Tech Bytes – Week until Feb 7

Recent Top Tech News 📰

1. Amazon Billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos Steps Down – Cloud is the Future
2. iOS update and Impact to Online Advertising – Time to Diversify!
3. Google threatens to exit Australia – yeah, nah, it’s not happening.

Takeaways

Jeff Bezos steps down (or up) from CEO to Executive Chairman of Amazon Board, and announces the new CEO, Andy Jassey, who was previously head of Amazon Web Services.

🔎 Our Take

• Cloud & Digital Services is clearly the future of all tech companies, with Bezos placing his giant company in the hands of someone who’s been growing the wildly profitable cloud business. Amazon Web Services (AWS) grew to this space by making it extremely easy to buy cloud processing and storage, entirely online with just a credit card.

🧁 Your Takeaway

• If you are running a business, consider relooking at how online friendly your services are, and how automated the customer experience is.

Apple pushed an important iOS update – so now apps like Facebook and Instagram need explicit permission to track users outside of the apps.

🔎 Our Take

• Going from a default Yes to tracking to a more explicit “Allow Facebook to track me outside the app” is going to be scary for many new users. However, advertising online will still remain a critical growth engine for all companies, and we expect Apple (and Google) to come up with a more privacy focused advertising system.

🧁 Your Takeaway

• Marketers may treat this as a Y2K-level event, but as with anything, focus on a diverse set of marketing tools (Google ads, Pinterest, Reddit, Emails, SMS, Influencers etc) instead of just one Facebook.

Google has threatened to leave Australia over a controversial bill that forces Google to pay Australian news outlets to link to them.

🔎 Our Take

• If this were actually happening, it would impact business who are invested in Google’s Search Engine Rankings, Reviews, Paid Advertising, Google Maps… and a dozen other services that helps business be found by customers. Google saw $4.8 Billion revenue in 2020 from Australia alone… so we can almost guarantee this threat is meaningless.

🧁 Your Takeaway

• Consumers are already looking at other search engine options other than Google, such as DuckDuckGo, and Microsoft’s Bing. Make sure your website is optimised and ranked on other portals as well, with actually useful content and not cheap ranking tricks.

Jargon Buster

• API – “Application Programming Interface” – these are program connectors that allow different company’s software to talk to each other. For example, when you login to Domino’s Pizza app using your Google account, there is an API from Google server that talks to Domino’s server to know it know that your login looks good.
• One of the reasons of success of Amazon Web Services is that all their services can be accessed via an API, which allows a lot of automation too.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, and you know someone in your team or business circle would find this useful, then be the Legend that you are and forward this to them.

Also, if you find some news and wanted an explanation or a takeaway, drop a comment below or just shoot over a note to vishal@quantana.com.au and I’d love to do a breakdown in the next days update.

Stay Awesome!

Vishal
Founder & Director
Quantana