Chaos & Amazement #2337 TikTok Shops, China’s Digital Yuan, and Emojis as a Universal Language
Chaos & Amazement #2337 TikTok Shops, China’s Digital Yuan, and Emojis as a Universal Language
Welcome to the newest edition of Chaos & Amazement! In this issue, get ready for a whirlwind of tech insights, intriguing trends, and a glimpse into the future.
Tech News
Biggest Tech News was of course the Apple Event, which basically only talked about the new iPhone and Apple Watch - not the Apple Vision Pro, which is supposed to be available “early next year”.
Good news: the USB-C ecosystem is booming! Bad news: you'll still need those dongles for a while. Apple’s new USB-C iPhone cables and dongles are predictably expensive
shop.tiktok.com is now available in the U.S., offering shoppable videos and livestream shopping. This move aims to connect brands, merchants, and creators with users. The rollout has faced some challenges, including concerns about data privacy and product authenticity.
CapCut, ByteDance's video app, hits $100M spend milestone, 490M global users, strong growth in new markets, and top Video Editing app status. The Video Editing App Cements Top Position in the Photo & Video Vertical
China's digital yuan strategy is advancing as efforts to standardize QR codes gain momentum. The goal: widespread e-CNY adoption across various retail scenarios.
Alipay, WeChat Pay urged to unify QR codes by China’s digital yuan chief
New Stripe report reveals significant growth in the education sector of the creator economy. Revenue surged by 120% in the last two years, making it the leading niche. Projections show the online course market is set to reach $319 billion by 2029. The creator economy goes global
Some #InfluencerMarketing pricing insights from https://get.impact.com/how-much-influencers-charge-blog/
Instagram: $10 per 1k followers.
TikTok: $5 to $2.5k per post.
YouTube: $20 per 1k subscribers.
Twitter: $2 per 1k followers.
Blog: $60 per 1k unique visitors.
Fresh AI
Just read about the NYPD spending millions on Voyager Labs' AI tech that can monitor social media and predict future crimes. Sounds a lot like Minority Report! NYC police have spent millions on a tech company that claims it can use AI to monitor social media...
From my blog
The Future is Now: How The Cable Guy Predicted the Digital Age https://bnox.be/2023/09/the-future-is-now-how-cable-guy.html
What surprises me most in these 1996 predictions is how Mortal Kombat is still the best-selling fighting game franchise worldwide and one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time.
Typing Monkeys and Fake Universes: @Kurz_Gesagt's "Are You A Dream Of The Universe?" https://bnox.be/2023/09/typing-monkeys-and-fake-universes.html
Emoji: The Universal Language We All Speak https://bnox.be/2023/09/emoji-universal-language-we-all-speak.html. Here’s a rendering of the new emoji, the Phoenix, I made with Google’s Emoji Kitchen:
Weird and Wonderful
On the Subreddit Intentionally bad User Interfaces, https://www.reddit.com/r/badUIbattles/ engineers are competing who creates the worst UI. Some spectacular examples in this hilarious Twitter thread: https://x.com/volodarik/status/1657755496852475906?s=20
We mentioned this website when it first was launched. It’s been alive for 40 months, 3 days, 2 hours, 42 minutes, and 2 seconds.
A daily update matches hours and minutes on both words and numerals from recent headlines from English-language news sources. a clock where the time is made of news headlines
