November 20, 2020

what we are watching...

empowering you with insights and information from the edge of today’s headlines

Technology

Apple makes a concession: Apple announced that it will be reducing it App Store commission rate for small businesses. The new App Store Small Business Program will allow any developer who earns less than $1 million in annual sales per year to qualify for a reduced App Store cut of 15%, half of Apple’s standard 30% fee, on all paid app revenue and in-app purchases. The App Store currently hosts 28M registered app developers and had an estimated $50B in revenue in 2019, although Apple declined to mention how the new fee structure would impact its bottom line. The move seems to be a nod to potential antitrust lawsuits, although Apple is spinning it as a means to support small business innovation.

Sarcasm-meter: Researchers in China say they’ve created sarcasm detection AI that achieved state-of-the-art performance on a dataset drawn from Twitter. The researchers’ AI focuses on differences between text and imagery and then combines those results to make predictions. It also compares hashtags to tweet text to help assess the sentiment a user is trying to convey. We suppose that when our AI overlords take over they’ll now have an additional tool to convey their mockery and contempt for the human race.

Google goes all in on payments: In case you haven’t yet figured out your Venmo or Zelle or Apple Pay, Google has relaunched its Google Pay service, and has added a bunch of new features (or at least this is the first time they will be contained in one app). The new app includes peer-to-peer payments, insights about your spending habits, offers for coupons and savings, and it can even reach into your gmail account to find receipts. In 2021, Google will partner with some banks to directly offer fully online checking and savings accounts inside Google Pay — a service Google is calling “Plex.”

Year-End IPOs: The IPO calendar is not slowing down, and some of the IPOs appear to be a direct result of the pandemic. Roblox, the popular gaming platform for tweens, filed to go public: in October it reached $2B in lifetime revenue just from mobile players, and an average of 36M users log on to the platform daily. (Lil Nas X also just performed concert series within the platform, attracting over 33M viewers. )Affirm, the buy-now-pay-later online financing firm, filed for an IPO as well. Revenue grew 98% year over year, according to its S1, and the company got a huge boost from one of its major financing clients: Peloton. DoorDash also filed to go public, after it gained a 50% marketshare in US home delivery: it had 543M total orders in the first nine months of 2020, compared with 181M a year-ago. 

Boris goes to Space: Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, announced the formation of a new RAF Space Command in order to launch “British satellites and our first rocket from Scotland in 2022.” Developing domestic space launch sites is one of four components of the UK’s current space strategy. The UK Space sector is already worth £14.8B a year, with nearly 40 new companies added to the country’s space sector every year since 2012. In 2018, the Space Industry Act allowed private involvement in spaceflight in the UK for the first time. The government is now putting money behind its goal of capturing 10% of the global space market by 2030. The Space Command announcement came within Johnson’s statement that his government will direct a £16.5B toward the country's military over the next four years.

Radio Telescope: The US National Science Foundation has just announced it is going to decommission the famous Arecibo Observatory, the 1,000-foot-wide, 900-ton radio telescope located in Puerto Rico. In August a support cable slipped out of its socket and caused a 100-meter-long tear in the dish, then a second cable snapped earlier this month. Engineer evaluations of the damage found that the structure is “in danger of a catastrophic failure” and the telescope could collapse at any moment. Arecibo was once the largest radio telescope in the world (it is now the second), and it is credited for finding evidence for the existence of neutron stars, directly imaging an asteroid for the first time in history, and detecting a pulsar that was home to the first exoplanets ever identified.

Politics

Thai Monarchy: Despite continuous pro-democracy protests, Thailand's parliament declined to move forward constitutional reforms that would curb the powers of the king. Shortly after parliament's decision, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha warned that he would use "all available laws" to end the protests, which have been going on for months, signaling that he might start enforcing Thailand's draconian lèse majesté law, which punishes any offense of perceived insult to the royal family with up to 15 years in prison.

Wealth Tax: Argentina’s government began debating a bill seeking to raise $3.75B through a tax on large fortunes, in order to finance programs aimed at helping families hit by the pandemic. People with more than $2.5M - about 12,000 individuals - would get hit by the 2% flat tax, and the levy would increase progressively as equity increases.

Mexican Drug Lord: The US arrested Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, Mexico’s top military official from 2012-2018, on October 16 on corruption and drug charges. However, the charges were dropped this week after Mexico threatened to to kick out the DEA and limit cooperation with the U.S. on international narcotics investigations. The Mexican authorities have stated that they have opened their own investigation into the former defense minister. There is some speculation that these negotiations might have been one reason why Mexico’s leader has not yet formally acknowledged Joe Biden as president-elect.

Political Threats: China strongly rebuked the UK, the US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada after being accused of a concerted effort to silence critics in Hong Kong. The countries, which form the Five Eyes alliance, criticized China's imposition of new rules to disqualify elected legislators in Hong Kong, and they urged Beijing to reverse course. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman responded that if countries "dared harm China's sovereignty, they should beware that their eyes could be plucked out."

Culture

ZoomTogether: Zoom has relaxed its 40 minute time limit for free accounts over Thanksgiving Day, so you can safely (and remotely) enjoy Turkey and stuffing over the internet. 

Christmas at the Movies: While we had a habit of spending Christmas Day at a movie marathon, we didn’t expect to have the same opportunity this year. However, we are all in luck. Wonder Woman 1984 will be released on HBO Max on Christmas Day (and unlike Disney’s Mulan, with no additional charge). While we’d prefer the surround sound and large screen, we’ll have the popcorn ready. (and fingers crossed that Top Gun and others follow the lead)

Pope Gets Racy: Pope Francis’s official Instagram account “mistakenly” liked a photo of a scantily dressed Brazilian model. Natalia Garibotto, the model, used her momentary notoriety to joke: “at least I’m going to heaven.”

Nostalgic Smells: A project at a European University aims to recreate the smells of the past, creating an archive of smells from the 16th to the early 20th centuries. The Odeuropa project, will bring together historians, artificial intelligence experts, chemists and perfumers from The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, France, Slovenia and the UK, to recreate scents that mimic the chemical and manufacturing processes redolent of the Industrial Revolution. We can’t wait to see Marie Antoinette as an Instagram influencer and hologram marketing her perfumes.

— Lauren Eve Cantor

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