🍏 Apple Hits $3 Trillion

APPLE BECAME WORLD'S FIRST PUBLICLY-TRADED COMPANY WITH A $3 TRILLION VALUATION

🌮 TLDR

Apple briefly became the world’s first three-trillion-dollar company on January 3rd, tripling its value in just over three years. The rise of TikTok continues and the video-sharing app is bringing its content to America’s TVs. Google is making life easier for Windows PC users, as it promises a new era of device interoperability. Our Stat of the Week looks at a very good Christmas period for Meta-owned Oculus. And in our new web3-focused section, What’s dAppening?, we look at Samsung’s bold move into the NFT space.

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🎬 Takes

💸 🍏 Apple — (Briefly) Becomes World’s First $3 Trillion Company

‍There were plenty of takeaways as Apple’s stock price meant it became the world’s first public company to reach a market cap of $3 trillion (its stock has since been pegged back a bit). At this point, if Apple Inc was a country, it would have a larger GDP than most of the bigger developed economies like Russia and Canada. However, we think the jaw-dropping aspect is that it was just 2018 when we were all shaking our heads at Apple becoming the first trillion-dollar company. Its value has tripled in just over three years, and that growth is across a period characterized by (relatively) flat iPhone sales, the supply chain and chip shortage crises, and, of course, the pandemic. We trawled around the financial media to make sense of it all, and the most common answer was that “Apple is very good at making money”. Sounds vague, but there is a little more to it than that. Apple is supremely adept at getting us to spend within its eco-system, nudging us to pay for extra iPhone storage or buy AirPods and annoyingly-expensive charging cables. There are also those juicy fees charged in the App Store, something that clearly upsets many of its Big Tech rivals. About 15 years ago, Steve Jobs made his famous keynote speech, explaining that “Apple was going to reinvent the phone”. The company’s market cap on the day of that speech, which introduced the world to the iPhone, was $81.6 billion. That's 37 times smaller than Apple is today. #AppleHits3Trillion Read more here.

📺 🕺 TikTok — Video-Sharing App Continues Inexorable Rise with TikTok TV

‍This story has been bubbling away for a while, but it comes on the back of a hellacious 2021 for TikTok when it reached the milestone of 1 billion monthly users. In short, TikTok has been quietly rolling out its TV interface over the last couple of years, partnering with Amazon Fire TV, Samsung, LG, and Google and Android TV devices. The TV interface became available in North America in November 2021, but it seems TikTok is not done yet with its bigger-screen ambitions. It has partnered with Atmosphere, a startup that provides licensed content to commercial venues – the kind of content you see on a muted screen when you are at the gym or a doctor’s waiting room. Atmosphere also provides video content for restaurants like Taco Bell and hotel chains like Westin, and it hopes to provide the gateway for TikTok to become a force as an out-of-home video service. It’s good news for TikTok, and it’s great news for creators who will earn from a broader audience on a new medium. #TikTokTV Read more here.📱

💻 Google — Bringing Android and Windows PCs Closer Together

‍Google wants to “invest in more helpful ways for your devices to work better together”, and that means working with its rivals. In this case, Google is working (indirectly) with Microsoft by rolling out new ways to integrate your Android phones and tablets with Windows PCs. Initially, Google has partnered with Intel, Acer, and HP to make it easier to connect PCs to your phone, share files, sync messages, and so on. It’s going to be a limited number of PCs to begin with, but this is commendable work from Google and Microsoft, who have both been looking at ways to increase device interoperability over the last couple of years. On the other hand, Google has been accused of making things difficult for users this week, and it has been fined $170 million by the French authorities for some cookie-based shenanigans. The Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés said Google – and Facebook ($68 million fine) – deliberately made it difficult for French users to reject les cookies 🍪, basically forcing them to do several clicks instead of one. Not a great look for the pair, who both seem to have meekly accepted their punishment, for now anyway. #GoogleWorksWithWindows Read more here.

🧐 Stat of The Week — Over 2M Downloads Since Christmas

This is really positive news for Meta, adding weight to its ambition of building the software and hardware needed for the metaverse. The Oculus VR companion app had around 2 million downloads over the Holidays, confirming that Oculus Quest 2 headsets were a top gift this Christmas; the Oculus app even hit number one in the App Store for the first time on Christmas Day. To put it in perspective, these 2 million downloads came across approximately two weeks, dwarfing what Oculus had in its first year (1.2 million downloads in 2018) and almost matching the 2.4 million from 2019. With around 8-10 million app downloads (depending on who you ask) in 2021, things are certainly looking up for Oculus and Meta’s VR ambitions. #OculusBestChristmasYet Read more here.

🕸️ What’s dAppening?

📺 🐵 Samsung — Electronics Giant Unveils New TVs With Unique NFT Integration

‍Last week, Samsung made a big fuss about its 2022 range of MICRO LED, Neo QLED, and Lifestyle TVs (no idea what a “Lifestyle” TV is, but we imagine it has a nice picture and does some cool smart stuff). Anyway, buried way down in the very, very long press release was this little nugget: “This application features an intuitive, integrated platform for discovering, purchasing and trading digital artwork through MICRO LED, Neo QLED and The Frame.”. In plain English, Samsung has launched its very own NFT platform through its smart TVs, allowing you to view, buy, and display NFTs as part of its integration. But beyond Samsung jumping on the NFT bandwagon, which will surely be an accusation thrown at it by naysayers, we have to admit this is a smart move by the electronics giant: What better way to show off your expensive purchase of a Bored Ape or Beeple original than displaying it on a 60-inch MICRO LED TV? #SamsungNFTPlatform Read more here.

Meanwhile at 3Advance...

Happy New Year! We’re back, and you may have noticed a new section in this Newsletter: What’s dAppening. It’s a play on the term “dApp”, which is a portmanteau (combination of two words, like podcast… hands up, who knew that? ✋) for Decentralized Application. A dApp is an app that runs on a blockchain as opposed to centralized servers. The more prominent term you’ve probably heard of at this point is web3, which is the umbrella term for all things crypto (dApps, NFTs, DeFi, DAOs,...). It’s hard to ignore this movement for much longer and we’re excited to feature a web3 story in this newsletter from now on.The team here at 3Advance has been doing more than just following the web3 movement: We have been building on it, and we have a big web3 project launching late Q1. Stay tuned. In the meantime, check our website or reach out to us about our offerings in this new frontier.