Cherry 

Best of the past week

Hey , 

I'm looking forward to enjoying Spring time on California's central coast this weekend. By the time you read this I'll be in Monterey Bay for a consulting, communication and listening practices workshop; followed by a conference, perhaps more about that next week.On a different topic, loving food as much as I do, this article about the future of food caught my attention. It's a short two minute read for those of you who don't have much time. That said there's a potential time sink rabbit hole connecting to a bunch of other both fascinating, weird and possibly terrifying stories in links. Particularly interesting to note the reference to a Barcelona based think tank specialized in the future of food, Reimagine Food.As an example from recently published piece of research, they reckon 3D printed foods will be a thing between 2019 - 2022. A company in Germany is already working on prototypes.More in the full article:The Wondrous and Completely Terrifying Future of Food

 Sprinkles What's the GIF? 

Whipped Cream

Caramel Fudge

What's sticky in the communications industry?

I caught an article about the progress of Snapchat since they went public with an IPO early March. At that time the social network popular with teens and young people was valued at $17.8 billion. It was all very successful until they just announced their first quarter earnings and slow user growth. Share prices dropped over 24% in the past week or so. They're having a hard time keeping growth up and since they went public Facebook released a series of clone features for Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp that may not encourage Snapchat fans to switch though it may well seriously hinder Snapchat's growth the US market - and it likely already has. Instagram already has more daily active users than Snapchat overall, 200M vs. 166M.I am actually amending this paragraph right now as I'm sitting in the lounge of my hostel in Monterey, a bunch of teenagers are on a biology field trip and I'm over hearing three of them talking about how they're using Instagram more than Snapchat now that the Instagram Stories functionality has more / better features (apparently - I'm sure some people would disagree and I don't know enough about the differences). Unsurprisingly Snapchat is going to have a tough time proving they can be a serious challenger to the dominance of Facebook or Google when it comes to online advertising.Snap is getting absolutely crushed after falling short of Wall Street's expectations

Snapchat hits a disappointing 166M daily users, growing only slightly faster

Chocolate

What's going on in gaming?

I'm happy to report I've made some progress with my board game design idea last week. I'm hoping to have a very rough first prototype to start play-testing next month.At least that's the excuse I've used to justify giving in to another exciting Kickstarter project that has a couple more days before it ends, if ever you want to jump in. The White Box is a tool box along with design principles and guidelines for budding tabletop game designers to test and experiment.The White Box: The Game Design Workshop in a Box

Vanilla

What else is interesting this week?

I hear it's Mother's Day in the United States, happy day for American moms! French mother's day is at the end of the month so I still have a couple of weeks before wishing it to my maman.I was just browsing looking into what I could share that might be interesting and vaguely mother's day related, I'm pretty sure I got the interesting part of the equation at least.In the world of various multi-level marketing type schemes had you heard of pearl parties? They shuck oysters and reveal different kinds of pearls, typically at meetings in people's homes but more recently they've grown crazy popular via Facebook Live video, so much so that some of the companies had to stop getting new resellers on board. And some of the companies don't seem completely legit either. I had no idea this was a thing.Pearl Parties Are Taking Over Facebook Live, But Buyers BewareEnjoy Mother's Day if you're in the United States and normal Sunday wherever else you are! As usual, if you've enjoyed the newsletter, please forward tell a friend about it, I just want more people to check it out!Best,Willem