Edouard Chazal

The Fantastic Apple Car

Jean-Louis Gassée, former executive at Apple Computer, isn’t a believer :

Apple’s life today is relatively simple. It sells small devices that are easily transported back to the point of sale for service if needed. No brake lines to flush, no heavy and expensive batteries and cooling systems, no overseeing the installation and maintenance of home and public chargers. And consider the trouble Tesla faces with entrenched auto dealers who oppose Tesla selling cars directly in some states. Apple doesn’t need these headaches.

→ Monday Note

Risky Business

Wishing all the best to the next endeavors.

David Sparks :

My other option was to leave my regular paycheck and health benefits behind and jump into the chaos that ensues from running a smaller, solo attorney law practice and (in my case) a book & video publishing business. I could serve just my clients with my own, smaller law practice and do things a bit more on my terms.

→ Mac Sparky

The Anti-Information Age

Myself, I sometimes think that I’d gladly censor what’s coming out from the tubes — what you get access to can be so depressing and conflicting with our own beliefs.

No place shows the contradictions of this contest on as grand a scale as China does. The country with the most Internet users and the fastest-growing connected population is also the world’s most ambitious censor. Of the 3 billion Internet users on the planet, 20 percent live in China (10 percent live in the U.S.). The government maintains the “Great Firewall” to block unacceptable content, including foreign news sites. An estimated 2 million censors police the Internet and the activities of users. Yet a 2014 BBC poll found that 76 percent of Chinese reported feeling free from government surveillance. This was the highest rate of the 17 countries surveyed.

→ The Atlantic

The Epidemic of Facelessness

The Gyges effect :

When the police come to the doors of the young men and women who send notes telling strangers that they want to rape them, they and their parents are almost always shocked, genuinely surprised that anyone would take what they said seriously, that anyone would take anything said online seriously. There is a vast dissonance between virtual communication and an actual police officer at the door. It is a dissonance we are all running up against more and more, the dissonance between the world of faces and the world without faces. And the world without faces is coming to dominate.

→ The New York Times

The NYTimes Could Be Worth $19bn Instead Of $2bn

Frédéric Filloux :

Through this lens, if Wall Street could assign to The New York Times the ratio Silicon Valley grants BuzzFeed (8.5 instead of a paltry 1.4), the Times would be worth about $19bn instead of the current $2.2bn.

Again, there is no doubt that Wall Street would respond enthusiastically to a major shrinkage of NYTCo’s print operations; but regardless of the drag caused by the newspaper itself, the valuation gap is absurdly wide when considering that 75% of BuzzFeed traffic is actually controlled by Facebook, certainly not the most reliably unselfish partner.

While BuzzFeed relies on ridiculous headlines and traffic from Facebook, investors are more inclined to value BuzzFeed way higher than the Times because of the potential it can generate in the future.

On the other hand, the Times is a safe-house, which proved to be realistic 5-7 years ago by transitioning into a successful digital brand. So all in all, the growth of Times is less tangible than a relatively new website. That’s precisely why there’s such a gap between the two. Though to be perfectly realistic, considering that one is kinda overvalued and the other one undervalued (in Silicon Valley standard) these two ratios should adjust and get closer together.

→ Monday Note