Bits & Pixels — TL:DR End of Year Edition

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Bits & Pixels

2 min readFeb 13, 2017

After a bit of absence, I am hoping to make this newsletter a priority in 2017.

#2016

What a year 2016 was for tech and the US in particular. From Mr Trump’s surprise win (a surprise to everyone including Team Trump) to the revelation that AR / MR darling Magic Leap wasn’t quite ready for showtime this has been a sobering year for tech.
When it comes to Augmented Reality, there are two elephants in the room, and they are Microsoft Hololens and the $1.4 billion funded startup Magic Leap. For the latter, the last month of 2016 was one they could have done without. It was reported that a purported game that was played in the office everyday was actually a video made by Weta Workshops in New Zealand.
While embarrassing, that wasn’t as damaging as the fact that 4 senior executives left in 2016, perhaps because of an internal culture in disarray.
VR/AR as a whole had a banner year when it came to investments, with the industry receiving $2.3 billion from both corporate investors like Alibaba and venture capitalist like Sequoia.

Whether you hate it or love it, the iPhone has changed the way we communicate, shop and entertain ourselves.
By the numbers, 1 billion iPhones were sold worldwide. Let that sink in for a little bit. Apple sold it’s first million iPhone in its first 3 months. There are 2.2 million apps in the Apple Store and apple has paid out $60 billion to App Store developers.
What is next you ask? According to Blogger Robert Scoble has been outfront with his prediction that Apple will make an announcement concerning a AR headset that is powered by an iPhone.

After having raised some $2.36 billion, Snapchat has decided that 2017 will be the year it goes public. It will debut at an initial targeted value of some $20 billion.
But not everyone thinks its a good idea. For one the argument being made is that unlike Facebook pre-IPO snapchat is currently losing money on every user. And to get to Facebook’s $12 per user revenue it would have to x4 its current revenue.
Part of the pessimism is based on the fact that their user growth slowed (from 7% the previous quarter to 3%) at the same time that Facebook / Instagram released their user stories.