Tag: tech

• The scale of Apple’s iOS economy

  

  This is an interesting post on the size of “the iOS economy.” 

  About 70% of customer spending on Apple’s App Store goes to developers. The remaining ~30% is kept by Apple. 

  In 2017, iOS developers earned $26.5 billion. This is up about 33% from the year prior and is higher than McDonald’s revenue in 2016. Cumulatively, Apple has paid out about $86.5 billion to developers.

  And this past new year’s day, a new record was set with $300 million in App Store purchases. According to Horace Dediu, this year should average closer to $100 million per day.

  Also, this year’s App Store revenue is expected to surpass the film industry in terms of global box office sales. And we’re only talking about Apple. This does not include Android revenues.

  Click here to check out the full post.

  Photo by Ben Kolde on Unsplash

  2018.01.21

• Class action litigation filed against GoPro

  Snowboarding season is starting late for me this year. But that doesn’t mean it will be any less epic. So far this season Jackson Hole has had 221″ of snow.

  This year I’m introducing a GoPro gimbal stabilizer into the mix. Here is a good example video of the difference a stabilizer makes – buttery smooth video footage. I am a big nerd when it comes to gear and tech, and I guess many other things as well.

  But judging by GoPro’s stock right now and the cliff it fell off of at the beginning of this month, I may be in the minority when it comes to worrying about buttery smooth snowboarding videos.

  Sales over the holiday season were disappointing and they recently announced that they’re discontinuing the Karma drone. GoPro is now said to be shopping for a buyer.

  Part of the problem may be their narrow action sports use case. When I’m on a mountain, I love my GoPro gear. But when I’m not snowboarding, I struggle to find consistent value in it. We all just use our phones to capture photo and video.

  To make matters worse, class action litigation was recently filed against GoPro, and the company’s CEO and CFO. Investors are claiming that they failed to disclose, among other things, that demand for the GoPro brand had declined dramatically.

  Who do you think would be a good buyer for GoPro?

  2018.01.20

• My even shorter Amazon HQ2 shortlist

  Amazon released its shortlist of HQ2 cities this morning. Below are the 20 metropolitan areas. They were selected from 238 bids, so this shortlist represents 8.4% of the original pool.

  • Atlanta, GA
  • Austin, TX
  • Boston, MA
  • Chicago, IL
  • Columbus, OH
  • Dallas, TX
  • Denver, CO
  • Indianapolis, IN
  • Los Angeles, CA
  • Miami, FL
  • Montgomery County, MD
  • Nashville, TN
  • Newark, NJ
  • New York City, NY
  • Northern Virginia, VA
  • Philadelphia, PA
  • Pittsburgh, PA
  • Raleigh, NC
  • Toronto, ON
  • Washington D.C.

  I saw some people on Twitter say that they were surprised to see Toronto and Miami on this list. I was not. If you remember, I publicly predicted on this blog that Toronto would be selected for Amazon HQ2.

  That said, I thought it would be fun to guess at an even shorter list from Amazon’s shortlist. I have no knowledge of Amazon’s actual selections process, but if I had to guess, here is who I would cross off the list:

  • Atlanta, GA
  • Austin, TX
  • Boston, MA
  • Chicago, IL
  • Columbus, OH
  • Dallas, TX
  • Denver, CO
  • Indianapolis, IN
  • Los Angeles, CA
  • Miami, FL
  • Montgomery County, MD
  • Nashville, TN
  • Newark, NJ
  • New York City, NY
  • Northern Virginia, VA
  • Philadelphia, PA
  • Pittsburgh, PA
  • Raleigh, NC
  • Toronto, ON
  • Washington D.C.

  That leaves us with a list that looks like this:

  1. Boston, MA
  2. Miami, FL
  3. Montgomery County, MD
  4. Newark, NJ
  5. Northern Virginia, VA
  6. Toronto, ON
  7. Washington D.C.

  So why this list? I’m probably wrong, but my reasons are as follows:

  – I think Amazon will opt for a metro area on eastern time.

  – There seems to be a predilection for areas around Washington D.C., so I left Montgomery County and Northern Virginia. 

  – As wonderful as it is, New York City feels too center ice for Amazon – at least in my view. But maybe Newark places them in the catchment area.

  – The area needs to be of a certain scale so Amazon doesn’t overpower it and they have enough human capital to draw from.

  – Miami is my sleeper bet. Most people think of it simply as a resort town, but there’s a huge percentage of foreign born residents and powerful arts/design scene.

  – Talent is number one, which is why I left Boston and Toronto and why I continue to believe in Toronto. Toronto is more dynamic than Boston.

  If I had to pick just three from the above shortlist, my bets would be, in alphabetical order: Boston, Toronto, and Washington D.C. What are yours?

  2018.01.18

• What happened (in tech) in 2017

  I am still catching up on reading after being mostly offline last week, minus short windows where I would go online to upload these daily blog posts.

  Here is a post that Fred Wilson wrote on new year’s eve about “what happened in 2017.” It has become a tradition of his to write a “what happened” post on the last day of the year and a “what is going to happen” post on the first day of the new year. He then uses these posts to keep track of how well he does on his predictions for the year.

  His three headlines for 2017 were: (1) crypto; (2) the beginning of the end of white male dominance; and (3) the tech backlash (i.e. tech is the new Wall Street). It is worth a read. Crypto was an obvious one, but he has been writing about it – and investing in the space – for years. Of particular interest in this post is how he positions it as the basis for Internet 3.0 (the decentralized internet).

  What is also clear from the post is just how ingrained tech has become in our everyday lives and how much it reaches beyond simply the tech industry. I have been saying this for years, which is why I spend a lot of time writing about it on this blog.

  2018.01.08

• Google and Facebook show

  This morning Fred Wilson posted this chart on his blog:

  

  What is clear is that when it comes to US digital ad revenue, it’s the Google and Facebook show, followed by everyone else. Microsoft/LinkedIn is a distant third. Fred calls it “the digital advertising duopoly.” And his view is that the tech industry needs to figure out new approaches to monetization that still allow free content to be consumed. 

  I’ve said this before, but Facebook buying Instagram for $1 billion seems like a bargain when you look at a chart like this and you see what they were able to do with the platform. Instagram’s 2018 revenues are projected to be bigger than every other company on the list minus Google but including YouTube.

  Also notable are the flatlining of Twitter and the projected growth of Snapchat. 2017 was a rough year for $SNAP. But it appears that somebody believes they’ll be able to turn things around with their app redesign and reconstituted ad platform. Be that as it may, it’s still the Google and Facebook show – at least for the time being.

  2017.12.28

• Is San Francisco losing its openness?

  Sam Altman has an interesting post up on his blog talking about what he feels is a changing cultural environment in San Francisco (which is where he is based). His argument is that heresies are good for innovation and for moving the world forward. We need people to question established norms. But for that to happen we need environments and cities that encourage it, or at the very least allow it.

  Here’s an excerpt:

  Restricting speech leads to restricting ideas and therefore restricted innovation—the most successful societies have generally been the most open ones.  Usually mainstream ideas are right and heterodox ideas are wrong, but the true and unpopular ideas are what drive the world forward.  Also, smart people tend to have an allergic reaction to the restriction of ideas, and I’m now seeing many of the smartest people I know move elsewhere.

  In San Francisco he is starting to feel that it is becoming increasingly difficult to have wacky ideas and to work on wacky startups. And for this reason, people are starting to leave the city in search of more open cultures. Openness used to be a hallmark of San Francisco. It was once the epicenter of counterculture. Has that changed?

  Here is a final excerpt:

  I don’t know who Satoshi is, but I’m skeptical that he, she, or they would have been able to come up with the idea for bitcoin immersed in the current culture of San Francisco—it would have seemed too crazy and too dangerous, with too many ways to go wrong.  If SpaceX started in San Francisco in 2017, I assume they would have been attacked for focusing on problems of the 1%, or for doing something the government had already decided was too hard.  I can picture Galileo looking up at the sky and whispering “E pur si muove” here today.

  Click here to read the full post.

  2017.12.15

• So the tech works. What’s next?

  Below is a keynote talk by Benedict Evans about what’s going on in tech today and what may happen in the next ten years. It covers: the growth of mobile; S-curves; Google / Apple / Facebook / Amazon (who knew Amazon had so many employees?); machine learning; autonomous vehicles/impact to cities; mixed reality; crypto-currencies; and so on.

  For those of you interested in crypto-currencies – and that appears to be everyone these days – it’s interesting to hear how Evans describes their current position at the beginning of the curve: “The tech works, but what’s the use case?” This is not to say the potential isn’t huge. It is. Automated trust. Distributed and programmable money. But the future is still unclear.

  If you can’t see the video below, click here.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVYDkPidXrU&w=560&h=315]

  2017.12.12

• The geography of innovation and equality of opportunity

  The Equality of Opportunity Project has a recent paper out called: Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The importance of Exposure to Innovation. Vox also has a summary of the findings, here.

  The overall goal of the project is to “use big data to identify new pathways to upward mobility.” And in this particular study, they discover that in America there are many “lost Einsteins” – people who have the ability, but not the opportunity.

  Not surprisingly, socioeconomic class, race, and gender play a significant role. Children from high-income families are 10x more likely to become inventors (measured in patents) as compared to children from low-income families.

  Geography, place, and environment also matter. Where and how a child grows up has a significant impact on future outcomes. If a child grows up in a city/network that exposes them to other inventors, it increases the likelihood that they too will invent. 

  Where a child grows up also has an impact on the types of inventions, even if the child move cities as an adult. For example, the study found that if a child grows up in Silicon Valley but moves to Boston as an adult, it is still more likely to author patents related to computers because that’s what it was exposed to as a child.

  These associations also impact in a gender-specific way. Women are more likely to invent in a particular technology if they grow up surrounded by similar female inventors. The presence of male inventors has no impact. This makes a powerful case for better gender diversity and strong role models.

  If you would like to read the full paper, click here.

  2017.12.05

• Jeff Bezos’ regret minimization framework

  Who better to talk about on Black Friday than Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Supposedly he’s now worth $100 billion.

  I just finished watching this short 60 Minutes clip about Amazon from 1999. If you can’t see it below, click here.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjjUOemW-_Q?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

  Amazon was founded in 1994, so this was 5 years in. Already the company had gone public and had a market cap of somewhere around $30 billion.

  Now, keep in mind that this was right in the middle of the dot com bubble, but already Bezos was a billionaire on paper.

  What is clear from the above clip is just how obsessed Bezos was and is on the long game (”I don’t go in for carpe diem”) and on his customers. Here he is worth quite a bit, but driving around in a Honda Accord. 

  Bob Simons, the interviewer, pokes fun at him a few times for his reluctance to spend money. But Bezos says that it’s all about spending money on things that matter to customers and not spending money on the things that don’t.

  That’s customer obsession.

  P.S. The title of this post will make sense once you watch the video.

  2017.11.25

• People you may know

  If you’ve ever wondered how Facebook figures out all of the people you may know, here is some reading material. 

  The short answer is that Facebook doesn’t just know the things you’ve told it about yourself, it also knows what other people have told it about you. 

  One of the ways in which this is done is through its so called “shadow profiles". These are profiles that get created when other people share information about you with Facebook. 

  For example, you may not want to share your work email address with Facebook, but if it’s sitting in someone’s phone and that person decides to share his/her address book with Facebook, then it could show up in your shadow profile.

  And if there’s a common data point, such a phone number, then Facebook can fairly easily link that work email address back to you and start suggesting people from your work that you may know.

  The scary part, of course, is that Facebook is getting your information without you explicitly sharing it with them. It could be coming from that person you gave your business card to at the bar.

  It goes to show you just how fierce the competition is for our attention. It may be an assault on our privacy, but more Facebook connections means a higher likelihood that we’ll stay engaged on the platform.

  Over the past year I have been growing increasingly intolerant of this demand for my time. Slowly but surely I have been turning off all nonessential notifications on my phone. 

  Very few now remain, which is why if you’ve been trying to reach me on Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn or some other platform, and I’m not responding, it’s because there’s a good chance I’m not seeing the notifications.

  And let me tell, it feels liberating.

  2017.11.21