Predictions of the Day

Wednesday, 04/15/2015

Crossing the Pacific — Christopher Mims of the WSJ comments on a piece examining how entrepreneurs from China’s three leading Internet firms — Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu— are finding luck at home (and soon abroad in Mims’ eyes) on their own ventures. Venture-capital investments more than doubled there to $6 billion last year from $2.8 billion the year prior, and although there is plenty of value yet to be captured across all industries within China, the high-end opportunities present in the US could be enticing to Chinese cos. Lastly, while many US tech companies (Facebook, Twitter, and Uber to name a prominent few) continue to find endless difficulties trying to operate in China (due to both state restrictions and market conditions), the same challenges look not to be as daunting for Chinese tech startups looking to make early inroads in America.

Let it Shine — The International Energy Agency is bullish on solar. In Bloomberg, the organization puts its chips on solar to beat out wind, hydro, and nuclear in the long-term, claiming the renewable energy crown. Things are certainly looking up for renewables as a whole. The world is now adding more capacity for renewable power each year than coal, natural gas, and oil combined, with no signs of slowing. By 2030, more than 4x as much renewable energy capacity will be added vs. traditional fossil fuels.

More Than Square? — Hunter Walk of Homebrew puts his faith in Foursquare, following rumors of an impending sale to Yahoo for ~$900 million (that were eventually denied, for now). The local recommendations app, which was latest valued at north of $600 million last year, is a hard company to size up. It announced earlier this spring that revenue was more than doubling year-over-year, yet a decision to unbundle check-ins from its core search product hasn’t garnered the praise or growth it had hoped. Google Trends data shows that interest in the company has since plummeted. There is no denying that Foursquare’s data is valuable though. Last month, it announced a deal with Twitter allowing tweets to be geo-tagged, and earlier this week it announced Pinpoint, an ad platform which allows brands to target users based on where they’ve been in real life. Whether all of this will eventually add up to a near-or-over $1B exit is to-be-determined. Stay tuned.