Tag: technology

How has Xiaomi grown so quickly?

Xiaomi is a very interesting company with a very interesting business model.

The vast majority of phone manufacturers around the world create a smartphone with a cost of around $100 and then they spend a huge amount of money on marketing and branding. The company then believes that the smartphone has a much higher percieved value – so they sell it for $400 or above.

Xiaomi doesn’t do this!

Xiaomi is aiming to sell all of its products as close as possible to their costs – as they want to have as many products available in the world as possible.

Once out in the world and being use – Xiaomi then looks to drive revenues from providing software and services around these products, which has a much higher margin that the hardware itself. Thus, driving higher demand, more product adoption and thus more revenues from services.

Asana Files to Go Public via Direct Listing on NYSE – Asana by Numbers!

Asana is one of the world’s most popular project and task management software (we use Asana in our office). A week ago Asana filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange.

Instead of an IPO – Asana has elected to file for a direct listing (which means that they aren’t selling any new shares in the listing only the existing ones).

By the numbers:

  • For the year ending Jan. 31, 2020, Asana had a loss of $118.6 million on $142.6 million in revenue. For the year ending Jan. 31, 2019, it lost $50.9 million on $76.8 million in revenue.
  • The company says it has more than 3.2 million free account users and 75,000 paying customers with a total of 1.2 million paying users across 190 countries.
  • Asana’s biggest shareholders are co-founder and CEO Dustin Moskovitz, Benchmark Capital, Generation Management, and Founders Fund.
  • According to its most recent secondary trades, Asana’s stock traded at a volume-weighted average price of $15.82 in fiscal 2020, $15.98 in Q1 2021, and $17.26 in Q2 2021.

Blackstone Acquires Ancestry for $4.7 billion from Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, Permira, Silver Lake, Spectrum Equity

Blackstone has acquired Ancestry for $4.7 billion from a group of private equity investors (Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, Permira, Silver Lake, Spectrum Equity)

Within eight years those private equity investors purchased Ancestry for $1.3 billion and have now sold for $4.7 billion. Not a bad return!

Ancestry currently has $1 billion in annual revenue from a base of more than 3 million customers who pay for its various family history services.

In what ways is Google Waymo a threat to Tesla and its Self Driving Technology?

Waymo at present has a private valuation that is twice as high as Tesla.

How can this be?

Margins! Tesla is focused on the full production of the car where Waymo is focused purely on the underlying technology with self driving cars. Thus, Waymo will have a Gross Margin that is extremely high in comparison to Tesla.

Eric Schmidt talked about this a lot. How Google and its products always wanted to be focused on providing the technology sub stack instead of the full product as it keeps margins at a high level and thus maximising value.

What is the Biggest Tech Company That Uses Contractors or Remote Workers?

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

Should Verizon Create a Consumer Version of BlueJeans Video Conferencing After Acquisition?

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?

Verizon’s BlueJeans acquisition is about more than the work-from-home trend

Apple Maps will Soon Show Everyone All COVID-19 Testing Locations

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.

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.

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.