The Helpdesk

Facebook ban follow up 

• Following up on the big story last week, and unsurprisingly news consumption dropped after Facebook banned news from its platform. 
• Data compiled by measurement company Nielsen found that the ban had an immediate impact on publishers.   
• Nielsen used its Digital Content Ratings methodology – which provides data each month on traffic volumes for tagged websites and apps regardless of the source being on or off-platform – to track total sessions and total time spent for the Current Events & Global News category yesterday. 
• Total Sessions fell by 16% last Thursday, when compared with an average Thursday.
• According to Nielsen about 22% of news audiences consumed their content exclusively via the Facebook app. 
• But, media execs are saying people are coming directly to their sites. And the ABC news app was the most downloaded free App in the App Store on Friday. Above Insta, Messenger, FB and Whatsapp 
• They may have had strong traffic on Thursday because it was a strong news day. It will be hard to sustain that without huge breaking news. If publishers can hang on and adapt it could be a net positive. 

Facebook news ban: Thuggery shows why we must move fast to fix it

https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/facebook-s-devastating-display-of-defiance-is-vintage-zuckerberg-20210219-p5741b.html

Facebook loses friends as protest over new media code backfires

COVID vaccinations in Victoria to be tracked by new tech platform

Australia’s vaccination program starts today! 

Victoria will be using a system from Microsoft to keep track of the vaccinations. the Vaccination Registration and Administration Solution (VRAS) is a management platform to co-ordinate the logistics and scheduled delivery of the vaccines at clinics.

According to Microsoft, the VRAS technology would also let the Department of Health monitor “cold chain” requirements to ensure vaccines are safe and effective. 

Hopefully this isn’t a covid safe app situation… 

When it comes to record keeping, the Australian government will use its existing systems, in particular the Australian Immunisation Register. 

All Covid vaccination info will be required to be uploaded to the register to help track and trace who is and isn’t protected from the virus.

Previously it wasn’t mandatory to report vaccines, but a law change earlier this month means that the gov will have a complete picture of vaccinations.

Vaccination records are viewable through Medicare Online, myGov, the Express Plus Medicare mobile app or My Health Record.

Ahead of the vaccine rollout, federal government services minister Stuart Robert on Friday...

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Holy crap! Facebook has deleted all news sources.

And here’s some of the stories that caught our eye this week, but didn’t warrant a full discussion: 

Bitcoin (BTC USD) Cryptocurrency Price Jumps to $50,000

• If you had bought $100 bitcoin in 2011, it would've been worth $6.1m this week 

Is no one buying the small phone? 

• Sorry, small-phone lovers: The iPhone 12 mini was Apple’s 2020 sales flop
• But wait! 
• iPhone 13 Mini Still Expected Despite Lackluster iPhone 12 Mini Sales

Lastpass munted 

LastPass free restricts users to one device type in March

• LastPass is restricting the way it’s free tier works. The next update will make you choose between lastpass on mobile devices, or computers, but not both. 
• DO you use a Password Manager? 

SolarWinds: How Russian spies hacked the Justice, State, Treasury, Energy and Commerce Departments

• Microsoft head of security tells 60 Minutes the Solarwinds hack was the most “sophisticated” he’s ever seen!

Want a cheap electric car? Ausdroid has a guide 

Want a sub $20K electric car? Tassie entrepreneurs Good Car co are importing into Australia

Parler Back

Parler crawls back online empty and with a Tea Party CEO 

• After being kicked off AWS servers in January, conservative social media platform Parler is back online. The new host is SkySilk
• There’s a new logo and the old CEO John Matze has been replaced by Mark Meckler, founder of the Tea Party Patriots. 
• It’s still banned on App Stores so users need to log on via web. 

Xinja

Xinja - should see if there’s an update after the shareholders meeting 

'Gun at their head': Xinja shareholders call for more options

• Investors who own more than 20 per cent of Xinja’s shares are now calling for a third option that includes retaining the company’s banking license, raising more capital and flushing out the board. “The license is the most valuable asset the bank has,”  

NYT Doco on the “Teenager who hacked Twitter”

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12673712/?ref_=ttep_ep5

• I found this lookin g for the britney spears doco, which i’d also recommend. 

A new online game -

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Media Code

Google, Nine agree commercial terms for news content 

• Another day, another deal with Google. Nine reportedly struck a $30 million-a-year cash deal with Google on Wednesday. (although neither side are officially confirming it yet)
• The AFR is reporting Junkee Media inked a smaller agreement and Guardian Australia and the ABC could have agreements wrapped up by the end of the week. That follows the Seven West deal we spoke about earlier in the week. 
• Under the proposed Media code the options are basically: negotiate or arbitrate 
• This could be Google setting the market rate before it goes into arbitration. Ie News can’t ask for $600 million when Nine’s already agreed to $30 million 
• Nothing from FB yet. I wonder how those negotiations are going. 
• What would you do with the cash? Well, the media union, the MEAA, says any money from these content deals must “end up in the newsroom, not the boardroom” 

Facebook Ban 

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/craig-kelly-cops-one-week-facebook-ban-for-covid-19-misinformation-20210216-p5730u.html?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1613459499

• Federal member for Hughes, Craig Kelly, has copped a 7 day ban from Facebook for “violating the company’s COVID 19 misinformation policy
• Facebook also deleted four coronavirus-related posts from Mr Kelly’s official MP Facebook page, including one where he likened the wearing of masks by children to child abuse.
• Mr Kelly has used his page, which has more than 80,000 followers, to promote treatments for COVID-19 at odds with official government and medical advice.
• Kelly revealed the 7 day ban in a bizarre interview with Cam Wilson of Gizmodo. 
• At one point in the interview, Kelly is asked what fact checking he does before sharing Covid related stuff and gave this answer: 
• Before I posted it, I checked the credibility of it. He had this long Jewish beard. He looked a bit … I looked him up to see that he was on the up and up and I satisfied myself. So I posted it to Facebook.

Amazon just bought an Australian ecommerce company you’ve never heard of

• Imagine you’re an Aussies entrepreneur, you started your business in 2013 making ecommerce software. Over the years you raise $11 million, and open offices overseas. 
• Then you do the biggest deal of your life and sell your company to Amazon. What do you do? 
• Selz, which was founded in Sydney, announced they had been bought by Amazon in January with 2 sentences of their website. And no one really noticed until this week. 
• “We have signed an agreement to be acquired by Amazon and are looking forward to working with them as we continue to build easy-to-use tools for entrepreneurs.” CEO Martin Rushe 
• There’s a few reasons Amazon might have wanted to do this deal, one would be as an acqui-hire (an...
  

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What is Clubhouse 

• Clubhouse is a real-time audio-based social network 
• Clubhouse lets you create and join "rooms," where you can then chat with others in a big conference call. It’s just audio & you can drop in and out of rooms at any time. 
• Once the conversations are over the room closes and 
• There’s a lot of discussion around start-ups and clubhouse itself. But there’s also NBA watch parties and 
• Clubhouse is like crack for big LinkedIn users - I see it as an audio extension of LinkedIn. 
• It reminds me of twitter when hashtags started being a thing - which again reminds me that twitter couldve and shouldve done this first 

Who’s behind it? 

• The company recently raised around $100 million in Series B funding led by existing investor Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the company at $1 billion 
• Founders are Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Paul Davidson and Rohan Seth. who have been working on social products for a decade, with little success. According to Business Insider, the pair have at least nine failed apps between them, including Talkshow, their first collaboration and the predecessor to Clubhouse. Clubhouse was their "one last try" to crack the social graph

Who’s on Clubhouse? 

• Well apart from Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley types … 
• Theres a lot of talk about Marc Andressen wanting to side step the media - i think thats part of the appeal of Clubhouse
• In a post Trump world, we’re seeing more people like Elon Musk ignore trad media and speak directly to followers. Just like Trump, Elon has stepped in trouble with tweets, but it hasn’t seemed to impact him too much
• Clubhouse has been downloaded about 4.7 million times to date since launching in September according to Apptopia. Growth is accelerating:
• It hit 1 million downloads at the end of last year, per Apptopia. For now, it's only available on iOS. 
• Access still requires an invite. I joined without an invite, I just signed up last Friday and 20 minutes later one of my LinkedIn contacts had vouched for me and I got a notification that my account was ready” 

First Impressions?   

• The app icon is weird compared to every other icon on my homescreen
• I really don’t know what I’m doing in there. But I don’t feel old like when I was using house party. I’ve clicked on notifications, been taken directly to a room and freaked out because I don’t know why I’m there. 
• If you’ve got limits on your phone about how long you can use social media, Clubhouse will burn through those limits really quickly. 

Why Audio-first? Who’s the competition? 

• Facebook & Twitter 
• Facebook Is Said to Be Building a Product to Compete With Clubhouse
• Twitter launches its voice-based 'Spaces' social networking feature into beta testing
• The Case for Twitter Spaces. Why Twitter's Clubhouse clone is poised… | by Alex Kantrowitz | Feb, 2021 | OneZero
• 
  

All the possible downsides 

• Clubhouse is facing the same content moderation dilemmas as...
  

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Media Code update 

Seven West Media and Google strike long-term partnership 

Federal government concession sends tech giants scrambling 

After chat with Mark Zuckerberg, Treasurer thinks deals under media code are 'very close' 

Google, Seven strike News Showcase deal

Seven West Media strikes deal with Google, swings to net profit

• As we round the home stretch of the media code law - with the vote expected this Friday, last minute deals are being made… 
• Seven West Media has inked a deal to join Google Showcase, Google’s preferred way of distributing its wealth to media in Australia
• Meanwhile, the Age reports both Google and Facebook are quote “scrambling” to make last minute deals with media companies to avoid the media code deadline of friday, though that paper provides no detail of these deals. 
• And the ABC reports that treasurer Josh Frydenberg has chatted again with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, again, no new details beyond their budding friendship, but Frydenberg is also optimistic that some last minute deals will be struck. 
• Doesn’t that sound like the federal government is somewhat undermining its own proposed law, if it hopes that deals will be struck before it’s passed? Not really - remember, the media code was only drawn up after media and tech refused to negotiate. 

What’s happening with Xinja? 

• In December neobank Xinja handed back its banking licence and closed all of its customers’ accounts. But the startup didn’t go out of business. 
• On the other side of the summer holidays, and The Australian has an update on what’s going on with the former bank. 
• The company’s future will be decided at an extraordinary general meeting on Wednesday, the paper reports. 
• The options on the table are to pivot from a bank to a US share-trading platform or wind the business up. 
• in a letter penned by chief executive Eric Wilson asks his investors if they would prefer to lock in a loss of 95c-100c in the dollar, or recapitalise and bet on the new venture. 
• Mr Wilson, who declined to comment, writes in the letter, “I don’t wish to sugar-coat this. It will be a long and difficult journey with considerable risk. We will be starting with a small team and limited capital. It will require raising further capital”  

Facebook Meets Apple in Clash of the Tech Titans—‘We Need to Inflict Pain’

• Forget the cold war between Facebook and Apple, as the Wall Street Journal says Facebook executives have been told to “inflict pain” on Apple 
• There’s not much new here, but the details are...
  

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Clubhouse issues 

https://onezero.medium.com/clubhouse-is-suggesting-users-invite-their-drug-dealers-and-therapists-a8161b3062fc

• Clubhouse has become big news recently and because of that, it is under more scrutiny 
• Will Oremus has looked at how Clubhouse uses your contacts, and its not great
• Like most apps, if you grant it access to your contacts, it uploads your entire address book 
• It you dont allow it to upload your contacts, you dont get the much prized invites to invite two friends
• But then if you do, like me, and like Will, you might find it requesting names you cant remember 

And twitters clubhouse 

https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/the-bull-case-for-twitter-spaces

Clubhouse’s launch feels like a throwback with its beg for invites model

My Twitter dms are full of randos asking for invites 

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facebook-plans-smartwatch-with-focus-on-messaging-health?shared=68804956321ee69c 

https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/12/22280798/facebook-smartwatch-messaging-health-fitness-release-date 

• A scoop from the Information, Facebook is building its own smartwatch 
• Facebook isn’t known for its hardware, but it does own VR headset business Oculus and released the Portal video chat devices a few years ago. 
• The smartwatch would have messaging, health, and fitness features, 
• The device reportedly is an Android-based smartwatch. It also says Facebook is working on building its own operating system for hardware devices and that future iterations of the wearable may run that software instead. 
• Peter, where would a Facebook watch it into the wearable market? I guess this makes sense if you think about integrations with Whatsapp or Messenger… 

https://www.axios.com/microsoft-us-should-consider-aussie-law-vexing-facebook-google-a691794e-2018-4c3a-aff1-172b42864761.html

• As we’ve already discussed Microsoft thinks Australia’s media code is great and now the maker of Bing thinks the U.S. and other countries should consider adopting media rules.
• In an interview with Axios, Microsoft President Brad Smith said "we recognize that this is an opportunity to combine good business with a good cause," 
• Exploiting the angst between Google & governments is perhaps the best shot Microsoft have ever had to grow their search business 

… And the media code is a step closer towards becoming law. 

The  government will introduce the news media bargaining code to parliament on Monday after a Senate committee recommended the bill be passed. 

The Australian reports the government will seek to push its legislation through the lower house today, and debate on the bill could begin in the Senate as early as Tuesday, with the government hoping to have the code finally enshrined in law within a fortnight. 

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Bumble is about to go public with a stack of women in the top jobs

• Bumble, the dating app where women make the first move, has priced its IPO at $43 per share - The company will begin to trade tomorrow morning/by the time you hear this podcast with a market cap of $7 billion. 
• 31 year old CEO and founder Whitney Wolfe Herd will be the youngest woman to ever take a company public
• The chair of the board is also female and women occupy 8 of the 11 board seats, that’s 70% … that’s incredibly rare most big companies in Australia have just been pressured by shareholders to have 30% female representation on their boards.
• Bumble is free to use but sells features to users. The company had 42 million monthly active users as of the end of September, out of which 2.5 million were paying users, up 22% from the prior year.
• The company will rival Match Group which owns Tinder, OkCupid and Hinge 
• I think the valentine’s day timing is deliberate - proving IPOs are a major branding event. 

Twitter news 

Twitter’s Jack Dorsey wants to build an app store for social media algorithms

Twitter kept gaining new users after it banned Trump

• Twitter has announced its quarterly results and they’ve had a great quarter, but there were some interesting tidbits from Jack Dorsey on the call 
• Firstly, Dorsey talked about wanting to turn Twitter into a kind of federated platform for chat, that could power other chat services. 
• He believes Twitter could be the “app store” of social media - which is basically what Twitter was back in 2008, before it decided to keep all the conversation to itself, and disable all the weird and wonderful apps people were building on top of twitter, and limiting 3rd party access to the API
• Another interesting data point: Twitter saw user growth AFTER it banned trump and Qanon 
• Dorsey didn’t give exact numbers, but indicated the trend proved Twitter “Was bigger than one account” 
• It seems that 13 years into Twitter, it’s creator is finally understanding the appeal of the service. 

 Can smart speakers survive without Google Search? 

• Alex Kidman has a story on Gizmodo about how your smart speaker will cope if Google Search leaves Australia. 
• Google has threatened to pull search from the market as a response to Australia’s new media code - however it has walked back some of those comments and Google CEO Sundar Pichai has had a “constructive” call with Scott Morrison. 
• But the withdrawal could have consequences beyond your web browser. For example just about every service Google offers relies on search, such as its smart speakers or displays
• Google has a 64% share of the smart speaker market here in Australia.
• While Google didn’t comment, Kidman writes that most of the smart home IoT device functions of a Google powered smart speaker should continue to operate
• Cops

Is This Beverly Hills Cop Playing Sublime’s ‘Santeria’ to Avoid Being Live-streamed?

• In a textbook...
  

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An incredibly detailed twitter thread on ACCC report on google

* Last week? We took a very high level look at a report from the ACCC into the digital advertising market - this isn't the media code, but moreseo looking at how competition in the digital advertising market which happens to be dominated by Google and Facebook. 

* Jason Kint has taken a deep dive into the 222-page report. He is an expert on the Digital Duopoly (Goog & FB) and he is the CEO of Digital Content Next which is an industry 

association that represents big publishers in the US like the NYT & Conde Nast. 

* "hands-down the best report I've ever seen on adtech complex - creates an overwhelmingly clear picture of the problem." Almost makes me want to read it! 

* One of the key findings of that report is Google's tech is the whole way along the advertising supply chain, that means its technology is representing the advertiser who is bidding on an ad spot and the publisher who is selling an ad spot. 

* Kint says "the report pretty much summarizes that both sides of the market are screwed due to Google's adtech monopoly power" - DSP and an SSP 

* He notes that a lot of Google's advantages come from the massive amount of data it collects on us, which make its advertising tools so much more effective than anyone else (except maybe FB). One proposed solution is to make Google silo its data and act as a service provider when selling ad tech. 

* All of this may go some way to explaining why publishers are so pissed off and pushing the media code so hard 

Aussies' iPhone obsession is saving the phone industry

• John Davidson of the Fin shares sales figures of mobile phones in the last quarter
• The numbers show a modest increase in sales for the last q of 2020, up from 3 per cent 
• A small growth, but much better than the “disastrous” sales at the start of the year, which makes a lot of sense
• The rebound was not enough to make up for the slow start to the year, however, and the industry exited 2020 having sold just 8.38 million phones, down 1 per cent compared with the 8.44 million phones sold in 2019.
• The rebound was led by Apple, which had a bumper final quarter of the year after the release of its iPhone 12. Its market share increased by 3.8 percentage points in the year, Telsyte figures show.
• The iPhone now has 46.2 per cent of Australian phone sales, compared with 53.8 per cent for the entire Android market.

Salesforce declares the 9-to-5 workday dead, will let some employees work remotely from now on

• It’s almost a year since we all got sent home from the office and companies are still working out what to do about remote work. 
• Facebook, Microsoft, Dropbox have all announced permanent WFH policies in response to the pandemic. 
• Salesforce says the “9-to-5 workday is dead” and that it will allow employees to choose one of three categories that dictate how often, if ever, they return to the office once it’s safe to do so. 
• Behind Door number one is Flex - which means coming into the office 3 days per week for team meeting etc. and 2 days at home to hang the washing out and get your packages delivered. 
• The second option is fully remote - committing to a lifetime of Zoom calls and the third is office based, like the before...
  

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Amazon Australia 

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/companies/amazon-australia-still-losing-money-despite-hitting-1bn-sales-in-2020/news-story/212a95c7354bc9962e842ff5519118be?utm_source=TheAustralian&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Editorial&utm_content=AM_BIZREV_Newsletter

Amazon breaks through $1 billion revenue mark in Australia 

• Amazon Commercial Services, reported $1.12 billion in net sales for the 2020 calendar year, a 99.4 per cent jump from the year prior.
• This shows the online retailer has also seen a similar boost in customer numbers as other major Australian e-commerce sellers such as Catch and Kogan as locked-down shoppers took their spending online.
• Despite the huge growth, Amazon Australia’s results revealed the company still closed the year with a $3.8m loss, according to its accounts lodge with the corporate regulator.
• 
  

Woolies promises to protect jobs from automation 

The robots are coming for our jobs. 

But the economists forecast that while automation will destroy old jobs, new ones will be created. The problem is training people to move from stacking shelves to programming those shelf-stacking robots

Australia’s biggest employer Woolworths will spend $50 million over the next three years on training and education to “upskill, reskill and redeploy” 60,000 of its 200,000 staff. 

The key training areas will be in: digital, data analytics, machine learning and robotics plus “advanced customer service skills, team leadership and agile ways of working.” 

In an opinion piece published in Nine newspapers this week, Woolies CEO Brad Banducci says people shouldn’t be scared of technological change. Pointing to self serve checkouts: 

“In 2009 - when we completed the self-service rollout - we employed 113,000 people in our Australian supermarkets. Today, we employ around 140,000, and the number continues to grow.”

“the fastest-growing role in our business is one that didn’t exist in 2009. It’s that of the online personal shopper and at Christmas we had around 25,000 of them hand picking orders for our customers.” 

iOS 14.5 lets you set Spotify and others as Siri’s default music service

• Apple’s latest beta will allow users to set default music service
• iOS 14 already allowed users to set default mail and browser clients, but more apps would be welcomed 
• Hopefully maps becomes the next default 
• Casey Newton tweets https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1358838280746225665
• The threat of an antitrust lawsuit is truly the most powerful and benevolent product manager in all of tech 

Bitcoin 

• Tesla now owns $1.5 billion worth of...
  

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This is the Democrats’ plan to limit Section 230

Now It's The Democrats Turn To Destroy The Open Internet: Mark Warner's 230 Reform Bill Is A Dumpster Fire Of Cluelessness

• In the last few months of his presidency, Trump - remember that guy? - rallied against the tech companies over Section 230 
• Trump believed conservatives were being unfairly targeted on social media, and that’s where his focus was - less moderation 
• Democrats have taken a different approach - proposing to change 230 to only protect speech, not actions, information. This means twitter, for example, would still be protected on any speech it hosts, but could be fined for hosting instructions to make a gun, or providing a platform that leads to an insurrection..
• "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." Under the SAFE TECH Act, the word "information" would be swapped out for the word "speech,"
• The SAFE TECH Act was introduced Friday by Sens. Mark Warner, Mazie Hirono and Amy Klobuchar.
• The bill has already drawn some criticism for the dismantling of protections of 230 - 
• Techdirt complains the bill would make all web hosting unprotected, because “money changing hands” for hosting would strip both parties of 230 protections. 

Google retracts its threat to leave after Scott Morrison meeting

Google launches News Showcase in Australia

• Scott Morrison has given some details of his call with Google CEO, Sundar Pichai. 
• The Australian reports that ScoMo was upbeat and positive about the call, saying he made it clear that the media code would be going ahead, and Google will find a way to work within it 
• Sundar Pichai hasn’t confirmed this, but he also hasn’t denied it. 
• Meanwhile, Google’s News Showcase product launched Friday. Apparently. 
• I’ve been trying to see what its like, but it’s not in my google news app, or on the web 
• Wait!! I found it - it’s under the old newsstand column… So much for a showcase.. 

Apple versus Facebook on ad-tracking: Harvard sides with Apple

• Harvard Business Review has examined Facebook’s claim that App Privacy in iOS 14 will cost small businesses “up to 60%” of sales because their ads will be less effective 
• Havard’s study is long and detailed, so instead I’ve read 9to5 Mac’s crib notes
• According to the site, Harvard thinks these “eye-popping” claims are over stated, saying facebook has conflated correlation with causation - and there’s no evidence the anti tracking features will affect sales
• They also point out that Facebook’s reported increase in ad spend during the pandemic is also highly inaccurate. 
• It’s so unlike facebook to exaggerate data to make them look good.. 

Australia steps up its bushfire prediction...

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