All in one: Twitter is now X, as Musk looks to build a "super-app"

7/25/23 7:00PM

NeXt chapter

Twitter is dead, and an X marks the spot where its iconic blue bird once perched. While Elon Musk’s latest change may have taken some by surprise, with “X” users rushing to “X” their views about the “X” redesign, his preoccupation with (and plans around) the 24th letter actually go way back.

In 1999, Musk founded X.com, an online bank that merged with Confinity to become PayPal just a year later. Now, his biographer Walter Isaacson says, the Tesla CEO is ready to complete his original vision from nearly 25 years ago — turning X into a one-stop everything platform.

Everything, everywhere, all in one app

Everything apps, or “super-apps”, are platforms where the user can fulfill a variety of tasks from one centralized hub. That means playing minigames in the same place you message your loved ones, or reading the latest news on the app that you transfer a friend the $10 you owe them. Super-apps are huge in Asia and Musk’s goal will be to try and replicate the biggest of them all — WeChat.

Indeed, in a town hall event for Twitter employees back in June 2022, Musk explained that people in China “basically live on WeChat because it’s so usable and helpful to daily life”. The app’s 1.32 billion monthly active users — who can hail taxis, order food, pay their bills, read books, message people, post pictures, and much more — would likely agree with Musk on that point too.

Apparently, the mogul wants X to be even bigger, though. Axios observed that Musk’s tellings herald the app as “Twitter + Substack + YouTube + PayPal + Amazon + TikTok + WeChat + Baidu” rolled into one. The everything app for everything apps, then.

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Amazon expands low-price Haul section to 14 new markets as Amazon Bazaar app

Amazon is expanding its low-cost Amazon Haul experience to a new stand-alone app called Amazon Bazaar.

Amazon launched its Temu and Shein competitor a year ago as a US mobile storefront on its website and has since expanded to about a dozen markets. Consumers could purchase many items for under $10, as long as they were willing to stomach longer delivery times.

Now, thanks to success in those places, the programming is expanding to 14 new markets — Hong Kong, the Philippines, Taiwan, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Nigeria — with a new app and name: Amazon Bazaar.

“Both Amazon Haul and Amazon Bazaar deliver the same ultra low-price shopping experience, with different names chosen to better resonate with local language preferences and cultures,” the company said in a press release.

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After watching small drones reshape the battlefield in Ukraine, the US Army has announced plans to buy 1 million drones over the next two to three years, according to a report from Reuters.

The military threat of China’s dominance of the quadcopter-style drone industry is also driving the decision. But China’s control over much of the supply chain for drones, including rare earth magnets, sensors, and microcontrollers, will make it much harder for American drone manufacturers to catch up.

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