Unicorns in the Mobile Cloud

The overall public tech industry is currently worth some 10.7 Trillion $ and the 162 Unicorns at a cumulative valuation of 548 B $. The market caps of Apple, Google, and Facebook for perspective are 587, 518 and 320 Bn $ for context. The three companies are also 39 years, 17 years and 12 years old. Most Unicorns are 3-8 years old.  If 162 Unicorns seems like a big number, the top 10 Unicorns are worth about 230 Bn $ (42%).

The other insight here is the growth of Cloud & Unicorns at the expense of the legacy technology players. Most of the unicorns have been made possible by two big trends – Mobile & Cloud. Here is a quick snapshot of how mobile subscriptions exploded in the last two decades:

Cloud has grown due to the scalability needs of unicorns and thousands of small businesses which hope to be unicorns one day. The scale (Dropbox with 500PB, Apple still uses Google, AWS and Azure for iCloud) at which these Unicorns are moving to private infrastructure has left legacy players scrambling.

What’s more important is what will be happening going forward:

1. Oil & Gas sees patent wars: Who would have thought! But as Oil prices drop and margins get squeezed in the O&G industry, they are seeking to expand market share by exerting IP. But given the oligopolistic nature of O&G industry with a few key players most of the IP the industry 
2. Patents are shitty everywhere and in every technology: While we patent professionals love to discuss the impact of Alice & the higher bar of EU courts. A new study from Germany had the following findings: Around 80% of all German patents are partially or fully invalid (based on modeling 305 court decisions between 2010 & 2012)
3. EMC gets a partial victory against Pure Storage: A federal jury has found EMC entitled to $ 14 Mn from Pure Storage for infringing one of EMC’s patents. EMC was aiming to seek infringement verdict for 3 of its patents.
4. Kudelski scores a win over Apple in Germany: Dusseldorf has found Apple’s streaming services to be infringing a Kudelski patent covering interactive video. Kudelski already has licensing deals with Cisco, Google, and Disney.

1. Sony just made VR real and approachable ~ Sony announced the release of its PSVR product in October 2016. The headset will be priced at 399$ (besides the price of a VR). It will be able to support a 1920x1080p resolution at 120 Hz refresh rate! Coming to the content problem, they highlighted the upcoming exclusive Star Wars game!
2. Snapchat is hiring wearables veterans ~ Snapchat has snapped up over a dozen wearable technology vets and industrial designs. Snapchat had also earlier acquired Vergence Labs (maker of Google Glass type glasses). Snapchat is expected to making forays in AR.
3. Men want VR badly ~ A survey of 3000 people in the US had the following results. However, I find it hard to believe that 16% of average Americans have tried a VR headset. So take the results with a pinch of salt. I smell sample bias.
4. No wonder Alibaba wants to build VR shopping experiences
5. While most wearables only tell you active you’ve been doing a new wearable (HMD) hopes you help you find the motivation to workout by tDCS. I would however highly recommend against being a lead user. A different tDCS wearable which was supposed to help focus was later found to be impairing memory. Be very cautious with neuroscience-related tech in general! We just don’t know enough to be able to do things with precision.

1. Messaging is the new social ~ No one messaging app might be as big as Facebook (yet), but the top 4 messaging apps  have outpaced social networks  Fortunately, Facebook (the company) saw this coming from a mile and acquired WhatsApp and focused on its messenger platform
2. Facebook wants Messenger to be a platform ~ Facebook announced the launching of its bot sore allowing developers to offer services to people through the messenger platform. Unfortunately, Facebook’s experience with 3rd party developers hasn’t been that great in the past. Remember Farmville and all those invites?
3. Quora crossed 100 Mn users ~ While Snapchat is high up there on everyone’s radar approaching 200 Mn users. Niche networks like Quora are growing consistently e.g. Quora was at 80 Mn users in January!
4. Social commerce is suffering ~ While Groupon withers away, the other major player in the space LivingSocial too isn’t doing too well. It announced layoffs of 280 of its employees (50% of its workforce)

1. Baidu wants to test self-driven cars in the US ~ Currently 11 companies have permits to test autonomous vehicles in CA.
2. Toyota acquires Jaybridge to bolster its self-driven car initiatives
3. Alibaba is entering India
4. Google is divesting its robotics division Boston Dynamics
5. Sprints tests 3 channel carrier integration with the new Galaxy S7 to get 300 Mbps data rates
6. GE wants to be a software company. Quick search with Dolcera’s PCS tool shows that GE has been filing some 200 odd patents in the software space and already has a bigger software portfolio than most major tech players 

1. Moat raised 50 Mn $ in Series C to make online ads searchable
2. Mirriad raised 15 Mn $ to bring better ad experience to different screens
3. Yi Jiu Pi raised 30 Mn $ to sell liquor online in China
4. Elliptic raised 5 Mn $ to identify illicit activity in blockchains
5. Headspace raised 34.3 Mn $ to help people meditate