Good morning. The 2014 launch of Amazon’s Fire Phone will forever be seared into my mind thanks to the image of a grinning (smug?) Jeff Bezos holding the device high.
It was never a question that Amazon wanted an oh-so-hot smartphone to sell you goods; what was, however, was whether anyone would want one, given that subtext. (We found out quickly: the Fire Phone was extinguished a year later.)
It’s hard to believe today’s Amazon could fall on its face so publicly in such a popular category, which is why the Version History podcast’s latest episode about it is a fun walk (stumble?) down memory lane.
Today’s tech news below. —Andrew Nusca
P.S. Don’t miss colleagues Jeremy Kahn and Leo Schwartz’s hard look at the fundamentals of CoreWeave, “potentially the first domino to fall in the AI ecosystem” if it isn’t able to grow its way out of substantial debt. (Here’s hoping CEO Michael Intrator will offer additional perspective when he speaks at our fast-approaching Fortune Brainstorm AI in San Francisco.)
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The EU might relax privacy regulations to boost AI growth
A new Politico report says the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, plans to relax some of its privacy laws in a bid to cut red tape and boost AI-driven economic growth.
Among the laws to be revised: the all-encompassing GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, which took effect in 2018 and is familiar turf for every marketer and software engineer.
Among the changes, according to the report: Exceptions for AI companies that would allow them to “legally process special categories of data to train and operate their tech,” such as religion or ethnicity, and a reframing of “personal data” to exclude pseudonymized data.
Changing today’s laws won’t be easy. On the one hand, consumer protection laws are a hallmark of the region. On the other hand, business leaders are growing increasingly concerned that they won’t be competitive on the global stage with such restrictive regulations.
There are good reasons to fret. Google, Meta, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, and Elon Musk’s X have all delayed, adjusted, or flat-out refused to launch AI products because of the bloc’s laws. And several executives—some European—have made their concerns clear.
“There’s a whole range of areas where I think the risks are minimal and we should let innovation run there,” Amazon CTO Werner Vogels told CNN last year, adding: “We need to make sure that innovation continues to happen and that the innovation doesn’t just come outside Europe. We already have a very long history in Europe of underinvesting in R&D.” —AN
Can a Chinese company deactivate 700 U.K. buses?
It’s not often that transit officials ask to pump the brakes, but here we are.
The British government is investigating whether the world’s largest bus maker—China’s Yutong—can remotely deactivate some 700 electric buses already on U.K. roads.
Most of the buses supplied to the U.K. are on streets in Glasgow, Nottingham, and South Wales. The company was also working with Transport for London on a double-decker electric bus, but the agency has yet to place an order.
Questions arose after a similar probe in Norway revealed that the Zhengzhou-based company could stop or render inoperable supplied buses, according to a Financial Times report.
Ruter, the transport group for Oslo, found that Yutong retained remote access to the battery and power supply management system of a bus it tested.
Denmark is also looking into the issue.
Yutong told the Sunday Times that it “strictly complies with the applicable laws, regulations, and industry standards of the locations where its vehicles operate.”
Whatever the case, sensitivities about national security risks remain high as China’s relationship with Western nations grows tense. —AN
The TikTok Shop sells almost as much as eBay
There’s scale, and then there’s scale.
According to the market research firm EchoTik, the TikTok Shop sold $19 billion worth of products globally in the third quarter of this year, from July through September. (TikTok doesn’t disclose sales figures.)
That’s a notch short of eBay, which raked in just over $20 billion in its latest quarter.
If that doesn’t astonish you, consider that eBay, founded in 1995, is No. 411 on the latest Fortune 500.
Meanwhile TikTok, founded in 2016 as Douyin, added commerce features in China in 2018 and launched its U.S. shop in late 2023.
Wowza.
Most TikTok usage in the U.S. is social media-focused versus social commerce-focused. (That, of course, is what the federal ban is all about.)
Still, EchoTik told Wired that it estimates that the U.S. market accounted for upwards of $4.5 billion in TikTok Shop sales as people gravitate toward seeing products in action.
Will “livestream shopping” take off in the U.S. the way it has in, say, China? Looking back to an example that rose to prominence decades ago—QVC—it’s only a matter of time before someone gets it right for a new generation. —AN
More tech
—Tech layoffs 🤝 AI spending. It’s not the AI, but the financial stress from spending on it, that’s causing cuts to human gigs, according to two academics.
—Rivian spins off Mind Robotics, a standalone industrial AI and robotics company with $110 million in outside capital.
—Cold storage crypto wallets: so hot right now. A growing pushback on hack attacks.
—Apple Music’s kryptonite? A lack of a free tier might be stopping the audio service from global domination.
—Subsea cable investment: $13 billion between 2025 and 2027, 2X the previous two years.
—OpenAI petitions U.S. for AI infrastructure relief. A request to extend a Chips Act tax credit to AI data centers.
—AI investors are as good as humans, which is to say, not very good at all!