This Week I Learned - Week #26 2024

This Week I Learned

* Anthropic recently released its new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which reportedly outperforms OpenAI’s best model, GPT-4o. 

* LinkedIn Insights is a useful tool for job-seekers to research companies and understand the job market.

Median tenure can indicate if a company is employee-friendly

LinkedIn, with its vast and dynamic data on individuals and companies, serves as a barometer for the job market.

* Airtel & Jio have hiked mobile tariff by 12-25%. Possibly as a sweetener, Jio will offer these applications (worth Rs 298/month) free for a year -

JioSafe - Quantum-secure: Communication app for calling, messaging, file transfer and more (priced at Rs 199 per month)

JioTranslate - AI-powered multi-lingual communication app: The app will be translating voice call, voice message, text and image (priced at Rs 99 per month).

* Infosys is aiming to achieve 45% female representation in its workforce by 2030 as part of its ESG Vision 2030.

* Akio Morita, who pioneered the Walkman at Sony, famously said he didn't ask customers what they wanted. He'd be ready with what they needed. The big music device maker after him was Steve Jobs, said "A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them". Henry Ford was in another era, but had the same take: "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse".

* Ray Kroc envisioned McDonald's when he was 52. Morris Chang started TSMC - the most astoundingly large chip maker - at age 54. Colonel Sanders started Kentucky Fried Chicken at age 62. Bernie Marcus was 50 when he opened the first Home Depot. Leo Goodwin started GEICO, the now-Buffett-owned car insurer, at age 50. - Capitalmind

*  BookMyShow founder Ashish Hemrajani has faced multiple business crises. The dot-com bubble burst in 2000 wiped him out leaving him “on the streets”. He had to mortgage his parents’ house to buy back his company, a software-service provider for movie theatres which he had started just a year before. In 2007, he launched BookMyShow’s consumer-facing avatar, an online ticket-booking platform. Just a year later, the global meltdown took place. Massive pay cuts across the company followed. Lightning struck for the third time in 2020 following the pandemic. After earning a robust INR740 crore in the financial year 2020, it slumped to INR108 crore in 2021. In 2015, Softbank’s blue eyed firm Paytm entered the sector offering heavy discounts and cashbacks on movie tickets. The next year, Paytm acquired online ticketing and events startup Insider.in for INR35 crore. In 2018, it acquired another startup TicketNew to expand the business giving jitters to BookMyShow.

* The movie ticket sector is known for its low margins, typically ranging from 6% to 10%. Film producer and industry expert Girish Johar has stated that the annual box-office revenue in the country is approximately INR 12,000 crore.

* In 2018, PVR renewed its non-exclusive arrangements with BookMyShow and Paytm for selling the theatre’s ticketing inventory. In a disclosure to the stock exchanges, PVR stated it was getting INR410 crore towards minimum guarantee and refundable security deposit for booking the inventory for three years.

* Humans don’t need colour vision to recognise objects but colours can provide adaptation and survival advantages. A newborn baby mostly sees the world in black and white. The photosensitive cone cells in the child’s eyes don’t mature until they’re around four months old. In this time, the brain uses other visual cues to make sense of the world. In May, a team of Indian and U.S. researchers reported in the journal Science that this delay in developing colour vision is actually important for overall vision development. 

* Novo Nordisk, a leader in insulin medications, reported annual sales of USD 33.7 billion in 2023. A staggering USD 31.2 billion of this revenue was generated from its anti-obesity and anti-diabetes medications. Specifically, Ozempic, which is approved for type 2 diabetes treatment and also aids in weight management, contributed USD 13.77 billion to last year's sales. Medications like Ozempic are often referred to as "forever drugs," meaning they are intended to be taken for a lifetime, similar to statins or blood pressure drugs, and cease to work once discontinued.

* Incretin is a hormone that stimulates the pancreas to release insulin after eating, aiding in the reduction of blood sugar levels. GLP-1, or glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, produced in the small intestine, decreases glucagon, which otherwise raises sugar levels, and also decelerates digestion. Essentially, the injection mitigates hunger pangs, leading to weight loss in obese individuals.

* Animal-welfare ethicists and veterinary scientists say we’re humanizing our pets too much. The more we treat pets like people, they argue, the more constrained and dependent on us our pets’ lives have become, and the more health and behavioral issues our pets develop.

* The pet population in India hit 31 million in 2021, up from 10 million in 2011.  

* The National Language Translation Mission, which was re-christened as Bhashini in 2022, fosters an ecosystem that helps real-time translation of local Indian languages by facilitating access to open-source databases and translation tools. The government is calling on universities and independent startup incubators to develop strategies to boost the use of Bhashini, the natural language processing service.

* “Man hands down misery to man - it deepens like a coastal shelf” - Philip Larkin