HQ Trivia has held its last live stream and shut down for good
ACCC launches two new digital advertising market inquiries
Zuck reckons Facebook needs some government regulation
Tritium batteries can power small devices for years
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Hands up who played HQ Trivia for like a fortnight then never opened the app ever again? Yep, me too. I totally forgot about HQ Trivia until now, which probably explains why the app and associated business is closing down. It launched in late 2017 and was a huge viral hit. One of it's co-founders died of an accidental drug overdose in December 2018. It paid out US$6m in prizes and spent $15m in venture capital in its roughly 2 year existence. At one point it was worth US$100m and made "millions in revenue" via in-app partnership and sponsored trivia sessions. Here's a video of the last ever HQ Trivia live stream.
The federal government has instructed the ACCC to do "a long‑term inquiry into digital platforms and to undertake an 18 month inquiry into advertising technology" in response to the ACCC's mid-2019 Digital Platforms Inquiry that it hopes will "improve the sustainability of the Australian media landscape". The Digital Platform Services Inquiry 2020-2025 will monitor "competition in markets for the supply of digital platform services" for the next 5 years and provide bi-monthly reports on how competition in the industry is going. The Digital Advertising Services Inquiry will spend 18 months looking at "technologies that gather information about consumers and use it to target them with highly personalised advertising online".
Zuck has given an interview at the Munich Security Conference saying that he concedes Facebook and other social media companies need some sort of state regulation. The areas he thinks Facebook should be regulated are "elections, political discourse, privacy and data portability" and that a framework for regulating social media should be "somewhere in between" newspapers/existing media and telcos. Here's a video of the 30 min chat. On the topic of Mark Zuckerberg, Steven Levy has written a book about him and an excerpt is up on Wired. I haven't read it all yet (I honestly can't muster much energy to give a shit about Zuck these days, we've known the dude's a megalomaniac prick for a decade and nothing's changed) but Levy gets access others don't so it's probably worth a read.
Have you heard of tritium batteries? I didn't until recently and they are some straight up 50s future tech. These batteries are about the size of an SO-DIMM stick of RAM and look like regular integrated circuits that you solder on to a PCB. They are able to supply a tiny bit of power (50-100 microwatts) for like 20 years by generating electricity off the molecular decay of the radioactive element tritium. The main uses are "environmental pressure/temperature sensors, intelligence sensors, medical implants, trickle charging lithium batteries, semi-passive and active RFIDs, silicon clocks, SRAM memory backup, deep-sea oil well sensors & lower power processors". Not sure how much they cost, but still, pretty cool.
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