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- What's Appening: dAppuccinos & NFTeas ☕🕸️
What's Appening: dAppuccinos & NFTeas ☕🕸️
Starbucks web3 Initiative, TikTok Bytes Spotify, Amazon’s Clean Up, The Hack That Never Was
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STARBUCKS TAKES ITS “THIRD SPACE” TO THE BLOCKCHAIN
🌮 TLDR
In this week’s What’s Appening, we cover Starbucks’ web3 rewards initiative. The coffee chain has always been quick out of the blocks when adopting payment technologies, and it seems to have seen the light with what web3 can do for its rewards program. Elsewhere we report on Amazon’s acquisition of Roomba maker iRobot, and the rumors that Spotify may be next on the chopping block for TikTok? Our Stat of the Week looks at the GitHub hack that wasn’t a hack. And What’s dAppening reports on how Instagram is expanding NFT support globally, with Flow, one of our favorite blockchains, among the big winners.
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Takes 🎬
☕🕸️ Starbucks – Coffee Chain Set to Reveal web3 Initiative Next Month
Starbuck has always been an early adopter of payment technology, embracing ideas like mobile payment wallets long before most people had heard of Apple Pay. Its Starbucks Rewards program (around 27 million members) is also one of the best examples of a driver of customer loyalty and brand affiliation. Thus, we cannot think of a better organization to integrate the adoption of web3 technologies into its business model. So, what’s happening with Starbucks and web3? On Investor Day (September 13th), the coffee chain will officially announce a web3 rewards plan, although we have some of the details available now. This will involve NFTs, yes, but they won’t just serve as digital collectibles. Holders will use the NFTs to access rewards, as well as unique experiences and content. As we have pointed out in our web3-focused What’s dAppening section in the past, this use-case for NFTs is much more important for web3 adoption than speculative asset trading. They allow Starbucks to build a sense of community, fostering the idea of the ethereal “Third Space” between home and work that the company likes to promote. And this is only the beginning of what web3 can do for companies like Starbucks and their customers. If you have five minutes, take a look at this Twitter thread from the brilliant @TaschaLabs (a must-follow on Twitter), who looks at how web3 and crypto tokenization can transform companies’ reward programs, including Starbucks. We don’t fully agree with every prediction Tascha makes on web3 adoption, but some of her arguments are truly compelling. #Web3SpicedLattes Read more here.
🎶📹 TikTok – Potential Challenge to Spotify and Apple Music with Patent Filing
TikTok and music have always gone hand in hand. The company’s parent is called ByteDance for a reason, and many music artists have become ‘TikTok famous’ before hitting the mainstream. But there has always been a clear line in the sand over where TikTok ends and streaming services like Spotify begin. You don’t have TikTok gym playlists, for example, or download TikTok tracks, and you probably don’t play TikTok in your car. However, a patent filing in the US might be about to change all that. From the USPTO filing, ByteDance wants to allow “users to purchase, play, share, download music, songs, albums, lyrics.”. Filing a patent is not the same as launching a streaming platform, and we have yet to learn what TikTok’s plans are, but it might sound ominous if you are Spotify, Apple Music, or Amazon Music. ByteDance has already launched a streaming platform, Resso, in parts of South America and Asia, combining many of the social elements of TikTok with traditional music streaming. Until we see more detail on the blueprint, we should stop short of saying that this spells bad news for Spotify and other streaming services. What Resso offers is not dissimilar to YouTube Music, even if some TikTok-like elements make it unique. Still, when the world’s most popular app moves into your patch, you would do well to sit up and take notice. Spotify, the global leader in music streaming, might feel secure in its position. But Facebook and Instagram felt that way one day, too, before TikTok came along. #SpotiFight Read more here.
🤖💵 Amazon – Acquisition of iRobot Suggests Big Future for Smart Homes
A bit of a change of pace here away from TikTok’s global domination with a look at the exciting world of vacuum cleaners. Amazon’s $1.7 billion acquisition of iRobot – the maker of robot vacuum cleaner Roomba – has added another arrow to the company’s quiver (Echo, Ring, Astro) of smart home products. We won’t go into too much detail on Roomba, nor Amazon’s plans for keeping your floors clean, as we are a little more interested in iRobot’s launch of an AI operating system for its products. Launched in May, iRobot OS uses AI to learn about your home and your habits, allowing it to get smarter about when and how it cleans. The use of an OS creates more of an ecosystem for iRobot products, allowing them to connect to other devices, including presumably Amazon’s existing smart home range. Interestingly, Amazon is going to keep Colin Angle in position as CEO of iRobot, which seems a smart move as the MIT graduate is seen as something akin to the Steve Jobs of home-cleaning robotics. #AmazonCleansUp Read more here.
🧐 Stats of the Week – 35,000 Repos “Not” Hacked
Hacking news was everywhere last week. We watched on with horror as many Solana wallets were drained of crypto, and the Nomad Bridge suffered one of the most chaotic hacks we’ve ever seen. So, it was with trepidation on the same day that Twitter users read the tweet from a Github dev, who reported that 35,000 repositories were infected with malware. A Github repository, or repo, is basically the location where files and lines of code relating to a project are stored and managed. The tweet created something of a panic and some erroneous reporting before it later transpired that the repos had been cloned, with malware added to the clones, rather than hacked. The difference is important, as it meant that official projects ranging from python to crypto to golang remained unaffected. Eventually, GitHub managed to get on top of things, purging the clones without having its accounts compromised. We might file this one under disaster averted. #NotHacked Read more here.
🕸️ What’s dAppening?
A dApp is a decentralized app. Here’s the latest in web3, NFTs and blockchain apps.
🖼️🌍 Meta – NFT Support on Instagram Extended to over 100 Countries
We have covered each step of Instagram’s foray into NFTs over the last few months, remarking on how Adam Mosseri (Insta’s boss) was taking a careful approach by “starting small” (his words). Instagram has dipped a toe in the water, but now it seems Mosseri is going waist-deep with the roll-out of NFT support to over 100 countries. It’s good news for those of us who want to see NFTs given more mainstream exposure, but it’s also a win for the blockchain Flow, as Instagram has added it to the list of blockchains it supports. Flow is the blockchain of choice for our NFT and web3 projects here at 3Advance, and we are big fans of its developer-friendly tools and green credentials. Almost every major crypto wallet will be able to connect to Instagram, including Rainbow, Dapper, MetaMask, and Coinbase Wallet. We should remind you that Facebook is just a step behind Instagram in its own NFT support. At a stroke, hundreds of millions of users will be able to share and display NFTs. Surely an NFT marketplace might not be far behind? #NFTsFlowingOnInsta Read more here.
Meanwhile at 3Advance...
Well, it seems like it’s been birthday after birthday here at 3Advance, so that’s been hogging the airwaves over here on our Slack channels. So, thought we’d better big up all the Leos in the house over at 3Advance HQ. Happy Birthdays to Rishi (7/28), Roshan (7/30), Gabe (8/9), Matt (8/14) and Kayne (8/18)… Leos are noted for being lively, fun, loyal, and honest. So in addition to being solid professionals, we’ll take all this too.