Myth of privacy
AMZN slips, Tesla smashes expectations, and Ethereum seals top.
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What’s brewing hot? ☕
✅ Worse before it gets better—India overtook the US to report the second highest daily COVID-19 cases in the world with infections surging to 81,466 a day, nearly 8x the average we were seeing at the end of 2020. Markets are closely watching the stats as potential lockdowns and restrictions could dent economic recovery, pushing timelines for normalcy by months! Vaccinations are picking pace though, with over 7 Crore plus folks getting first doses, and daily dosage pace topping ~37 lakh as of April 1st. Still a long way to go.
✅ Shown the mirror—Amazon’s crusade of taking on politicians and regulators blew in its face. “You force employees to urinate in bottles”, claimed a politician chastising Amazon over its poor treatment of employees. The overenthusiastic Amazon PR guy in-charge banging out those sassy replies quickly called fake news on the allegation… but then it's true, because the thousands of drivers working for Amazon, especially women, end up using bottles and cups whenever they can’t find restrooms. The company had to walk back on its statement, while Bezos, who's apparently personally pushing for these fights himself, learnt a lesson or two in PR.
Myth of privacy 🤦🏻♂️
Facebook continues to out-shame itself.
Personally identifiable information of over 533 million Facebook users, all taken from a major data breach from 2019, is now made available on an online forum for free! That’s info on almost 25% of the users using the service at that time.
An Israeli cybercrime officer found the leak, which apparently has been circulating on the dark web since January. When researchers spotted and linked the dataset to FB, the company claimed the hack had been resolved and fixed, and restricting the data file from being shared is now beyond its control.
The file includes info on citizens of nearly 106 countries, including phone numbers, FB IDs, names, and emails. Some 6 million Indians are affected too.
Meanwhile, after years of depression, FB stock had just started running over the last month, and this news absolutely doesn’t help that case.
Key takeaway: even the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which saw data being mined to sway global elections, including Brexit, had affected about 80 million users. This would’ve probably been buried had the data file not emerged, and now that it has it significantly increases the potential risk of global nations individually pursuing action against FB for its own affected citizens.
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Tesla’s momentum continues to show promise 🔌
Tesla managed to sell a record number of cars for the first three months of 2021, smashing all market expectations, despite a global shortage of semiconductor chips kneecapping the broad automobile industry.
The cheaper Model 3 car particularly helped move the needle.
Quick look at numbers:
Delivered 185K cars, beating old record for highest quarterly sales by 4,000 cars
Model 3/Ys sales were up 13% vs. December 2020
Couldn’t sell a lot of expensive models though, mostly due to semiconductor shortage
No room for error—Tesla’s stock has run up so much that the company faces the huge task of delivering proportionate business outcomes that help the company grow into its valuation. For the full year of 2020 for example, the company had slightly missed its numbers of selling 500,000 cars, which landed a 25% blow to the stock.
But the global EV game has changed a lot since last year—China EV market is on fire, global demand for EVs is at an all time high, coupled with Biden’s favorable clean tech policies, which makes analysts believe $TSLA will easily top 850,000 vehicle deliveries this year.
Pinterest wants to look like Instagram 🤔
Pinterest is in final talks to acquire VSCO, a photo, and video editing app, meant to supplement Pinterest's graphic toolbox, allowing users to upload fancier images. No deal tag has been disclosed, but VSCO was last valued north of $550 million.
VSCO is basically an Instagram-like platform, minus the social features (likes/comments/followers), that allows users to slap a bunch of custom high-quality filters that give images a jazzy, 2021-vibe. The business solely makes money via paid subs, and reports a massive 2 million paid users, with another 50 million+ monthly active users.
The app kinda blew in 2019 when it emerged as a stereotypical favorite among GenZ women who made it part of their cultural universe. Super popular in the western world only.
Anyway, Pinterest, which exploded on the back of the pandemic, is looking to scale its user base from 450 million to the Instagram like billions, would probably leverage VSCO to augment its editing-tech in a bid to attract younger shoppers, pinners, and product discoverers, giving a sleeker look to its service which right now is more popular among the 30 year old plus audience.
What matters: Pinterest is firing on all cylinders to capitalize on the “social commerce” opportunity that Facebook and the other social media leaders are taking forever to roll out. VSCO is critical to the company’s attempt to level the field with visuals as good at Snap and Insta. At least good enough to speak the language of em’ younguns.
Closing out— Ethereum seals top 📈
it ain’t just Bitcoin running wild.
Ether, the crypto currency running on top of smart contract platform Ethereum, just breached $2,000 on the weekend, drawing steam from the recent news happening where credit-card network Visa settled its first transaction on the blockchain.
Folks are suddenly waking up to the potential of all the lending, the banking, the spending applications and pretty much anything that’s being built on the Ethereum blockchain, many of which have considerable potential.
Meanwhile in India, the WazirX exchange token backed by one of India’s leading crypto exchanges virtually tripled overnight after the exchange offered a sneak peek into its metrics—which is processing nearly $200 million in daily trading volumes, thanks to India’s all time high interest in crypto.
A lot like 2017 tbh..
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🙄 In today’s update on snatching basic rights - Myanmar’s military regime has shut down broadband internet services as protests over the military’s coup gain fresh momentum in the country. At least 543 people have been killed by the military since the coup started.
💉 Another one - Johnson & Johnson has begun trials of its COVID-19 vaccine to include minors aged 12 years to 17 years old. The vaccine will be first tried in teenagers aged 16 and 17 years of age and then expand to minors as young as 12. Companies such as Pfizer and Moderna have already started their clinical trials with minors.
Monday blues
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