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Apple Earnings

Apple Inc. AAPL 3.71% benefited from a significant uptick in sales of laptops and iPads due to the pandemic, even as quarterly iPhone sales fell from a year earlier after a delay in the launch of the company’s flagship new smartphone.

iPhone sales down 28% yoy - 

Before the pandemic, the bright spot of Apple’s business had been its services unit, which had more than doubled in fiscal 2019 compared with five years earlier. It rose 16% in the most recent quarter to $14.5 billion.

Google Earnings

Google’s parent company Alphabet announced that it earned net income of $7 billion on revenues of $40.5 billion for the quarter ending September 30. That revenue figure is a gain of 20 percent year-over-year.

“We had a strong quarter, consistent with the broader online environment,” Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said. “It’s also a testament to the deep investments we’ve made in AI and other technologies, to deliver services that people turn to for help, in moments big and small.”

83.4 percent of Google’s revenues were derived from advertising.

Amazon

Even without Prime Day, Amazon had a blockbuster quarter. Its net income nearly tripled from this time last year, as retail store closures and coronavirus restrictions encouraged people to spend big online. In its earnings report today, Amazon said it made $6.33 billion in net income, up from $2.13 billion during the same quarter a year earlier.

Amazon’s “other” category, which mostly covers the company’s advertising business, was up 51% to $5.4 billion in revenue.

Facebook 

Revenue in the three months ended in September rose to $21.47 billion, yielding EPS of $2.71.

Daily average users rose to 1.82 billion, while monthly average users rose to 2.74 billion. That compares to increases of 12% for each of DAUs and MAUs in the prior quarter.

Twitter

Twitter beat out analyst expectations on revenue and net income; However, Wall Street was stuck on Twitter’s user user figures, which showed minimal growth and sent shares lower in after-market trading. 

Spotify

The streaming service had added 6 million subscribers in Q3 to achieve a total 144 million paying customers across 320 million active users, but fell short on both sales and earnings, driving the stock lower.

COVIDSafe Panel

Some of the leading researchers who have been srutinising the CovidSafe app appeared on a panel yesterday. 

Consensus was that the app hadn't proven incredibly effective, there had been some bug fixes but they still havent seen the server code and that fact it wasn't developed alongside the state-based contact tracers was a major downfall. Also discussed if we should be scrapping it and moving to the Google-Apple framework. And raised concerns about all those QR codes you've been scanning 

Graham Greenleaf, professor of...

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Big Tech Section 230 Hearings

First to a story we flagged yesterday & Jack Dorsey left his wood cabin to join the meetings... 

the ceos of twitter, facebook & google have appeared at US Senate Committee hearing this morning. It was nominally about Section 230 a 1996 statute that grants internet platforms broad legal immunity for user-generated content while allowing them to moderate that content without fear of taking on liability. Wired reports, the hearing, however, was mostly an opportunity for Republicans on the committee to berate Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for supposedly discriminating against conservative users—especially conservative user number one, Donald Trump

Republicans continually mispronounced Sundar Pichai's name, the ceo of one of the US most valuable companies 

NyTimes 

"“Mr. Dorsey, who the hell elected you and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report and what the American people are allowed to hear?” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas asked.

Mr. Dorsey bore the brunt of questions, with Republicans asking him almost four dozen times about alleged “censorship” of conservative politicians and media outlets. He was asked 58 questions in total, more than the 49 for Mr. Zuckerberg and 22 for Mr. Pichai, according to the Times tally.

Spotify Defends Joe Rogan...

According to Jane Lytvynenko of Buzzfeed: 

In public, Spotify is staying quiet about an appearance by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones yesterday on its flagship podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, despite banning Jones' own podcast last year. But in an internal email sent from a top executive, the company is defending the booking.

Horacio Gutierrez, the company’s chief legal officer and head of global affairs, wrote to team managers on Oct. 28 about the episode of Joe Rogan's podcast that featured an interview with Jones and podcast host Tim Dillon.

On his guest appearance, Jones played videos that had been banned from youtube

and Rogan said kids are "getting polio from taking vaccines" after Alex Jones spreads conspiracy that Bill Gates is trafficking vaccines that get 100% of people sick. He also denied climate change and spread disproven conspiracies about Joe Biden

Spotify signed Joe Rogan for an exclusive $100m podcasting deal 

Gig Economy companies spend $200m on Prop 22

Gig economy companies are campaigning hard against something called proposition 22 in the US. according to the wall street journal: 

Uber Technologies Inc., Lyft Inc. and DoorDash Inc. are spending tens of millions of dollars and flooding voters with messages in a neck-and-neck battle to preserve their current business model in California.

Spending nearly $200 million to persuade voters to approve a ballot measure that would exempt them from a new state law requiring businesses to reclassify contract workers as employees. That amount, the most ever raised for a California ballot question, according to Ballotpedia, suggests how pivotal the vote will be for companies reliant on a labor model in which workers are summoned at the touch of an app.

On the other side unions argue, companies have flourished on the backs of gig workers without providing them the protections that most employees receive. 

If voters reject the Proposition 22 measure, the companies would...

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Microsoft has a great quarter

From The Verge: 

Microsoft posted the first quarter of its 2021 financial results today, reporting revenue of $37 billion and a net income of $14 billion. Revenue is up 12 percent, and net income has increased by 30 percent. The Verge reports, While the ongoing pandemic continues to force many to work remotely during an economic downturn, Microsoft is benefiting from the shift in the way people are now working, playing games more, and connecting to others through videoconferencing.

Cloud services are the biggest boost to Microsoft’s revenues from the pandemic shift in behavior. Both Office commercial and consumer are up, with Office 365 Commercial revenue growth up by 21 percent. Server products and cloud services revenue has also increased 22 percent as more businesses rely on cloud services for remote working. Azure revenue itself grew 48 percent.

The biggest news here from a consumer point of view is that Microsoft 365 Consumer subscribers have also increased to 45.3 million. That’s a jump of 27 percent year-over-year, and likely thanks to Microsoft’s renewed focus on consumers with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams earlier this year.

AMD had a monster quarter

For the third quarter of 2020, AMD reported $2.8B in revenue, a 56% jump over the same quarter a year ago. As a result, AMD has once again set new revenue records for the company, posting both their best Q3 ever, and their best single quarter period. Driving this was further growth in both of AMD’s major segments, with everything from consumer CPU sales to EPYC and semi-custom sales reported as being on the rise.

And everything is looking positive for future growth, with both Xbox and PS5 using AMD in their next generation consoles.

AMD and Xilinx have hugely different product portfolios and are focused on different markets with a few exceptions. That is a good thing when it comes to acquisitions and I believe the two companies are complementary.

AMD is focused on high-performance CPUs and GPUs for PCs and datacenter servers and SoCs for game consoles and notebooks. Xilinx is focused on high-performance FPGAs, SoCs for datacenter (including SmartNICs), communications, automotive, industrial, aerospace, and defense markets.

Not earnings, but sticking with business, you'll soon be able to Buy stuff on TikTok

Sarah Perez of Techcrunch explains: 

TikTok is further investing in social commerce with today’s announcement of a new global partnership with e-commerce platform Shopify. The deal aims to make it easier for Shopify’s over 1 million merchants to reach TikTok’s younger audience and drive sales. The partnership will eventually expand to include other in-app shopping features, as well, the companies said.

At launch, the agreement allows Shopify merchants to create, run and optimize their TikTok marketing campaigns directly from the Shopify dashboard by installing the new TikTok channel app from the Shopify App Store. Once installed, merchants will have access to the key functions from the TikTok For Business Ads Manager at their disposal.

Earlier this year Facebook announced its big social commerce play. to buy stuff through FB, Insta and now whatsapp. Builds on strong marketing tools & means you don't have to exit the app to buy something. 

Live stream shopping, which is big in China, also likely to be see we see more...

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Facebook announced the launch of cloud gaming, making it possible for its web and Android users to try out free-to-play games without leaving the social network. 

It's available on Facebook's desktop website and Android app but not to iOS due to Apple’s “arbitrary” policies. The exclusion of Apple devices from Facebook cloud gaming is the latest shot fired in a long-running feud between the companies.

Are these games any good? 

App store rules? 

& Facebook keeping users inside its ecosystem. 

Just 17 people found with covidsafe that wouldn't have been found otherwise

But given Australia had recorded 27,520 cases of COVID-19 and uncovered hundreds of thousands of close contacts, the app was clearly ineffective.

0.06%

Priya Dev is a technologist, data scientist and researcher in digital assets at the Australian National University’s College of Business and Economics. She was recently booted off a university panel on the app for being too critical. Yesterday she wrote a blistering editiorial for the Financial Review:

When I was removed from a university panel discussion about the COVIDSafe contact-tracing app, it brought to my mind the folktale The Emperor’s New Clothes, a story of profit and pride.

The story is of an emperor who is conned into purchasing an imaginary suit that only worthy people can see. Everyone maintains the illusion of the emperor’s suit because speaking the truth would reveal them to be fools.

Melbourne Startup Linktree has raised $15 million AUD 

Natasha Gillezeau of AFR reports: 

Linktree's founders created the platform as a side hustle to their digital agency Bolster in 2016, to solve their clients' problems finding a quick way of funnelling their social media followers towards different parts of their internet presence.

A lot of people would say 'build it with scale from the start', but I think the way we went about building it made us focus so much on the product, Mr Zaccaria said.

We added bit by bit, solved problems and really tested it, rather than trying to move too quickly and use marketing to drive growth in a way that wouldn't have been sustainable.

New Airpods! 

Bloomberg is paywalled, so from The Verge: 

According to the report, Apple’s second-generation AirPods Pro could ditch the stem that has been a hallmark of the AirPods’ design since their introduction in 2016. They’ll reportedly still feature noise-cancellation, but with a design that’s more similar to the likes of Samsung’s Galaxy Buds Plus, or Google’s Pixel Buds. Fitting everything into a smaller housing has been a challenge for the company, Bloomberg reports, meaning this design could change.

The...

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A busy weekend at Facebook,

firstly, the social media giant is upset with academics who are seeking to study the platform without its permission.

Facebook is demanding that a New York University research project stop collecting data about its political-ad-targeting practices.

The dispute involves the NYU Ad Observatory, a project launched last month by the university’s engineering school that has recruited more than 6,500 volunteers to use a specially designed browser extension to collect data about the political ads Facebook shows them.

Facebook says the project violates its T&Cs - that prohibit bulk data collection from its site. 

While preparing for a post election shitshow 

The WSJ reports Facebook is considering releasing new tools following the US election to turn down the heat. 

Previously used in countries including Sri Lanka and Myanmar, the tools could alter what tens of millions of Americans see when they log onto the platform, diminishing their exposure to sensationalism, calls to violence and misinformation

The emergency measures include slowing the spread of viral content and lowering the bar for suppressing potentially inflammatory posts,

Github removes youtube-dl

the very popular command line project allowed users to download full quality youtube, iview, 

gtihub is owned by microsoft 

Where's my self driving car? 

The Verge reports, Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ beta is here, and it looks scary as hell 

last week Tesla released a beta, or test version, of what it calls a “Full Self Driving” software upgrade to an undisclosed number of “expert, careful” drivers. What could go wrong? 

The U.S. auto safety regulator said its heeping an eye on the program. “NHTSA has been briefed on Tesla’s new feature, which represents an expansion of its existing driver assistance system. . The agency will monitor the new technology closely and will not hesitate to take action to protect (the) public against unreasonable risks to safety,”

The riskis that Tesla’s customers will ignore the company’s warnings and not supervise it. Humans are very bad at passively monitoring something 

Video games help soldiers with PTSD

The huge marine holding a cherry red Nintendo DS just killed me...

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We weren't the only ones watching AOC on Twitch yesterday - the NY congresswoman clocked up over 400k views on Twitch, making her video the 3rd most streamed event in Twitch's history 

The stream peaked at 439,000 views, making it the third-highest-viewed single stream in Twitch history. The all-time record is Ninja's, when he teamed up with Drake and Travis Scott in a game of Fortnite. Viewership ranged from 300,000 to 400,000 for most of the stream.

In sad news, parenting forum Essential Baby is being shut down after twenty years

I find this really sad - so many of my friends are people i made on forums in the early oughts 

the fact that 20 years of advice could disappear at the end of the week is really troubling. 

ASX debuts for ecom companies 

Adore Beauty and MyDeal listing on ASX today and tomorrow. 

18 months ago ecommerce companies were valued at EBIDTA - now these businesses are being valued at a multiple of revenue 

Pour one out for Quibi, the video platform you never heard of

A team of writers at the Wall Street Journal are reporting "Quibi Holdings LLC is shutting down, according to people familiar with the matter, a crash landing for a once-highflying entertainment startup that attracted some of the biggest names in Hollywood and had looked to revolutionise how people consume entertainment.

What the hell was Quibi? Besides the terrible name, it was a short clip video service. The technology "break through" was how the video played in both landscape and vertical...

because of this, it touted itself as the first "true mobile first" video experience, which seemed laughable, as tiktok and youtube and instagram were pretty damn mobile already

Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman have confirmed the news in a medium post

And yet, Quibi is not succeeding. Likely for one of two reasons: because the idea itself wasn’t strong enough to justify a standalone streaming service or because of our timing.

Unfortunately, we will never know but we suspect it’s been a combination of the two. The circumstances of launching during a pandemic is something we could have never imagined but other businesses have faced these unprecedented challenges and have found their way through it. We were not able to do so.

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First big development in the case to break up big tech

• The Justice Department filed a long-awaited antitrust lawsuit alleging that Google uses anticompetitive tactics to preserve a monopoly for its flagship search engine and related advertising business, illegally stifling potential competition.
• It's the biggest anti-trust case since Microsoft back in 1998
• Joining the feds are attorneys general from 11 states. Interestingly, all states are republicaan Conspicuously absent from that group are dozens more AGs comprising a bipartisan coalition of nearly every top state prosecutor in the country that has been investigating the company on antitrust grounds for more than a year.
• That doesn't mean the other AGs oppose bringing antitrust action against Google. The remaining states may want to move ahead with separate legal actions and join the case later, DOJ officials told reporters Tuesday, and the agency doesn't take their sitting out the initial filing as "non-support."
• Google says the Justice Department's lawsuit alleging competitive abuses is "deeply flawed" and would fail to help consumers.
• From Google's blog:
• We understand that with our success comes scrutiny, but we stand by our position. American antitrust law is designed to promote innovation and help consumers, not tilt the playing field in favor of particular competitors or make it harder for people to get the services they want. We’re confident that a court will conclude that this suit doesn’t square with either the facts or the law. 

Photoshop 21 includes a mind melting neural filters, allowing you to adjust the lighting, age, mood of a person in a photo

• Some of this was expected, as modern phones already include lightning changes -but the adjustability here is nuts 
• Tweet
• Premiere Pro
• Automatic speech-to-text caption generation in 12 languages, including translation.

Earnings day! Snap and Netflix report earnings

• Netflix experienced explosive growth during the first half of the year. It wasn't expected to match that growth this quarter, when lockdowns lifted and after new competitive services had launched, but analysts were still expecting it to meet expectations of at least 3.3 million net new global subscribers.
• So while more people are joining and binging Netflix, the company is still spending crazy amounts of money to acquire new users, including their amazing new Europe studio designed to pump out content across a bunch of languages
• Criminal is the beta test of this studio 
• Meanwhile, Snap's stock price shot up by more than 23% in after-hours trading Tuesday after the company posted Q3 results that beat analyst estimates. 
• Advertisers are back! From Snap "As businesses adapted and began to look for opportunities to increase their marketing budgets in Q3, we were pleased to see existing advertisers resume and even increase their budgets, as well as new advertisers allocate spend to drive real business...
  

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Here's a novel solution to our dependence on Facebook's apps... 

The Guardian has picked up a new proposal that the ABC aught to run its own social media platform. 

A publicly funded social network run by the ABC has been floated as one possible response if Facebook and Google limit services in Australia when the mandatory news code becomes law this year. To which Google and Facebook have threatened to limit their services. 

The proposal for a platform hosted by the ABC is among a raft of risk mitigation proposals in a report commissioned by the Centre for Responsible Technology, “Tech-Xit: Can Australia survive without Google and Facebook?”

It should be noted that this report is from an independent think tank, and not the ABC itself. 

My thoughts: as if you'd want to go anywhere near this mess and the problems that plague social media networks. But interesting to ask, is social media a utility? I mean then you just Have Nextdoor, which is all missing cats and what do I do about these cockroaches.

Ben Thompson breaks down the response of Twitter and Facebook to the NY Post Story

Last week, The NY Post ran a story on Hunter Biden, 

On the face of it, Twitter's reaction seemed stronger, but in a 4000 word blog post, Ben Thompson of Stratechery argues they did more bad than good. 

The story was so flimsy it was rejected by Fox News, but Ben thinks the social media response has created a Streisand effect, bringing more people to the story 

He compares it to "hillary's emails" where the substance of the story is far less important than it being run as snackable headlines

For a short version, try https://dithering.fm/

E commerce boom in COVID times

Guess which was the busiest ecommerce month of the year? 

Some stats: X was the biggest month in Australia’s online shopping history, up over 85 per cent nationally and up 170 per cent in Victoria year-over-year.

That's nearly 10 % higher than the 2019 pre-Christmas peak, 31 days from mid-November to mid-December last year. 

Between April and the end of August, Australia Post has delivered over 2 million passes on 53 days. For the same period the year prior, didn’t have a single day of 2 million parcels. 

Two speed market - winners & losers. Travel - a loser, grocery, beauty Home & garden all winners 

Anyone that had digital and Service level agreements in place with their partners to scale up 

there's nearly 1 million new households shopping online, and that behaviour is expected to stick 

Internet of things killing the NBN? 

John Davidson of the Australian Financial Review shares a telsyte report about the surge in IoT purchases as Australians spend more time at home 

Looks like Australians are nesting with tech, spending up on internet connected light globes, doorbells and security cameras, as well as smart speakers

Comments from the reports author in the article suggest Australians on a "low NBN plan" may feel the strain on their network with all these new devices. 

While I agree the NBN sucks, I think the average 25/5 is fine for IOT, and the problem may be your router. 

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The Guardian reports

A total of 2.2m ads on Facebook and Instagram have been rejected and 120,000 posts withdrawn for attempting to “obstruct voting” in the upcoming US presidential election, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and communications Nick Clegg has said. warnings were posted on 150m examples of false information posted online,

Facebook has been increasing its efforts to avoid a repeat of events leading up to the 2016 US presidential election, won by Donald Trump, when its network was used by Russia for voter manipulation. The US election is 15 days away, so four years well spent? 

Once again, stopping ads is good, but it's the individual posts and groups that go viral. 

The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom today announced the development of The Citizen Browser Project—an initiative designed to measure how disinformation travels across social media platforms over time.

a custom web browser designed by The Markup to audit the algorithms that social media platforms use to determine what information they serve their users, what news and narratives are amplified or suppressed, and which online communities those users are encouraged to join. Initially, the browser will be implemented to glean data from Facebook and YouTube.

A nationally representative panel of 1,200 people will be paid to install the custom web browser on their desktops, which allows them to share real-time data directly from their Facebook and YouTube accounts with The Markup. 

“Social media platforms are the broadcasting networks of the 21st century,” said The Markup’s editor-in-chief, Julia Angwin. “They dictate what news the public consumes with black box algorithms designed to maximize profits at the expense of truth and transparency.

I would sign up for the plugin myself if it were available to the public

You're going to have to log-in to watch ABC iview 

Over at The SMH, Zoe Samios reports, ABC sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plans are confidential, said the broadcaster intends to make password-protected access compulsory from mid- next year.

The commercial broadcasters do this so they know who you are, and show you ads related to your demographic and beahviour. 

The play here seems to be about personalising the Iview platform, These logins create a profile that allows broadcasters to tailor the types of programs and films that appear on the app to a person's interests. It also gives a broadcaster access to personal data, so may raise privacy concerns. 

TPG is launching a low cost mobile brand called Felix that looks set to compete with Belong, Telstra's low cost alternative. 

... we don't know the prices yet... But TPG says it will increase comeptition in the market. 

The TPG-Vodafone merger was finalised in July. It was originally held up over concerns the deal would reduce competition. 

The products announced at the last Apple event havent even shipped yet, and there's already rumours of the next Apple event. 

This event, slated for November 17, is expected to see the introduction of ARM based computers - Apple promised an Arm Mac before Christmas. This will see the company moving away from intel in some of its line up. 

The big question amongst my nerd friends - which Mac first? The highest selling computer in the line up, the Macbook Air, or the lowest selling, the Mac Mini. There are good arguemtns for both 

Finally, someone has come up with a use for smart lights. 

Zilzie, near Rockhampton in Queensland, is using colourful lightas to safely guide hatching turtles to the sea. It's bloody adorbale and well worth clicking through. 

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Revenge Porn Legislation Debated in NSW Parliament

At ZDNET, Asha Barbaschow reports "New South Wales Attorney General and Minister for the Prevention of Domestic Violence Mark Speakman on Wednesday introduced legislation to state Parliament with the aim of offering further protections for victims of the distribution of non-consensual intimate images and videos online, colloquially known as "revenge porn".

Under the proposed amendments to the Criminal Procedure Act 1986, victims of intimate image abuse would have the same court protections as other sexual assault complainants. Judicial officers would also have greater powers to order images and recordings be destroyed

More protections for victims: who'll be able to give evidence remotely, in a closed court and have their privacy protected. 

Citing the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, Speakman said there were 296 charges for intimate image offences between July 2018 and June 2019, and 420 charges laid between July 2019 and June this year.

Youtube has joined the Qanon Ban Party, in the lead up to the US election 

YouTube said Thursday that it would no longer allow content that targets individuals and groups with conspiracy theories, specifically QAnon and its antecedent, "pizzagate."

YouTube’s move to rid the platform of QAnon content follows similar recent changes by other social media platforms. In July, Twitter removed QAnon accounts and restricted QAnon content. Last week, Facebook said it would remove groups, pages and Instagram accounts that identified with QAnon.

Meanwhile, across the pond Facebook is clamping down on a far right political party, Advance NZ

a Facebook spokeswoman said the party was deplatformed after it repeatedly breached the social media site's misinformation policies.

The party's leader Te Kahika holds a number of controversial views, including that Covid-19 was a bioweapon designed to be used on civilians around the world.

Friday Review Round Up

pretty much everyone except me shared their Pixel 4a and 5 reviews 

Anula Keenan of Finder reviews the Fitbit Versa

Tim Biggs at SMH went hands on with the Xbox Series X

My man Daniel Vooks got his Mario Kart early 

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