Top articles of the week | June 15

June 15, 2019

Every week, we put together a list of our top 5 articles of the past week. Happy reading!

The Next Big Phones Could Bring a Billion People Online Bloomberg (reading time: 7 minutes)

It has been shown that by increasing a developing country’s mobile internet use by 10% correlates with an average 2 percentage-point increase in gross domestic product. This is why African countries are pushing for internet adoption. Leading the charge is a mobile phone company innovating with a low-end phone.

Shopify’s State of Ecommerce Shopify (reading time: 10 minutes)

Canada’s leading tech company, Shopify, released its first State of Ecommerce report this month. The data from the report is culled from its global platform. If you are interested in ecommerce, I highly recommend going through this insightful report.

People Don’t Actually Know Themselves Very Well Adam Grant, The Atlantic (reading time: 10 minutes)

We don’t tend to cover psychology in this newsletter but I could not pass up this article in the Atlantic. Having self-awareness as a leader is an incredibly important asset, yet people to overestimate their abilities more so than their peers. There are some useful tidbits of advice on how to recognize this and what do about it.

News Publishers Go To War With the Internet — and We All Lose Jeff Jarvis (reading time: 7 minutes)

Jeff Jarvis is my favourite author on media strategy. In his latest piece, he discusses how publishers are still coming to terms with the change that the internet has wrought on their business models. The moral panic needs to set aside for practical solutions from both sides of the table, media and technology.

Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Kleiner Perkins (reading time: 30 minutes)

Just in case you missed it, here is this year’s internet trends by Mary Meeker. Yes, it is long at over 300 slides. The trends, facts and insights are always great. My favourite section starts on slide 122 about improving customer experiences (collect data, manage connections and optimize data).