?? Wiser! #99: What's New and What's Happening In Tech

?? Wiser! #99: Elon's Chaos | Binance Games FTX | Why Ban TikTok? | Snap's AR Strategy

w/Wiser!?#99?- Sunday 13th November

Welcome to this round-up of what's happened in tech this week. This is the condensed Sunday edition of the Wiser! Newsletter, made especially for LinkedIn.

Email subscribers got the richer, more colourful version of the Wiser! Newsletter delivered straight into their inboxes early on Friday morning. They already have a two-day head start on this Sunday digest.

To read the full-colour, longer version of this week's Wiser!?go here.

This week's featured news...

• Elon's chaotic start as the proud new owner of Twitter. How's that working out? (spoiler alert - not so well!)
• Who is talking (again) in the USA about banning TikTok. But are they looking in the right direction? I'm not so sure.
• The emerging shopping trend in augmented reality that's being led by Snap.
• How the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange brought down a competitor and what it means for the crypto industry

Plus: there's a ton of headlines, articles, and interesting stuff to keep you informed and entertained.

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?? Every week,?15k?readers?like you?get Wiser!

ATB, Rick

p.s. - the things some people say about me...

Big Tech Little Tech is "the best podcast in the whole wide world." Praise indeed from Lesley Huckstep, aged 78 and a quarter, who listens every week with her friend Shirley. Thanks mum!

w/SocialMedia

It's Chaos. Or Does Elon Musk Have A Master Plan For Twitter?

In Plain Sight:?There's so much happening at Twitter that it's hard to keep up. Elon is literally redesigning the product live on Twitter. He's reshaped the workforce and he's alienated the advertisers that pay the bills.

Best/Worst of all, he's given an open invitation to everyone with a sense of humour to find ways to humiliate and disrupt his plans to save Twitter for humanity. The rollout and subsequent withdrawal of the Twitter verification system has been a total disaster.

This is a fake Nintendo account..

This is a fake post that sent the share price for Ely Lily into free fall...

The clue to this being a fake Lockhead Martin account is in the handle (can you spot it?)...

Some fakes are less obvious to spot...

The point is...advertisers are not amused by this own goal from Musk!

Musk's solution was this...

...and it didn't work!

When I said this on the latest Big Tech Little Tech podcast (on 31st Oct) ...

"I think Twitter's over now..."

...I didn't expect it to be quicker than the dismantling of a Liz Truss government.

To be fair, Musk has taken some bold actions and wasted no time getting to grips with Twitter's broken business model.

The issue isn't so much "what" he's doing as "how" he's doing it!

To find out exactly what I think is going on and a whole lot more on what's been happening with the Elon/Twitter soap opera, continue reading here. There's a video of Musk's recent interview recorded after the Twitter acquisition, some tweets and the best of the headlines and numerous stories about what's going on with the show. Enjoy!)

w/Crypto

Binance's Game Play Takes Down FTX

TakeOver or TakeDown:?Apart from Elon's shenanigans over at Twitter, the other big story in tech was in crypto.

The long and the short of it is that FTX, the 4th largest and once seen as the darling of crypto exchanges, collapsed in 24 hours. It went from being valued at $32 billion to zero quicker than a Tory party u-turn.

It's a story that's still unfolding and the long term implications are yet to be seen.

But the point is that this is a big deal. It shows the fragility in the unregulated, centralised exchange ecosystem. And highlights the opaque nature of the business model that has reinforced the view in some quarters that much of crypto is just a ponzi scheme.

There are many casualties in the collapse.

• Big name venture capital investors like Temasek, SoftBank, Sequoia are looking at a total wipeout of their investment having pumped $billions into FTX.
• Regulators are going to be looking at this very closely. At the heart of the issue are the complicated interdependencies in the crypto ecosystem. And the promises made about security and trust when behind the scenes, retail investments were being over-leveraged into highly risky bets.
• Crypto investors are unsettled. Bitcoin dropped 20% in value on the news and the whole crypto market cap dropped below the psychological barrier of $1 trillion (from $3 trillion a year ago).
• Centralised v Decentralised? This story has further divided the debated on the role of centralised exchanged in a world built on a decentralised promise.
• Finally, NFL superstar Tom Brady was an investor in FTX. Watch this ad where Brady and Gisele Buchen promote FTX as "the most trusted" way to buy and sell crypto.

Go here to continue reading this story, with more links and explanation about what happened

w/SocialMedia

Should TikTok Be Banned?

Be Gone!?An FCC commissioner has just repeated a call that the USA should ban TikTok. It's a call we've heard before from Commissioner Brendan Carr. And, of course, it was Donald Trump's hobby horse.

BUT...the concern in the US is focused on data, specifically, who has access to the data of American citizens?

?? But I think they're missing the real threat. For me, the bigger issue is?content,?not?data.

Hidden:?The TikTok algorithms are totally opaque, nobody knows how they're weighted. But one way to get a sense of what's happening with content on TikTok is to compare the Chinese home-market version, called Douyin, with the Rest of the World version, called TikTok.

• In the US version of TikTok, kids spend on average 90 mins a day watching a diet of highly addictive short form videos that are dialled in to their individual personalities, anxieties and preoccupations.
• In the Chinese version of TikTok kids are shown science experiments you can do at home, museum exhibits, and patriotic and educational videos. And their screen time is limited to 40 minutes per day.?

Watch Tristan Harris explain it in this snippet from a recent 60 Minutes documentary.

Here's my take on the question of the Chinese Communist Party's involvement (or not) in TikTok...

Here's an explainer about TikTok's addictive qualities ??

Social Media's Impact of Children

?? A survey of preteens in the US and China asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up. In the US, it was social media influencer. In China, it was an astronaut.

Here's The Thing: The data shows there is a significant negative impact of social media on adolescent girls' mental health. More than in many other public health issues (such as lead and IQ, calcium and osteoporosis.)

Up until now, Instagram has been the main point of blame for the undeniable rise in suicide, anxiety, self-harm and loneliness rates amongst adolescent girls over the past decade.

But now we have TikTok, which really only took off at the start of the pandemic, 2 years ago. It's too early to tell if there has been a TikTok effect, but my money says there will be.

TikTok is not only more addictive at retaining our attention, but it is also ten times better at dialling into whatever we're feeling or thinking at the time. It's a deadly cocktail for underdeveloped and maturing minds.

Don't get me wrong, I love TikTok. I know firsthand how addictive it can be once it figures out what I'm in the mood for that day. BUT, even at my age, I'm not immune to its seduction.

This was the subject of this Big Tech Little Tech podcast with Jeffrey Kluge, FHCA

Do You Know What The Big Consumer Brands Are Doing In Emerging Tech?

I have tracked, analysed and documented the use cases for 250 consumer brands and their projects in emerging technologies such as NFTs, virtual reality, blockchain and crypto.

You'd be surprised who is doing what in this space, targeting a generation of digital natives who buy, sell, shop and engage differently to their parents.

To find out how to access this unique collection, read this.

w/AugmentedReality

?? WATCH THIS TREND: Augmented Reality in eCommerce

Keep your eyes on what's happening at Snap, aka Snapchat. They've just teamed up with Amazon to let users try on new glasses using Augmented Reality lenses.

• This means that customers can "try on and see" what something looks like on them without having to go into the store to do it.

The company recently?conducted a study on AR’s role in shopping?and said that it is set to surge over the next 5 years.

By sector, Snap's survey found:

• Nearly three-quarters of respondents are likely to buy clothing after using an AR experience in the future,
• followed by retail (70%), beauty (69%), travel (64%) and food and beverages (60%).

For more on Snap's strategy of AR in eCommerce aimed at GenZ and Gen A, read this.

Links and headlines to keep you informed

• Meta announced?plans to layoff more than 11,000 employees. CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the move to reduce the workforce by 13% as necessary to "become a leaner and more efficient company." TBF to Zuckerberg, he's been generous to the staff he laid off and came across empathetic on the all-hands call to staff. Also worth remembering, Meta still has more employees now that before the pandemic.
• Palantir said on Monday its revenue grew 22% year over year, but it forecast revenue growth slowing to 16% in the current quarter. Shares closed down 11.5%.
• Non-fungible token marketplace OpenSea will help enforce royalty payments for NFT creators using a new tool, as more people have recently moved to royalty-free marketplaces.
• JPMorgan executes first DeFi transaction on Polygon under the pilot program organized by the Singapore’s regulator "MAS". UBS AG launches the world’s first digital bond that is publicly traded and settled on both blockchain-based and traditional exchanges
• Apple expects to produce at least 3 million fewer iPhone 14 handsets than originally anticipated this year, primarily due to softer demand for the lower-end iPhone 14 and 14 Plus models
• LG has unveiled the world’s most stretchable display. It can be stretched by up to 20% of its original size without damage. It can also be folded and twisted. The stretchiness is made possible by a special film substrate made from the same silicon that enables flexible contact lenses. It's similiar to Samsung's flexible OLED display technology they released about five years ago, but the LG one is much stretchier. LG says the technology enables displays attached to clothing, cars, even skin.
• The European Union has followed the UK’s lead to open its own investigation into?Microsoft’s planned $69 billion acquisition of game developer Activision Blizzard.
• Google held an AI event, announcing a project to build a language model that can handle the top 1000 most spoken languages (YouTube)
• Google wants to help teens control their tech use with smart wearables.?Called Project Eleven, Google is quietly working on a wearable device for preteens as it chases a surging number of younger tech users
• Roblox stock drops on widening losses?in Q3, but other growth metrics remain strong
• The WSJ has an interesting piece on the Chinese digital fashion app Shein. They report revenues of $30 billion for 2022, making Shein bigger than Zara or H&M.
• Understanding decentralised insurance, and what its all about? (YouTube)
• Walmart are using Roblox to sell to Christmas presents to kids (YouTube)
• Is Plastic Good or Bad??(YouTube)
• How Big Brands Are Using NFTS, Blockchain and Crypto To Build Loyalty And Create New Markets (YouTube)
• Holly Herndon is a wonderfully talented musician and a computer genius. Her latest single is perfect proof of that: a cover of Dolly Parton’s Jolene sung by Holly+, the deepfake AI voice she modeled after her own.

• TikTok’s Stratospheric Rise: An Oral History?(Source: The Wall Street Journal)
• Alphabet's Wing and DoorDash?have partnered to provide drone-delivered meals in Australia.
• In 2021, there were 7 companies with a market capitalisation greater than $1 trillion. Today, there are only 4, and likely to become 3 shortly if/when Alphabet drop out of the trillion dollar club. Of the BigTech Four - Apple, at $2.2 trillion, is now worth the same as Alphabet (Google), Amazon and Meta combined!
• How To Grow Your Twitter Audience With Typefully
• Speed Write Posts for Linkedin Using Genei AI Writing Tool
• 2X Your Output with Quillbot's AI Writing Tool
• Here's Why You Should Start Your Newsletter on Ghost

What's happening and what's coming next.

Wiser! is a weekly newsletter that makes sense of what's happening and what's coming next in the tech economy. From disruptive technologies, like blockchain, crypto, and artificial intelligence, to emerging trends, like Web3 and the Metaverse. Plus, there's a big focus on BigTech and the impact of social media.

The purpose of Wiser! is simple, to help you stay interesting, informed, and one step ahead of your competition. Using easy and engaging language, I make sense of it all so that you don't have to.

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The original, longer version of this newsletter was published on Friday 13th November 2022 and can be found?here.