Read this Monday’s edition of the FolhaMercado newsletter (8) – 04/08/2024 – Market

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How the government wants to tax big techs

The Lula (PT) government opened four fronts to try to tax big techs. The idea is to propose taxation to Congress this year.

How Planalto wants to tax big techs:

↳ “Fair share”: payment for the use of the telephone network.

• It consists of charging more to companies whose platforms use the network more – such as streaming and cloud services, for example.

• Telecommunications companies are in favor and defend investment in infrastructure. Critics say it will make the service more expensive.

↳ Income tax collection of big techs within the scope of discussions on tax reform regulation.

↳ A kind of “Cide” (a type of tribute) for journalism.

• The money would be allocated to a fund that would prioritize promoting journalism from underrepresented groups and news deserts.

↳ Video taxation “on demand” (streaming, for example).

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Do you accept like?

A global actress asks to “pay” for a weekend stay for her and her family at a super-luxury hotel in São Paulo with posts on her social networks.

She ends up posting just a “look of the day” story, without reference to the hotel’s accommodations, and becomes “persona non grata” at the establishment.

The case, reported by reporter Daniele Madureira, is just one of many that involve the negotiation of services and goods through posts on the networks.

There are influencers who marry or buy new home properties only with these agreements – which have disappointed companies in some cases due to a lack of engagement and visibility.

What explains: this exchange of services for likes happens in a context in which traditional advertising is losing space and generation Z uses social networks as a reference to decide what to consume.

↳ In 2023, 50% of Brazilian consumers who made online purchases were influenced by advertisements broadcast on social networks, especially Instagram and Facebook, according to research by NielsenIQ Ebit.

In numbers:

• US$91.6 million (R$ 456.6 million) were moved in Brazil by the influencer market last year, according to the American consultancy PQ Media.

• 24% should be the high this year, for US$113.5 million (R$566.2 million).

• US$185 million (R$922.2 million) is the projection of how much this market should generate by 2027.

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The ‘hero’ of Linux

Software engineer Andres Freund, a 38-year-old German who works at Microsoft and lives in San Francisco (USA), may have saved the internet from major problems last week.

Understand: he found a loophole in the Linux operating system that could trigger a cyberattack with enormous damage.

Why it matters: Considered the main open source software in the world, Linux is used in universities, large companies and even government agencies.

• If the cybercrime avoided by Freund went ahead, it could cause serious problems without leaving a trace of its perpetrator.

The episode made the software engineer a hero among the developer community,

• “I find this very strange,” he told the British newspaper Financial Times. “I’m a pretty private person who just sits in front of the computer and messes with the code.”

As Freund discovered: While doing routine maintenance earlier this year, he noticed some error messages that he didn’t recognize.

He noticed that an application called SSH, used to log into computers remotely, was using more processing power than usual.

It was then that he noticed that someone had planted malicious code that would allow its creator to hijack a user’s SSH connection and secretly run his own code on that user’s machine.

Who planted the code: It is not yet known, and Freund is contributing to finding the hacker.

What is certain is that a user with the pseudonym “Jia Tan” planned the crime some time ago. He gained the trust of the community until he became a “maintainer”, a role that reviews and approves changes.

The new compromised version of the code had been released, but was not yet in widespread use.

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Startup of the Week: Inner AI

On Mondays, the panel features an x-ray of a startup that recently announced funding.

The startup: Founded at the beginning of last year, it brings together several AI (artificial intelligence) tools for creating content on a single platform.

• The company emerged from the experience of the two founders: Pedro Salles, with experience in programming and software development, and Eduardo Mitelman, who created a content agency.

In numbers: the startup announced that it had received R$ 12 million in a pre-seed round (which comprises a very early phase of the business. Understand the stages of investment in startups here).

Who invested: the Canary fund led the round, which also had participation from names such as LASP Capital, Play9 (from youtuber Felipe Neto and executive João Pedro Paes Leme), Alexia Ventures, Crivo Ventures and Newtopia VC.

What problem does it solve: Inner’s proposal is to help companies’ creative teams navigate the extensive universe of generative AI tools – which gained momentum after the public launch of ChatGPT.

• Its platform brings together chatbots ChatGPT, Gemini (Google), Mistral (OpenAI’s French “rival”) and the functions of LLaMA (Meta’s AI engine) and Stable Diffusion (image creation tool).

• Among the solutions offered are integration and quick access to company data, creation of training and marketing campaigns using AI tools, which generate images, subtitles and dub videos.

• Aimed at large companies, the startup already has Claro, Embraer, Market Livre and Bayer as clients.

Why it’s featured: Created in the post-AI fever universe, Inner is one of the startups surfing the current wave of the tool and attracting a lot of attention from investors here and abroad.

• Also noteworthy is the value for a pre-seed round, when the company is still in the process of validating its business model – the platform will only be launched on the market now.

• Inner AI’s R$12 million fundraising is the largest at this level for a Brazilian company since the ECSA round, a crypto startup, which raised US$3 million (R$15 million) more than a year ago, according to the platform Sling Hub.