Tag: Jack Dorsey

Should You Buy Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)?

by Fred Fuld III

You may have read about all the hype over the last few months regarding non-fungible tokens, more commonly called NFTs, and occasionally referred to as nifties.

If you don’t know what an NFT is, I will try to explain it as simple as I can. An NFT is a digital asset, such as a jpg or png artwork, a gif, a cartoon, music, a video, digital sports cards, video game assets, and even naming rights to a giant sea bass. The NFT is recorded on a blockchain which secures the ownership of the asset and certifies that the asset is unique, or one of a very limited quantity.

Stock Ticker Man Spitting Out Money

Stock Ticker Man Spitting Out Money NFT

The NFTs are usually sold on platforms such as OpenSea, Rarible, SuperRare, and Foundation, with cryptocurrency, such as Ether, being the primary currency. Some sales have facilitators for buyers who just want to pay by credit card or check.

The prices of many of these NFTs has been skyrocketing. Last year, the NFT market was about $250 million. For the first quarter of this year, sales jumped to $2 billion. You may have heard that Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter (TWTR), sold an NFT of his first tweet for $2.9 million.

Michelle Phillips, vocalist with the Mamas & the Papas, songwriter, and actress has gotten in on the act. A couple months ago, I interviewed her about her NFT auction (I believe it was her only NFT auction interview) and all ten of her NFTs  sold out.

With regards to buying NFTs as an investment, I won’t comment on that because I never make investment recommendations. However, you should treat NFTs like art or collectables. If you like what you see and you plan to hold on to it without the expectation of reselling at a profit, then maybe you should buy it.

You might even want to create your own NFT. Click HERE for an example of a stock market themed NFT for sale on Rarible.

 

The Twitter Annual Meeting

Me & Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO
Me & Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO

The Twitter Annual Meeting was held yesterday at the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco on Market Street. Jack Dorsey, the CEO, spoke about the goals for the company.

Areas covered were:
Improving Timeline
Notifications
Safety, with regard ti transparency, better tools, and deep learning & machine learning

Dorsey talked about three major improvements:

  1. Twitter Lite – for Safari or Chrome on mobile devices
    30% faster load times
    Uses less than 1 meg of data
    Looks identical to the app
    Can turn on Data Saver – all images, videos, gifs blurred
    Reduce data usage by 70%
  2. Explore tab -brings everything together
    Trends, Moments, Live Events
  3. Mute – Safety control
    Notifications -muted words -pause and not see

Anthony Noto, Twitter’s CFO, then spoke. He talked about the Live Streaming Video and expansion into:
Sports
News
Entertainment
ESports

He said that in Q1, there was 800 hours of live video content, over 450 events, with more than 200 premium content partners.

All the shareholder resolutions passed except the one that proposed that Twitter become a user owned company. The proposal said:

“A community-owned Twitter could result in new and reliable revenue streams, since we, as users, could buy in as co-owners, with a stake in the platform’s success. Without the short-term pressure of the stock markets, we can realize Twitter’s potential value, which the current business model has struggled to do for many years. We could set more transparent accountable rules for handling abuse. We could re-open the platform’s data to spur innovation. Overall, we’d all be invested in Twitter’s success and sustainability. Such a conversion could also ensure a fairer return for the company’s existing investors than other options.”

The questions and answers were related to looking into a Twitter Prime type service where some users could pay for a premium service, and utilizing artificial intelligence through machine learning and deep learning for timelines and notifications.