News about Discord, NFTs, and more
March 2021 was an exciting month with news around Discord and of course, the craze around NFts so let's get straight into your tech update all summarized for the month. Don't forget to share it if this update has been useful for you!
1. Microsoft in talks to buy Discord for 10 billion dollars
If you’re a gamer or someone who keeps up with tech, you would have either used or heard of Discord.
In short, Discord is a community communication tool that allows users to hang out in groups to talk over voice, text, and even share content. In a way, it’s where a lot of gamers migrated to after Skype got clunky to use.
Discord has reached out to potential buyers, and Microsoft happened to be one of them. Microsoft is most likely going after this buy to strengthen its position within the social networking market and the gaming market. This would work especially well across its Xbox range as well as Microsoft gaming.
Exciting to see if Discord will go with Microsoft or just end up going public.
2. Oneplus released its first watch for $159
Oneplus definitely took the phone market by storm with its range of phones. However, it’s taken a while for this tech giant to release a watch into the market, unlike many of its competitors.
Its new watch is priced reasonably at $159 and Oneplus opted for a more circular design rather than a rectangular one like Apple or Oppo. What I really like about this is its promised battery life which supposedly could last a week with a 20-minute charge.
Here is a fact sheet:
3. The NFT craze!
In March, Jack Dorsey (founder of Twitter) sold his very first tweet for $2,915,835.47.
Of course, this whopping amount was donated by the entrepreneur to GiveDirectly, a charitable organization that gives money directly to people living in poverty.
So what exactly is NFT? NFT stands for Non-fungible token.
Let’s look at it as an analogy. If you go to an auction and you buy a painting, you receive the actual physical item.
Unfortunately for digital items, if you win, say, a digital piece of art, you could always receive it in a digital format, but there is no way of ‘owning it’ as someone could easily just copy it. Instead, NFT hopes to change this but giving you a unique digital token that symbolizes your ownership of said product which can then be bought or sold.
The records cannot be forged as these smart contracts are executed via a blockchain, making yours unique. In a way, you’re owning the ‘original’ work even if others can still copy it.
In my opinion, it’s all kind of silly, and this will eventually bubble out, but it’s still interesting to see this concept take off since I had seen it years ago.
4. Facebook, Uber, and Microsoft will start to open their offices again
With COVID-19 vaccines in market, many tech companies that have been remote for the most of 2020 are now looking to reopen their offices for their employees to return.
Although many of these companies have promised most of their employees could work remotely for the next 5 - 10 years, of course, with the amount of spending on campuses and property, there is no doubt they want to at least populate some of these offices to some capacity.
Uber has already re-opened their offices at a 20% capacity while others will follow suit. Other companies like Twitter will keep a more remote-focused workforce.
5. You can officially buy a Tesla with bitcoin
In February, Elon Musk made headlines when he purchased over $1.5 billion in Bitcoin for Tesla. He also mentioned he wanted to make Tesla’s purchasable through bitcoin.
1.5 months later, he has now made it possible to buy a Tesla through Bitcoin. So far, this is only available to the US but will open up to the rest of the world over time.
Final Note
Hope you enjoyed the wrap-up of March! If you enjoyed this, please share it as it helps and motivates me to produce more content every month 😊
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