Tech, Business, Finance and Everything Else
Here is the key difference.
Alibaba is a marketplace. They do not own the inventory of the merchandise sold. They put buyers and sellers together. Buyer and seller agree on terms online via their platform or offline.
Amazon’s main business is they own the inventory, and sell directly to the customer.
Both models have their Pros and Cons. Amazon has also turned into a very strong third party seller platform in recently years, but they still like to control a lot of the fulfilment.
No.
At the time of writing this article Alibaba (BABA) has a market cap of $545 billion.
Source: Yahoo Finance (BABA)
The first company I know to publish the salary of every staff member was Buffer. Buffer have long had an open policy on their wage algorithm.
Buffer recently updated their wage algorithm – you can see the full google spreadsheet here.
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
Spotify raised a total of $188 million from venture capital and private equity companies before its IPO.
Series A, 10/08 $21.6M
Creandum
Northzone
Li Ka-shing
Series B, 8/09 $50M
Wellington Partners
Li Ka-shing
Series C, 2/10 €11.6M
Sean Parker
Founders Fund
Venture Round, 6/11 $100m
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Accel Partners
Digital Sky Technologies
Yes. RouteNote is completely free and allows any artists from anywhere in the world to upload as much music as they want to the worlds largest stores and streaming services.
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?
Discord voice chats have been known to have quite a lot of background noise (especially when one of your friends has a mechanical keyboard). However, for sometime Discord has been working on suppressing that background noise and they currently have a new tool in early testing.
The company stressed that the technology, from Krisp, runs entirely locally and doesn’t share data with anyone else.
Development is still “early” for the noise suppression tech, and a phone version is in development. Don’t despair if the technology still feels rough around the edges, then — Discord still has a lot of work to do before noise suppression exits this test phase.
Apple will soon be showing all users where their closest COVID-19 Test location is in Apple Maps. There will be a red medical glyph icon, and a special banner in the Apple Maps card.
Apple has launched a portal for hospitals, healthcare providers and businesses to register as a COVID-19 testing location. Apple will review the application and when approved, the location will start appearing on Apple Maps.
The testing locations will appear with a red medical glyph icon, and a special banner in the Apple Maps card.
If you searched for Xiaomi ADRs, you’ve inevitably come across both XIACF and XIACY. What’s the difference? You cannot trade XIACF as a retail investor because it’s a “privately placed” ADR under SEC Rule 144A. This means that they’re for qualified institutional buyers (QIBs) only. QIBs want and contribute to the 25x higher average trading volume than XIACY. Volume ensures there are enough buyers and sellers to trade with you. Information and services are also limited to QIBs.
Short Answer: NO – I doubt it.
Airbnb was in a good position to IPO at the end of last year, but seemed to push it back. Since then the follow has happened:
Airbnb won’t be seeing the public markets any time soon as they really need to focus when the Coronavirus lockdowns start to exit and the world opens up for business again.
Google Maps has long been my favourite maps platform. However, Waze is widely used by my friends. Google owns both Maps and Waze, but why don’t they combined the two platforms?
Simple – There are two distinct use cases.
Use Case One: Help me Find a Destination
Use Case Two: Help me in my regular commute
Google has made a very good decision on keeping them separate. It’s seems to be the right decision.
There is an IMDB for the music industry that is currently in development – Tunedex.
Tunedex seems to offer the world’s largest open music database, which shows the discographies of every musician on the planet.
Tunedex has a lot of opportunities so it will be very interesting to see where it heads in the future.
It depends.
Producers can receive some music publishing royalties if that is what is negotiated in the publishing agreement. Sometimes high end producers will insist on taking a percentage of the tracks that they produce.
Microsoft buying Wunderlist seemed to fit nicely with the business productivity suite that Microsoft has developed over many year.
The Wunderlist acquisition was only $150 million and it sounds like a lot, but it is only 0.1% of Microsoft’s market capitalisation.
Wunderlist fits in nicely with Outlook and running tasks from within email – plus it can go nicely with Office 365 inside a suite of much larger products – it also might have been to hire the amazing talent at Wunderlist.
In-and-Out remains a private company because it is hard to run a public company and there are limited upsides.
Lynsi Snyder is the current owner and she is a billionaire without the stress of being public. Public companies require a lot more regulation.
(NRZ) New Residential Investment Corp have announced that because of the Coronavirus they are reducing their next dividend payment to $0.05.
This now means that the yield will be around 5%.
Quibi launches today.
Price point: $4.99
Reason: Immersive video content on a mobile device.
Funding: Quibi has raised over $1.8 billion in funding to date.
I think it’s very easy to see that Quibi is being made by a bunch of executives who aren’t or connected to their target audience. Quibi is built for a younger generation who don’t really want to consumer full length films on their mobile devices only. The younger generation are all about short form content and getting information as fast as possible (eg. TikTok).
p.s. their target audience also don’t have enough money for yet another subscription service at $4.99 per month.
Conclusion: Quibi will be a flop!
Im expecting that we are all sitting here in 12 months saying that they just haven’t been able to get the subscriber numbers that they wanted or needed to hit with $1.8 billion in funding.
Twitch has seen a huge wave of growth in its viewership in most part due to coronavirus. Twitch wants to generate $1 billion in ad revenue and commerce this year, according to The Information. The company reportedly delivered about $300 million in ad revenue in 2019.
The only way Twitch are going to achieve this is by expanding beyond just hardcore gamers. Brands will want to see diversity of content – Games, Music, Chat, Entertainment and more.
Twitch seems to be the first part of Amazon’s grand plan for gaming. Amazon will soon launch its very first game from its recently established gaming studio.