Waymo has to get back out front. Waymo has raised $2.25bn from outside sources as I think it needs to accelerate its progress as evidence that many of its rivals are hotter on its heels than it anticipated. Waymo is raining $2.25bn from Silverlake, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and UAE-based Mubadala. Conspicuously absent from this raise is SoftBank...
I think Cortana will go back to the research lab. Cortana is set to become a productivity-based digital assistant which in reality means that Microsoft is cutting the resources it has allocated to it, paving the way for its demise and a whole-hearted switch over to Amazon Alexa. Cortana is one of the last remnants of Microsoft’s consumer-facing activities that...
Softbank must be under real pressure. In the current environment, the last thing one should do is bring a highly valued, loss-making, sharing economy-based company to IPO, demonstrating that Softbank is under withering pressure to produce some good news. With the spectre of a global infectious pandemic looming, businesses that enable users to share assets are not particularly desirable as...
The field tightens a long way away from commercial offerings. Disengagement data from the California DMV (see here) shows that Waymo has lost its lead in autonomous driving to Baidu explaining why Waymo has criticised this data for the first time. The use of disengagements to measure the quality of an autonomous driving system is deeply flawed but in the...
Toyota comes to its senses (sort of). After its inexplicable investment in Uber’s self-driving unit (see here) at a valuation of $7.25bn and its madcap plan to build an entire city in the shadow of Mount Fuji (see here), it has finally done something that I can find some sense in. Toyota is investing $400m in Pony.ai at a valuation...
Screen durability and price still hold back this enticing segment. Despite the cancellation of MWC, Huawei is going ahead with its device launches as planned with the new Mate Xs at its pinnacle. The Mate Xs is a folding phone that looks much like its predecessor and sadly it suffers from all the same flaws (as do its peers) that...
Ford is starting to understand digital. I may have issues with Ford’s view on vehicle demand (see here) but there are signs that Ford is one of the very few OEMs that is starting to understand how important digital data is and the opportunity that it presents. More importantly, it appears to be almost the only one that is doing...
Google should issue refunds. Gaming on mobile phones remains a huge opportunity because outside of China, there is no dominant player but the way that Stadia is going it looks like Google will lose to someone else. Despite being one of the most important Digital Life services on smartphones and one of the highest earners for developers, no one has...
Robotaxis will not be appearing anytime soon. McAfee has exposed a corner case that triggered dangerous behaviour by a Tesla vehicle in another example of how deep learning is not well suited to the chaotic road environment. The result is that robotaxis remain as far away as ever and that investors should wary of pricing in robotaxis into Tesla’s valuation....
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.
Google Stadia – Humble pie pt. II.
Google is making more errors. In addition to issuing refunds and apologising to its users (many of whom feel duped (see here)), Google should also realise that its power in search and Android has not crossed over into games and be nice to developers. There is little doubt that Stadia is an unmitigated disaster and given the current opportunity with...