Hello, welcome to Lately, The Globe’s weekly tech newsletter. I’m Jacob Dubé, filling in for Samantha Edwards as she takes a much-needed break this week. You can usually catch me writing The Globe’s weekly real estate newsletter, or convincing award-winning journalists to shoot TikToks (no takers on the Apple dance yet). As always, if you have feedback or just want to say hello to a real-life human, send Samantha an e-mail.
In this week’s issue:
🚙 A driver-first ridesharing app
🤖 The future of AI is agents
🎟️ Why Taylor Swift tickets are so expensive in Canada
🌪️ Inside the competitive Beyblade scene
STARTUPS
Ridesharing app Hovr looks to compete by paying their drivers better
Harrison Amit, founder and CEO of HOVR says he hopes the public is willing to pay a little more to know their driver is making a better wage.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
A new ridesharing company is looking to set itself apart from other tech innovators with this simple strategy: paying its drivers more. Launched in Toronto, Hovr – a ridesharing app that functions almost exactly as Uber and Lyft do – is offering prospective drivers the entirety of the rider fare, no pricing algorithms involved. As Vanmala Subramaniam writes, the rise of apps such as Uber, Lyft and DoorDash has coincided with the ascent of digitalized pay practices, where algorithms can dictate a worker’s wage for a job depending on a variety of unknown factors, and make it impossible for them to predict how much they will be getting paid. Last week, Uber announced its drivers in Ontario will have their wages entirely determined by an algorithm, where they will know up front how much they will make from a ride, but will no longer be able to estimate their daily earnings based on time and distance. While the price for a short Hovr ride in Toronto is still more expensive than what a competitor currently offers, the company’s founder Harrison Amit says he hopes the public is willing to pay a little more to know their driver is making a better wage.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI developers are rushing ahead with multitasking ‘agents’
While many companies are still trying to figure out what, if anything, they want to do with generative artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT, AI developers have already moved on to the next thing. If you still have some brainspace left after finally wrapping your head around what the blockchain is, allow Joe Castaldo to introduce you to the world of AI agents. Compared to chatbots, who can answer questions or perform simple tasks, agents are touted as being able to perform tasks with multiple steps, even tapping into other software to do so. Need important documents uploaded and categorized? A delivery status tracked down? Agents can help with that ‐ at least, in theory. The enthusiasm behind agents is also an attempt to boost generative AI adoption when questions still remain about the cost, return on investment and utility of the technology, which can suffer from accuracy and reliability problems. In October, chipmaker Nvidia partnered with Accenture to train some 30,000 consultants to help their clients integrate agents.
RESALE PRICES
How Swifties found a way around the exorbitant game of buying Taylor Swift tickets in Canada
Taylor Swift performs at Wembley Stadium as part of her Eras Tour on June 21, in London. Fans who hope to see her when she comes to Canada in November and December face steep prices for resale tickets.Scott A Garfitt/The Associated Press
It’s almost Taylor Swift-o-clock in Toronto, as the city prepares to welcome the pop star in a few weeks – along with a projected $282-million in new economic activity. But a dark cloud has been hanging over the concert dates: the exorbitant price of the tickets themselves. The Eras Tour has traveled all across the world, and the massive price difference between its North American shows and those in places like Europe highlight how warped the local ticket market has become. The resale-ticket aggregator and data provider TicketIQ, which collects data in U.S. dollars, has found that the average listing price for Swift’s November dates in Toronto and Vancouver dates in December is US$6,351 – 225 per cent higher than for European and British dates. Some clever Swifties discovered it’d be cheaper to buy a ticket and travel to somewhere such as Paris to see Taylor Swift instead – hotel and plane ticket included. Josh O’Kane dives into how we got here, and what we can learn from how other countries regulate ticket prices.
LET IT RIP
How online spaces kept competitive Beyblade alive for 20 years
Dozens of players competed in the pre-qualifiers and finals of the Ontario Beyblade Community’s tournament out of a small room in a downtown Toronto community centre.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Back in elementary school, I used to run an underground Beyblade tournament at recess. Huddling around the back of the schoolyard, we’d let the toy tops rip in a makeshift arena that naturally formed out of the interlocking roots of two trees. Me and my Dragoon were unstoppable, and I’ve been chasing that high ever since. Apparently, I’m not alone. Seeking other enthusiasts, fans from Canada and around the world met on online forums such as BeyWiki and began to organize weekly meet-ups and tournaments for its thousands of members – long after the mass popularity of the original show slowed down after the early 2000s. Twenty years later, the tops are experiencing a resurgence in popularity with the release of a new television show Beyblade X, and the competitive “blading” scene welcomed these fans with open arms. Xavier Richer Vis met with this new generation of bladers at an Ontario-wide tournament in downtown Toronto.
What else we’re reading this week:
Algorithms policed welfare systems for years. Now they’re under fire for bias (WIRED)
‘I Applied to 2,843 Roles’: The Rise of AI-Powered Job Application Bots (404 Media)
Meet the Chinese ‘Typhoon’ hackers preparing for war (TechCrunch)
Inside Elon Musk’s plan to trigger a ‘red wave’ for Trump (The Washington Post)
Soundbite
You’ve got to think about what kind of country you want to live in. Do you want to walk down the street and the butcher and the baker are just an employee and no one has ownership? In my personal experience, the further removed the decision maker is from the business, the easier it is to compromise on product quality and service.
— Rachel Wasserman, author of The Private Equity Playbook: Understanding the Secretive Industry Hollowing Out the Canadian Economy
Adult Money
VIDEO GAMES
Alarmo tracks your motion in bed and plays small sound effects whenever it detects any movement, and only truly shuts off when you fully get out of bed.Supplied
Nintendo Alarmo, $129.99
The Japanese video game company has finally unveiled its latest piece of hardware – and it’s a motion-controlled alarm clock. Alarmo starts by playing a selected song from a series of Nintendo games featuring Mario, Zelda, Splatoon, Pikmin, and Ring Fit Adventure (pandemic throwback, anyone?) when a selected alarm is triggered. It then tracks your motion in bed and plays small sound effects whenever it detects any movement, and only truly shuts off when you fully get out of bed. Serial snoozers beware; If you take too long to get up, the music intensifies. Always one to keep us on our toes, Nintendo announced the new home device on Oct. 9, and rolled out an early release on the same day – exclusively for its Nintendo Online subscribers and in its physical store in New York. On the product site, Nintendo advises that Alarmo works best on twin to king-sized beds, and says the motion controls won’t work as well if you share a bed with a partner or a pet. My chihuahua would definitely set off a few 1-up sounds in the morning. It comes at a hefty $129.99 price tag in Canada, so it might be relegated to a fun gimmicky product for diehard fans.
Culture radar
MAGA AT THE MOVIES
Illustration by Klawe Rzeczy
On stage at Nashville’s iconic Ryman Auditorium, the Daily Wire showed off the trailer for their first-ever theatrical film release – Am I Racist?, a Borat-style movie that claims to uncover the “race hustlers and grifters” working inside the diversity, equity and inclusion industry. The film is a major endeavor for the conservative media empire, and part of its efforts to carve a space for right-wing content in the cultural landscape. Barry Hertz writes about how the Daily Wire grew out of its days as a news aggregator and podcast platform to launch a streaming service aimed to go head-to-head with Netflix and the Hollywood film industry. But as they make their plan for world domination, the group of right-wing podcasters and serial forum posters are hit with a vital roadblock — are their movies even any good?