Signs of the rebellion are gathering pace. The rebellion against the current status quo in-app distribution is growing and it is Apple that may find itself with the trickiest problem to deal with at the end of the day. Along with Epic Games (see here), Netflix and Spotify, Tinder is now attempting to cut Google out of its revenue stream...
Folding screens need to start again from scratch. There is still plenty of enthusiasm and research being put into flexible screens but until the scratch-ability issue is solved, these designs are going nowhere. The level of interest in the industry in flexible screens is high mostly because they have the potential to kick-start a big replacement cycle which the industry...
Netflix is now a studio. A great set of results was disfigured by slower user growth as price increases and the verticalisation of the content industry means that Netflix must now stand on the quality of its own content only. Subscribers grew by 2.7m to 151.56m but this was well short of the company’s forecast of 4.7m and the 5.0m...
UC Irvine treads in Deep Mind’s footsteps. The University of California has created an algorithm that can solve Rubik’s cube from scratch, but I think that this achievement pales when compared to what DeepMind already achieved some time ago. The Rubik cube is a great task to choose as it has flummoxed humans for two generations making for the widespread...
Yandex is closer to robotaxis than Tesla. Yandex’s subsidiary is expanding its reach into the taxi industry in Russia which provides a route to market for its very promising autonomous driving solution. Yandex’s subsidiary, MLU (in which Uber owns 35%), is paying around $204m to acquire Vezet, one of its chief taxi rivals that operates in 123 regions within Russia...
Updated version. Original mistakenly identified only one working chipset in commercial handsets. RFM is aware of two. Patent counting is very misleading. A report at the RISE conference in Hong Kong lays claim to China’s superiority in 5G due to the fact that it has more 5G related patents than anyone else. However, reality tells a different story which underlines...
The whole industry is worth $16.7bn. The valuations being attributed to autonomous driving hopefuls are so high, that I think investors must be assuming that there will only be one successful solution that can charge what it likes for its autonomous driving software. By contrast, I think that there will be many offerings and the time will eventually come when...
It is still a reprieve in name only. A statement from the US Secretary of Commerce (see here) has been interpreted by the press (see here and here) that Huawei will be able to get access to all the US technology it needs for a temporary time, but I conclude the opposite and continue to think that this remains a...
Elon Musk is becoming a big problem. Outside of a chronic inability to scale, Tesla’s biggest problem is rapidly becoming its mercurial CEO where I think that his views on AI are causing friction and pushing the company in the wrong direction. Management of Tesla’s autopilot activity has changed hands multiple times in the last few years (see here) and...
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.
Open AI & Microsoft – Lottery ticket
Microsoft takes a punt on Open AI. Open AI, the “non-profit” AI company, has taken a $1bn investment from Microsoft that sees Microsoft buy itself a new customer as well a lottery ticket on the tiny chance that Open AI cracks the most vexing problem of AI. Microsoft will invest $1bn in Open AI which is an AI laboratory whose...