Why Chinese Apps Are Young Americans’ Favorites

(1) we are waking up to the big mistake of letting Facebook buy up all the emerging social media sites and lately all the VR game companies. If people are getting funding to start VR game companies now it is backstopped by the near-certainty that they’ll get acquired-hired someday and their games shut down. Maybe it’s not a big win but it’s like playing the lottery and knowing you’ll always get a free ticket. It sure distorts the market.

(2) I had my own interest in recommenders that was based on what I knew about years ago, I pointed that technology to the RSS feed from arXiv.org and found a lot of literature on “sequential recommendation” and other advanced techniques that is being written about almost exclusively from people in India and China. The people around me and myself have often been interested in subjects that seem almost “blacklisted” from funding in the US such as quasicrystals and the semantic web but those fields were arguably “useless” which in terms of e-commerce it is more like a “missile gap”.

In the U.S. people don’t realize how far the rot has gone. We still think AMZN is a leader while really it is coasting, figuring you’ve subscribed to Prime for 15 years and you’re just going to keep buying from AMZN out of habit. If in any way it was better it is because until recently it subsidized a money losing retail operation with the monopoly profits of AWS. The next wave of Asian tigers risk making ‘big tech’ look like Phillips and Siemens.

Fashion of the day. Where was the hoo-haa when it was US apps, or Japanese apps, or Tetris, or .....

Next thing you know, that "Rock'n'Roll" stuff will be all the rage.

Over-controlling stuff always backfires. Ask the Temperance Societies how they got on during and after Prohibition.

No Paywall: https://archive.is/hllO4