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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Whenever I create a new WordPress blog on Google Cloud and then try to edit the permalinks it gives an INTERNAL SERVER ERROR.
This happens in every Google Cloud deployment of WordPress.
The reason is because you need to Enable mod-rewrite in Apache because the .htaccess files need to do what it needs to do. Here is now to fix it.
Step 1) Make sure you have enabled mod_rewrite in apache. This can be done by going through Compute Engine>VM Instances > identify the correct instance and to the far right on the line will be SSH. Click it and it will take you securely inside a command line interface. Run this command:
$: a2enmod rewrite2) Check your virtualhost configuration in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and make sure that it is configured with AllowOverride All instead of the default AllowOverride None for your web root directory. This tells apache it is ok for settings in .htaccess files to override settings. Use this command to modify the file.
sudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.confOnce you're in there, find the right spot and change it.
<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride ALL <----(edit from none)
Require all granted
</Directory>After you’ve made that change, make sure to restart the server:
sudo service apache2 restartNow, your .htaccessshould work. You can also make this change inside a virtual host, which would normally be preferable, but that depends on the way Apache is set up.
It seems like in the business chat application world there are really only 2 big players – Microsoft Teams and Slack.
Here is a little list of other alternatives if you are looking for something different.
For the past month or so I have been thinking a lot about internal communications at our company and trying to work out how we can create a central source of truth and information for all the products we create. This lead me to Confluence.
Confluence is a tool that allows anyone to create a wiki (that actually looks good) in a matter of minutes.
Confluence looked like a great solution and I even had a play around with the product as its free to signup and use for 10 people. However, I was simply shocked at the price of such a tool. I understand internal communication is very important, but should it really be valued at $10 per user per month?
I know Confluence hosts the platform and there are a lot of great features, but $10 per user per month just seems a little bit over the top for a tool that I could create using WordPress in a matter of hours (which will have a hosting cost, but at a fraction of the cost).
Why are so many technology companies especially paying for such a service? Is it because of the ease of use? Is it because of the templates?
You can’t even brand Confluence effectively for your company on the $10 per user per month.
I have been watching This Week in Startups – with Jason Calacanis – pretty much since the beginning. The video series / podcast provides a great insight in to some of the leading minds in the technology world.
Jeff Housenbold (Softbank Vision Fund) recently sat down with Jason to talk about the Softbank Vision Fund and some of its portfolio companies.
The comments about Growth vs Profit were very interesting and provided great insight.
Some hot news for those of us that have with held buying an iPhone (all 2 of you). Word on the street is that Apple has had an excellent 4th Quarter, and with sales of iPhones surpassing previous estimations, there is some wiggle room when it comes to price.
The iPhone which currently resides in an exclusive contract with AT&T, sells for $199 with contract. Millions and millions of people jumped on board with the first iPhone came out, and the second generation was just as popular. With over 15 million iPhone sold worldwide, it has dominated the mobile market. Outstanding sales have given Apple a cushion in case the current economic downtown starts to effect sales, they can afford to drop the price of the iPhone to $99.
What would a $99 iPhone do to the market? For starters, with such a low barrier to entry, the iPhone will clearly bleed further into the consumer market, even those on the fence would be tempted to purchase, and the market dominance would only leave true niche mobile companies like Blackberry able to withstand the onslaught.
Conjecture? Possibly, but only time will tell. Get those Christmas wish lists ready and stay tuned for more info!