Makes sense. The push is part of SoftBank’s aforementioned program to invest in e-commerce businesses in emerging markets. It put $100 million into Indonesia’s Tokopedia last year, for example, and it has also backed Snapdeal (via a $627 million round) and Housing.com in India.
Month: January 2015
Scottish startup PureLiFi raises $2M to create wireless networks from light bulbs | VentureBeat | Business | by Paul Sawers
Scottish startup PureLiFi has announced a £1.5 million ($2.25 million) funding round — valuing the company at £14 million ($21 million) — as it looks to introduce Internet connectivity via light bulbs around the world.
Founded in 2012, PureLiFi — previously known as PureVLC — is a spin-out from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland’s capital, and is led by Professor Harald Haas. During a TED talk he gave back in 2011, Haas popularized the term “Li-Fi” to describe networked, bi-directional, wireless communication that uses visible light instead of traditional radio frequencies. You can watch that talk here:
Ship Your Enemies Glitter
There are others of us out there? Others who hate…no…fear glitter? What a terribly great business.
The service is simple. For a mere $9.99 you can ship someone you (presumably) hate a heaping pile of glitter in an unmarked, anonymous envelope.
How the Next Five Years Will Revolutionize Business
Any interview with Peter Diamandis is worthy of your time. This is no exception.
The best way to become a billionaire is to help a billion people. Identify a product or service that can impact a billion people, begin with a near-term revenue stream and grow it using scalable, exponential technologies, gamification, crowd and community—all the tools that enable you to take big swings at the problem without having to scale a huge number of people. If you’re passionate about solving a problem, you literally can be a guy or gal in a garage using the internet and exponential tools and technologies to take on any problem at scale. An individual has the potential to impact the lives of a billion people in a decade.
List of Mavericks: My Annual CES 2015 Wrap-up
Text. Email. LinkedIn. Facebook. Voicemail. All of the above were flooded Friday of last week as I returned from the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Every message or conversation started … Continue reading List of Mavericks: My Annual CES 2015 Wrap-up
A dear friend’s tale of life and death on Catalina
The following account is from a long-time friend and former professor, Lynn Nelson. Lynn and her husband were caught in a terrible storm this last New Years Eve. Are summary is … Continue reading A dear friend’s tale of life and death on Catalina
The Internet of Things Now Belongs to the Product Managers
So for me, CES demonstrated a very promising trend. The way that we talk about IoT is changing. We will probably still be barraged with talk about the Internet of Everything, and marketing around 50 billion connected devices (or is trillion?). But beyond that high level marketing, the real business of building ecosystems is beginning. It will not be one ‘industry’ but new products and features in many industries.
I think this was best on display at the Lowe’s booth. Lowe’s is giant hardware retailer, and I only stopped in their booth by accident, a friend of mine had just bought some locks for his home and saw a new model on display. Lowe’s was promoting its Iris ecosystem of connected devices. Beyond locks, this also included thermostats, sprinklers, windows, alarms and a whole range of other products you could expect to see on their shelves. I do not know much about Iris. It is a freemium service that sends sensor alerts for free and charges a monthly subscription of $10 if you want to apply more detailed rules to that (e.g. alerts when a window opens after 10pm). But they had a whole booth filled with partners. They are not relying on Nest or Apple or AT&T, but Schlage, Pella and other hardware suppliers. Traditional tech industry wisdom holds that eventually there will be one common platform that dominates. That is the economics of software. I think this may not happen in the home IoT segment. The market is just too big, with too many players. We could very well see multiple ecosystems thriving.
http://digitstodollars.com/2015/01/12/the-internet-of-things-now-belongs-to-the-product-managers/
Platforms Are Becoming The ‘Bundles’ Of The Digital Age
Platforms Are Becoming The ‘Bundles’ Of The Digital Age. This is a great take on another transformation.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/matzucker/2015/01/12/bundling-brands-and-big-ass-fans/
Article: Capital One Acquires Budgeting App Level Money
Capital One Acquires Budgeting App Level Money. Fintech is hot and get to hotter.
http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/12/capital-one-acquires-budgeting-app-level-money/
Why AMD is staying out of the Internet of Things chip market
AMD isn’t doing much in the Internet of Things (IoT), which is Intel’s major expansion area. But Byrne notes that the PC chip market is still a $40-billion-a-year opportunity. He said that AMD has to execute on its upcoming Carrizo family of accelerated processing units (APUs), which will be focused on the mobile-computing market. About 300 million PC processors and 90 million graphics chips are sold each year, and Byrne wants AMD to get its fair share of those sales.
“I’m not in the business to lose money,” Byrne said, in reference to whether AMD will go into the Internet of Things chip market.
But Byrne does believe that virtual reality is just the beginning of a whole new wave of demand for computing products in the future.
We caught up with Byrne this week at the 2015 International CES, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview with Byrne.
Pete Deutschman 