3 charts for you today:
Last year an invitation-only app called Clubhouse, which lets users join impromptu audio conversations with strangers, launched in the App Store. Within a few weeks it was being touted by tech heavyweights as the next big thing in the social media space.
Clubhouse took that hype and ran with it. Despite having only a few thousand users the company raised $12m at a $100m valuation. Downloads soared, and just 8 months later the company raised again, this time at a $1bn valuation. Then, just 3 months later, the company raised again, this time at a $4bn valuation.
Few companies have had such a meteoric rise in such a short amount of time — but the latest download data suggests that enthusiasm for Clubhouse might already be waning. According to data from Sensor Tower Clubhouse was downloaded roughly 900,000 times in April. That's down more than 90% from the peak of February, when the app was downloaded 9.6 million times.
A lockdown fad?
The numbers suggest the hype period is coming to an end for Clubhouse. Perhaps as cinemas, restaurants, sporting venues, cafes and everything else continues to open up the allure of listening to what could be called "live podcasts" is a little less enticing.
That said, Clubhouse does have a few levers to pull, the first of which it initiated this week by launching an Android app — widening the pool of potential users significantly. The other lever Clubhouse could pull would be to remove the invite-only feature, which has limited user growth only to people who already know someone with the app. With no fewer than 7 tech companies having announced they are working on a feature like Clubhouse perhaps the mystery is fading.
The latest data from the US Social Security Administration reveals that Liam and Olivia have retained their places at the top of the most popular baby names in the United States. For male babies, Liam has now been the most popular name of choice for 4 years, while Olivia has ranked at the top for females for 2 years, relegating Emma to second place after a 5-year spell at the top.
100 years of names
We went back through the data from the SSA, to chart the most popular names of the last 100 years. For years Mary dominated naming lists, occupying the top spot for females from 1920 until the early 1960s, with Linda only briefly knocking Mary off her perch. Then, after a short spell at the top for Lisa, the "J's" of Jennifer and Jessica reigned until the mid-1990s before Emily ascended for a 12-year run. Since then, Isabella, Sophia and Emma have each had a spell at the top before Olivia topped the table in 2019.
For male babies, John, Robert and James ruled in turn until Michael took the top spot in 1961 — a place Michael would stay for 44 years in total, giving up the top spot to David for just 1 year in 1960. Jacob was then top for 13 years from 1999 to 2012 before giving way to Noah and eventually Liam.
Honourable mentions: There have been more Patricias born than Jennifers in the last 100 years, but Patricia never cracked the top spot. There were also 3.5 million Williams born, with William never falling outside of the top 20 names, but again never cracking the top spot.
The most popular names in total from the last 100 years can be found here and the top 10 for 2020 can be found here.
This week stock markets have been under pressure as investor worries about meaningfully higher inflation have begun to go mainstream. Indeed just last week we wrote about the price of lumber, which has spiked almost 500% in the last 12 months, making housebuilding significantly more expensive.
The numbers are in
So the US inflation data released this morning had a lot of eyeballs on it — and the numbers came in pretty meaningfully ahead of expectations. Overall the Consumer Price Index (which measures the prices of a basket of consumer goods and services) is up 4.2% over the last 12 months. That's the highest reading since 2008.
Some of that jump can be explained by the pandemic because comparing anything from this year with 12 months ago can look pretty weird — but even the monthly gain was +0.8%, way ahead of forecasts for +0.2%. Inflation might be back.
1) Since Apple's latest iOS update, users now have to give their permission before apps are able to track them across the internet. According to analysis from Flurry Analytics, only around 5% of US users have opted in to tracking so far. Worldwide opt-in rates are higher, at 13%.
2) Elon Musk's appearance on Saturday Night Live brought in an average of 7.3 million viewers — making it the third most-watched episode for the season, behind the episodes hosted by Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock.
3) The Colonial Pipeline, which runs from Texas to New York and carries 2.5 million barrels of fuel per day, was taken offline last weekend after a ransomware attack from a nefarious group called DarkSide. DarkSide offer "ransomware-as-a-service" software that encrypts data — making it unusable — unless a ransom is paid.
4) Over 2,000 businesses around the world rely on Sisense for game-changing business insights. Find out why they trust Sisense to go beyond business intelligence to infuse analytics everywhere.**
5) Shares in Palantir, the software and data analytics provider for large enterprises and governments, rose 9% after reporting its first quarter results. Palantir reported having just 149 customers.
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