Tag: technology

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Business Tech

Apple Will Allow iPhones to Accept Contactless Payments by NFC

Apple is reportedly going to allow iPhones to start accepting contactless payments. This is huge news!

It will dramatically affect any card company and how they collect their fees – as well as companies like Square and other POS services.

Apple has reporting been working on this service since 2020, when it purchased a Canadian startup called Mobeewave. Mobeewave’s technology only needs an app and the phone’s NFC to work.

I expect that Apple will roll out such a service as part of Apple Pay.

Game changer!

Categories
Tech

How do you check if Google AdSense ad code is inserted correctly?

google ads

I have recently added Adsense to Crenk.

I wondered how long it takes before the ad code starts to show correctly on your site once it has been added.

Answer = random.

If your using the same Google account or the same IP address as you did when you inserted the code then Google won’t show you an ads and you will see a big white blank space.

However, if you get in touch with a friend and get them to test the site for you then they should be able to generally see the ads. It normally takes a few hours after the ad has been inserted, but sometimes it can be faster.

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Business Tech

Wise Goes Public Today on LSE – Great Investment Opportunity

wise logo blue

Wise is one of my favourite companies and has been for a long time.

Today Wise goes public on the London Stock Market – under the ticker – WISE.

They have been a leader in the P2P money transfer space forever, but I think they have a huge number of opportunities in adjacent markets to enter.

Today they will go public for around $7 billion USD.

I can easily see this company being worth $70 billion within 3-5 years.

Categories
Tech

Xiaomi EV is Coming Soon and Im Excited

Xiaomi entering the EV market.

I think Xiaomi is one of the most interesting companies in the world. Xiaomi has managed to develop a huge portfolio of products with the aim of selling them with low margins to gain as much market share as possible and then make most of their margins from software based services for these products.

Xiaomi has now announced that they are going to spend $10 billion USD over the next 10 years to manufacturing electric cars, embarking on its biggest-ever overhaul to enter China’s booming EV market.

Xiaomi didn’t specifically state whether they were going to develop the software for these EVs or develop the entire Car (much like Tesla).

I would assume they will go down the Tesla route to market and will develop an amazing EV.

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Tech

Venture Capital is a Game of Outliers – Here are the Numbers / Chances of Success

Venture Capital by Numbers:

Venture Capital business is 100% a game of outliers

  • 4000 venture fundable businesses per year
  • 200 will get by top tier Venture Capital
  • 15 will some day get to $100 million in revenue
  • Those 15 – provide 97% of all the returns for the entire Venture Capital category for the year.
Categories
Business Tech

Coinbase Valued at Over $100 billion – You Have to Be Kidding Me (From $8 billion to $100 billion in a year)

Coinbase is looking to go public very soon and its valuation in the secondary markets has just gone over $100 billion.

Coinbase’s valuation over the years:

  • 2016 — $500M
  • 2017 — $1.6B
  • 2018 — $8B
  • 2020 — $100B

Coinbase reported revenue of $530M for 2019 and $691M for the first nine months in 2020. The company posted a net income of $141M between January-September 2020, up from a loss of $30M in overall 2019. Notably, these numbers don’t include 2021, when the Bitcoin price surged more than 90% YTD.

Categories
Business Tech

Is the S&P 500 Over Weighted in Tech Stocks or Not?

The S&P 500 is an index of some of the leading companies in the United States. The S&P 500 doesn’t push extremely high in one area as its supposed to show a cross section of America.

Here is the breakdown the S&P 500 by Market Sector:

As you can see there is a very broad cross section of companies in all sectors of America. Technology is the leading sector, but it’s not the whole S&P 500.

Categories
Tech

Baidu Shares Jump 14% as it plans to Enter the Electric Vehicle Market

baidu electric vehicle

Baidu shares rose 14% on Tuesday after news was announced that the Chinese search engine based company was planning on building their own electric vehicles.

Its great to see that Chinese technology companies are starting to think about the EV sector and how they can disrupt the auto industry. Alibaba has also partnered with Chinese automaker SAIC to develop premium EVs for the Chinese market.

It will be interesting to see how this unfolds as technology companies are very well placed to enter this market and make huge disruptions in the same way Tesla has.

Categories
Sports Tech Tennis Video

Tennis Deep Fake Interviews with Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic (Video)

rafael nadal deep fake technology interview

Rafael Nadal will most likely still be winning Roland Garros in 2050!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9ce_z9rW_EU

This videos really shows how technology has moved on and the ability to make even the small details (like hair) move in the right direction when he moves his head in this interview.

Amazing Deep Fake technology.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhn0kzS1SeI
Categories
Music Tech

Free Spotify Music Distribution within 48 Hours!

RouteNote-stores

There are a growing number of musicians and labels all over the world that would like to get their music live for Free in Spotify! Music distribution to Spotify and other services can take some time and the vast majority of them have poor customer service – however, you should check out RouteNote.

RouteNote is a very large music distribution service that allows artists and labels to get their music live in Spotify and other stores for free within 48 hours. This is outstanding!

RouteNote is free to create an account and artists can upload for free and keep 85% of the royalties with monthly payments straight into your Paypal account or International Bank Account.

Im a huge fan so click here to take a look for yourself!

Categories
Tech

What is Slaps.com and Who Owns It

Philip Kaplan seems to be the owner of Slaps.com, which is a new music website. Phil is a serial entreprenuer who seems to create a lot of startups and then a few years in will get a little bored and start a new project.

Slaps.com seems to be a very early and very basic Soundcloud streaming services, but with basically no features and hip hop heavy.

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Tech

Substack Stealing Writers from Major National US Publications to Write Newsletters to Subscribers

Substack-Business-Model

It seems as though Substack has been approaching writers at top national publications in the USA and offering them the ability to create and obtain subscribers on Substack. It also sounds like they are offering these writers minimum guarantees to move, which allows the writers to have a very minimal downside on moving.

Categories
Business Tech

Warren Buffett: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Has Changed The World

NEW DELHI, INDIA - MARCH 24: Warren Buffett, Chairman of Berkshire Hathway and Trustee of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation during the press conference at the Hotel Oberoi on March 24, 2011 in New Delhi, India. (Photo by Ankit Agrawal/Mint via Getty Images)

Warren Buffett’s views on Jeff Bezos and how he has changed the world. 

Why this matters: Warren Buffett for a long time has been watching Jeff Bezos and commenting on how amazing the run of Amazon has been. It would have been very interesting if Warren Buffett understood the technology industry at the beginning of the internet as it would have provided a lot of great investment opportunities.

Categories
Tech

Interview Domm Holland on launching Fast, a one-click checkout for the entire Internet (Video)

Another amazing interview by Jason on This Week in Startups.

Domm Holland runs Fast, a one-click checkout for the entire Internet.

It seems like Domm noticed that Amazon’s one click patent expired and took advantage.

Categories
Tech

How has Xiaomi grown so quickly?

xiaomi phone lineup

Xiaomi is a very interesting company with a very interesting business model.

The vast majority of phone manufacturers around the world create a smartphone with a cost of around $100 and then they spend a huge amount of money on marketing and branding. The company then believes that the smartphone has a much higher percieved value – so they sell it for $400 or above.

Xiaomi doesn’t do this!

Xiaomi is aiming to sell all of its products as close as possible to their costs – as they want to have as many products available in the world as possible.

Once out in the world and being use – Xiaomi then looks to drive revenues from providing software and services around these products, which has a much higher margin that the hardware itself. Thus, driving higher demand, more product adoption and thus more revenues from services.

Categories
Business Stock Market Tech

Asana Files to Go Public via Direct Listing on NYSE – Asana by Numbers!

Asana is one of the world’s most popular project and task management software (we use Asana in our office). A week ago Asana filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange.

Instead of an IPO – Asana has elected to file for a direct listing (which means that they aren’t selling any new shares in the listing only the existing ones).

By the numbers:

  • For the year ending Jan. 31, 2020, Asana had a loss of $118.6 million on $142.6 million in revenue. For the year ending Jan. 31, 2019, it lost $50.9 million on $76.8 million in revenue.
  • The company says it has more than 3.2 million free account users and 75,000 paying customers with a total of 1.2 million paying users across 190 countries.
  • Asana’s biggest shareholders are co-founder and CEO Dustin Moskovitz, Benchmark Capital, Generation Management, and Founders Fund.
  • According to its most recent secondary trades, Asana’s stock traded at a volume-weighted average price of $15.82 in fiscal 2020, $15.98 in Q1 2021, and $17.26 in Q2 2021.

Categories
Tech

Blackstone Acquires Ancestry for $4.7 billion from Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, Permira, Silver Lake, Spectrum Equity

Blackstone has acquired Ancestry for $4.7 billion from a group of private equity investors (Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, Permira, Silver Lake, Spectrum Equity)

Within eight years those private equity investors purchased Ancestry for $1.3 billion and have now sold for $4.7 billion. Not a bad return!

Ancestry currently has $1 billion in annual revenue from a base of more than 3 million customers who pay for its various family history services.

Categories
Business Tech

In what ways is Google Waymo a threat to Tesla and its Self Driving Technology?

waymo_minivan_HP

Waymo at present has a private valuation that is twice as high as Tesla.

How can this be?

Margins! Tesla is focused on the full production of the car where Waymo is focused purely on the underlying technology with self driving cars. Thus, Waymo will have a Gross Margin that is extremely high in comparison to Tesla.

Eric Schmidt talked about this a lot. How Google and its products always wanted to be focused on providing the technology sub stack instead of the full product as it keeps margins at a high level and thus maximising value.

Categories
Tech

What is the Biggest Tech Company That Uses Contractors or Remote Workers?

Google is one of the world’s largest technology companies and at present the majority of its work force are contractors. Its reported that there are over 90,000 direct employees at Google.

Google’s Alphabet Inc. employs hordes of these red- and green-badged contract workers in addition to its full-fledged staff. They serve meals and clean offices. They write code, handle sales calls, recruit staff, screen YouTube videos, test self-driving cars and even manage entire teams – a sea of skilled laborers that fuel the $795 billion company but reap few of the benefits and opportunities available to direct employees. 

Source: Fortune

Categories
Tech

Should Verizon Create a Consumer Version of BlueJeans Video Conferencing After Acquisition?

bluejeans-platform

Verizon recently announced their acquisition of BlueJeans and it was very well times as it was remote working was starting to explode around the world due to Coronavirus COVID-19.

BlueJeans has long been one of the favourite video conferencing applications for the enterprise, but it has never really catched on outside the large enterprise deals.

Is this an opportunity for Verizon to also create a consumer version on BlueJeans?

Verizon’s BlueJeans acquisition is about more than the work-from-home trend