What You Need to Know Today: November 23

Good afternoon, Early Risers!

Here’s what you need to know

TECH

The best thing since sliced bread. If I can’t preview a Word doc. in Gmail, I get annoyed. If I have to download a song with no option to stream, I might not listen to the song. When did YOU decide to stop downloading [songs, movies, documents, etc.] and switch to streaming? (For the sake of this brief, we’ll treat streaming and previewing the same. Their goal is similar: shortening the customer journey.) Like a boiling frog, we’ve all gradually become accustomed to the many benefits of streaming. As our world becomes more connect, it only makes sense to stream more — which is why Google thinks streaming apps could be the future.

Hotline bling ‘90s edition. If you were born in the ‘90s, then you may recall hearing your parents or their friends gripe about how their kids racked up a huge 1-900 bill. Before Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, kids would follow their favorite celebrities by dialing a 1-900 number and listening to pre-recorded messages from their idols. 1-900 numbers were used for everything: checking flights, the weather, sport scores, you name it. Typical rates: $1-2 for the first minute and then a couple cents for every minute you stayed on the line. So calling a 1-900 number and then leaving the phone off the hook would result in something like this. Fast Company wrote a great article on how dialing 1-900 numbers foreshadowed the Internet. Check it out.

What is FOGO? You know what FOMO is (Fear of Missing Out), but what about FOGO? Fear of Going Out is a real thing apparently, and this entrepreneur wants to solve it. Meet the Uber for nightclubs.

CAREER

For just $1 a day you can live like Elon Musk. It’s not pretty.

How to create online courses that make $100,000 or more. “There are so many options for membership sites and online course software that seem great, and their pricing models seem decent, but when you run the numbers, it does not work out in your favour,” says Paul Jarvis. “I don’t have a magic bullet for building online courses, but because I’m cheap (very cheap), I’ve figured out a way to run a course that makes sense financially, regardless of whether 20 people buy or 2,000.” Read more.

What the NEW ‘dress’ can teach us about niche marketing. You remember ‘the dress?’ Was it blue and black or white and gold? It doesn’t matter, because there’s a new dress that’s taking the Internet by storm. A Facebook group of meteorologists are all buying this dress and posting pictures. Why? I don’t know, and I don’t really care to know (neither should you). What’s important here is we’re seeing how effective niche marketing works. Full story.

+ If you’re selling luxury goods, you’ll likely be selling to this 1 percent.

LIFESTYLE

10 things we should all be informed about in life. Good reminder.

Tips for first time home buyers in NYC. “Buyers should plan to put at least 20 percent down in order to be taken seriously. That’s right, for a $500,000 apartment, you’ll need a down payment of $100,000, and that does not include closing costs,” says Michelle Higgins. Full story.

Aural sex. Thinking about self-publishing a book? Try writing a smut novel. Erotic fiction is a lucrative market right now. Long-haul truck drivers like the #longreads.

+ Why 50 Shades of Grey is great literature.

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#NOWYOUNOW

How the phrase ‘the best thing since sliced bread’ originated

By the Atlantic

The first effective bread-slicing machine was invented by Iowa-born Otto Frederick Rohwedder and put into service in 1928 by the Chillicothe (Missouri) Baking Company (the local paper ran a front page story on it). By the 1930s, pre-sliced bread was fully commercialized, and standardization was reinforced by other inventions that required uniform slices, such as toasters. The common phrase, “the best thing since sliced bread,” as a way of hyping a new product or invention may have come into use based on an advertising slogan for Wonder Bread, the first commercial manufacturer of pre-wrapped, pre-sliced bread. Read more.

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