I was really, really present on social media this week, but in case you missed it, our startup held a party at NFT.NYC, a major crypto conference. The party was held at the New York Stock Exchange, including on the trading floor. It was very cool to see our logo up on the screens there. Maybe we’ll be back when Proof of Learn goes public. 😉
At the same time, driving back after the Solana event the next day, I heard the news from the Supreme Court decision. I won’t hit the politics of this decision much here; suffices to say that I’m pro-choice for a myriad of reasons, even though I have moral qualms about the procedure. There are so many exceptions to the usual trope of “consequences” of voluntary sex that I’d much rather leave this to women and their doctors.
For this space, I do want to highlight some angles that are important for product managers and businesses to consider. Because of how anti-abortion state laws are being written, your companies and products may become involuntary investigators against pregnant women seeking medical services (and beyond, if this trend continues). It’s no longer just state AGs you will need to worry about, but any activist… or worse, I fear, someone with an entrepreneurial mind that wants to collect the “bounty” on each lawsuit. We should all be thinking abou what data we need to collect and whether the risks outweigh the potential business benefit we’re seeking.
Related Links #
- We Need to Take Back Our Privacy: First, Zeynep Tufekci spells out the risks of these aggregated data pools, and how they will likely get abused. Good place to start, even though it’s a long post.
- What Companies Can Do Now to Protect Digital Rights In A Post-Roe World: Follow that up with this article from the EFF, which spells out some things you and your company should consider to make sure you’re not a data source. Taking this seriously will prompt difficult conversations for your company - tradeoffs where the default or easiest path is to just collect and share data. If you care about your customers, you want to be a brand that people trust. Don’t end up in an article about how your app contributed to some woman going to jail for possibly life-saving treatment.
- Four Takeaways From a Times Investigation Into China’s Expanding Surveillance State: The Chinese government is the world leader in surveillance. Much of the data in private hands in the US could be aggregated and used in very similar ways.
Reads #
- Designing and Implementing Avatars for the Metacrafters Metaverse: The first in a series of posts about how we’re generating our avatar NFTs for our game. Our company has an education mission, and part of that is making sure we share our approaches and learning as developers.
- Solana is making a crypto phone with help from former Essential engineers: I was at the announcement (and POL/Metacrafters is a launch partner for the device). This article captures both the hope and reality of a new phone manufacturer in 2022. I’m still excited to work with Solana Labs on this because they’re very clear-eyed about why they’re doing this. In every conversation, team members have said they don’t expect to become a big phone company. What they need is access to the trusted enclave to really build a crypto UX that was user-friendly AND secure. Easiest way is build the phone.
- Solana Mobile Stack announcement: The real value of this release lies in the SDK and supporting specifications that Solana is releasing as open source.
- Casey Liss on Twitter: “Probably the best #WWDC video I’ve seen on async/await is actually wrapped in a ‘Check out new Instruments features’ package.” This was also recommended by a number of other Swift devs I follow on Twitter.
- Web3 games Million on Mars and Sunflower Land will do cross-chain event (updated): An early example of cross-chain interopable gameplay. Nothing too special here, but interoperability feels like the most compelling long term payoff for users in Web3 gaming.
- Netflix Meets With Google In Cannes To Discuss Its Ad Business: Netflix is indeed doing ads.
- The Nothing Phone: Speaking of new phones, this hit my radar a bunch this week. Looks interesting.
Code & Tools #
- Solana Mobile Stack: The actual SDK I referenced above.