📘 This Week I Learnt Edition 12
June 4th - June 11th 2021
Hello👋🏻
Welcome to the “This Week I Learnt” (TWIL) Newsletter. Hope you’re doing well.
I’ve got some interesting stories that I came across this week. Hope you enjoy it!
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Sit back, relax and read on 📚
🍝 Al dente alla sostenibile
Pardon my Italian. CMU researchers are trying to make your Pasta more sustainable. A perfectly packed box of Macaroni is 67% air. Inspired by the IKEA-esque flat-packed design from the furniture industry, the CMU scientists hope to bring a more sustainable form of packaging, storage, and transportation to pasta. Optimise everything amirite?
🔑 Dearly Departed, Where’s the Private Key
Crypto investors are beginning to think about the afterlife of their digital assets. Digital assets like Bitcoin don’t have a central regulatory authority. Nearly ~20% or $140B worth of bitcoins are “lost,” meaning the wallets containing them haven’t been accessed in 5+ years. A growing industry solving for private key inheritance is now booming.
🎮 The quasi-illegal million $ video game cheat industry
Cheating is a constant topic of conversation among players in games like PUBG, Overwatch, and CoD. Cheats for those games are essentially hacks that allow cheaters to boost performance. One of the groups part of this industry "Chicken Drumstick" made more than $70 Million selling cheats for PUBG Mobile. They make the chicken and eat it too
📚 The Study Web Industry
LoFi, Aesthetic vibes, Pomodoros? Study Web is a vast, interconnected network of study-focused content and gathering spaces for students that spans platforms, disciplines, and age groups. Students seeking motivation, inspiration, focus, and support watch live streams of a real person at their desk, studying on Discord, Reddit, Twitch and YouTube
👗 Second-Hand Fashion, First-Hand Moolah
Etsy, the handmade crafts/e-commerce company announced its acquisition of 2nd Hand fashion platform DePop for $1.6B, this week. The Depop acquisition gives Etsy a seat on a larger macro trend: secondhand clothing. The total market for secondhand clothes is expected to reach $64B by 2024, rocketing from $28B in 2019!
💪 Tata Digital Flexes its Muscles
The Tata play into becoming a super app got a shot in the arm. Tata Digital signed a strategic deal to invest up to $75 million in Curefit, India’s most popular health and fitness platform. They also confirmed that Curefit's founder Mukesh Bansal is going to be joining Tata Digital as its president. BigBasket, 1mg and now this. Things are heating up!
💼 Democratising access to Disclosures
With a growing influx of retail investors into the stock markets, the legacy way of communicating to shareholders is passé. There is a growing trend of management engaging with their retail base directly. Like the AMC CEO appearing on a YouTuber’s show. Pretty soon will we see CXOs on Clubhouse spaces, Twitter and Reddit AMAs? Time will tell.
My curated reading List for the Week: 📚📚📚
The Ken on Meme Stocks and the rise of direct retail investor engagement
New York Times on using Virtual Reality to simulate trauma to combat PTSD
Creative Strategies on an alternate to the Net Promoter Score(NPS) -> The Delight Scale
The Ken on Wicked Environmental Problems of to the New Normal of Work
Scientific American on the correlation of Pupil Size and Cognitive Ability
That’s all for today! As always lookout for the next issue on Friday!
Until then. Stay safe. See you soon 👋🏻
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