TikTok finally chooses a winning bidder for its U.S. operations. Although this is not an outright bid it seems. This is a collaborative partnership with TikTok parent company, ByteDance.
In the first week of August, the U.S. government put pressure on the Beijing, China-based company to sell it’s U.S. operations. The United States government was not alone, nor the first in banning TikTok from the country. This was a reaction to the U.S. government’s view that the ability of the app to capture users’ location data and browsing history was a threat to users in the United States. The largest names in the running for the bid included Walmart and Microsoft. There were a few interesting conditions to the sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations. One in particular was that the sale would include a ‘substantial amount of money coming to the U.S. Treasury.’
Oracle (ORCL) has emerged as a serious competitor to other cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AMZN), Microsoft Azure (MSFT), Google Cloud Platform (GOOG), and others. Zoom chose Oracle in April of this year as it’s main Cloud Infrastructure Platform for their Core Online Meeting Service as Zoom saw in increase from 10 million daily users to a reported nearly 300 million, which the company later retracted. But nonetheless, the company has seen an absurd increase in numbers almost entirely due to Covid-19.
Overall, I think the partnership with Oracle will serve as an interesting one. And I really believe this will be remembered as a significant turning point for Oracle. This does not appear to be a takeover of assets or intellectual property (referring to the effective machine learning algorithm that keeps users glued to their phones – according to this article, the average user spends 52 minutes per day on the app).
Speaking of machine learning algorithms, please make sure that you are doing your best to be aware of what your social media feeds are recommending for you. What shows up on your Facebook feed and YouTube recommended list, those are by design. If you are not seeing the ‘media’ outrage about a particular issue, that’s because your social media platform or news organization is helping guide your emotional decision making. Your greatest asset is time, don’t waste it all on a screen every day. That’s literally what this Black Mirror episode portrayed. Just please be careful, and don’t hesitate to ‘smell the roses’ every now and then. Do your best to protect your mental health during this unprecedented time, that is the most important priority!
