Category: Member Briefs

I didn’t know what to say to my grandmother. As a teenager, I avoided the consumption of soft drinks but, according to her, they were a healthy option. Why? Her doctor prescribed her Coca-Cola by the caseload to manage her blood sugar. In the corner of her small kitchen stood several cases of red cans, each packed with 46 grams of sugar. At the time, I’d say that her doctor knew best but over time, that presumption was proven wrong. By the end of her life, I was viscerally angered by the sight of a red can.

No one actually knows what the metaverse is. While the spirit of Neal Stephenson’s 1992 ideal remains “a collectively shared virtual space,” it’s difficult to pinpoint what that means or how that ideal will materialize. There are frameworks that guide today’s business titans, however. Mark Zuckerberg reads Matthew Ball’s voluminous essays on the topic and is influenced by them. Ball’s writing has a consistent framework that steadies his rhetoric. He focuses on hardware, computing power, networking, virtual platforms, interchange standards, content, and payment services. His metaverse primer is 33,000 words of intellectual curiosity.

It’s going to be another autumn season of heightened eCommerce activity. If you follow technology press, the punditry would suggest otherwise. In a recent Op-Ed for Bloomberg, Tae Kim writes: “Amazon may be facing headwinds from a slowdown in the entire e-commerce category, which faces tough comparisons from the peak pandemic months last year.” The well-written piece highlights the “post-pandemic blues” by including rapidly declining eCommerce numbers. According to Kim, Bank of America’s aggregated card spend data shows a March to May crash in year-over-year online retail growth from 60% to 1%. But this doesn’t nearly tell the whole story. This slowing growth in eCommerce is temporary.