Good morning! The hermit kingdom of Bhutan gets massive amounts of hydroelectricity from Himalayan glaciers. What does it do with this energy? Fuel the homes its 800k residents, and use the surplus energy to quietly run a giant state-sponsored Bitcoin mining operation 🅱️

🌶 Highlight of the day 🌶

Microsoft Teams shipped a feature letting small businesses charge for appointments, webinars, and more. Business users can now request payments from meeting attendees within the Teams UX itself, while a separate payments app tracks requested and received funds 💵

There’s lots of scope for businesses to use Teams for payments across the likes of webinars, online classes, and appointments. Given the scale of Teams, it’s a huge move for the virtual events space ⛰️

♨️ Hot off the press launches

Big tech

• YouTube ships new ad-formats for Shorts

• Amazon adds Prime Video originals to its FAST service

• Meta to require that shops enable FB and IG checkout

• Meta updates its avatars with new shapes, hair, and clothing

• Google ships emoji reactions to comments on Docs

General and early-stage

• Love launches a health and wellness marketplace

• Findaway Voices kills its 20% podcast distribution fee

• RTRO launches a text-based social app

• Vercel adds back-end tools to its front-end cloud

• Mastodon overhauls its new user onboarding flow

🔍 Other good finds

• Steam room. Inside Temu’s efficiency obsessed fiery culture

• Wild times. Scientists use GPT AI to passively read people’s brains

• Tim’s bank. Apple’s savings account draws $1bn in four days

🧈 Twitter nugget

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- Amol