July 24, 2020

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

Technology

E-Commerce: Yesterday Google announced a new initiative to help boost sales on its Google Shopping platform in an effort to compete with Amazon. (Google Shopping has 3700 merchants vs 3M on Amazon.) Prior to this week, retailers had to place ads and give up a 12% commission in order to sell on Google’s marketplace. Google removed both of these monetary barriers in an effort to woo more small businesses onto its platform.

Shopify, which powers the online sites of over one million merchants, announced an exclusive partnership with Affirm. Affirm is a financial lender that converts upfront payments into monthly installments, giving consumers financing at the point of purchase (rather than relying on their credit cards). Affirm was already available at over 6,000 online sites, but will now spread seamlessly across Shopify’s merchants.

Supply Chains: Several brands have announced that they are re-thinking their supply chains as it relates to China. Both Nike and Apple came out with similar statements, although they have yet to condone China for its treatment of the Uighur population or Hong Kong. A public rights group claims that “roughly one in five cotton garments sold around the world contain cotton” from the Uighur region, and they suspect that the production is tied to forced labor.

Add-On Products: WhatsApp is branching into financial products such as insurance and pension plans to its users in India. While Facebook was stopped from targeting the financial sector in Brazil, India’s banking sector has been more open to the platform. WhatsApp aims to reach the unbanked and already has a reach of 400M users in India.

Tesla also announced that it will be getting into auto insurance. Because its cars are constantly providing data about the roads and its drivers (ostensibly to better its autonomous driving programs), Tesla has a unique insight into its drivers’ behaviors. Tesla will use this data to create personalized insurance coverage. Tesla, has tried this before in California, but the plan failed mostly due to high premiums.

Tech Hearings: Monday, the major US technology CEOs are expected to testify in front of the US House Antitrust committee. However, the meetings might be delayed as John Lewis is expected to lie in state in the Capitol building next week. The Republicans also attempted to invite Twitter’s CEO, in an attempt to turn the hearings into a fight over anti-conservative bias, despite the fact that Twitter pales in size to the other companies. (Twitter has a market cap of $29B compared to over $1T each for the big four.)

Media Snippets

• Ready to trade in your cozy pants for a superhero costume? Comic-Con, the annual festival celebrating not just comic books but most of pop culture, is online this week. The 51st edition of the convention will be streamed as Comic-Con@Home with a series of panel discussions, movie previews and academic discussions (yes, there is a discussion on the “cruelty of masks” in HBO’s Watchmen).

• Ready for some more true crime? Or time to listen to American drama that isn’t about politics or the virus? The New York Times has acquired the audio production company behind the podcasts Serial and S-Town. The first co-branded podcast is called “Nice White Parents” and is about “the role white families play in shaping public education.” The first episodes air on July 30.

• Want to re-live the ‘80s or just truly turn your brain off and laugh (we hope)? The threequel for the Bill & Ted series, Bill & Ted Face the Music, dropped a new trailer and new release date (September 1). It stars Keanu Reaves and Alex Winters as dads who continue their time traveling escapades. Since we are living in the Matrix and have binge watched the John Wick trilogy several times, we are happy to revisit Keanu in his more flannel ways. “Strange things are afoot.”

• AMC Theaters have again delayed reopening until mid-August. Many summer blockbusters have been postponed or switched to video-on-demand, so even if we weren’t afraid of sitting in an air-conditioned room surrounded by strangers, the theaters have no new inventory to screen. Some notable movie delays: Christopher Nolan’s spy film Tenet, Disney’s Mulan, John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place Part II, The Fate of the Furious (part 9 of the racing franchise), and Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick. We agree that most of these films would be much better viewed with surround sound, large screens and popcorn, but we hope we don’t have to wait to build our own home studio or find a drive-in. (If we could fly to Paris, we’d happily watch them on the Seine.)

Space

SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) is a term for public searches for alien life. But what do we call the secret, classified encounters? Seems a full blown investigative unit has been hiding deep inside the US Defense Department, and they are ready to go public.

The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program and has evolved into a DIA task force. Last month the US Senate Intelligence Committee revealed that is was investigating UFOs, or rather, looking for information regarding unidentified aerial vehicles captured in US Naval intelligence videos. Harry Reid, the former Senator from Nevada (which is home to Area51) believed “that crashes of vehicles from other worlds had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades, often by aerospace companies under government contracts.” Only the videos have been declassified so far, but with briefings to aerospace contractors and government officials we’re hoping for a leak.

Can’t take our eyes off: The Sloan Digital Sky Survey released the largest 3D Map of the Universe using the information from over 2M galaxies. It has taken over 20 years to build and raises some new questions about the structure of the universe. It may be hard to grasp but measuring at such vast distances includes time: astrophysicists have to include the time it takes light to arrive at their telescopes, so something is not just far away but we are looking into its past. The universe consists of 70% dark energy (which is different than dark matter, but we really don’t know what both are, hence, the name dark). We can account for roughly 11B of years of cosmic history, and 19B light years of space, but we are still working on the mechanics behind the expansion and structure of the universe itself.

A little less complicated: Scientists released the first picture of a multi-planetary system that mimics our own solar system: a star orbited by several planets. The system is around 300 light years away, but its star is a “very young version of our Sun,” and the planets are gaseous giants similar to Jupiter and Neptune.

Sports (Branding)

The Washington football team has decided to rename itself (at least temporarily) The Washington Football Team. The NFL franchise will keep its burgundy and gold color scheme, and although they’ve probably had decades to rethink the team’s name and logo, we think going generic is a stunning failure. While a trend in e-commerce has been to go Brandless, hyping a minimalism and hint toward clean, natural products, we don’t think the NFL’s marketing team was going for “authentic.”

On a more creative note, the Seattle Kraken (the new NHL team) announced their name and logo with a fabulous sizzle reel. The team even points to the Giant Pacific Octopus that lurks off its shore. The website walks through the anatomy of the logo design, its hidden tentacles and tribute to the sea. Seattle gets the definite WIN in this round.

Design

Los Angeles is full of artists and a vibrant art community. Following the boarding up of many storefronts due to the lockdowns and protests, the LA artist community came together to paint murals on the plywood in an effort to show that the city was still alive and supportive of the businesses and the protesters. “Public art for public good.”

Los Angeles, however, has been having trouble containing its Covid outbreak, and the city has enlisted Shepard Fairey’s design studio to create free posters to promote the wearing of masks. (You may remember Fairey’s iconic Hope poster for President Obama’s 2008 campaign). Mayor Garcetti has called to “use every tool at our disposal to deliver this message across Los Angeles, throughout our country, and around the world.” The posters are free to use and print, and you can even submit your own artwork if you’d like to participate.

Culture

If looking through random windows wasn’t enough for you, you can now talk to random strangers through video chat on Omegle. The website is essentially a modern update to Chatroulette but attempts to pair you with those with similar interests. Videos of the impromptu hangouts are also making the rounds on YouTube and TikTok, so be warned.

— Lauren Eve Cantor

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