Ouch Microsoft 🙄

Stimulus clearing, mining SPACs, and Twitter features won't stop.

Mar 08, 2021

Hi 👋, Tanvi here.

Filter Coffee hits your inbox every morning with notable tech and business news scoops to jump start your day.

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What’s hot? ☕

✅ Limping along with the unicorns—pandemic battered OYO Rooms saw its fortunes beaten down to rubble, which ended in an embarrassing down round valuing the company at $8 billion in August 2020. But in a fresh raise, OYO picked up a small $7 million check at a revised valuation of $9 billion, as demand probably shows some hint of predictability (all those Goa trips you keep seeing). The check comes from Hindustan Media Ventures, who clearly isn’t a genius in the travel space, and probably just wanted a piece of the cake seeing that the store was on a discount.

✅ Joe switches the money printer on… brrrrr—friends in the West cleared way for another $1.9 trillion of COVID relief package, which will give direct payments of about $1,400 a month to every American citizen ($5,600 for a family of 4), with some unemployment and healthcare benefits. Some $350 billion will go to local governments, while the rest includes assistance for vaccine production & distribution, school reopening cost, and other programs. Consumer spending should see a healthy boost this summer, and some of the increased spend should trickle down to bolster exports from emerging economies like ours. Markits gonna love the news.

Quickly running through the important stuff now…

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In today's issue of Who’s Copying Who 🙄

In the latest of Big Tech copying the other, TikTok parent Bytedance is apparently going full force on churning out a Clubhouse clone, looking to repeat its video magic now with the audio format.

China banned Clubhouse last month after anti-governmental agenda began picking steam on the platform, and a bunch of Chinese apps have sprung in the aftermath including a modified invite-only service by smartphone maker Xiaomi designed for professionals.

Clubhouse may have opened the doors on the audio social category, but real-time long-form discussions between a bunch of nerds is not the only way this game will be played. Could a TikTok like short form audio + text product work? Or perhaps a celebrity/influencers-to-millions of users type broadcasting platform?

Discovering a hook is key, but there’s ample room for innovation. Count on Bytedance to show some magic.

Not just any other SPAC 💰

Professional Bitcoin mining firm Cipher Mining is going public via a SPAC, merging with holding company Good Works Acquisition in a deal valued at $2 billion, as the crypto rally continues to show outstanding resilience.

Most importantly though, the deal will witness Fidelity and Morgan Stanley’s Counterpoint Global both plow nearly $425 million into Cipher—another datapoint that underlines old school investors increasingly getting drawn towards BTC as an asset class, as questions from clients become hard to deal with.

As of 2021, nearly a million professional Bitcoin mining companies operate in the world, who made over a billion dollars mining the currency in the last 1 month alone. Cipher alone has mined nearly 600,000 bitcoins over its lifetime.

Overall, as the price of the currency takes violent turns, the miners are a good way of gaining a much more stable secondary exposure to the ecosystem, cushioned by the “real assets” they own in terms of their mining rigs.

This the season of viruses 🦠

Not that Outlook needs a “virus” to take it down, but Microsoft’s “Poster boy of enterprise software” image was dented when the biz email service was hacked into, affecting nearly 60,000 Microsoft customers globally. No points from guessing who’s behind it, drum roll… Gyna.

The attacks began earlier in Jan, and Microsoft since then has been firefighting to limit scope of the spread. Oddly, majority of those targeted are small and medium sized businesses, mostly banks, old age homes, and even a freaking ice cream company.

The hack basically focuses on stealing email data by exploiting a flaw in the Microsoft Exchange Server email software, seeding hundreds of thousands of end devices with code that gives the hackers remote access and control.

US State Cybersecurity officials however claim that not all is clear, and repeated attempts to break into government networks are still plenty visible, via a system that now appears automated. Barely months ago had the SolarWinds story left the US administration red faced, exposing secrets of nearly 100 companies and 10 or so government agencies.

What matters: persistent exposure to such vulnerabilities, rendering even giants like Microsoft helpless, is one of the biggest headwinds to the global adoption of cloud computing. Governments and corporations are going to be forced to significantly boost spending here over the next 5-10 years.

Otherwise, the world news mills were mostly quiet yesterday. Couple of brutal weeks in the market, and looks like everyone took the weekend for some extra naps.

What else are we snackin’ 🍿

📱 Supplementing POS infra - NCPI is working with SBI and others to roll out ‘RuPay SoftPoS’, a service that turns any NFC enabled smartphone into a payment processing platform that will enable merchants to accept contactless payments of up to ₹5,000. NCPI is pushing hard to make low cost processing options available for SMEs to support the crusade for mass digitization of payments, especially across heartland.

🐦No edit, but undo mayyyybe - Twitter is finally testing an undo button which will let users retract or make changes to the tweet and post it again. Not the edit button users had hoped for but it's definitely a huge relief to people who tweet impulsively. Guilty!

Feeling Monday Morning GIF by Rise at Seven

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