Tech / Telecom news — 23 Feb 2017
PRODUCTS & SERVICES
Video
Facebook has been revealed to be in talks with the MLB to stream professional baseball games this summer. This and similar announcements confirm that the technology is prepared, but also show that sports leagues are under pressure to go where the audience is, after suffering ratings erosion with the traditional model (Story)
Semiconductors
Semiconductor stocks are in a boom that analysts cannot explain as a cyclical effect, and seems to respond to expectations on a technology revolution driven by the internet of things, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and driverless cars. Nvidia is the paradigmatic example here, with a 25x EV/EBITDA, and +265% in 1 year (Story)
Financial services
Digital banking startups might have underestimated established banks’ potential to avoid disruption, and now aim to collaborate with them, to transform their operations / service portfolio, instead of displacing them. Even more now, as the Trump administration will remove regulatory constraints for traditional banks (Story)
Traditional cash could also be more resistant to disruption than it looks, as it avoids tracking of transactions by authorities. So there’s a trade-off between governments’ interest to promote digital cash, to avoid tax-evasion or corruption, vs. the need to maintain some level of traditional money, to preserve users’ privacy (Story)
Car sharing
Alphabet will expand the scope of the car-sharing service they had started to test through their Waze car-navigation app, to several US and LatAm cities. The approach is even more radical / less “professional” than Uber’s, making it possible for regular drivers to offer very cheap rides to other people using the app (Story)
NETWORK TECHNOLOGY
T-Mobile USA and Verizon are prepared to launch LTE-U, LTE services using unlicensed 5GHz spectrum, the same frequencies currently used by WiFi, as the FCC just authorised this use after evaluating potential interference with WiFi networks. T-Mobile has already announced commercial launch for this Spring (Story)
Pre-5G trials by Verizon with 28GHz spectrum to provide high speed fixed wireless broadband will be a key milestone for Samsung, as a “next generation” wireless vendor. They aim to (1) validate the technology, (2) learn how to deploy it in a cost-effective way, and (3) understand demand and improve customer experience (Story)
Meanwhile, AT&T is involved in its own tests of a similar technology, streaming video from their brand new DirecTV Now app. In this case they’re using 39GHz spectrum, and Nokia is the reference vendor. They claim the trial has demonstrated 5G’s promise of providing new ultra-low latency, high bandwidth experiences (Story)
BIG DATA & ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The next step in AI could be the development of algorithms that require less training data, and are instead able to collect feedback from “humans in the loop”. E Brunskill, a professor at Stanford, describes here her work for this, using Reinforcement Learning, the technique behind Deep Mind’s Go-playing algorithm (Story)
M&A MOVES
Dish published 4Q16 results yesterday, and surprised the market with positive net adds. So short term financial pressure has reduced to make a deal (probably with Verizon) to monetise their spectrum assets. But they still have pressure to do something before 03/20 (the regulatory deadline to build a network using the spectrum) (Story)
