Will Airbnb IPO on a Public Stock Market Any Time Soon?

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:

  • Coronavirus has all but stopped their business.
  • Combination of debt & equity from Silver Lake, Sixth Street Partners
  • Previously raised $4.6 billion
  • Financial Times reported new $25b valuation last week

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.

If Google owns Waze, and Waze is even better than Google Maps, then why doesn’t Google combine them?

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.

Is There an IMDB for the Music Industry?

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.

Why Did Microsoft Buy Wunderlist and Then Kill The Product?

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! Quibi Will Flop for Sure!

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 Sees Big Viewership Growth But Needs to Expand Beyond Games to Generate $1 billion in Ad Revenue

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.

Quibi Launching Tomorrow (Monday 6th April 2020) – Good Timing or Bad Time due to Coronavirus COVID-19?

  • Quibi launch date is Monday 6th April
  • Not supposed to compete with Netflix or Disney Plus
  • Aimed at on the go video streaming (YouTube competitor really)
  • How will it do while launching during Coronavirus COVID-19 epidemic?

Quibi and timing… good or bad??

How to Fix Your Permalinks in Google Cloud WordPress Deployment via SSH Due to Internal Server Error

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 rewrite

Enable Apache AllowOverride

2) 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.conf
Once 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 restart

Now, 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.

Wimbledon 2020 Cancelled but They Will Gain £100 million due to Infectious Disease Insurance

Wimbledon announced yesterday that they have had to cancel the 2020 All England Championships because of the coronavirus outbreak. This comes off the back of the French Open announcing that they were going to try to reschedule their Grand Slam from May to September, because it was expected to lose £230 million if they had to cancel.

Wimbledon took the strong position of cancellation, because they knew that they had insurance of £100 million if they had to cancel the Championships.

It turns out that the All England Club had the foresight to take out infectious disease insurance during the SARS outbreak, which has then help them in a good stead for the current coronavirus outbreak.

Still a huge shame though that there will be no Wimbledon 2020!

(I used to play tennis for a living, so it’s just unimaginable to not have Wimbledon this year!)

Confluence – Is It Really Worth $10 per user per month to Create an Internal Wiki on Their Platform?

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.

Jeff Housenbold Interview – How Softbank Vision Fund Deploys $100 billion

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.

Crenk is live

Crenk is live again.

Here at Crenk we are looking to explore the world of business, finance and technology. All stories and comments will be straight from the wandering mind of a CEO within the technology industry.

Expect short articles that are straight to the point and written in a very short period of time with limited storylines.

I’m doing this to gain more of an understand on the overall business landscape as it helps my mind to learn by writing.

Hope you all enjoy this site and the content as much as I do from writing it.

What is WordPress

WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. WordPress is installed on a web server, which either is part of an Internet hosting service or is a network host itself; the first case may be on a service like WordPress.com, for example, and the second case is a computer running the software package WordPress.org. An example of the second case is a local computer configured to act as its own web server hosting WordPress for single-user testing or learning purposes.

Features include a plugin architecture and a template system. WordPress was used by more than 26.4% of the top 10 million websites as of April 2016. WordPress is the most popular blogging system in use on the Web, at more than 60 million websites. It was released on May 27, 2003, by its founders, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, as a fork of b2/cafelog. The license under which WordPress software is released is the GPLv2 (or later) from the Free Software Foundation.