How to see markets beyond the curve, catch weak signals, and anticipate turnarounds to leverage change and disruptions
Hot Takes
Working on long-term trends is obviously getting tricky since a few months ago, and I guess I don't have to explain why anymore. Whether some key events will have long-term negative or positive impacts, businesses and innovators need some level of stability to invest in the future. Knowing
Weak Signals
If you've been on any social media recently, you've probably been hit by one of these videos initially pushed through TikTok. The script is always the same: a Chinese manufacturer demonstrating how they carefully craft high-end luxury bags with imported leather, high skills, and very aggressive
Weak Signals
Elon Musk's surprise move of merging xAI with X (ex-Twitter) is a process that should have required at least four independent parties: each company and their respective investment banks. Here, the deal only involved Elon agreeing with Elon and Morgan Stanley agreeing with Morgan Stanley. This ensures that
Weak Signals
Back in September 2022, I was reporting on digital and AI: (...) this Friday, I'd suggest we get some fresh air and a dose of solid optimism about what digital can achieve. How? Remembering that artificial intelligence cracked one of the most complex problems of modern biology this year:
Weak Signals
While the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) has supported national startups with $5.5 billion since 2015 to try and reboot this historically sluggish sector, their current outputs have been anything but satisfying. And if a few tech startups like Anduril Industries have thrived, Pentagon bureaucracy still ends up
Weak Signals
The term "involution" has recently appeared more and more in China. At the core of the issue is China's manufacturing overcapacity issue, which has built over two decades of global trading with the West, and how it developed in a flood of cheap goods that benefit
Weak Signals
Elon Musk just announced he plans to counter cheaper competition from China with a $25,000 electric car. To get there, he wants to completely overhaul the century-old manufacturing logic pioneered by Henry Ford, where the car moves along an assembly line. Instead, he's envisioning an unboxed approach
AI
Zach Seward (editorial director of AI initiatives at The New York Times) just gave a a cogent and educated deep-dive on how artificial intelligence has been (mostly) ill-used by media up to now, and (in a few cases) remarkably well. AI news that’s fit to printHow news organizations are
AI
Kayak, the travel booking aggregator app, has been offering a filter for a few months now that allows you to include or exclude certain planes from your travel research. This means that a great number of customers have been more than happy to filter out the Boeing 737 Max. Some
Toolbox
I discovered a long, fantastically written, and deep article from 2019 on Design Thinking and the story of IDEO from x in 2019. At this point, you're probably bored to death by these discussions, and the few of you still using this methodology have understood its limits and
Weak Signals
In the world of luxury hospitality, the bar for how much a night costs keeps getting higher. Not long ago, dropping $1,000 for a night's stay seemed excessive, even for the ultra-wealthy. But today, that's barely enough to get your foot in the door at
Technology
Most multinationals are rushing to implement AI-powered chatbots as the simplest way to demonstrate they're doing something about AI. And that's fair, as we all recently discovered the power of a fluid (yet automated) conversation with an AI agent in one way or another. What we