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Learning in Public: 10/25/21
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Learning in Public: 10/25/21

Bits and bytes

Bill Ferrell
Oct 25, 2021
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Counting people

The devil is always in the details. Interesting thread:

  1. We don’t have an accurate population count both at a local and national level - in the US nor really in any country.

  2. When you look at vax coverage for a specific area — the percentage may not have significant meaning.

Twitter avatar for @jburnmurdochJohn Burn-Murdoch @jburnmurdoch
In Miami-Dade, vax coverage among over-65s exceeds 100% in *more than half of all zipcodes*, in some cases passing 200%. This is the "snowbird" effect: thousands of older folks went south to Miami in winter, got jabbed, then returned north
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October 11th 2021

259 Retweets994 Likes
Twitter avatar for @jburnmurdochJohn Burn-Murdoch @jburnmurdoch
FL had a brutal wave, setting records for deaths. It looked much more like Georgia than Maryland, whose Delta wave has been much more muted.
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October 11th 2021

62 Retweets469 Likes

The strategic value of Anchorage

Twitter avatar for @AeroDorkAeroDork @AeroDork
Flight times from Anchorage, where huge amounts of air freight transit.
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October 13th 2021

65 Retweets310 Likes

The aerial proximity of Anchorage to the world.


Sky Scans

Hit play on the first video in the tweet below.

Twitter avatar for @lemonodorJohn Wiseman @lemonodor
I think N300WQ was doing bathymetric LIDAR scans along the coast of Los Angeles last night. A couple nights before someone took this video of it doing the same thing in San Diego.

Advisory Circular LA @SkyCirclesLA

N300WQ is circling over Los Angeles County at 1375 feet, speed 169 MPH, squawking 0207, 1.63 miles from King Harbor Yacht Club #N300WQ https://t.co/iid9oD0ExX https://t.co/znJhRm5AF1

October 11th 2021

213 Retweets726 Likes

I love it for the science and the data gathering.


Flight Simulators for Management Education

"The Beer Game"

I’m hoping to play the beer game in the next couple of weeks. What other business “flight simulators” do you know? I’d love a list to play both for fun and at the office.

Read the details of the game and the takeaways here: http://web.mit.edu/jsterman/www/SDG/beergame.html


Hyper-Local 15 Minute Delivery and Dark Stores

Turner’s Blog
Jokr and Personalized Instant Commerce
In April of 2021, Ralf Wenzel and his team launched JOKR, a global platform for instant grocery and retail delivery at a hyper local scale. Within six months, the company operated in seven countries and its annualized revenue run-rate surpassed $100 million, showing no signs of slowing down…
Read more
7 months ago · 18 likes · 8 comments · Turner Novak

This is a detailed bull case for Jokr, one of the many 15-minute delivery services operating globally — and in the USA mostly present in NYC. These companies have raised significant capital and I’m fascinated to see if they are able to become viable businesses. Will we see a WebVan 2.0 OR something more akin to an Uber — a business that CAN operate profitably in certain markets — but that I believe (Uber) still operates at a significant loss. There are so many of these new 15-minute delivery services we will have to see significant consolidation. I’m mostly including this so that in a year’s time we can revisit and learn something.

One tidbit from the above:

CPG brands spend $500 billion on trade promotions every year. On average, manufacturers spend between 11-27% of their revenue on trade promotions,

Source: https://www.repsly.com/blog/the-amount-of-money-you-could-be-losing-to-poor-promotion-execution

So here again, as with Instacart and soon DoorDash, is the real business Advertising?


Digging out from the container backlog

Twitter avatar for @typesfastRyan Petersen @typesfast
Last night Flexport brought a taco truck to the Port of Long Beach as a big thank you to the ILWU laborers there working like crazy to clear this container backlog. A thread on what we learned! /1
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October 20th 2021

85 Retweets522 Likes
  • Flexport continues to be an impressive and interesting company

  • Taco truck idea - such a great, low-cost way to create goodwill

  • Lots of interesting tidbits on the situation at the ports. For all the soundbites and articles about ships stuck outside the ports — interesting to learn where the real bottlenecks lie.

Read this second thread for more insight into the bottleneck

Twitter avatar for @typesfastRyan Petersen @typesfast
It seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals. The terminals are simply overflowing with containers, which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either from ships or land. It’s a true traffic jam.

October 22nd 2021

934 Retweets4,938 Likes

and how to re-prioritize such that the most capital intensive part of the operation line is the bottleneck

Twitter avatar for @typesfastRyan Petersen @typesfast
When you're designing an operation you must choose your bottleneck. If the bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn't choose it, you aren't running an operation. It's running you.

October 22nd 2021

857 Retweets6,471 Likes

Streamer Home Shopping Network - China leading the way

Twitter avatar for @danqing_liuDan Liu ✦ lu.ma @danqing_liu
Two Chinese streamers sold 18 billion RMB (about $3B) worth of goods in a half-day livestream yesterday. 🤯🤯🤯 That's almost as much as Twitter's annual revenue ($3.72B).

October 21st 2021

1,359 Retweets5,705 Likes
  • Who: 2 Streamers in China that review and sell products in live streams.

  • What:

    • They sell everyday products (skincare, make-up)

    • Daily ~20M people tune in to watch their stream (This big sale a few days ago 200M showed up! Why? I think because it is the start of the big shopping week which is semi-equivalent to post-Thanksgiving shopping in the US)

    • They are popular because they are trusted — maybe equivalent to The WireCutter in the US.

  • Click the tweet above and read the whole thread. The bit they call out about how the internet and e-commerce are now so large it is impossible to know what is the best product or how well a specific product does its job. This creates the need for curation and shows the value these streamers bring in reviewing everyday products and in some sense negotiating an incredible deal for their customers (because they can push so much volume). There is a degree of Costco in here in so far as the Streamers aren’t trying to sell products with high mark-up — rather they win by helping users find great deals — and the OEMs love the extreme volume and prestige of being associated with the trusted streamer.


FUN

Twitter avatar for @juanbuisjuan @juanbuis
students are starting to steal each other's notes with iOS 15 and it's... kind of genius

October 14th 2021

16,114 Retweets87,076 Likes
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