Welcome back to Forests Over Trees, your weekly tech strategy newsletter. It’s time to zoom-out, connect dots, and (try to) predict the future.
Google stops and Bitcoin drops
Seven Tech Stories
1/ No… comment!
Spotify is rolling out a feature to let us comment on podcast episodes. Seems like they’re trying to set the stage for more community engagement. Maybe they’ll even let commenters have profiles and grow followings, moving towards a music/podcast-based social media, similar to what I argued for back in June. Read more here from The Verge.
2/ Child $tar
A new Illinois law went into effect last week, and it requires parents/caregivers who are making money while featuring kids in >30% of their social media content to set aside $$$ for said kids. This is well-intentioned, but probably pretty difficult to track/enforce. Read more here from ABC News.
3/ NFC Opening
Apple has agreed to compromise with the EU on opening-up its NFC chip for other apps/3rd parties to use for payments. They still have several “irons in the fire” with the EU regulators, including the $38B in anti-steering fines I wrote about last week. But getting small problems solved with the regulators should create some positive momentum for them on those scarier issues. Read more here from Bloomberg.
4/ Blocks > Warnings
Historically, web crawlers were expected to heed the warnings contained in Robots.txt files on websites. If that file effectively said “don’t crawl here”, then crawlers would skip it. But with the rise of AI-powered bots (and huge incentives to grab data to train AI models), these warnings are being ignored. So Cloudflare introduced a new tool to identify and block AI-bots directly. If you ask me, moves like this should be a hell of a lot more effective than just asking nicely. Read more here from TechCrunch.
5/ Google Not Buying HubSpot
For Google, it would have been a pretty sweet deal strategically. They already dominate advertising but would have benefitted from horizontally integrating with a best-in-class CRM company like Hubspot. Plus, because HubSpot’s customers are mostly SMB’s in growth-mode, it would have given them introductions for selling them Google’s cloud and AI services down the line. Read more here from CNBC.
6/ Easier to Grok
X is apparently planning on giving its users the option to pop-up and use their GPT clone, Grok, while using the X app. While it’s still a head-scratcher that Grok exists as a research project within X (and that Elon is pursuing for-profit AI after being vocally critical of OpenAI’s pivot away from non-profit status), this is probably a good idea. It could be interesting to fact-check things or draft clever rebuttals with some help from AI. Read more here from TechCrunch.
7/ Mt. Gox makes BTC slide
Mt. Gox was one of the first crypto exchanges. And in 2014, hackers stole 950K Bitcoin from it. After a ten-year bankruptcy and unwinding, 140K coins have been recovered and are being returned. Even comparing the lowest price of 2014 to the lowest price of 2024, prices are up more than 100x, so lots of those coins are expected to be sold… which means prices are down slightly. So listen, if you wanna throw a couple recovered Bitcoin at me, I’ll take a couple… the big thing is that we’re all moving on. Read more here from Coin Telegraph.