July 20, 2020

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

Business Snippets

Alternative Healthcare: In 2018, Amazon partnered with JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway in an attempt to reform corporate-sponsored healthcare. The venture created Haven in 2019 to support the health care of the combined 1.2M employees. Yet like most of Amazon’s innovations, the company decided to test a variety of alternatives and add-ons.

Amazon bought PillPack, which delivers medications direct-to-consumer in simple packages, for $753M, launched Amazon Care, a virtual care clinic in Seattle (Amazon’s HQ), and it is partnering with Crossover Health to open clinics for Amazon employees across the country. Amazon is also using its platform expertise to offer expanded tele-health. Amazon is currently the second largest employer in the US, behind Walmart, so any disruption to its corporate health plan would be significant.

We are not sure if Amazon is using Crossover Health to compete with Haven or to push the joint venture to innovate faster, but regardless, lowering the burden of health care for both employees and employers is a disruption we’re happy to get behind especially in a pandemic.

An update: In late June, Wirecard, the German payments platform, became insolvent after an accounting scandal resulting from the “loss” of €1.9B. Several executives of the company have been arrested and questioned, and now more issues are coming to light. It appears as though German banking regulators were more likely to investigate short sellers of Wirecard (hoping to keep the budding unicorn alive, we think) rather than actually investigate concerns over the firm’s financial reporting. The EU is probing Germany’s financial regulators which are a mix of private sector watchdogs and market regulators to confirm that they are upholding European guidelines.

Spotify: Last week Spotify expanded into Russia and twelve additional European markets, bringing its reach to a total of 92 markets and 250M potential new users. The app launched with targeted playlists that were curated for each market’s musical taste and culture. Spotify has been working to offer a variety of new product offerings in saturated markets as it announced podcast deals with Joe Rogan and Kim Kardashian. Spotify is Europe’s largest, home-grown tech unicorn, but its business model suffers from the hurdle of paying a large portion of its revenue for licensing. Now the streaming company will have to navigate privacy laws, especially those in Russia which require cell phones to come pre-loaded with Russian tech.

AgTech: With the disruption in America’s food supply due to the pandemic, AgTech (agricultural technology) has become another new avenue for innovation and investment. Microsoft announced a partnership with Land O’Lakes (the US’s third largest agricultural cooperative) to help farmers plan their crop cycles using artificial intelligence. Data harvesting is becoming more prevalent around farming as farms move from small, family-owned properties to industrial conglomerates. Microsoft hopes to become the AI behind the modern Farmer’s Almanac.

On the flip side, Burger King received some backlash after attempting to humorize its new plan to feed cows lemongrass. The burger chain released a commercial singing about the cows’ new diet, which aims to reduce the climate impact of its cows. While livestock accounts for roughly 14% of greenhouse gases, we imagine that farts account for over 50% of dad jokes. We’ll give BK a pass in their efforts to save the planet and quiet their cows.

Politics

Both the US and the EU are in the midst of negotiating the next round of coronavirus relief packages. In the US, phase 5 of the CARES Act should be front and center this week ranging from $1-3T in funding. The bill is expected to have some consideration for states, schools and unemployment benefits, while we expect fights over payroll tax deductions, liability protections for employers and shockingly, for contract tracing and testing. Lobbyists for the restaurant and airline industries are looking for bailouts to be included, and we may seem some additions to the Payroll Protection Program.

In Europe, the leaders of the 27-nation group met to discuss the details behind a $1T recovery plan. The in-person talks were meant to end on Saturday, but are still in negotiations. Similar to the financial crisis of 2008, some members of the EU want strict conditions requiring austerity and economic reforms from those members who require funding. As of Sunday night, the EU leaders remain at an impasse despite the expected recession (economists expect an 8% retraction in economic activity in the EU in 2020).

Moms demanding action: Moms have been getting into the action as a force for change on two battlefronts. This weekend a group of Moms formed a human chain to protect protesters in Portland, chanting “Moms are here, Feds stay clear.” Unfortunately, the group was forcibly dispersed after federal agents used tear gas.

On the other hand, Moms have been working behind the scenes to organize alternatives to getting their kids back to school. Some Mom groups have been working to create their own bubbles, hiring tutors or out of work teachers, to effectively homeschool their children, so they don’t have to take the risk of going back to public school.

As with Moms Demand Action, the movement to protect people from gun violence, we hope the grassroots movements will be heard. We’ve seen corporations step in and fill the void of government inaction, and now we are seeing women using their voices and bodies to demand change.

Space

Just a reminder: Today is the 51st anniversary of the moon landing by Apollo 11 astronauts. Watch Neil Armstrong’s Giant Leap here.

This month we’ll see several launches of Mars missions. So far, only the US has operating rovers on Mars. Currently, the Earth and Mars are most favorably aligned for a short mission, and this alignment happens every 26 months.

Yesterday, we saw the first from the United Arab Emirates with the launch of the Hope spacecraft, from a launch site in Japan. The Hope should arrive at Mars (some 306M miles away) in February 2021, and is expected to study the weather patterns of the planet.

Up next will be China’s Tianwen-1 Mars mission consisting of a rover, lander and orbiter, and is expected to conduct experiments for three months on the red planet.

The US’s Perseverance Rover will launch between July 30 and August 15, joining InSight and Curiosity in their exploration of the Martian landscape. The Perseverance’s main mission is to search for signs of life (past or present). The rover will be collecting and analyzing rocks that will hopefully brought back to Earth on a future mission. Set your calendars to watch the US Launch here.

Go Deeper:Nature

Culture

Feeling locked indoors: Feeling sick of the view out your own windows? Missing the pleasure of travel, looking outside your hotel window and seeing a new world to explore? Or would you just like to imagine yourself somewhere new? Now you can randomly click through dozens of windows through Window Swap and experience the view outside of other people’s windows. You can also submit a static video of your own video if you’d like to share your view with the world.

Ready for some drama with your trivia: In 2018, the HQ Trivia app sucked in our attention at 3PM/9PM each night. The live, mobile gameshow guaranteed monetary prizes if you could outguess and outlast the millions of viewers through a series of trivia questions. The app was created by the co-founders of Vine, and temporarily transfixed millions of players. HQ fell victim to its own success with drama both inside the game (lots of glitches as too many players attempted to logon, the firing of its host) and outside (loss of investors, the death of its founder, and general employee drama). While the game officially shut down in February 2020, and then rebooted itself in March, the Ringer’s podcast going behind the scenes of the startup has all the highs and lows of the trivia game itself. Boom/Bust: The Rise and Fall of HQ Trivia

— Lauren Eve Cantor

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