Welcome back to your daily memorandum talking tech, business, AI, markets, and more. 🗞️

In today’s edition we are tackling the following:

🤳🏻 Instagram is planning to downgrade quality of unpopular posts.
🐻 Trump does Rogan, Kamala backs out.
🇮🇩 Indonesia bans sales of the iPhone.
💹 NASDAQ boss says she’s not surprised we’ve not opened the IPO market.
🚀 Megadeals are still booming, and not only in AI.

TECH

• Instagram is lowering video quality for unpopular videos

  • Meta wrote last year about using different encoding configurations for different videos depending on their popularity.

  • “If something isn’t watched for a long time, we will move to a lower quality video,” per Instagram leaders, Adam Mosseri.

  • Users are pushing back suggesting this approach creates a system that privileges popular creators over smaller ones.

• Google prepares to launch AI agent, code-named Project Jarvis

  • ‘Jarvis’ will take over a person’s browser to gather research, make purchases, book flights.

  • Anthropic’s release last week is in similar vein.

  • Product may be previewed in December.

• Founders and VCs back a pan-European C corp, but an ‘EU Inc’ has a rocky road ahead

  • Europe’s answer to a Delaware C-Corp idea is gaining particular traction.

  • Launched on October 14, the ‘EU Inc’ petition has already attracted some 11,000 signatures.

  • Critics say the European equivalent of a Delaware company structure will be dragged down by red tape and nation-states. 

BUSINESS

• VC megadeals are booming—and AI is surprisingly not the top category

  • Down rounds were still at near record highs through the first half of 2024.

  • Despite the gloom, new data from Crunchbase shows a boom in $100M+ megadeals.

  • Biotech and healthcare startups accounted for 87 mega-deals, compared to 26 for second-place category AI.

• This is the Mac Mini’s big moment

  • Apple is about to announce its smallest computer ever.

  • Mac Mini was first introduced in Jobs era of early 2005, it was pitched as a compact “stripped-down” desktop.

  • Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that the M4-powered Mac Mini will be the size of Apple TV.

• Siri’s big ChatGPT upgrade is here—for better and worse

  • Apple Intelligence’s official launch is less than a week away.

  • Siri will ask if the user wants to ‘ChatGPT’ a request.

  • Siri gets a new look with a glowing border, a new text interface, and improved language understanding. And ChatGPT.

CONTENT

• Trump does three hour Rogan interview

  • The episode has 32 million views within 48 hours.

  • Currently the 4th highest view JRE in history.

  • Reports are Kamala will not make appearance.

• An Interview with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff about AI Abundance

  • Ben Thompson of Stratechery sits down with Benioff.

  • Building Salesforce, Agentforce, AI’s false prophets and more.

  • The interview has a run time of just under an hour.

• Meta episode by the Acquired podcast

  • Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, AI, Oculus, Orion, and more.

  • The Acquired Podcast hosted Zuckerberg live in stage recently.

  • Total runtime of over 6 hours, 22 minutes.

WORLD

• Indonesia bans sales of the iPhone

  • Government of Indonesia claims Apple hasn’t fulfilled investment pledges.

  • Rivals Samsung, Xiaomi have set up local factories to comply.

  • The $1 trillion economy has over 350 million active mobile phones.

• Influencers are earning thousands for election posting

  • On TikTok, Instagram and X, freelancers are profiting from election advertising.

  • Campaigns and PACs are funnelling record amounts of campaign financing into influencers and creators.

  • Critics are unhappy with the lack of transparency and oversight into said campaigns.

• Musk, Putin and CEO Telephone Calls

  • It's common for Satya Nadella to make two calls a day to rival CEOs.

  • Elon speaks personally with Putin on a regular basis per the Wall Street Journal.

  • Reports are that Putin once asked Musk to do a favour for China’s president Xi Jinping.

AND MORE…

• Hospitals use a transcription tool powered by a hallucination-prone OpenAI model

  • Researchers found that Whisper invents entire passages of text when presented with moments of silence.

  • More than 30,000 clinicians and 40 health systems use Whisper.

  • The researchers found that hallucinations also included invented medical conditions.

• Polymarket Is a Success for Polygon Blockchain–Everywhere But the Bottom Line

  • Polymarket has been a major success getting mainstream usage and attention of late.

  • But according to data, Polymarket has only brought in about $27,000 of transaction fees for Polygon in 2024.

  • Polygon Labs CEO, Marc Boiron, agreed $27k is low. Argues it’s a selling point of how cheap it is to use blockchain.

• NASDAQ CEO Adena Friedman isn’t surprised we haven’t seen a resurgence in startup IPOs yet

  • “It’s a little bit of a tale of two cities,” Friedman said.

  • “Large cap, which has done very well … if you look at the small cap index, they’re actually down 10%.”

  • Friedman said she thinks IPOs will start to return with momentum in 2025.