Tech, Business, Finance and Everything Else
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.
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.
Amuse.io is a new music upstart that has been getting a lot of press of late. Amuse.io has just released their official 2019 financials and it’s very interesting reading.
Revenues = $9.5 million USD
Profit / Loss = $10.9 million USD Loss
Staff = 49 staff
Cash Liquidity = 208%
This basically means that Amuse will need to raise another round of Venture Capital within the remainder of 2020 or start of 2021 to be able to survive.
Source – https://www.merinfo.se/foretag/Amuseio-AB-5590367016/2kgcyso-1hslk
Tesla shares have finished the day at 21.06% down. This is the biggest single day share decline for the company in its history.
Why this matters: Tesla is a company going after a big dream. However, it also seems to be the company that is riding a very high valuation based on very little fundamental numbers being it. Revenues have increase 14% in the past 12 months, but the share price has increased 573%.
My views: I love the company and I love what they are trying to achieve, but it seems like they have become the poster child for a heavily overpriced stock market based on poor fundamentals.
Yes of course. Take a look at RouteNote.
RouteNote has a FREE option for all artists and labels. Any artist or label in the world is able to upload their music to the worlds largest music streaming services and download stores with no upfront costs.
I wrote this article over 10 years ago. I thought it would be very interesting to post again to see how many of these services are still alive and going over 10 years later.
Ten years ago, who would have thought that most of our work would depend on the internet? The internet allows us to have easy access to our files, anywhere, anytime. We chat face to face with friends, meet clients virtually, process payments in a flash and much more. The internet is huge and you can’t get enough of it. It has no end.
While on the topic of the internet, you can call the current scenario, the Web 2.0 revolution, the next dot com boom. Web apps are torrenting the internet with their numbers and new ones pop-up everyday.
Today, I will talk about the latest additions to the pool, of course; the ones you probably don’t know about.
So, without further ado…
With TinyChat you can create your own chatroom and invite people through one simple link. Chat rooms are disposable and can be created within seconds.
With KeepHD, you can download the high defintion version of youtube videos and also fetch the FLVs and 3GPs for your mobiles.
With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way. Move beyond the slide, it only takes 5 minutes to learn how to use Prezi.
With Wix, you can create stunning flash websites for free, all from your internet browser! It offers you a simple powerful online platform to make flash websites, MySpace layouts and more. No downloads or programming needed.
NiceTranslator is a fast, easy to use online translator designed with simplicity and functionality in mind. It is ajax powered, so you get the translations on the fly!
A to-do list with a twist. It streamlines tasks in an elegant calendar view
Pizap is a fun free photo editor that lets people easily create wacky images with their digital pictures. You get a very easy to use photo editor that lets you add photo effects, custom text or speech bubbles and much more.
Need to receive a message by email, but can’t (or don’t want to) give out your email address? whspr! gives you a URL to share instead.
WobZip is an online tool which lets you uncompress compressed files online. It supports many formats including the major ones as Zip, RAR, 7Z, Gzip, TAR, ISO etc…
Create an invitation in seconds, add entries from mobile, twitter, email, iCal, gCal or Outlooks. And of course, send them with ease from withing the app.
Fliggo is an out-of-the-box, all-in-one, solution for creating your own video website. It can be a video blog, a YouTube-like community or a private site for your company or family.
Yidio combines over 200 million videos and offers one of the largest video search engines on the Web.
SlideRocket is an online, flash based tool for creating slides and presentations. It brings together a complete package of online slide making with features such as an intuitive interface, themes, flickr integration and much more
Ziddu is a new free file hosting solution with features such as unlimited storage space, fast uploads and downloads, file management, a sharing community a referral program and the ability to earn money with your downloads.
Mufin is your music discovery engine, that will let you easily discover new music among millions of tracks. With the sound that you dig!
YoutubeReloaded creates an embeddable playlist of YouTube videos that can be added to any website. Simply choose a playlist type to create your free youtube playlist.
FriendPaste is a an online tool where you can paste code snippets of many different languages to share with friends. It sports and intuitive interface with support for syntax highlighting.
Survs is a collaborative tool that allows you to build, deploy and analyze online surveys. With a great user interface, Survs is currently in private beta, though a single request fetched us an invitation.
With SendPhotos Mobile, Web and PC you can upload photos, edit them, create photos albums and share them online with whoever you want. Also available for Android, iPhone and BlackBerry.
BackupURL creates instant cached copies of web pages. The content of a web page stays the same while you share the link provided. The cached page can also be used for referencing or even mirroring data. The cached page will always be online (html,css,images) no matter whether the original site is up or down.
Rapidstack is a realtime Rapidshare link searcher. It scans the links before they are displayed as results and only working links are displayed.
CC Betty organizes your message and its contents – photos, addresses, documents, links – and create a mailspace where everyone can track replies, view and add content. You just CC your messages to her!
Make your emails pop with signatures that reflect your personality and change with every email you send! Create signatures with your twitter status, flickr photos, blog entries, youtube stream and much more, all realtime.
Create your own RSS feed by combiningRSS feeds from your favorite websites, and use filters to choose what you want in it!
Twe2 is a service which sends you your twitter replies, direct messages and custom searches that you specify free to your mobile as SMS. Available in more than 230 countries.
Markkit is a web2.0 text highlighter. Drag’n’Drop the markkit yellow pen into your browser toolbar. Whenever you want to highlight text in a web page, click on the markkit bookmarklet.
So which ones are your favorites?
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.
Most of the Lofi channels on YouTube work with or talk to Lofi artists on a daily basis and they ask if they can use their music in their videos.
If the channel is large they normally ask the artist to sign an agreement which states the channel can use the audio in their videos and keep the money from the videos.