Operating at the Intersection of Technology and the Capital Markets
Month: March 2019
We all want to feel special, to believe we make a difference, that we contribute to society whether it be through job creation, volunteering our time or some other means. M&A is no different. Target company CEOs and management teams want to feel loved. This is especially true of founder CEOs. Should a founder CEO … Continue reading We All Want to Feel Loved. M&A Is No Different.
Sure, Amazon’s Alexa-powered devices are nifty, but there’s only one AI king of the jungle - Google. Google benefits from more nodes on the network - i.e. more input data from which to learn - than any other single technology platform. “Google By the Numbers” or “How We Feed the AI”: Google processes 63,000+ search … Continue reading “Google By the Numbers” or, “How We Feed the AI”
Earlier this week Amazon’s AWS unit and automobile giant VW announced a joint effort to build the “Industrial Cloud”. This effort delivers on the Cloud vision from more than a decade ago of driving operating efficiency by migrating large, complete enterprise data sets to the cloud. Massively scaled, secure cloud environments like AWS enable interoperability … Continue reading The Industrial Cloud
When speaking or writing about Apple we have spent much of the past 18 months beating up on the iPhone. Yesterday's "Apple Event" didn't engender confidence in the firm's content strategy. Anchored by a curated, walled garden approach, Apple's strategy seems mired in the early 2000's at a time when young people have migrated to … Continue reading Apple’s Strategy – The Good, The Bad & The RetroPremium
Not Apples to Apples but the Below Tells A Story.. YouTube (GOOG): More than 1.9 billion logged-in YouTubers each month. 200 million+ logged-in users watch people play games on YouTube each day. (YouTube/Stadia has one foot in today and one in tomorrow with traditional content and video games on the platform). Netflix (NFLX): 139 million … Continue reading Content Wars & Investing for Tomorrow
Last week we wrote about autonomous video games where visual elements of video games are self-created via machine learning. This week's news is equally inspiring whereby Google announced its massively-scaled cloud gaming entry "Stadia" which perhaps only Google could pull off. See our "Key Takeaways" and more below. KEY TAKEAWAYS:Revenue model and pricing were not … Continue reading Google “Stadia” – Cloud Gaming’s New Giant
From Chatbots to Ambient AI. Cloud-based AI and Machine Learning technology is readily available. Large technology platform companies such as Amazon (Alexa), Google and Microsoft (Azure), encourage third-party developers to build applications and services on top of their core AI and Machine Learning platforms. This enables developers to focus resources on building value through the … Continue reading How AI Will Conquer Financial Services
FIS to Acquire Worldpay for approximately $43 Billion (enterprise value). This deal comes on the heels of the recently announced Fiserv acquisition of First Data. The FinTech M&A spree is approximately two years old at this juncture. So what gives? We went through this exercise a couple of weeks ago with a buyside friend. While … Continue reading The FinTech Consolidation Wave Continues. Incumbents Fear the Mobile Wallet.
The gaming industry - the largest segment of the broader entertainment industry - continues to grow and evolve. Google is set to join Technology giants Amazon (Twitch) and Microsoft (Xbox) in the gaming space - formal announcement coming on March 19th. Not only are the industry players changing, but so is the underlying AI technology. … Continue reading The Age of Autonomous Video Games
Will we subscribe to Apple’s forthcoming subscription video on demand (“SVOD”) service simply because it’s Apple? Apple plans to release various service bundles later this year that will contain video and news content. For purposes of this discussion let's focus on video content where the name of the SVOD game is "content quality". At launch, … Continue reading Apple’s New Video Service – How Many Subscription Services Can We Eat?
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