DPL Reading List – September 2, 2016
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
10 Tips Guaranteed to Improve Your Startup Success (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “Having had the good fortune to work with many entrepreneurs and get a front-row seat to see their success, I thought it’d be valuable to share 10 key tips that I’ve found work 100% of the time to increase your odds of startup success. Try to execute on as many of these as you can!”
The 30 Things Customers Really Value (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “Breakthroughs may be worth pursuing, but most companies benefit more from incremental innovation efforts that add new forms of consumer value to their present products and services. The trick is to determine what elements to add in order to boost the perceived value of your offering. You don’t want to expend resources adding features that consumers don’t care about.”
Eleven Reasons to be Excited About the Future of Technology – “There has never been a better day in the whole history of the world to invent something. There has never been a better time with more opportunities, more openings, lower barriers, higher benefit/ risk ratios, better returns, greater upside than now. Right now, this minute. This is the moment that folks in the future will look back at and say, ‘Oh, to have been alive and well back then!’”
JustFix.NYC: Say Goodbye to Horrible Landlords, Hello to Housing Justice (Thanks to Cassey Lottman for recommending this article) – “With city development driving up the already exorbitant cost of property, housing is reaching a state of crisis – particularly in low income communities where tenants have retained their homes thanks to rent stabilization. But many greedy landlords have turned to tactics like harassment and illegal eviction threats to turn a bigger profit. After witnessing instances like this first hand in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Dan Kass teamed up with Ashley Treni and Georges Clement to build a digital platform that connects tenants, community organizers and legal teams with the tools and resources they need to achieve housing justice.”
Making a Case for Letter Case (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “Title case and sentence case both have their advantages. Whichever direction you decide to go, just make sure you make an informed decision that makes sense for your brand. The worst thing you can do is to not have any standards at all, which eventually leads to inconsistencies that’ll be a pain to fix later. Once your users start noticing inconsistencies, that’s when they start losing trust in your brand.”
How Artificial Intelligence Could Help Diagnose Mental Disorders – “In 2015, a team of researchers developed an AI model that correctly predicted which members of a group of young people would develop psychosis—a major feature of schizophrenia—by analyzing transcripts of their speech. This model focused on tell-tale verbal tics of psychosis: short sentences, confusing, frequent use of words like ‘this,’ ‘that,’ and ‘a,’ as well as a muddled sense of meaning from one sentence to the next.”
The Start-up that Watches Corn Grow, from Orbit – “Descartes’s forecasts have also seemed to drive the national maize market. When it announced that the corn harvest would trail the USDA’s estimate last August, it moved the market by three percent. Johnson said he expects this year to affect individual farmers’s lives more, because Descartes now estimates county-level data—which may help people better know which local silo to sell corn to.”
