I’ve written about this a million times, and people are still letting everyone see all the details of their Venmo transactions.

 

For example, I can see that …

• Somebody I barely know paid for a chicken sandwich for his friend who forgot his wallet
• I can see that one of my neighbors is paying for her kid’s tutor
• I can see people paying for babysitters
• Teacher’s gifts
• Sunscreen
• A kale salad with beans
• Somebody I know thru work treated somebody with a Starbucks for their extra hard work
• Hairdresser got paid by Venmo

Nothing horrible here but it feels weird to see people’s private lives exposed in public. I’m not quite sure whether you see all your contacts or only facebook friends who also happen to be Venmo users, but it’s a lot of people in your peripheral network. Venmo makes it sound so cool to see what your family and friends are doing, but what you see is way more invasive. For example, a while back, I saw a very casual friend’s weekly payments for a hook-up. I didn’t need to know that much about him.

 

Here’s how you make the switch to private:

• Go on your Venmo
• Go to Settings
• Go to Privacy and then click on Private.
• Additionally, click on “past transactions” and switch them to private as well.

And here’s why you should do it per thenextweb.com

• Venmo, which has 40 million monthly active users, makes transaction details public by default. This includes usernames, full names, profile pictures, recipient information, and more.
  
• Venmo has stated it keeps the transaction history public by default because it treats them as a social activity. “People open up Venmo to see what their family and friends are up to,” it said last year.
• But the PayPal-owned company has done precious little to prevent scenarios that could result in the potential abuse of the public API to scrape users’ transaction details.

And that’s it for today’s PSA! You’re welcome!

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Have any of you ever heard of Nicolas Cole? I hadn’t. But if you want to dial up your social media game, you’ve got to check him out (links below).

 

I stumbled across him on Ladders. They published an article by him entitled “The 1 Painfully Obvious Reason Nobody Follows You On Social Media.” Reading it was a wake-up call, like having cold water tossed in my face.

But, kudos to him for being such a compelling writer. Both his message and his backstory are incredibly powerful.

What became apparent to me in reading his article was how much more value I need to provide to my readers to get the engagement I want. I need to seriously up my game if I want to write more insightful, useful articles.

Cole claims 99 percent of people don’t put in the necessary effort. I thought I did, but in reading how he got his start, I see that my effort can stand improvement.

For example, here are the lengths he went to in order to establish himself as a writer:

• When he was in his early 20’s, he was writing on Quora. He soon realized that Quora had columns with all the major publications.
• He studied what each publication liked to republish from Quora, specifically the topics, the headlines, and the way they seemed to want the content written. And then he replicated it.
• He created formulas for himself that matched the style guide of each publication. Then, he would write an Answer on Quora (to someone else’s Question) formatted the same way an article would appear on Inc. or Forbes, or Business Insider.
• That’s a lot of effort, but it paid off.
• Every single publication republished his work – and the rest, as they say, is history.

Here’s the link to his Ladders article on why nobody follows you on social media.

• For those of us on Instagram, he includes tips on photography as well as how to write persuasive first and second paragraphs. His perspective on hashtags is worth considering, as well (hint: he’s not into using a million of them just because you can).
• He also offers excellent insights on how many social media platforms you actually need to be on. I was surprised that he has a relatively small following on twitter (7.5K) but 51K on Instagram and 42K on Medium.
• His biggest tip for writers: get on Quora. That’s the platform that has been his secret sauce. For example, even after he got millions of readers from being republished by major news sources, he doubled down on his commitment to Quora.

 

It’s also worthwhile checking out the Nicolas Cole site itself – two links in particular. Read on below.

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I consider this essential reading whether you’re a data nerd, an investor, or someone just curious about where the world is headed.

 

If you have not yet scrolled through Mary Meeker’s newest 333-page Internet Trends Report, I’ve got an abridged version for you (24 slides).

It’s the most highly anticipated trend deck for Silicon Valley and was presented at the Code Conference on June 11th.

For those of you who may not be familiar with Mary Meeker, she is a highly respected internet analyst who has been publishing this report since 1995 just as Amazon launched and Google was still being dabbled with by two students in a Stanford dorm room. The earliest example I found of using her work is 2008 so I have been fangirling her for over ten years.

The tenor of this year’s report is a bit somber. More of us than ever are online (51% of the global population) but people are becoming increasingly siloed, which is reinforcing our most extreme differences.

Growth is slowing, and there seem to be fewer fun, exciting things on the horizon for consumers. It’s all about data and AI now. The bloom is off the rose on so many aspects of tech and the internet. Interestingly, we are somewhat less freaked out about privacy, but more of us are consciously dialing back the time we spend online.

The report also delves into the on-demand economy, tech startups around the world but especially in Asia, e-commerce and programmatic advertising,  trends in education and health care, and the growth of online gaming which Reed Hastings of Netflix has said is his biggest competitor (especially Fortnite with its 250 million gamers).

My biggest personal surprises were how important YouTube is to consumers both as a learning tool and for where they get their news, the pervasiveness (still!) of Facebook, and the growing role of voice vs. video (great news for all my podcaster friends).

 

Scroll down for my key takeaways from Mary’s report. I have also included a link to the entire deck at the end. 1000% worth checking out.

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Personalized nutrition technology is expected to take the food and supplements market by storm over the next ten years.

 

One of my friends who is always on the vanguard of everything new in the tech startup world as well as in health/wellness has been especially fired up about Viome. This biotech startup, founded in 2017, provides health and nutritional recommendations specifically tailored for each customer based on their microbiome.

And she’s not the only one excited about this company. Per GeekWire Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce just invested in the company.

Viome’s Gut Intelligence Test determines your microbiome – which is like a fingerprint. Each of us has a unique microbiome based on our ancestry as well as our current lifestyle. The program requires you to send them your poop! And you have to do it every month.

Their metatranscriptomic technology almost sounds too good to be true. But they claim to be able to identify everything from the nutrients in specific foods that your microbiome is not able to process to whether you’re eating more protein than your gut can digest.

They use Artificial Intelligence to discover what foods and supplements are ideal for your gut microbiome so that you can “experience optimal health.”

Viome doesn’t come cheap – although, at $199, it is on half-price sale at the moment. Curiously, it is not presently available in NY, and that may be because some of their claims are drawing criticism, e.g., Jonathan Eisen, a professor at UC Davis, called Viome the “Theranos of the microbiome world.”

But I’m writing about Viome because it is a forerunner of this nascent trend to personalized nutrition. And it is gaining traction, e.g., I just came across this article on the topic in Food & Drink International.

 

Scroll down for a recap of the Food & Drink article – but if this is your thing, read it in its entirety here.

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Love using Grammarly. Whoever put it on my radar, big thanks! WOW so great even with all its quirks.

 

I’m currently using the Free version which only catches spelling and grammar errors. It’s $30 a month to get the full-on service which doesn’t sound outrageous given the amount of writing I do. However, it is not clear precisely what $30 covers

At the moment, I am highly confused by many aspects of the service.

• It works on Zandl Slant but not on Microsoft Word or perhaps that’s included in the $30 version of the program – but maybe not.
• In one of their emails, they call it an Add On service but is that an add on to Free or an add on to the $30?
• It’s very quirky, e.g., whenever I use it to edit the blog, it deletes any videos I might have added. Why?

Besides correcting my spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation, what I love, is their weekly update on how my writing is working out.

According to Grammarly, my first week was epic.

• I was 98% more productive than other users with 48,450 words checked!!
• I was 40% more accurate
• I used more unique words than 98% of Grammarly users (3578 unique words)
• My top mistakes were missing commas and missing articles, e.g., I start a lot of sentences without the “I.”

My tech guru is giving me a tutorial this week on the inner workings of Grammarly. Based on what I learn, I plan to continue with the free service for another week and then switch to Premium. And if I really love it, I will probably spring for the annual program which works out to $11 a month.

Stay tuned. And I’ll let you know if I upgrade. There are 16 advanced corrections that I ought to make to this post – and I’d know what they were if I had the premium service!

 

And with that, I’m excited to get in another day of Grammarly-assisted writing!

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Let me just say I am loving being a Google Local Guide (top 1% in NYC). But I don’t understand the algorithms they use for how people find/view my photos.

 

For the uninitiated, Local Guides is a global community of Google users who write reviews, share photos, answer questions, add or edit places, and check facts on Google Maps.

I do it because I travel a lot and am always checking out new restaurants and stores in whatever city I’m in – whether it’s Bentonville, Oslo or NYC. And even before I started reviewing for Google, I always relied on Local Guide reviews (and photos) to plan my itineraries, decide where to stay, what to see and even what to order at restaurants.

Every month, Google sends their Local Guides a status update and if you’re sufficiently geeky, it’s a pretty cool way of reviewing how much exploring you’ve done, how your photos fared and how many people checked out your reviews.

They also send you updates when you reach certain milestones e.g. I just got to 4 million views on my photos. One of my pics reached over 200,000 views just this month. It’s a photo I took at Kulturhuset, a co-working space I used while in Oslo last year. And amazingly, I just noticed it has become the official photo of the place on Google (see below).

But I am beyond baffled as to why certain photos get thousands of views while others barely register.

For example:

• Onyx Coffee Lab in Bentonville gets 35,764 views
• My tomato salad at Milos, Hudson Yards gets 5720 views
• A great photo of the Yayoi Kusama Stainless Spheres with a brilliant Chris Ofili painting at Frieze Art Fair gets a paltry 35 views

I’ve heard it has something to do with the proportionality of the photos – the algorithm looks at it in thirds but when I look at my photos, that makes no sense. If anyone has any answers for me, please let me know!

 

Scroll down for more on the Local Guides monthly updates and my claim to fame with the Kulturhuset Google photo!

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In America, once again, in our misguided attempts to protect the unbanked we’re looking backwards instead of to the future.

 

Instead of doing more to make sure that everyone has access to the benefits of the digital economy, we’re focusing our efforts on perpetuating cash payments and hefty check-cashing fees that go along with that outmoded way of getting money.

Per Gemalto, a leading digital security company:

• Research from the WorldBank shows that not only are the number of adults with a bank account growing (it’s currently estimated to be around 69% of the world’s population) but it is also helping to reduce poverty and gender pay imbalance.
• The countries which are making digital payments a top priority (see below) are experiencing the biggest gains in financial inclusion and the most progress in gender equality.

Here are the 7 countries that are quickly emerging as the world’s leading cashless economies and how they’re doing it:

 

#1: The Chinese skipped credit card adoption and embraced QR codes.

The main players are Alibaba’s Alipay and WeChat.

• The seamless use of phones as wallets has advanced China to potentially become the largest cashless economy in the world.
• Everywhere you go in China you see QR codes: supermarkets, amusement parks, temple donations, and market vendors all ask for payment this way.
• Even traditional New Year’s gifts now contain digital payments instead of cash.
• For taxi drivers, it means avoiding robbery or receiving counterfeit notes.
• For street vendors it means they don’t have to carry or give change.
• And the QR code trend is spreading – Japan and Finland, where lots of Chinese travel, have started accepting QR codes.

#2: Sweden goes cashless

Sweden leads the way in Scandinavia with Denmark and Norway not far behind.

• Market traders, churches and magazine vendors all accept card and phone payments.
• Only 15% of payments involve cash transactions. A popular mobile payment app, Swish, is used by half of the country’s 10 million population, to make transfers to people and businesses.
• Swedish buses no longer accept cash.
• Many stores no longer accept cash.
• More than 900 of Sweden’s 1,600 bank branches no longer take cash deposits.
• Many banks have stopped dispensing cash and removed their ATMs.
• Sweden’s Riksbank, the world’s oldest central bank, is considering launching a state-guaranteed national cryptocurrency: the e-krona.

 

Read on below for the 5 other countries beating us to the future.

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I rarely get jealous but when I read about this 23-year old tech blogger who hacks code for the love of the scoop, I was pea-green with envy.

 

I felt such a kinship with her. She’s driven by an inexorable passion for getting the “scoop” which as some of you may know is a key driver for me. We also share this hunger for learning which is fed by by the process of getting that elusive scoop – you always learn a ton when you’re sifting through all that information. And, finally, we both got started on this path when we were just kids (she was seven, I was ten).

Where our paths diverge is the level of acclaim she has received for those scoops (and deservedly so). I can’t lie, it makes me a bit glum to realize that level of recognition continues to elude me. And yes, I’ve heard from high-level execs about how much they appreciate my “scoops” on shifts in the culture and how grateful they are for the edge it’s given them in the market. But those private accolades have never made me a superstar. I continue to struggle to connect to a broader audience. Zandl Slant is clearly no Daily Skimm.

But enough bitching about my shortcomings.

I highly recommend you follow Jane Manchun Wong on twitter and read the two fabulous articles I’ve just found on her – one from the BBC, the other from the South China Morning Post.

And if you don’t have the time for an in-depth read, scroll down for my recap of what’s made her so major.

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