Daily Precap

Hey I’m Domm, it’s Friday 10th August 2018, and this is your daily precap of the latest and greatest technology, startups, and business news.

Samsung has announced the Galaxy Note 9 smartphone and it was a huge announcement, mainly because the device is HUGE with a whopping 6.4” screen. So if you are wanting to stuff a tablet in your pocket this is the phone for you.

Its got the same camera as the Galaxy S9+ and will ship with the second generation of Samsung’s smart assistant Bixby, complete with better language processing, integration with apps like Yelp and Uber, and more.

Samsung also announced they were throwing their hat in the smart speaker ring, and will be releasing Galaxy Home, a Bixby-based smart speaker with a built-in subwoofer, six speakers, and eight-microphones.Pricing and availability yet to be announced.

Google has launched Cameos, it’s a Q&A app for iOS that lets users respond to commonly searched questions about themselves, as part of its Posts on Google platform

The app is aimed at celebrities and other public figures, who are often the subject of Google searches.

With the Cameos app, they can address fans’ questions in their own voice, instead of leaving the answers up to other websites.

The feature is an extension of the company’s “Posts on Google” platform which has been slowly rolling out over the past couple of years, giving some people and organizations the ability to post directly to Google’s search result pages.

Facebook is shutting down Friend List Feeds sometime today, according to a message posted in the Facebook app. The feature allowed users to scroll through only those posts from one of their designated friend lists — for example, family, work colleagues, neighbors, industry peers and so on.

Amazon this morning announced the launch of a toolkit for developers that will allow anyone to integrate Alexa into their cars entertainment system. The “Alexa Auto SDK” is available now on GitHub, and includes all the core Alexa functions like streaming media, smart home controls, weather reports, and support for Alexa’s tens of thousands of third-party skills.Let’s see how many car manufacturers get on board.

 

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Hey I’m Domm, it’s Thursday 9th August 2018, and this is your daily precap of the latest and greatest technology, startups, and business news.

We may be witnessing the start of a rapid demise to Snapchat. Their latest earnings report showed that their total user numbers actually shrank 1.5% from last quarter, meaning 3M less people are using the service than the previous 3 months.Now, for a well established business a drop of 1.5% in use in a quarter may not be concerning, however, any high growth tech company, needs, well growth. And any decline, is a BAD sign, let alone when the company loses $353M in a quarter after revenues of just $262M.So, Snap would need to better than double its current revenue to break even, at a time when its user base is shrinking. If I was a shareholder I would be very concerned.

Food is about to get more expensive. Uber Eats is changing its delivery fee from a fixed to variable fee based on distance. Now, if you just live around the corner from your favorite restaurants then its good news for you and fees could potentially decrease, although if you live that close, maybe you should be walking. But for most people, its likely their delivery bills will now increase, although so too will Ubers delivery radius, so your restaurant options may grow as well.

Elon Musk has a tumultuous relationship with the public, so running a publicly listed company is well, tumultuous.So much so that Elon has been on a twitter rampage announcing his plans and apparently his funded plans to buy back Tesla from the public and take it private.As a public company, there are many eyes on Tesla: shareholders, people shorting the stock and betting against the company, regulators, and reporters. And as a public company, Tesla must show us all its accounting every quarter. Musk sees this as a risk for his vision and distraction from his execution.

We all know that the most annoying thing about using a microwave is having to punch in the time you want to cook your food for.Or do we?We, GE has fixed that problem, or that with its new GE Smart Countertop Microwave works with Amazon's Alexa, so you can control it with a voice command. The microwave will send you push notifications when it's done cooking so you don't forget about your snack.The microwave also has a scan-to-cook feature which won't actually save you much effort, and you might have trouble finding prepackaged foods that work with the feature. Basically you can scan a compatible snacks box with your smartphone and the microwave will automatically grab the correct cooking time.

 

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Hey I’m Domm, it’s Wednesday 8th August 2018, and this is your daily precap of the latest and greatest technology, startups, and business news.

Look out Netflix, a startup backed by business and media titans Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman has just raised a Billion dollar seed round.The company, NewTv, is building a naive mobile entertainment company, content developed specifically for mobile devices, with episodes of just 10 minutes each. Backers include a who’s who of Hollywood studios: Disney, 21st Century Fox, NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Viacom, AT&T’s WarnerMedia, Lionsgate, MGM, ITV and Entertainment One.Plus Chinese tech giant, Alibaba.The service will offer a free - ad supported plan, and a cheap paid plan with less ads.Don’t expect it anytime soon though as they are hoping to launch by the end of next year, giving them time to develop the content and the platform.

We may soon have another Ubereats rival, at a perfect time when we are losing Foodora. Chinese food delivery company Ele.me is raising between $3B and $5Bn in a round led by Japanese investment conglomerate Softbank.

What an absolute flop the GDPR was. Not only did it directly result in more emails from online services than we have ever received before, but today, more than 1,000 US news sites and about a third of the 100 largest newspapers are still unavailable online in Europe. Given this it seems that the bill designed to protect data has actually resulted in less access to data, and could equate to a result more like censorship than protection.

Melbourne software startup Roller is fueling its international expansion with a recently raised $7 million Series B investment round. The company offers an all in one software platform for leisure and entertainment venues such as trampoline parks, amusement parks, and hospitality venues like cafes and bars. It is fantastic to see an Australian start-up so laser focused on international growth.

Private equity company Mercury Capital is set to take a 30% stake in Australian SMS delivery company MessageMedia, valuing the company at $250M.

Wesfarmers is considering taking on Amazon, by pooling its vast retail holdings into one mega combined e-commerce site. Wesfarmers owns a stable of iconic Australian retailers including: Coles, Kmart, Target, Bunnings, Officeworks, Liquorland, Vintage Cellars and more.

Now, I doubt it will be this pending federal election, but we may soon be able to vote from our phones, and not have to line up in our local school for hours. New blockchain based technology is set to be trialed in West Virginia in the US, to open up mobile voting.It’s primarily being tested for the serving military overseas.

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Hey I’m Domm, it’s Tuesday 7th August 2018, and this is your daily precap of the latest and greatest technology, startups, and business news.

We are getting night vision. US company Sinoyx released their Aurora High Definition night vision action cam for Presale.

The company has been making night vision devices for government for over 10 years and is now bringing their advanced tech to the consumer market.

They are concentrating on the direct to consumer market but their sensors and tech could potentially be integrated by smartphone manufacturers to put the tech in your pocket.

The devices are selling for $799 US, and I can’t wait to get my hands on one.

If your phone is a Google Pixel you get pie. Pie being the latest version of the Android operating system that is.The new OS was released yesterday and offers of a tonne of new features mainly centred around better integrating AI to make your life simpler, some of the new additions are:

messages in notifications when replying inline, smart replies in notifications, Adaptive Battery and Adaptive Brightness features, App Actions for predicting what the user will do next, and multi-camera APIs that let you access streams simultaneously from two or more physical cameras.

Amazon has sold ~50M Alexa smart home speakers to date, and only 2% of those have ever made a purchase online, and of that 1M who did, only 100,000 made a second purchase through the speaker, equating to not even half a percent of all users.

Although some are now questioning all the hype around smart speaker commerce, I believe the answer is simply that there is a lack of seamless transaction experiences. What can we really purchase through these speakers yet? Not much. I cannot book a table at my local restaurant, or buy movie tickets to the local cinema.

We need to organise the physical world to enable transactions through these smart speakers. I have said it before and I will say it again, there is a race to connect and organise as much of the physical world as possible into a platform capable of integration with smart speakers. These Alexa stats just prove that the race isonly getting started and anyone can win at this point.

Carbar the Melbourne based virtual car dealership has raised nearly $6M to fund growth and expand its service. The company sells cars over the internet, but doesnt expect you to front up the cash for a car you have never driven so it delivers a chosen car to your door for a 3-day trial before you commit.

They have sold 1,000 cars to date since launching in 2016, with a 87% conversion rate from their 3 day trial model, and have turned over $10M in the last year.

Part of the $5.75M they raised came from peer-to-peer debt funding, which further supports the need for a large debt funding option, like OneVentures recently announced $100M debt fund.

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Hey I’m Domm, it’s Monday 6th August 2018, and this is your daily precap of the latest and greatest technology, startups, and business news.

Facebook is testing a new dating feature!

They are only testing internally at the moment,which is likely fueling romances within the Facebook office!No word on when they will release the product publicly and Facebook can finally bring back the poking.

OneVentures, a prominent Australian Venture Capital firm is set to unveil a $100M credit fund for Australian scaleups.

Essentially the fund, which is an Australian first, will give Australian companies an alternative debt facility when the banks won’t loan cash to anyone who actually needs it, and they don’t want to give away a chunk of equity.

Its another funding facility for our maturing startup sector.

Google has accidentally leaked their release date for the Google Pixel 3, and its October 4th.

A Google ad with the date was spotted on Google’s influencer marketing site, Famebit.

But at least they’re launch is on track, as Apple may be in a spot of trouble for their pending September iPhone announcement, as one of the major iPhone parts manufacturers, TSMC, or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company was hit by a computer virus on the weekend which shut down several of their manufacturing plants.

Many of the plants were down for days, and some still down.

TSMC is the largest independent semiconductor foundry in the world, with profits last year of $11.6 billion

No word yet on exactly what these outages will do to the next generation iPhone release date.

Nine is bringing targeted ads to your TV, kind of. For users streaming TV through the 9Now app/s whether they be on your phone, tablet, or smart TV will now see targeted ads based on your profile and demographics.

The broadcaster also plans to later check credit card information against advertisers to measure just how well the advertising system converts to sales.

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Hey I’m Domm, it’s Friday 3rd August 2018, and this is your daily precap of the latest and greatest technology, startups, and business news.

Apple has become the only company in the world with a $1 trillion market cap. The iPhone has continued to grow revenues and profit for Apple as well as the company's share price, which briefly traded at $207.05 which valued the company at over $1 trillion.

Sonos, the wireless speaker company has just finished its first day of trading on the stock market after listing on the Nasdaq, and it was a great first day for the tech company, with stock soaring and closing 32% up at $19.91 at the end of the day from an opening of 15%. That values the company at

Instagram Stories has turned two, and what a success it has been. The service caught flack early on for blatantly copying Snapchat, but Instagram Stories as bulldozed its way to the leader, with 400M daily active users, compared to Snapchat’s 191M.

You are going to be playing more games. Facebook has launched playable ads in the newsfeed so you can try games out before you download them!

Another day, another US giant focusing on China. Starbucks has partnered with Alibaba in China, it will integration with Alibaba's apps and will open 150 stores in just two Chinese cities, Beijing and Shanghai.To put that in perspective, Starbucks has just 40 stores across Australia.

If you like to olive life on the bleeding edge, Microsoft has just released the ISO files of its newest Windows 10 update for installation. It contains a desktop version of SwiftKey, an AI-powered smart Windows Update feature, and the "Your Phone" feature which links your Android device to a Windows 10 PC.

A photo has leaked of three new iPhone X’s which Apple will announce next month at its keynote event. There will be a 5.8, a 6.1 and a 6.5 inch model. An estimate based on Apple’s previous September events suggests that the 2018 iPhone keynote could be scheduled for September 12th. Apple is yet to issue invites for the press conference.

Even though Apple has been killing it on the back of the iPhone and will likely see another surge with the newly released models, it has been beaten on the #2 spot of number of smartphones shipped last quarter by Chinese company Huawei, for the first time ever, with Huawei shipping over 54M devices.

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Hey I’m Domm, it’s Thursday 2nd August 2018, and this is your daily precap of the latest and greatest technology, startups, and business news.

 

Silicon Valley is hot on China at the moment.  Just last week Facebook was granted a licence to operate there, which was quickly revoked by the government, as soon as the media found out.  

 

Now a leak has exposed plans of Google to launch in China, apparently they will launch a censored version of the search engine that will blacklist websites and filter search.

 

For those not familiar, in China there is a company called Baidu, which is basically a Chinese clone of Google, which runs a number of similar services, including a YouTube clone, which is losing a tonne of cash by the way.

 

So, it looks like the search giant has succumbed to the strict conditions of the Chinese government to get its foot in the door of the massive Chinese market.

 

This eagerness of US tech companies is one that should be mirrored and actually accentuated by Australian companies.  

We are already in the Asia Pacific, we are quite close trading partners with China, setting aside recent spats between our governments, and with our domestic population that is too small for us to dedicate our startups too, the Chinese market should be a key attraction.

 

Reddit, the website dubbed the front page of the internet, has been compromised and has leaked some user data.  This is concerning, but the way in which the site was compromised is more concerning.

The breach was made by intercepting text messages used for 2 factor authentication for the website admins.  

SMS Intercepting, especially for 2 factor authentication is becoming a very popular way for hackers to breach user accounts, and very concerningly apparently its actually quite easy, and as many as 90% of all mobile operators all over the world are unprotected because of the “holes” in the SS7 protocol, which isnt the only method of intercepting SMS.

 

Knowing this, its very concerning this is still the primary method of 2 factor authentication for most services we use online, with every from social networking sites, to our banks.

 

Clearly, there needs to be a solution, and maybe it is a physical token to replace passwords, such as the recently launched Google Titan security key.

 

Melbourne based startup Matrak Industries says they are the Construction Industry's first Materials and Delivery Tracking network, simplifying Project Management, Defecting, Procurement, Progress Claims and more.

And they have just raised a $765k from high profile Aussie investor Simon Yencken, which was a lot more than the $450k they went looking for.

They are eyeing more domestic growth, plus they have just landed their first client in the US, and after the pending upgrades they will be eyeing more growth domestically and internationally.

 

Snap has launched some new Snapchat lense feature that no one will use so I wont bother going into detail.

 

Now, I’m getting excited about this.  Bird, my favourite of the electric scooter sharing startups in the US, who recently landed a $100M round to fund growth, has announced they are about to drop 100 scooters in Paris in what I think is their first international launch, and will shortly thereafter launch in Tel Avi.

 

Well Bird, we want your scooters here in Brisbane. Let us be your first opening in the Asia Pacific region.  We have the biggest single council in Australia looking covering Brisbane, a population of 2.4M, and its pretty flat.

You couldn't ask for a better testing ground, reach out let's get these scooters on the ground!

 

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That was your daily precap, I am Domm, thanks for listening.

Daily Precap - Wednesday 1st August 2018

 

Hey I’m Domm, it’s Wednesday 1st August 2018, and this is your daily precap of the latest and greatest technology, startups, and business news.

 

There is a theory about why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer because its more expensive being poor.

Its called the toilet paper theory.  

The theory is that the poor buy toilet paper in smaller batches, say weekly, due to cash flow constraints.  But the rich, who have available cash reserves, buy in bulk and get volume discounts. Obviously this is true of most products and services not just toilet paper.  So, life is cheaper for the rich.

 

Well, thanks to an Aussie retail veteran Ido Leffler, and Tina Sharkey who founded San Francisco based company, Brandless, Toilet paper theory may be closer to being a thing of the past.

 

The company make hundreds of high-quality domestic goods, such as toilet paper, kitchen tongs, organic peanut butter, face creams, organic virgin cold-pressed coconut oil and much more; and most of the products sell for just $3.  

 

Virtually all of their products are lower than competitors, often more than 50% less, and their quality is meant to be top rate.

 

Their business is so inspiring, that Softbank, that huge Japanese Investment Conglomerate has just signed a $240M US cheque to the company, to fund a head to head battle with competitors like Amazon.  

 

The deal gave Softbank at 48% stake in the business, valuing the company at $500M.

 

Despite being founded by an Aussie, they don’t ship here yet, so us poor folk will have to wait a little longer.

 

Labor has announced it will spend $3M if elected on establishing a national centre of AI excellence.  While its promising to see government acknowledging the need to focus on emerging technologies, there is little detail so far to where that funding will go, and what the centre will do.

 

First of all it better not bloody go towards constructing a new building for the centre.  Just rent some space. Ideally, poor the money into AI focused startups, that will build jobs faster than any government run panel could do.

 

Lastly, $3M is really a token amount playing lip service to real change, which likely will have so little significance.  We need to double down as a nation on technology and innovation, we need to add zeros to our commitments to the sector to see real change.

 

Tic Toc, an  Adelaide-based digital Home loan lendging platform has raised $11.5 million bucks.  The service was launched by Bendigo and Adelaide bank execs, and has already processed $1.2Bn worth of home loan applications, actually fulfilling $170M of just over 10% of them.

 

According to Tic:Toc their tech can approve a loan in just 22 minutes thanks to a ‘digital decisioning engine’, with no input from a human.  

 

Although it seems strange to me that a digital system would take 22 minutes to perform a credit check, unless there is a human step in there?

 

Samsung, Apple, and Sony have all released their quarterly earnings, and all three are rolling in cash.  However, Sony is losing money from its smartphone division and fears that those losses will worsen.

 

Sounds like a cry for a buyout of that division, so can we expect a Google or Microsoft buyout perhaps, time will tell.

 

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That was your daily precap, I am Domm, thanks for listening

Daily Precap - Tuesday 31st July 2018

 

Hey I’m Domm, it’s Tuesday 31st July 2018, and this is your daily precap of the latest and greatest technology, startups, and business news.

 

Uber has had a tumultuous few months with its autonomous driving fleet, after a few crashes, a fatality, and recently letting go their entire in-car staffing crew.  

 

Well now comes another change, they are no longer developing self-driving trucks, and are focusing all their efforts on self-driving cars.

 

Your next computer virus could come in the mail, but not email, the actual snail mail, mail.  

 

Chinese hackers, are sending CD’s loaded with malware to state officials in the US.

 

Its bold and innovative taking a low tech social engineering approach to getting this high-tech malware onto PC’s.  

 

Its not known if any of their deliveries have managed to successfully infect their targets.

 

You now surf the web through VR, with Google bringing its Chrome browser to it’s Day Dream VR headset.  

 

So now, at long last, you can immerse yourself in a virtual reality, to do EXACTLY what you do in your regular life.

 

Youtube will now cater for vertical videos through its web player, as it does on mobile.  This is good news ina world where native mobile video content is becoming increasingly popular, such as this very Daily Precap shot vertically.

 

If you love gadgets as much as me, you will be excited to know that Berlin based start-up Grover, raised a 37M Euro Series A to fund its Netflix style subscription for gadgets.  

 

BUt we will have to wait a little while, as they withdrew from the UK, have paused launching in the US and for now are focused on expanding in Germany.

 

Augur is a blockchain platform that essentially lets you make predictions and bet on those predictions, for things such as predicting the next election, or whether crypto coins will go up or down.  

 

And now, some people are even using the service to predict assassination of public figures, and mass shootings.

 

Don’t get left behind, follow me on instagram and Twitter @domm, AND subscribe to the daily precap podcast, on your favorite podcast app.

 

That was your daily precap, I am Domm, thanks for listening.

Daily Precap - Monday 30th July 2018

 

Hey I’m Domm, it’s Monday 30th July 2018, and this is your daily precap of the latest and greatest technology, startups, and business news.

 

SoftBank, the Japanese investment conglomerate with mega stakes in big names like Alibaba, Uber, Didi Chuxing, WeWork, Slack and SO many more, has partnered with Yahoo Japan (who is another one of its investments) and also with PayTM to launch a QR code-based mobile payment service PayPay.

 

The service will launch in Japan by November, with no commission fees for 3 years.

 

The most glaringly stark observations I make on this deal though is:

How is Yahoo still functioning? And are they running on Google cloud?

Why the hell do we keep trying to find a use for QR codes

No matter how much money you have, you will still pick stupid names because all the .coms were taken, I mean PayPay, seriously.

 

I finally found an Opera worth watching, and it was the web browser company that just listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange.  Their stock closed around 10% up on the first day of trading.

 

The Norweigan founded, now Chinese owned company,  raised $115M in the IPO.

 

Chris Hemsworth is launching a production company, called Thematic Entertainment.  It will be based in both Melbourne and Los Angeles.

 

Although not tech heavy, the venture speaks to the same important outlook needed by all our startups.  The companies remit is to develop and produce projects with global appeal.

 

We must remember that our audience, customers and users are now global.

 

With the speed of data transfer and communication it is too naiive to be building a product or company for a local audience.  

 

Think Global, act global.

 

Tesla just released a new product.  

A $1500 carbon fibre surfboard.  

But don’t get too excited, the limited run of 200 boards sold out before anyone had a chance to bat an eyelid.

 

The rumour mills are now building about the next Apple iPhones and Google Pixels.  Apple next device should be out in September, and Google’s in October.

 

With rumours like front dual-facing cameras and front facing speakers, I am interested to know what you would want in your next phone, and are you a iPhone or a Pixel person?

 

Do NOT miss out on the best news, reviews and tip-offs, and the occasional rant about the most exciting happenings in tech, startups or product releases, make sure you are following me on instagram and Twitter @domm, AND subscribe to the daily precap podcast, on your favorite podcast app.

 

That was your daily precap, I am Domm, thanks for listening.