GAFAM Grows, Contact Tracing

Whether Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon or Microsoft: the big tech companies are certainly among the winners of the pandemic. And GAFAM continued to grow rapidly in revenue and profit in the first quarter of 2021.

Microsoft and Google already started the reporting season strongly: the 145 million DAU at Microsoft Teams and the continued deep red growth of Google Cloud are particularly noteworthy.

Apple and Facebook followed suit, outperforming growth and prospects: Apple grew by a whopping 54% and sold more products than ever before. And Facebook not only sold more advertising - but made it more expensive.

Amazon grew by 44% - and especially in online advertising by as much as 77%! Nobody had believed in such figures - as much as consumer buying behaviour had changed in the last 12 months.

The open question of whether online first would continue and whether the digitalisation of organisations and consumer behaviour would continue can be answered better with these results - with a more confident: Yes!

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The European digital vaccination certificate is moving closer to digital reality: the infrastructure for doctors' practices and vaccination centres is to be provided by IBM, Ubirch, Govdigital and Bechtle, while the actual certificate is to become part of the Corona Warning App (CWA) as a QR code.

Meanwhile, complaints about the Luca App are piling up, described by data protection experts as a "surveillance system" and its risks by security researchers as "completely disproportionate". Despite all the indications from the beginning, 20 million euros of taxpayers' money have now been wasted here. No one knows why.

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The iCare.report is all about technology, media, politics. The weekly email report delivers the absolute essentials from the last episodes of the eicker.TV (German) livestream and is a purely private commentary by Gerrit Eicker on the most important tech news of the week.