June 2016

There were 4 posts published in June 2016 (this is page 1 of 1).

Weekly#172

  • Uber Customers Will Get Upfront Pricing in New App Version
    App will eliminate lightning-bolt icon previously used to indicate surge pricing (WSJ)
  • YouTube Will Soon Let You Stream Live Video From Your Phone
    The Google unit, Twitter and Facebook all want to be your mobile app of choice for live video (WSJ)
  • Tencent Seals Deal to Buy ‘Clash of Clans’ Developer Supercell for $8.6 Billion
    Tencent is little known in the West, but the company’s market capitalization was about $207 billion based on Tuesday’s closing price, more than that of Oracle Corp. and Intel Corp.
    Online games accounted for more than half of Tencent’s $15 billion in revenue last year. “We are very bullish on the [mobile games] market,” Tencent President Martin Lau said on a conference call. (WSJ)
  • Self-driving cars may one day face decision of who to save, kill (Wtop)
  • WhatsApp hits 100 million calls per day (TechCrunch)
  • Twitter quietly launches tags to location feeds with Foursquare
  • How Brands Can Put IoT Insights To Work For Them (Forbes)







Weekly#171

  • Salesforce.com Inc. lost out on its own bid for LinkedIn Corp. to Microsoft Corp., which acquired the professional social network site for $26.2 billion on Monday, according to a person familiar with the matter.Salesforce.com’s offer price isn’t known, but Brent Thill, an analyst at UBS Group, said purchasing LinkedIn would have been a stretch for the company, which makes web-based software for salespeople. The price Microsoft paid is nearly half of Salesforce.com’s $55.9 billion market capitalization. (WSJ)
  • Watch Apple’s Two-Hour 2016 WWDC Keynote in 7 Minutes (MacRumors)
  • Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. released an annual revenue forecast for the first time, projecting a 48% increase for the fiscal year ending in March as the Chinese e-commerce company seeks to alleviate investors’ concerns about its growth prospects. (WSJ)
  • LinkedIn also could supercharge Microsoft’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, used to identify and track sales leads. Microsoft is in fourth place in market share among the large CRM players, including Salesforce.com Inc., SAP SE and Oracle Corp.
    Salesforce is the market leader, but it holds a minority of the complex and sometimes ill-defined market.LinkedIn already has its own CRM-type product, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, but more important, it has the data and reach that any CRM company would covet.(WSJ)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#170

  • Sony Confirms It Is Planning High-End PlayStation 4
    No release date or pricing disclosed but new version will come with a faster processor and graphics enhancement (WSJ)
  • Messaging-app operator Line Corp. is planning a dual listing in Tokyo and New York in July that could raise more than $900 million and value the five-year-old company at more than $5 billion. (WSJ)
  • In a rare pre-WWDC sit-down interview with The Verge, Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said that Apple would soon alter its revenue-sharing model for apps. While the well-known 70 / 30 split will remain, developers who are able to maintain a subscription with a customer longer than a year will see Apple’s cut drop down to 15 percent. The option to sell subscriptions will also be available to all developers instead of just a few kinds of apps. “Now we’re going to open up to all categories,” Schiller says, “and that includes games, which is a huge category.” (TheVerge)
  • Tesla’s Betting You’ll Pay
    $9,000 for a Software Upgrade
    On Thursday, Tesla Motors re-introduced the Model S60–a cheaper version of its all-electric sedan that was discontinued last April. The new S60 starts at $66,000 and has a range of about 208 miles. For $8,500 more, customers can choose an upgraded version, called the S75, which can travel about 40 more miles per charge, according to the company’s website.

    So the upgraded model has a bigger battery, right? Nope. The two versions of the car are identical and sport the same 75 kWh battery. The only difference is that the software on the lower-end version limits the capacity of the S60’s battery, crippling its range. In fact, owners can instantly transform a lowly S60 into an S75 at any time for a fee of $9,000 ($500 more than if they’d initially bought it that way). They don’t even have to bring the car to a service center. Tesla flips the software switch remotely. (Bloomberg)

  • Machine Learning Trends and the Future of Artificial Intelligence 2016 (Algorithmia)
  • Marc Andreessen’s Favorite Books

Weekly#169

 

Mary Meeker Internet Trends 2016

  • Ericsson Mobility Report June 2016 [PDF]
  • Code Conference 2016
  • Code Conference Videos
  • The biggest challenges for Chinese companies making the next generation of wearables, self-driving cars and drones is having experts in cross disciplines, GGV Capital Managing Partner Jenny Lee said Friday. (WSJ)
  • Notes for the summer: what happened, what’s happening now and what’s next (Ben Evans)
  • Transportation technology will be the next Internet protocol (TechCrunch)
  • Elon Musk Code Conference