Tech, Business, Finance and Everything Else
Shazam doesn’t have a web based application at the moment.
However, Shazam used to have a native Windows 10 app for desktop until it was shut down a few years ago.
Since Shazam is now owned by Apple I doubt they will be making a desktop PC or web based version any time soon.
Great interview with Garry Tan about all things investing – including the recent move by Alexis Ohanian to leave Initialized.
Currently – No.
Webull is currently only available in the US, Brazil, Japan, and India and is yet to go live in the UK.
However, it is only a matter of time before it makes its way to the UK.
Deliveroo is planning to go public at a valuation of around $7 billion USD. Here is a quick breakdown of some of their numbers that have just been released.
These number make for hard reading, but it seems like there is a real path towards profitability – but it feels like it is going to really require mass scale of nearly £10 billion per year in GTV to get there.
However, Deliveroo have the ability to start new product lines and delivering in other areas as well as corporate contracts, plus geographic expansion.
Technology stocks are currently dropping fast – so it will be interesting to see if there is an appetite on the London Stock Market for a heavy losing technology company with growing scale.
The flying taxis are coming!
Lilium is a German company who are developing electric air taxis – they are currently in talks to go public via a SPAC.
It seems like they are running out of great companies to SPAC and seems like people are focused on select around buzz words – like mobility and electric vehicles.
Another German company with very similar aims, Volocopter, opted to raise new capital on the private market, bringing in €200 million (about $238 million) for a Series D.
The short answer is = NO.
Amuse claim that they pay artists / musicians more money than their competitors – but this is a completely FALSE claim.
The major record labels and the lead music distributors all have the same revenue share with Spotify, Apple Music and other DSPs. There is NO way that a small distributor such as Amuse would have a higher revenue share than the major record labels!
It’s getting a little bit tired that there are a lot of companies out there making completely false claims knowing they can’t be challenged.
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:
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.
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.
Great article on Bloomberg about Jetbrains – the company behind the popular programming language Kotlin.
Key numbers:
It’s great to hear from other founders who are far more interested in the issue they are trying to fix than the billions of dollars they could be personally making.
The US Commerce Department recently announced that DJI is now on the US Trade Ban list.
DJI has since come out and stated that Americans will be able to continue to buy and use its products “normally” despite the companies presence on the list.
This ban only affects the companies from purchasing parts from American companies, so I’m assuming DJI saw this ban coming and already had a plan B supply chain in place ready to go at any time.
I’m not entirely sure how a drone company is helping to support human rights abuses in China. It seems like if this is the case then all Chinese companies will be in the same position!
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.
Rafael Nadal will most likely still be winning Roland Garros in 2050!
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.
When I read most of the leading technology sites like The Verge or TechCrunch or Business Insider there is a distinct focus on US based technology companies (with a hint of EU), which of course is understandable. However, I find myself these days wanting to find more about companies in Asia or the Developing World. This is where true innovation will come from!
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.
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.
I have just come across Tara AI (via DaringFireball), which provides a completely free to use alternative to Jira and other project management software.
I had a very quick look at it seems to have a very strong user interface and provide a strong amount of features.
However, WHY IS IT FREE?
Shutterstock has acquired AI driven Amper Music.
Amper Music claims to have over 1 million individual audio samples in its catalogue.
It seems like Shutterstock wants to be able to create endless AI driven music and be able to monetize that in its marketplace and keep 100% of the royalties. It will be interesting to see what happens to Amper Music after the transaction closes, as I expect that the company will be completely shutdown immediately.
RouteNote has started offering Free Music Distribution to TikTok and Resso. RouteNote was one of the first music distributors to partner with TikTok and Resso globally and they can provide full access into the platform for no upfront fees and artists and labels keep 85% of the royalties.
TikTok and Resso pay royalties to both artists and labels so its worth adding your music into the music library into TikTok so creators of all shapes and sizes can find you and promote your tracks to a global audience.
It was confirmed that Spotify is buying Megaphone for $235 million.
Megaphone is a podcasting hosting and advertising company – it’s easy to see how this fits into Spotify’s plans for world domination in the podcast market, but it will throw up a lot of concerns on how powerful Spotify is in this market now and how they plan to control all the data around podcasts.
These podcasts should be platform agnostic – like music. However, they seem to be getting acquired and then made exclusive for either Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal or whoever has the most money at the time.
Who is going to lose out? CONSUMERS!
Google seems to think the future of work lies in between the office and working remotely.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that Google were currently making changes to its physical spaces to better support employees in the future. He didn’t specific state what those changes were.
“I see the future as definitely being more flexible,” Pichai said during a video interview for Time 100. Pichai was an honoree on this year’s list of the most influential people in the world.
“We firmly believe that in-person, being together, having that sense of community, is super important for whenever you have to solve hard problems, you have to create something new. So we don’t see that changing, so we don’t think the future is just 100% remote or something,” he said.
Pichai said that Google is “reconfiguring” its office spaces to accommodate what he called “on-sites” — presumably, days where employees, who mostly work from home, gather in the office.