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The World
Amazon reported its second straight quarter of $100bn-plus sales, comfortably beating Wall Street’s targets as it continues to reap the rewards of pandemic conditions. The company posted net sales of $108.5bn in the first three months of the year, up 44% on the same period a year ago. (Financial Times)
The combined revenue of Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Facebook hit ~$1.2T this year, up 25% since March 2020, benefitting from a “perfect positive storm.” (New York Times)
Twitter shares fall after issuing tepid revenue forecast. (Financial Times)
10 takeaways from Big Tech's big earnings: 1) The ad business is no longer a two-company race. 2) There will be lots of winners in the cloud wars. 3) YouTube is a streaming giant. 4) LinkedIn is a true force in social. 5) Product diversity is everything. 6) Facebook isn't really a U.S.-focused company. 7) And Apple's privacy push continues to cause Facebook trouble. 8) It's a good time to make hardware. 9) Except everyone's nervous about the chip shortage. 10) But overall, the post-pandemic world isn't scary. (Source Code)
A lot of U.S. gig workers should be classified as “employees” who deserve work benefits, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said, suggesting a shift in policy that is likely to raise costs for companies that depend on contractors such as Uber and Lyft. (Reuters)
A broad majority of U.S. employers, 65%, plan to offer employees incentives to get vaccinated and 63% will require proof of vaccination, according to an ASU/Rockefeller Foundation survey. Overall, 44% will require all employees to get vaccinated, 31% will just encourage vaccinations and 14% will require some employees to get vaccinated. (CNBC)
Russian and Chinese media are systematically seeking to sow mistrust in Western Covid-19 vaccines in their latest disinformation campaigns aimed at dividing the West, according to an EU study released by the bloc's disinformation unit. From December to April, the two countries' state media outlets pushed fake news online in multiple languages sensationalizing vaccine safety concerns, making unfounded links between jabs and deaths in Europe and promoting Russian and Chinese vaccines as superior. (Reuters)
The positivity rate in Delhi is around 32%. ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe. (Hindustan Times, The Guardian)
Brazil is on the verge of registering 400,000 coronavirus deaths, quickly catching up with the world's worst death toll in the U.S., which has seen more than 570,000 casualties. In fact, all of South America is suffering its worst death totals yet. (Reuters, New York Times)
Heathrow fears border crisis if overseas travel resumes in May: London airport warns thinly staffed immigration desks will struggle to cope with Covid passenger checks. (Financial Times)
Coronavirus vaccine makers have started clinical trials to test their vaccines on infants and teenagers, in what scientists say is a crucial step toward controlling the pandemic. (Washington Post)
Thousands of Myanmar villagers poised to flee violence to Thailand, while Myanmar authorities are seeking to file charges of murder and treason against one of the main leaders of the protest campaign against military rule. (Reuters, Reuters-2)
Federal agencies are investigating at least two possible incidents on U.S. soil, including one near the White House last November, that appear similar to mysterious, invisible attacks that have led to debilitating symptoms for dozens of US personnel abroad. While the Pentagon and other agencies probing the matter have reached no clear conclusions on what happened, the fact that such an attack might have taken place so close to the White House is particularly alarming. (CNN)
CA recall backers have gathered more than 1.6 million valid voter signatures, enough to put a recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom on the ballot. So whose signatures were they? A Times analysis of the data shows that although petitions were signed all across the state, the highest concentrations of signatures were found in the rural northeast — areas with low coronavirus case counts and where voters heavily favored former President Trump. (Los Angeles Times)
Voters back corporate income taxes over targeted gas, mileage taxes to pay for infrastructure investments: Democrats more likely to support all the tax options than their GOP counterparts. 54% of voters back a 25% corporate income tax, and 31% oppose. The controversial but largely bipartisan proposal of a carbon tax on those emitting greenhouse gases was roughly as popular as the corporate income taxes, at 52% in support and 34% opposed. An increased gasoline tax is comparably unpopular with voters (at 31% in support and 59% opposed), especially with Republicans (16% vs. 76%). (Morning Consult)
Economy
Globally, women lost at least $800 billion in income last year, according to a new report from Oxfam International. That's more than the combined gross domestic products of 98 countries, the $700 billion market capitalization Amazon topped last year and the nearly $721.5 billion that the US government spent in 2020 on the world's largest defense budget, the global organization said. (CNN)
For the first time in more than 25 years, San Francisco is forecasting that its property tax base will fall — a decline that reflects the tough straits of the city that is among the hardest hit by the pandemic downturn. (City Lab)
Broadband buildout could boost U.S. agtech: A Biden administration plan to spend $100 billion for broader broadband access could be a boon for agtech VCs and startups. Ag-focused investors see potential to open up the rural U.S. to more connected and edge devices, easing the way for harvesting robots, upgraded supply chain monitoring, and a host of other technologies. (Crunchbase)
Private equity firms made £10.1bn of corporate carve-out acquisitions in the UK last year, up from just £765m in 2019 as the Covid-19 pandemic drove more corporates to sell non-core business units, according to new data shared with City A.M. this evening. The economic disruption of the past year has forced many large businesses to focus on their core operations to a much greater extent, leaving them much more open to sales of less strategically-important business units. (City A.M.)
The climate solution actually adding millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere: New research shows that California’s climate policy created up to 39 million carbon credits that aren’t achieving real carbon savings. But companies can buy these forest offsets to justify polluting more anyway. (MIT Technology Review)
Technology
'Miami Tech Week' wasn’t planned, but the hype is infectious: Founders and funders are flocking to the beach for an impromptu event that some are calling "South by Southeast." The airport was crawling with venture capitalists. A highway billboard invited out-of-towners to “imagine Miami as the next tech hub.” A few miles away, more than 200 people gathered in front of City Hall to hear mayor Francis Suarez toast to the future of technology in Miami. Afterward, people lined up to pose for selfies with him. The city had gone into full-on festival mode for “Miami Tech Week,” a phrase that refers to neither a conference nor an event, but a vibe. (Wired)
The Guardians of Apple’s App Store Gird for Battle: For the next three weeks, one of Apple’s most senior executives, Phil Schiller, will spend his days in a sterile courtroom in Oakland, Calif., 50 miles from Apple’s gleaming spaceship-like headquarters in Cupertino. Schiller, who helped launch the App Store 13 years ago and still oversees it, is the designated “corporate witness” for the company’s trial, which pits it against Epic Games. The videogame developer claims that Schiller and his colleagues have operated the App Store as an illegal monopoly by, among other things, requiring app makers to pay a 30% fee to Apple for all in-app transactions. Schiller’s constant presence at the trial, which starts Monday, is a sign of how seriously the company is taking the matter. (The Information)
Apple firing on all cylinders in 1Q21. (Statista)
To help consumers overwhelmed with choice, Netflix is adding a "Play Something" button to its TV interface this week. Pressing it automatically launches a new show or movie based on the service's existing personalized recommendations. And if it's not the right title for the moment, consumers can click to play something else. (Protocol)
The geopolitics of the chips that make your tech work: Taiwan is the big kahuna. One of the (many) reasons President Xi Jinping is pushing harder than ever to annex Taiwan is the self-governing island's outsized chip manufacturing capacity. TSMC alone makes more than half of the chips outsourced by all foreign companies, which means your iPhone runs on Taiwanese-made semiconductors. If China were to someday reunify Taiwan with the mainland, it would become such a chip juggernaut that it could bend individual countries to its will by controlling supply — as the Chinese often often do with their rare earth metals. The US, for its part, has its own clear interest in propping up Taiwan as a global chip-making power. Taiwanese-made semiconductors are cheaper than those produced on US soil, and the more that are sold to the US and its allies, the less China gets. But if climate change makes not only droughts but also earthquakes and typhoons more frequent in Taiwan, global chip shortages will become a recurring problem — and geopolitical power struggle — for the entire world. (GZERO Media)
Smart Links
Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek is “very serious” about wanting to buy English soccer club Arsenal — his favorite team. (CNBC)
Influencers reach twice as many Gen Zers as broadcasters, as consumption of influencer-created videos surged by 26% over the past year. (Ad Age)
Goldman Sachs predicts quantum computing 5 years away from use in markets. (Financial Times)
America is running low on chicken. Blame covid-19, a sandwich craze and a huge appetite for wings. (Washington Post)
Air pollution disproportionately kills Americans of color. (Axios, Science Advances)
New York beach town faces millions in bills for mismanaged past: “If Long Beach was a business, it wouldn’t be in business.” (Bloomberg)
Macron defies left with Napoleon tribute on bicentenary of his death. (The Times)
Less is more: Why our brains struggle to subtract. People typically consider a limited number of promising ideas in order to manage the cognitive burden of searching through all possible ideas, but this can lead them to accept adequate solutions without considering potentially superior alternatives. Through 8 experiments, we show that people systematically default to searching for additive transformations, and consequently overlook subtractive transformations. Defaulting to searches for additive changes may be one reason that people struggle to mitigate overburdened schedules, institutional red tape and damaging effects on the planet. (Nature)