// journalist, analyst, futurist, dreamer //
Jason Howell and Mika Sargent invited me on to their show last week Thursday to chat about Hong Kong, technology, and my Bridgefy story.
That story tells how Hong Kong protestors are using technology to communicate while avoiding China’s censorship.
You can catch the episode in video here or as an audio podcast via Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts or Spotify Podcasts or on YouTube (among other places!)
And of course I can just embed the YouTube video right here đ
Apple just announced TV+ and Apple Arcade at its September Apple event. Now, getting all of the companyâs consumer subscription services will cost you around $100/month.
And that doesnât include AppleCare.
Apple, Google, and China are all bound up in the news this morning, thanks to an Apple statement released this morning. A week ago, Google released details of a hack that could essentially own your iPhone, just by visiting a website.
Never mentioned by Google: which websites, where they were, or who they impacted.
But today, Apple provided a big clue that implicates China.
Startup browser maker Brave has filed new evidence with the Irish Data Protection Commission stating that Google has created a GDPR workaround that is sharing the personal data of billions of people to thousands of companies globally.
If upheld, this could cost Google $5.4 billion.
Read this sentence slowly: pre-movie ads at the theater will grow faster than internet advertising next year.
You got that right.
Ads shown for 10-20 minutes to a paying audience waiting for the real show to start will grow faster than the fastest, most modern, most digital advertising ecosystem ever created. The most annoying part of going to a theater is now also the fastest-growing sector in paid marketing.
But this shouldnât be a shock, at least on one hand.
Not because cinema ads are shockingly effective â 8X better than TV, according to one study â and not because more people globally are going to movies than ever before. But it shouldnât be a shock primarily because nothing can grow at huge rates forever.
Internet advertising has just gotten too big to grow at huge multiples.
CMOâs biggest priority in 2019 is getting actionable insights from data. We know this because theyâve told us.
âWith the exponential growth of data over the past decade and into the new year, itâs becoming harder daily to turn information into action,â says SurveyMonkey CMO Leela Srinivasan. âWhile more data has the potential to deliver more meaningful insights, prioritizing an action plan to address it is critical.â
The question, of course, is how.
The big problem for mobile/digital marketers today is way too much data. Exploding channels. And more and more siloed marketing technology tools to âmanageâ it. As we see every day, everything in technology and data is up and to the right:
E-commerce and m-commerce are hard.
Retail in general is challenging, and digital commerce has both giant international competitors like Amazon and Alibaba. Plus, there are hugely successful direct-to-consumer startups like Dollar Shave Club (now owned by Unilever), Casper in the mattress industry, Allbirds in shoes, and Bonobos in clothing.
So how do you scale profitable growth?
A CGO is a growth catalyst who brings together almost every department in a company to stimulate growth, including product development, customer support, sales, and yes â of course â marketing.
But how do they drive growth? And, how different is a company with a chief growth officer than one without?
Hereâs three key differences that our recent survey of 700 companies found. CGO-led organizations are investing much more heavily in:
Mobile marketing is a high-stakes game of cyber warfare, and the fraudsters are winning.
Advertisers will lose as much as $42 billion in 2019 to digital ad fraud, according to Juniper Research. To fight back, Singular has built a team of cyber-security experts with roots in Unit 8200, the elite Israeli intelligence division that has been called âthe foremost technical intelligence agency in the world.â
Today Singular is unveiling the teamâs latest breakthrough: first-in-industry Android Install Validation that is deterministically identifying fake app installs.
How do you communicate when the government censors the internet? With a peer-to-peer mesh broadcasting network that doesn’t use the internet.
That’s exactly what Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters are doing now, thanks to San Fransisco startup Bridgefy’s Bluetooth-based messaging app. The protesters can communicate with each other â and the public â using no persistent managed network.
SK Telecom in South Korea announced today that it has surpassed one million 5G subscribers in just 140 days after launching service. That’s twice as fast as its LTE uptake in 2011.
The big difference with 5G?
People are using 65% more data on 5G than LTE.
Apple Card is launching this morning to every Apple customer in the U.S., the company announced this morning.
With the launch Apple takes one more step away from the old Apple Computer, or even the Apple mobile company that has become of the most valuable companies in the world, and another step towards technology-mediated services.
And now credit is as private as cash.
Amazon Prime Video is now outspending Netflix as the top streaming or over-the-top video advertiser, according to a new study by MediaRadar.
And not just by a little.
State Farm is almost the opposite of a tech startup.
It’s a 100-year-old company with 58,000 employees, 19,000 independent agents, and 84 million customer accounts. State Farm is #36 on the Fortune 500 and has been the #1 insurer in the United States for the last 70 years.
But three years ago, State Farm executives knew they needed a digital transformation of basically Biblical proportions to continue to be relevant in the digital age.
Read this sentence slowly: pre-movie ads at the theater will grow faster than internet advertising next year.
You got that right.
Ads shown for 10-20 minutes to a paying audience waiting for the real show to start will grow faster than the fastest, most modern, most digital advertising ecosystem ever created. The most annoying part of going to a theater is now also the fastest-growing sector in paid marketing.
Clearly, smartphones are the new PCs: global shipments are down for the seventh straight quarter. Globally, smartphone shipments dipped to 360 million in the second quarter of 2019, down 1.2% or 4.3 million devices from the same quarter in 2018.
But Chinese manufacturers like Huawei, Xiaomi, and Vivo bucked the trend.
Most tech companies know about you when you visit their websites or use their apps. Some however, like Facebook, know about you on virtually every important site on the planet … and the majority of top apps as well.
But the European Union just threatened that massive data source.
Facebook was fined $5 billion by the FTC today.
Good thing for Zuckerberg and company that its latest quarter racked up $16.6 billion in revenue.
The fine was a new record for the FTC, almost 2000% more than the next biggest: Equifax. It’s for Facebook’s violation of user privacy in the Cambridge Analytica case and other breaches of privacy agreements with the FTC. But Facebook’s quarterly revenue was also a record for its second quarter at $16.9 billion â and was within a whisker of an all-quarter record.
Almost three-quarters of U.S. retailers fear being outpriced by Amazon, according to a new study of 500 retail executives. That compares to just under half being concerned by traditional brick-and-mortar retailers.
The question is: why aren’t the other 29% worried?
Controversy must be great for business. Face-altering entertainment app FaceApp, which claims rights to your face for the privilege of aging you, changing your look, or making you look younger, is blowing up.
How fast?
Over 500% in just the last six days.
I’m speechless …
Here’s MuckRack’s post about trending news on that day (search for Forbes on that page to find their note) and here’s the page that shows total shares …
Pretty safe to say that with about 3 million views and over a million shares, this is my most popular story of all time.
Everyone’s seen them: friends posting pictures of themselves now, and years in the future.
Viral app FaceApp has been giving people the power to change their facial expressions, looks, and now age for several years. But at the same time, people have been giving FaceApp the power to use their pictures â and names â for any purpose it wishes, for as long as it desires.
Get the full story in my post at Forbes … which has gone viral itself, with more than 700,000 views.
We already know that actionable insights are CMOsâ top priority in 2019. AI is a big way theyâre planning to get there.
One big reason: the need for performance at scale.
One of Singularâs customers, N3twork, tests 50 new videos a week. Another, Yelp, needs to analyze hundreds of campaigns and even more creatives ⌠in real time. Ilyon already had hundreds of millions of app installs, but wanted a massive 98% growth in the last year.
A CGO is a growth catalyst who brings together almost every department in a company to stimulate growth, including product development, customer support, sales, and yes — of course — marketing.
But how do they drive growth? And, how different is a company with a chief growth officer than one without?
Here’s three key differences that our recent survey of 700 companies found. CGO-led organizations are investing much more heavily in:
Amazon’s mid-summer consumer extravaganza is almost over, but the fact that the company has managed to invent its own shopping holiday speaks volumes of its dominant position on top of the retail landscape. Which is probably why Amazon was rated “best” by 21% of American consumers in a mammoth 7,000-person study for the second year in a row.
Meanwhile, Walmart was rated “worst” for the second year in a row.
Get the full story in my post at Forbes …
Zoom just released a software update that removes an open web server that it used to install on Mac users’ computers. The web server was open to malicious attacks which could enable hackers to remotely turn on your webcam and record you in your home or office.
“We are discontinuing the use of a local web server on Mac devices,” Zoom’s release notes for the new version of the software, released today, say. “Following the update, the local web server will be completely removed from the Zoom installation.”
Facebook’s Oculus Quest is a game-changer device that puts us back on track for Ready Player One experiences.
Of course, a full Spielberg’s Ready Player One experience is still in the far future. But now it’s easy to see the path forward, mostly because Oculus Quest has fixed the single biggest problem with VR: the five-minute fix.
Why are you not reaching your maximum level as a marketer?
Your goal as a marketer is to drive your companyâs growth performance. That might be user acquisition. It might be customer retention. It might be share of wallet, revenue, or some other metric that is critical to you.
WHATEVER.
Your goal is to beat the competition. Hereâs ten reasons you fail to win.
This is the eleventh chapter of Insights from the Future, a book Iâm writing about technology, innovation, and people ⌠from the perspective of the future. It is a collaborative exercise, and you are invited to participate.
August 17, 2025
Three Alabama men are in hospital today after a woman opened fire at an electric vehicle charging station in the Walmart parking lot in Bessemer, Alabama. Two are in stable condition while a third remains critical, doctors said.
According to early police reports, the woman was upset by how long the men were taking to charge their Nissan Leaf electric vehicles.
Her own electric car, a Chevy Bolt, was critically low and needed a charge to get home, but the men were still charging their vehicle. An SUV with an internal combustion engine was blocking the second charging station.
âIt happens all the time,â a bystander told local reporters. âThe rule is that you can charge for one hour only, and only while youâre shopping. Those guys were on their third hour, and basically just tailgating and drinking beer until their car was fully charged.â
âWhich doesnât mean it was right to shoot them, of course.â
According to the Pew Research Center, electric charging shootings have jumped 1300% in the last three years. The problem is simple: under-supply and over-demand.
âElectric vehicle sales have spiked 10 times in the last year as gas prices have continued to rise,â Pew analyst Alexandria Justice said today. âThat means that home charger installers canât keep up, and people are forced to charge at public stations.â
With competition increasing, some take longer than the stated allowable charging times, leading to conflicts. In one case, a Tesla pickup truck spent seven hours in a shopping center charging slot, leading frustrated EV owners to take matters into their own hands and vandalize the vehicle.
âWhen you add guns to the mix of impatience, frustration, and range anxiety, bad things happen,â Justice said.â
Police have a suspect in custody. The woman allegedly shot at the tailgating Leaf owners 17 times, hitting all three men multiple times.
Bail has not been set.
Alabama governor Mitch Jones promised to build more EV chargers as quickly as possible, saying that additional level one chargers are needed, which can charge an electric vehicle to full in just 20 minutes.
Iâm writing this book as a collaborative exercise. Many chapters are posted to my Facebook and LinkedIn feeds before going live. If youâd like to participate in critiquing and improving these posts, connect with me there. Alternatively, join my Telegram group here.
CRM vendor Salesforce is releasing new AI-powered shopping experience design tools today, along with updated email marketing tools and new messaging tools that will allow companies to communicate to customers on virtually any messaging channel customers prefer.
The result?
Three times faster development, according to Bobby Amezaga, Salesforce’s senior director of product marketing.