Wiser! #86: Amazon's Palm Reading | NFT eBooks | Elon Cashing In On Tesla

w/Issue #86 - 12th August 2022

Happy Sunday. I'm Rick Huckstep and welcome to the 86th edition of Wiser! - the newsletter that makes sense of what's happening in the tech economy.

13,976 subscribers are getting Wiser! this week.

In this issue, I'm going to be talking about;

• Amazon's use of palm-reading technology to make cashless payments, and the privacy concerns it has triggered.
• What happened when the world’s largest book publishers, Pearsons, announced the use of NFTs to get a slice of the second-hand book market,
• The tech headlines from the equity and crypto markets,
• And, of course, the latest chapter of the Elon Musk Twitter soap opera (you couldn’t make it up!)

As always, you’ll find dozens of links, headlines, and the top stories of the week from across the tech economy.

Reminder: the latest Wiser! Trends Report is coming in September. It will detail how big brands are embracing web3, NFTs, crypto and the Metaverse. It will be free to all Premium Members.

LinkedIn Edition

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w/BigTech        

Hey Presto! With The Wave Of Your Hand, Amazon Knows Who You Are

BackStory: When you think of Jeff Bezos and Amazon, there word that comes to mind is “convenience”. Every innovation from Amazon has sought to make the consumer experience a more convenient one.

The latest tech in play is palm biometrics. Instead of fumbling for a credit card at the checkout or waving your phone at a card machine, Amazon One reads your palm. Wave your hand over a scanner, and hey presto, the bill is paid!

Amazon One

Palm Reading: Amazon has announced plans to expand its palm-scanning payment technology to 65 Whole Food stores in California. Amazon One is a palm-scanning payment system that uses machine learning to identify customers with just their hand prints.

The tech works like this:

?? Users visit a kiosk or a point-of-sale station at the participating stores

?? They link the biometric profile of their palm to a payment card. They do this while they wait ??.

?? From then on, all they have to do is hover their hand over a scanner at the checkout and, bingo, they've paid for their stuff,

Convenience: Customers no longer have to go through the time-consuming trouble and effort of getting their credit card out or waving their iPhone over the card reader. That's another first-world problem solved!

However, this isn't proving to be all plain sailing for Amazon.

Privacy Concerns: Here's the thing that's dogging the Amazon tech: Amazon One holds the hand-palm biometric data in the cloud.

Which is different to how Apple does it with FaceID or TouchID or Samsung does it with Samsung Pass. Apple and Samsung store the data on the local device. Amazon One stores it in the cloud (because your hand is not an electronic device until you get a chip implanted under the skin.)

Deja Vue: We've been here before! When Amazon partnered with ticketing company AXS last year, they had a plan to roll out the palm-recognising technology at a Denver music venue. But fans pushed back, citing concerns over data privacy, sharing the data with government agencies and the risk of their IDs being hacked.

Was this unnecessary paranoia from the music fraternity? Er, no! Amazon has form when it comes to privacy concerns.

??? Amazon has been known to hang onto Alexa voice data even after the users have deleted it.

??? In 2020, Amazon introduced a self-imposed moratorium on selling biometric facial recognition data to law enforcement agencies in the US.

??? In 2019, the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post reported that Amazon's Ring camera company partnered with more than 400 police forces across the U.S. to gain access to homeowners’ camera footage.

The Takeaway: Matching convenience with privacy is tricky.

Apple has navigated this terrain well, falling foul just once with the CSAM issue when they announced they'd be checking uploaded iCloud images against a child sex abuse database. Tim Cook has made privacy a defining differentiator and claimed that ground.

For Amazon, it's not proving so easy. And whilst Amazon wants to make consumers' lives as effortless as possible, it's going to also have to address the growing list of concerns that it can be trusted with their data.

Related News

• Facebook defends itself after handing over chat messages to US police who were investigating a mother and daughter over an illegal abortion.
• Amazon buys iRobot . In this latest in a series of seemingly sudden and somewhat surprising acquisitions, Amazon is spending $1.7 billion for the company best known for its robot vacuum cleaners.
• Amazon can now map your home and figure out what's in it. (Op-Ed)

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w/Podcast
        

Big Tech Little Tech Podcast

In the latest episode of the Big Tech Little Tech podcast, co-host Shaun and I have a big catch-up. Why wouldn't we? It's been over a month since we recorded the last one.

We talk about Amazon's move into healthcare, the beginning of the end for Facebook and (of course) the Twitter soap opera with Elon Musk .

Plus lots of other interesting stuff and nonsense, like how many people are younger than Rick in the world (it's a lot!) and what we thought of the Lionesses.

Here's a snippet from Episode #86...

?? To listen to Episode 6 on all the popular podcast platforms and for all the latest on the Big Tech Little Tech podcast with lots of links and background info on the topics we cover in each episode, check out the Big Tech Little Tech webpage here .

?? Follow the Big Tech Little Tech Podcast on Twitter.

?? Sign up for the Big Tech Little Tech newsletter.

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w/SocialMedia
        

?Photo by BP Miller on Unsplash

Does Elon Musk Have A Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Card Up His Twitter Sleeve?

BackStory: This week’s enthralling storyline in the Elon Musk Twitter soap opera started with Musk filing new papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC is the organisation that overseas all market trading in US stocks and shares.

Anyhow, the point is that Musk disclosed he has just sold $6.9 billion of Tesla stock. That’s $32 billion of Tesla he’s cashed in in less than a year. Second guessing Musk is a fool’s game, but I love to play it.

Elon Sells More Tesla Stock As He Prepares For Twitter Court Case

Liquidation: The big story of the week in the Musk Twitter soap opera was that Elon Musk had sold more than $6.9 billion in Tesla shares. This was according to new filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission published late yesterday.

Why It Matters: It's bad news for Tesla shareholders as the boss cashes in on the over-inflated and hyped-up price of the auto manufacturer. Just as the competition in the electric vehicle market is hotting up, drawing to a close Tesla's unchallenged domination of the sector.

The selloff comes just weeks after the Tesla CEO withdrew a $44 billion offer to buy Twitter.

So What? The only way to read this is that Musk is preparing for the eventuality that the Delaware Court of Chancery compels him to complete the take-over deal he wanted and signed up to.

About Face: It has been less than four months since Musk said he didn't plan to sell any more Tesla shares after he disclosed he'd just offloaded $8.5 billion of Tesla to part-fund the Twitter takeover. As news broke of the latest sell-off, a Twitter user asked Musk if he was "done selling?”.

Musk replied, "Yes. In the (hopefully unlikely) event that Twitter forces this deal to close and some equity partners don’t come through, it is important to avoid an emergency sale of Tesla stock."

The point is: it looks increasingly unlikely that Elon's spam bot distraction is going to win the day. Instead, his only get-out-of-Twitter-jail-free card would be for some of the bankers to bail out. They could blame the plunge in credit markets.

Even if they do withdraw their credit line, the Court of Chancery could still compel Musk to go through with the deal. Which would mean he'd have to stump up the cash himself.

Get Out Of Jail Free: I wrote a longer article about how the bankers could be Musk's get-out-of-jail-free card here...

Related News

• Elon Musk has accused Twitter of fraud . Musk has counter-sued Twitter claiming he was “hoodwinked” into signing the purchase agreement.
• Musk’s super-sleuth interrogation techniques of the Twitter bot problem has been revealed. It seems that the “proprietary analysis” of Twitter data is no more than a website tool called Botometer . I ran my Twitter profile against and it confirmed that there is only a 20% chance I'm a bot!

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w/Web3
        

What Do Pearson’s Plans for NFT eBooks Mean For The Future Of Web3?

Pearson Tease The Markets With NFTs

BackStory: Pearson is the largest publisher in the world in a $138 billion global industry. You’d think they’d be satisfied with being the market leader in a huge market. No, they want more. Pearson wants to get a piece of the second-hand book market, a space they have no control or influence over, at the mo!

NFTs: Guess what happened when CEO Andy Bird said Pearson is looking at NFTs as a way to get a slice of the action every time a Pearson book is sold on the second-hand market (which happens on average 7 times)?

Their stock popped 10%! The markets loved it, even though it was an idea without a plan to back it up. I wrote a longer article about it here...

Related News

• The Metaverse real estate boom has turned into a bust . Sales volumes and average prices for virtual land have plunged this year, part of a broader slide in crypto and non-fungible token prices.
• Instagram is expanding NFT features to more than 100 countries . Meta has started to roll out NFTs after integrating with Coinbase Wallet. The company is testing NFTs on Facebook and it aims to enable cross-platform NFT posting.
• Blackrock, the world’s largest asset manager with $8 billion AUM, has partnered with Coinbase , the only publicly listed crypto exchange in the US, to give institutional investors access to crypto trading, custody, prime brokerage, and reporting capabilities.

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w/Markets
        

A Week In The Tech Markets

?? Coinbase report $1.1 billion loss

The crypto exchange also?reported revenue down 31% at $803 million. Its stock fell 11% in post-market trading on news of the Q2 results. The results reflect the drag from the decline in the crypto markets throughout this year.

• Why it matters: Coinbase is one of the crypto market’s key players when it comes to the mainstream acceptance of digital currencies. As the largest public market crypto exchange in the USA, Coinbase has become the battleground for a very public debate with securities regulators over what is and is not allowed in the cryptocurrency markets.
• The SEC has listed seven crypto assets that it deems to be securities. If the SEC win the definition game, it will have huge implications for Coinbase, the projects minting the crypto tokens, and the holders who bought and traded them.

?? Meta raise $10 billion in its first-ever bond offering

No surprises here. MetaFacebook is in deep trouble and the direction of travel is only going one way. The capital is to be used to fund share buybacks (thereby boosting share performance) and to make investments as it pivots to the Metaverse .

?? SoftBank post $23.4 billion loss

This comes after the technology investment fund posted a $26 billion loss in May!

Other Market News

• Chipmaker Nvidia announced preliminary financial results and issued a warning that Q2 revenue would be about 17% below its prior forecast, causing its stock to fall 6.3%
• Meta have appointed 36-year old Susan Li as their Chief Financial Officer, replacing Dave Wehner, who had been in post for the last 8 years.
• Just 1% of Netflix’s users have taken to their new gaming service. According to analysis by Apptopia, Netflix games have been downloaded (just) 23.3 million times and have an average 1.7 million daily users.

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w/Snippets        

Headlines from the Tech Economy

• An AI trained on 4chan learnt to spew out misogynistic hate speech. To the surprise of precisely no one.
• TikTok is on track to overtake Facebook in influencer marketing spend in 2022, and will overtake YouTube by 2024. However, Instagram will still capture 3x the influencer marketing dollars as TikTok, or $2.23 billion versus TikTok’s $774.8 million.
• A ruling by the European Union’s top court?could have major implications?for online platforms and apps that use background tracking and profiling to target users with behavioral ads or personalizing content.?It set a precedent that even this inferred data derived from things a company learned about a user?could be considered?personal data.
• Starbucks to launch a web3 initiative, including coffee-themed NFTs . Previously Starbucks have said that its NFTs wouldn’t just serve as digital collectibles, but would provide their owners with access to exclusive content and other perks.
• A Netflix documentary tracking the life and times of true tech maverick?John McAfee ?is a guaranteed wild ride.
• Amazon granted more shares to employees in the 2nd quarter than in the whole of 2021 . That's 138 million restricted stock units with the single intention of hanging onto top talent.
• Clubhouse is being broken up into little houses. After it’s 15 minutes of fame at the start of 2021, Clubhouse has gone nowhere. So it’s trying something new, which is to create a platform for communities . It’s very Web3 in its thinking and I kind like it. I’ll be checking it out this week.
• Americans see misleading info daily in search results. A new survey conducted by the Poynter Institute and YouGov, with support from Google, found that 62% of people say they see false or misleading misinformation online every week.
• The date has been set for the tech industry's most important private antitrust lawsuit in history (Epic Games v. Apple ) - Friday, October 21, 2022. At issue is Apple (and Google’s) restrictive control and pricing of the App Store. If Epic win, it will be huge.
• The FCC has rejected Elon Musk’s bid for $886 million in broadband subsidies for Starlink . The SpaceX Starlink system of low-earth orbit satellites had applied for funding to provide internet broadband for rural areas. But the FCC said no. This is the same strategy played out at Tesla, who for years benefitted from taxpayer subsidies as it defined the electric vehicle market.
• A US appeals court ruled that AI systems cannot be considered an inventor under US patent law .

By The Numbers

• 4%: A new report indicates Apple’s iOS?has lost 4% of ad spend market share ?since Apple launched the user tracking and privacy measures last year.
• 4-5: This is the number of hours a day that consumers in more than a dozen countries are spending in apps.
• 339%: The number of installs of Buy Now Pay Later apps has reached a record 10 million during the first half of 2022. That's an increase of 339% since 2019.

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w/Hacks
        

Collection Of Tips And Tricks To Make Your Life Better

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?? Book Of The Week: The First Super App

Kevin Shimota tells the story of WeChat’s creation and its climb to become the world’s first superapp, providing insights on the psyche of WeChat’s founder, and of modern China tech to explain the fundamentals of these new innovations and how the framework they form could be reproduced beyond China. Go here to read it .

??? Use AI Writing Tools To Do The Heavy?Lifting

Do you ever need to summarise an interesting, long-form article without going through the effort of doing it yourself? Like, when your boss can’t be arsed to read it themselves, they dump it on you to do it for them. Well, here’s a hack you’ll find useful (and one that I use myself).

Check out Quillbot’s Summariser Tool. There’s a free and a paid version and you have options to adjust how you want the summary presented for you. Here's how I use it...

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