Welcome to the fiftieth edition of this newsletter, in which I intended to look back, pontificate and stare into the distance, all inspired by Dutch comedians Koot and Bie classic line: "But enough about myself, what do you think of my hair? But then an ayatollah pushed a few buttons, forcing even the announcement of my new podcast to give way to the impact of world news. Because if there's one thing I excel at, it's modesty.
Originally I wanted to spend this 50th edition mostly on the final breakthrough of crypto, which is slightly ironic because after the Iranian attack on Israel, Bitcoin and Ethereum, in particular, are experiencing the biggest drop in a year.
Iron Dome saves markets
In the above price chart of the last five days, the cryptos' decline is especially notable because Microsoft stock and the S&P 500, which I included for comparison, have been stationary since Friday. Chances are that when Wall Street opens tomorrow, the market will be over the initial shock and the equity markets will fall less than the crypto market this weekend. Also because Israel's Iron Dome is holding up well, as Wired explains.
If Iran's leaders wanted to hit the detested West harder, they should have attacked on a day when Wall Street was open. Now Bitcoin and Ethereum in particular are getting the brunt of it, with all the altcoins in their wake.
For those who want to follow the crypto market at a glance, the top 100 biggest risers and fallers is always handy. In this, one can distinguish between the "hit list" within the top 100 largest cryptos measured by market cap; or for the real daredevils, the overview of all coins. It is not unusual to see in it, like today, a riser of 32951% (this is not a typo) like Policy or a fall of 98% like NTD is experiencing.
Except that those kinds of tokens have nothing to do with investing or innovation, so don't expect any attention to the latest memecoins or other geeky stuff here. Those are the crypto versions of roulette or slot machines, only with even worse odds. Blockchain technology offers special opportunities, especially when combined with a decentralized structure such as Bitcoin, unfortunately those aspects tend to be underexposed because of all the nonsense in crypto.
New: Crypto Spotlight 9
Original idea: a podcast
There are seemingly between three and five million podcasts in the world, so high time to add one. No fear of me rehashing my drivel in audio form: I'm not doing this alone. I'll be co-creating the podcast with a successful entrepreneur who has made his mark in online media and e-commerce.
The nice thing is that he started his startup while he was still a student, but after selling his company decided to join a very successful e-commerce company first and later work in the corporate world to broaden his experience. This unique combination offers a special perspective on the technology of today and tomorrow.
My co-presenter also happens to be an expert on cryptocurrencies and author of a leading work on the subject. His expertise allows him to make analyses and predictions, to which we are going to hold him to.
We want to make a weekly effort to analyze tech news and look a little beyond the delusions of the day. Don't expect reflections on the number of megapixels on the new iPhone or the clock speed of an Nvidia GPU. What we want to discuss is: how do Microsoft and Google react when Amazon makes its AWS even more attractive to AI startups? And what does that mean for you if you work at a startup, or indeed at a large corporate, and see all this technology coming your way?
Please be warned
The very fact that we make a newsletter and a podcast about technology and innovation shows that we have the pretense of being able to proclaim something meaningful about it. But it's more fun to make that pretense measurable.
So we are each going to build an investment portfolio, which will consist of a mix of tech stocks and crypto currencies. (Although one of us will be cowardly enough, or wise enough, to include an index fund.) Either way, we're going to keep score weekly.
We're going to try to get smarter together. Very happy to get suggestions, comments and questions from readers and listeners to respond to. But in any case, what we're not going to do is give tips or advice. Please remember this motto: "read the newsletter and listen to the podcast, but never listen to us."
The lightning quick reaction of the markets to developments in the Middle East this weekend does underscore the need for us to offer some sort of alert function as well. Think of a message when one of us adjusts his investment portfolio because he expects a price change of more than ten percent. But again; that's not investment advice then.
Do you have any tips, advice or warnings? I'd love to hear it via email or in a comment on LinkedIn and Medium, where this newsletter appears in English.
Special links
Some noteworthy items from this week:
AI researcher Dr. Andrew Ng joins Amazon's SB, replacing ex-MTV CEO Judy McGrath. It underscores that the AI war has become primarily a battle for top talent, after Microsoft recently brought in former Google DeepMind founder Mustafa Suleyman. This makes Google the loser of the week right away, as it is notable that both ex-Googlers are now with AI competitors Amazon and Microsoft.
In addition, it shows that Amazon places little value on someone with a media and marketing resume like McGrath, preferring instead to bring in top technical talent. The nerds are winning the war over the hip media kids.
Ng previously co-founded the Google Brain project and was chief technologist at Chinese Internet giant Baidu. His newsletter The Batch is highly recommended, and his presentations at TED and Stanford are also engaging for anyone interested in the potential impact of AI on society.
Ng has a gift for explaining complex topics like AI in a clear and understandable way. At his presentation last year in Singapore, I took pictures of almost every slide, no matter how ugly they were and in far too small font, because Ng knows how to visualize a lot of information in a very concise manner.
'For $699 and $24 a month, this wearable computer promises to free you from your smartphone. There’s only one problem: it just doesn’t work.'
The Verge wrote a heartfelt but scathing review of the AI pin I wrote about in November:
'The whole presentation video is interesting to watch, but perhaps not for the reasons the founders hope. First of all, I don't understand why you would buy a $699 device that can do little more than a smartphone, which everyone always carries with them and is not going to be replaced with an AI pin. To live stream with then, from your chest? That's mostly fun for self-loving mountain bikers and Hamas members.'
And now it turns out that thing doesn't even work, for seven hundred dollars plus monthly subscription. I also still don't believe in smart glasses like Meta's. I already have glasses and would prefer to get rid of them! I'd prefer tech companies to make my watch smarter, as a possible replacement for the smartphone.
Ken Kantzer is CTO of startup Truss and shared interesting experiences from working with ChatGPT on a large scale. One conclusion stood out, when testing all kinds of prompts: "Why is this crazy? Well, it’s crazy that GPT’s quality and generalization can improve when you’re more vague – this is a quintessential marker of higher-order delegation / thinking." Apparently, vague is good in AI.
"People are all meant to get along. Online text-only media have given us the delusion that people can't get along, but actually everyone gets along."
Thus Naval Ravikant, founder of Angellist, who started Airchat along with Tinder's Brian Norgard.
I haven't been able to try it out yet, but would love to hear reactions from people who are already Airchatting. I'm not a fan of the name, but anything is better than Air X or X Air.
In 1991, as a student internship, I wrote a business plan to start a weekly sports magazine called... Sportweek. Hey, you got it or you don't. Only one publisher in the Netherlands was remotely interested: Maarten van den Biggelaar, previously founder of popular Amsterdam student nightclub Dansen bij Jansen and founder of the business magazine Quote, a more elitist version of Fortune. After months of visiting media buyers and advertising agencies, it was clear: there was zero interest.
Disillusioned, I left to do a student exchange program in San Francisco, where I first stumbled on the Internet. Forget Philips, IBM or TNO: back in the Netherlands, Van den Biggelaar was the only one who recognized that the Internet would become a mass medium, and he became our first investor in Planet Internet, which became the biggest internet service provider and most popular website in the country - well, until this Google thing started, but by that time I had left.
High-speed trains are an excellent alternative to short-haul air travel; faster, cheaper and more sustainable. I wouldn't bet against him and think Van den Biggelaar is on the right track with this train plan - please excuse the pun, I couldn't resist. Oh, and Sportweek: a few journalists started a magazine with that name a few years later, apparently without first asking the advertising world about its appetite. It quickly went belly up.
Within two days, this video has already been viewed nearly five million times: comedian Conan O'Brien was a guest on the popular YouTube series Hot Ones, in which host Sean Evans and a guest eat chicken wings with increasingly hot sauces.
The trick lies in the combination of Evans' stunningly good preparation, with the utter despair of his guests who find it hard to keep up their PR talk under the sweat and pain attacks. It's sort of a mirrored version of waterboarding.
At least, until O'Brien was a guest Friday and even decided to drink from the hottest sauce bottles. Asked about his familiarity with spicy food, O'Brien replied in advance:
"I grew up in an Irish-Catholic family in Boston. I never saw herbs until I was about 52 years old."
Conan O'Brien
These are the 19 best episodes of Hot Ones: featuring Shaquille O'Neal, Margot Robbie, Gordon Ramsay and Billie Eilish, among others.
In conclusion
Music festival Coachella streams live from many stages from the California desert. Today is the final day with Doja Cat, among others. Enjoy!