Blue Apron vs. HelloFresh – Bloody palms.

HelloFresh looks certain to crush Blue Apron. Blue Apron is in real trouble and, when compared to HelloFresh, it serves as a classic example of how important scale is in a network-based business. Blue Apron reported Q3 18 revenues / customers of $150.6m / 646,000. Q3 18 revenues are down 28% YoY and customers have fallen by 10% since Q2...

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Tencent & Uber – Soul searching.

Both Tencent and Uber have some thinking to do. Uber Q3 18 Uber’s Q3 18 results show that it is not really capitalising on its dominance which increases my fear that the company has lost its aggression and will to dominate the market it created. Q3 18 bookings were up 6% QoQ and 41% YoY to $12.7bn and revenue was...

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Palm phone – Doomed experiment.

A resurrection best not practised The Palm brand (now owned by TCL) has launched a new device which is arguably more useless than cellular in the Apple Watch as it adds cost for the user and solves no problem that the user is ever likely to have. Palm used to rule the personal digital assistant (PDA) space 16 years ago...

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Cable TV – Sword of Damocles pt. IX

Devices to hasten the demise Never one to miss a trick, both Amazon (see here) and TiVo (see here) are now offering set-top boxes that make combining streaming and OTA TV as easy and as fun as possible. This combined with a further loss of 1.1m cable TV subscribers in Q3 18 (MoffatNathanson) and rapid consolidation is a further sign...

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Tencent – Winter is coming.

Tencent battens down the hatches for the quarters ahead With the Chinese government showing no signs of letting the video game industry out of its current bind, Tencent is slashing costs and focusing on other areas to lessen the impact of the what is now an inevitable fall in gaming revenue. The video games industry relies on a constant stream...

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Samsung Developer Conference – Communicator II

Samsung reinvents the Nokia Communicator but sadly, doubles down on Bixby. Samsung has shown (see here) the form factor within which it thinks that a folding screen will be most applicable, and in doing so has reinvented the enterprise-focused iconic Nokia Communicator (see here). Most importantly, Samsung confirmed that the screen would be going into mass production in the coming...

Facebook – The Dunce pt. III

AI so dumb, it accepts ads from ISIS. Despite its rhetoric regarding its progress in the fight against fake news, even the most obviously fake placements still seem to be getting through, highlighting once again that at the root of almost all its problems lies its weakness in AI. Tests carried out by Vice News (see here) and Business Insider...

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iOS vs. Windows – Input and Office

Even the best can’t touch laptops The tablet market is dying and its failure to take over the laptop market means that it is likely to continue being squeezed and not even the new iPad Pro will be able to save it. The new reviews on the new iPad Pro are in and while they are, as expected, universally positive,...

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CES 2019 – Optimistic origami pt. II

If you fold it, will they come? With most major announcements now out of the way before CES 2019, the folding screen is positioning itself to be the biggest theme at CES in January 2019, potentially kickstarting the next product cycle. Full-face screens are now pretty much the norm meaning that there is very little if any differentiation to be...

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Apple FQ4 18 – Opacity rules

Apple signals the way ahead is less predictable. Apple reported excellent FQ4 18 results but guided weakly for FQ1 19 which combined with Apple putting an end to disclosing unit figures, caused general disappointment causing the shares to fall 6.5% in after-hours trading. FQ4 18 revenues / EPS were $62.9bn / $2.91 compared to consensus at $61.4bn / $2.78. Apple...