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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Tag: video

  • TikTok’s revenue is apparently over $7 billion

    Last week, audio clips from an internal Q&A session at Facebook were leaked and published by the Verge. These meetings have historically always been private. In what I think was the right move, the company then decided to publicly livestream a subsequent Q&A session — you know, to show that they had nothing to hide.

    The media tended to focus on Mark Zuckerberg’s comments about the threat of Facebook being broken up by regulators. #BreakUpBigTech. Lots of people are also attempting to glean what this leak might signal about the company’s current corporate culture. But there are lots of other interesting soundbites.

    Here’s an excerpt from Zuckerberg about the Chinese social media app, TikTok:

    So yeah. I mean, TikTok is doing well. One of the things that’s especially notable about TikTok is, for a while, the internet landscape was kind of a bunch of internet companies that were primarily American companies. And then there was this parallel universe of Chinese companies that pretty much only were offering their services in China. And we had Tencent who was trying to spread some of their services into Southeast Asia. Alibaba has spread a bunch of their payment services to Southeast Asia. Broadly, in terms of global expansion, that had been pretty limited, and TikTok, which is built by this company Beijing ByteDance, is really the first consumer internet product built by one of the Chinese tech giants that is doing quite well around the world. It’s starting to do well in the US, especially with young folks. It’s growing really quickly in India. I think it’s past Instagram now in India in terms of scale. So yeah, it’s a very interesting phenomenon.

    TikTok now has over 1.4 billion installs outside of China according to TechCrunch. And in the first half of this year, it supposedly booked more than $7 billion in revenue (though most of it came from China). The company is also saying that it posted its first profit in June of this year.

    All of this is, indeed, “a very interesting phenomenon.”

    But it’s even more interesting because this is probably the first consumer-facing Chinese internet product with massive global adoption. And it has Facebook paying attention. They’re now the ones who have to play copycat — their version of TikTok is called Lasso. Of course, it’s not nearly as popular.

  • How Medellín fixed its slums

    I have written about Medellín, Colombia before on the blog. But the content has mostly come from my urbanist friends. About five years ago, my good friend Alex Feldman — who is a Managing Director at U3 Advisors — wrote this guest post about what other cities could learn from Medellín. He wrote it following a trip to the city for the World Urban Forum.

    I haven’t been to Colombia, but it’s high up on my list. So I enjoyed watching the story of Medellín’s turnaround in this Future of Cities Retro Report. It is the same story that Alex told over five years ago, but that doesn’t make the lessons any less valuable. (If you can’t see the embedded video at the bottom of this post, click here.)

    Eugenie Birch — who is interviewed in the video and who is a professor at my alma mater — hits the nail on the head when she says that a lot of this stuff isn’t rocket science. Look, we know how to lay pipes. We know how to build transportation systems. It comes down to this: Is there the political will?

  • Standard elements in non-standard ways

    A few people have now sent me this TED talk by architect Débora Mesa Molina. But I watched it for the first time today. I guess my personal brand is pretty closely associated with architecture and design.

    In it, she talks about her firm’s approach to using overlooked and/or standard building materials in unconventional ways. For example, here, she used stacked precast beams to assemble a house in Madrid (c.2008). The entire structure came together in only 7 days.

    My first reaction is that I like the idea and approach — which is really quite interesting — more than the final designs. I am also curious if there were any cost savings as a result of using “standard” materials. What are your thoughts?

  • Shoppable videos

    Sometimes I think that writing a blog has become a bit old fashioned. I should probably be making videos. But the reality is that I like writing. Getting up in the morning, reading, having a coffee, and writing my thoughts down is a ritual that I really enjoy. Making videos is also a bigger time commitment, and I would rather focus my energy elsewhere.

    But there’s no question that user-generated videos have and will continue to change ecommerce and many other aspects of society. This recent blog post by Connie Chan and Avery Segal called, “Ecommerce as video’s killer app,” is a perfect example of that. In it, they talk about a handful of Chinese companies that are pioneering “shoppable videos.”

    What these platforms are doing is allowing consumers to buy things natively within their app and through a “video-centric checkout flow.” In other words: watch a story being told (from an individual, as opposed to a company); become interested in a particular product or service; and then immediately purchase it with only a few taps.

    Another use case, which I think many of you will find interesting, is the creation of “crowdsourced video city guides.” Instead of checking for hotel reviews on TripAdvisor, simply find someone who has already vlogged a stay and book it that way. The individual who uploaded the video will then earn a commission.

    This behavior already exists. Discovery and buying decisions — for many products and services — have moved to social platforms. Just today a friend reached out asking me about a bar that she saw on my Instagram stories a few weeks. She’s planning to go next week. Now where’s my commission?

    Shoppable videos are a natural extension. They may also lower the barriers to participation. And so maybe I will end up making videos, after all.

  • Bill Gates on tech and climate change

    Bill Gates recently spoke with David Rubenstein at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. Full video, here.

    The bit that got a lot of attention is his admission that Microsoft should have dominated in mobile (in lieu of Android). The core competencies were all there and the company was in investing in mobile at the time.

    The technology discussions in general are interesting, but I also really enjoyed hearing about his efforts to address climate change. He spends a good chunk of time talking about that. Strongly recommend. (Related link: Breakthrough Energy.)

    On a somewhat unrelated note, this is also the first time I’ve seen every question and answer neatly transcribed below a video. This makes it very easy to find the parts that may be of interest. All video discussions should have this.

  • Tokyo’s kitchen cars (or food trucks)

    Click here for a short video (by Monocle) about Tokyo’s nascent “kitchen car”, or food truck, scene. (The soundtrack is fun.) Historically, street food stands, or “yatai,” have had a questionable reputation in Japan. They proliferated across the country following World War II when times were tough and food was being rationed. But as Tokyo prepared to host the 1964 Olympics, local governments began to clamp down on yatai. They were seen as unhygienic and a place for drunks to hang out. There may have also been a sense of shame around the country’s post-war struggles. Whatever the case may be, these new food trucks have — aided by technology — changed the way people eat on the street.

  • [Video] Yearning for turning

    It is a beautiful snow day in Toronto today and so I thought we would switch gears a little.

    If you don’t care about snowboarding (or skiing), you may want to ignore today’s post and check back tomorrow. But if you do care, then you are going to absolutely love this video by KORUA Shapes. There’s something so magical about pairing the right song with the right video. If you can’t see it below, click here.

    I’ve been following KORUA for a number of years now. They make unique snowboard shapes with virtually zero graphics or ornamentation. The tops are white and the bottoms are red. Clean and simple. It’s all about the geometry of the boards and their performance. Their mission: “Simply for the sake of beauty and joy.”

    I think I’m going to try one out next season.

  • A beautiful destination: Rio de Janeiro

    Below is a breathtaking video of Rio de Janeiro by Beautiful Destinations. If you haven’t heard of them before, they run a great YouTube channel profiling places and experiences from around the world. I think they also post a new video every week. If you can’t see the video of Rio below, click here.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYy1RITRN9s&w=560&h=315]

  • Archival street life footage

    Guy Jones is a videographer who specializes in archival footage, or at least that is what his YouTube account suggests. He edits old videos and makes them more watchable by doing things like adding sound and slowing them down to a natural rate. 

    (Older films often appear sped up because they were recorded at less than 24 frames per second and then later played at 24 or more frames per second.)

    I’ve blogged about one of his videos before. This one of New York City in 1911. But he has so many other fascinating films on his channel – including a frozen Ottawa from 1942 – that I figured I would share it in its entirety today. 

    For the city builders in the room, here are some street life videos of Paris in la Belle Époque (1896-1900), New York City in 1927, and London in 1967. Among other things, it is fascinating to see how quickly the car crept its way into our cities.

    The video of Paris is all horses and moving walkways. The video of New York City (1927) is all cars. And if you look at the other video of New York from 1911, you’ll see a city in the midst of that transition.

  • Dendrochronology of U.S. immigration

    I can’t remember where I found it, but I recently stumbled upon this video simulating the dendrochronology of U.S. immigration from 1830 to 2015. 

    It is part of an ongoing project by Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, and Felipe Shibuya, and is supported by Northeastern University.

    As its name suggests, the video (and broader study) uses the metaphor of a tree (and its growth rings) to explain historical immigration to the U.S. 

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

    [vimeo 276140430 w=640 h=280]