TC Daily

TechCabal Daily – Apple wants a bite of Peloton and Strava’s business

Olumuyiwa Olowogboyega 16th September 2020

Welcome to TC Daily! In today’s digest: Apple hogs all of the headlines, with announcements of a fitness app to rival Peloton and Strava as well as its decision to put all of its subscription services into a bundle.

Please take a moment to subscribe to our newsletter if this email was forwarded to you. Also subscribe to The Next Wave, our Sunday newsletter designed to be your post-pandemic guide
on tech and innovation in Africa.

On Monday, Abubakar made a few people nervous with his article on GTBank’s ambitions.

If you missed it, here’s a quick recap:

GTBank is restructuring its business so that it can now directly compete with fintech startups in Nigeria. “We will be very aggressive” were the words of the company’s CEO.

When a company the size of GTB wants to compete with you, you have to admit its scary. But a lot of people are unimpressed, and I saw quite a few tweets pointing out that GTBank will not find success in the space.

Quite a number of people even mentioned that the bank didn’t do well with some of its digital offerings like Habari and the SME marketplace.

Honestly? I think everyone’s a little nervous.

There’s no better way to give context to what GTBank can do than to point to Tuesday night’s Apple event and some of
the big announcements we saw. One of the most important announcements is that Apple is launching a new service called Fitness+.

Fitness+ will allow Apple users stream workout videos from trainers while they work up a sweat. If you’re reading that right, it means Apple just turned a bunch of startups into one feature.

Hello Peloton and Mirror.

You can be sure Peloton’s shareholders will already be biting their fingers this morning. Oh to be a fly on the wall at the offices of Lululemon Athletica, the company that bought Mirror, a fitness startup for $500 million in July.

This is the kind of advantage big companies have; you spend a decade building your product and they turn it into a feature one Monday night in September.

So, I’ll ask again; are we still going to pretend GTBank doesn’t pose a threat to fintechs?

Apple may be valued at $1 Trillion but the company is innovating like a startup that is in crunch time. In the last few years, the company has focused a lot on services, charging subscription fees for services like Apple Music and Apple TV.

It has now added Apple Fitness+ to its services but the company has now sweetened the deal for its customers by bundling all of these subscriptions.

Instead of paying for several subscriptions, Apple users can now pay for an Apple One bundle which starts at $14.95/month. An Apple One bundle gives you access to all of Apple’s services.

This brilliant decision will drive up Apple’s revenue. For Q2 2020, Apple’s services revenue climbed to $13.35 billion, up from $11.45 billion a year earlier.

Expect
even bigger figures by 2021.

FACEBOOK & INSTAGRAM

I suspect Alex and Kim Kardashian are watching the same titles on Netflix. A day after Alex wrote this article on “The Social
Dilemma,” a documentary that shows some of the bad sides of social media, Kim Kardashian has announced a plan.

Her plan, according to this tweet is to freeze her Facebook and Instagram accounts today to pass a message to Facebook to stop misinformation.

Facebook’s share price went down 1.4% minutes after Kim’s tweet but beyond the stock market, it will put Facebook in the headlines again for its poor efforts in fighting misinformation.

The countdown’s over, it’s TC Live time!

Today, TechCabal in partnership with identity verification company, VerifyMe will mark International ID-day by bringing industry veterans together to explore the state of digital identity in Nigeria.

Speakers include Mitchell Elegbe, Founder / Group Managing Director, Interswitch, and Esigie Aguele, Co-Founder and CEO, VerifyMe Nigeria. They will answer questions including how a digital identity ecosystem will enable the Nigerian tech community, particularly fintech; and how entrepreneurs and professionals can shape and take advantage of a working digital identity system?

Email Marketing by ActiveCampaign

TechCabal Daily – Apple wants a bite of Peloton and Strava’s business

Read Next

Read more