Headlines this week - Oct 9, 2022
Apple's supply chain. Big Tech becomes mature / efficiency-driven. AI-generated videos expected to populate social media soon. The semiconductor crisis. The Second Cold War. Musk and Twitter
IN SUMMARY - TOP 15 TRENDS THIS WEEK
Trying to capitalize on the post-pandemic work trends, and attract global talent (including from the US), Portugal launches a “digital nomad” visa
Apple is re-building its supply chain, and shifting iPhone manufacturing from China to India (and also the US)
Meta desperately looking for cash: closing some services, closing some offices, freezing hiring, trying to make app feeds more attractive and/or more profitable at the same time (quite a stretch…). Even the Metaverse momentum could be affected
Amazon is also looking to increase efficiency. They just stopped their autonomous delivery robots program. And they also announced they’re freezing hiring for e-commerce (corporate) roles
Google confirms its commitment to sell public cloud services and keeps investing in moving the Cloud to “the edge”. New data center investments were announced this week in South Africa and Japan
Latest demos revealed by Google and Meta suggest that AI-driven video content creation has arrived, and this could have concerning implications on social media
Satellite networks are becoming the new hype in connectivity. AT&T claims it’s building a better service vs. Starlink / SpaceX. Sateliot, a startup, is partnering with AWS to build a satellite-based global 5G IoT network
Uncertainty grows in the semiconductor industry, with a decrease in PC sales and negative results from leaders in memory chips (Micron, Samsung). Amid this climate, TSMC seems to be (relatively) thriving
Elon Musk reverses gear and now proposes to go ahead with the acquisition of Twitter. Many people still don’t believe it. In parallel, there are lots of concerns about how the Twitter app could evolve, and about potential “culture shocks” at the company
The IPO of CALB, a Chinese startup, reminds us of how much the car industry depends on China for its EV batteries. CATL, BYD are the top-2 players, and CALB aims at #3 (at the expense of LG Energy). The US is trying to address this issue
Autonomous vehicles may be entering the “Trough of Disillusionment” that Gartner often talks about. In the short term, the industry seems to be focusing on limited use cases (like trucks in “backbone” routes)
The Physics Nobel Prize this year goes to researchers in Quantum Mechanics that established some of the basis for Quantum Computing. A field where (again) China has plans to be the global leader
The US is announcing further restrictions in chip-related exports to China. So maybe the previous ones where insufficient. Something also suggested by news about Huawei (apparently) having been able to bypass them