I often wonder if it is obligatory that if you start and IPO a digital business raising billions of bucks you should have to spend money on acquiring unprofitable businesses where the synergies are unclear and it seems entirely within the capacity of your own technical team to build the added functionality yourself. Twitter chasing Spotify and Pandora and other music streamers is a case in point. Spotify recently reached 10m subscribers. Whoopee! Twitter has several hundred million users! Why spend billions to buy them? Is it sheer laziness on the part of management or activity for activities sake? I mean Google built their own version - Google Play. Twitter should too.
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It has long been clear that the litigious nature of the United States with respect to personal injury claims is now established firmly on UK shores. Anyone who turns on the TV at lunchtime during the week will hear how even if you tripped over a fly whilst guzzling the last dregs of your Vodka bottle there is a ‘lawyer for you’. (In fact, these commercials are now so hectoring it’s enough to give you a hangover without the vodka!). But now this pernicious legal trend is affecting the business information industry where companies even sue over public information matters. In one ongoing case, the owners of a liquidated firm are blaming the UK Registrar, Companies House, for their demise (Read HERE). I cannot comment on the detail of this case but it is surely the responsibility of each company and individual to check on their status in this information age and to make every effort to correct inaccuracies with the information providers concerned. It takes time to run down a healthy company. Can one untimely data point be the cause of such destruction? Put me down as a sceptic! Strike one up for the little guy. (Yeah, right!) So called ‘privacy advocates’ (and who isn’t when it comes to their own information?) are hopping for joy over the European Court of Justice, the European Union’s highest court ruling that we all have a digital right for certain data historic data points to be ‘forgotten’. Google, which delivers 90% of all search in Europe, is rightly worried that the ruling will mean it faces a huge burden which none of its clever algorithms will be able to spirit away. Tech companies are all about automation and scale. Try calling Google with a service question and their response is reduced to the voice activated morass of all big companies. They are simply not set up to deal with grit in the Oyster. Still, they’re smart enough to spot a nightmare when it’s on the horizon. But does the wider business information industry? Let’s face it when Equifax gets sued because it’s technical and customer service systems can’t handle a chap called ‘God’, what chance does the credit reporting industry have when European punters notice just how much historic data these companies have? What’s more, so much of it is being sold to third parties who aggregate it and post snippets freely to attract web traffic so that visitors will purchase the more up-to-date variety (full disclosure: I built a whole business around this model) it won’t be long before the ECJ’s ruling is a real business disruptor for big business information companies like Equifax, Experian and Dun and Bradstreet. Sleep now while the going's good... This morning Virgin launches its quad play with TV, mobile, internet and landline deals costing ‘as little’ as £30 pm. Virgin is aiming to leverage its impressive result to date of 66% of its customer base taking three products, BSkyB has so far managed to get 37% of its 10 million customers to take three of its products. The more services a customer takes also reduces customer ‘churn’ for Telcos. But the mobile reception offered by the Quad provider may not be the best for a customer and how many now need a landline? All to play for... 17Apr14 0845hrs Weibo Watch. The Sino micro-blogging site IPOs today in a volatile market: Is it possible for corporations to have too much cash? Of course it is. A sure sign of this is when they pay silly money for acquisitions. As I posted on the day, WhatsApp at $19B is a silly money acquisition for FaceBook when they have their own far superior Messenger App. It can be used across multiple devices with one login (i.e. it is not phone number dependent so the same messages on your iPad can be viewed your Android phone). Now some bright spark at Facebook has realised this and the company is forcing all Facebook Users to download it if they want to send private messages. Go Figure! Last July I tweeted this mind-blowing graphic of a snapshot of High Frequency Trading. As more evidence emerges of a huge divergence between productivity and average wages (the gains from productivity have almost exclusively gone to the capitalist class, “the 1%”), HFT amplifies returns for the 1%. A new book out yesterday, Flash Boys, by Michael Lewis appears to evidence this. I am half way through it. It’s a brilliant read. You can arbitrage it at Amazon UK where it is available for the Kindle while being Kindle embargoed in the US: Read This HERE Understand How Digital Is Changing Our World! Barely noticed was last month's news that the #FCC will NOT appeal a court decision tossing out its 'net neutrality' rules. I applaud this. If telcos can’t make money from laying pipe then fast broadband is dead in the water without public subsidy. But #Apple’s discussions with #Comcast about preferential access to the cable company’s subscribers is worth watching (#Netflix have struck a similar deal for their service with Virgin Media in the UK). There’s only so much pipe around and the more that gets rented out to big companies who can pay, the less there is for new innovators who can’t. |
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Concise, immediate, comment on the balls bouncing around the digital technology space. Archives
April 2016
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