Sara Castellanos / Wall Street Journal:
The pandemic has increased the adoption of AR in automotive and other industries, where it is being used to provide remote assistance for employees in real time — Whether to fix cars or apply makeup, companies hamstrung by the pandemic found immediate uses for the distanced expertise AR technology can provide
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Christine Hall / Crunchbase News:
Analysis: investors have pumped $7.3B into ~730 US-based fitness apps and services over the past five years, with $2.4B coming just in 2020 across 187 deals — Sometimes the best way to know something works is by trying it out yourself. — Health and fitness-related goals are commonly …
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Zeyi Yang / Protocol:
A look at Bilibili, the “YouTube for China”, as it balances competition and cooperation with Alibaba and Tencent, both of which invested in the video platform — “Should Bilibili keep expanding and become a larger player, their relationship with Tencent will surely deteriorate.”
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The Internet Health Report 2020:
Mozilla's 2020 Internet Health Report spotlights racial injustice of algorithms, lax data rights for gig workers, and accountability of social media firms — In a challenging year for the world, the internet helped us and harmed us like never before. With 2020 in the rearview, we combine research and stories about what can be done.
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Yoolim Lee / Bloomberg:
ELSA, an app that helps non-native English speakers improve pronunciation and speaking skills, raises $15M Series B, says its revenue increased by ~300% in 2020 — - Founder draws on her experience for English-language app — ELSA's backers led by Vietnam Investments Group, SIG
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Brad Templeton / Forbes:
Chinese self-driving startup AutoX announces that its robotaxi service, with no safety drivers on board, is now available to the general public in Shenzhen — AutoX, a Chinese self-driving startup funded by Alibaba BABA and others has announced that its Robotaxi service, with no safety drivers on board …
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Ben Schoon / 9to5Google:
Canalys: a record 11.2M Chromebooks were shipped in Q4 2020, up 287% YoY, with Lenovo Chromebooks up 1,766%; in 2020, 30.7M Chromebooks were shipped, up 109% — COVID-19 has had a lot of negative effects on the market, but it's been great for the PC market as millions of people transitioned to working and learning from home.
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Cat Ferguson / MIT Technology Review:
VAMS, a CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M to manage rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine, has been abandoned by states due to bugs and problems — The CDC ordered software that was meant to manage the vaccine rollout. Instead, it has been plagued by problems and abandoned by most states.
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Prachir Singh / Counterpoint Research:
Research: smartphone shipments in India fell 4% YoY to ~150M in 2020 and H2 2020 saw 100M+ shipments; among the top 5 brands, realme grew the most at 22% YoY — - The Indian smartphone market registered a modest 4% decline in the pandemic-hit year. — The market crossed 100 million units …
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Catherine Shu / TechCrunch:
Canalys: smartphone shipments in China fell 4% YoY to 84M in Q4 2020 and shipments for 2020 fell 11% YoY to 330M, as iPhone's share jumped from 15% to 18% YoY — The impact of United States government sanctions on Huawei is continuing to hurt the company and dampen overall smartphone shipments in China …
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Chloe Sorvino / Forbes:
Profile of Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta, who since the pandemic started has overseen three consecutive quarters of positive cash flow, a first for the company — The Business of What We Eat and How It's Made — The pandemic transformed Apoorva Mehta's grocery delivery service into an essential—and booming—business.
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Under the Hood:
Robinhood explains why it placed restrictions on certain securities over the past week, says its clearinghouse-mandated deposit for equities increased tenfold — With the extraordinary market activity this week, and the temporary restrictions we put in place on certain securities …
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2020 was a dumpster fire of a year, but it made us realise the importance of a few things like masks, pants (while attending work Zoom calls), and fitness bands. While all of us may not have Instagram-worthy home gyms to motivate ourselves, we can make do with the nudge of a not-so-expensive fitness band. If you are still looking for one of those, Xiaomi’s new Mi Band 5 might just be the right fit for you. Just like the previous generations, Mi Band 5 also comes with a secret sauce of the latest features, average looks at a budget price.
Same old design
For me, a device that is strapped to my wrist for the most part of the day needs to look good. Unfortunately, this fitness band as just average looking. It comes with the same capsule-shaped design as its predecessors, and looks boring. I have to admit that Redmi Smart Band’s sharp-edged rectangular design looks way more trendy and stylish than the Mi Band 5’s repetitive design.
In terms of comfort, the band is extremely lightweight (11.9 gm) and quite comfortable to wear. The straps are not detachable, but unlike the Redmi Smart Band, the band is easy to put on. I wish Xiaomi had tweaked the design this time around and popping in the strap pin was not frustrating. The fitness band has a 1.1-inch AMOLED with a resolution of 126 x 294 pixels. It also offers upto 450 nits brightness that is adjustable.
Features
Xiaomi has aced the features, just as before. The Mi Band 5 comes with a continuous heart rate monitor, stress level monitor, sleep tracker, guided breathing exercises and more. The curated data was reliable, especially the sleep tracker that categorised the data into deep sleep,REM, light sleep and awake categories, and advised me to go to bed by 10, as staying up late leads to "weak immune system and speeds up aging". Thanks for the intel mom, I will go to bed now.
I was impressed that this time, the fitness band comes with a menstrual cycle tracker that not only shows the predicted menstrual period, but also provides details like fertile period and ovulation day. In my experience, I found this data quite helpful, and can't help but wonder why would the company omit such an important feature from its other wearable product – its first smartwatch!
The band comes with several workout modes including outdoor running, walking, indoor cycling and outdoor cycling, indoor running, indoor swim, free exercise, indoor riding, elliptical machine, rope skipping, yoga and rowing machine. It can also auto-detect running and walking. The “Personal Activity Intelligence” (PAI) also measures the overall fitness of the user based on their daily activity, age and gender. An interesting feature motivating the user to keep moving and achieve a better PAI score.
When it comes to watch faces, the band offers a huge palette to choose from. Since the display is pretty responsive, you can check the time, date, steps tracker, battery status and heart rate with just a single tap. You also get raise-to-wake, if you find it inconvenient to tap on the screen every time you want to check something. But this will impact battery life.
Everything looks good with this band, but the missing piece of the puzzle is the blood oxygen monitor. We are still amid a COVID-19 pandemic, and this feature could have really come in handy. This feature is already present in the Honor Band 5, OnePlus Band (Review), Realme Watch and more. Take notes, Xiaomi, because while not a deal breaker, this feature is expected from fitness bands in the COVID era.
The Mi Band 5 uses the Mi Fit app to connect with smartphones. In my opinion, the app really needs some work, as it has a confusing user interface. It took me at least ten minutes to find out how to set an alarm. The option was buried deep inside the settings. It did not take long to sync data from the band like the Xiaomi Wear app that I used for the Mi Revolve Watch, but the latter was definitely more user-friendly. The Mi Fit app presents details about different features including the heart rate monitor and stress level monitor quite nicely.
The new, no-hassle magnetic charging
The best new feature of the band is that it now comes with support for magnetic charging. It is now completely hassle-free to charge, unlike previous generations. The charger just sticks to the back of the band and voilà.
It fills up the dead battery in about two hours. The company claims that the battery can last up to 14 days in a single charge with "normal use", and it lived up to its promise. With my regular use and a couple of battery-eating features like raise-to-wake and sleep tracking, it lasted up to 11 days.
Plugging it for charging once a week or 10 days for a couple of hours will work just fine.
Verdict
Although, the Mi Band 4 is smaller, heavier and has less features, it doesn't make much sense to upgrade it to the Mi Band 5 unless you really want to use the latest one. Mi Band 5 is for those folks who are planning to buy their first fitness band. It has almost every current feature, looks decent and is affordable as well. If you are keen on getting a good basic fitness band, go for the Redmi Smart band that comes in at Rs 1,599.
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Bloomberg:
Filing: Xiaomi has sued US Defense and Treasury departments, after the DOD blacklisted the company thereby blocking US investors from buying Xiaomi's securities — - Pentagon had called it a ‘Communist Chinese military company’ — The move prohibits U.S. investors from buying Xiaomi's shares
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John Herrman / New York Times:
Reddit's uncommon qualities as a community platform, inspiring nihilism and humor, may explain why r/WallStreetBets' growth feels reminiscent of r/The_Donald — Reddit communities grow powerful in plain sight. Why do they keep taking the world by surprise?
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Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Clearsky researchers say Hezbollah's cyber unit Lebanese Cedar hacked 250+ unpatched Atlassian and Oracle servers at telecoms and ISPs in US, UK, Israel, more — Security firm Clearsky said they identified at least 250 servers hacked by Lebanese Cedar, a hacking group linked to the Hezbollah militant group.
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Mitchell Clark / The Verge:
Robinhood has placed trade restrictions on more than 50 stocks as of Friday and limited the purchase of some stocks, like GameStop, to a single share — The company is giving us numbers for what ‘limited buys’ really means — Robinhood only wants users to have a limited number of shares …
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Adam Satariano / New York Times:
Graphika: Huawei officials retweeted messages from fake accounts on Twitter to spread a pro-5G influence campaign in Belgium; Huawei is investigating the claim — A covert online push to sway telecommunications policy in favor of the Chinese company may presage a new twist in social manipulation.
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Mike Isaac / New York Times:
Sources: Facebook is developing newsletter tools for journalists and writers, including tools to help build followers, curate email lists, and offer paid subs — Facebook is working on newsletter tools for journalists and writers, according to three people familiar with the company's plans …
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Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge:
Robinhood says it didn't proactively sell shares of GameStop, AMC, or any other buzzworthy stocks without traders' permission, denying claims made by some users — Traders say they intended to keep holding — No, Robinhood tells The Verge, it didn't sell off full shares of GameStop …
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Cameron Faulkner / The Verge:
Epic says its Games Store has 160M+ PC users, up from 108M in 2019, with DAUs up 192% YoY to 31.3M; gamers spent $700M+ in 2020, with $265M on 3rd-party games — And Epic confirmed it'll keep giving away games in 2021 — Epic Games Store released a bevy of stats to show off …
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The internet and stock market are aflame over GameStop, the video game retailer whose stock is suddenly the darling of day traders who are putting the squeeze on Wall Street’s big players.
The stakes are enormous: The surge in trading has driven GameStop’s value up by more than $10 billion as of Wednesday.
GameStop — that feature of malls and shopping centres across the USA — was worth about $2 billion in December. Now it is worth $24 billion, roughly the same as the meat giant Tyson and the fuel refiner Valero Energy. On paper, at least.
Exactly why has to do with a mix of traditional investing, rampant enthusiasm, stock-market mechanics and the belief that anyone with a Robinhood account can meme a fortune into existence.
What’s going on?
It’s called a short squeeze, and it involves investors betting on which way a stock will go — up or down. These bets are placed by buying the shares themselves, or stock options, which we’ll grossly oversimplify here.
Investors who bet against a stock are called “shorts.” In GameStop’s case, the shorts include at least two big hedge funds.
Shorting a stock essentially means borrowing shares from a broker and selling them, with the agreement you’ll return the shares later. When the price falls, you buy back the shares and pocket the difference. But shorting a stock is risky — if the price rises, you can lose big.
Sometimes you just make a bad bet. But you can also lose if someone tries to push up the price by buying lots of shares, even though the company isn’t doing anything different.
This is the squeeze.
Shorts have to close their position — that is, buy up the shares they owe their brokers and return them. This demand kicks the stock higher, and a short who acts too late could be ruined.
Usually, these kinds of standoffs involve sophisticated Wall Street investors, for example when Bill Ackman squared off against two other billionaires — Daniel Loeb and Carl Icahn — over the dietary supplement maker Herbalife.
Why did GameStop’s stock start rising?
The amateurs started driving up the price.
Over the past year, armchair traders have surged into the market. Some smelled opportunity after stocks tumbled last spring, some were trying to scratch a gambling itch after sports leagues shut down, and for some it’s just a game — trying to ring up dollars instead of points. All this has been made easier by the free trades available through platforms like Robinhood and E-Trade.
Some of these enthusiastic amateurs are buying shares of GameStop, but many are placing their own options bets, on the opposite side of the shorts.
These bets involve contracts that give them the option to buy a stock at a certain price in the future. If the price rises, the trader can buy the stock at a bargain and sell it for a profit. (In practice, lots of traders just sell the options contract itself for a profit or loss instead of actually buying the shares, but this description suffices for our purposes.)
The brokers that sell the options contracts have to provide the shares if the trader wants to exercise the option. To mitigate their risk, they buy some of the shares they’d need. Normally, this small amount of demand doesn’t do much to the price.
But if enough traders bet big, the demand can push the stock up. If it goes high enough, the brokers who would be on the hook have to buy more shares, lest they get stuck having to buy a lot of expensive shares all at once.
That increases demand, which increases the stock’s price. Which means the brokers have to buy more shares, which means… You get the idea.
Okay, but why GameStop?
You can put some of the blame on Reddit’s Wall Street Bets forum, one of the weirder places on the internet. Wall Street Bets, or WSB, is where armchair traders gather to share memes, commiserate over losses and share more memes. But they also trade tips and analysis that can go on for pages.
GameStop’s shares started to rise late last year, after the founder of the pet-supply site Chewy bought a stake in the company and got a spot on its board. Slowly, the company gained the attention of WSB and traders who frequent the gamer-friendly social media service Discord.
The traders’ motivations vary widely. Some reason that GameStop’s shares are a good value. Others are just riding the wave. And others want to squeeze Melvin Capital, a hedge fund that was shorting GameStop. They’re the ones quoting Heath Ledger’s Joker character from The Dark Knight: “It’s not about the money, it’s about sending a message.”
But the aggressive manoeuvres against the shorts aren’t necessarily limited to the amateurs. Wall Street’s big players know a good opportunity when they see it.
How does the GameStop squeeze end?
Nobody knows.
A spokesperson for Melvin Capital — which needed a $2.75 billion cash injection Monday because of the squeeze — said the firm had closed out of its short position. Andrew Left of Citron Research, another short, said he had covered the majority of his short position “at a loss, 100 percent.”
There’s a catch: GameStop, as a company, is not noticeably different from a month ago. By any conventional measure, its share price wildly inflated — and extremely risky for whoever owns its shares.
But this isn’t just about GameStop anymore. Enthusiastic amateurs are also bidding up the prices of other struggling stocks, like movie theater chain AMC and smartphone maker BlackBerry.
This weird little bubble doesn’t just affect the bettors, though. If big investors on the losing side of these trades have to raise money to cover their losses, it could mean dumping enough shares to hurt the prices of otherwise solid stocks.
If the sell-off is big enough, it could have a cascading effect that leads to broader losses for investors who have never bought or sold a share of GameStop.
Matt Phillips c.2021 The New York Times Company
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Kanishka Singh / Reuters:
Henry Moniz, ViacomCBS' top compliance official, will become Facebook's first chief compliance officer, amid heavy regulatory scrutiny — (Reuters) - ViacomCBS Inc's top compliance official, Henry Moniz, is moving to Facebook Inc as the social media platform's first chief compliance officer …
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Issie Lapowsky / Protocol:
A PR error by Google is drawing criticism from digital rights activists after it implied its new cloud region in Saudi Arabia would store private Snap user data — A few days before Christmas, Google published a blog post announcing that it was expanding its cloud network in Chile, Germany and Saudi Arabia.
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