Business December 27, 2022
Amazon Agrees to Deal With EU Antitrust Authorities
Amazon Inc has agreed to a deal with European Union (EU) antitrust authorities to address concerns over of how non-public data undermines rivals and pledged to treat all sellers equally.
Also read : Video Gamers file lawsut against Microsoft Activision deal
Under the agreement, the US tech behemoth committed to adhere to treating all sellers equally on its platform and said it would make competitors’ products “more visible” on its “buy box”, which generates the majority of purchases on the site.
Now, Amazon will add another second buy box that shows alternative offers for customers who decide that speed of delivery did not matter to them.
Major EU victory
The deal has brought to an end investigations into the $866bn company.
“Amazon can no longer abuse its dual role and will have to change several business practices,” said Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition chief.
“Competing independent retailers and carriers as well as consumers will benefit from these changes opening up new opportunities and choice,” she added.
The agreement will see Amazon abandoning its long running business practices. Under the new deal, sellers will also be able to choose logistics companies and negotiate their contracts directly. The legally binding deal will remain in force for between five and seven years and comes after three years of investigations.
Saved by the bell
By agreeing to the measures, Amazon has avoided being charged for violating of EU laws and being heavily penalised. Normally, a violation attracts a fine of up to 10% of global revenues. For amazon, this could mean several billions.
Should Amazon breach this agreement, the EU commission would be able to enforce this fine without finding any infringement of antitrust rules. In some cases, regulators can impose a penalty payment of 5 per cent per day of Amazon’s daily turnover for every day of non-compliance.
“We are pleased that we have addressed the European Commission’s concerns and resolved these matters,” Amazon said in a statement
The company insists it disagreed with a number of EU commission’s preliminary conclusions but had engaged “constructively to ensure it could continue to serve customers across Europe.”
But some analysts have raised concern over what they believe to be “overregulation” in Europe.
Overregulation can cause immeasurable harm. Companies have a duty to protect their business & brand without compromising consumer experience. Excellent article by @mvpeers applicable in the present Indian regulatory context. @EU_Competition @cci_india https://t.co/QOurXfQFwb
— Lloyd Mathias (@LloydMathias) December 22, 2022
American superiority
“Although the EU punished Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and other American technology giants, American companies still have an advantage because they still firmly occupy the European market,” DaiWW wrote on Twitter Saturday.
Although the EU punished Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and other American technology giants, American companies still have an advantage because they still firmly occupy the European market. pic.twitter.com/WB8RfUfAad
— DaiWW (@BeijingDai) December 24, 2022
Under the Digital Markets Act, which was enactedin November, the big platforms must give equal treatment to data and bars self-preferential treatment, a practice of where a company prioritise its products in searches above rivals on its online marketplace. Amazon is not the first US giant to run into trouble in Europe.
Meta Platforms Inc, the parent company of Facebook, was also served with a complaint from the EU’s antitrust watchdog on Monday amid concerns the social network’s classified advert service was not fair to rivals. MetaNews has recently covered Meta’s EU antitrust case.
Yet others hailed the agreement as a milestone against big tech.
This is a big deal for @vestager & @amazon …and Big Tech more broadly. It balances two things: #antitrust enforcement with #DMA.
And EU can show that antitrust gets results the DMA can't. Ergo: the two can & should co-exist. Legally, strategically, it is a poster-child /1 https://t.co/OcgzAit7yy
— Lewis Crofts (@lewis_crofts) December 20, 2022
By giving its users access to Facebook Marketplace, the network’s platform for buying and selling goods, the social network has “a substantial distribution advantage that competitors cannot match”, the European Commission said. Meta dismissed the claims as baseless and vowed to challenge them.
Business
Twitter Now Worth Only a Third of Musk’s $44B Purchase Price
It’s been almost seven months since Elon Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion but the tech entrepreneur has failed to invigorate the company’s fortunes. Financial services corporation Fidelity now estimate the value of the app to stand at just 33% of Musk’s purchase price.
Musk completed his famous takeover of the microblogging site in October, fulfilling his long-term desire to be the boss of Twitter.
The tech billionaire was criticized for overspending on Twitter during the acquisition. Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter, with $33.5 billion in equity. However, Musk has also acknowledged he overpaid and said it was only worth half of what he paid.
“Myself and the other investors are obviously overpaying for Twitter right now. The long term potential for Twitter in my view is an order of magnitude greater than its current value,” said Musk.
Twitter was valued at $20 billion in March by Musk himself in an email that was sent to the company’s employees.
Reminder: Elon Musk massively overspent on his Twitter purchase out of ego and now wants you to pay for it through a subscription plan 😂
— tridder.pugs (@tridder46290) November 3, 2022
Twitter struggles under Musk
Following Musk’s takeover, many corporations and companies cut ties with the platform. Musk’s erratic decision-making and management style is blamed on driving a host of advertisers away.
Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen, General Mills, Mondelez, Pfizer, and United Airlines are among the major corporations that paused or pulled their advertisements from Twitter due to concerns regarding hate speech and conspiracy theories.
International ad and consulting firm Interpublic, which represents American Express, Coca-Cola, Fitbit, Spotify, and dozens of other major corporations, has also stopped advertising on the platform. That cut caused Twitter to lose $24 billion. Given the recent advertiser exodus it is unsurprising that Fidelity downgraded Twitter’s value – but it remains unclear exactly how they arrived at a final valuation.
In November, Fidelity initially decreased the value of its Twitter stake to 44% of the purchase price. This was followed by subsequent markdowns in December and February.
“In 2021, Twitter generated more than 4.5 billion U.S. dollars in advertising service revenues, up from 3.2 billion U.S. dollars in the previous year,” according to Statista.
Also Read: Six Months of Twitter Under the Rule of Elon Musk
Additionally, the micro-blogging platform produced around $571 million in data licensing revenue, up from $508 million 2020.
Insider Intelligence projected “that Twitter’s 2023 ad revenues would reach $4.74 billion worldwide.” However, since Musk took charge, the market research company has cut its projection by “nearly $2 billion, to just $2.98 billion, as the app grapples with brand safety issues, confusing policies, and broken technology.”
Twitter Blue: a flop card
Twitter Blue, a subscription-based verification checkmark with various features, remains one of the most popular changes in Musk’s brief tenure.
In November, the Tesla chief introduced a feature called “Blue for $8/month,” which brought a drastic change to Twitter’s policy by providing a verification checkmark known as a Blue tick.
This feature also offers additional benefits such as the ability to edit tweets, half-ads, longer tweets, text formatting, bookmark folders, NFT profile pictures, etc.
Interestingly, though, the change has been copied by Facebook and Instagram owner Meta, whose subscription service Meta Verified lets users add a blue checkmark to their accounts.
You will also get:
– Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam
– Ability to post long video & audio
– Half as many ads— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2022
Musk faced accusations of charging its users to cover his $44 billion, which he invested to become the boss. Despite the criticism for removing legacy checkmarks from popular accounts, Twitter Blue generated $11 million on mobile in its first three months as a new product.
The amount it has generated is slightly lower than expected, as Twitter has 368 million monthly active users worldwide.
However, Twitter is adding more features to the paid verification badge as Musk tries to develop it as a flagship product under the Twitter umbrella.
AI
Baidu Is Rolling Out a $145M Venture Capital AI Fund
Chinese tech giant Baidu is setting up a venture capital fund of $145 million or 1 billion yuan to back AI-focused startups. Baidu co-founder and CEO Robin Li announced the launch of the fund at a JP Morgan summit in China this week.
The move could signal China’s push towards self-reliance in the cut-throat generative AI sector. The fund will support the development and innovation of AI-based content creation, such as chatbots, video and audio synthesis, and natural language processing.
The fund is targeting early-stage AI applications, an area which Chinese generative AI startups have so far struggled to reach widespread adoption.
Also read: AI Code of Conduct Coming ‘Within Weeks’ Says US and Europe
Tailing the US’s OpenAI
OpenAI recently created an investment fund valued at more than $175 million, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. the company has been investing in startups, with its OpenAI Startup Fund to back companies “pushing the boundaries of how powerful AI can positively impact the world.”
Baidu is also planning to launch competition for developers to build applications using its Ernie large language model (LLM) or integrate the model into their existing products, in a similar fashion other tech firms are using OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology.
Ernie bot is Baidu’s own AI-powered LLM that can generate natural and coherent texts based on user inputs.
“American developers are building new applications based on ChatGPT or other language models. In China, there will be an increasing number of developers building AI applications using Ernie as their foundation,” said Li.
Baidu unveiled the chatbot in March this year and claimed that it outperformed other LLMs in several benchmarks.
Battle for AI supremacy
The success of ChatGPT has put Chinese tech companies under pressure to fast-track the release of their own LLMs and bring them to market.
According to Reuters there are over 75 Chinese companies that have already released their own LLMs since 2020. Baidu and e-commerce giant Alibaba are among these companies.
A report by a state-run research firm says over 79 LLMs have been launched in the past 3 years.
And the Baidu boss predicts that in the generative AI age, Chinese companies will catch up, and even lead the way in discovering commercial applications for AI.
“I am very bullish on China AI development. Over the past few decades, China has warmly embraced new technologies,” said Li.
“Even though we didn’t invent Android, iOS or Windows, we developed a host of very innovative applications like WeChat, Douyin and Didi. Many of them are popular and useful. The same trend is playing out in the AI age. Technology ushers in a myriad of possibilities and we are good at capturing them to build applications,” explained Li.
LLMs, a vital tech
Since they can produce realistic and varied material across a range of subjects and forms, LLMs are seen as a vital technology for expanding AI applications and services. They do, however, also present ethical and legal difficulties, such as possible abuse, plagiarism, and bias. China released draft regulations on the use of generative AI in April in response to the spike in LLMs, requiring developers to acquire approval and explicitly label such products.
The growth and adoption of AI-based content production in China and elsewhere are anticipated to be accelerated by Baidu’s venture capital fund and competition.
Business
Metaverse Gaming Market Expected to Reach $119.2 Billion by 2028
The metaverse gaming market is estimated to encompass $22.7 billion in 2023 and projected to reach $119.2 billion by 2028, according to a recent report from ReportLinker.
The metaverse has been a hot cake in the tech industry in recent years and was boosted by Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to change Facebook’s name to Meta. However, the market has been limping towards AI, which stole the spotlight from virtual reality.
“The global metaverse in gaming market size is estimated at USD 22.7 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach USD 119.2 billion by 2028 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 39.3%,” stated the report.
The growth of the metaverse in the gaming market is expected to be fuelled by several significant factors, including the dynamic and evolving landscape of adjacent technology markets “such as extended reality (XR),” which encompasses “virtual reality (VR),” augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR).
Expectation of rapid growth
In 2021, the gaming industry experienced rapid growth, with billions of people playing video games globally and generating over $193 billion in revenue.
Gaming companies quickly became early adopters in exploring the potential of the metaverse. Looking ahead to 2023, it was projected that the metaverse will continue to reshape the gaming landscape.
A survey from last year shows that about 52% of U.S. gamers believe the metaverse will change the game industry.
“According to the survey, just over half (52%) of gamers believe the metaverse will change the video game industry and a plurality (41%) think that the metaverse will have a positive impact on the industry (vs. 25% who disagree),” reads the survey report of Globant and polling firm YouGov.
Moreover, 40% say the buzz around “metaverse gaming is warranted,” though nearly “one-third (30%) were undecided” on that subject.
Who are the big players?
The metaverse is not just a single platform, virtual experience, or game; it is an entire world recreated to provide an immersive experience. Gaming is one of the many experiences in the metaverse that is powered by AI, VR, and AR.
Whenever it comes to gaming, some of the giant games like Fornite, Unreal, and Roblox come to mind.
Read Also: Meta Seeks to Boost Its Metaverse Gaming Credentials
And those are expected to be significant players in the metaverse due to their existing influence and capabilities in the gaming industry, as a report from 2022 states.
“As gaming platforms like Fortnight gain functionality and evolve into technologically advanced social meeting places, it becomes more likely that a functioning Metaverse, with an independent economy, systems, and processes is in our future,” reads the report.
Fortnite has transformed into a social meeting place, offering interactive events and branded experiences.
Unreal’s powerful engine enables immersive media experiences, while Roblox’s user-generated content and virtual currency have attracted millions of users. These factors position them to thrive in the evolving metaverse landscape.
Europe expecting significant growth
Europe is expected to witness significant growth in the gaming metaverse market, with the second-highest CAGR during the calculation period.
The UK, Germany, and France lead the way in technology investment, while Russia and Spain are also adopting new display technologies.
“The substantial growth of the virtual world immersive interactive gaming industry in Europe is a crucial driver for the gaming metaverse market in this region,” stated the report.
The immersive interactive gaming industry in Europe, along with the demand for AR, VR, and MR technologies in the entertainment sector, serves as a driving force, indicated ReportLinker.
@riseofaitech are now entering the Metaverse and the Play2Earn gaming space which, according to a 2021 Bloomberg report, is valued at $500bn with huge growth predictions. @sanboy23@Iamchike2@nainiydd#NFT #Crypto #P2E $AITECH pic.twitter.com/uMzyD2aSqL
— 오라클🔺 (@hoonjitw) June 1, 2023
Initiatives such as the European Association for Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality (EuroVR) and projects like Augmented Heritage and International Augmented Med (I AM) contribute to market growth.
With increasing startups in extended reality, particularly in Sweden, Europe is poised for increased growth in the gaming metaverse markets.
-
AISat 3 Jun 2023 06:45 GMT
Japan Leads the Way by Adapting Copyright Laws to the Rise of AI
-
BusinessFri 2 Jun 2023 14:00 GMT
Twitter Now Worth Only a Third of Musk’s $44B Purchase Price
-
AIFri 2 Jun 2023 09:30 GMT
Metaverse Experiences Must Be Worth Having, Says Stephenson
-
FeaturedFri 2 Jun 2023 07:40 GMT
Mark Zuckerberg Unveils $500 Meta Quest 3 VR Headset
-
AIThu 1 Jun 2023 18:00 GMT
Baidu Is Rolling Out a $145M Venture Capital AI Fund
-
AIThu 1 Jun 2023 13:30 GMT
AI Code of Conduct Coming ‘Within Weeks’ Says US and Europe
-
BusinessThu 1 Jun 2023 06:36 GMT
Metaverse Gaming Market Expected to Reach $119.2 Billion by 2028
-
AIWed 31 May 2023 17:45 GMT
Judge Orders All AI-Generated Research To Be Declared in Court