Turning Silicon into Gold: The Strategies, Failures, and Evolution of the Tech Industry

Contents
About the Authors
Introduction
Part I: Getting Started
	Chapter 1: The Second Mover Advantage
		The Rise of Facebook
		Breaking Down the Second Mover Advantage
		What This Means for You
	Chapter 2: Election Meddling
		Goldstein’s Experiment
		Impact
		Technology’s Role
	Chapter 3: Cashless Cash
		What Is M-Pesa?
		The Rise of M-Pesa
		Why M-Pesa Was Successful
		The Failures of Apple Pay
		Replicable Parts of the M-Pesa Strategy
	Chapter 4: Pivot to Perfection
		Knowing When to Pivot
		User-Driven Pivots
			Product Pivot
			Customer Pivot
			Problem Pivot
		Pivots for Long-Term Viability
		How to Pivot Successfully
	Chapter 5: The Chicken or the Egg
		Marketplace Problems: The Chicken and the Egg
		The Origin of OpenTable
		OpenTable’s Approach: Single-Player Mode
		Why Single-Player Mode Works
Part II: Gaining the Edge
	Chapter 6: The Secondary Market
		What Are Secondary Markets?
		A Closer Look at Secondaries
		Growth of Secondary Funds
		The Effects of an Expanding Secondary Market
	Chapter 7: Cutting Out the Middleman
		Before Netflix Originals
		Why Original Content
		Tech-Powered and Promoted Content
		Problems with Targeted Content
		Continue Watching?
	Chapter 8: Innovating an Industry
		History of Video Games
		Shigeru Miyamoto: Nintendo’s Legendary Video Game Designer
		Nintendo and the Art of Innovation
	Chapter 9: Flourishing Freemium
		From Glitch to Great
		Introduction to Freemium
		Building a Strong Core Product
		Centralization
		Customer Focus
		Delightful Branding
		Achieving Your Freemium Dreams
		Easy to Enter
		Habit-Forming
		Hard to Leave
		Freemium Conversion
	Chapter 10: Fake It ‘Til You Make It
		The Provenance of PayPal
		Reddit Rising
		Fake Demand, Real Value
Part III: Extending the Lead
	Chapter 11: Online to Offline (O2O)
		Amazon and Disruptions in Retail
		Brick-and-Mortar and Prime
		Amazon’s Foray into Groceries
		O2O and D2C
	Chapter 12: The Last Mile Problem
		Amazon and Last Mile Delivery
		Amazon’s Solutions
		Implications of a Solution
	Chapter 13: Tech IPO Flops
		What Happens in an IPO
		The Profitless Prosperity Model
		Longer Incubation Periods
		Market Sensitivity to News and Tech Scrutiny
	Chapter 14: Apples to Apples
		Understanding Market Cannibalization
		History of iPhone Models (2007–2019)
		iPhone Sales Problem
		Planned Obsolescence Backlash
		Problem or Strategy?
	Chapter 15: Memes As Marketing
		The History of Memes
		Understanding Virality
		Creating Viral Marketing: The Wendy’s Twitter Account
			What Will People Be Sharing?
			Why Will People Share Your Content?
			Where Will Your Content Be Shared with New Customers?
		Building Virality Into Products: WeChat’s Red Envelope Feature
			What Will People Be Sharing?
			Why Will People Share Your Product?
			Where Will Your Product Be Shared with Nonusers?
			Why Will Exposed Nonusers Use Your Product?
Part IV: Failing
	Chapter 16: Un-assistive Voice Assistants
		The Beginnings of Smart Assistants
		Lessons Learned from Clippy
		Assistants in the Age of Ambient Computing
		The Future of Voice Assistants
	Chapter 17: Too Much of a Good Thing
		The Messaging Market Today
		Social Messaging vs. Social Media Platforms
		The Fragmented Nature of Messaging
		The Future of Messaging
	Chapter 18: print(“No.”)
		Amazon
		Microsoft
		Google
		Big Tech = Big Controversy?
	Chapter 19: The Rise and Fall of Virtual Reality
		The Origins of Virtual Reality
		Virtual Reality in the 1980s and 1990s
		Current-Day Virtual Reality
		VR in Gaming and Entertainment
		Mobile VR
		VR for Training
		VR for Communication
Part V: Society
	Chapter 20: Chinese Women in Tech
		Chinese Tech
		A Deeper Dive
		A Multilevel Solution
	Chapter 21: Mental Health Algorithms
		Opportunity for Intervention
		Creating a Mental Health Algorithm
		Big Tech, Big Data, Big Responsibility?
		Generalizing Suicide Risk Predictions to Other Mental Diseases
	Chapter 22: I Made It; It’s Mine
		Shares and Voting Rights
		Founders, Their Companies, and Voting Shares
		It’s a Tech Thing
	Chapter 23: What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Billion New Users
		Who Are the Next Billion Users (NBU)
		Overview of Urban Population Demographics
		Why NBU?
		Mobile Phones, Big Tech, and NBU
		Small Tech and NBU: Emerging Market Start-Up Model
	Chapter 24: Wisdom of the Crowd
		Today’s Online Crowd
		Idea Competitions
		The “Pioneer of Crowdsourcing”
	Chapter 25: Dataism and Transhumanism
		History of Religion and Technology
		Digitizing Religions Today
		The Next Stage of Human Evolution
		The Arrival of a New “God”
Glossary
Index