This month in technology: Jeff Bezos bowing out and the return of a forgotten social media site

End of an era

Long-standing Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will step down from his role at the mega-retailer by Q3 2021.

Bezos, who founded Amazon in 1994, transformed the business from an online bookstore to a $1trn (GBP) company with a global presence.

As part of a wider corporate reshuffle, Bezos will become the executive chair of the Amazon board and will be replaced as CEO by current Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andy Jassy.

Jassy joined Amazon in 1997 and oversaw a 28% year-on-year revenue growth for Q4 2020 for AWS.

In an open letter to his employees, Bezos outlined what his role as executive chair would entail.

He said: “I’m excited to announce that this Q3 I’ll transition to executive chair of the Amazon board and Andy Jassy will become CEO.

“In the exec chair role, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives. Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have. He will be an outstanding leader and he has my full confidence,” he added.

Tesla time

Elon Musk’s Tesla has purchased $1.5bn worth of bitcoin as it looks to “further diversify and maximise returns” on its investments.

The purchase of such a significant amount of the cryptocurrency flooded the market with confidence thanks to the backing of billionaire Musk, who has been outspoken on the topic in the past.

The South African has tweeted regularly about the vertical and has even been credited with raising the price of bitcoin due to his praise.

Tesla also confirmed it would start accepting payments made in bitcoin, making it the first automaker to do so.

According to the firm’s most recent filings, it held more than $19bn in cash and cash equivalents at the end of 2020.

EU extension

The European Union (EU) is set to extend its cross-country mobile roaming regulation for a further 10 years.

Under current regulation, EU citizens can visit other EU countries and use their mobile phones without extra charges as if they were in their home nation.

The policy has been in place since 2012 and the bloc have announced plans to extend the regulation through to 2032 when it expires in 2022.

Additionally, the EU is looking to improve the framework by promising to match data speeds abroad that customers pay for in their home countries, as well as making access to local emergency services easier.

Thierry Breton, European commissioner for the internal market, said: “Millions of Europeans have been enjoying the benefits of roaming throughout the EU at no extra charges.

“[Roaming regulation is] an established and successful cornerstone of the single market,” he added.

Bebo bounces back

Former social media giant Bebo is set to make a comeback with the platform’s co-founder looking to relaunch the site.

At its peak, Bebo had more than 40 million members before being sold to AOL in 2008 for £623m by Michael Birch and his wife Xochi.

The pair later bought it back for $1m and tried to revamp the platform as an esports streaming service before selling it to Amazon’s Twitch arm in 2019 for $25m.

However, the couple still hold the rights to the brand and are looking to mount a challenge to Facebook and Twitter moving into the 2020s.

Birch is coding the platform himself and told the BBC that now was the right time to launch a new social networking site.

Birch said: “Covid has had a lot of detrimental effects, but I think it sort of opened people’s eyes to new things in new ways. And people are craving interaction.

“We’re going to do some nods to the past, but you’re not going to log in and see the original Bebo as it was. But what we want to do is go back a little bit to this idea of a profile. That you have an identity you sort of take pride in. That you can visit a profile and see things that aren’t just the latest news articles being shared,” he added.

Am relaunching https://t.co/UTPPQbgWR6 as a social network next month. Have been coding it myself during lockdown. I put a coming soon page up yesterday and it trended on Twitter in Ireland. Hopefully the actual site does nearly as well… pic.twitter.com/y6V1wLS6to

— Michael Birch (@mickbirch) January 29, 2021

Calming cloud

Research has shown organisations who quickly adapted to cloud-based technologies at the start of the pandemic found the shift to remote work easier.

Microsoft discovered team cohesion was improved remotely when systems such as the cloud were in place to support individuals.

From an employee perspective, 57% said their attitude towards the use of cloud-based services had changed positively because of Covid-19.

Additionally, the study found that 58% of employers expect to blend home and office working in the future.

Kieran McCorry, Microsoft Ireland national technology officer, said: “Organisations that had their systems on-premises faced difficulties as these systems were often neither configured nor optimised for home-working. The security wasn’t there, and they weren’t able to scale to meet the new requirements.

“They faced a position where around 80% of traffic came from inside the network to one where around 80% was coming from outside, and the systems just couldn’t handle that,” he added.

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