007 Turns Techie 🔫
What’s happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍 The possible end of Airbnb, a digital concert for 12 million people & AI comes to spies.
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The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
10 tech & startup stories in 118 seconds.
💰WhatsAds: Since Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19bn in 2014, the technology community has been speculating when Facebook will seek the monetise the platform with Ads. Check out this article from a source close to Zuckerberg that talks through why Facebook cancelled the 2020 rollout of Ads on the green messenger service.
📉 End of Airbnb? This year was supposed to be big for Airbnb - the time they went public and raised $50-70bn. However, bookings are reported to be down 85% and cancellations rates are close to 90%. This article is a great read to analyse the future of the company.
🦋 Butterfly Filters: Instagram in isolation are putting down their makeup brushes and favoring the use of augmented reality ‘filters’. Take two minutes to read how Instagram is setting makeup trends through its filters. Article here.
Free Gaming: We’ve written previously about the increase in gaming since quarantine initiatives began, and now Google put some additional drive behind it by making their ‘Stadia Pro’ product free for two months 🎮 See it here.
Fintech Falls…or Does It? Downloads of UK challenger banking apps have plummeted 23% from February to March. See more data in the drop here. Forrester have also reported that Finech funding is being hit hard by COVID-19, despite Stripe raising $600m last week. Equally, Crunchbase reported strong fintech funding and hiring this week.
Join my Squad: Over 12.3m people tuned in live to watch Travis Scott perform digitally on the ‘Battle Royale’ game - Fortnite. This is part of a much larger trend where games are becoming ‘Third Places’ where people can meet, discuss and express themselves (especially since they can’t do so in person right now).
Chat Bot Wars 🤖Facebook has launched ‘Blended’ a new open source chatbot it claims has ‘empathy, knowledge and personality’. Take a look at this video showing Blended having a chat with Google’s Meena chatbot here.
007 Turns Techie 🔫: A major think-tank has concluded that UK spies will need to learn to use AI to deal with future threats such as cyber-attacks, malware & deep-fakes. Will this be a step towards predicting serious crime like in ‘Minority Report’? They don’t think so, as there’s not enough data & too many variables to create patterns.
Musk Breaks Ranks: The Tesla CEO is creating havoc once again as he described quarantine measures as ‘fascist’ and tweeting ‘FREE AMERICA NOW’ 🤬 Despite that shares in the company rose 4% in after-hours trading…nothing makes sense anymore.
The Real Everything Store? 🛒 Chinese e-commerce giant, Alibaba, is experiencing incredible growth around the world. A large part of it is due to the fact that they’ve shipped 40m pieces of protective equipment to 150 countries. This has opened them to a market outside China and now, they hope that this’ll translate to them rivaling Amazon in the US & Europe.
A Positive Spin
We don’t need to tell you about what’s going on in the world this week; but we do want to tell you about the companies (especially startups) doing their part to support people around the world.
📷 Tired of Zoom? HTC have launched their ‘virtual reality’ meetings app into Beta. Meeting participants start with a selfie, then design their avatar, then finally wear a device that tracks your body, mouth and eye movements. Read more about, and sign up to, the beta here.
🧠Not covid-related, but our favourite video of the week highlights how one groundbreaking technology enabled, Greg Bieker, a sufferer of ‘Locked In Syndrome’ to communicate with those around him using solely his brain waves. Watch it here.
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Over & Out,
Nick & Louis