Multiverses Move in Mysterious Ways🧙
Niantic is vying to become the IRL Innovative Online Industries👓, the TikTok saga continues with Walmart with the time running out ⌚ and Nintendo is doing a lot😵!
After announcing the Plante-Scale AR Platform last year, an environment that will allow everyone to develop large-scale AR experiences, Niantic, makers of Pokemon GO revealed the creation of an alliance with cellular carriers that will enable high-quality experiences on the 5G networks of the future. In this partnership, Niantic will be responsible for providing the AR experiences while carriers will build out the infrastructure needed for these products to reach consumers’ devices.
And boy, does 5G need a killer APP already. Understandably, it’s not that easy to get consumers excited about 5G, while the increase in speed is quite large, the fundamentals will remain the same for the majority of users. On one side, the majority of people are already over-served by 4G speeds where the technology is available, on the other, 5G will probably never achieve the level of ubiquity that its predecessors enjoyed, mainly due to the large infrastructure demand required.
AR applications look like good candidates for experiences that can be consumed in urban centers where 5G, with its high bandwidth and low latency, will have strong coverage, enabling it to serve high-quality content to the masses. This will likely encourage developers of AR to integrate social elements in their future projects, which will give all of these products the network effects that will then enable them to propagate organically to massive user bases.
But while AR entertainment products are a gate towards the adoption of 5G, they can’t be the only one. The strength of augmented reality compared to any other technology is that it can overlay objects, contextually, on top of the real world, helping users to navigate day-to-day life and hopefully improving it. For more people to adopt the faster speeds, 5G needs to provide this level of help to a majority of people in the future.
With over 1 billion downloads of Pokemon GO worldwide, Niantic is in a leading position to show others the way forward. The company already leverages this user base to monetize by selling advertising opportunities to businesses big and small, and according to their business portal, it’s going pretty well. Many players visit the IRL locations featured by the APP and even create routines and consciously change their daily behavior in order to include such locations. I can’t think of another entertainment product that can bridge the virtual and real life as good as AR products and advertisers are slowly but surely realizing this as well.
If you’ve been reading this letter for a while now, you’ll remember that I keep mentioning proto-metaverses whenever I get the chance; this is one of those times. While we don’t know the exact path to creating the first through metaverse, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: there’s no one path to it. Gaming products like Fortnite or Roblox that are consumed by billions of people at this point represent just one avenue in creating this new, future synthetic world. AR experiences like Pokemon Go will be another and VR products will represent the third of the obvious paths. I expect others will soon emerge and there will be some accordion-like movements of expansion and then consolidation until the end goal is achieved.
We’re just a week away from the deadline set for the TikTok sale and Walmart has now entered the discussion.
With TikTok just entering the monetization phase after focusing on growth this entire time, this partnership between Walmart and Microsoft kinda makes sense. Microsoft will handle the technology-related aspects of the deal while Walmart can leverage its physical locations along with their upcoming delivery program to provide purchasing opportunities. Microsoft gets a foothold in social media while Walmart gets to stick it to Amazon in a demographic that will prove seriously valuable in the future: young people.
The other bids that are still in the race for TikTok are the Oracle-led alliance, Centricus+Triller’s bid for $20Bn, whilst the Google+Softbank collab is no longer a contender by any account and Twitter is slowly sliding into spectator mode.
One thing’s for sure, China’s new ban on exporting AI will make things a lot harder than they were a week ago, as I mentioned previously, selecting the elements that change hand will be hard. Not being able to export the AI part, probably the most valuable item in TikTok’s value network, will be a massive problem for closing the deal, regardless of who ends up being the acquirer.
Nintendo is doing A LOT for the 35th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. this year. A new $50 handheld console, a $100 Nintendo Switch kit that allows you to race real RC karts around a virtual track in the comfort of your home, a ‘jeans collaboration’, and not on, but two! sneaker collaborations. If you opened a new tab to check Nintendo stock right now I don’t blame you, they usually do these out-of-left-field moves when the company is in dire situations, but not now. The Switch is sure to become the second best-selling Nintendo console of all times and the rumored Switch Pro coming next year might just give it a shot for the top spot. This begs the question, ‘Is Nintendo becoming a contemporary company in the existing capitalist system?’ Are they transforming into a company that, when it sees itself winning, aims to win more? I’m almost thinking about buying some stock… 📈🤔
All these Youtube “reviews” of Microsoft’s Surface Duo being restricted to hardware —Fight Club-style— are quite strange and made me wonder a bit about the reasoning behind the strategy. While the ‘atom side’ is quite sexy and novel, perhaps the ‘bits side’ is less so. The hardware is getting raving reviews left and right but a modern phone is made up of a harmonious combination between the two sides, if one of them is under par then the whole is under par. Now that we’re slowly getting out of the early adoption phase, when someone pays the $1400, you expect an experience that’s above and beyond anything at lower price points; and, from what we can infer from this dual-embargo strategy, this ain’t it chief. I feel sorry for those ‘hingeneers’ now 💰🥟
Apple is now officially bundling hardware and services if you live in the UK and it’s looking great. Consumers can add Apple Music, TV+, and Arcade to their plan when they buy a new iPhone for no additional cost, providing around £11 in saving each month compared to buying the services individually. As I mentioned previously, I expect this to happen in increasingly more markets as Apple goes beyond the iPhone and relies more heavily on services for its revenue 🍎🎶📺🕹️
For years now Disney’s parks were the closest thing we had to absolute surveillance of human behavior. Consumers tolerated this first because it was happening in a restricted where people would choose —and pay— to go to, and secondly because the benefits outweighed the perils. The company has been, intelligently, raising the temperature of the boiling water slowly and unbeknownst to the frogs within for a few years now, the latest effort being ‘smart toys’. These new products will incorporate a myriad of sensors within —like accelerometers, location, light, temperature, image, audio, and pressure sensors—, making it easy for the company to both record actions and offer feedback to kids in real-time through the ̶s̶p̶y̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶d̶e̶v̶i̶c̶e̶ toy. This sounds a lot more like an activity tracker for kids than anything involving ‘play’ and it’s sure to open a can of worms for Disney if elements of the patent are ever implemented in a real product 🚸📹
Ubisoft’s Chinese office has been notoriously prolific at creating viral campaigns in their presentations in the past, but the latest one is also one of the best. Orders for the ‘buggy mug’ are pouring in as we speak, the universal sign that the marketing department is firing at all cylinders 😊
A semi-stealthy update from Medium came around last week, boasting 1.25 billion page views, hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and removing the sign-up step in the UX for reading articles. So the biz model now is really ‘free, no ads’ as far as readers are concerned👁️🗨️👁️🗨️📰
If history is any judge, with boring trailers of Guadagnino films resulting in a very good end product, this series is looking promising 👌
Every job of this type will go ‘tele’ in the short term before AI completely takes over 🦾>💪
Ever wondered how Flamingos eat? Me neither, but here we are…🦩🤷
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