Nov 3, 2019

📡 A little 🎃 and a lot of Gen Z 🙄 for Boomers

Revue

November 3 · Issue #61 · View online

Welcome to the first Pulse of November 2019!

Have you noticed that in less than 60 days, this decade ends? This decade! That puts a lot in perspective - well, at least for me!

By the way, do you have Spotify? Join my collaborative playlist. Let everyone enjoy your favourite music!

Now, dive in…

- Ben from [ perspective ix ]

📰 News

Instagram is now running paid ads on TikTok! Paying money and following the attention [Twitter].

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is buying Fitbit. The acquisition pits Alphabet against fellow tech giant Apple in the wearable fitness tracking space. Fitbit says Google is paying $7.35 per share in cash for the company, valuing it at about $2.1 billion [CNBC], which is twice as much as Facebook reportedly offered [Verge].

The U.S. government has launched a national security review of TikTok owner Beijing ByteDance Technology Co’s $1 billion acquisition of U.S. social media app Musical.ly [Reuters] - something that could’ve, but didn’t happen when the acquisition went through.

Internet Archive makes it easy to read books cited on Wikipedia [TNW] - Yay!

Government officials around the globe targeted for hacking through WhatsApp [Reuters].

Russia just brought in a law to try to disconnect its internet from the rest of the world. Russia’s “sovereign internet” law went into effect on Friday. The law tightens Moscow’s control over the country’s internet infrastructure and aims to provide a way for Russia to disconnect its networks from the rest of the world. However, experts doubt whether such a move is technically possible [CNBC].

Driving license tests just got smarter in India with Microsoft’s AI project [TechCrunch]!

Twitter banned all political ads from its platform [Twitter].

Apple Inc asked the Trump administration to waive tariffs on Chinese-made Apple Watches, iPhone components and other consumer products, according to company filings with the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office [Reuters].

🧠 Insights

Shannon O’Connor’s OK BOOMER hoodie - Credit: Shannon O’Connor

‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations

Now it’s war: Gen Z has finally snapped over climate change and financial inequality.

In a viral audio clip on TikTok, a white-haired man in a baseball cap and polo shirt declares, “The millennials and Generation Z have the Peter Pan syndrome, they don’t ever want to grow up.”

Thousands of teens have responded through remixed reaction videos and art projects with a simple phrase: “ok boomer.”

“Ok boomer” has become Generation Z’s endlessly repeated retort to the problem of older people who just don’t get it, a rallying cry for millions of fed up kids. Teenagers use it to reply to cringey YouTube videos, Donald Trump tweets, and basically any person over 30 who says something condescending about young people — and the issues that matter to them.

Read more on The New York Times.

🛍 Shop 'OK BOOMER’

📊 Statistics

Poor Bing! - Credit: Statista

Google: The Most Popular Search on Bing

Poor Bing. The beleaguered search engine with dreams of world domination never really had a chance against its all-conquering competitor, Google. Adding insult to injury, analysis by SEO experts Ahrefs has revealed that in 2019, the search Bing is most often tasked with is pointing its disloyal users in the direction of ‘google’. As of July, the search engine dealt with 44.4 million such queries from around the world, far more than the second most frequent - 'youtube’ was searched for 33.3 million times. In another blow for Bing’s owner Microsoft, the fifth most common search was people looking for help with Windows 10.

via Statista.

Top Apps Worldwide for 3Q19 by Downloads - Credit: SensorTower

Top Apps Worldwide for Q3 2019 by Downloads

WhatsApp was again the most downloaded app in Q3 2019 with close to 184 million first-time installs. WhatsApp has been the No. 1 downloaded app each quarter since Q3 2016, when Pokémon GO took the top spot.

The second most downloaded app worldwide in 3Q19 was TikTok with more than 176 million new installs. The third highest performing app was Messenger, followed by Facebook and Instagram.

Read more on SensorTower.

Mobile matters - Ofcom

www.ofcom.org.uk – Share

Ofcom has researched consumers’ behaviour and experience of using mobile services in the UK by analysing crowdsourced data collected from Android devices.

📱 Tools & Apps