News Tiktok Sundays. Late on Sunday night a US judge temporarily blocked the sale-or-shutdown order, which would have gone into effect that day. Meanwhile, the Oracle 'deal' (whatever it might be) appears still to be up in the air. The problem isn't that we don't know what the White House is trying to do - it's that no-one in the White House knows either. Trying to analyse policy here is like playing chess with a pigeon - it just knocks the pieces over and flies off declaring victory. Link Amazon Alexa firehose. Amazon held a big Alexa event. Of interest: it's doubling down on home security as a use case, and in particular, there is now a small autonomous indoor camera drone (!) If your Alexa units think they detect a break-in, the drone will take off from a docking/charging station and fly around your home on a pre-determined route to see what happened, and send video to your phone. The hardware design means the camera is masked when it's in the docking station, for privacy/trust. There are lots of things you could say here (Did they test it with cats? What if the doors are shut?) but what strikes me is how alien this must sound to a standard remote monitoring alarm company: it's an orthogonal attack, with one camera plus lots of software instead of lots of cameras and lots of people. Link Apple's chip supremacy. A nice illustration of where Apple is, and how far Intel has fallen: Apple is booking out TSMC's entire capacity for its newest cutting edge 5nm manufacturing process to make the new iPhone and iPad (and Mac) chips. Apple designs the best chips and TSMC has the best manufacturing (roughly). Link Quibi for sale? Apparently, with little runway left and none of the numbers in line, they're looking at 'strategic options'. There was nothing fundamentally silly about the Quibi thesis, even if it's wrong. The puzzle was why to do it at billion dollar scale before contact with the customer - no room for experiment or iteration. Hence, the Quibi thesis was "now the grown-ups are here to show you how to do quality content", but the Silicon Valley response: "sure, but you also need to know how to take a consumer product to market". NB: they don't actually own the content, so what is there to sell? Link Daniel Ek puts $1b into European 'moonshots'. There are lots of conversations in Europe (and Silicon Valley!) about business model innovation versus technology innovation, how to drive investment in 'frontier tech', what a European or UK DARPA might look like (and if it matters) and how to turn a European science lead into more big companies. This is one big move in that direction. Link Advertisers define hate speech? An advertisers group (the WFA) has joined with Facebook, Youtube and Twitter to produce a standard definition of 'hate speech' for the purposes of content moderation. This is partly a result of the recent advertisers' boycott. It is good to standardise, and to remove subjectivity (where that's possible, which is certainly not everywhere) but I'm nervous at control of speech being determined on a commercial basis. Link Coals to Newcastle: Amnesty found EU tech companies selling surveillance equipment to China. Link Apple App Store lobbying: a group of software companies that have had fights with Apple recently (Epic, Basecamp, Spotify etc) formed a lobbying front - the 'Coalition for App Fairness' (where 'fairness' is sometimes defined as 'the terms we want'). As I've written recently, Spotify is on very strong ground and the others rather weaker. Link This week in 'unicorns you'd never heard of' - Allegro filed for a $10bn IPO. Polish ecommerce, and, interestingly, owned by private equity (originally Naspers, of course). Link Reading The New York Times published an editorial saying that tech platforms should have coherent policies around what they would do if Trump tries to deny or distort an election result. This is very true, but the piece suffers from not mentioning TV, which would carry any such speech live, or indeed newspapers, such as, um, the New York Times. More self-awareness needed here, please. Link ($) Showing rather more self-awareness - the Washington Post on how news organisations should handle leaked/hacked information in the US election: presume bad faith, presume it may be manipulated, don't let yourself be used. Link I did a video about commerce in lockdown for Google. Link Reuters Institute survey on the explosion in email newsletters. Lots of data. Link Italy discovered ecommerce in lockdown (only 40% of Italians bought anything online in 2019. 'Europe' is not a market.) Link ($) Frederic Filloux on the difference between Netflix management and news organisation management. Link Ikea product shots have been CGI for years - now it's adding digital influencers. Link Nasdaq as tech company: interesting WSJ piece on Nasdaq's software business and move to the cloud. Link ($) Interesting things BBC Horizon documentary from 1981 on electronic graphics: 'Painting by Numbers'. Ed Catmull, Nolan Bushnell and lots of CRTs. Link In the 1950s, RAND Corporation made a book with a million random numbers (how they did it is fascinating). Someone just discovered that they're not as random as they thought. Maybe. Link ($) Stats Tiktok data on take-down of harmful content. Link This year's global industrial robotics statistics. Link (PDF) International AI talent migration. Link Zebra IQ 'Gen Z' attitude report. Very qual. Link | 
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