Startups
- A fascinating story about a startup exchange battling industry incumbents, including through the SEC
“Despite IEX’s attempts to make trading nicer, it is never going to be a country club sport,” said R. Cromwell Coulson, the chief executive officer of OTC Markets Group Inc., who like many in the industry has been watching the battle with keen interest. “Citadel plays hard to win.”
- Uber is heavily investing in rider volume
And losses are growing: In the third quarter, Uber lost $697 million on $498 million in revenue, according to a person briefed on the numbers.
- Famed Investor: “Blood in the Water”
We are entering a 90–10 situation for the unicorn class of startups with billion-dollar valuations in which 90% of the startups will be repriced or die and 10% will make it.
- The End of the Big Venture Formula
It’s time to actively fight the trend of staying private longer. Employees need to have more insight into the company that is paying their bills, and investors need to have more options for liquidity, especially angel investors who often are putting up their own wealth to invest.
Smart City
- Uber is moving into on-demand food delivery
The UberEats app, expected to launch in the mobile app stores of Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google by the end of March, also represents Uber’s first attempt to build a mobile app from the ground up in the five years since it launched its flagship ride-hailing service.
- Citymapper, a startup helping people move around cities, raised a Series B
“It’s not just about London, NYC and Paris anymore. The next set of challenges involve the massive emerging market cities where the infrastructure is limited, rules of transit are different, data is sparse, and even the consumer approach to smartphones and apps is not the same.”
- Facebook wants to connect the 2/3 of the world’s population not on the internet
A kid in India — Zuckerberg loves this hypothetical about a kid in India — could potentially go online and learn all of math. “It’s the underpinning for helping people get into the modern economy,” he says. “Ten years from now, we should not have to look back and accept there are people who don’t have access to that.”
Industry and Markets
- Netflix falls after a staggering 2015
Netflix Inc., the top performer in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index last year, fell as much as 10 percent after reporting fewer U.S. subscribers than anticipated in the fourth quarter.
- To keep its search bar on the iPhone, Google pays Apple $1 billion
The search engine giant has an agreement with Apple that gives the iPhone maker a percentage of the revenue Google generates through the Apple device, an attorney for Oracle said at a Jan. 14 hearing in federal court.
- The microchip industry is quickly consolidating
“As the semiconductor industry consolidates, Microchip continues to execute a highly successful consolidation strategy with a string of acquisitions that have helped double our revenue growth compared to our organic revenue rate over the last few years,” said Steve Sanghi, president and chief executive of Microchip.
- Corporations are hoarding trillions. Why?
It has around $80 billion sitting in Google’s bank accounts or other short-term investments. With $80 billion, Google could buy Uber and its Indian rival Ola and still have enough left over to buy Palantir, a data-mining start-up.
- Google’s Android OS generates massive profit windfall
Google Inc.’s Android operating system has generated revenue of $31 billion and $22 billion in profit
Business of Defense
- With stock plummeting, FireEye, a cybersecurity leader, acquires intelligence startup iSight
FireEye sells appliances that protect computer networks and said it is adding iSight to help improve its offerings. Texas-based iSIGHT hires intelligence agents abroad to try to spot attacks before they happen.
- The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has serious technological capabilities
The U.S. military is banking on an emerging technology called cognitive electronic warfare to give the jet an almost-living ability to sniff out new hard-to-detect air defenses and invent ways to foil them on the fly.
Marine Maj. Gen. Joseph Osterman, commander of Marine Corps Special Operations Command, said he is heavily focused on protecting command-and-control and intelligence systems in an increasingly threatening cyber and electronic warfare environment.
