Much less likely to get into trouble. Pinterest is in a much better position than either Uber or Lyft as its financials are in much better shape and it not engaged in a bloody price war to try and dominate the market. Demand for Pinterest has been soft, to say the least, as its IPO is now being offered at...
Apple needs to strike a very delicate balance with its partners. Netflix’s gripe with Apple is symptomatic of the problem that Apple faces and the difficult waters it must now navigate to keep its premium margins in hardware. In addition to snubbing Apple’s new TV app, Netflix has now dropped support for AirPlay citing technical reasons around guaranteeing the quality...
Epic challenges the 30/70 revenue split. Not content to disrupt the status quo on Android (see here), Epic’s moves against Valve are bearing fruit sending a strong signal that the traditional 30/70 platform developer split is now obsolete. Epic has launched its own app store on PCs to challenge Valve and is beginning to win some big-name exclusives much to...
Snap needs Facebook to slip to mount a comeback. Snap’s 1st developer conference revealed a move into gaming as well as a strategy to prevent the rampant copying of its innovations that have caused it so much trouble. I don’t think that this is going to trigger user numbers to start really growing again but it may enable Snap to...
Bike sharing has descended into a game of chicken. Hellobike is raising $500m into a suicidally difficult market where its main competitors are either flirting with bankruptcy or have been completely swallowed by much larger ecosystems (Mobike). Hellobike is one of the smaller bike-sharing players in the Chinese market but obviously, it thinks that it has a shot at taking...
Pony.ai & Baidu can do what Waymo apparently cannot. While Beijing is keeping the important autonomous driving data close to its chest, what is available suggests that Pony.ai is the company that is best placed globally to offer a solution in more than one country. Baidu is a close second. The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economics and Information Technology has...
Whack-a-mole is not good enough. A Chinese demonstration of the inadequacies of Tesla’s autopilot also clearly shows that the current methodology of rushing out software patches after the event is simply not good enough for autonomous vehicles. One only has to look to Boeing and the severity of the issues it is suffering as a result of alleged bugs in...
Samsung margins unlikely to recover from Huawei’s predations. Samsung’s handset margins are unlikely to recover anytime soon thanks to a resurgent Huawei, but as ever in Android, it is Google that will reap the real benefit. I have written a long series (see here) concerning the competitive dynamics between Samsung and Huawei where my opinion has long been that Samsung’s...
Google goes bananas. Google has pioneered a new field of computer science and intelligence research resulting in new systems that can take over when the traditional AI fails. A sudden hike in the price of bananas in the immediate vicinity of Pryor Creek, Oklahoma prompted Radio Free Mobile and NGCodec to send their undercover investigator into Google’s biggest data centre...
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.
Twitch & Google – Another crack.
PewDiePie follows Epic Games in undermining the supremacy of Twitch and Google. The first credible challenge to the dominance of Twitch and YouTube has arisen as YouTube’s biggest creator (PewDiePie) who has 93.5m subscribers has announced that he will exclusively live stream on an almost unknown platform called DLive (see here). DLive is run by a tiny Cupertino based start-up...