Google i/o – Catch-up.

Google plays catch up on multiple fronts. Google used its keynote to highlight updates to its ecosystem that offer up its version of competing products as well as a few new tweaks of its own. First, LaMDA: which is Google’s answer to Open AI’s GPT-3. In a nutshell, this is a new language model that attempts to make conversation more...

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Arm & NVIDIA – RISC Risk

RISC-V gains more momentum. One of the big problems of Arm’s perceived loss of independence by being acquired by NVIDIA is that interest in rivals, once thought to be dead, has been greatly revived. I don’t think that RISC-V has any chance of challenging Arm at the high end without massive Chinese government intervention, but at the low end, Arm...

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Telco operators – Packet pushers

AT&T & Verizon admit defeat. AT&T and Verizon’s failure to differentiate themselves through media consumption is a stark warning to all telco operators that they need to do something very special in order to avoid being packet pushers. First, it was Verizon that decided that it was unable to make a go of its 3rd rate media assets and sold...

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Crypto – No currencies here

Currencies in name only. While cynics will call Tesla’s recent policy changes regarding Bitcoin a classic pump and dump, I think that they are a clear demonstration that cryptocurrencies are speculative assets and totally unsuitable to be mediums of exchange. The facts of Tesla’s involvement with Bitcoin are not pretty. In early February 2021, Tesla announced that it had bought...

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Gone camel racing – Back May 17th

RFM has gone camel racing but will return to active duty on May 17th. 

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Crypto – Picks and shovels

The genie is finally out of the bottle? While cryptocurrencies and digital tokens are grabbing all of the headlines, I think that the real action is going to be in the mechanisms that allowed the frenzy to be created i.e. the blockchain. I know very little about how this whole thing works but there is one important distinction to make...

The Boring Company – White Elephant

The Boring Company reinvents the wheel. We were promised autonomous pods zipping through undercity tunnels at 200kph / 150mph but what we got was Tesla-taxis chugging from one side of the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) to the other at 30mph. The Boring Company did make it look pretty cool with funky LED lighting but stripping away the form makes...

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Folding devices – Nasty origami pt. VII

Samsung fixes everything but the elephant. Samsung is expected to release two new folding phones in July where it has made substantial improvements to durability except the one that really matters meaning that this segment will remain niche and that Apple will hold off from going down this route. A sift through Samsung’s trademark documentation and leaks reveals that the...

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Yahoo – Another last hurrah?

Apollo bets $5bn on a fourth attempt. Apollo is paying $5bn to acquire 90% of Verizon’s media assets in yet another sure signal that the only good thing that Marissa Meyer did for Yahoo shareholders was to sell it to Verizon. Yahoo is a has-been Internet titan that has catastrophically failed to capitalise on the opportunities that were in front...

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Arm & NVIDIA – The unthinkable pt. VI.

The risks are demonstrably manageable. Herman Hauser has once again criticised the acquisition of Arm citing clear signs of unfair competition but what I think he has done is merely re-iterate the risks of this acquisition which everyone already knows are there. The promotion of the idea of a merger between Graphcore and Arm does not help the credibility of...

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