Friday Fives
Friday Fives
A round up of five things that have caught our eye (or ear) this past week.
1. AMAZON H2
Amazon briefly joined Apple this week as a trillion dollar company - but the question on lots of people’s minds is which city will they select as the home for their second HQ? HQ2 would reportedly bring with it 50,000 high-paying jobs and a $5 billion investment in construction. And, according to Amazon, “is expected to create tens of thousands of additional jobs and tens of billions of dollars in additional investment in the surrounding community”.
The very public selection process has been hotly debated since it was announced a year or so ago. Site visits have now been completed, and a shortlist of 19 US and one Canadian city has been made. Speculation is rife on who the front runner will be - with City Lab picking the greater Washington, D.C. region as the most likely. Rumour has it that the “winning” city will be announced by the end of the year.
What we do know is that the naysayers and the supporters will all be watching the impacts of the move closely once the final city is announced and construction is underway.
Read more: "Amazon second headquarters search has become a cultural meme, a year after it began"
2. AI ART ROBOTS
We love some good street art - and this caught our eye recently at Russia’s annual street art festival Stenograffia. Born in the industrial city of Yekaterinburg, this year’s festival featured an AI powered - art making - robot replicating a mid-fourth century Spanish mosaic onto the facade of a building. The AI tech even restored and recreated missing elements of the original mosaic so that it could then transfer a completed, to-scale, replica on the wall.
Read more and have a peek here: “Yekaterinburg’s next big street artist is a robot”
3. PODCAST: WHAT KIND OF IDIOT GETS PHISHED
Are the never ending “what primary school did you go to”, or “what’s the name of your first pet” social media posts doing your head in, and you feel the need to scream at the top of your lungs “they’re trawling for your passwords people!”?
Well before you get too smug and think it won’t happen to you - have a listen to this oldie but goodie on Gimlet Media’s Reply All podcast on phishing.
Listen here: “What kind of idiot gets phished”
4. SLACK GROUPS
We have to admit that we are slack fans, jumping on the bandwagon back when it came out in beta and never looking back. A resounding YAY for no internal emails (... and custom emojis). We also love a good slack community - and were stoked to see this handy list of slack groups by category from the peeps at Standuply.
Some interesting stats:
the number of Slack groups doubled from 1000 to 2000 since 2017;
the total number of their members is 2.2M people;
the largest group is Kubernetes with 40,000 members;
top-25 Slack groups account for almost 500,000 members with half of them related to programming;
Check it out here: “Standuply Slack Chat Groups”
5. QUOTES WE LIKE
We’ll leave you with this quote from Zat Rana which resonates with us on a number of levels. As the world rides its wave of digital disruption, the human to human connections become even more important. And as O/TG grows, it is these connections and relationships that are at the core of how we work together as a team and approach new markets.
"In a way, happiness is other people. It’s the connections we build and the relationships we foster. They create us, and they continue to shape us."
Read the full article here Read the full article here: “The subtle art of connecting with anyone”