Nothing phone needs to not live up to its name. Another brave soul has decided to have a crack at the highly concentrated and brutally competitive smartphone market which, unless it has something pretty special up its sleeve, is going to end in another expensive disaster (like Essential). Last time around it was Andy Rubin’s start-up called Essential Products (see...
Crypto heads for a deep freeze. The rhetoric around the safe haven and inflation hedging properties of crypto has gone eerily quiet as it transpires that cryptocurrencies are nothing more than speculative assets whose value is impossible to determine. The news gets worse and worse as Bitcoin is now around $21,000 and many of the crypto-related companies are cutting staff...
EV SPACs break down and Geely gets it right. EVs: One down, many more to go EV SPAC Electric Last Mile Solutions (ELMC) has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy indicating that there is no chance of a recovery in what is likely to be the first of many. Chapter 7 is different from Chapter 11 which is a process by...
I don’t think LaMDA is anywhere close to being sentient. Another disagreement between Google and one of its researchers has sparked a big debate on whether AI has become sentient, but all of the evidence that I can see points to the contrary and that AI remains as dumb as ever. This time, the researcher in question is Blake Lemoine...
The state sees some sense at last. The readmittance of Didi (and two others) to the Chinese transport market is the first tangible evidence that the regulatory crackdown that has crippled the Chinese technology sector is, at last, coming to an end. However, there are worrying signs that the Chinese government is determined to cling onto Covid-zero meaning that the...
Apple declares war on OEMs. The strength of Apple’s position in the domestic vehicle market has given it the confidence to make a play for the whole digital vehicle making Apple as threatening to the OEMs as Google. Apple’s expansion of CarPlay into the instrument cluster pushes OEMs further away from the Digital Life of the vehicle and brings them...
Apple declares war on short-term loan providers and car makers. Apple produced an ordinary performance but saw announcements that challenge both the vehicle makers and the fintech industry. However, there was nothing on the Metaverse clearly indicating that Apple is far from ready with anything confirming its position with Google and Microsoft at the back of the pack in RFM’s...
Tesla – Never a dull moment Mr Musk has been living up to his mercurial reputation by ending work from home, announcing job cuts and then backtracking on them two days later leaving everyone as confused as ever. Tesla also postponed its AI Day by 6 weeks in the hope that its humanoid robot would be working by then something...
The strangest profit warning. Microsoft has been forced to downgrade its earnings forecast less than one month after it gave it in what is both a complete non-story but also makes me wonder whether something else is going on here. On 26th April 2022, Microsoft said that FQ4 22 revenue / EPS would be $52.4bn – $53.2bn / $2.28 –...
Klarna – WeWork replay?
Despite the parallels, Klarna is not a re-run of WeWork. At a high level, Klarna looks like a re-run of WeWork although it is a much better company meaning that the only real issue I have is a stratospheric SoftBank-pumped valuation that is now causing great distress. Klarna is now enduring the hangover as it needs more money, but the...