Advance Happy Thanksgiving! (yes, we remind you all we’re from Canada) 👋 . Hope you and your loved ones enjoy your time together!
Analytics, Digital, Design In Action
Netflix Effect in Action
An under-the-radar South Korean show has taken the world and Netflix by storm. There’s long been talk of the Netflix effect (we wrote about it too!) and ‘Squid Game’ is no different (though we caution it’s for adults!).
Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, said Monday during Code 2021, an annual technology conference hosted in California, that "Squid Game" is on track to become the biggest show in its history in any language. “Squid Game” follows the likes of “Lupin”, “Dark”, and “Money Heist”, non-English content that resonated around the world.
Facebook Goes Dark
Facebook sees its largest outage in years. Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp witnessed a global outage for over six hours on Monday.
The short version of the explanation is that the outage was caused by “a faulty configuration change on FB’s end.” The company has said that there was no malicious activity involved, and that there’s no evidence user data was compromised during the downtime.
If you want to geek out like us and try to understand the technicalities on the blackout more, then you’re in luck! Web infrastructure and security company, Cloudflare, wrote a quick technical primer.
Affirm’s on a Partnership Spree
Buy-Now-Pay-Later company Affirm inked its third major retailer deal in weeks as it signed a partnership with Target ahead of the holiday shipping season. This is on the heels of its similar deals with Wal-Mart and Amazon.
Affirm has always been partnership driven and focused on retailers than other modes of commerce.
The BNPL space has been growing strongly. For instance, Ezetap, a digital payments company, claims that it recorded a steep increase of 220 per cent (year-on-year) in the transactional volume of EMI in July 2021 compared with February 2020.
DeepMind Gets Into Deep Trouble
Google and DeepMind face lawsuit over deal with Britain’s National Health Service. DeepMind found itself in the spotlight in 2016 when the New Scientist reported that its collaboration with the U.K.’s National Health Service went beyond what was publicly announced.
Investigations found a number of shortcomings in the way patient records were shared for this trial. Patients would not have reasonably expected their information to have been used in this way.
The NHS has also been criticized for signing a data-sharing agreement last year with U.S. company Palantir. The data firm was co-founded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel who was an early investor in DeepMind.
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