Hello! Alphabet lost ~$100bn in market cap yesterday, reportedly after its new chatbot — seen as a competitor to ChatGPT — got something a bit wrong. Welcome to the new search wars. Today we’re exploring:
Health and wealth
CVS Health Corp. has agreed to buy Oak Street Health, a network of 169 primary-care medical centers across the nation, in a deal reportedly worth $10.6bn.
It’s the latest move that reflects a broader trend in the sector, which has seen large retail players look to consolidate primary-care practices and bring them under their corporate umbrellas. CVS had already acquired Signify Health for $8bn last September, rival Walgreens gained hundreds of primary-care practices after its subsidiary VillageMD splashed ~$9bn on acquiring Summit Health, and Amazon bought One Medical last year.
The pharmacy footprint
In the pharmacy world, CVS and Walgreens have long been the two main retail players, with Nasdaq estimating that the pair controls over 40% of the market between them. Walgreens had a head start after Charles Walgreen Sr. took over the Chicago drugstore he worked at in 1901, but it’s CVS, founded in 1963, that’s the largest in the US, with nearly 10,000 stores.
Building an integrated healthcare offering has become the de facto strategy in recent years, with obvious potential synergies across the sprawling healthcare supply chain. On top of its retail footprint, CVS also operates CVS Caremark, its pharmacy benefit manager, it owns insurance provider Aetna, and it has 1,100 walk-in clinics. Those activities combined for a whopping $322bn of sales last year.
\!/ Time To BeSafe \!/
Damien Kieran, Twitter's ex-chief privacy officer who left the company when Musk took over, has been recruited by BeReal — last year’s official iPhone app of the year. BeReal has been challenged on privacy issues in the past, particularly over concerns about real-time location sharing, but privacy might be just one of its worries at the moment.
The pic-sharing platform, which gives users the same 2-minute window to capture whatever they are up to when the notification hits, may have already had its 15 minutes of fame, as downloads have quickly dropped off.
Building on the buzz
The Paris-based company seemingly emerged out of nowhere, one app in a buzzy new set of stripped-back social media that threatened to upheave the established powerhouses, as younger generations sought authenticity in the carefully-curated world of Instagram and Facebook.
BeReal, which raised $60m last year, properly took off in the summer of 2022, with global downloads peaking in Q3 when the app welcomed more than 40m simultaneous-snappers. Extrapolating from the figures in January, BeReal's downloads are set to drop to just 16m in Q1 this year, according to data from Apptopia via Sifted. And, despite the aforementioned plaudit from Apple itself, BeReal has dropped out of the top 100 on the App Store in recent weeks, per Sensor Tower data.
Like Clubhouse, Vine, Yik Yak, Periscope and many, many other social media apps that briefly caught lightning in a bottle, BeReal may be finding out just how hard it is to maintain the buzz.
On Sunday, the Philadelphia Eagles will take on the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LVII, in what is pretty much guaranteed to be the most watched event of the year.
Personal fouls
Perhaps unsurprisingly, football is one of three sports surveyed that a majority of Americans understand the rules of at least somewhat well, per data from YouGov. 36% of Americans feel confident they understand the rules of football “very well”, the most of any sport polled. Interestingly, there's still a solid 31% who are likely to be asking questions this Sunday or on their phones googling "football rules" — a query which spikes every year at the start of the season in September as well as during the playoffs in January / February.
Baseball and basketball are similarly understood by the general public, but that's where the average person begins to drop the ball. Fewer than half of Americans understand the rules of tennis, soccer, volleyball, boxing and golf at least somewhat "well", and just 12% reported understanding the rules of ice hockey "very well".
• Codebreakers have decrypted 57 letters from Mary, Queen of Scots sent when she was imprisoned by her cousin nearly 450 years ago.
• Barbie can be anything she wants… except consistent, with sales down 33% in the last quarter.
• The House of Mouse is shedding 7,000 jobs after a lackluster quarter for Disney+ in the US and Canada.
• Unrecognized: the 33 most popular songs that didn’t get a Grammy.
• Visualizing the death of the "stay safe" email sign-off.
• A comprehensive visualization of internet access around the world.
Off the charts: Which outer space problem were we charting about back in March 2022, that has been added to after a mysterious Russian satellite malfunction? [Answer below].
