Techonomics — IBM’s Weekly Newsletter
February 2, 2018
Market Activity and Trends
Amazon, Chase, and Berkshire Hathaway partner up to disrupt health care | NBC News | January 30, 2018 |
Amazon has joined forces with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase in a bid to slash health care costs for their 1.1 million employees — creating a possible “black swan” event that could disrupt the industry.
Together, the three partners will combine resources to create an independent company that will initially focus on “technology solutions” to provide “high-quality and transparent health care at a reasonable cost.”
Wall Street responded swiftly to the news, with shares in CVS, UnitedHealth, and Aetna all seeing their shares take a tumble of up to 8 percent. Pharmacy benefit manager Express Scripts fell nearly 5 percent.
Facebook is Banning All Ads Promoting Cryptocurrencies — Including Bitcoin and ICOs | Recode | January 30, 2018 |
Facebook is banning all ads that promote cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, in an effort to prevent people from advertising what the company is calling “financial products and services frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices.”
That means no advertiser — even those that operate legal, legitimate businesses — will be able to promote things like bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, initial coin offerings — ICOs for short — or binary options, according to a Facebook blog post.
The cryptocurrency boom/bubble has led to scams and wild price fluctuations that have cost a lot of people — including unsophisticated investors — a lot of money. Scams are illegal, but gambling on investments you don’t understand is not.
Uber’s New Training Wheels: Testing Bike Sharing in San Francisco |New York Times | January 31, 2018 |
For the first time in Uber’s history, the company is offering rides on roads in the United States using something other than cars. Starting next week, it will let certain users in San Francisco reserve pedal-assist electric bicycles through its app. The idea is that people will see the bicycles as a cheaper and faster alternative — not a huge stretch of the imagination for anyone who has been stuck in Friday evening gridlock traffic in San Francisco.
Uber is not supplying its own bicycles. It is working with Jump Bikes, a bike-sharing service that secured a permit in January to put 250 motorized bicycles — making it easier to tackle San Francisco’s steep hills — in locations throughout the city.
Uber said its app would present selected users with a “bike” option in a drop-down menu. From there, the customer could reserve a bicycle and be charged $2 for 30 minutes and then a per-minute fee after that.
Airbnb CFO Departs Amid Tensions, Leaving IPO Timing Unclear |Bloomberg Technology| February 1, 2018 |
Airbnb Inc. Chief Financial Officer Laurence Tosi is leaving the home-rental company amid tensions and a shakeup in the senior ranks. His departure raises questions about the timeline for an initial public offering, which now won’t come until next year at the earliest.
Tosi, who was CFO at Blackstone Group and one of the most visible executives on Wall Street before joining Airbnb in 2015, learned of Chesky’s decision to name Johnson as operating chief on Monday evening, said people familiar with the matter. Tosi had envisioned the role for himself but was butting heads with Chesky recently as he jostled for more control, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussions personnel issues. Tosi told Chesky he would leave Airbnb later that night.
CEO Brian Chesky said that there would be no IPO in 2018 as the company continues to focus on “becoming a 21st-century company and advancing our mission.” That being said, Chesky did say that the company is still working on getting ready to go public and that it is making decisions about doing so on its own timetable.
Could YouTube TV Mean the End of Cable? | CNet | February 1, 2018 |
Cable television officially peaked in the year 2000. As the dot-com bubble got ready to burst, more than 68 million American households subscribed to cable TV, a number that has declined by millions each year. That number now stands at around 49 million and will likely continue to fall as people grow less interested in paying hundreds of dollars a month for hundreds of TV channels they don’t watch. The paradigm might finally be shifting to something you could cheekily call “skinny TV” — a world where you pay far less for a far smaller bundle of channels.
YouTube is certainly taking a risk with this approach. The allure of cable television has always been in the breadth of its offerings — by bundling so many hundreds of channels together, even if some of them are completely insignificant, it can offer something for everybody. But as cable costs have ballooned and streaming networks like Netflix have moved into original television content, there’s less reason to shell out for a giant TV package if an online one offers most of what you want.
