Must Reads 266

Good Morning Must Readers, trust you had a great week. MR#266 newsletter includes the following important themes:

• Apple Tax - Apple’s 30% tax coming to AI

• Nomad Town Issues - Digital nomads increasing prices for locals

• Ghost Writers - The power of the ghostwriter across books & social media

• International Cuisine Investments - How countries have to invest millions in influencing international dish adoption (not just rely on viral social posts)

• News 4.0 - How user flagging clickbait and emoji reactions are becoming a way to enhance news consumption

>> How To Know Your Team Members Better Framework 👏- Brand new free super simple framework to help you as a manager to understand what motivates, demotivates, helps to empower and makes your team members feel powerless

>> Apple Taxing AI 📲- Apple is still the go to place for companies looking for big affluent audiences and attempting to become a utility for them. Despite “record number of users in the quickest time” AI needs to get on the default device to continue its growth and developing its offering based on prompts as we go. Apple’s AI play has been subdued but will take in ~30% of every app charging on the App Store. We will see hundreds of AI apps flood the App Store over the next year, some with mass appeal (viral effect of sharing filters or mashing (fusing) of x and y) others being killed by Google’s offering Bard being in the browser.
Hint: Don’t sleep on Apple’s gatekeeper role in AI, who wins and losses will likely be played out on their App Store.

>> BuzzFeed Soon To Be AI/PR Problem 🤖- I know I said I wouldn’t overshare AI but its the theme of the next 3 years and it’s dominating every conversation, for all it’s good and bad, we are about to see brands across tech rush for AI solutions. BuzzFeed has added AI across their portfolio from their site, to tasty to new shopping on a dedicated domain. The wider issue is how they are replacing humans with AI and then reducing headcount, there are going to be two issues, (1) proving AI can be more effective and overly reliant on AI and then (2) the hallucinations creating inaccuracies. Be wary of going all in on AI when it’s often inaccurate and requires numerous editors to verify the output and the data.

>> News Rethought Again 📰- If you listened to my most recent podcast appearance you would have heard me suggesting how I use different tools to create my newsletters Must Reads & Leaders Letters. Artifact is a recent tool I started using and has rethought how we (1) find relevant news (2) engage with news stories & (3) with journalists — this week adding a flag as click-bait and adding emojis to news stories. The comments section was always challenging for a website especially in media, sharing on social brought huge negativity and political engineering. The big question: will an app designed for better and less biased consumption (based on your inputs) work? If you like Apple News this is the next phase of better news in a feed consumption model.

>> Remote Workers Coming To Towns 🌆 - In major cities across the Western world there are a large number of city problems, from fewer footfall in stores and half-empty offices, however, in other cities (and towns) digital nomads and fully remote workers are actually negatively impacting locals, with rising rents and increasing prices for food and drinks (as what is cheap to the nomad is expensive to locals). We will see this continue to be a trend and it will come at a cost with locals fighting against it and digital nomads chasing the next city - we will see numerous price increases and cultural battles take place.

>> Robot Deliveries 📦- More towns and cities across the UK are rolling out robot delivery, Wakefield (a Northern City in England) isn’t known as a tech hub is rolling out robotic delivery from a supermarket chain co-op. We are going to see last mile delivery leverage robotic tech for delivery of cold and hot food (seen as more reliable and the tech is basically bomb-proof), its whether human drivers who stay the majority or is it robots that become the majority. I expect it to go up to 50/50 in coming years.

>> South Korean Food Investment 🇰🇷- The explosion of food types, national dishes or viral creations typically is associated to the latest app (or usually exploding on Reddit, Instagram or on TikTok etc) but what a lot of people don’t see is the actual investment made by countries attempting to drive their food or culture into other countries and this article is an interesting look at the investment made into South Korean food.

>> Ghost Writer Power 💪- Prince Harry’s book made waves at the turn of the year and is the highest-selling book for a long time, thanks to his stories and the great writing and research from his ghostwriter J. R. Moehringer. This is a brilliant long read on the process and why so many trust him to tell their story for them

Thanks and have a great week,

Danny Denhard