Delicious Digest #12 - Devils, Rockstars, and Cyborg Jellyfish

A weekly newsletter of what I’ve seen in (mostly) tech & games and thought was interesting. This week: Devils, Rockstars, and Cyborg Jellyfish.

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😳 Must reads of the week

◼ Ben Evan’s fantastic “Tech in 2020” presentation. Lots of food for thought. Link

🗞 News

◼ Europe would like to have its own cloud infrastructure to reduce reliance on Google, Amazon & Co. Understandable - but the big question is whether this can be achieved via public funding and projects. Link

◼ Okta’s sixth Businesses @ Work report, “an in-depth look into how organizations and people work today (…) and the applications and services they use to be productive”. Link

◼ “Facebook Advertising Decoded in 15 Minutes”. Pretty useful for anyone who has no good grasp of how this stuff works. Link

◼ Apple is now selling more watches than the entire Swiss watch industry. Bonkers. Link

◼ One for the artists: your Wacom tablets are tracking every app you open. Don’t ask why… Link

◼ Using AI to search for new drugs. AI is everywhere. Link
See also: “AI-analyzed blood test can predict the progression of neurodegenerative disease”. Link

◼ YouTube is huge - but not quite as huge in revenue as some expected. Link ($)

🕹 Games

◼ Stats nerds rejoice! Overwatch League is releasing the beta of stats lab ahead of Season 3. Link

◼ Blizzard also caught a big fish: the former Gears of War studio head joins Blizzard to lead Diablo. Link

◼ Rockstar, meanwhile, is losing one of its co-founders and driving force behind GTA (among others), one of the biggest game franchises ever made. Link

◼ Nintendo Switch hit by “unavoidable” production delay amid coronavirus outbreak. This does affect many tech products already. Link

◼ Zynga’s Q4 bookings grow 62% to $433 million, thanks to recent acquisitions. Link

◼ Steam hits 18,801,944 concurrent users – the highest ever recorded. Link

◼ Sony is closing a studio in Manchester focused on VR games. I don’t think VR will ever truly live up to the hype it generated 4-5y ago. Link

◼ Fate/Grand Order has passed $4 billion in revenue. Link

◼ The Sims are turning 20y old. True innovation that was. Link

😋 Tasty Tidbits

◼ “Hacking” Google Maps. Link

◼ Little-known but obvious fact that will immediately make all of us feel stupid. Fetch some popcorn before opening. My favorite: 4% of 25 is the same as 25% of 4 (and that trick works with any number!). Link

◼ “Scientists create cyborg jellyfish with swimming superpowers”. I think the headline sells it well enough. Link

◼ Cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin’s images of Earth from the space station. Link

◼ The most detailed photo of the sun ever taken. Link

I work for King. All views in this newsletter are personal and my own. They do not represent the views of King or ActivisionBlizzard. This newsletter is provided for informational purposes only and it’s surely no investment advice. This newsletter links to other websites and information obtained from third-party sources and I cannot ensure nor verify accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation.