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Global chips shortage
The world is facing global shortages for chips which are needed in automobile and many electric products. US and many advanced countries outsourced lots of components manufacturing and governments to countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, and China. US’s supply has dropped from 37% worldwide from 1990s to only 12% on 2021. Not only the effect of the chip shortage has been obvious, but also it rises a problem of how long countries’ chip dependent companies can endure the pandemic aftereffect. Chips take a months to produce so it doesn’t fix the issue like a switch on resuming manufacturing. A bright side is that the joined force in ceasing to supply the Chinese firm Huawei chips lowers the global demand on chips. The current US administration has been tasked to prioritize to prevent the chip shortage vulnerabilities persisting.
Entrepreneurship during pandemic
The pandemic has given the nudge to many to kickstart their side hustles or even turn hobbies into their new careers. There are people who become a cook from a delivery worker, making artistic vinyl mix record from being a software engineer, a denim magician from a restaurant managers. Some started the hustlers mostly because of being furloughed from their jobs. When there are crisis, there are also opportunities. Also, social media has played a huge role for people’s foray into their new careers. It is the best medium to spread their new endeavors and to raise enough attentions to confirm their decision on their new possibilities.
WhatApp’s new privacy update
What’s app’s recent update on privacy terms and conditions agreement has sparked great controversies. Due to social pressure, the team has pushed back its plan for the update by three months and explained to customers the reasons for the update. However, the team has yet to explain what they will do with the data which this time includes the metadata of payment and transaction. It is believed that the data will be used to broaden its e-commerce offerings and looks to merge its messaging platforms. Actually, since 2016, WhatsApp’s privacy policies have granted the service permission to share with Facebook certain metadata such as user phone numbers and device information.
WhatApp’s alternative Signal’s focus
On January 2021, Signal’s active user has grown to 525 million which is a quarter of WhatApp’s. CEO Acton has spoken about its long term goal on expanding the business to areas such as email and browser with the same mindset to protect users’ privacy and personal data. Acton has urged users to move away from Facebook but hasn’t made any suggestion to move away from WhatApp’s for the reason that WhatApp’s still has the value for certain uses. Signal has no plan of implementing most of the functionalities WhatApp’s have and have no intention of replacing WhatApp but only to give users another options. The source of money is donation based and quite a few successful businesses such as WikiMedia and Mozilla adopt the model. Currently there are around 50 employees in the Signal Foundation team and the company still has cash left in the bank. Acton is positive for the company’s future replying on donations. “If Signal gets to a billion users, that’s a billion donors. All we have to do is get you so excited about Signal that you want to give us a dollar or 50 rupees. The idea is that we want to earn that donation. The only way to earn that donation is building an innovative and delightful product. That’s a better relationship in my opinion,” he said.” Acton said.
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