Carjitsu, Juliet balconies, and deorbiting

March 14, 2025

Mar 14, 2025

Welcome to this 150th issue of our newsletter “Weak Signals and other Trends”.

Each week, I personally sift through hundreds of sources of inspiration to track where we’re heading. If you are a new subscriber to this newsletter, take the time to send me a note and introduce yourself, I love to understand who is reading.

Competitive Intelligence

DownThemAll to quickly download and batch rename a long list of PDFs on a government website. A waybackmachine extension. An insight about middleschoolers. Several countries have started making job posts and reaching out on LinkedIn for dismissed foreign intelligence officers with security clearance.

Strategic blindspots and business models

Looking at the familiar with “alien eyes” allows you to unlock new business model opportunities while avoiding risks stemming from strategic blindspots. This section also is about the risks we miss.

Southwest says goodbye to ‘significant driver’ of old business model. How LinkedIn became luxury fashion’s newest runway. Is Anyone Using Their Tiny Balconies? In Europe, to get a five-star safety rating, cars will now need physical controls for five core safety features. Best Buy is putting creator storefronts on its digital shelves, so influencers can curate product recommendations. Brazilian government rolls out bold 35-year plan that could change how valuable land is used and aims to transform environmental restoration into a business model.

Our future

The future of animal wellbeing. Bookwatch Or the next format to “read “ books. The friendship wedding. Deregulated freedom cities. Automation, surveillance strain workers in Bangladesh’s factories . Future proofing business continuity: trends for 2025. Future menus.

We keep you updated on those trends and more on Twitter and Bluesky.

Weak signals

Weak signals are indicators of a change, a trend or an emerging risk that might become significant for the future. They allow us to run hypothesis, expand our thinking, and challenge assumptions. How will you interpret those in your industry or field of expertise?

Two actors put on a virtual production of Hamlet inside the online version of Grand Theft Auto. Carjitsu is a form of organized fighting taking place inside a very small car. Montreal DJs move clubbing from midnight to morning, adding coffee and croissant. The houses color is telling you when a neighborhood is gentrifying. Vanity plates applications. Rejected vanity plates.

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Down the rabbit hole

This section highlights a subject that led me to many useful threads, or a single site, that opened many doors: “A rabbit hole is not a distraction. A rabbit hole is your brain trying to tell you to pay attention to something you’re curious about. Ignore algorithmic rabbit holes” ( by are.na):

This week, I explored Teen Vogue , following a note from Rohit Bhargava in his “Non-Obvious Insights” newsletter: “Teen Vogue challenges me with perspectives I haven’t seen elsewhere, products I didn’t know existed and celebrities I’ve never heard of In short, it’s the perfect publication to help me have empathy for a world that is different from the one I usually see”. A great source of insight into emerging weak signals.

I like new words, this week I learned about permorary.

Unpacking AI

This is a new section. Clients have asked me to dig into the impact of AI for their organization, industry, or their own work. I will add in this sections tools, or angles of interpretation that I find relevant to our community of curious minds:

Judges Are Fed up With Lawyers Using AI That Hallucinate Court Cases.

Hodgepodge discovery

Articles for curious minds and the polymaths.

Impossibly hungry judges. Shuffled each week will email you with a short overview of which countries in the world have changed leader over the past 7 days. The business of deorbiting. Background music was the radical invention of a trailblazing composer.

Numbers

87.8k. That’s how much a buyer paid at auction for a three-inch Flamin’ Hot Cheeto in the shape of the Pokémon Charizard.

120- In January alone, more than 120 Starlinks deorbited, creating a shower of fireballs.

Feeling good

The handwriting of famous authors. Diving into Tokyo. Subway stories. Photos of the old West. How could we effectively visualize 100,000,000 books or more at once?

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Weak signals and other trends