Russian problems 💻
Dubsmash exists, recovery, and data breaches.
Hi 👋, Tanvi here.
Filter Coffee hits your inbox every morning with notable tech and business news scoops to jump start your day.
Sign up below for free. 👇
Let’s go ahead and get started:
Market summary: 📊
Indian markets kicked off this week on a positive note, as global vaccine news boosts sentiment. US markets had a choppy day with tech moving up but others mostly lagging.
US:
S&P 500 - down 0.44%
Nasdaq 100 - up 0.71%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 0.33%
Sensex - up 0.34%
Things to begin with ☕
1️⃣ US rolls out vaccine — an emergency authorization that dragged along for weeks coming through, Fedex planes ferrying first batches into a Pfizer distribution center, trucks slowly rolling out with doses while herds of supporters wave flags, and finally doctors vaccinating patients on live TV—the US’ vaccine roll out had all the oomph, chutzpah, and thrill of a Clint Eastwood movie (rights already sold probably, never know).
Jokes aside, docs have begun giving patients shots and healthcare workers, political figures, bankers, and other frontline workers will receive first doses, with citizen vaccination expected to be done by mid-June 2021.
The vaccine is practically ineffective for India given distribution hurdles in high-temperature countries, but India could get a highly-controlled tiny batch early on to help frontline and essential workers.
2️⃣ Pornographic shakedown — Visa and Mastercard created some furor last week when both card companies decided to stop processing payments for a particular online pornographic portal (you know which) because the website has a lot of unverified, illegal content that glorifies child abuse and other nefarious activities. Anyway, since then the portal seems to have gotten the message, and effective immediately they’ve decided to delete ALL unverified content. Millions of videos. Human rights champions cheer the move.
But on the other hand—the happenings have also ignited a debate from free market and free internet champions, who are sounding the horn on how much power card-networks like Visa and Mastercard hold in deciding what’s right for whom in today’s world.
3️⃣ Finally, 2020 got to Google — Google’s services including YouTube, Gmail, Gmeet all went down for a brief moment handicapping work from homers and their meetings. Peeps took to Twitter to show disappointment, obviously, but we all know what a relief the break was.
Take some, give some 📈
India has come a long way from the worst of these lockdowns, and fresh data points emerging continue to show healthy recovery. In the latest, Industrial production output—basically an index calculated using the production output for key industries most sensitive to consumer demand, grew 3.6% for the month of October, up from a paltry 0.5% growth in September. For the 6 months before that, industrial production growth had been negative—so overall that’s some positive news.
Then consumer inflation dropped from 7.61% in October to 6.93% in November 2020, as shortages at consumer retail points as well as hurdles in distribution and last mile logistics slowly ironed out, recovering from lockdown jolts.
On the other hand, wholesale inflation has spiked—as prices of raw materials, labor and other production essentials necessary to convert raw materials into finished goods, remain high. For the month of November, WPI (wholesale price index) rose 1.55% compared to 1.48% in Oct and 1.32% in September.
This time non-food products drove most of the growth in wholesale inflation, which can be attributed to the increased holiday gift shopping, while food inflation seemed quite under control, which signals improvement.
Bottomline: broad recovery is looking much much easier than earlier believed, but inflation will likely continue to stay high as pent up demand will keep prices high, while problems in supply chains take some time to get ironed out. Government’s move to not flood the economy with too much fiscal support jussssst may pay off. But definitely not without widespread pain on mainstreet—where small businesses, SMEs, proprietors scramble to get by each day.
Reddit bringing own booze to short video feast 💪
Reddit acquired short-form video platform Dubsmash, in a weird move as the company looks to bump up engagement and go more mass market from the relatively “niche” internet base it was thriving on until now. Deal amount is unknown.
Fact that everyone knows Dubsmash but doesn’t remember when they last saw it tells you everything about the state of the company—founded in 2015, quickly rising to fame, and then overshadowed by mightier rivals like TikTok. But COVID man, is a blessing for even the worst, and last reported engagement puts them at some 1 billion video views per month.
Reddit in its blog post says they’re primarily buying Dubsmash for its nimble editing and short-video creation tools—which kinda makes sense. Overlaying text on video, adding sounds, patching multiple videos together and making funny memes is kinda Reddit’s bread and butter for engagement—why not make it easier for users to do that?
Anyway, so far no plans of taking the app off of App Stores but whatever the end product is, Reddit says it's going to be part of the existing app eventually. Also, kinda surprising that Dubsmash had just 12 employees, seriously? All going to Reddit now though and congos to the founders.
US government breached ☹️
The US Commerce department, the Treasury (money printing bois) and a few other agencies of the government were breached into by Russian hackers, throwing global state security another curveball to deal with and absolutely embarrassing the administration.
The hackers breached a cloud software platform that the government uses, called Orion (basically for IT monitoring and logging), provided by software giant SolarWinds. The company had released an update earlier this year, which was apparently pre-infected. Officials say hundreds of thousands of networks were exposed, and although the government may not fully acknowledge the extent of the breach, rumors are it's pretty damn serious.
SolarWinds is now working with 300,000+ customers to ensure not many were affected due to the problems, while the “cloud software” industry is put on notice. Also, most hacks usually come from independent contractors who get paid for their pots in the open market, this time it's the Russian intelligence services themselves — which makes matters even more complicated.
Bottomline: Cyber warfare is increasingly becoming a major problem states are grappling with. Wars solely fought on the power of bullets and bombs are far behind us, with lax data practices, incessant use of social media by consumers, and ease of manipulation allowing for far too much damage digitally than a few bullets could ever do. Will be interesting to see how the world reacts to these latest happenings.
Closing out 👋
Uday Kotak has been re-appointed to continue as the CEO of Kotak Bank, along with 2 other of his execs for another 3 years starting Jan 1st. Investors should be happy about the leadership clarity near term, and the appointment should further boost hopes of the broad capital system given Kotak’s vocally bullish stand on the India growth story.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
♟️ Hunting the next prodigy - Vishwanathan Anand has opened an online chess academy in collaboration with Westbridge Capital, launching a fellowship program to groom and train junior chess prodigies. Anand himself will monitor the progress of the students.
🤝 Sonu Sood joins tech-land - Spice money, a fintech app from the Spice Group for rural India, has managed to get Sonu Sood as their brand ambassador. The app basically providers rural entrepreneurs basic banking and payment services, sealing Spice’s attempt to hedge against tech disruption and carve out a piece for itself.
💻 More devices - Flipkart has partnered with Nokia to launch the Nokia PureBook X14 - a lightweight laptop as the company looks to boost margins, capitalize on the current work-from-home led device boom, and solidify its device strategy. Just recently had they forayed into smartphones and smart TVs as well.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
You can forward this email or share FC on social media by clicking the button below. Thanks and Ciao! 😀