It’s another Thursday, and here’s another week of tech talk with Mark Starling and the First News 570 crew. This week, Quibl dribbles out of existence, PayPan and Venmo get into Bitcoin, and AOC Twitches while playing Among Us. You can listen to Mark and I point and laugh while talking about the wild and crazy technology world every Thursday morning, LIVE at 6:43am Eastern.
QUIBL SHUTS DOWN AFTER DRIBBLING BILLIONS
The mobile-first streaming service, Quibi, will be shutting down after raising $1.75 billion, billion with a ‘B’, in capital. We spoke about Quibi on First News 570 and raised a number of concerns about the mobile only streaming service, but a pandemic where most people are at home with larger screens, a lot of free short form content from YouTube and TikTok, and no break out show ads to the shutdown. The service is shutting down after winning two Emmys and have tried to sell its content others, but no one took them up on their offer.
PAYPAL AND VENMO LETS US USERS PAY BY CRYPTO
PayPal and millennial money exchange service, Venmo, will allow its US based users transact business using Bitcoin. PayPal and Venmo users will be able to buy and sell Bitcoin, with PayPal taking the extra step of allowing its users to pay for goods and services anywhere PayPal is accepted for payment. PayPal won’t be transacting payments at merchants in Bitcoin, but will instead settle the payments in dollars with the merchant, but drawing down the user’s Bitcoin account. Kind of like how international transactions are settled when you pay for products in Europe, but your account has dollars.
AOC ONE OF TOP TWITCH STREAMERS AMONG US
With everyone pulling out all of the stops ahead of the US Presidential Election, Democratic Congresswoman Akexandria Ocasio Cortez amassed 440,000 viewers during her Twitch stream while playing Among Us. The congresswoman claims to be a bit of a gamer and opened up her stream to raise awareness and get out the vote. 440k makes her the third highest viewed Twitch streamer behind top of the leaderboard Drake’s Twitch stream while playing Fortnite, and somebody I don’t know.