Swipe to Unlock: The Primer on Technology and Business Strategy (Fast Forward Your Product Career: The Two Books Required to Land Any PM Job)

And since collaborative filtering gets better with more users, Spotify (which already has tons of users) can continue furthering its lead. The second reason is that personalized recommendations make users more likely to stick with the service.[40] The more you use Spotify, the more the algorithms know about your tastes, and hence the better they ca

Every Monday morning, Spotify sends its listeners a playlist of 30 songs that are, almost magically, perfectly tuned to their tastes. This playlist, called Discover Weekly, was an instant hit: within six months of launching in June 2015, it was streamed over 1.7 billion times.

The Discover Weekly algorithm starts by looking at two basic pieces of information. First, it looks at all the songs you’ve listened to and liked enough to add to your library or playlists. It’s even smart enough to know that if you skipped a song within the first 30 seconds, you probably didn’t like it. Second, it looks at all the playlists that o

account on this app so I can send you money” never fails).[1097] What’s more, WeChat made it a game — you can send random amounts of money to friends, which makes users eager to open any hongbao sent their way on WeChat.[1098] There’s even a game where you can send money to a group chat — but only the first member of the group to open the chat gets

Swipe to Unlock is a primer on technology and business strategy. In this book, we’ll use real-world examples to break down the software, hardware, and business strategies that power the tech world and give you the tools to start understanding, analyzing, and shaping tech yourself.

Shortly after its founding in 2010, WeChat started letting you shake your phone to randomly connect with other users. You could also write a digital “message in a bottle” and send it to a random WeChat user in the hopes they’d respond.

Similarly, Tinder lets you “swipe” on potential romantic partners — but only a few dozen a day. If you want to get more “swipes,” you’ll need to pay for Tinder Plus, a monthly subscription.

instance, in 1983 the US government made GPS data publicly available — and today over 3 million jobs, from truck driving to precision farming, rely on open GPS data.[1088]