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

In 2018, Tinder announced that it would let users sign up with their phone number instead of their Facebook account, if they chose.[82] Why? In a word, competition. In 2018 Facebook announced a new dating service, widely seen as a competitor to Tinder, and Tinder’s parent company saw its stock price tumble 20% overnight.[83] Tinder was probably afr

Welcome to the world of “open data,” the idea that institutions like governments should make data publicly available, free to reuse, and easy for computers to analyze.

So anything that involves passwords or databases tends to happen on servers,[396] whereas interactive user interfaces are usually drawn by the frontend.

WhatsApp users sent 500 million pictures a day in 2014, which was more than Facebook and Instagram combined.[988] Snapping up WhatsApp was a smart way for Facebook to regain dominance over photos.

Put this together and you can envision a future where Alexa notices you’re sick, Amazon mails you a health test kit, you send it back, a virtual doctor prescribes medication, and PillPack mails you the pills.[1449]

More notably, Facebook succeeded in bringing targeted ads to Instagram, a platform that originally had no monetization strategy; Instagram ads now pull in over $8 billion a year.[971]

Other apps just hope to be bought before their money runs out. For instance, a free email app called Mailbox hit the market in 2013, and soon it was delivering 60 million messages a day.[334] Then, within a month of launch, Dropbox bought the app and the team behind it[335] for $100 million.[336] There’s a slightly tragic ending, though: Dropbox ki

There aren’t many brick-and-mortar retail stores here — Southeast Asia has 46 times less retail space per person than the US![1049] Local e-commerce startups, such as Singapore-based Lazada[1050] and Indonesia-based Tokopedia,[1051] have done well, so Western companies will probably want to emulate them.

WhatsApp could provide Facebook troves of personal data on its millions of users — especially in developing markets — which would help Facebook better target its ads and services.[985]