Features • 1) Amazon HQ2: Second Headquarters North America (video), 2) Why Hurricane Harvey Won't Slow Down Houston, 3) Leading Cloud Providers Run Away with the Market: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, 4) Investing: Roku IPO, Best IPO, Uber, AT&T $T, 5) ICYMI Tech News: Huawei, Apple, Samsung, Google, HTC, Xiaomi, Facebook, Angry Birds IPO, Equifax data breach.
1) Amazon HQ2: Second Headquarters North America
Amazon Announces Public Hunt for New Headquarters
Video above published Sep 7, 2017, by Bloomberg.com: Amazon.com Inc., (NASDAQ: AMZN), is breaking from its history of secret expansions with a public hunt for a second headquarters, spurring quick interest from cities eager to land a workforce of as many as 50,000 people. Bloomberg's Gerrit De Vynck and Shira Ovide, a Bloomberg Gadfly columnist, have more on "Bloomberg Technology." Ovide's opinions are her own (not Bloomberg's).
Amazon.com Inc. Press Release: "Sep. 7, 2017—Amazon today announced plans to open Amazon HQ2, a second company headquarters in North America. Amazon expects to invest over $5 billion in construction and grow this second headquarters to include as many as 50,000 high-paying jobs. In addition to Amazon’s direct hiring and investment, construction and ongoing operation of Amazon HQ2 is expected to create tens of thousands of additional jobs and tens of billions of dollars in additional investment in the surrounding community. Amazon is opening the Amazon HQ2 Request for Proposal (“RFP”) now, and local and state government leaders interested in learning more about how they can bring Amazon to their community can visit www.amazon.com/amazonHQ2. Amazon estimates its investments in Seattle from 2010 through 2016 resulted in an additional $38 billion to the city’s economy – every dollar invested by Amazon in Seattle generated an additional 1.4 dollars for the city’s economy overall. Details of Amazon’s Seattle headquarters ..." (go to link above for more info)(link and emphasis added).
See also: Two Very Different Stories About Amazon: "The best thing since credit cards or the next Sears?"--Bloomberg.com
2) Why Hurricane Harvey Won't Slow Down Houston: "... The economic forces favoring a quick recovery are just too strong ... Houston is a tech cluster ... the center of the U.S. energy industry, which has gone increasingly high-tech in the past few decades. The city probably is home to more engineers than any other in the country. The same pool of skilled employees that sustains Houston’s energy industry makes it appealing to other knowledge-based sectors as well ..."--Bloomberg.com
See also: Hurricane Irma is not expected to disrupt banking in Florida, even if a lot of bank branches shut down during the storm. Leaders of institutions such as CenterState Bank Corp. and Seacoast Banking Corp. of Florida told American Banker that technology, including the ability to deposit and withdraw money electronically, will keep business on track.--South Florida Business Journal | bizjournals.com
See also: Hurricane Irma is not expected to disrupt banking in Florida, even if a lot of bank branches shut down during the storm. Leaders of institutions such as CenterState Bank Corp. and Seacoast Banking Corp. of Florida told American Banker that technology, including the ability to deposit and withdraw money electronically, will keep business on track.--South Florida Business Journal | bizjournals.com
3) Leading Cloud Providers Run Away with the Market--Synergy Research Group | srgresearch.com: Amazon ended June with 34% of the cloud services market compared to 11% for Microsoft and 5% for Google, according to Synergy Research:
Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services) have now reached almost $11 billion and continue to grow at over 40% per year. While AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft and Google are the lead providers in IaaS/PaaS, IBM continues to lead in hosted private cloud. Alibaba has now become the fourth ranked provider in IaaS with very strong growth in China and aggressive expansion abroad.
“While Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform are doubling in size, IBM continues to dominate in hosted private cloud and AWS is still over three times the size of its nearest competitor. Some of the numbers are actually pretty spectacular. The year-on-year market growth rate is nudging down as we expected in such a large market, but it remains at comfortably over 40% and AWS alone generated revenue growth of $1.2 billion over the last four quarters.”--John Dinsdale, Synergy Research Group Chief Analyst and Research Director4) Investing
- Roku IPO: Netflix and YouTube generate huge streaming hours, no revenue | Recode.net: "if you’re a must-have programmer, then Roku has to have you — unlike cable TV, there’s no lock-in. It’s incredibly easy to swap out internet TV hardware. And Roku has just told the world that the two biggest players in internet TV are paying it zilch."
- Chinese logistics firm Best, backed by Alibaba, launches $930 million U.S. IPO | Reuters.com
- Uber: What To Do - Uber (Private) | SeekingAlpha.com: "A good board can't save a bad company, but a bad board can screw up a good one, and Uber's board was well on its way."
- AT&T (NYSE:T): The Good, Bad And Ugly Truth--SeekingAlpha.com and AT&T's Earnings Weren't As Good As They Looked--SeekingAlpha.com.
5) ICYMI Tech News:
- Smartphones: MWC Americas, September 12-14, 2017, in San Francisco at the Moscone Center. China's Huawei (domain: huawei.com) passes Apple in global smartphone sales, now second behind Samsung--cnbc.com. Apple's Sept 12th Event: Apple’s New iPhones May Be Called iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone Edition--cnbc.com (video). Google buying HTC? | cnbc.com. See also Samsung Galaxy Note 8: great build, dual camera and display, but not huge upgrade from S8+ and too expensive at $929--engadget.com, and finally, Google and Xiaomi partner to launch the Android One Mi A1 smartphone for just $234 in more than 40 markets--a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 processor, 3080mAh battery, a 5.5-inch curved glass display, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB internal storage--VentureBeat.com
- America's Superstar Companies Are a Drag on Growth--Bloomberg.com--"Lack of competition lets them gouge consumers, underpay workers and invest too little ... Since the 1980s, antitrust enforcement has gotten weaker." TalkingPointsMemo.com: A Serf on Google’s Farm: How publishers' extreme reliance on various Google services gives Google effective monopoly power, stifles criticism, and sometimes results in unexpected losses. See also Silicon Valley Ethics Issues: Companies court "brand-name teachers."--NYTimes.com, and U.S. tax reform needed to spur competition and growth says Jamie Dimon--usatoday.com.
- HollywoodReporter.com: Amazon and Apple are competing with Warner Bros. and others for rights to the James Bond franchise.
- Has disruption from e-commerce run its course? | 13D.com: Alibaba’s Jack Ma has put it bluntly: “We must embrace physical space.” See also Brick & Mortar Meltdown: Toys R Us Hires Bankruptcy Law Firm | Wolf Street and Mexico signs e-commerce deal with China's Alibaba Group--Reuters.com
- Facebook: how its quest for growth and monetization shapes and distorts company's stated mission of connecting people--You Are The Product | London Review of Books | lrb.co.uk. See also Facebook's Watch goes up against YouTube for ad dollars--Reuters.com, and Facebook Tees Up WhatsApp to Make Money | WSJ.com. Meanwhile Facebook digital ads figures differ from census data: analyst--Reuters.com.
- Angry Birds' Oy IPO in Finland: Rovio Entertainment Oy, Finnish mobile game and film company, plans IPO in Helsinki, with an issue of shares for €30 million and sale of existing shares by majority owner Kaj Hed, uncle of Rovio co-founder Niklas Hed, and others, with the goal of valuing the company at about US$2.38B--WSJ.com.
- Chinese ICOs banned: China bans fundraising via initial coin offerings | cnbc.com and China's virtual coin fundraising ban just the start of tighter regulations on virtual currencies a/k/a cryptocurrencies--Reuters.com
- EU plans rule change to increase taxes on "digital multinationals such as Google and Amazon ..."--Reuters.com; ECB working on licensing rules for fintechs--Reuters.com. See also Zelle, the payment network backed by major US banks, launching a standalone app--TheVerge.com
- Hackers Coming for Your Cell-Phone Number--Hackers have been increasingly able to convince carriers to transfer customer phone numbers to devices in their control, allowing a reset of passwords for sites secured using two-factor authentication, a feature now used widely by sites like Twitter and Facebook.--NYTimes.com and MIT TechnologyReview.com. See also Instagram Hackers Claim To Have Data of Over 6 Million Users--wccftech.com, and Equifax website hack exposes data for ~143 million US consumers | ArsTechnica.com: "Breach affecting 44 percent of US population is one of the biggest yet."--personal data of millions of people is now in the hands of hostile governments, criminal gangs, or both, and will remain so indefinitely.
-- John Poole, Editor, Domain Mondo
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