• 9 Trends That Will Shape Work in 2021 and Beyond
• Countries experiment with special remote-work visas for Digital Nomads (Paywall: WSJ)
• The priority for workplaces in the new normal? Wellbeing
• CES 2021 Summaries
  • IGN
  • BBC
  • Digital Trends
• Cyberpunk Rollout“…Making Cyberpunk would require CD Projekt to invest in new technology, new staff and new techniques they hadn’t explored before…
  …tried to develop the engine technology behind Cyberpunk 2077, most of which was brand new, simultaneously with the game, which slowed down production…
  …While The Witcher 3 was created by roughly 240 in-house staff, according to the company, Cyberpunk’s credits show that the game had well over 500 internal developers…”
• PC sales finally saw big growth in 2020 after years of steady decline…In total, 91.6 million traditional PCs were shipped in the fourth quarter of 2020.
• AT&T is killing off the online-video service formerly known as DirecTV Now and introducing a no-contract option for the newer online service that replaced it.
• Qualcomm will acquire chip company founded by Apple execs for $1.4 billion
• BMW becomes the latest automaker to shut down its subscription service…Access by BMW was a $2,000-a-month service that launched in 2018
• Ford unveils new self-driving test vehicle for 2022 launch
• Windows 10X is now Microsoft’s true answer to Chrome OS
• Apple Plans Upgraded MacBook Pros With Return of Magnetic Charging
• Blue Origin successfully launches and lands key crew capsule test in first mission of 2021
• Apple Considers Foldable iPhone; Minor Changes Planned for 2021 Models
• Telegram adds 25 million new users in just 72 hours
• 2020 was second-hottest year on record, NOAA says
• Nuclear fusion tech developer General Fusion now has Shopify and Amazon founders backing it
• YouTube and WhatsApp inch closer to half a billion users in India
• Upgrade launches checking accounts and debit cards
• Elon Musk’s SpaceX starts testing Starlink broadband service in the English countryside
• Chips Are in Hot Demand—and That’s a Problem (Paywall: WSJ)
• FAA Approves First Fully Automated Commercial Drone Flights (Paywall: WSJ)
• Deliveroo may be heading for an April initial public offering at a valuation of $13.6 billion.
• Amazon, Walmart Tell Consumers to Skip Returns of Unwanted Items…using artificial intelligence to decide whether it makes economic sense to process a return.
• Cowen analysts wrote that they estimate Amazon’s ad revenue to rise to $26.1 billion in 2021, and rise to $85.2 billion by 2026.
• Rediscovering RISC-V: Apple M1 sparks renewed interest in non-x86 architectures

• Chip Shortage Hits Global Automakers
• Introducing Amazon Marketing Cloud (beta)
• The world’s cryptocurrency is now worth more than $1 trillion
• Apple allegedly working with Hyundai on electric car for 2027…Apple’s Self-Driving Electric Car Is at Least Half a Decade Away
• Amazon Pantry is being discontinued as Amazon consolidates its grocery delivery services
• Google’s plan to replace tracking cookies goes under UK antitrust probe
• Mercedes unveils Hyperscreen, a curved 56-inch screen for its flagship EQS electric vehicle
• Roku acquires Quibi’s content
• Roku is becoming the most powerful company in streaming…51.2 million active accounts, adding around 14 million accounts over the past 12 months.
• Chinese search giant Baidu to make electric cars
• Xbox: The Oral History of an American Video Game Empire…The original product was ungainly, over-budget and nearly canceled. Here’s how it became a hit and reshaped an industry
• Mandatory WhatsApp Privacy Policy Update Allows User Data to be Shared With Facebook
• Apple’s App Store had gross sales around $64 billion last year and it’s growing strongly again
• The First Pig-to-Human Organ Transplants Could Happen This Year
• Microsoft is building a new Outlook app for Windows and Mac powered by the web
• Google’s iOS apps haven’t been updated in weeks. Could Apple’s privacy labels be the reason?
• Amazon Makes First Aircraft Purchase to Expand Cargo Network…Retailer will buy 11 767-300 planes from Delta, WestJet…Amazon expects fleet to have more than 85 jets by end of 2022
• Their observations, plus a bit of cosmic geometry, suggest that the universe is 13.77 billion years old—give or take 40 million years. A Cornell University researcher co-authored one of two papers about the findings
• Epic Games buys a huge mall for its new global HQ
• Haven, the Amazon-Berkshire-JPMorgan venture to disrupt health care, is disbanding after 3 years
• Study finds brain-activity of people coding isn’t quite like when they use language, or do math
• How The New York Times Is Adapting to Life Without Third-Party Cookies

• Top digital marketing trends and predictions for 2021
• Spotting the signals
• The year shopping changed forever“…At the end of last year, only around 13 percent of retail purchases — excluding auto and gas sales — were made online, according to Mastercard. By the end of 2020, that figure stands at around 20 percent, or $1 out of every $5…“
• How coronavirus has shaped the home of tomorrow (Paywall : FT)
• What Did 2020 Do to Retail?
• Your Most-Played Song of 2020 Is … White Noise?“…Ambient music, background noise and calming sound effects have soothed the anxious, isolated and sleep deprived this year…”
• The Hidden Tradeoffs of Working From Home
• Tech’s top seven companies added $3.4 trillion in value in 2020
• The Apple car, briefly explained
• EarlyBird’s new app lets families and friends ‘gift’ investments to children
• Elon Musk says SpaceX will attempt to recover Super Heavy rocket by catching it with launch tower
• Fluence, the energy storage systems developer, is now worth over $1 billion after QIA investment
• Amazon acquires podcast network Wondery
• Student-founded Develop for Good surpasses 25,000 volunteer hours connecting students with nonprofits
• Best new board game apps of 2020
• The best video essays of 2020
• The Turing Test is obsolete. It’s time to build a new barometer for AI
• Study Finds More Than $100 Billion Spent on App Stores in 2020
• What we have learnt about the limits of science
• Human Development Report 2020 [PDF]
• Automation nation: 9 robotics predictions for 2021
• Why retailers everywhere should look to China
• Responsible Marketing with First-Party Data
• Decoding Decisions [PDF]| Think with Google

• Covid-19 Propelled Businesses Into the Future. Ready or Not. (Paywall: WSJ)
• FT People of the Year: BioNTech’s Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci (Paywall:FT)
• Will you have to carry a vaccine passport on your phone?
• The power of value 4.0 for industrial internet of things
• Nearly half a billion users played Among Us in November
• Zoom may launch an email service and calendar app to compete with Google and Microsoft
• Microsoft may be developing its own in-house ARM CPU designs
• Tesla is going to release Full Self-Driving monthly subscription in early 2021
• Telegram, nearing 500 million users, to begin monetizing the app
• TaskRabbit is resetting customer passwords after finding ‘suspicious activity’ on its network
• Horizon Robotics, a Chinese rival to Nvidia, seeks to raise over $700M
• Apple targets car production by 2024 and eyes ‘next level’ battery technology
• The Battle for Mars
• German firm says indoor vertical farm in Singapore will produce 1.5 tons of ‘leafy greens’ every day
• There are now almost 300 so-called “neobanks” live worldwide, with nearly half concentrated in Europe.
• How Amazon Wins: By Steamrolling Rivals and Partners (Paywall:WSJ)
• Investors pour $1bn into buying up small merchants on Amazon (Paywall:FT)
• These breakthroughs will make 2021 better than 2020
• Amazon Echo Frames
• GP Bullhound Technology 2021 Predictions
• Fjord Trends 2021
• BBC Tech trends in 2021
• Trends In 2021: The Future Of Life, Learning And Play
• Trendwatching: 21 meaningful, trend-driven innovation opportunities for 2021
• Top 100 Business Trends for 2021

• McKinsey: The Next Normal
• The great hack attack: SolarWinds breach exposes big gaps in cyber security
• Deloitte 2021 Global Marketing Trends
• AWS introduces new Chaos Engineering as a Service offering
• Global Competitiveness Report Special Edition 2020
• Global chip shortage threatens production of laptops, smartphones and more
• Battery prices have fallen 88 percent over the last decade
• E-commerce became commerce…Online shopping made up 14 percent of all retail sales in the US last quarter as in-store retail flagged.
• Walmart will use fully driverless trucks to make deliveries in 2021
• Google Waives $1.5 Billion DeepMind Loan as AI Costs Mount
• Floating ‘mini-nukes’ could power countries by 2025, says startup
• China just brought moon rocks back to Earth for the first time in its history
• Google to shut down Android Things, a smart home OS that never took off
• “None of us were ready” to manufacture genetic vaccines for a billion people
• Amazon’s answer to SpaceX Starlink delivers 400Mbps in prototype phase
• AI controlled a US military aircraft for the first time
• OneWeb launches 36 satellites to join its global broadband constellation on orbit
• UiPath files confidential IPO paperwork with SEC
• WhatsApp to bring voice and video calls to desktop next year
• Among Us’ is coming to Xbox in 2021
• A successful experiment gets us one step closer to a quantum internet
• Twitter launches its voice-based ‘Spaces’ social networking feature into beta testing
• Walmart to pilot test livestreamed video shopping on TikTok
• F1 engine makers are testing sustainable fuel…Formula 1 aims to hit net zero carbon emissions within 10 years.
• How Pfizer Delivered a Covid Vaccine in Record Time

Zoom was adding 5,000-6,000 servers (on AWS) a night as they scaled in the early days of the pandemic ? #reInvent

— Rachel Dines @ #reinvent (@RachelDines) December 15, 2020

• Goodreads: Best books of 2020
• Disney+ Could Hit 260 Million Subscribers by 2024, CEO Bob Chapek Says
• Outlook 2021: Sustaining the Outperforming Covid Recovery
• Wall Street Begins Trading Water Futures as a Commodity
• Apple Fitness+ launches this coming Monday at $9.99 per month
• Facebook hit with massive antitrust lawsuit from 46 states
• SpaceX’s Starship has flown a record 12.5 km into the air—and then crashed
• Adobe just released the last Flash update ever…Adobe will stop supporting Flash on December 31st, 2020, and it will block Flash content from running on January 12th, 2021.
• Amazon’s redesigned Fire TV software starts rolling out today
• Seoul-based payment tech startup CHAI gets $60 million from Hanhwa, SoftBank Ventures Asia
• Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics for nearly $1B
• Coronavirus, election results, Kobe Bryant and Zoom among Google’s top 2020 search trends in US and world
• App stores to see 130 billion downloads in 2020 and record consumer spend of $112 billion
• With over 1 billion users, Chrome is both a browser and a major platform. The Chrome Web Store hosts more than 250,000 extensions and themes with 4 million Chrome extensions downloaded every day
• McKinsey estimates that global digital-health revenues—from telemedicine, online pharmacies, wearable devices and so on—will rise from $350bn last year to $600bn in 2024
• Sony to buy AT&T’s anime business for $1.18 billion to expand global footprint
• The New Consumer Conversation in an Era of Uncertainty

• After reaching $40B in revenue in record time, Amazon Web Services hints at its own reinvention
• AWS brings the Mac mini to its cloud
• Facebook Buys Customer-Service Software Maker Kustomer
• How the US, UK and China are planning to roll out vaccines
• Japan is about to bring back samples of an asteroid 180 million miles away
• Warner Bros. will release entire 2021 film slate in theaters and on HBO Max… includes Dune, Matrix 4, and Godzilla vs. Kong, among other titles.
• More online retailers are following Amazon’s lead in making it easier to drop off items at brick-and-mortar locations near your home, no box or shipping label necessary
• The death and rebirth of America’s department stores, in charts
• Revolut lets businesses accept online payments
• Grab-Singtel and Ant Group win digital bank licenses in Singapore
• More than 500,000 full electric cars sold so far this year in Europe
• Singapore approves sale of lab-grown meat in world first
• Stripe announces embedded business banking service Stripe Treasury…The company is partnering with banks to offer a banking-as-a-service API. In other words, Stripe clients will be able to provide bank accounts to their customers — the service is invite-only for now.
• Microsoft launches Azure Purview, its new data governance service
• Hulu officially launches its co-viewing feature, Watch Party
• Elon Musk is open to talking about merging Tesla with another car company. These are the 4 most likely candidates, experts say.
• Coronavirus: Vaccination ‘could become routine from 2022‘
• Elon Musk is ‘highly confident’ SpaceX will land humans on Mars by 2026
• Gartner Says Global Smartphone Sales Declined 5.7% in Third Quarter of 2020
• The Luxury E-Commerce Wars Heat Up

• Slack’s stock climbs on possible Salesforce acquisition
• AI can run your work meetings now
• HBO Max, for instance, has around 9 million users; Roku has 46 million users, giving it an estimated 30 percent of the streaming device market.
• SpaceX Starlink engineers take questions in Reddit AMA—here are highlights…Expanded beta is coming in January, and there’s no plan for data caps.
• Alibaba vies for a piece of China’s booming EV market
• Thanksgiving online shopping hits record $5.1B, up 21.5% on 2019, 47% of sales via mobile
• Bigblue wants to automate e-commerce fulfillment in Europe
• SpaceX successfully launches a Falcon 9 booster for a record seventh time
• Mobile banking app Current raises $131M Series C, tops 2 million members
• 1% of farms operate 70% of world’s farmland
• Microsoft hints at turning Xbox into an app for your TV
• How my electric car is helping to power my home’
• China launches ambitious mission to land on moon and return samples to Earth
• “The Queen’s Gambit” set the record as the most-watched scripted limited series to date on Netflix — with 62 million member accounts tuning in to the show in the first 28 days, according to the company.
• Imagine a World Without Apps
• How Archaeologists Are Using Deep Learning to Dig Deeper

• An Economist’s Guide to the World in 2050
• Four Reasons the Stay-at-Home Economy Is Here to Stay (WSJ:Paywall) “…First, companies have made huge investments in the infrastructure needed to deliver goods and services to our homes quickly and efficiently, which means those products are now easier to use and often less expensive. Second, families have also invested in the services and gadgets to keep their members safe and sated while sheltering in place. Third, our habits have changed: Many people have gotten over the “hump” of adopting new technologies earlier than they otherwise might have. And finally, hundreds of thousands of Americans who lost traditional jobs in retail and service—on showroom floors and inside restaurants—have found new ones working in online order fulfillment and delivery. Even those who retained their jobs are seeing their roles shift to address these new conduits for economic activity...”
• During the pandemic, 10 years of consumer adoption of e-commerce was compressed into three months, according to a recent survey by McKinsey
• Who should get a covid-19 vaccine first?…Mathematicians are faced with two conflicting priorities when modeling for vaccines: Should they prevent deaths or slow transmission?
• Rocket Lab has successfully recovered a booster for the first time
• Spotify has 300 million users
• “…That’s a remarkable thing. It’s the first time you’ve ever been able to decide exactly when and where you want to watch a big, would-be-blockbuster Hollywood movie on opening day…“
• Google Chrome is available as an Apple M1 native app today
• Stadia game streaming will come to iOS via Web browser
• Google revamps its strategy towards banking (FT:Paywall)
• Google Pay gets a major redesign with a new emphasis on personal finance
  • Google Pay now has about 150 million users in 30 countries
  • Google is also partnering with 11 banks to launch a new kind of bank account in 2021. Called Plex, these mobile-first bank accounts will have no monthly fees, overdraft charges or minimum balances. The banks will own the accounts but the Google Pay app will be the main conduit for managing these accounts
  • …combining three things into one,”
    • One is the ability to pay friends and businesses really fast.
    • Explore offers and rewards, so you can save money at shops.
    • Getting insights about your spending so you can stay on top of your money.”
• Apple drops its cut of App Store revenues from 30% to 15% for some developers…The cut benefits only developers who pull in less than $1 million annually.
• Thanks to SpaceX, NASA regains a capability it lost for a decade
• Windows Turn 35: A Visual History…The PC revolution started off life 35 years ago this week. Microsoft launched its first version of Windows on November 20th, 1985
• Microsoft and Apple working on Xbox Series X controller support for iPhones and iPads
• Eero’s security subscription now lets parents block sites at the router level
• OneWeb emerges from bankruptcy, aims to begin launching satellites again on December 17
• LidarPhone attack converts smart vacuums into microphones
• Japan Inc to begin experiments issuing digital yen