Earnings season rolls again, which means lots of juicy news from the largest public companies!
Analytics, Digital, Design In Action
Big Apple Bites
Snap reported earnings that largely missed expectations amid Apple’s latest privacy changes. CEO Spiegel said Snap’s advertising business “was disrupted by changes to iOS ad tracking that were broadly rolled out by Apple in June and July. While we anticipated some degree of business disruption, the new Apple-provided measurement solution did not scale as we had expected, making it more difficult for our advertising partners to measure and manage their ad campaigns for iOS.”
Apple rolled out these measures - under the movement called IDFA, which was part of its iOS 14.5 update - earlier this year. While traction was initially slow, user adoption ultimately grew, which led to the likes of Snap experiencing weaker attribution and user tracking.
On a similar note, Facebook has been speaking out about Apple's changes since they were implemented. Ultimately, some other tech companies are saying Apple is consolidating its grip over its ecosystem and pushing its own advertising solutions instead - all in the guise of privacy.
So Much for PinPal
Earlier last week, a rumor about PayPal being interested in acquiring Pinterest was widely spread on social media. Although this was denied by PayPal on Monday, it still triggered wide range discussions on the increasingly intensified online competition. Undeniably, PayPal feels the pressure from e-commerce platforms like Shopify as well as its cash-app competitor, Square. In the pandemic, PayPal benefited from soaring online shopping volume and participation in distributing stimulus checks. However, the rise of social commerce is gradually eroding the market share that was once owned by PayPal.
This also shed some light on the ongoing thesis of building ultimately a “super app”, which is confirmed by PayPal President and CEO Dan Schulman’s statement “no consumer wants to have dozens of apps on their phones”.
What do we think? We think it is an inevitable trend for tech giants (including payment companies) to go down the path of building their version of “super app” due to competition and the need for maintaining user engagement. The question remains as to how to best integrate with additional apps/functionalities to create synergy rather than disruption.
Sovereignty Fears - Amazon Soon to Host all of Your Secret
It was confirmed recently that the UK's three spy agencies (GCHQ, MI5 and MI6) have contacted Amazon Web Services for hosting classified materials. Although this is still in the contracting stage, once this deal goes through, Amazon will be the go-to Cloud provider for the World’s intelligence agencies. This is not the first time that Amazon works with intelligence agencies - as early as 2013, the CIA signed its first $600M’s cloud contract with Amazon.
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