#35 Google & Amazon's troubles with games ... PayPal India ... Payment Wearables ... BookMyShow
Some bits, (actually a lot this edition)
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is stepping down from his position as CEO in Q3 and will be taking the role of Executive Chairman to focus on his other ventures such as Blue Origin, Day 1 Fund, Bezos Earth Fund, Washington Post and others. He will be replaced by Andy Jassy, who founded the ever-profitable AWS business within Amazon.
Also, more about Jassy’s conference room called Chop, where ideas are teared by stress testing the Memo’s assumptions and data.
Uber buys alcohol delivery company Drizly for $ 1.1 billion.
BookMyShow has entered the video on demand streaming service. But unlike other streaming platforms such as Netflix, Disney+ Hotstar, etc, viewers dont pay a monthly or yearly subscripton for now. Rather they can buy a movie for ever or rent it so that it can be watched within a 30-day period. Though it has 600 + movie titles for now, the content is just not strong enough.
Google is winding down its in-house game development operations, due to high costs involved in developing games. Stadia, Google’s cloud based gaming platform will still be alive. The platform will not make any games, but will allow others to use its platform.
Amazon too has its own share of problems with developing games. The company’s 3 games - Crucible, New World and Grand Tour - did not make any tractions. A Bloomberg report highlighted some problems such as game developers in Amazon are repelled by Amazon work culture, the company seeing games as hook to attract customers to its other offerings and the inability of the company’s leadership to understand game development.
Paypal India is winding down its Indian domestic business to focus solely on enabling international sales for Indian businesses. Though the company has not provided any official reason, one can guess that PayPal struggled to make in-roads in Indian market. In the UPI era, An Indian consumer will know Phone Pe, GPay or Paytm, but how many know PayPal. Think about it.
4G mobile services are now restored in Jammu & Kashmir after a gap of 18 months.
Payment wearables
Do you always need to use a Phone or smart watch to make a payment? These are expensive options, isn’t it? Why not let your wristband to make payment?
Enter Payment Wearable Devices. With the pandemic, these devices take even more contact out of the contactless payments. These wearables use Near Field Communications (NFC) technology to activate payments when the wearable is within a certain distance of the Point-of-Sale (PoS) terminal.
The market for such wearables is expected to be worth around $80.39 billion by 2028. Some of the players will include big companies such as Apple, Mastercard, Google, Samsung etc and smaller players such as Nymi, Gemalto, Wirecard, etc. Access the full report here.
Hope you found that this edition informative. See you in the next edition
Best
-Senthil