FTI Consulting News Bytes – 19th August 2022

This week’s news

TV viewing numbers slump with younger audiences

An Ofcom report has revealed that people aged 16 to 24 spend just 53 minutes each day watching TV, a two-thirds decrease in the past 10 years. BBC News reports that the figures also represent a seven-times gap between viewing figures for this age group and over 65s, who watch television for just under 6 hours a day on average. Ofcom attributes the gap to the popularity of streaming services, with one in five households now using subscriptions for all top three streaming services, Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime. Streaming services have seen trouble amidst the cost-of-living crisis, though, the number of homes with at least one subscription having decreased by 350,000.

US Private Equity firm attempts Darktrace takeover

A US private equity firm has launched a multi-billion pound bid to take over British cybersecurity company Darktrace, The Telegraph reports. The Chicago-based firm Thoma Bravo previously bought another UK cybersecurity company, Sophos in 2019 for £3.1bn; Darktrace’s current market cap is £2.8bn, however the current takeover bid amount is yet to be confirmed. Founded by tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch in 2013, Darktrace’s unique selling point is its AI-powered cybersecurity tools. Whilst tech stocks have recently seen a downturn, the company has been benefitting from increased attention to cybersecurity bought about by the growing threat of Russian hacking. Darktrace said: “Discussions are at a preliminary stage and there can be no certainty that any offer will be made, nor as to the terms of any such offer.”

Apple employees return to the office

Apple CEO Tim Cook has announced employees will soon be required to return to the office for at least three days a week in an effort to preserve the “in-person collaboration that is so essential to our culture”. The Financial Times reports on a memo sent to all Apple employees specifying that they must be present on Tuesdays and Thursdays, plus one more day to be decided on a team-by-team basis. The move comes as various Silicon Valley firms struggle to coax their employees back to work. Pushback against in-person mandates has been strong, particularly in the tech sector. In fact, the first time Apple tried to take this decision in June 2021, (although it was eventually delayed due to Covid), one of their directors of machine learning left for Alphabet in protest. Apple’s approach is strict in comparison to other companies such as Instagram, Twitter and Airbnb, the latter having announced a ‘fully remote’ work system.

Airbnb says the party’s over

Airbnb has said it will deploy ‘anti-party’ technology to prevent guests from throwing house-parties, The Guardian reports. Previously, Airbnb had allowed hosts to rent out their properties for parties at their own discretion, but now its stance is to prevent them altogether. The preventative technology, which has been trialed in Australia, will look at “factors like history of positive reviews (or lack of positive reviews), length of time the guest has been on Airbnb, length of the trip, distance to the listing, weekend vs weekday, among many others” to determine whether a particular booking was likely to be intended for hosting a party, the company said. In 2019, the company banned ‘chronic party houses’ (houses let out repeatedly for one purpose, which became nuisances in their communities), and in 2020, due to Covid, parties altogether. The ban was made permanent in June of this year, with Airbnb now looking to enforce it more effectively.

Chinese tech giants reveal their algorithms

In an unprecedented move, large Chinese tech companies like Alibaba and Tencent have shared details of their prized algorithms with the country’s cyber regulators, CNBC reports. The move comes as Beijing looks for more oversight of its domestic internet sector, including the recommendation algorithms used by the largest tech companies. The Cyberspace Administration of China, one of the country’s most powerful regulators, released a list on Friday of 30 algorithms alongside a brief description of their purpose. A law introduced in March means that Chinese tech companies must allow users to opt out of recommendation algorithms and must register those algorithms with the regulator.  The U.S. and European Union have yet to introduce anything like the law seen in China, although European lawmakers are currently debating rules around the use of artificial intelligence.

Top Tweets of the Week

• Jim Waterson , Media Editor at The Guardian– “TikTok is TV…. Britons aged 15-24 spend an average of 57 minutes a day watching TikTok. More time than they spend watching all traditional TV broadcasts. Meanwhile old people continue to bloody love broadcast TV and watch enormous amounts of it.”
• Tom’s Hardware – “Scammers Distribute Fake Microsoft Office USB Sticks With Malware”
• Rory Cellan-Jones Former BBC Technology Correspondent – “Over 90% of A-level Computer Science students are boys. Confirms what I wrote about looming crisis in tech ed”

Number of the Week

£22.5M – The amount of money raised by London-headquartered fintech startup Super in a pre-seed round as it looks to take on PayPal and Klarna.

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