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Showing posts from November, 2018

Microsoft Is Worth as Much as Apple. How Did That Happen?

By STEVE LOHR from NYT Technology https://nyti.ms/2Ro5dkF
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Sheryl Sandberg Is Said to Have Asked Facebook Staff to Research George Soros

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and MATTHEW ROSENBERG from NYT Technology https://nyti.ms/2Q5e9Pc
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Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled Are Fined in I.C.O. Crackdown

By NATHANIEL POPPER from NYT Technology https://nyti.ms/2Rnb1Lb
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SoftBank sets indicative share price of 1,500 yen for next month’s IPO

In a regulatory filing today, SoftBank Group said it has set an indicative price of 1,500 yen ($13.22) per share for the initial public offering of its domestic telecoms unit next month. This means the offering is potentially worth 2.4 trillion yen (about $21.16 billion), making it one of the largest IPOs ever. The price is the same as the tentative one SoftBank disclosed in a previous filing earlier this month . The IPO is set for Dec. 19 on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and its final price will be determined on Dec. 10. The record for the largest IPO is currently held by Alibaba Group, which raised a total of $25 billion in 2014. If there is enough demand for SoftBank Group’s shares, a overallotment can potentially increase its offering’s total by 240.6 billion yen (or about $2.12 billion), bringing it closer to the amount Alibaba raised. One interesting aspect of this initial public offering is SoftBank Group’s efforts to reach retail investors. For example, brokerages have run televi
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Don’t miss out on free tickets to Startup Battlefield Africa 2018

Sorry folks. If you wanted to buy a ticket to Startup Battlefield Africa 2018  you’re out of luck. We’re sold out. However, you could be one of the lucky few to score a free ticket to our day-long startup-pitch extravaganza in Lagos, Nigeria on 11 December. We have a limited number of tickets available, so apply for your free ticket here — before they’re all gone. Don’t miss 15 of the continent’s top early-stage startup founders as they launch their companies on a global stage in front of a live, enthusiastic audience. Choosing the Startup Battlefield competitors from hundreds of applications was no easy feat — a testament to the depth and creativity of the region’s growing startup scene. A quick reminder of how Startup Battlefield works. The 15 teams compete in three preliminary rounds — five startups per round. They get only six minutes to pitch and present a live demo to a panel of expert technologists and VC investors. After each pitch, the judges have six minutes to grill the t
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“Daredevil” will not be renewed for a fourth season, the latest Marvel series cancelled by Netflix

Despite strong reviews and a fan petition , Netflix said today that it is cancelling “Daredevil” after three seasons. This is the latest Marvel series, after “Luke Cage” and “Iron Fist,” that Netflix has cancelled recently, and is a sign that Marvel TV and Netflix’s multi-series agreement, signed in 2013, may be hitting some bumps. Centered around a blind lawyer-turned-superhero in New York City, played by Charlie Cox, “Daredevil” was the first series released as part of the Marvel -Netflix deal in 2015. This leaves “Jessica Jones” and “The Punisher” as the two remaining Marvel series on Netflix. Netflix said in a statement sent to Deadline, which first broke the news , that “we are tremendously proud of the show’s last and final season and although it’s painful for the fans, we feel it best to close this chapter on a high note. We are thankful to our partners at Marvel, showrunner Erik Oleson, the show’s writers, stellar crew, and incredible cast including Charlie Cox as Daredevil
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Insurance startup Bright Health raises $200M at ~$950M valuation

A flurry of digital-first insurers are betting they can surpass industry incumbents with a little help from technology and a lot of help from venture capitalists. The latest to land a massive check is Bright Health , a Minneapolis-headquartered provider of affordable individual, family and Medicare Advantage healthcare plans in Alabama,  Arizona ,  Colorado ,  New York City ,  Ohio  and  Tennessee. The company, founded by the former chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare Bob Sheehy; Kyle Rolfing, the former CEO of UnitedHealth-acquired Definity Health ; and Tom Valdivia, another former Definity Health executive, has brought in a $200 million Series C. The funding values Bright Health at $950 million, according to PitchBook — more than double the $400 million valuation it garnered with its $160 million Series B in June 2017. Sheehy, Bright Health’s CEO, declined to comment on the valuation. New investors Declaration Partners and Meritech Capital participated in the round, with
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Nine companies will compete to help NASA astronauts return to the moon

NASA is ready to send astronauts back to the moon for the first time in more than 40 years. It won’t be doing it alone, however. The agency is enlisting nine companies, large and small, to compete for a combined maximum contract value of $2.6 billion over the next 10 years. NASA released the list of names today, including aerospace stalwart Lockheed Martin, along with Astrobotic Technology, Deep Space Systems, Draper, Firefly Aerospace, Texas Intuitive Machines, LLC, Masten Space Systems, Inc., Moon Express and Orbit Beyond — all American companies. “Today’s announcement marks tangible progress in America’s return to the Moon’s surface to stay,” NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a press release. “The innovation of America’s aerospace companies, wedded with our big goals in science and human exploration, are going to help us achieve amazing things on the Moon and feed forward to Mars.” Baby steps. The teams will start with lunar payload missions, which could kick off as ear
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New AWS tool helps customers understand best cloud practices

Since 2015, AWS has had a team of solution architects working with customers to make sure they are using AWS services in a way that meets best practices around a set of defined criteria. Today, the company announced a new Well Architected tool that helps customers do this themselves in an automated way without the help of a human consultant. As Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said in his keynote address at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, it’s hard to scale a human team inside the company to meet the needs of thousands of customers, especially when so many want to be sure they are complying with these best practices. He indicated that they even brought on a network of certified partners to help, but it still has not been enough to meet demand. In typical AWS fashion, they decided to create a service to help customers measure how well they are doing in terms of operations, security, reliability, cost optimization and performance efficiency. Customers can run this tool against the AWS services th
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The attributes that define the increasingly critical Data-as-a-Service industry

Alex Rosen Contributor Alex Rosen is managing director at Ridge Ventures . More posts by this contributor An inside look into a venture negotiation Building a Series A SaaS valuation estimator (2017 edition) It’s now common in tech to describe data as “the new oil or electricity” — a fuel that will power innovation and company growth for the foreseeable future. However, data is far from a novel industry. In fact, it’s a decades-old market, and many successful data companies, such as Bloomberg, LiveRamp ( now Axciom ), Oracle Data Cloud and Nielsen have been built in the past and serve as industry leaders… for the time being. Still, a few characteristics separate today’s world of data businesses from those in the past. The market for data  is  increasing in size at a rapid rate, mostly due to new methods of measurement (like mobile phones, IoT sensors and satellite imagery) that generate new forms of information, as well as new, prevalent use cases like AI, which rely on h
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