I am trying to learn a bit of Spanish very quickly. I’m going to Peru in a few months and I think it would be fun to see how much I can learn for that trip. I have never formally studied Spanish but am familiar with Romance languages and so I feel like I’m learning […]
Author: Joe Hovde
Square’s Cash App strategy
When you hear about a business on a podcast 30 or 40 times, you start to wonder about its business model. When I first heard about the Cash App, it seemed like a Lyft to Venmo’s Uber: a viable alternative, but a clear market follower. But Square (Cash App’s parent company) keeps adding new features […]
AI, China, and Apple’s weakness
I keep hearing about the astonishing pace of innovation in China. I’ve seen lots of tweets like this one, and they leave me feeling nervous but deeply curious about what will come of the Chinese tech explosion. What I learned from 5 weeks in Beijing + Shanghai: – startup creation + velocity dwarfs anything in […]
One Sentence Takeaways from Sixteen Books
I often wonder how much I retain when I read. I’ll think about a book a lot while I’m reading it, and for the next month or so afterwords, but then largely forget about it. There are a few books I think about a lot, even years afterward (The Black Swan, The Power of Habit […]
What are the Most Common Settings for Best-Selling Novels?
I was recently wandering a bookstore, looking through new arrivals in Fiction. I came upon a book with a summary that was something along the lines of, “a young woman finds herself thrown into the Upper East Side aristocracy, and must navigate this strange new world, where not all is at it seems.” I laughed, […]
Cognitive Biases in Apartment Hunting
I’m looking for an apartment and while it has been fun, it’s frustrating how irrational it makes me feel. Some of the irrationality has come from tactics used by the realtors; some of it has come purely from my brain. Here are some of the tactics I’ve noticed realtors using. Reciprocity effect: At each complex I’ve […]
Traffic Data from a Viral Post
Viral posts don’t bring sustained traffic. I thought they did for a long time, before I started building websites and seeing the effects of traffic spikes. It’s natural to assume that if a post “blows up” and is seen by hundreds of thousands of people, it will bring lots of traffic (or revenue, users etc.) […]
Visualizing Arctic Monkeys Spotify Data
Edit: Updated with data from TBHC! In honor of the Arctic Monkeys’ new album Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino, I decided to look at Arctic Monkeys data using the terrific SpotifyR package from Charlie Thompson. The package lets you easily pull data from Spotify’s API. You can very quickly extract all the songs by a given […]
Growth in Government Requests for Facebook Data
The relationship between government and Facebook is increasingly complicated. I recently worked on a project with Big Finish Digital, a new advertising agency, looking at the rise in government requests for Facebook data around the world. The founders of Big Finish are interested in data privacy and the ethics around data in advertising, and gave […]
Sentiment Analysis of Media Coverage of Facebook
I recently worked on data for a story with Charlie Warzel at Buzzfeed about media coverage of Facebook over time. I am really interested in the decline of public opinion towards Big Tech, and wanted to quantify it. Getting Data from the NYT API I started by using the New York Times API to pull […]