DIGITAL CURRENCY

The Zuck Buck Draws Nearer

Facebook’s digital payments project is oh-so-close to getting off the ground. 

Libra could launch as soon as January, per an FT report last week. The Geneva-based Libra Association, an FB-founded parent org with 27 members, is waiting on the go-ahead from Swiss authorities. 

Launch day won’t be everything Facebook dreamed of 

Libra will initially be one stablecoin tied to the U.S. dollar. Reminder: Stablecoins are pegged to fiat currency to avoid the volatility you’ve seen in your Coinbase account this month. Tokens tied to other currencies are coming—and so is a “digital composite” made up of all of FB’s coins. But they won’t launch in January. 

In FB’s initial vision, Libra would be tied to a basket of currencies and the network nodes would be run by dozens of “Founding Members.” But FB pared down its ambitions following icy reception from U.S. policymakers, European finance ministers, and other officials. 

• And some Founding Members, from Mastercard and Visa to e-commerce players, pulled out of the Libra Association just months after it was announced.
• All told, Libra’s launch date is running roughly one year behind schedule. 

The Libra bull case: Digital payments functionality could work seamlessly across FB’s Marketplace or its integrated messaging apps. Shopify has signed on as a partner. And even a low adoption rate in a billions-strong social network isn’t peanuts. FB could also incentivize merchants to buy ads with Libra. 

Big picture

We’ve given airtime to the idea that Facebook is its own nation-state. But when it comes to Libra, the real nation-states knocked down Facebook’s bid to mint its own dollar. 

That may be because they plan to compete in digital payments themselves. Governments around the world are hatching schemes for their own central bank digital currency (CBDC). 

• China is expanding pilots of the digital yuan, while Cambodia and the Bahamas have launched their own CBDCs. 
• The common denominator, from Libra to the Bahamas’s Sand Dollar: Expanding access to financial services and expediting payments in the age of ubiquitous mobile computing.

CLOUD

Sunny With a Chance of Rain

Forget Blair and Serena: The world’s most influential frenemies are cloud computing and climate change. 

Cumulus: The cloud’s computing power can supercharge climate change research, which involves identifying trends in increasingly large, complex data sets. It’s also helped democratize access to machine learning tools. 

• Researchers lean on ML algorithms to pull insights from rainfall patterns, satellite imagery, ocean temperatures, and more. 
• A University of Oxford team uses Amazon Web Services to understand ship exhaust’s effects on actual clouds, reports the WSJ. 

Cumulonimbus: The data centers that enable cloud computing eat up enormous amounts of energy—much of which comes from fossil fuels. By 2030, data center demand could reach 13% of the world’s total electricity consumption. 

• Training one natural language processing pipeline, including tuning and experimentation, can emit over 78,000 lbs of CO2 equivalent, according to one paper. That's more than the average human's climate change impact over a two-year period.

The massive amounts of data to sort through will only increase as we inch closer to climate change’s “point of no return.” The National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration alone collects ~20 terabytes of data daily. 

Potential bright spot: According to Microsoft’s Project Natick, storing data centers below the ocean could be instrumental in reducing their energy consumption. 

SPONSORED BY BRIGHTCOVE

The Show Must Go On

Waving a lighter at a rock show, settling in at the symphony, gasping in awe at the ballet…

The days of enjoying arts and entertainment IRL seem to have taken an indefinite intermission.

The good news? We’ve got an encore to tell you about.

Brightcove is helping organizations in the arts and entertainment community unlock new potential through the power of video, whether it’s the Sydney Symphony Orchestra or Willie Nelson rockin’ in Austin.

Video lets you pivot to reach wider audiences—think attendees, members, subscribers, and donors—while granting everyone VIVP access (that’s Very Important Video People) to insider peeks behind the scenes, Q&A sessions with performers, and never-before-seen footage.

And this ain’t no choppy, fuzzy, unreliable streaming either. 

Brightcove recently powered the first audience-free concert streamed from a major US stadium featuring Dropkick Murphys—with over 9 million views, 28 songs, and zero downtime over a flawless livestream.

Keep the show going with the power of Brightcove.

CLOUD

Down for the Count

What do Glassdoor, iRobot, 1Password, Roku, WaPo, and Flickr have in common? 

All intermittently went down last Wednesday, along with many other sites and apps. 

The culprit? A multiple-hour outage affecting Amazon Web Services, the cloud infrastructure behind a good chunk of the internet. Major AWS clients include top Screen Time offenders like Netflix, Twitch, Reddit, Slack, and Spotify. 

This outage affected one of 23 geographic AWS regions, but it still caused an influx of reports on DownDetector. 

• Even puppies weren’t safe: "I got a cryptic message that an AWS outage is impacting my Petsafe feeder,” one user reported. “Do I have to somehow get home early so my animals have food?” 
• Ironically, the issues prevented AWS itself from publishing updates to its Service Health Dashboard. 

Issues stemmed from the Kinesis Data Streams API, according to Amazon, and efforts to increase system capacity.

Looking ahead: AWS outlined an updated game plan in response to the outage, including a move to larger CPU and memory servers. It’ll also direct more resources towards cellularization, a process that aims to isolate the effects of service failure. 

BITS & BYTES

Stat: Black Friday shopping surged to a record $9 billion this year—up ~22% year over year, according to Adobe Analytics. And $3.6 billion of those sales occurred on smartphones.

Quote: “One of the reasons AI has been so successful at solving games is that games have a very well-defined notion of success….If we could define what success means for physical laws, that would be an incredible breakthrough.” —Dr. Jesse Thaler, particle physicist, in the NYT 

Read: Today, the Supreme Court hears its first big case related to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which will further define “unauthorized access” (aka hacking), TechCrunch explains. 

SPONSORED BY KIWICO

Prepare to be intimidated by your child’s intellect. KiwiCo delivers hands-on science and art projects that feel more like game time than homework. And it will make your kids smarter than you. With projects for every age level, interest, and budget, you can be sure that your kid will get so smart you won’t even know how to talk to them anymore. Get 50% off your first month’s subscription here.

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• The UK will ban the installation of Huawei gear in 5G networks starting in September 2021. 
• Ant Group has long odds of going public next year, Chinese officials told Bloomberg. 
• The White House is planning to place Chinese semiconductor giant SMIC on the defense blacklist, per Reuters.
• A division of Chinese e-commerce company JD unveiled blueprints for an AI-powered smart city “operating system.”  
• The Lion Electric Company (a real name for an electric truck maker) will go public via SPAC. 

THREE THINGS WE'RE WATCHING

We’re overhauling this corner of the newsletter: Wave goodbye to What’s Brewing This Week and say hi to Three Things We’re Watching. In this section, we’ll provide a curated look at the most essential events of the week. 

Today: We’re watching earnings from Zoom, poster child of the so-called "stay-at-home" stocks. We know it has an inverse relationship with positive vaccine news. What we don’t know: How are growth and retention numbers holding up? 

Tuesday-Wednesday: Qualcomm will show off new 5G silicon for smartphones and other devices. There are technical details to absorb, but we’re more interested to hear an update on global 5G subscriptions. 

Friday: TikTok must sell itself to a U.S. company by the end of the week, or so the U.S. government says. Washington previously set the deadline for Nov. 12, then Nov. 27, and now Dec. 4. Will it be pushed back again?

TECH THINGAMABOBS

For remembering a trailblazer: Tony Hsieh, the 46-year-old former CEO of Zappos, passed away on Friday. An outpouring of tributes to the internet entrepreneur hit the web this weekend.

For holiday stress: No need to buy an adult coloring book—Google came out with an online NASA-themed one. Digitally color in astronauts, satellites, and rocket launches here. 

ICYMI

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions: 

• Trends to watch in e-commerce 
• Inside an AI-powered savings algorithm
• Roblox’s vision of the metaverse