canadian hockey moms, poker buddies and neighbors are adopting Syrians, a family at a time.”

How the world fell out of love with Obama: Politico’s Nahal Toosi recorded a series of interviews for a BBC documentary on the evolving view of US President Barack Obama globally. Toosi captured this changing perception through interviews in Cuba, Egypt, and Ukraine as some of the countries affected most by Obama’s policies. Egyptians interviewed recalled the sanguine view following Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo University. Former Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy is also interviewed for the documentary and talked about how Obama’s discomfort with Egypt’s circumstances led to confusion among his aides as a battle of idealists and realists in Obama’s circle played out.

Fahmy says “young staffers” would pass a “hilarious” number of small pieces of paper to senior representatives, including John Kerry and Susan Rice during meetings he attended; “trying to get them to say something, which they didn’t want to say … at the senior level, they realised ‘Egypt is going to be Egypt’ while younger people, and I was young, it’s fine, thought that no, they could decide what a 7,000 year-old has to do and when on their time.” When Toosi asked Fahmy if he thought Obama managed to grasp the “nitty-gritty” side of diplomacy, Fahmy replied: “No.” (Runtime 49:27)

What shapes the way we perceive the world around us? Season 2 of NPR’s excellent podcast Invisibilia moves forward with exploring people’s “frame of reference” and how they impact perception. The main story is about a recent experiment that took place at Harvard to see if people with Asperger’s “could see emotional and social cues in the same way that neurotypical people do if they stimulated the brain with magnets.” Turns out, only for a brief window of time, they can. Hosts Alix Spiegel and Hanna Rosin speak with one of the people who took part of the study as well as The Daily Show’s Hasan Minhaj, who contrasts his experiences in life with his parents’ frames of reference. (Runtime 59:22)

Scrap the notion that the main supporters of Islamist parties are poor and disenfranchised — it’s the middle class, University of New South Wales researchers argue. The researchers say the middle class supports Islamists “due in large part to neoliberal economic policies.” Using survey and electoral data from Tunisia specifically, the researchers show that “belonging to the middle class and living in a rich district together affect the decision to vote for the religious party more than actually being religious.” They conclude that “more about political Islam and the development of democracies in the Muslim world” would be learnt if “we study these phenomena within the same framework we study political competition in the West.”

Is satire causing soul-searching at tech companies? Those familiar with HBO’s comedy show Silicon Valley already know it’s centered around a tech startup called Pied Piper that accidentally invents a revolutionary compression algorithm. In the three-season run, Pied Piper goes through incubation and seeding before going on to raise successive rounds of venture capital. The show satirizes many of the industry’s stereotypical excesses, including scooters, free food, spiritual gurus, and other ridiculous lavish office perks, as well as meaningless platitudes including “making the world a better place,” writes Erin Griffith for Fortune.

The show has surprisingly been “embraced by those it so brilliantly skewers,” writes Sarah Hughes for The Guardian. This includes Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google. More importantly, the show addresses the importance of execution over a revolutionary idea, and the distinction between DIY idealism against big-business budgets. “If you’re in Wall Street you’re kind of unashamed about how much money you’re making,” he says. “But in the tech world, it’s not enough to be making money — you’ve also got to be saving the world and that’s kind of funny,” says executive producer Mike Judge.

A business idea for you: Deploying cloud tech in the energy sector. The gap between sustainable causes and the tech industry is widening amid a competition for capital, writes David Koji for Entrepreneur. Big Tech is realizing it will need more than “smart bulbs and mobile-controlled thermostats” to operate the wave of cloud-based platforms that require energy mass-scale server farms, he says. Tech has skyrocketed in the energy sector in the last three years, particularly in data collection services. “Technology consulting firms are vital to improving the capabilities of current working assets to optimize output until additional units can be put in service,” international energy consulting firm Opportune LLP writes on its blog.The conventional wisdom has been to supplement upstream costs with downstream cash from end-users, writes Koji. Nobody wants to reinvent the wheel, or the microprocessor chip, so huge business opportunities exist for tech companies who can take advantage of the increasing pressure to move management of the energy sector into the cloud.

Apple have issued a casting call this week for their new reality TV show Planet of the Apps, which searches for the “next great app,” providing developers with the necessary funding and priority access to Apple’s app store, the Guardian reported on Wednesday. Contestants must be above 18 years of age, with filming to start this year and running into early 2017. Producers on the show include musician Will.i.am, Ben Silverman and Howard T Owen of Propagate Content. Apple, however, is adamant on not getting into TV or film production, despite being “in a strong position to do so” as iTunes is one of the world’s largest content distribution platforms, with 800 mn registered users.

The music industry’s very public derision of YouTube may just all be noise after all, according to Bloomberg Gadfly’s Leila Abboud. A number of industry insiders have publicly called on YouTube to enforce legal reforms to help end its reliance on Safe Harbor provisions that protect it from liability when users upload copyrighted content to the site. The industry is joined by the likes of other streaming websites such as Spotify, which pay royalties for every song heard, decried the YouTube free music model as being bad for the industry as a whole. But thanks to music business researcher Mark Mulligen’s report on Youtube’s music economics, the industry’s arguments don’t appear to hold water. According to his data between 70-80% of popular music videos on the site are actually uploaded by the record labels themselves, while a mere 2% of YouTube music videos are unofficial. Furthermore, record labels get a share of the ad revenues at a time when music distribution on YouTube is growing, making the site a godsend from a promotional perspective. So the next time you hear Taylor Swift moan and groan about royalties from her private jet, just remind yourselves that she wouldn’t be where she is today, without 1.7 bn viewers checking out her Blank Space video for free.

Coding their way out of limbo: Refugees in Europe are finding their stride in foreign societies by learning to code, thanks to a number of social-minded coding schools that hope to provide a means of integrating refugees in these countries where they are increasingly being seen as a burden. Bloomberg Technology’s human interest piece takes a look into how the tech industry has now keenly taken to developing potential talent fleeing the war-torn Middle East. But the most sustainable solution may be tech literacy as a means of integration: So far the systems is far from perfect, as graduates from these academies struggle to find employment beyond the unpaid internships. But by their own account, many asylum-seekers just appreciate the chance to go out and do something productive beyond sitting in the depressing purgatory of a camp, dwelling on their struggles day-in and day-out.

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

• Ground crew on bikes follow Solar Impulse 2 in as it lands at Cairo International Airport. (Financial Times, photo)
• Netanyahu and Shoukry take in the Euro 2016 final together, tweeted by the Israeli PM’s spokesman for Arab media. (Twitter, photos)
• How much more will we be paying for electricity? (Al-Mal)
• Infographic on why Reddit users say they avoid visiting some countries (image)
• How Egyptians say goodbye to friends when we emigrate. (Youtube, parody, profanity)
• Video highlights of Solar Impulse 2’s flight from Seville to Cairo. (Youtube)

Lawyers have filed a USD 1 bn lawsuit against Facebook on behalf of the families of four Americans killed and one wounded in Israel, saying the company platform for Palestinian militant group Hamas to plot the attacks, Bloomberg reported on Monday. Hamas has responded by claiming the suit is evidence of America’s fight against freedom of the press. (Yes, Hamas wrapping itself in the language of human freedoms. How are those extrajudicial killings going over there, Hamas?) Bloomberg’s Paul Barrett reckons that a legal obstacles stand in the way of the suit, including constitutional protections on freedom of speech and the “safe harbor provision of the Communications Decency Act” that protects service providers from the legal liability for what their users say.