Mobile News - Week of March 15, 2021

Amazon started disclosing a big and highly profitable business has quietly emerged in the footnotes at the back of the 10k. Amazon’s ‘Other’ revenue line, which is ‘primarily’ advertising, was over $20 billion in 2020.

Amazon is not the only retailer to have realized that the time we spend on its site makes it a media owner by accident. The more privacy and data rules we have, and the faster that cookies disappear, the more that content silos, large audiences and first party data matter in ads and eCommerce.

Great Twitter on why and how ClubHouse may fail.

1 - Twitch creators are live ~40 hours a week. Our best creators do weekly shows. ~3-4 hrs a week max. The game makes content creation easier

2 -Twitch is vertically focused (gaming). Clubhouse is horizontal. You need “great content” across EVERY category.

If the 15% fee schedule on revenue up to $1 million had been in place on Google Play in 2020, Google would have missed out on $587 million, or about 5% of Sensor Tower’s estimate of $11.6 billion in Google Play fees for the year.

If Apple’s program had been in place for 2020, Sensor Tower estimates that it would have missed out on $595 million, or about 2.7% of its estimated $21.7 billion in App Store fees in 2020.

Amazon Live is a prominent example of how interactive video shopping, popularized by TV networks like QVC, has moved online.

Although e-commerce livestreams are still a niche enterprise in the United States, they are big business in China, where they drive about 9% or $63 billion, of the country’s online market. Kim Kardashian West went on a popular Chinese influencer’s stream and sold out her perfume stock within minutes after 13M tuned in. At least one Chinese college offers e-commerce live-streaming as a degree. 

When a secretive start-up scraped the internet to build a facial-recognition tool, it tested a legal and ethical limit — and blew the future of privacy in America wide open.

In January 2020, Clearview had been used by at least 600 law enforcement agencies. The company says that is now up to 3,100. The Army and the Air Force are customers. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, signed a $224,000 deal to use Clearview’s technology in August. “Our growth rate is crazy,” Ton-That said.

Samsung’s new Galaxy S21 5G taking the top spot with an average 5G/4G download speed of 56 Mbps.

One of the big takeaways was Samsung accounting for 60% of the top 25 5G performers.

TCL’s Revvl 5G and the OnePlus 8T+ took second and third place respectively with 49.8 and 49.3 Mbps averages. LG’s Velvet 5G came in 25th with 37.8 Mbps.

Hearables* were the largest category of devices with 64.2% share of shipments, followed by watches with 24.1% share.

For an earworn device to be considered a hearable by IDC’s definition, it must offer functionality beyond audio, like a smart assistant, health and fitness tracking, or audio experience enhancement.