Swipe to Unlock: The Primer on Technology and Business Strategy (Fast Forward Your Product Career: The Two Books Required to Land Any PM Job)

So, why do companies like Nordstrom offer free Wi-Fi? Offering Wi-Fi gets shoppers to turn on their phones’ Wi-Fi connections, which makes them start shooting radio waves at Wi-Fi hotspots. The store can then use triangulation to track their movements. And that, as we’ve seen, means big bucks.

When Western companies expand into emerging markets, they tend to just import their existing apps and business models.

Consider Amazon’s patented technique called the “Anticipatory Shipping Model.”[554] 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.[555]

So, in summary, why did Microsoft buy LinkedIn? There are many factors, but the underlying theme is that it helped Microsoft maintain its much-needed chokehold on the enterprise space and keep the valuable business and data of LinkedIn away from its opponents.

The reason smartphones are so popular in India is that most Indians didn’t experience the internet until the smartphone boom of the 2000s was well underway, meaning that India skipped the PC era and went straight to mobile.[1024]

Swipe to Unlock is a primer on technology and business strategy. In this book, we’ll use real-world examples to break down the software, hardware, and business strategies that power the tech world and give you the tools to start understanding, analyzing, and shaping tech yourself.

Because ISPs sit between you and every website you visit, they can track your entire browsing history. Then they can sell this information, along with demographic information like your age and location, to advertisers, who can use the data to target ads at you.

As UXPin says, “Wireframes are the skeleton. Prototypes demonstrate the behavior. Mockups are the skin.”[1480]

Prime is a powerful loyalty program that gets customers to spend more and more money on the platform.

Google and Facebook — and most other software companies that use ads — don’t sell your data to advertisers. Advertisers submit ads to Google and Facebook, and the two companies use your data to decide what ads to show you. Your data is used extensively on Google and Facebook computers, but it never leaves them.[293] In fact, it actually helps Googl