Collection of My Best LinkedIn Articles

BYJU’S ACQUIRES AAKASH COACHING:

Byju's bought Aakash coaching for Rs 7300 crore yesterday and frankly, I'm scared for the future of Indian education. I'm afraid that Byju's and Unacademy will establish a monopoly in the entire Indian education market, not just the online education space. Last year, both these companies bought many online learning platforms like CodeChef, prepladder, mastree, etc. Although many people said these 2 companies could establish a monopoly, I wasn't much concerned. There were many competitors in the education market, and winning over them seemed difficult. Examples-
Traditional coaching institutes like Aakash, non-profit orgs like Khan Academy, and emerging players like Kalpit Veerwal's AcadBoost and AMAN DHATTARWAL's ApniKaksha. But yesterday's acquisition brings them closer to a monopoly in the entire education market. Why is such a monopoly bad for the market? Because it suppresses market competition. Once they get a monopoly, most of the new players will be crushed or acquired by these 2 companies. This will make it difficult for small players like Apni Kaksha or AcadBoost to acquire market share. Students won't have any alternatives, so Byju's/Unacademy can charge whatever they want. This will be bad for the students.

IS ELON MUSK AN INFLUENCER NOW?

After WhatsApp's new privacy policy was announced, Twitter went on fire. Various alternatives to WhatsApp gained instant popularity on Twitter. Among these alternatives was the app Signal. It is a super-secure and private messaging app. Then, the king of Twitter- Lord Elon himself gave his endorsement to the Signal app. At 6:26 PM, Elon Musk tweeted "Use Signal". Within 5 hours, Signal's servers became overloaded due to the huge number of people trying to sign-in. And today, Signal became the No.1 messaging app on App Store in India. Just think of Elon Musk's brand power- one tweet by him was enough to send this (relatively)unknown app to the No.1 position. Although the power of his tweets shouldn't surprise us. In the past, almost every tweet by him has become a news article. Every tweet by him is analyzed and debated. Some tweets are praised, other tweets face huge backlash. His personality, his tweets, his social media followers- all these have made "Elon Musk" into a brand. This represents a new breed of entrepreneurs- entrepreneurs who have a personal brand. Influencer entrepreneurs.

Should we start calling Elon Musk an "influencer" now?

AMAZON IS BUYING 100 BOEING JETS!!

When I read the headline "Amazon buys 11 Boeing jets", my reaction was- ok this is normal. Then I read the next line- "They plan to buy 85 more by the year-end." That's when I realized this was something much bigger. Naturally, the first question here is- Why does Amazon need so many planes? In the past, Amazon has only rented planes, never bought them. But due to the bad condition of the airlines, Amazon must have bought these planes at a huge discount from them. Buying the planes now would be cheaper than renting them. This makes sense.
But there is a second reason also. Amazon is becoming too big to handle for its delivery partners. Last year during the holiday season, the delivery partners were overwhelmed by the huge amount of orders coming from Amazon. This led to many shipping delays, clearly unacceptable for Amazon. So Amazon is slowly forming its own delivery network so that it doesn't have to depend upon outside partners. For several years, they have been testing delivery drones in many countries. Last year, the company acquired many malls in America and converted them to warehouses. This brings the products much closer to consumers, so faster delivery.

WHATSAPP’S PRIVACY POLICY

Yesterday, WhatsApp took out front-page ads across every Indian newspaper to clarify its privacy policy. Seems that the shift to Telegram and Signal is more serious than we thought, and WhatsApp is doing damage control here. To verify whether their newspaper ad was accurate, I thought to read the actual privacy policy. Unfortunately, it was written in the Hebrew language and I couldn't understand a word of it. And that's the main problem- No one has been able to understand the new privacy policy. Even WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton said the new privacy policy is confusing. So I read several news reports to make sure you guys understand this new policy.
First- WhatsApp has been sharing our data with Facebook for a long time, and we didn't even know about it. Facebook already knows your WhatsApp number, your device location, and how often you open WhatsApp. Facebook CANNOT read your WhatsApp messages or your contact list.
The new policy is about WhatsApp business accounts. When you chat with a WhatsApp business account, WhatsApp and Facebook can read your messages and use that for advertising. This is the new policy, I hope you guys understand it now.

THIS STARTUP IDENTIFIED COVID BEFORE W.H.O!!

Exactly one year ago, a Canadian startup identified an unusual disease breaking out in Wuhan. This was 10 days before the WHO even identified COVID19.
What is this miracle startup, and how did they know about COVID before anyone else?
The company is called BlueDot, and it was founded in 2014 by Kamran Khan, a medical professor. The jewel of the company is its AI model, which collects and analyzes data from many online sources. The AI program then uses this data to predict the spread of diseases. And the company's track record is impressive- they successfully predicted the spread of the Ebola virus in 2014 and the Zika virus in 2016. Here's one more example- the AI model used the global airline ticket data to correctly predict that after Wuhan, the coronavirus would spread to Bangkok, Seoul, and Tokyo.
Amazing, isn't it? Let's take a moment to appreciate the significance of this technology. WE CAN PREDICT PANDEMICS NOW!!!!! For me, this is hands down, the most important application of AI. Exactly the positive ending we needed for 2020!!

Talk to me

Send me comments, questions, and suggestions:

Integral🕹

Discussion about this post