Byton’s trouble is an opportunity for others. One of my favourite electric car makers is in the kind of trouble from which it may not recover which I think spells a great opportunity for an OEM who has not yet figured out how to deal with the issues facing the industry over the next 20 years. Byton is my favourite...
Ban is meaningless without further action. India’s banning of 59 Chinese apps including TikTok and WeChat is a ban that will have very little effect without further government action making this a warning shot across China’s bow. India has cited “compilation of these data, its mining and profiling by elements hostile to national security and defence of India [ . . . ] is...
Google has another go at AR. It looks like Google is in the final stages of agreeing the acquisition of North, one of the more interesting augmented reality (AR) companies, in an attempt to start again and put the whole glasshole incident behind it. North is a small player that span out of Waterloo University (somewhat like Blackberry) and as...
Zoox is all about the automation of distribution. I am far from convinced that Amazon has decided to enter the autonomous driving game but instead is likely to use Zoox to automate the last mile of its distribution network and make a vast cost saving. Amazon has been in talks to acquire Zoox for some time but The Information (see...
The 4-year design cycle problem again. Nvidia has landed a major blue-chip client for its Drive Orin platform in announcing with Mercedes-Benz but by the time it ships in 2024, the landscape may have changed highlighting again how problematic this 4-year design cycle is becoming. For those not familiar with the automotive industry, the vehicle design cycle is four years...
Apple brings the ecosystem closer together. Apple released one of its more interesting updates to iOS, included some concessions to developers and confirmed the widely leaked news that it is transitioning to an in-house Arm-based architecture for the last device category still to use a 3rd party: the mac. iOS 14, iPad OS 14 & Apple Watch . These new...
Google & Co. out. Rivals in. VW has confirmed its solo strategy when it comes to vehicle software, but it will need co-operation with other vehicle makers if it wants to make the most of its data and for that data to remain independent of Google & Co. To reach this lofty goal of software independence, VW has set up...
App store revenue shares are under pressure again. The original intention of the Apple App Store was to drive loyalty to the iOS ecosystem which begs the question whether all of the bad press that Apple is receiving for its mandatory 30% revenue share is worth it. Ahead of WWDC next week, the old bone of contention around revenue sharing...
June 17th 2020: Star, global Strategy, Design and Engineering consultancy, has published an analysis of the global vehicle companion application landscape. Star is partnering with Radio Free Mobile, to showcase its in-vehicle application trend analysis. Download a copy of the report copy here. Companion apps offer great opportunity for the vehicle makers who badly need to become more than vendors...
Richard is founder, owner of research company, Radio Free Mobile. He has 16 years of experience working in sell side equity research. During his 11 year tenure at Nomura Securities, he focused on the equity coverage of the Global Technology sector.
BMW – Risk on.
Subscription features is a risk worth taking. BMW’s potential move to feature subscription has some problems but if this pushes BMW towards having a relationship with its users, it may well be a risk worth taking. This is very different from BMW’s idea of charging users extra to interact with its infotainment unit (see here), which it subsequently abandoned and...