Ring ring, dis Tata 📞

Ola's plans, Dorsey won't stop, and the business of media.

Mar 09, 2021

Hi 👋, Tanvi here.

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

Let’s go ahead and get started:

Market summary: 📊

Indian markets circled in place with investors waiting for US to open to get some clarity on the week’s agenda. US investors returned to give tech another thrashing.

US:

S&P 500 - down 0.54%
Nasdaq 100 - down 2.92%

India:

Nifty 50 - up 0.12%
Sensex - up 0.071%

Fresh from the oven ☕

✅ Bijnes of monarchy—the gossip pages on Insta are better updated with the scoops, but we’re mostly in awe of business that was made off of the historic Prince Harry and Meghan Markle interview. Oprah Winfrey, the OG influencer and creator billionaire, had her firm paid more than $7 million for distribution rights to the interview. CBS, the old media company that bought those rights then sold ad slots for over $300K+ for each 30 second slot. Now only if such rates existed in the newsletter world…. Social media was raving about the interview, so you can bet the spending worked.

✅ Big Tech celebrates women's day—again, social was flooded with wishes on the occasion of women’s day, and tech companies of all shapes and sizes made customary moves to bridge gaps. 2 efforts stood out to us—Google announced a $25 million global grant and a range of programs for nonprofits and social enterprises working broadly for women's welfare. About $1 million more is earmarked for Indian women, mostly future entrepreneurs, which includes building a repository of digital and financial literacy content, and offering access content around tutorials, business ideas, and other coaching. Meanwhile, Paytm’s heartening video throwing light on the gender divide in financial literacy was very well received.

FYI—what’s important is to remember it’s women’s day today too, and then again tomorrow…

Elizabeth Warren Feminism GIF by Women's History Month

Not just any ride hailing company 🚕

For a couple of years now, Ola’s been making bold moves to transform itself from a ride hailing platform into a fully integrated automobile company, and the agenda is finally culminating as Ola looks to become one of the largest electric bike makers worldwide.

A mega plant built by the company in the outskirts of Bengaluru is apparently going to be the world’s largest 2-wheeler manufacturing facility, capable of churning out a bike every 2 minutes, or 2 million bikes annually once its fully commissioned by the end of 2022. It’ll cost about $330 million, and will be done in under 12 weeks.

The grand strategy dictating Ola’s progress is pretty simple—leverage a generational shift to EVs, and expand total addressable market by going after the $200 billion EV space in India, and in the process build a completely vertically integrated transportation company with the products (the vehicles) + the services (the hailing).

In the past, we’ve seen global ride hailers like Uber try to rapidly expand outside of their core businesses too, but most have failed, eventually selling off one business after another to salvage operations, which makes us truly praise the operational cunningness and audacity of the Ola team. Not to mention all these gutsy investments come at a time when COVID had literally frozen the ride hailing cash cow.

Here’s an outstanding profile from BloombergQuint on the company’s ambitions. Also, Bhavish Aggarwal for Musk of India? 🤷‍♂️

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Jack’s selling his first Tweet 🐦

In today’s edition of tech billionaire doing some crazy shizz, Jack Dorsey is selling his first tweet ever via an NFT based auction.

The tweet reads the glorious words that’d put Athenian philosopher Plato to shame…

“Just setting up my twitter”— Jack Dorsey, March 21, 2006. And the highest bid right now is for an eye popping $2.5 million. You cannot make this shit up.

For those confused about NFT, these are crypto contracts called Non-Fungible Tokens, which is essentially a couple lines of code that lives on the Blockchain and indicates that YOU have rights to the one-of-a-kind piece of particular digital art (or crypto art or gaming content, but gotta be digital and gotta be unique) and that you paid a certain amount for it in Ethereum tokens (or any other coin) to acquire that digital ownership. Your ownership and the amount you paid is sealed forever on the blockchain.

You can’t exchange the art-token for another one like it, because it's unique, and hence it's non-fungible. A bitcoin can be exchanged for another bitcoin—they’re all the same, or you could exchange a Bitcoin for a bunch of Ethereum tokens, which makes it fungible in crypto-speak. But your NFT is as unique as you.

Anyway in the recent days:

A cat pooping rainbow was sold for $600K
Nearly $1 million was paid for an algorithmically drawn image of “crypto punk”
$6.6 million was paid for a 10-second digital video clip

Jack’s tweet is the least surprising of all. And oh btw, this piece of art you’re reading, selling for $999. DM for details.

Unending ambitions 😎

Reliance is pushing deeper into consumer devices a low-priced 4G-enabled laptop, looking to ride the work from home boom, and tap into the remote instruction, edtech, and other device markets for heartland India. Production and launch is scheduled by the end of year.

The device will run on a customized Android OS (remember they’ve secured that through a multi-billion dollar Google partnership) and have most Jio apps pre-loaded similar to RIL’s mobile phones. Under the hood is a respectable Qualcomm Snapdragon 665 processing system with built-in 4G LTE connectivity.

The same Chinese manufacturer, Bluebank Communication Technology, making low-cost Jio smartphones has been contracted to make the devices. The irony.

Bottomline: over the past year, work from home demand has seen device sales shoot through the roof. There’s still plenty of low hanging fruit, especially in the low cost market segment, and Reliance could quickly build a sizable business while making the essentials accessible for hundreds of millions of Indians in heartland India.

TATA ringed Justdial 🤙

Justdial stock popped 10% yesterday after news broke out that Tata, in the process of chasing its own digital ambitions, made a quick pit stop by Justdial’s offices to feel the pulse on a potential acquisition.

FYI, Justdial runs an online classifieds empire, as well as newly launched online B2B wholesale marketplace JD Mart—with the latter apparently key to Tata’s interest in them. Although Justdial made a fortune during the internet 1.0 era building a classifieds empire, the company has failed to repeat the magic with its ecommerce ambitions, and has recently seen profits erode.

But they still cater to a respectable base of 140 million or so merchants across India, and with the right incentives as investments, Tata is probably hoping to lure merchants into selling wholesale merchandise on the platform, building a B2B commerce empire in the process.

Other pending Tata deals so far:

$1.2 billion deal for majority stake in Big Basket
$250 million deal for majority in online pharmacy 1mg
Proposed “Super App” that has even Walmart lined up for an investment

As far as Justdial goes, the news is clearly half baked, with some folks reporting that maybe the meeting was about a strategic partnership going forward. Or perhaps both Tata and JD are testing the waters with the leak to see if investors warm up to the idea. Regardless, its another datapoint underlining Tata’s aggressive commitment in mounting a multi-flanked assault in the digital commerce game here in India.

What else are we Snackin’ 🍿

👀 Answering to the security debate - Whatsapp is bringing password protection for its cloud backup of data, which will encrypt personal chats and give access only to the user based on the code. Although the Whatsapp chats are broadly end to end encrypted, the same security wasn’t extended to the cloud backups.

👏 The real multi-flanked attack - Nita Ambani latest venture is a networking platform for women called Her Circle, offering a goal fulfilment digital platform for women securing users a space for interaction, collaboration and networking. The platform will also focus on upskilling and help users find jobs.