We present a snapshot of the comprehensive daily global Bloomberg TMT briefs from Bloomberg’s Chris Lowe, the company’s global technology, media and telco specialist. His daily brief highlights the TMT industry across Europe, Asia and the USA, and looks at companies (including start-ups), markets and tech trends. These are just some excerpts which are relevant to our own focus on innovation, ecosystems, technology trends, and economic development.
Europe
AVANTI: the pioneering British high throughput satellite operator put out solid H1 results with second quarter revenue at $17.3m. The business won $40m of new orders in the last quarter and is fully funded business through to the launch of its transformational HYLAS 4 satellite next year. A strong play on emerging market data growth.
NXP: The US listed, Dutch based semiconductor player forecast a quarterly revenue rise of 55 percent, based on demand for high-performance chips used in cars & appliances & the implementation of a broadened product portfolio.
London vs. Berlin: Which startup ecosystem will lead Europe? Between 2013 and the first three financial quarters of 2014, London outpaced Berlin 187-145 for VC investments in startups (German), though that obscures (or preludes) gains for the German city. Both cities recently made headlines with outreach to the Israeli startup ecosystem — a country whose number of startups per capita far exceeds any other in the world. They were both ranked in the Top 10 of Compass’ annual Global Startup Ecosystem Ranking (London sixth, Berlin ninth). Of the 332 European tech acquisitions in 2014 overall, Germans acquired 40 of those companies and Britons 33. See this story.
Asia/Africa
NINTENDO: reported a 36 percent fall in Q3 profit after a lack of hit game titles hurt holiday sales of its Wii U and 3DS hardware and the absence of currency windfalls that boosted the year earlier. The result comes as the company faces its biggest shakeup since the 1970s, with its first smartphone game Miitomo scheduled to debut next month while work is under way on a new console code-named NX. Market comment: Tomoaki Kawasaki, analyst at Iwai Cosmo Securities Co., said, “There is a lot of attention on Miitomo in March and what it will say about the company’s strategy.
USA
VIRNETX: won federal ruling in Texas saying it was owed $625.6m by Apple over patented technology to secure communications. Apple has pledged to appeal Wednesday’s jury finding that its FaceTime, iMessage and newer VPN on Demand services infringe VirnetX patents.
FACEBOOK: is challenging the commonly accepted idea that everyone in the world is connected by six degrees of separation. According to a study published by the company, the members of its user base — made up of roughly 1.4bn people — are separated by around 3.57 connections.
CISCO: acquires Jasper Technologies (based in Santa Clara), that delivers a cloud-based IoT service platform to help enterprises and service providers launch, manage and monetize IoT services on a global scale. The Jasper IoT service platform automates the management of IoT services across connected devices and enables companies to create new business models that transform their products into connected services and generate new sources of ongoing revenue. The proposed acquisition will allow Cisco to offer a complete IoT solution that is interoperable across devices and works with IoT service providers, application developers and an ecosystem of partners. Cisco will continue to build upon the Jasper IoT service platform and add new IoT services such as enterprise Wi-Fi, security for connected devices, and advanced analytics to better manage device usage.
Trends in focus
SUPERBOWL ADVERTISING
This Bloomberg note highlights: “Wix.com, has spent millions of dollars for its Super Bowl advertising campaign in which the characters from DreamWorks Animation’s “Kung Fu Panda 3” discover that a good website can help them sell noodles. The company is in the midst of a multiweek effort to capture the attention surrounding the game, splitting its budget with television, Facebook Inc., Google and YouTube – and Twitter is virtually absent from the plan. Omer Shai, Wix’s chief marketing officer, said, “Most of the power audience is on Facebook and YouTube.”
HONG KONG STARTUP SCENE
The Hong Kong startup scene is on fire, according to this Forbes article, the populous place is seeing an explosion in growth and startup cool, reminiscent of Shoreditch in London, UK 2-3 years ago.
WEARABLES
Wearable sensors that collect data from sweat. “The device could help people monitor conditions like dehydration and fatigue in real time”, said Ali Javey, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the inventors. The sensor could provide an alarm, for instance, that alerts a patient to drink a glass of water or take some medication. Dr. Javey and his colleagues described their system in the journal Nature. Other researchers have been developing sensors for sweat, but this is the first one that breaks down and analyzes multiple chemicals in sweat at a molecular level and transmits measurements in real time. Full story here.
VC IN FOCUS
INDEX VENTURES: who backed startups like Skype & Dropbox, has raised a fresh $550m fund & expects to accelerate its deal making in 2016. The venture firm is now armed with as much as $1.25bn (£858m) after having spent little of the $700m (£480m) it raised last April. They refrained from jumping into many late-stage deals last year in part because it felt valuations were too high. The firm, founded in Geneva, Switzerland 20 years ago, is atypical of venture capital firms. It opened its San Francisco office five years ago, and US deal flow now represents about half of the firm’s portfolio. Index had eight of its companies go public within the past 12 months and now counts 160 active companies in its portfolio.
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