Daily Insight
New COVID-19 cases per day in the U.S. have fallen 74% from their peak on Jan. 11th, and are now at the lowest level since Oct. 23. COVID-19 hospitalizations in the U.S. have declined 40 straight days in a row. (Click to Tweet)

LinkedIn is developing a marketplace for freelancers that will compete with existing services such as Fiverr and Upwork. The service is likely to integrate with Microsoft’s digital wallet, which reportedly is under development.

More:

• The marketplace has been in development since Microsoft’s acquisition of “UpCounsel” in 2019. UpCounsel provided a platform to connect freelance lawyers and small businesses.
• Competitors for the LinkedIn marketplace are Fiverr, which generated $190M revenue last year — up 77% YoY, and Upwork, whose revenue is expected to be around $365M for 2020 — up 20% YoY. Revenue share from freelancers last year: Upwork — 13%, Fiverr — 27%.
• Microsoft’s new product will replace LinkedIn ProFinder, through which users can post freelance project proposals. ProFinder is currently priced at $60, and the service reportedly generates only marginal revenue. It doesn’t include features available on competitors' platforms, such as direct booking and rate comparison. 
• In December last year, it was reported that Facebook is developing a similar marketplace but for physical work, while LinkedIn’s product will focus on white-collar jobs.

Microsoft’s digital wallet:

• The company is developing a digital wallet that lets users store money and transact across different apps and services. TheInformation reported that the digital wallet will be used to pay freelancers using LinkedIn's service and for other transactions, such as subscribing and tipping LinkedIn creators.

LinkedIn:

• LinkedIn currently has over 740 million users and generates $30 revenue per monthly active user on average. During the start of the pandemic, LinkedIn was significantly impacted due to the reduction in advertising revenue. The company announced layoffs for about 6% of its workforce in June 2020, due to the impact of the pandemic in hiring.
• Though the combined revenue of $550M generated by Fiverr and Upwork is marginal compared to LinkedIn’s overall $8.8B revenue in 2020, providing a marketplace feature will allow the platform to add another revenue stream that is not based on advertisements.

Freelance market:

• Around 59 million Americans did freelance jobs in the 12-months ending September 2020 and contributed $1.2T to America's GDP. 
• In ten years, around 80% of the global workforce is expected to be made of freelancers.
• The growth in freelancers also resulted in the growth of freelance-based startups. According to Crunchbase, such startups received $83M in funding in 2020, up from $17M in 2019. 

IBM is looking to sell its IBM Watson Health business, which generates around $1B annual revenue. The business's brands include Merge Healthcare, Truven Health Analytics, and Phytel, which it acquired for an overall cost of $3.8B.

More:

• The company is considering options, including a SPAC merger and selling the unit to a private equity firm.
• On Oct. 8, 2020, IBM announced that it would spin-off its managed infrastructures unit as a separate company to focus on its cloud platform led by Red Hat and growing markets like A.I. and hybrid clouds. Post-separation, more than half of IBM's revenue will come from subscriptions rather than services. IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019 for $34B. 
• Watson Health was expected to be one of the company's major moves into A.I. and healthcare. However, physicians' reluctance to adopt the technology and problems in collecting and analyzing data under medical privacy laws are some of the factors that could have led to the division's lack of growth. Similarly, Google's healthcare division DeepMind is also yet to turn a profit.

Spotify announced it will launch a new high-end subscription service, called Spotify HiFi, to offer higher quality audio to select listeners. Spotify will also begin to work out new deals for content creators as well as new special edition features for artists. 

More: 

• Spotify HiFi will allow subscribers to listen to higher quality, lossless music that Spotify describes as a "CD-quality, lossless audio format.” Currently, Spotify's audio tops out at 320kbps audio.
• The announcement was made during Spotify's virtual, live-streamed "Stream On" event, where Billie Eilish and brother Finneas featured to talk about the power of HiFi. 
• Spotify HiFi is scheduled to launch later this year and will first be available to current Spotify Premium subscribers in certain global markets. 
• Higher quality audio was one of Spotify's biggest customer requests, and it's something competitors like Amazon are already doing. The tech giant rolled out Amazon Music HD in 2019 for $14.99 per month, or $12.99 per month for Amazon Prime members. 

Inside Washington

• The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against former President Donald Trump and opened the door for a prosecutor in New York City to obtain Trump's tax returns and other financial records as part of a criminal investigation.
  • The ruling declined Trump's request to postpone and delay the subpoena for his financial records, which will now allow a New York grand jury to obtain his financial records and review them behind closed doors. 
• A report from an anonymous source this week claims that Trump will address the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida this weekend and claim he is the Republican's presumptive 2024 presidential nominee. 
• The Supreme Court of the United States decided that it will not be reviewing a challenge of Pennslyvania's Supreme Court ruling to extend the mail-in voting deadline for the 2020 Presidential election.
• President Biden's nomination for Attorney General, Merrick Garland, is testifying live today at a confirmation hearing, though he won't be fully confirmed until March. 
• President Biden is altering the Paycheck Protection Program to accept applications only from firms with under 20 employees for two weeks in an attempt to support smaller businesses. 

February 23-25, 2021 | 11:00 a.m. ET

Join over 1000 of your retail colleagues at the eTail Virtual Summit & Expo, where you will learn from 45+ leading expert retail speakers and explore the latest technology and opportunities to grow during these challenging times. Retailers - register now for free here http://bit.ly/39YbFKP.*

* This is a sponsored post.

QUICK HITS:

• This company is reinventing home and renters insurance. Get a quote to see how much you could save.*
• Apple sold 80 million phones in Q4 2020, surpassing Samsung's 62 million. Overall, 384 million phones were sold in Q4 2020.
• Google will remove the ban on political ads which was imposed following the Capitol Hill riots, starting from Wednesday.
• Luxury conglomerate LVMH bought a 50% stake in Jay Z's champagne brand Armand de Brignac.
• Cryptocurrencies trading platform Coinbase is valued at more than $100B in a secondary market valuation. In comparison, it was valued at $54B in January and $8B in 2018. 
• What are the costs of inefficiencies in your product release cycle? Read how top companies save over $1M each year.*

*This is sponsored content.