Monthly Archives: March 2021

Nischal Shetty, founder and CEO of WazirX took to cryptocurrency after his previous business was hit by actions of global tech giants. A software engineer from Mumbai, Shetty shares his story with Mint. Edited excerpts:

Tell us about your background

Im a software developer. I grew up in Mumbai and studied engineering in Mangalore. I worked in a company in Bengaluru for 2 years before being hired by a start-up in Mumbai called Burrp.com in 2010. This is how I got introduced to the world of startups and entrepreneurship. On weekends I used to try different coding projects, just as a hobby. One of these was an app to manage social media, called Crowdfire. This was the early days of social media networks like Facebook and Twitter and we were able to spot ways in which users could improve their social media following. To give you an example, our app could identify all the followers of your competitors and follow them - thus making them aware of you and migrate to you. Crowdfire grew rapidly and I was able to quit my regular job and shift to managing it. Eventually however the western tech giants changed the rules and now you cannot really grow your social media following without paying them in some way. Crowdfire of course still exists in B2B format, but its previous individual-facing avatar is no more. It is this situation - dependence on centralised giant corporations that got me interested in cryptocurrency and blockchain which are by definition decentralised.

Why did you launch WazirX?

I began dabbling in crypto in 2017 and towards the end of the year I had identified several gaps in the market. There were long waiting times to buy bitcoin and spreads were too high. Bitcoin exchanges were faceless and this created a trust problem. I decided to launch an exchange and enter this space towards the end of that year. In this exchange, I was a very visible face and was available on social media from the inception. Initially I just put up a page announcing the launch and asking users to sign up - I got 20,000 signups with just that! WazirX was launched in March 2018, shortly before the RBI ban on crypto related payments. The ban actually became our opportunity. Established exchanges folded up or left India. We pivoted to a crypto-to-crypto model. Traders could still convert rupee to crypto and back on our exchange - it's just that the transactions were carried out through an escrow route rather than directly through our bank account. For example, if A wanted to buy crypto from B, the seller B would have to deposit crypto at our exchange which we held in escrow. Once B gave us confirmation that he had received the funds, we would release the crypto to A.

Tell us about why you sold the exchange to Binance in 2019

I was looking for global expertise and Binance fit that bill. There wasnt much innovation in crypto in India but there was plenty happening abroad. The Binance acquisition gave me access to all that. I also wanted to grow rapidly and growth needs capital. Binance was able to provide that. The acquisition has paid off in retrospect. Within 3 months of the it in December 2019, the Supreme Court lifted the RBI ban on crypto payments. Our users and volumes have exploded since then 20 to 30 times over. People were stuck home during the lockdown and took to crypto investing in a big way. We now have around 17 lakh users and weve added around 2 lakh even after the news of another alleged ban came out in February. In that month our volume was USD 2.5 billion and I expect around 60-70% of that was rupee-crypto volume and not just crypto-crypto.

Why shouldnt India ban cryptocurrency?

Cryptocurrency works on network effects and those effects have already begun working, without Indian participation. Network effect means that as more and more people use a thing, applications and use cases related to it become more and more cost effective, in turn spreading it further. Secondly cryptocurrency is a 1.7 trillion USD market, just a little short of Indias current GDP. If we really want to reach a $5 trillion economy, can we do it without participating in this vast market? Third, our nations success in the past 3 decades has come from software. I dont think that we can continue to be a software powerhouse if we neglect the next big shift in tech - blockchain and cryptocurrency. Last but not least, around 1 crore Indians have already invested in cryptocurrency and around 10,000 crore worth of Indian assets are in it. Around 340 startups in India are in this field. There is an entire ecosystem around cryptocurrency in India - do we really want to destroy it? Coinbase an exchange that is supposed to go for an IPO soon in the US is valued at $68 billion. India should also create billion dollar startups. If cryptocurrency isnt banned in India, WazirX could be Indias first crypto unicorn.

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Anger against tech giants led me to cryptocurrency: Nischal Shetty of WazirX - Mint

When the pandemic upended the economy last year, companies took a hard look at their advertising plans.

Oreos maker Mondelez International Inc. shifted money meant for TV commercials during March Madness basketball and the Summer Olympics into digital platforms. A hefty chunk went to Alphabet Inc.s Google, which offered data on what locked-down snack lovers were searching for.

Athleisure company Vuori Inc. more than tripled its spending on Facebook Inc., spotting a chance to juice sales of its sweatpants to people stuck at home. Office-furniture maker Steelcase Inc. built an operation to sell directly to workers and advertised aggressively on Amazon.com Inc.

The Big Three of digital advertisingGoogle, Facebook and Amazonalready dominated that sector going into 2020. The pandemic pushed them into command of the entire advertising economy. According to a provisional analysis by ad agency GroupM, the three tech titans for the first time collected the majority of all ad spending in the U.S. last year.

Beneath the shift are changes driven by the pandemic: more time spent on computer screens; more e-commerce; a jump in new-business formation, and a steady improvement in tech giants ability to demonstrate a return on ad investment.

More:

How Covid-19 Supercharged the Advertising Triopoly of Google, Facebook and Amazon - The Wall Street Journal

NEW YORK -- Google plans to invest more than $250 million in New York throughout 2021.

The tech giant plans to invest $250 million in New York City this year and will grow its headcount in the city to 14,000 over the next few years, up from 11,000 currently, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Thursday.

Google has been a presence in New York for over two decades, and has more than 11,000 full-time employees in the state.

RELATED | New York sues Amazon over worker safety during COVID pandemic

The company is investing in its long-term campus footprint in Manhattan, with an eventual 1.7 million square feet total office space in Hudson Square.

The latest addition is the St. John's Terminal at 550 Washington St., which topped-off in November 2020, and is expected to complete mid-2022 and be occupied by 2023.

Google is the latest tech company to commit to more office space despite the ongoing pandemic and the rise of remote work.

"Coming together in person to collaborate and build community is core to Google's culture, and it will be an important part of our future," CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post. "So we continue to make significant investments in our offices around the country."

Google said it will invest more than $1 billion this year in its home state of California. The company also plans to expand its other offices, including adding thousands of roles in Atlanta, Washington, DC, and Chicago in addition to New York.

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Silicon Valley's biggest companies were among the first businesses to tell their employees to work remotely as the coronavirus began spreading in the United States. Now, some of these companies are among the most aggressive in expanding their office footprint.

Last year, Facebook said it would buy a previously unused corporate headquarters from outdoor retailer REI, even though it plans to shift more of its employees to working from home in the coming years. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that he could see half of Facebook's employees permanently working remotely within the next five to 10 years.

Many tech companies have thrived during the pandemic and are adding thousands of workers at a time when other companies are undergoing layoffs or even shutting down.

These tech giants can also afford to be more opportunistic in picking up commercial real estate regardless of whether they have longer-term plans for transitioning to more remote work in the future.

Unlike some startups and smaller tech firms that have promised permanent remote work options, Big Tech has spent billions on elaborate offices over the years and may be more reluctant to abandon in-person work after the pandemic ends.

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Google New York: Tech giant to invest $250 million in jobs, office space - WABC-TV

It doesnt need to be said out loud that Wikipedia is the go-to source of information on possibly the largest catalog of topics on the internet. And sometimes, it definitely boggles my mind thinking that a database as useful as Wikipedia is free to access, while users are forced to pay for far worse and less meaningful digital services which can be anything from paying to read someones messages on a shady dating app and buying a game character cosmetic to avoiding ads on a music listening services.

But regular folks aside, one of the biggest beneficiaries happen to be tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Apple, which serve reliable and useful information to their audience (read: customers) via Wikipedia without shelling out a dime for it. That changes now!

Now introducing the Wikimedia Enterprise API! An opt-in product for commercial entities that could improve the way they reuse/deliver Wikimedia data, helping make more free knowledge available to more people. Get details via @noamcohen in @WIRED. https://t.co/eruxuLDLGF

Wikimedia Foundation (@Wikimedia) March 16, 2021

Wikimedia the non-profit behind Wikipedia and other affiliated Wiki services now wants tech giants to pay up. But it has less to do with asking these billion dollar trillion dollar in a few cases companies to pay for using Wikipedia to serve their services, and more to do with solving their own problems. That solution is Wikimedia Enterprise.

The focus is on organizations that want to repurpose Wikimedia content in other contexts, providing data services at a large scale, so that they are faster and more comprehensive, reliable, and secure, says the official description. Wikimedia is targeting companies that reuse its library of content in large volumes, and the goal is to offer them benefits in three key areas:

1. The frequency with which they receive regular bulk data dump, ensuring that any vandalism can be fixed at a quicker pace.2. Increasing the reliability aspect via a dependable infrastructure that allows them to reuse the information and serve their user base round the clock.3. Availability of technical support.

In simple words, Wikimedia Enterprise will offer big tech an assurance of speed, reliability, and consistency with which they can extract and restructure Wikimedias content to their needs. The Wikimedia Enterprise API will allow high-volume, high-speed access and reuse of Wikimedia content that these very wealthy clients can exploit to maintain the entries for projects related to their company, which can be anything from company profile page on Wikipedia to related media.

After all, why should Wikimedia dedicate efforts and resources to address the technical requirements of these billion-dollar companies, when they dont pay a nickel for it?

Big tech will spend money for the infrastructure they should've paid for long ago

The objective is also to make more of the content machine-readable and reduce the server load. Specifically, the Wikimedia Enterprise project wants to reduce the need for high-intensity site-scraping by the highest-frequency and highest-volume reusers, which currently target our production servers. In simple terms, the stress on Wikimedia servers due to content that is reused by these popular deep-pocket brands has to be cut down by offloading it to dedicated servers, the cost of which will be paid for by these clients.

Wikimedia is reliant on funds and donations to serve its goal of providing free access to arguably the largest trove of information on the planet. But the added pressure of ensuring that the data reused by companies such as Google and Apple to serve their user based require more effort and resources to ensure that it is error-free, accessible, and incidents such as vandalism can be countered quickly.

Big tech pay should for the work a non-profit is doing for them so that they make money.

The company is targeting a May/June 2021 release of its Wikimedia Enterprise APIs across two tiers Realtime and Bulk with their own set of subcategories, each with specific benefits. To achieve the technical goal of catering to those rich clients, the Wikimedia Enterprise APIs will be hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), but the company is not bound to use AWS and is actually exploring alternatives when the initiative scales up.

However, Wikimedia doesnt expect to rake in a fortune by asking big tech to pay. In fact, the non-profit still expects to receive a large chunk of financial support from its readers and donors. In the hindsight, it also ensures that these tech giants cannot exert any form of pressure on how Wikimedia operates, and more importantly, how its content is served. Revenue from Wikimedia Enterprise will supplement our reader support, but it will not eclipse it, says the FAQ section.

Ive been writing about consumer technology for over three years now, having worked with names such as NDTV and Beebom in the past. Aside from covering the latest news, Ive reviewed my fair share of devices ranging from smartphones and laptops to smart home devices. I also have interviewed tech execs and appeared as a host in YouTube videos talking about the latest and greatest gadgets out there.

Read more:

At last, Wikipedia asks tech giants to pay for solving their own problems - Pocketnow

Vuzix (NASDAQ:VUZI), a developer of augmented reality glasses and headsets, was a penny stock throughout 2019 and most of 2020. Its stock remained below $5 a share as its unpredictable sales and ongoing losses curbed the market's enthusiasm for the growth potential of its AR business.

Vuzix's stock price dipped below $1 during the COVID-19 crash last March. But it subsequently bounced back above $4 by July, hit $10 in late December, and continued climbing to the mid-$20s this year. Let's look back at Vuzix's history, why it suddenly attracted a stampede of bulls, and whether or not it can maintain that momentum over the next five years.

Image source: Vuzix.

Vuzix was founded in 1997. It initially developed products for the military but started producing consumer electronics devices in the early 2000s. Vuzix went public in 2013, and Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) bought 30% of the company for $24.8 million in 2015.

At the time, Vuzix was selling its flagship AR glasses, the M100, to a handful of enterprise customers. It subsequently launched the M300, M400, and M4000 devices for enterprise customers over the following years, and developed AR glasses for big customers like Toshiba.

Vuzix launched its consumer-facing Blade AR glasses, which can be tethered to Amazon's (NASDAQ:AMZN) Alexa and Alphabet's (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google Assistant, in 2019. As a result, Vuzix's annual revenue rose more than fivefold between 2016 and 2020.

Fiscal Year

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

Revenue (Millions)

$2.13

$5.54

$8.09

$6.67

$11.58

Growth (YOY)

(23%)

160%

46%

(18%)

74%

Data source: Vuzix. YOY = Year-over-year.

That growth was impressive, but the AR market suffered several setbacks during that period. Google discontinued its consumer-facing version of Google Glass inearly 2015 and pivoted the device toward enterprise users. Intel halted its AR headset partnership with Vuzix in 2016.

The first pair of AR glasses from Magic Leap, the start-up backed by Google and other tech giants, also fell woefully short of expectations when it finally arrived in 2018. Intel shut down its New Devices Group, which housed its wearable devices and smartglasses, that same year.

Those challenges, along with other disappointing product launches, snuffed out the hype for AR devices and caused many investors to question Vuzix's growth potential.

The AR market was seemingly on the ropes by 2019, but the pandemic boosted demand for its products again in 2020. Vuzix CEO Paul Travers called 2020 a "transformational year" for the AR market, as the pandemic sparked a shift to remote work in the enterprise and healthcare sectors.

Image source: Vuzix.

Vuzix attributed most of its growth in 2020 to robust sales of its M400 smartglasses, as well as brisk OEM orders from medical and defense customers. It ended the year with 184 approved or pending patents for AR technologies, up from 150 patents in 2019.

Vuzix didn't provide any specific guidance for 2021, but Travers claims the company is "well-positioned to achieve significant year-over-year comparative revenue growth in our first quarter and throughout 2021" as it sells more M-Series and Blade smartglasses.

Analysts expect Vuzix's revenue to rise88% to $21.8 million in 2021, then jump another 87% to $40.6 million in 2022. Those estimates are rosy, but the stock is pricey at over 60 times this year's sales. Vuzix's bottom line also remains in the red, and analysts expect it to remain unprofitable for the foreseeable future.

The bears will likely point out a few other major issues. Vuzix enjoys a first-mover's advantage in the AR market, but bigger challengers loom on the horizon, including Apple, Facebook, and Qualcomm -- which recently launched an AR reference design that lets OEMs easily produce their own headsets.

Intel also gradually reduced its stake inVuzix and sold all itsremaining shares earlier this year. The departure of its top backer and imminent competition from larger tech companies could throttle Vuzix's growth.

The bulls will argue that Vuzix doesn't need to go toe-to-toe with those tech giants. Instead, it just needs to hold onto a sliver of the expanding AR market.

For example, Grand View Research believes the AR market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of43.8% between 2021 and 2028 to become a $340.2 billion market. If Vuzix merely keeps pace with that market, it could generate multibagger gains within a few years.

Moreover, only 15% of Vuzix's shares are owned by institutions, and only four analysts currently cover the stock. If the stock gains more mainstream attention, it could have much more room to run.

Vuzix is still a speculative stock, but its first-mover's advantage, established customer base, and expanding lineup of enterprise-facing AR devices could drive its stock higher over the next five years. It'll be a bumpy ride, but the potential rewards could easily outweigh the near-term risks.

This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the official recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. Were motley! Questioning an investing thesis -- even one of our own -- helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer.

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Where Will Vuzix Be in 5 Years? - The Motley Fool

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are paying third parties millions to make their case. Sometimes we know about the money, sometimes we dont.The New York State Capitol building. Photo: Matthew Cavanaugh/Stringer/Getty Images

When New York State Senator Michael Gianaris called a hearing last September to discuss his new Big Tech antitrust bill, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft all declined to appear. But as he sorted the schedule, the Progressive Policy Institute, a radically pragmatic think tank, asked to send a representative.

Alec Stapp, that representative, mounted a robust defense of Big Tech in prepared remarks at the session. But when Giannaris started asking about PPIs funding, he clammed up. In my role in research, Stapp said. Im not privy to the full donor list or who gives how much money.

Left unsaid was that Apple, Facebook, and Google are all PPI donors, a fact that still frustrates Gianaris. If Big Tech wants to defend itself, he told me, It should have the courage to do so.

That courage seems to be slipping away as support for antitrust action against Big Tech builds. These companies are instead paying third parties like PPI to make their case for them, and the organizations reliably advance their arguments, do so with spotty disclosure, shield them from criticism, and add credibility to their defense. Its money well spent for the tech giants. All the while, the third parties tell us and themselves they arent bought.

Stapps PPI is relatively unknown, but its not alone. The Brookings Institution, an esteemed think tank, takes money from Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Yet it implausibly insists the money doesnt influence its positions. In an article suggesting 21 questions Congress should ask Big Tech ahead of their CEOs hearing last year, Brookings claimed its findings were not influenced by any donation. Yet its questions included softballs like, What is your greatest hope about technology today? A more honest statement would admit that when companies spend money, theyre buying something.

Brookings would not stand fully by its disclosure when reached for comment. The institution, a spokesperson wrote to me, has adopted policies that enshrine the requirement that its personnel not permit the interests of any outside party to inappropriately influence Brookingss work. The addition of the word inappropriately leaves open the possibility that tech giant money does influence Brookings work, just in ways it finds appropriate.

Its very, very telling, Bruce Freed, president of the Center for Political Accountability, which examines corporate money and does not take it, told me. Because the question is, what do they define is appropriate?

Articles and testimony with faulty disclosures are what we see in public. Behind the scenes, theres a full array of briefings with officials and background conversations with reporters that are never disclosed.

Saw a couple lists of what think tanks and organizations Google and Facebook fund and was thinking back through my conversations with those people, one reporter told me. Was trying to think of negative things they said about those companies. Couldnt. The reporter said he was rethinking his relationship with these organizations.

Tech giant-funded third parties also recruit small businesses to write opinion pieces supporting their positions in local newspapers; a practice called grasstops, which Big Technology covered last summer. And sometimes they do the work themselves, like when Stapp wrote a piece in the MIT Technology Review last year claiming that Congress made a lousy case for breaking up Big Tech. Stapp, who declined to comment for this story, only disclosed that Amazon, Google, and Facebook fund PPI after publication, in a correction at the bottom of the page.

New York Times columnist David Brooks was also part of this influence campaign, at least until recently. Earlier this month, BuzzFeed News reported Brooks was pulling in a second salary from the Aspen Institute for his work on a project called Weave, a project that Facebook, and other companies Brooks comments on, funds. Brooks resigned from Aspen after BuzzFeed News brought its finding to the Times. But not before writing a blog post on Facebooks website praising its Groups product.

Aspen, Brookings, and PPI are just a small selection of the organizations the tech giants fund, and though they do disclose who they donate to, we may never know the full extent. Despite the detailed disclosures, the exact totals of the donations are difficult to pin down, Nirit Weiss-Blatt, author of a forthcoming book on the techlash, told me. We dont have full transparency. Thus, we dont know how much money is flooding the zone.

The tech giants, of course, are entitled to donate to think tanks and spend money to influence the conversation about their companies. They have a right to speech, and a right to make their counterargument. But as long as the misleading, missing, and sometimes delusional disclosures persist, theyll be undermining an oversight process theyve brought on themselves.

The problem is the tech giants are incredibly powerful and disproportionately so, Sen. Gianaris told me. They set up either fake groups or co-opt more legitimate ones to do their bidding in the realm of public discourse, in a way that is not transparent and pretends its more objective than it actually is.

Big Tech Funds a Think Tank Pushing for Fewer Rules. For Big Tech. (NYT)

Inside Big Techs Years-Long Manipulation of American Op-Ed Pages (Big Technology)

2019, Sophie Schmidt founded Rest of World, a news site dedicated to telling technology stories about whats happening outside of North America and Europe. After watching her father, Eric Schmidt, run Google for 10 years, she became convinced that the rest of the globe would drive techs next era. And so understanding how it was developing there was imperative. Schmidt joins Big Technology Podcast this week with Louise Matsakis, a senior editor at Rest of World, to discuss the sites work to date, and where its heading from here.

To subscribe to the podcast and hear the interview for yourself, you can check it out on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Continued here:

The Soft Corruption of Big Techs Antitrust Defense - OneZero

By AFP Mar 18, 2021

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Beijing - Chinese authorities on Thursday said they had summoned 11 tech companies including Tencent, Alibaba and TikTok owner ByteDance for talks on "deep fakes" and internet security, as regulators try to reel in the country's runaway digital sector.

The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said talks concerned "voice software that has yet to undergo safety assessment procedures", as well as the application of "deep fake" technology.

It also said companies should report to the government plans to add new functions that "have the ability to mobilise society".

China has in recent months taken a tough line on the country's fast-growing tech firms, with 12 companies hit with fines last week for allegedly flouting monopoly rules.

Authorities last year halted a record $34 billion initial public offering by Alibaba fintech subsidiary Ant Group.

They called in its billionaire founder Jack Ma and then opened an investigation into Alibaba business practices deemed anti-competitive.

The latest summoning of big tech also involves companies such as smartphone maker Xiaomi, TikTok rival Kuaishou, and music streaming service NetEase Cloud Music, the CAC said.

The aim is to ensure they comply with regulations, carry out safety assessments, and take "effective rectification measures" if potential hazards are found.

In 2019, China issued rules banning online video and audio providers from using artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality technologies to produce "fake news".

"Fake news" has been generalised to mean anything from a mistake to a parody or a deliberate misinterpretation of facts.

Regulations stress the dangers of "deep fakes", meaning technology that manipulates videos to appear genuine but depict events or speech that never happened.

The CAC notice comes shortly after China blocked the US invite-only audio app Clubhouse.

The app briefly flickered in the mainland before vanishing but has since sparked a number of copycats.

President Xi Jinping on Monday warned about risks surrounding "platform" companies -- a term that could refer to mobile and internet firms -- and called for greater oversight of the sector.

AFP

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Tech giants summoned over 'deep fakes' and internet security - IOL