Amazon goes vertical. Amazon has moved to cement its grip on the smart home with the purchase of the WiFi router company Eero that should make the smart home much simpler as long as the user sticks with Amazon. Amazon has agreed to acquire Eero for an undisclosed sum which leads me to suspect that Eero has been a bit...
The main beneficiaries are Samsung and Ericsson. Just as Huawei is on the edge of casing Samsung real problems, it has a host of troubles that could completely destroy almost all of its business outside of China. Huawei’s problems are best understood by splitting them into two pieces. First, Iran: There appears to be some evidence (see here) that Huawei...
Pressure on Valve could lead to pressure on Google. Valve is resorting to underhand tactics to undermine Epic’s competition on the PC in another sign that the app store business model, in general, is coming under real threat. Valve has been virtually unchallenged in the market for online purchasing of games on PCs for some time and in all aspects...
The labels won’t go quietly into the night. Spotify reported its first-ever profit and underscored its move into podcasts but the fall in the share price just serves to underpin the view that Spotify still has no real business in being a public company. Q4 18 revenues / EBIT were €1.70bn / €94m compared to consensus revenues at €1.71bn. Crucial...
In this business, it pays to be big. Alphabet Q4 18 – Outside the doghouse. Alphabet reported good Q4 18 results, but rising costs and an increasing fear of privacy regulation has kept a lid on optimism both inside and outside of the company. Q4 18 revenues / adj-EPS were $31.84bn / $12.77 ahead of consensus at $31.33bn / $10.86....
A new breed of digital ecosystem may rise. Fortnite is showing early signs of expanding from gaming and offering other Digital Life services leading to the possibility that it could become a digital ecosystem in its own right. Fortnite is a hugely popular massively multiplayer online (MMO) game where players typically fight each other to the death with the last...
The privacy religion may prevent the AI fix. In stamping his authority on Apple’s AI efforts, John Giannandrea has an opportunity to fix the problems that are plaguing Siri but runs the risk of running up against Apple’s deepening religion on privacy. The head of Apple Siri has (been?) moved into another role completing the rout of the old guard,...
Facebook users & clients don’t seem to care about its’ issues. Facebook reported good Q4 18 results confirming that its users and its clients do not seem to care about the privacy issues that have tied up the media and regulators up in knots during 2018. Hence Facebook’s real problem remains AI which is responsible for its falling profitability where...
Apple is looking like a safe haven once again. Hardware is by far the most efficient method of digital ecosystem monetisation but at the same time, it is also the riskiest, meaning that when it goes wrong, it really hurts. Furthermore, Apple’s hardware is so profitable that it will find it virtually impossible to replace hardware profits with services, leading...
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.
IBM – Watson the wanderer.
Watson goes nomadic. IBM has sensibly decided to allow its AI offering (Watson) to run on the cloud offerings of its rivals as well as enabling an ability to run effectively over multiple cloud instances at the same time. This is a good move which some may see as detrimental to its efforts to win share in the enterprise cloud,...