Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Category: Tech

  • Meatspace vs. metaverse — what is the best way to flex?

    With every passing year, the Matrix feels less and less like science fiction. With the continued rise of the metaverse — Zuckerberg is betting all of Facebook on it — we are increasingly living our lives between two worlds: one is offline and one is online. What this will ultimately mean (for us and for our cities) is of course up for debate. But what is clear is that the traditional trappings of real life have quickly made their way online into the metaverse. Arthur Hayes recently penned this fantastic article about the future of the world (it’s the metaverse) and the role of art (including NFT art). In it, he makes the argument that to “flex” is integral to the human experience. Here’s what he means by that:

    As social beings, the sole purpose of many activities and purchases is to publicly display how much energy you can waste. The nightclub economy is extremely a propos to this concept. Individuals walk into a dark room, listen to loud music (art), dance (a waste of energy akin to a mating call), and pay exorbitant amounts of money to drink liquid. Everyone gets dressed up real nice in articles of clothing that serve no useful purpose other than to demonstrate that the wearer spent a lot of money to display their social status to the rest of the clubbers present.

    People go to clubs to flex. In the words of the late Clayton Christensen, that is the “job” to be done.

    Why this matters is that many of us are now doing the same kind of things online. Buying a CryptoPunk (an OG NFT) for a large sum of money and posting it as your social media profile pic is a flex. Is this rational or irrational behaviour? Whatever your answer, it is akin to paying several hundred dollars for a t-shirt from some cool streetwear brand. The real job to be done is not that you desperately need a t-shirt to cover your upper torso. It is the signalling that goes along with owning something scarce and valuable. One of the things that is so special about NFT-permissioned stuff is that there’s now a simple way to prove and enforce all of these things: ownership, scarcity, and so on.

    What’s equally fascinating to me is how offline and online will end up interacting with each other. (Arthur refers to our offline world as the meatspace. I don’t know if he coined the term, but I’m going to rolling with it for the purposes of this post.) If people end up preferring to flex online instead of offline (and I’m sure many already do), what does that do to our meatspace(s)? And what does it do to our cities and how we build? I have no doubt that these questions are coming.

    Photo by Richard Horvath on Unsplash

  • Making sense of public ledgers

    One of the things about crypto and blockchains is that they are mostly public. Every transaction gets logged in a public ledger, which means that if you know the address of a particular wallet, you can see its balance, all the in and out $/crypto flows, any NFTs that it may own, as well as probably many other things that I am still working to get my head around. In all likelihood you won’t know who the wallet belongs to, but you’ll be able see what’s going on at that particular address.

    This is a pretty radical feature if you compare it to the way things generally work today. And what it signals to me is that we are headed towards a world with a lot more transparency and real-time data. Today I learned of a company called Dune Analytics. It is an analytics company built around open blockchain data (there’s no proprietary data). At the same time, it’s also a community. And it is this community (think of them almost as analysts) that helps to make sense of the open data.

    To give you an example, here is a chart from Dune showing monthly volume by NFT marketplace. OpenSea looks to be running away with things right now. And there’s no guessing. Here is all of the data.

    But, of course, this is just one example. Blockchain data could also be used to generate something like a real-time profit and loss statement for a company, which again, is pretty radical when you compare it to the way (and how slowly) that things are done today. It’s hard to not to see all of this and think about the far reaching implications of what’s unfolding right now. Everything from healthcare to real estate will almost certainly be transformed by this next iteration of the internet.

  • Architect Bjarke Ingels announces new “design living” company

    News has just dropped that architect Bjarke Ingels, Roni Bahar, and Nick Chim are launching a new “design living” company called Nabr. Their website says that it is “coming soon to Silicon Valley” and so presumably there will be tech involved and we should actually be calling it a startup.

    The video embedded at the top of this post (link here) will tell you a little bit about it. But from what I can glean from their website, the focus is on using technology and modular construction to deliver housing that is more personal / adaptable, more sustainable, and more attainable. There is a note on their site about buying with only 1% down.

    We have talked a lot on this blog about the antiquated and slow-moving nature of design, development, and construction. So what it absolutely clear is that there are many problems to be solved here. I am excited to see what the team brings forward.

  • “As-is” residential real estate marketplace raises $80 million

    Sundae, which is a residential real estate marketplace that connects distressed sellers and/or dated properties with potential investors, has just raised $80 million in Series C funding. Since its founding in 2018, the company has raised a total of $135 million.

    The marketplace is largely targeted at investors looking to buy, renovate, and then flip off-market homes. The company has also said that it is looking to protect distressed and/or uninformed sellers from opportunistic buyers.

    The way it works is that Sundae lists the home and then aggregates demand from qualified local investors. These investors then bid against each other, in an auction, to buy the home. Presumably this is a good thing for homeowners.

    Once a bid has been accepted, Sundae will then advance $10k to the seller to help with moving and other expenses. Supposedly the company delivers, on average, about 10 offers within the first few days of a listing.

    Sundae appears to have a narrower focus compared to other real estate startups like Opendoor. This is a marketplace for “as-is” homes and a solution to “predatory wholesalers” who buy off-market and then quickly assign the paper.

    But perhaps this is just the start of more change in the real estate industry.

  • Shinjuku east exit cat — a new trompe-l’œil in Tokyo

    Last month, a giant 4K digital cat was installed on a billboard near Shinjuku station in Tokyo. See above tweet. It was created using a 26 x 62 foot LED display, and the resulting effect is very much a trompe-l’œil. The cat looks like it’s sitting on a ledge that is carved into the side of a building.

    The cat doesn’t have a name. But the New York Times has reported that locals have started to call it “Shinjuku east exit cat” because of where it is situated relative to the station. I am going to assume that this name sounds a little more endearing in Japanese.

    Having spent a fair bit of time in Asia in my twenties — mainly Taipei, Tokyo, and Hong Kong — I’ve always been impressed by how playful Asian cities are with their buildings, billboards, signage, and lighting. It can make us feel overly conservative. A trip to Tokyo can be like a trip to the future.

    I appreciate that most people don’t want their cities to be overrun with advertising, and that’s what billboards are usually for. It can get tacky. I get it. But sometimes it just makes sense to stick a massive 3D cat on the side of your building. It’s fun and it captures people’s attention.

  • Google opens first ever retail store in New York City

    Google just opened up its first ever retail store. It’s in Chelsea in New York City at the base of its offices in a building that the company owns. The space is about 5,000 square feet and it occupies a full city block.

    A collaboration with New York-architect, Suchi Reddy, the retail space is deliberately different from what you’ll find at an Apple store (though the broad intentions are arguably similar). Instead of sleek, metallic and futuristic, the focus here was on creating a warm and inviting space that feels more like a home. (Note the pale woods.)

    The approach is intended to make a statement about the role that technology, or at least Google’s technology, should play in our lives. It is about tech servicing humanity and not the other way around.

    FastCompany has a good article, here, that explains all of this.

    It is interesting to watch these spaces evolve into what we are now calling experiential retail or commerce. If you read the FastCompany article you’ll read about the work that Johns Hopkins University is doing on neuroaesthetics, which is the study of how spaces and aesthetics affect our bodies. That is how finely tuned these spaces have become.

    And it’s kind of what you need to do today. Consider the example of Microsoft’s retail stores, which launched in a clear attempt to mimic the successes that Apple has seen with its stores. They even looked somewhat similar. But then last year Microsoft announced that the company would be closing all of its stores.

    Why? Part of the problem is that they were too focused on just selling Microsoft products. And that, it would seem, can’t really be the main objective anymore. You also need to consider the experience. What story are we telling about our brand with our space, and is it compelling enough to standout?

    P.S. The first image at the top of this post is of their Google Translate booth. You walk in. Say something. And Google translates the hell out of it for you.

    Photos: Google

  • Ecommerce as logistics

    Benedict Evans asks some great questions in this recent post about ecommerce penetration. Instead of just looking at the product itself and/or the way in which we buy it (online versus offline, for example), he focuses on the logistics model that accompanies the transaction.

    What can be parceled and shipped via Amazon? What can be delivered using a bicycle? What requires some sort of special delivery or collection method?

    The point he is making is that different things need to happen for a new fridge to make it to your home, compared to say a Chipotle burrito. And these differences matter when it comes to how we should be thinking about ecommerce and the real estate in our cities.

    Personally, I find it helpful to reframe the questions in this way.

    Here’s an excerpt from the post:

    But if I buy online and then drive to the store to collect it, is that different to phoning and reserving it? We didn’t have a statistics category for ‘telephone ordering’. If I use an app to order pizza instead of phoning the restaurant, has that become ‘ecommerce’ or is it still pizza delivery? 30 years ago, if I drove to Walmart instead of walking to a neighbourhood store, or drove to Best Buy instead of going to a department store, we didn’t call that ‘car-based commerce’. So is this a tech question, or a retailing question, or an urbanism question?

    For the full thing, click here.

    Chart: Benedict Evans

  • Popular times — how live is live?

    I was searching for a location this morning on Google Maps and I came across the “popular times” chart that many of you are probably familiar with. It shows you how busy the location you’re looking at tends to be throughout the day. But this time around, I noticed a pulsing “live” dot and it got me wondering: How live is live?

    Google collects this data from of our phones.

    It is aggregated and anonymized Location History data from anyone who has opted in on their Google Account. If you’re using Google Maps and have your location services set to “always”, you can actually see a timeline of the places you’ve visited — even if you haven’t explicitly navigated to them (see above).

    So the short answer is that the live data is really live. If there’s a spike in the busyness of a particular venue — one that doesn’t match historical busyness patterns — the Google network can pick it up.

    I’m fascinated by this kind of city data because I see it as part of the future of city building. Why not use more data to inform the way in which we plan and build our cities. Retail data, traffic data, migratory patterns, population densities — all of this and more is now available to us.

  • PAPILIO: Wind-powered streetlight

    Well here is a clever idea by Berlin designer Tobias Trübenbacher. It is a wind-powered streetlight — one that also detects when people are nearby and emits an insect-friendly light spectrum. Lots of cities already rely (partially) on solar powered lights and signage. But that doesn’t always work if the street doesn’t get a lot of direct sunlight or if you happen to be in a darker city. So perhaps wind is the answer. I could imagine this working very well here in Toronto in the middle of the winter at the intersection of Bay and King. And if you remember my post from earlier in the week about a roadmap to net zero energy, it is pretty clear that both solar and wind electricity are going to need to become far more prominent in our cities.

    If you can’t see the embedded video above, click here.

  • Plastic surgery, LA mega-mansions, and digital NFT art

    “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.” -Warren Buffet

    According to the Wall Street Journal, there is a real estate trend underway in Los Angeles: Celebrity plastic surgeons are piling into the business of building over-the-top spec homes. (Spec means that they are built speculatively, without a buyer in place, and sold — hopefully — upon completion.)

    What is clear from this phenomenon is that there appears to be a bit of money to be made in the world of LA plastic surgery. What is also clear is that the market value for a 21,000 square foot mega-mansion in Los Angeles is basically who-the-hell-knows:

    The rush of new contemporary spec homes built in the Los Angeles area has put downward pressure on prices. While Dr. Nassif says he’s had significant interest in his home since listing it earlier this year, Dr. Kanodia recently slashed the asking price of his home to $99 million from $180 million. Developers like Nile Niami, known widely as the king of Los Angeles spec homes, handed the keys over to his lenders on at least one project and is facing default on others, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

    Is the market price $180 million? Is it $99 million? Or is it much less? Probably depends on which way the winds are blowing that day. At this snack bracket, you’re looking to harpoon a whale and there are only so many of those. But ultimately, the market price is whatever someone is willing to pay.

    One thing that is interesting to see in some of these homes — besides hidden DJ platforms on hydraulic lifts — is that NFT art displays are now starting to get incorporated into these new builds. Assuming that digital NFT art does continue to take off, which is still TBD, there is going to be an explosion of different display/gallery solutions.

    Perhaps these mega-mansions are a leading indicator for that trend.