David Curry

Chinese discount ecommerce app Temu has taken the United States and United Kingdom by storm, as the newest Chinese-based challenger aiming to saturate the market with products at under half the price of similar items on Amazon and other ecommerce stores. Temu, which is owned by Chinese ecommerce giant Pinduoduo, launched in the US in 2022 and in select European countries in 2023, offering a megastore of almost every conceivable item at a fraction of the cost. Like Wish and other discount stores, Temu offers lots of discount codes and freebies to entice users to spend. It was the most downloaded app in the US for the last few months of 2022 and has remained there for almost every day in 2023. At first, Temu’s

Shein is, by some measures, the largest online only fashion company, which may be a surprise to those who have never heard of the app. Originally a portal to buy wedding dresses, Shein branched out into general womenswear in the early 2010s and to all types of fashion by the mid-2010s, although the vast majority of its customers are still women. It is now the leader of a new generation of fast fashion that puts Zara and H&M to shame, producing thousands of new items to match the current trends every week. On an average day, Shein adds 2,000 new items to its store. Shein has also captured the social media age better than any other fashion company, using Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok intuitively

In a wave of entrepreneurship in the early 2010s, in which every industry was to be transformed through the deployment of technology, Uber and Lyft were born. The two companies are a product of the terrible taxicab ecosystem which existed in California before 2010. People could order cabs over the phone or on the internet, but operators would dispatch them based on their position in the queue, meaning someone could be waiting an hour for the cab to arrive from the other side of town. And if the cab saw a fare on the street, they were under no obligation to complete the booked ride. In Uber’s case especially, the app was designed to make ordering a taxi far more reliable. Lyft retuned its service

In a second attempt to be one of the first inductees of the startup incubator Y Combinator, University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian built Reddit, which they labelled “the front page of the internet”. The site functionality remains much the same as it was back in 2005. Users write posts, upload photos, videos and link to other parts of the internet. To organise the content, Redditors upload to specific subreddits. If the post receives a lot of attention, it may be featured on /r/all, the front page. A year after launch, Reddit sold to Conde Nast Publications for $20 million. Conde Nast owners Advance Publications moved Reddit to its own subsidiary a few years later. It remains the largest shareholder, although a

In the late 90s, paying for things online still had a stigma attached to it. There wasn’t any assurance that goods would be delivered or that faulty payments would be recovered. It was wild west and PayPal was one of the first payment solutions to try and civilise it. PayPal was formed when two companies, Confinity and X.com, merged. Elon Musk, of Tesla and SpaceX fame, was CEO of this combined company for a time. As he would in the future, he zoned in on the vision of PayPal’s future and terminated all other operations that were deemed unnecessary. That didn’t go down well with PayPal’s board members, who got rid of Musk in October 2000. He had been CEO for less than 12 months.

The move comes as the UK’s Department for Transport speeds up its push for self-driving trials across the country.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, Instacart became an essential service for millions of Americans trapped at home. Even as early as February, Instacart started noticing unusual demand for items such as toilet paper, canned vegetables and long-life milk. The next few months accelerated the growth of Instacart, which in 2019 was losing $25 million every month. It recorded its first monthly profit in April 2020, netting $10 million, and CEO Apoorva Mehta said the company had passed its 2022 goals. While Instacart doesn’t publish usage statistics, it added 300,000 more ‘shoppers’, riders responsible for picking up and delivery groceries, in the first half of 2020. It had a headcount of 350,000 by the end of 2020, with $35 billion in grocery sales. Instacart was one of

DoorDash began life as a paloaltodelivery.com and at launch the four founders ran the entire operation, which included building the app, receiving orders and delivering them. It instilled a culture in the startup which is still ingrained today, as DoorDash employees spend one day a month as a ‘dasher’ delivering food. In the first year of operations, DoorDash expanded to 70 restaurants in the Bay Area and received $2.4 million in funding. It grew at a rate of 20 percent every week, according to Y Combinator. Its goal was to build an artificial intelligence system capable of perfecting delivery, by taking into account every variant of the delivery process and using the data to better estimate delivery time and reduce errors. Named Deep Red in

In 2007, a cash-strapped Brian Chesky came up with a shrewd way to pay his $1,200 San Francisco apartment rent. He would offer “Air bed and breakfast”, which consisted of three airbeds, breakfast, WiFi and a desk to work, to attendees of the Industrial Design Conference, who needed a place to crash over the weekend. After an initial period of uncertainty, in which the founders sold Barack Obama and John McCain cereal to sustain the business (seriously), the company received $20,000 in seed funding from Y Combinator and Sequoia Capital. The next year, it ran a Series A round which generated $7.2 million for the startup. Things moved quickly from there, in May 2011 Airbnb acquired Accoleo, a German clone of the website and launched

Key Mobile Game Demographics StatisticsMobile Game Age Demographics by CategoryGame Gender Demographics by CategoryGames are the most popular app category on both app stores, accounting for about 59 percent of the consumer spending on app and 37 percent of all app downloads. Inside of the gaming category, there are many sub-categories of games that have their own audiences, mechanics and monetization systems. Casual games tend to offer a similar experience every time, while puzzle games increase in difficulty as the player passes a level. Quite a lot of games are monetized through ads, however, some use subscriptions and in-game purchases to make the majority of their revenue. This is seen more commonly with games that hold long replay value, keeping gamers invested for more than