Weekend Reading
A summary of this week’s best articles. Follow us on Twitter (@INTRINSICINV) for similar ongoing posts and shares.
China’s Content Crackdown Forces Western Media Concessions (Lilian Lin, @LilianLinyigu, WSJ)
Media companies, such as Disney are finding it difficult to distribute their content in China. They created Disney Life, a streaming service, and partnered with Alibaba to distribute their content. It was later cancelled due to the ban on foreign brands distributing content in China. Discovery is one of the few media companies that has managed to navigate this complicated area. They’ve partnered with Wasu Digital TV Media Group and renamed the channel to Qui Suo (meaning Quest in Chinese). They’re driving demand for their content and making their brand known by taking a page from Disney’s book by opening adventure park in Hangzhou.
How a GPS Glitch Can Change the Taste of Your Salad (Geoff Manaugh, @bldgblog, The Atlantic)
The US originally developed the GPS system for military use. Shortly after, the Russians developed their own version “GLObal NAvigation Satellite System, or GLONASS.” The application of these systems have since been adopted across many industries and products. It’s become so common that even beet farmers are using it to help automate some of the planting and growing process. The accuracy of these systems and sensors, even for a beet farmer, is greatly relied upon.
Ensuring Our Donated Goods Hurt Less And Help More (Leila de Bruyne, Forbes)
While donating material items is an honorable objective, they can sometimes not have the desired impact. A great example of this, is the donation boxes in library parking lots. “According to Angie, the majority of those bins sell your donated clothes to wholesale vendors who then ship them to countries like Kenya where they are resold for profit.” Angie Janssen, like many people, had items she wanted to donate and was sure that there was someone in the area that needed that item, but she had no way of connecting with that person or organization, so she founded Donii. It’s an online platform (still under development) that connects donated goods with the people that need them most.
Google opens a Research Center in Europe (Sarah Perez, @sarahintampa, TechCrunch)
The battle for AI supremacy continues. Google bought DeepMind in 2014 to help compete against other major technology companies as they try to use deep understanding to gain a competitive advantage. This continues with the “opening [of] a dedicated machine learning research center in Europe.” The team in this new office in Zurich is not new to this field. They developed Google’s conversational engine that runs Google’s Allo.
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