Reply to this post Mobile payments could cause the gorillas to start fighting again. Google’s acquisition of technology from Softcard threatens to shatter the fragile peace that has existed between Samsung and Google since January 2014. For more details please see Samsung & Google – Gorilla War – 27th May 2014 Following the failure of...
Reply to this post Yahoo! still fails to address the central issue of its ecosystem. Yahoo! hosted its first mobile developer conference last week that barely created a ripple in the newsflow. This was because it was devoid of anything really new other than the launch of mobile developer suite that looks a lot like...
Reply to this post Lollipop in danger of sucking. Despite promises of significant performance improvements, initial testing is showing that Lollipop is not much better than KitKat. This will rub salt into the wound caused by the upgrade that has been sitting on the shelf for months and is still not in the market in...
Reply to this post LoopPay must become seamless to create value for Samsung. With the complete cessation of any attempts at the ecosystem (see here), the acquisition of unique hardware is the only way left for Samsung to differentiate. To this end Samsung has announced the acquisition of LoopPay which is an enabler of wireless...
Reply to this post Sony’s strategy raises more concerns that it solves. Sony has announced its medium term strategy with the aim of delivering JPY500bn in operating profit for the full year ending March 2017E. This would represent a return on equity (RoE) of 10% which will be the yardstick against which performance will be...
Reply to this post Using Microsoft apps is the final nail in the ecosystem coffin. It looks very much like Samsung has discarded all of its in house software on the Samsung Galaxy S6 in favour of productivity apps from Microsoft and the ecosystem from Google. Removing all the usual pre-installed apps. should make the...
Reply to this post Infotainment makes more sense than a car. Apple has money to burn, but I think that success has not gone to the collective head of the management team. If the chatter is correct, there is a project inside Apple taking up the time of 1,000 employees that is looking at the...
Reply to this post Pedometer going the way of the digital camera. A recent study by the University of Pennsylvania under scientific conditions has shown that smartphones are just as accurate at tracking steps as dedicated pedometer devices. 14 participants each conducted 4 walking exercises carrying two smartphones and 6 pedometers comprising 3 Fitbits, 1...
Reply to this post Baidu pays the price for its mobile ambitions. Baidu reported disappointing Q4 14A results the cost of building out mobile hurt the figures. Q4 14A revenues / net profit were CNY14.1bn (US$2.23bn) / CNY3.23bn (US$517m) which missed estimates of CNY14.1bn / CNY3.52bn. Mobile is causing Baidu two main problems. First: Like...
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.
Ecosystem economics – Sticky wicket
Reply to this post YouTube contributes no profit but a lot of value to Google. Even though YouTube managed to earn around $4bn in revenues in 2014A, the inherent nature of video economics continue to prevent it from turning a real profit in its own right. I suspect that the main reason for this is...