This iOS app is “a trip planner that lets you share your itinerary with family and friends, receive flight alerts, store documents, and also has suggestions of itineraries to some cities around the world.” It’s a neat idea – I often get lost in my many notes, emails, and reminders.

We all have friends whose business or side project could do with a simple website. I’m adding Readymag – a browser-based web design tool – to my list of recommended, no-frills website builders.

A fitting name for a service that offers disposable email addresses you can set up to forward incoming mail to your existing inbox. Simply set a time limit by which the email address ceases to function.

Flock looks like another Slack alternative with a suite of additional tools, such as video calls and screen sharing, shared to-dos, polls, reminders, and more.

Spooly Cable →

No untangling USB cable

This flat cable spools around a USB plug and secures itself with a magnet using powdered barium ferrite included in sections along the cable, magnetising as they overlap. The USB plug is reversible and the other end bears either a Lightning, USB-C 3.1, or Micro USB connector.

Capital is Dead →

Data as the new capital

In her provocative new book, Author McKenzie Wark argues that “the all-pervasive presence of data in our networked society has given rise to a new mode of production, one not ruled over by capitalists and their factories but by those who own and control the flows of information. Yet, if this is not capitalism anymore, could it be something worse? What if the world we’re living in is more dystopian than the techno utopias of the Silicon Valley imagination?”

A wonderful, actionable summary of the 1000 True Fans concept: “If you build an audience of 1000 true fans, you won’t have to spend a fortune on advertising or keep implementing growth hacks. Instead, you’ll have a much more sustainable way of growing, one in which the people who love what you do become your biggest fans, who spread the word, who recruit more people to join your tribe, buy your products, and who would miss you if you were gone. There’s no tactic more powerful than someone who is a true fan of your work.”

A great four-part series on the issues of our current social system and what reforms are necessary to ensure democracy survives. “Our political parties, our political tools, our political institutions, our political language – even our political ideas – were literally designed in and for a different industrial era. A different world from the one in which we now live.”

Today, we talk about Big Tech’s concentration of power mainly in regard to data and reach. But if the future is powered by AI, we will increasingly rely on the computing power of Amazon, Google, etc. to lead the way, and that’s problematic. “A.I. research is becoming increasingly expensive, requiring complex calculations done by giant data centers, leaving fewer people with easy access to the computing firepower necessary to develop the technology behind futuristic products like self-driving cars or digital assistants that can see, talk and reason.” [Possible paywall]