Google buys UK offices for $1B: As the rest of the world works remotely, Big Tech continues buying up real estate in preparation for growth and expansion.

Apps in related industries, such as real estate, have gone even further in AR and VR. Zillow, for instance, has 3D views of rooms and houses. Another real estate app, roOomy, lets sellers virtually stage homes and create VR tours. With more broadband and lower latency, the sophistication of these renderings will grow.

The parent company of real estate, mortgage, and financial services firms, Rocket is best known for Rocket Mortgage—branded as Quicken Loans until the company went public in July. It’s created a large real-estate-focused ecosystem, but it also offers auto and personal loans.

“Eventually, they are going to need to turn a profit and won't be able to afford the pricey real estate in cities like New York, especially as the market rebounds,” notes Blake Droesch, eMarketer analyst at Insider Intelligence.

The news: The US-based private investing platform will use the funding to offer access to digital securities—tokens traded on a blockchain that derive value from real-world assets like company equity or real estate.

But the two fintechs are also expanding the definition of wealth beyond real estate and cars to include other items that consumers can convert into alternative stores of value.

Analyst take: “Amazon has forever not wanted to open up its ecosystem to accept other buy buttons or give them any real estate on its platform. Obviously now it is, first with Affirm and then with Venmo,” said Jaime Toplin, senior analyst at Insider Intelligence.

Strong real estate and stock market growth (plus $4 trillion in aid packages) buoyed household wealth, which grew 12.3% year over year (YoY) in Q4 2020 among the top 10% of households. This comes as other demographics struggled with cash flow. And there is no slowdown in sight for HNWI asset growth.

Wildly speculative auction prices for everything from the first tweet to virtual real estate suggest the blockchain hype is getting out of hand.

And in Germany, financial institutions are testing the use of blockchain to divide real estate assets into digital tokens that represent a percentage of ownership.

The “Other” category accounts for a large proportion of spend and contains industries that are sizable but not sizable enough to be broken out individually (health and pharma, real estate, business, and industrial and education, for example). The only change in the ranking this year will be computing products inching ahead of financial services into third place.

The pandemic afforded Starbucks the opportunity to rethink its store strategy, particularly in urban markets with more expensive real estate costs. What’s changed: The company now says it is emphasizing “​​convenience-led formats,” such as drive-thrus, pickup locations and other such experiences. In addition, Starbucks is investing in video ordering and providing baristas with tablets to take orders.

Other (industry): Includes categories that fall outside of those mentioned, such as real estate, manufacturing and industrial, education, and government. Overview of Our Digital Ad Spending Numbers by Industry. US digital ad spending saw mixed results across industries last year.