All downhill from here. The move by MoviePass to suspend its service for a few weeks is almost certainly a sign that the end has almost arrived for an ambitious project that tried to defy the laws of reality. MoviePass started life as a “Netflix” for movies where users would pay $9.99 month and have all-you-can-eat access to movie theatres....
Facial recognition has to be nearly perfect. The Metropolitan Police (the Met) is struggling with a report that Scotland Yard commissioned that strongly indicates that its facial recognition technology is not close to being good enough to be acceptable for use as a tool to fight crime. The Met began trailing facial recognition technology in 2016 and have since conducted...
Hangs onto the global No. 2 slot. Baidu’s developer conference kicked-off with a demonstration of the company’s supremacy in Chinese AI but stopped short of providing convincing data that would foster the belief that it is in a position to mount a challenge outside of China. First, autonomous driving. In China, the little data that is available puts Baidu in...
The rebellion gains steam. The challenge to the existing status-quo when it comes to revenue sharing for app stores is gathering pace and sooner or later Valve, Google and eventually Apple will be forced to cut their take. The CEO of Paradox Interactive has gone on the record stating that the current 30/70 split is outrageous and went on to...
Reprieve in name only. The White House’s apparent U-turn on Huawei is unlikely to give Huawei the products it really needs and even if it did, it is quite possible that fatal damage has already been done to Huawei’s smartphone business. As a good-faith gesture in its wider trade dispute with China and to get the trade talks moving again,...
It could be a very long wait for electric vehicles. While the German automobile industry has a strong vested interest in the longevity of petrol and diesel engines, it has a point when it claims that electrification is pretty far away. On the sidelines of the BMW NextGen event in Munich, BMW’s head of development stated that in 2025, 80%...
Cashier-less stores are too stupid to make money. Cashier-less shops are not all they are cracked up to be as the emerging bloodbath in China and Amazon’s glacial roll-out clearly indicates. Amazon was first to launch a cashier-less store in 2016 but the fact that it has not taken this concept any further is a clear indication that this experiment...
Component loophole won’t help the smartphone business. US Hardware vendors have found a loophole that will allow them to continue selling silicon-based products to Huawei, but this will not work for software meaning that the outlook for the smartphone business remains dire. The loophole in question is called the di minimis rule which provides an exception for companies on the...
Apple’s response is unlikely to hold water. Apple is just one of a list of larger US tech companies under scrutiny by EU competition authorities, but I think its response to Spotify’s complaint will not hold much water with the EU. The whole dispute revolves around what is referred to as the “App Store Tax” which is the 30% share...
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 Hardware – Paging Dr. Porat
I think Google’s condition may finally be treated. While the wires are already speculating on the form factor of the Google Pixel 4 due to be launched in Q4, I am wondering whether this will be the last smartphone that Google makes. Ever since it wasted $12.5bn of shareholder’s money on Motorola Mobility in 2012, Google has had a bad...