• TIL: US’ biggest egg marketplace, colloquially known as “the Wall Street of Eggs”, is called … The Egg Clearinghouse. From WSJ,

    Lately, there are a lot more buyers than sellers using the “Wall Street of Eggs” with bird flu roiling the poultry market. And that is after last year marked the company’s busiest, trading over 2.6 billion shell eggs and 39 million pounds of egg product valued at more than $600 million. … “If you’re short on eggs, we’re the marketplace,” said Alan Munroe, president of ECI, a company overseen by U.S. egg producers and buyers. “We fill in the gaps.”

  • From The Diff,

    Meta is planning to invest in humanoid robots, with a plan to mostly offer software and sensors to other robot companies. There’s an interesting symmetry here with Meta’s investments in both AI and the Metaverse: the Metaverse is a bet that replacing normal sensory input with something else is the next interface, whereas a humanoid robot is a tool for gathering entirely human-optimized sensory input. The question on robots is: aren’t augmented reality sunglasses a lot cheaper, both for Meta and for end users? There’s some upside to reaching a different market, and for tracking the set of tasks people want done but don’t do themselves rather than the set of tasks that are visible from a first-person camera angle. Meta’s implicit bet is some combination of believing that there’s a real market for robots and believing that there’s a real market for reality, and that having humanoid robots is the best way to avoid being left behind.

    If Meta wants users to adopt the metaverse, wouldn’t it be easier to achieve this by providing the least jarring experience through reality-oriented sensory input? Putting on the Quest is cool, but none of it feels real, and this seems to be a step in that direction. So my read is that the bet isn’t so much a hedge but a TAM expansion investment.