Serious Tech News #2: Coins, Horses, and Honks
Bitcoin Christmas, angry about horses, and honking friends out of your life.
Welcome to the Holiday edition of Serious Tech News! There’s no better way to end this dumpster fire of a year than having a good ole’ Christmas carbs feast.
It’s like having a cigarette to ease your nerves after your car is being t-boned by a Toyota Prius in a quiet intersection. It’s an absurd situation, you’re still shaking and sweating, but you’re still alive. You’re too good to be killed by a Prius.
Coins for Christmas
Digital currency exchange Coinbase confidentially filed for IPO last week, prompting Bitcoin to hit a record high of $25,000. It is rumored that the timing was deliberately planned to make your Christmas dinner with your extended families miserable.
Good luck explaining to your 74-year old uncle how Bitcoin works and listening to your 16-year old Pompliano fan cousin telling everyone how “Bitcoin is a dynamic asset that becomes more functional and secure overtime” and why the US Dollar collapsing is “inevitable BRO.”
Horses in Tech
Tech Twitter is always angry. Last week, it was about horses.
Tech Crunch published an article about how startups should aspire to be “zebras” and not “unicorns.” - However, the term “zebras” has already been coined a couple of years ago by Zebras Unite, and Tech Crunch, for some reason, didn’t mention them at all.
They have now updated the article to apologize for not mentioning Zebras Unite in the first place. Talk about putting the cart before the horse (please don’t unsubscribe I have children to feed.)
Horse analogy in tech startups is on the rise. Entrepreneurs in the Indie Hackers community now call themselves “ponies”; cannabis startups now identify as “Bojack Horsemen”; and companies that got shut down after acquisition is “The beheaded horse in The Godfather” because they are more valuable dead.
Honk If You Hate Your Friends
Honk, a new chat app for real-time, ephemeral (I love this word) conversations launched last week. Promoted as a new way to have better, high-quality interactions with friends, Honk also has a useful feature for when you need to cut someone off your life: by HONKing the shit out of them.
🗣️ Need to get someone's attention fast? Honk them! They'll get a notification to come to the chat. If it's super important, you can spam the Honk button — that's hard to miss.
— Honk (@usehonk) 9:34 PM ∙ Dec 22, 2020
Social media apps have been catching up (read: copy) on this “one-time message” trend. Here’s how Facebook/Instagram described this “new” feature:
Sometimes a message is just spontaneous – something you want to say in the moment without worrying about it sticking around
Coincidentally, some men also said the same line as a defense when someone asked why they send unsolicited explicit pics to a poor women’s Twitter DM.
To stay in the competition, Apple just announced a new iMessage feature which makes your iPhone literally explode, Mission Impossible-style after a message, leaving no traces at all. Innovation.
In related news, the sound you heard just now are people Snapchatting their side piece “hey bb have you heard of this app Honk?”
That’s it for the second edition of Serious Tech News. If you somehow like the article even just a bit, please do share it with your friends! If you hate it, share it with your nemesis because nobody should suffer alone during the holidays.
See you next year, and stay serious.
