This week in tech: Nov 2-6
Greetings! Here is what is going on this week in Tech from around the web:
Slack chat, but upgraded. Watercooler is a new app with $12 million in funding and one simple mission: “to [digitally] create human connection between people at work.” But wait—aren’t we already doing that on our Animal Crossing islands during muted conference calls?
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Girls are raking in the green. 2020 has been a record year for female-led venture capital—but even so, less than 5% of all investing firms have women running the show. Want to change that? Learn about the female-led VC funds that already exist, and buy products that support their mission of economic empowerment for all.
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The digital ad market rebounded surprisingly strongly in the third quarter, and marketers regained confidence over the summer after slashing spending when the pandemic crisis first began. The question now is whether the new surge in Covid cases will cause another pullback.
Onto other news...
NETFLIX RAISES PRICES, AGAIN
Netflix is raising prices again, hiking its most popular tier by $1 to $14 a month while its top tier goes up $2 a month to $18. That means that since Netflix launched its streaming-only plan in 2010, it has increased the price of its service by 75%.
Yes, Netflix in that time has introduced a cheaper version, with no high-definition picture, so you can still sign up for the service for less than $10 a month. But most people are paying for the pricier options. It’s still cheap compared with cable TV, which is several times the monthly price.
Pepsi, Nestlé, and Bacardi are all using this new plastic-like packaging that’s compostable anywhere.The plastic is made by bacteria and will break down in your home compost bin, a landfill, or even the ocean.
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In the face of a will-they-or-won’t-they government ban, TikTok is unveiling a massive partnership with Shopify. The new program lets any vendor drop a shoppable video link into a regular feed, and offers a $300 ad credit to get merchants started. The move comes as Ariana Grande (finally) joins the social media platform… and Sasha Obama makes an unexpected (and totally delightful) appearance on her college friend’s feed.
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Look who’s branching out. Linktree—aka the reason every influencer you follow says “link in bio”—just raised over $10 million in seed funding thanks to their 8 million users, including brands like HBO. Guess in this instance, money really did grow on trees?
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Facebook escalated its low-level warfare against Apple by unveiling a cloud gaming service that is only available on Android devices. This is a twist on a longstanding reality of mobile phones: lots of apps on iOS aren’t available on Android (try downloading the New Yorker magazine’s app to your Pixel), but because most affluent people in America have iPhones, it gets little attention.
Facebook can’t offer the service on iOS because it breaches the iPhone maker’s App Store rules that effectively block apps that offer lots of different cloud games. Whether Facebook has the leverage to make its stance successful is the multi-billion dollar question. Is anyone going to switch phones to play Facebook’s cloud gaming services? Maybe not immediately. But other cloud gaming services, from Google and Microsoft, are also not available on iOS. Over time, the absence of these services from the iOS App Store could become a bigger irritant for consumers.
The standoff is reminiscent of longstanding wars in the entertainment industry between content (TV networks) and distribution (cable and satellite operators). At first, the content side appeared to win those fights, but longer term they have emerged as the big losers. TV networks pushed their prices so high that it made cable itself too expensive, triggering mass cord-cutting. That hurts TV networks more than cable. Apple may well emerge the victor in this fight in the near term. But anger over its restrictive App Store policies won’t go away and could come back to hurt Apple over the long term.