📱 Vaccinated? Just check the app

Nearly 150 years after the CDC gave students proof-of-vaccination cards to return to school in a smallpox outbreak, we’re using the same playbook.

Around the globe, teams are working on COVID-19 vaccine verification programs so we can go back to all the crowded spaces we so dearly miss.

Problem is, there’s no common standard for developers to use when designing “COVID passports.”

So governments are taking matters into their own hands…

… by introducing certifications of all kinds in cities and countries around the world:

• LA County’s vaccinated residents get physical CDC cards as well as digital cards for mobile wallets
• People in China use a symptom-checking app to access hotels and subways
• The European Union is looking at a vaccine certification plan

These programs are a nice start, but the lack of global coordination makes the efforts a far cry from universally accessible applications we could expect to use at airport check-ins.

Cue: Big Tech

With governments failing to collab, Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce teamed up with healthcare giants Mayo Clinic and Epic, among others, to build a passport dream team.

The team is working to establish universal standards for verifying, securing, and providing individuals access to vaccination records.

They’re not alone in the space: IBM, The Commons Project, the COVID-19 Credentials Initiative, and the International Air Transport Association are all working on similar systems.

These groups are facing no shortage of challenges

Rapidly building and scaling a global health care platform is cause for concern among privacy hawks.

Some also worry requiring the digital passports can be discriminatory toward those who can’t access the vaccines and to some elderly and homeless populations.

Yet the biggest hurdles are logistical. Anyone trying to take a healthcare platform global faces language barriers, database overload, and privacy laws up the wazoo.

For now, as with anything COVID-related, let’s just wait and see what happens tomorrow.

• Janet Yellen is the first woman to become US Treasury Secretary after the Senate confirmed her nomination.
• AMC gets a lifeline: The world’s largest — and most comfortable — theater chain saw shares leap 26% on Monday following news it secured $917m in much-needed financing.
• ByteDance competish: Kuaishou Technology — a popular Chinese video app — is eyeing a $60B valuation as it nears an IPO. Kuaishou’s main app has 481m monthly active users with an average daily time spent of 100+ minutes.
• Michael Scott x “Stone Cold” Steve Austin? The WWE is going exclusive on NBC’s streaming service Peacock following a $1B+ deal. (Read our story on how The Office anchors Peacock).
• Google employees launched their first union a few weeks ago and are now back again… with an international union sporting a pretty sweet name: Alpha Global.
• Amazon’s logistics business has partnered with 130 companies for its Amazon Freight Program, which currently leases out 1.1k+ Amazon-branded tractors. (We previously wrote about Amazon’s logistics ambitions here.)
• Team effort: Twitter launched Birdwatch, a product that taps the community to fight misinformation. Users on the service (which is still in pilot) can flag and add notes to tweets they believe are misleading.
• Taboola — makers of the advertising “chum box” (e.g., “You won’t believe what these 6 celebrities look liked in high school”) — will go public via a SPAC. We’ll have more on its business model tomorrow!

Do you remember Pebble?

It’s the smartwatch that raised $20m+ from Kickstarter but got eviscerated when Apple Watch started picking up steam.

Well, Pebble’s founder Eric Migicovsky just launched Beeper, a universal chat app that can link up to 15 chat platforms including WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and Slack, according to The Verge.

And its killer feature is a workaround Apple’s walled garden

Among messaging platforms, Apple’s iMessage (1.3B users) trails only Facebook-owned WhatsApp (2B users) and Messenger (~1.8B).

The only (and huge) catch with iMessage is you need Apple products to make it work. So, if you don’t have one, Beeper is sending users a “Jailbroken iPhone with the Beeper app installed.”

This crude hack probably accounts for Beeper’s monthly $10 subscription cost, per The Verge.

With the hack…

… Beeper can integrate chats across MacOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android. The whole product is being built on Matrix, an open-source communication protocol that Migicovsky wants to become a standard.

Right now, there’s a waitlist to join Beeper.

If Migicovsky can pull it off — particularly with the Apple jiujitsu — that might be a small slice of karmic revenge for Pebble’s fate… but will it have ICQ?

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If you’re stonking, GameStop ($GME) has been an unmissable sight in recent months.

The video game retailer — which has seen its stock rise more than 20x since March lows — is currently an epic battleground stock, pitting Reddit day traders vs. legacy hedge funds.

Bloomberg has a fantastic rundown:

1. $GME was first pitched as an investment on r/WallStreetBets about 2 years ago, but the current craze built up over the past 12 months.
2. Members on the subreddit r/WallStreetBets believed that GameStop, with 5k+ brick ‘n’ mortar locations, could turn around its fortunes by going digital.
3. On Aug. 31, 2020, Ryan Cohen — the billionaire founder of pet company Chewy — bought up a big position in $GME (he now owns 10%+ of it) with plans to modernize the company.
4. In the months since, a number of prominent hedge funds (Citron, Melvin Capital) revealed they were betting against (AKA short selling) $GME.
5. Typically in short selling, you: 1) borrow a stock; 2) sell it to a buyer; and 3) if the price of the stock falls, you can buy it for a cheaper price you sold it at and return the stock to the person who lent it to you.
6. One risk of short selling is called a “short squeeze.” Since you have to eventually return the stock you borrowed, problems can arise if there is a limited supply of the stock.
7. In a “short squeeze,” the underlying stock will get bid up as short sellers try to get their hands on stock that they have to return.
8. Options trading — the right, but not obligation, to buy a stock at a certain price — is also driving $GME up as institutions that sell these options are buying $GME stock to hedge their position.
9. $GME stock is on an upward tear as these market mechanics play out and r/WallStreetBets traders coordinate their efforts.

Over the past 2 trading days, $GME is up +79%. We have no idea how this will play out, but do know which subreddit will have updates.

We do a lot of talking at you, but not enough talking to you. We’d like to change that.

Got a question about your business, your side hustle, or even your love life (OK, maybe not that)? Ask us here, and next week we’ll share our thoughts “Dear Abby”-style in the Daily.

Yours Truly,

Us

Introducing Bobby 2.0 

That’s what we’re calling him now that he’s dropping lbs, picking up confidence, and walking around with the swagger of a young Leo Dicaprio.

He even sent his headshots out to “The Movie Industry” (what does that mean???) because he thinks he’s “got a face for the big screen.”

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Noom’s approach to changing your eating habits works by focusing on 3 common (and underutilized) areas: Knowledge, flexibility, and support.

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The day Volkswagen became the world’s most valuable firm. While the GameStop story is truly bonkers, one of the craziest short squeeze stories took place in October 2008, during the great financial crisis.

Starting in 2005, Porsche quietly built up an ownership position in Volkswagen for an eventual takeover attempt.

Porsche’s efforts led to a big divergence in the price of Volkswagen’s ordinary and preferred shares, with the former soaring even as the global economy was crashing.

Investors shorted the clearly overpriced ordinary shares but got caught in a short squeeze that sent Volkswagen’s stock skyrocketing.

On Oct. 28, 2008, Volkswagen’s market value hit $420B, briefly making it the world’s most valuable firm (larger than Microsoft and Exxon).

It literally lasted one day, but what a glorious day it was — or as they say in Germany, “Herrlicher Tag.”