The inevitable rise of Super Apps in the Western World

“He who controls the spice controls the universe.”

Baron Harkonnen, Dune.

It would be a mistake to think of Amazon and Facebook as operating in different domains or markets.

Both companies are after the same resource — Us, the people. And how accurately these companies can capture our attention, devise our preferences and anticipate our behaviours are critical to their ability to sell products or serve targeted ads.

Short of regulatory interventions, none of them would stop their expansionary plans. If a company knew everything about us we wouldn’t have…

A group of retail investors, inspired by a trader wearing a bandana and a kitten t-shirt, organised themselves to squeeze a bunch of hedge funds. We all cheered them on and basked in the institutional investors’ pain.

The former president of the United States instigated a mob of fanatics to storm the Capitol, wrecking havoc and causing the deaths of several people. We were horrified and supported the decision to ban Donald Trump from every platform and his followers to be prosecuted.

Why did we feel differently about these two events? …

And How to Prevent Them

Buying and selling physical goods online has never been easier and, due to the recent epidemic, often necessary.

Months of forced lockdown and economic uncertainty proved to be a fantastic combination for e-commerce marketplaces like eBay which saw their traffic, number of listings and sales conversion to surge above their expectations.

But a similar increase has inevitably been accompanied by a growth in the fraud rate across the e-commerce platforms, often targeting new and inexperienced sellers who joined en masse in the last few months

There is very little transparency about the number of…

The answer is yes. But you may want to read the entire article to understand why and, more importantly, why some people will instead tell you that it may be a bad idea.

What is a grey import?

Large companies often operate in several different geographical markets. These markets may have slightly different technical requirements (think about some weirdly shaped pins on your battery charger) and, more importantly, they may return different profit margins on certain items.

Digital cameras and lenses are often produced in the same factories and then distributed worldwide. The average cost per item is therefore very…

Predictability is not a word normally used to describe the eDiscovery business.

Nothing happens for a few hours and then suddenly 10 requests come in at the same time. The scope of an originally small project suddenly changes and several terabytes of data need to be processed immediately. That warm lead never becomes a sale but a person we randomly met at a conference months before sends us a hard drive out of the blue for processing to begin.

Peaks and valleys, feast or famine. Everyone who works in eDiscovery knows that this is the nature of the beast. However…

There is a deep misconception about how revolutions happen. We often forget that the images of crowded squares and symbols of power destroyed are the final effects of processes that were set in motion some time before those dramatic events.

The world of business faces similar revolutionary processes whose effects — we are told — are to be welcomed as they will ultimately benefit consumers. The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the term “creative destruction” to indicate these situations, signaling that destruction has a benign connotation if it is a business that is wiped out.

Similar to political revolutions, business…

I have never liked gambling and I resent playing a game where the odds are mathematically stacked against me. I feel no pleasure in pulling the lever of a slot machine, looking at the ivory ball dancing on the roulette wheel or simply scratching a card hoping that, by sheer luck, my future will just get better.

I approached Texas Hold’em Poker (Hold’em) with the same scepticism, but I quickly realised that it had nothing to do with what I described above and, on the contrary, several powerful life lessons could be drawn from playing and observing the game. …

Imagine entering a hospital and seeing two surgeons. The first one has an immaculate white coat, a stethoscope around his neck, a reassuring smile and a nicely framed Harvard diploma in his room. The kind of doctor you would see in a Hollywood movie production. The second doctor, instead, doesn’t look as good. He hasn’t shaved that morning, his hands are large and callous and he is quite overweight. He looks more like a butcher than a doctor.

Assuming that the hospital is a functioning and meritocratic environment, who would you pick?

Probably the white coated doctor. …