📰 Recent Top Tech News
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to be beaten to space by Virgin.
700 Million User profiles leaked from LinkedIn
Facebook hits $1 trillion value after recent anti-monopoly court win
The Takeaways
Virgin Galactic, a space flight company, announced that its billionaire founder Richard Branson would be flying to space on July 11th. This news came hours after Jeff Bezos, fellow Billionaire founder of Amazon announced that he would be flying to space on July 20th.
🔎 Our Take
Jeff Bezos got global attention on the announcement of his plan to go to space. The familiarity of his name and his company Amazon makes the stakes of the Space Flight already interesting, but a ‘Space Race Between Billionaires’ makes it fascinating. Richard Branson knows the power of publicity, which makes the timing of the announcement feel deliberate.
🧁 Your Takeaway
People love a competition to follow. If appropriate, talk up your brand as a race, to give your fans something to cheer on for.
2. A hacker has listed a package of 700 million profiles scraped from LinkedIn. This dataset is said to contain names, mobile numbers, and physical addresses of 95% of LinkedIn. LinkedIn faced a 500 million account leak in April, but this time they said there was no actual private data theft.
🔎 Our Take
Individually one profile isn’t much, but collectively, the emails and mobile numbers lists are valuable, especially for spammers and scammers. Every time a big contact list gets leaked, we can expect spam emails to rise and even more targeted phishing attempts.
🧁 Your Takeaway
Don’t post anything on the internet you don’t want a stranger on the street to see. Even if that information isn’t particularly sensitive, it could be used in identity theft or social engineering.
3. A US Court dismissed a complaint on Facebook from the Federal Trade Commission that Facebook and its Instagram acquisition made it a monopoly in the Personal Social Networking Services market. The Court dismissed it as there was no evidence of monopolistic behavior other than a 60% market share. Shortly after the ruling, Facebook hit a $1 Trillion market value, making it the fifth US company to reach that milestone.
🔎 Our Take
Facebook enjoys a Network Effect – the more people that are on it, the more valuable it becomes to everyone else on the network. However, it does remain constantly challenged by other platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, and also general social media fatigue. One real risk with Facebook’s dominance is its need to make it as addictive as possible, to keep its ~20% share of the global online ad market.
🧁 Your Takeaway
Use the network effort to your advantage. Connect people in your network to others in your network to increase the value of yourself. Become a platform that adds value to everyone who knows you, through you.
Jargon Buster
Phishing – A scam page or link that is designed to copy a trusted website with the specific aim of getting people to type in their real credentials. With data leaks from social networks, phishing attempts can get more realistic, so be extra careful when clicking any unexpected emails.
