Swipe to Unlock: The Primer on Technology and Business Strategy

by Parth Detroja

PageRank Instead of keyword density, Google’s core innovation is an algorithm called PageRank, which its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin created for their PhD thesis in 1998.

SEO includes plenty more techniques, such as putting the right keywords in your page’s title and headings or making all of your site’s pages link to each other.[23]

For instance, suppose someone made a playlist with eight songs on it, and seven of those are in your library. You probably like this type of song, so Discover Weekly might recommend the one song that isn’t in your library.[32] This technique is called “collaborative filtering,” and it’s the same technique that Amazon uses to suggest items you might like based on your purchase history and the purchases of millions of other users.[33] Netflix’s movie suggestions, YouTube’s video suggestions, and Facebook’s friend suggestions also use collaborative filtering.[34]

The second method that Spotify uses to make your playlist is your “taste profile.”

These snippets of code that let you borrow another app’s functionality or data are called APIs, or application programming interfaces. In short, APIs let apps talk to each other. Let’s look at three main kinds of APIs.

Economists call this the 80-20 rule or the Pareto principle: 20% of your customers will generate 80% of your revenue, and 80% of your customers will generate the other 20%.

Because advertisers often pay per thousand views, Pay-Per-Impression is more often called Cost-Per-Mille, or CPM.[270] (Mille comes from the prefix milli, as in millimeter.)

This debate is summed up in the Silicon Valley proverb: “if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.”[287]

Some apps just live on borrowed time (and venture capitalist money), providing free service until they get large enough that they can start earning — in other words, “grow first, monetize later.”

The more secure, encrypted version of HTTP is HTTPS, the HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure, which shows up as https:// in URLs.[342] They’re pretty much the same, except HTTPS indicates that your browser should encrypt your information, which keeps it safe from hackers.

Want to try this for yourself? Use an online traceroute tool[365] to look up how a packet would travel from the tool’s servers to a website of your choice.

And third, since Photoshop now regularly connects to the internet, Adobe can constantly push updates and bug fixes instead of having to wait until the next big version is ready. This keeps customers happy and helps squash security issues faster.[422] (This development model is called “agile development.”)

If you’re running a big website or app, you’ll need a huge server to handle all the data and computation.

Challenges of having a server

What’s the difference between SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS? Let’s use an analogy: food. SaaS is like a restaurant: you just tell the waiter what food you want, and they’ll bring it to you. IaaS is like renting a kitchen: you have the space, but you have to bring your own ingredients and utensils and cook the food yourself. PaaS sits in between SaaS and IaaS: you give someone your ingredients and recipe, and they’ll prepare the food for you.

Google uses this strategy for its famous “MapReduce” algorithms:[531] the “Map” step is when your friends counted each neighborhood, and the “Reduce” step is when you added up your friends’ results. The popular big data tool Hadoop uses MapReduce.[532]

Consider Amazon’s patented technique called the “Anticipatory Shipping Model.”[553] When Amazon predicts that you’re going to buy something (like how Target predicts when women are going to deliver their babies), they can ship that item to a warehouse near you, so that when you ultimately buy it, they’ll get to you quickly and cheaply.

For instance, an MIT study found that just knowing the dates and locations of four credit card purchases was enough to determine the identities of 90% of people tested.[567] Another study found that you could reidentify people by mashing up anonymous user data from Netflix and IMDb.[568]

So how does Apple Pay keep you safe? Don’t worry, your phone doesn’t just send your credit card number to the store when you’re using Apple Pay. Instead, Apple has worked closely with credit card vendors to make an extremely secure system.

As Salesforce cofounder Parker Harris put it: “all business leaders need to be technologists… and every enterprise needs to become an app company.”

Why does Nordstrom offer free Wi-Fi?

To track the customer location in the store (triangulation) and decide the strategy

The most unique opportunity for Western tech companies in Southeast Asia is in e-commerce. There aren’t many brick-and-mortar retail stores here — Southeast Asia has 46 times less retail space per person than the US![1045] Local e-commerce startups, such as Singapore-based Lazada[1046] and Indonesia-based Tokopedia,[1047] have done well, so Western companies will probably want to emulate them.

Plus, it provided a big incentive for new people to join WeChat (“get an account on this app so I can send you money” never fails).

So it doesn’t really matter whether you have an iPhone or an Android, as long as it runs WeChat.[1109] This is problematic for Apple, since its high-quality apps and iOS — which usually keep people hooked on iPhones — no longer matter.

Under this law, if you search for your name on Google in an EU country and see a link to a website that contains “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” information about you, you can ask Google to remove that website from search results for your name.[1240]

Users can ask for a takedown using a form on Google’s website.

If Google decides to censor search results for a particular term, it’ll show you a notification at the top of the page: Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe.

The UK government signed the Open Data Charter in 2013, which made its agencies commit to publishing their data by default.

Data.gov contains free data on everything from college tuition to agriculture to consumer complaints against big businesses.

And in 2014, the American government mandated that all spending data be made public at usaspending.gov with the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (known as the DATA Act).[1282] Cities like San Francisco[1283] and Boston[1284] followed suit and created their own open data portals, as did countries like Canada[1285] and Japan.[1286]

Generative adversarial networks In a “generative adversarial network,” or GAN, you create two neural networks and make them face off. The “generator” network tries to make something fake, and the “discriminator” guesses whether or not the generator’s creation is real or not.[1398]

One thing to worry Google is that Amazon has become many shoppers’ preferred search engine; more than half of product searches start on Amazon.[1424]