Entrepreneur, Philosopher
I’ve written quite a bit about China’s international moves to expand their sphere and scope of influence, and about the US’s and EU’s response — and all of that is certainly of global economic import; but this week China made a really interesting internal move. Remember, China is the second largest economy in the world … Continue reading “China is becoming more communistic”
It appears that Oracle has won the bid to purchase TikTok’s US operations. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Anyone who knows anything about Oracle has to seriously wonder what this is going to do. Sure, Oracle desperately needs to enter new markets, but … TikTok? At the other end of the spectrum, NVIDIA is acquiring ARM. Now, that deal makes a lot … Continue reading “Good and bad M&A”
The news business has always been tough. It’s been extra tough since the Internet came along. It’s shrinking in every possible way — relevance, number of reporters, income, readership; you name it, it’s hard to be in the news business. But as we look at the “news” on the Internet, it’s easy to see why, … Continue reading “If Australia doesn’t get their act together, they may lose all news”
The WSJ wrote an article this week, pointing out that Amsterdam is the leading EU-exchange for tech stocks. This may seem surprising, but actually makes sense. London’s AIM and Germany’s Deutsche Börse are notoriously low-liquidity for tech stocks. There are very few scenarios one can imagine where listing on either of those larger exchanges is … Continue reading “EU Tech Stocks and markets — or, will there be a Euroean Silicon Valley?”
If you don’t live in the EU, and don’t run a globally-targeted website, you may be forgiven for not being familiar with GDPR — the General Data Protection Regulation of the EU. If you do live in the EU, then you’ll be intimately familiar with the endless “agreeing” you have to do to various cookie … Continue reading “EU restricts personal data transfers to the US”
Here we are, yet again, back at Newsletter #14, wherein I brought up some of the problems with TikTok being controlled by the Chinese, and statements by the new CEO (who is an American), who asserts that they don’t send US user data to Chinese authorities, and moreover that they’d refuse if it were demanded. Things … Continue reading “TikTok and China”
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has released its final report on online platforms and digital advertising. This started as a preliminary look at possibly monopolistic practices by Google and Facebook, who collectively earn about 80% of UK digital-marketing spend. Parts of the UK press are already saying the report doesn’t go far enough, and that … Continue reading “Ad-tech regulation”
If e-commerce is all about buying physical goods online, e-payment is all about paying for such goods online, even if you’re buying at a physical location. Think Apple Pay or Google Wallet meet PayPal. That’s what WhatsApp is rolling out in Brazil this week — the ability to send money directly from within WhatsApp, either … Continue reading “WhatsApp payments isn’t about WhatsApp, it’s about Visa”
As I discussed last week, China’s proposed security law for Hong Kong would be a major blow. Follow-on discussions of potential results of the implementation of such a law really span quite a bit of ground. On the “very likely” side of things, Hong Kong is currently home to over 400 hedge funds, managing north … Continue reading “Hedge Funds and New Hong Kong”
With everything going on regarding COVID-19, and now the protests and riots in the US, it’s easy to forget that just a few months ago, there were on-going protests in Hong Kong around Beijing’s attempt to pass a law allowing people to be extradited to the mainland. Equally seemingly lost in the noise is Beijing’s … Continue reading “Hong Kong no longer autonomous from China”
The VOD wars had kicked off long before the COVID-19 global lockdowns started, but the lockdowns are accelerating change in a lot of businesses. In the wake of the lockdown, there are no movie theaters anymore, so NBC Universal decided to stream Trolls World Tour. It generated US$100 million in revenue, and prompted AMC Theaters (the … Continue reading “Did AMC just shoot itself in the foot?”
Long before Descartes dismissed imaginary numbers as nonsense, the Greeks derided negative numbers as “meaningless” — there’s no such thing in the real world. Last week, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange announced they would allow futures to trade in the negative, and they promptly did, with the May futures contract for West Texas Intermediate Crude (WTI) … Continue reading “A rare insight into how the oil supply chain works”