Jessi Hempel

In 2013 Mark Zuckerberg debuted a bold, humanitarian vision of global internet. It didn’t go as planned—forcing Facebook to reckon with the limits of its own ambition.

[Commentary] In classic Silicon Valley fashion, Peter Thiel made a contrarian bet that the ideas Donald Trump espoused — primarily, that many Americans weren’t being served by the current establishment, and a massive disruption could unleash the change they needed — would be embraced. He was right.

The danger is that Thiel’s stab at remaking the administration under President-elect Trump will turn out as misguided as his attempt to build a program to replace college — instead of introducing the change that will make all of America great again, it will simply make a lot of rich white men (and a few women) even richer and more entrenched than they already are.

The Saudi Arabia project kicked off in the fall of 2014, when Jan Chipchase got an e-mail from Ash Banerjee. Banerjee had just been hired as chief brand officer at Jawwy, a startup within STC that endeavored to launch a new mobile brand for young digitally native Saudis. As a middle-aged Indian executive who lived mostly in Dubai, Banerjee needed to figure out what would appeal to Saudi youth.

They developed a report. The insights were broad: The report included things like the allowance the government paid university students ($264/month) and the local minimum wage ($1413/month for Saudis; $666/month for non-Saudis). It described their living situations; both men and women live at home until they are married. It included diagrams that explained what types of coverings women wore, and when they were appropriate, as well as what socials apps people preferred (Skype, Instagram and Path are popular; Facebook and BBM are fading out). Not surprisingly, it also revealed that while mobile devices were important to Saudi men, they were absolutely critical for women. Instead of hiring a full-time driver, which might be prohibitively expensive and require planning ahead, for example, they could use on-demand services like Careem, for which they paid roughly $650/month. In May of 2016, Jawwy finally launched its service, which lets customers customize their mobile plans as they go. It’s still too early to say whether it will succeed, but the company said early signs are positive.

Q&A with Amazon Studios director Roy Price about how to make good TV and why it makes sense for Amazon.

The COO spoke about Amazon’s business model for original programming.

“Our business model is fairly straightforward because we have a subscription service so the goal of our program is simply to attract people to Amazon Prime,” he said. He said Amazon has put out 24 pilots so far, which is more than a typical broadcast network will do per year for prime time. “We're busy because we don't have a slate, a lineup. Maybe in a few years we can pull it back a little bit,” he said.

Price said this makes sense for Amazon. “What you really want in the on-demand environment, which is different than the broadcast environment, is that you need to find people who really like the show enough to seek it out. You need to really want to watch the show in modern TV, Price explained. "It's not about changing the channel anywhere, or just seeing what's on. It's not good enough to be good-ish,” he said.