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Here’s what you need to know
Major US and UK vaccines moved forward. Johnson & Johnson joins Moderna and Pfizer in advancing to Phase 3 vaccine trials. This final phase of testing will be the largest US study with 60,000 participants. Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports that the UK is moving ahead with “challenge trials” that involve deliberately infecting volunteers with Covid-19.
TikTok takes Trump to court… Days after Tencent’s WeChat won a delay to the US president’s national security ban, ByteDance is giving the same tactic a go. If a proposed deal between ByteDance, Oracle, and Microsoft isn’t completed by Sept. 27, TikTok could still be pulled from digital app stores in the US.
…and so did Tesla… The EV maker is suing the US government over 2019 tariffs levied against parts Tesla imports from China. The company also saw a rare complete network outage affecting internal corporate systems and consumer connectivity features. All that plus a disappointing Battery Day added up to a 10% ding to its stock.
…so is it time to look elsewhere for plug-in cars? SPI Energy, a Hong Kong-based solar energy business, announced a plan to develop an electric vehicle unit. You’ll never guess what happened next—the stock popped 4,000% before settling down to just a 1,200% daily gain. On the more established side, Volkswagen revealed its Tesla competitor and China’s Geely debuted its new platform for electric vehicles.
Why did Quibi fail?
The bite-sized streaming platform underestimated, well, a lot.
😴 Content: The shows just aren’t good enough. No video platform—no matter how innovative the technology or elaborate the marketing—will work without stuff viewers want to watch.
😰 Competition: Quibi thought it would corner “in-between moments,” but turns out social media already has. So by trying to sidestep competition with the big streaming services, it simply put itself up against other big platforms—TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat.
🤐 Shareability: At first, Quibi didn’t allow sharing content or even taking screenshots. You know what tends to be a show’s best free marketing? A viral meme.
And that’s not all. Adam Epstein details the missteps of the little streaming engine that couldn’t.
Charting Africa’s bitcoin activity
In August 2018, a report on the state of cryptocurrency regulation across Africa came back with one obvious conclusion: most countries were undecided on what to do. But, in what represents a major shift, Nigeria and South Africa—two of the continent’s largest economies—are stepping up regulatory plans.
Local users and cryptocurrency startups across the continent are not exactly waiting for regulation to catch up. Cryptocurrency trading has taken off, partly powered by homegrown exchanges which continue to operate in regulatory gray areas. Yomi Kazeem follows how the regulators of Africa’s big economies are trying to stay on top of a cryptocurrency trading spike.
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The history of the home office
Working from home is a revival of an old idea. Before the Industrial Revolution, the template for residential architecture included a space for doing business. English “workhouses” combined a workshop with the family’s living quarters, “longhouses” gave shelter to farmers and their animals, and merchants often lived above their workshops and storefronts. In the US, middle-class homes typically had a “den” or “gentleman’s study” close to the front door where the master of the house received clients.
What changed with the Industrial Revolution is now seeing another big shift. In 1967, US broadcast journalist Walter Cronkite concluded his report on the home office by predicting, correctly, that “with equipment like this in the home of the future, we may not have to go to work—the work will come to us.” Our latest field guide offers guidance on how to make the most of that shift.
✦ Not yet a member? Unwrap this special gift from us to you. It’s Quartz’s birthday, but you’re getting the treat—50% off a year of Quartz membership with code BIRTHDAY. Keep digging, because underneath all that tissue paper is another surprise—two free Quartz presentations on the future of sleep and cash. Both pair nicely with a celebratory glass of champagne.
Obsession interlude: Future of work
The gig economy has opened up a wave of flexible work options, but in doing so risks eroding hard-won worker protections. Companies whose business model rests on gig work are often criticized for exploiting workers and fighting attempts at organizing or worker reclassification.
In Hustle and Gig, sociologist Alexandrea Ravenelle interviewed 80 gig workers in the US to put their experiences in the context of America’s employment history. She concluded that for all its app-enabled modernity, the sharing economy “is truly a movement forward to the past.”
In a cruel irony, workers in the sharing economy—hailed as the height of the modern workplace—find themselves without any of the worker protections enjoyed by their great-grandparents. Although workplace protections still exist for full-time and part-time employees, gig workers as independent contractors, are outside the social safety net of basic workplace protections.
Keep up with the rest of our Future of Work obsession.
We’re obsessed with the Everglades
“There are no other Everglades in the world.” Conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas used these words to describe the Everglades, a vast sheet of slow-moving water that blankets South Florida, creating a unique wetland ecosystem unlike any other on Earth. In the 20th century, Floridians turned millions of acres of swamp into real estate, one of the grandest water engineering projects in human history—and one of mankind’s most ecologically destructive acts. Now, the state’s Everglades damage control could become a global model for environmental (and self-)preservation. The Quartz Weekly Obsession takes you on an airboat ride into the swamp.
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Surprising discoveries
Something smelled fishy at a Utah angler contest. A two-year-long meticulous scientific investigation hooked two fraudulent fishermen with felonies.
That cereal you like is going to come back in style. The nostalgia play from General Mills will see classic recipes return to breakfast cereals like Cocoa Puffs and Trix.
The rich are giving Amazon more room. The 2020 ecommerce explosion has wealthy homebuyers seeking out “Amazon rooms” to house their mountains of Bezos boxes.
WiFi password: MTFUJI. Japanese national parks have beefed up their broadband to encourage “workations” that mix business and pastoral pleasures.
Killer robots are taking over London. Covid-killing, ultraviolet-light zapping rolling robots are popping up at UK train stations to help combat the country’s second wave.
Our best wishes for a productive day. Please send any news, comments, workation recommendations, and fishing trophies to hi@qz.com. Get the most out of Quartz by downloading our iOS app and becoming a member. Today’s Daily Brief was brought to you by Ephrat Livni, Adam Epstein, Yomi Kazeem, Jackie Bischof, Susan Howson and Max Lockie.