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The Smart Speaker Conundrum (Part II)
As discussed in Part I, smart speakers have not attracted significant developer interest and, therefore, lack a robust app store. Assuming an app store for smart speakers never were to take off, we wonder if a few smart speaker apps would be able to sustain the market. In Part II of The Smart Speaker Conundrum, […]
Venmo vs. Cash App: A Look Inside the Most Popular Consumer Finance Products in the US
We believe that after adding more than 8 million annual active users during the six months ended September 30, 2019, Venmo is on track to surpass 50 million annual active users by the end of October, as shown below.1 As a result, it probably hosted more deposit account customers than any other bank in the […]
The AI Chip Landscape in 2019
With competition heating up in the artificial intelligence (AI) chip market, ARK was invited to present on the state of AI hardware at CogX 2019. Here we share a summary of our talking points and we invite you to watch the full presentation below. ARK’s research shows that more than 60 companies worldwide are in […]
The Smart Speaker Conundrum (Part I)
ARK’s research suggests that more than 50% of US households will have at least one smart speaker by this time next year.1 In other words, the adoption of smart speakers is happening at a record rate, with only 3 years between early adoption and mainstream adoption, as shown below. With such early success, many forecasters […]
Square Cash App’s Viral Marketing Strategy Attracts Users
According to our research, Square Cash App’s viral customer acquisition strategy has collapsed its cost of customer acquisition relative to that of traditional financial institutions. With an expanded menu of products beyond peer-to-peer payments and debit cards, Cash App profits per user could surpass those of banks. One of the leading consumer finance applications in […]
Digital Wallet Companies Can Bank the Unbanked, While Traditional Banks Cannot
When was the last time you received physical mail from your bank urging you to sign up for a new credit card? Probably not too long ago. In 2018, Wells Fargo spent almost $1.6 billion on advertising and promotion, postage, stationery and supplies, or roughly $6001 per new checking account. Retail banks pay between $350 […]
Auto Insurers Should Fear: Autonomous Driving Networks Are Near!
During the next five to ten years, as riders may increasingly choose to travel on autonomous taxi networks, the auto insurance industry – a $220 billion market – will face the biggest threat in its history, a collapse in the number of drivers and accidents. ARK’s research on Mobility-as-a-Service suggests that roughly 57% of all automotive […]
Tesla’s Self Driving Computer Is Four Years Ahead of the Competition
Last year we published a piece titled Tesla Through the Lens of Apple that argued Tesla’s strategy of vertical integration would allow it to out-execute and out-innovate its competitors, much as Apple had done in the past decade. This month, Tesla’s announcement of its own Full Self-Driving (FSD) computer is the strongest endorsement of this […]
Food-as-a-Service: The $3 Trillion Meal Delivery Market
To find promising investment opportunities in the consumer internet, we believe it is imperative to look for companies that improve convenience in industries that haven’t changed in decades. Convenience explains the success of Amazon, Expedia, Netflix, and Uber. Each of these companies attacked an industry that burdened the consumer with work—whether searching through bookstores or […]
Bitcoin: Winner Takes Most, or Winner Takes All: Part 1 of a 3 Part Series
This series, will explore how winner-takes-most or winner-takes-all applies to the cryptocurrency market. In Part I, we will discuss the evolution of monetary systems, including cryptocurrencies, with a focus on the limitations of previous forms of money. In Part II, we will explain why the clear winner, likely bitcoin, should capture most, if not all, market […]
Big Ideas: Technological Breakthroughs Investors Shouldn’t Miss in 2019
History is replete with examples of businesses and consumers ignoring or dismissing big ideas, particularly those associated with disruptive innovation. In 1876, for example, when Alexander Graham Bell was granted the official patent for the telephone, many businesses dismissed it as irrelevant or insignificant. Famously, Western Union took a pass on buying the patent.1 Likewise, […]
Will Bank Branches Give Way to Digital Wallets?
Digital wallets are emerging and could upend traditional branch-based banking networks globally during the next five to ten years. Already in China and Kenya, Alipay and M-Pesa have on-boarded hard-to-reach customers with digital wallets, offering access to payment platforms, investments, loans, insurance and asset management. Such wallet ecosystems are revolutionizing the delivery of banking products […]
Accelerator Demand Should Grow Ten-Fold According to Top 500 Supercomputers
One of the most widely debated questions in computing today is: what is the addressable market for accelerators such as GPUs (graphic processing units), FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays), and ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits)? Today accelerators are used selectively in servers to speed up workloads such as artificial intelligence (AI), search, and video transcoding. As Moore’s […]
Tesla Through the Lens of Apple
From 2007 to 2018, Apple’s revenue and market capitalization grew roughly tenfold1—making it the most celebrated technology growth story of the 21st century. Apple’s growth was fueled by the most productive period in the company’s history with the release of the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and App Store—each generating sales on par with a Fortune 500 […]
Is TV Advertising About to Collapse?
TV advertising, which has grown almost every year since its introduction in the 1940s1, is facing secular decline during the next decade. Among the forces causing this shift are a generational change in viewing habits, as shown below, and the growth of new digital video ad formats that are both engaging and measurable. TV ad […]
How Internet Advertising Can Grow to $600 Billion by 2023
Internet advertising is the business model that keeps on giving. Since its birth in the mid-nineties, it has mushroomed, generating more than $230 billion in revenues globally last year based on ARK estimates. After such a phenomenal run, many analysts expect a slowdown, with advertising research firm Zenith projecting 11% growth and eMarketer 15% in […]
Inside Deep Learning: Part I of the Big Ideas 2018 Webcast
Mentioned Companies: AAPL, ADBE, AMD, AMZN, BABA, BIDU, BOX, CRM, DE, FANUY, FB, GOOG, GOOGL, IBM, INTC, JD, MSFT, NUAN, NVDA, QCOM“Big Ideas” is ARK’s annual publication showcasing a selection of innovations that we believe will accelerate the pace of change. In this webcast, ARK’s Next Generation Internet Analyst, James Wang, takes a look inside deep learning, part one of Big Ideas 2018. Deep learning—a form of artificial intelligence inspired by the human brain—is sweeping across every […]
How Streaming Could Create a $50 Billion Music Industry
“I know of only two ways to make money—bundling and unbundling.” – Jim Barksdale, Former CEO of Netscape Few industries have felt the disruptive power of the internet like the music business. Global music revenue targeting the consumer market dropped from $24 billion in 1999 to $13B in 2016, a 63% drop when adjusted for inflation, […]
How Netflix Could Reach 400 Million Subscribers by 2023
Mentioned Companies: NFLXNetflix could triple its subscriber base over the next five years. Assuming continued growth in the US and a moderate inflection in international growth, the number of Netflix subscribers could more than triple to nearly 400 million, two times higher than Wall Street expectations, by 2023. Viewed from the perspective of an S-curve, Netflix has […]
The State of Deep Learning in 2017
In early 2017, ARK published “Deep Learning: An Artificial Intelligence Revolution”. This whitepaper made the case for deep learning as a foundational technology that should transform not only technology companies but every sector of the global economy. Since the paper’s publication, deep learning continues to grow at a rapid pace both in research and in […]
$1,700? Even Bitcoin’s Bear Case Is Bullish
Mentioned Companies: GBTCAs the first public asset manager to gain exposure to bitcoin at $250 through the Bitcoin Investment Trust,1 ARK Invest faced a number of questions and much ridicule in September 2015. Given our research-based conviction, and the knee-jerk reaction of skeptics, we knew we were on to something big! Ending a near cataclysmic slide from roughly […]
Digitizing Cash Transactions Could Become Quite Profitable
Digitization is unlocking voluminous amounts of data in every industry around the world. Businesses and individuals now are creating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily and, during the past five years, have generated 90% of all of the data ever recorded in human history, as shown below.1 Data aggregators like Facebook, Tencent, and Google have […]
GPUs vs. TPUs — Can NVIDIA Hold On To Its Lead?
Now that deep learning has turbocharged NVIDIA’s data center business by five-fold in the past two years, competition is brewing. As of 2017 nearly a dozen startups have launched, with the goal of building dedicated chips for deep learning applications. In addition, large public tech companies such as Alphabet, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple plan […]
How Much Artificial Intelligence Does IBM Watson Have?
Mentioned Companies: IBMTo gauge the future of IBM , one needs to understand its cognitive computing platform, Watson. As its core business declines, IBM is counting on Watson to drive growth in new areas such as analytics, healthcare, internet of things, and security. But, what kind of artificial intelligence (AI) is IBM Watson? And, how does it compare […]
How Large Is the Deep Learning Data Center Market?
Deep learning is having a profound effect on the microprocessor and server markets. In the face of a declining server market during the last six months, NVIDIA tripled its data center revenues. The reason? Deep learning applications like voice search, image recognition, and translation are taking off, and NVIDIA’s graphics processing units (GPUs)1 are the […]
Deep Learning: An Artificial Intelligence Revolution
Deep learning — a form of artificial intelligence inspired by the human brain—is sweeping across every industry around the world. Thanks to this breakthrough, computer vision, voice recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation, game playing, drug discovery, and robotics are setting game-changing performance records. ARK believes that deep learning is one of the most important software […]
The Race to Build the Best AI Chip: NVIDIA vs. Google
The explosion in artificial intelligence has created a new market for specialized processors. Chips like GPUs (graphics processing units) and FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) are now being used in data centers to help with these new AI workloads. In this podcast, ARK CEO, Cathie Wood, and ARK Internet Analyst, James Wang, discuss the race […]
Google: The Full Stack AI Company
Google has become a full stack AI company. It uses its own data to train its own algorithms running on its own chips deployed on its own cloud. The result is that Google is able to innovate very quickly in AI and deploy it ahead of its peers—just like Apple took full control of OS […]
Data from Cash Disruption: A Clear Advantage for Fintech Firms
Cash transactions play a dominant role in the lives of millions of people around the world: Cash is the leading payment instrument for day-to-day purchases such as groceries, petrol, and in some cases, even real estate. For Khin San,[1] a small farmer from Myanmar, cash is central to her livelihood. She often travels with large amounts […]
An Interview with NBR: The Bluest of Blue Chip Tech Stocks
In a recent interview with Nightly Business Report (NBR), ARK’s Next Generation Internet analyst James Wang discussed the bluest of blue chip tech stocks. Here are some takeaways: 1. Amazon is eating the world…in both retail and cloud Amazon continues to be the bluest of the blue in tech stocks – by both market cap and […]
Fintech Explained—The Financial Revolution Has Just Begun
Watch ARK’s explainer video on Fintech and the ongoing financial transformation. Learn why ARK believes Fintech could have a great and positive impact on our lives. ARK believes the financial services industry is ripe for innovation. While we have seen advances such as ATMs in the 60’s, debit cards in the 70s, and online banking […]
First Impressions From The Snap Inc. IPO S-1 Filing
Earlier this week papers were filed for the Snap Inc. IPO. Snap Inc. is the parent company of Snapchat and based on its S-1 prospectus, Snap seems to have a unique worldview, rapid growth, staggering costs, and no pretense of public shareholder governance. The Snap Inc. IPO makes clear that it doesn’t view itself as a […]
Bitcoin’s Price Behavior: Why 2017 is Not the Same as 2013
A common but mistaken refrain is building that bitcoin’s price behavior of late has been a replica of the infamous late 2013 rise and crash. Certainly, a similar narrative could be spun: bitcoin breaks $1,000, the People’s Bank of China issues some comments that scare people, bitcoin crashes. But if a few marketplace characteristics are investigated, we think the […]
Financial Blockchains: The Peril and Promise
We recently had the pleasure of sitting on a panel hosted at ConsenSys, a leading Ethereum startup, to discuss the future of financial blockchains. Below we include a brief summary of some of the topics we found most interesting from the panel discussion. Digital Assets Trading within the capital markets currently involves a mixture of […]
Deep Learning Based Diagnostics: Unlocking a $16 Billion Market
Mentioned Companies: IBMIntelligent software could “eat” into diagnostic radiology, just as it has eaten countless other industries. We think the result, deep learning based diagnostics software, will likely lead to faster, cheaper, and more accurate diagnoses on a global scale. The key enabling technology is deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence (AI) that has established benchmarks […]
A Potential Use Case for Blockchain Technology Outside of Bitcoin
What is a potential use case for blockchain technology outside of Bitcoin? Listen to ARK’s Blockchain Products Lead, Chris Burniske, explain. One promising use case for blockchain technology outside of Bitcoin is in healthcare. Right now in the U.S. we spend $3 trillion annually on healthcare; that’s almost 20% of our gross domestic product. […]
Could Deep Learning Grow the Robotics Market Ten-Fold (or More)?
Mentioned Companies: AMZNDeep learning—a machine learning algorithm that is setting performance records in vision, speech, medical diagnosis, and other fields1—could have a profound impact on the robotics industry. Despite their widespread use in manufacturing, robots are expensive and difficult to program. For most businesses, robots are not useful, at least not yet. In 2015, global unit sales […]
Blockchain Future States: Simon Denny’s Exhibit Investigates Ethereum, 21.co, and Digital Asset Holdings
Bitcoin, and therefore blockchain, was born as a phoenix from the ashes of near Wall Street collapse. A month after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, an unknown entity by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto, released a white paper that would be core to the cryptocurrency and blockchain movement. Contemporary artist, Simon Denny, brings Bitcoin’s founding […]
Ethereum May Be Undergoing Allopatric Speciation
It’s been an interesting few months for the Ethereum community between the DAO’s record crowdfunding, the infamous hack, and the eventual forking of the network. Ever since the fork, there have been two Ethereum chains: (1) Ethereum (ETH), which was altered to relieve the hacker of their funds, and (2) Ethereum Classic (ETC), which was […]
The Future of Social and Messaging Apps — Predictions for 2020
It’s no exaggeration to say that the future of messaging apps is the future of mobile. Six out of the top ten most used mobile apps are messaging apps according to research firm Quettra. Including social apps, that number jumps to eight out of the top ten apps. With smartphone sales slowing down, understanding the […]
Instagram Followers of Certain Brands and Celebrities Surpasses Facebook and Twitter
In May 2015, ARK did its first survey of user engagement with the three largest social platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We found that while Facebook dominated in absolute reach and Twitter owned real time news, Instagram was becoming the go-to destination for savvy brands and celebrities. In June of 2016, we repeated the same survey. […]
Three Takeaways from AlphaGo Beating Lee Sedol
AlphaGo beating international Go champion Lee Sedol is a historic milestone for artificial intelligence (AI). Here are our three key takeaways. 1. Machine Learning Accelerates Go AI by Ten Years Chess AI surpassed the best human players long ago. Until 2015, Go AI had reached only strong amateur performance.1 Based on ARK’s analysis of past AI performance […]
Fintech Fizz? – A World Economic Forum Panel Discussion
Investors put a record $4.5 billion into financial start-ups in Asia last year, four times as much as the previous year. But how are disruptive business models and technology innovations transforming finance in Asia and the world? ARK Invest CEO/CIO, Catherine D. Wood addressed this topic during the ‘Fintech Fizz’ session at the World Economic […]
Bitcoin: A Significantly Investable Asset
Exploring Bitcoin As A New Asset Class 1/4 A excerpt of ARK’s white paper exploring bitcoin as the first of its kind in a new asset class—cryptocurrency—distinct from all other asset classes. In this article, we make the case that bitcoin is a significantly investable asset. ARK Invest and Coinbase define investability as providing ample liquidity […]
Bitcoin: Ringing the Bell for a New Asset Class
ARK Invest and Coinbase explore the merit of bitcoin as the first of its kind in a new asset class—cryptocurrency—distinct from all other asset classes. Universally, we think traditional asset classes must meet the requirement of investability. However, traditional asset classes then differ in their politico-economic features, correlation of price movements, and risk-reward profiles. In […]
Bitcoin and Ethereum: How Smart Contracts Work
Mentioned Companies: GOOGThis article assumes a basic understanding of blockchain technology in order to fully understand how smart contracts work. Blockchain-based smart contracts have generated ample buzz recently as they could eventually build entirely autonomous organizations, enable self-regulated peer-to-peer insurance models, and facilitate the renting of all internet-connected-things. This article explores how smart contracts work. It provides […]
Machine Learning Opens Up Cloud Opportunity for GPUs
Machine learning—software that gets smarter by learning from data—is exploding in popularity. To keep up, servers—the workhorse of the Internet—will have to get a lot smarter. Specifically, they’ll need greater computing horsepower to process image, voice, and other forms of cognitive workloads. Today, servers are primarily composed of processors, memory, storage, and networking. Servers built […]
Netflix Will Be the Largest US, If Not Global, “TV Network” By 2019
ARK believes TV executives should feel paranoid about the rise of Netflix. At the current trajectory, our research forecasts Netflix will become the largest US video network by 2019. With Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, Hulu, and a host of niche players also experiencing rapid growth, streaming is set to become the new TV, with a […]
Bitcoin and Blockchain: Better Together
Adam Ludwin, founder of Chain.com, pointed out in an a16z podcast that people who say blockchain can exist without bitcoin are both completely correct and totally wrong. ARK’s view is the debate between Bitcoin and blockchain is misunderstood and overplayed, mostly due to its nascent nature, overlapping concepts and poorly understood jargon. Understanding the Bitcoin […]
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Took Off in 2015
Artificial intelligence — the stuff of science fiction—suddenly became real in 2015. Amazon shipped the Echo, its AI powered home assistant, to surprisingly positive reviews. The latest software from Microsoft and Google beat humans at image recognition. Tesla’s cars woke up one day and gained self-driving capability. And the latest software from Baidu is natively […]
Streaming Giant: How Netflix Will Reach 175 million Subscribers by 2020
ARK estimates that Netflix’s subscriber base will more than double in the next five years, growing to 175 million by 2020, up from 75 million in 2015. This growth will be fueled by aggressive international expansion of its streaming service, increasing numbers of broadband subscribers, and a growing library of content that caters to different […]
Undercover Big Data Companies Within Health Care
After attending both athenahealth and Medidata Solutions analyst days this past week, it was clear that both cloud companies are attempting to address issues faced by our health care system through leveraging the power of big data. Due to the beauty of true cloud, which is single instance multi tenant, both companies can monitor how […]
The Brewing IoT Standards Battle
Kevin Ashton coined the term Internet of Things (IoT)1 in 1999. In January 2014, Cisco’s (CSCO) then CEO, John Chambers, pegged its global financial impact at $19 trillion by 2020. Now in the role of Executive Chairman, Chambers went on to say at Fortune’s 2015 Global Forum that he expects 500B internet connected devices by […]
Instagram’s Monetization Potential Could Range From $3 Billion to $10 Billion
Mentioned Companies: FBInstagram probably will not reach the billion users to which Mark Zuckerberg aspires, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing for Facebook’s revenue prospects. At full maturity the platform will be much larger than Twitter, and a maturing growth profile should motivate Instagram’s management to accelerate its monetization efforts. Based on current growth rates as […]
Micro-Sharing Economy: Driving “Good Deflation”
Airbnb, founded in 2008, is pegged near a $24 billion valuation, and Uber, founded in 2009, is north of $50 billion. In comparison, neither Google nor Amazon was valued in the billions before going public. While private equity has undergone a dramatic shift that results in companies staying private longer and growing larger, the sharing […]
Securing the Bitcoin Network – White Paper
Bitcoin has the potential to be disruptive in a way not seen since the development of the Internet. While the Internet decentralized the dissemination of information, Bitcoin and its underlying “blockchain” are decentralizing the securitization of information. Due to its decentralized design, however, there is no single entity guaranteeing Bitcoin’s long-term reliability. This white paper […]
‘Silicon Alley’ Dissects Bitcoin | A Unique Bitcoin Panel Discussion
Bitcoin has the potential to be the biggest innovation since the Internet. On September 24, 2015 some of the brightest minds in economics, finance, technology and regulation came together during a bitcoin panel discussion to examine the disruptive innovation of bitcoin. (Bios of all panel members below) Moderated by Brian Kelly (CNBC), the event ‘Silicon Alley’ Dissects Bitcoin offered a unique bitcoin panel […]
Bitcoin: A Currency | Investigating Bitcoin 5/5
Investigating Bitcoin 4 | 5 A series of articles investigating the disruptive potential of bitcoin and evaluating it as a currency. Technically, bitcoin could satisfy all three roles of money, as discussed in ARK Invest’s prior pieces in this series (bitcoin: A Means of Exchange, bitcoin: A Store of Value, bitcoin: A Unit of Account). Next […]
Bitcoin: A Unit of Account | Investigating Bitcoin 4/5
Investigating Bitcoin 3 | 5 A series of articles investigating bitcoin and its disruptive potential as a currency. To satisfy the third and final property of money, bitcoin must become a “measuring stick” for assets and liabilities: in other words, it must be fungibile. bitcoins’ digital equality within the blockchain does allow for mutual substitution, although […]
Bitcoin: A Store of Value | Investigating Bitcoin 3/5
Mentioned Companies: TWTRInvestigating Bitcoin 2 | 5 A series of articles investigating the disruptive potential of bitcoin and evaluating it as a currency. As of August 1st, 2015, approximately 14.5 million bitcoins had been created which, at its US dollar exchange rate on that day of around $280 per bitcoin, implied more than $4 billion in stored value. […]
Bitcoin: A Means of Exchange – Investigating Bitcoin 2/5
Investigating Bitcoin 1 | 5. A series of articles investigating the disruptive potential of bitcoin and evaluating it as a currency. The software underlying Bitcoin enables bitcoin as an elegant means of exchange. In this article, “Bitcoin” refers to the open source, decentralized technology platform upon which “bitcoin”, the digital currency, depends. Like cash, transactions […]
Bitcoin: A Primer – Investigating Bitcoin 1/5
Few innovations have generated as much controversy and potential for worldwide economic transformation as have Bitcoin and bitcoin. Bitcoin is an open source, decentralized technology platform upon which bitcoin, the digital currency, depends. On August 1, 20151, the digital currency was priced at $280 per bitcoin, with 14.5 million units in circulation, $4 billion in […]
Four Mega Trends Shaping The Advertising Market
The battle for the $600 billion global advertising market still rages, but the war is already over—digital has won. Over the next three years US digital advertising, driven by mobile, social, and video, is expected to surpass TV in revenue. At the same time, ad buying will become increasingly automated thanks to online programmatic exchanges. […]
Social Networks Unpacked – Six Charts That Explain the Rise of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
The three most popular consumer social networks, Facebook , Twitter , and Instagram, have grown from scrappy upstarts to some of the most powerful communication platforms on earth. Despite the similarities of these platforms, users, celebrities, and companies are embracing them in different ways. To understand how they are evolving and performing, ARK researched engagement […]
IoT Ecosystem: Four Hurdles The Industry Has To Overcome
Surprisingly, while the “Internet of Things” (IoT) is nascent, research suggests that its growth rate in US homes has peaked,1 at least for now, as shown below. Before it can reaccelerate, the IoT ecosystem must overcome four hurdles: high prices, complicated interfaces and controls, unreliable interoperability, and the inaccessibility of data driven insights. If it […]
Facebook Will Eclipse TV in Advertising Value Starting 2015
What is more valuable to advertisers, an hour of television or an hour of Facebook? Up until this year, the answer has been TV. But starting 2015, that will change. Facebook ads, with constantly improving targeting and tracking capabilities, will eclipse the value of TV ads on a user-hour basis and TV viewership will become less […]
Are Google’s Golden Days Over as the World Goes Mobile?
As of the end of 2014, almost three billion people had internet access, with 2.3 billion on mobile broadband subscriptions. By 2017, more than half of the world’s population, or 3.5 billion people, are expected to own a smartphone, swamping the one billion in fixed broadband connections projected in the 2014 Internet Society Global Internet […]
The IoT Wave Is Surging – ARK Forecasts 7 Billion Devices in US Households by 2025
While the Internet of Things (IoT) may not be well-known to the average consumer, it is here. Beyond computers, smartphones and tablets, internet connected devices such as speakers, thermostats, fans, lights, locks and refrigerators are currently available, and many more items will become connected within the next years, as shown below.1 In January 2015, Samsung […]
Netflix’s Distribution And Interconnections: What Are The Economics Today?
How does Netflix’s streaming distribution work? The internet is a network of interconnected networks, each operated by a different entity. Interconnections between networks are potential bottlenecks because upgrades require agreements among the counterparties. Typically, investment in the gateways lags investment in the individual networks. As a result, traffic flowing from one network to another, crossing […]
PaaS: The Goldilocks of IaaS and SaaS
The International Data Corporation (IDC) projects the global public cloud computing market comprised of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS), will be $127B in 2018, more than double $56.6B in 2014.1 It is called the public cloud because through smart software, the same underlying hardware […]
Gaining Share in a Big Data Tsunami
Every day enough data is added to the world’s digital universe to fill 1.45 billion Apple iPhone 6s. Yet, lots of data will simply remain a pile of 1s and 0s, eventually dissolving into the ether, unless it’s analyzed and turned into actionable, useful data. The uses of this data are nearly infinite, from optimizing quick […]
Big Data Analytics: Life Preservers to Companies Drowning in Data
Data has always been critical to business decision making. Companies have devoted significant resources to expand into the digital universe, collecting, structuring, and analyzing data such as customer information, purchase orders, inventory tracking, and transactional records. As businesses have digitized operations, the amount of data has grown faster than their ability to process and organize […]
Netflix Earnings Report: Revisiting Netflix as a Market Leader
On October 20th, we published a piece reaffirming our opinion on Netflix, and offering an alternative view on the companies strategic decisions, original programming approach, and market expansion. (Read Full Article Here). This piece is an update following the Jan 20th earnings call. INTERNATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES Following launches across Europe, Netflix announced during its fourth quarter earnings call that it […]
RRAM’s Path to Disrupting Flash and HDDs
Given its promising performance specs, resistive-random access memory’s (RRAM) potential is provocative in the information storage space, a segment of the technology market historically rife with disruption. While easy to assert the inevitability of disruption, more difficult is to determine the timeframe within which RRAM will take meaningful share. Storage is one of the largest […]
Hadoop: Surveying the Scene
According to IDC, the quantity of data created, replicated, and consumed is doubling every two years. It is no wonder that in 2012 only two percent of worthwhile data was analyzed. During the next two days, the quantity of information produced globally will equal the total produced in the history of all time through 2003. […]
Peer-to-Peer Lending: Better for Borrowers. Better for Lenders. Terrible for JP Morgan Chase?
The IPO of Lending Club (LC) has drawn a lot of attention to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending, also known as marketplace lending. P2P lending directly connects borrowers and lenders on a secure platform. The resulting loans are better for borrowers, better for lenders, but may leave credit card companies and their banking partners in a lurch. […]
Can Apple Pay Win Mobile Digital Payments?
Mentioned Companies: AXP, BABA, BAC, BBY, C, DIS, EBAY, FB, GOOG, JPM, M, MA, MCD, NKE, SSNLF, V, VZ, WFC, WFMThe mobile payment market is one worth fighting for. According to the IDC, mobile-payment transactions will triple from $235 billion in 2013, to roughly $720 billion by 2017. NFC-enabled payments, a subset of mobile, are set to almost double this year to $8.2 billion, albeit a rounding error, to the projected $4.7 trillion US retail sales. […]
Containers: The Next Generation of Virtualization?
Although virtual machines (VMs) have been revolutionary for computing infrastructure, container technology may be on the verge of disrupting the disrupter. Companies with operations in the cloud are excited about containers because of superior resource allocation, deployment speed, and environment flexibility. Rackspace’s CTO, John Engrates, is describing containers as the next generation of virtualization. Prior to […]
Why Netflix might be in the best position to be a market leader
UPDATE: Tom Staudt continued his analysis of Netflix following the results of the January 20th, 2015 earnings call. The updated post can be found here. Over the past week, investors’ faith in Netflix has been shaken. Following its earnings announcement on Wednesday, and amidst a tumultuous week on Wall Street, its share price fell almost […]
Centralization Drives Need for Bitcoin Network Changes
The Bitcoin community has been anxious lately about the centralization of the network’s computing power into large pools of miners. On June 13, the largest of these pools, GHash.IO, briefly represented more than half of Bitcoin network’s computing power. Any party controlling more than half of bitcoin production, or its hash rate, could abuse and […]
Cryptocurrencies Will Challenge Traditional Transaction Platforms and Monetary Policies
Until cryptocurrencies surfaced seemingly out of nowhere, merchants and consumers seemed resigned to a 2.5-3% transaction toll with each credit or debit card purchase, while lower income individuals accepted the 8% remittance fee charged by companies like Western Union . Now, those payment platforms are facing the threat that cryptocurrencies could usurp their roles as intermediaries. Cryptocurrencies such […]
Quick Fire: The Spread of Smartphones and Tablets
In 2007 Apple sold over one million iPhones in the first full quarter of its availability. Today over two-thirds of the United States population owns a smartphone. While it took the cordless phone over twenty-five years to go from 10% to 40% saturation in the U.S., as shown below it took smartphones and tablets only […]
Square’s New Mobile Payment App is Uninspiring
Despite demonstrated disdain by the broader consuming public, mobile payment applications continue to proliferate. Square, of the like-shaped iPhone-attached credit card swipers, has launched its latest mobile payment effort, Square Order. It is unlikely to succeed. According to McKinsey, “Fewer than 10 percent of consumers have ever made a mobile-phone based purchase at the point […]
Cloud Computing Comes to Health IT
Mentioned Companies: ATHNAccording to the CDC, nearly 80% of office-based physicians in the US currently use some form of electronic health record (EHR) for managing their patient data. This number has increased over the past decade from about 20%, as shown in the below chart from a CDC report published earlier this year. The adoption of electronic […]
The Smart Grid: The More Efficient Way for the US to Use Energy
Could technology companies eliminate the need for any more power plants to be built in the United States for the next decade? Peak demand dictates the need for generating capacity. Therefore, a significant amount of the capacity is idle most of the time. A smart grid could increase the efficiency of electricity generation and distribution […]
Nest: The Tip of the IoT Iceberg
Earlier this year, Google acquired Nest Labs for $3.2B. That amount of money for a thermostat company seems expensive. But, so does $250 for a Nest thermostat when you can pick up a $30 programmable model at your local Home Depot . So, why might a consumer buy such a thing? (And why might Google […]
As the Cost of College Rises, Online Education Becomes a Promising Alternative
Classes, adventures, friendships… and debt. College experiences are universal but prices have increased significantly over the past forty years. As seen below, by 2013 a private college cost $40,917 per year, 2.5 times as much as it did in 1974. Can online education become a promising alternative? From 1973 to 2013, annual median household income remained […]
Adidas Smart Shirts
Mentioned Companies: ADSCould clothing cut healthcare costs and save lives? Today, most “smart” wearable textiles, or e-textiles, exist only in laboratories, not on production floors. Manufacturing e-textiles has been difficult because the fabric must be washable and safe for skin contact. Adidas’ (ADS) Textronics group has met these challenges, creating fabrics for the first commercially available products, with promising applications for sports and healthcare.
Is Social Media Use Approaching Saturation?
The big internet companies are running out of untapped social media users. In order to maintain growth they will have to think outside the box. From 2006 to 2013, the population of social media users grew nine-fold to 1.8 billion. Business prospects have been similarly favorable: LinkedIn , Facebook , Twitter —to name a few—all enjoyed consistent […]
Cybersecurity Fear Spells Opportunity
With roughly ten billion devices connected globally—a number expected to grow to over fifty billion by 2020—the Internet of Things (IoT) is both an incredible growth market and a security nightmare. Cybersecurity firms are hoping to capitalize on this rapid expansion. Retail, healthcare, banking, and many other sectors are raising security budgets and fortifying their current […]
Wearables and FDA Loopholes – What are the regulatory standards on health-tracking apps?
Health-tracking and medical services are the recognized “killer apps” for wearables, at least for now. The expensive, lengthy FDA approval process required for medical devices, however, is leading companies, both big and small, to find ways around it. Regulatory consultant Emergo Group notes that it takes five months for the FDA just to review and clear […]
Attention Spans For Mobile Video May be Longer Than Some Data Suggests
The past two years have seen an increase in innovative, ultra-short-form streaming of mobile video content created specifically for smartphone users. But the thinking behind that development may be based on data now being challenged. True, major brands have begun to embrace the six-second clip format pioneered by Twitter’s Vine. Time Warner Cable’s (TWC) Cartoon Network […]
Google’s gDNA: An Analysis of Employee Satisfaction and its Impact on ROI
Now two years into its planned 100-year lifespan, Google’s (GOOG) gDNA is an unprecedented and ambitious big data study that closely examines the lives and habits of 4,000 Googlers each year. Its goal is to understand how employees’ work lives interact with their personal ones, and how to help create more satisfied and productive workers.
How Many Cars can One Zipcar Replace: Zipcar and the Impact of Car Sharing on Auto Sales
Believe it or not, in an economic boom new car sales could fall, thanks to car sharing. Car sharing services like Zipcar (owned by Avis ), Car2Go (owned by Daimler), and Hertz OnDemand offer an alternative to car ownership that improves the utilization of vehicles and should lead to fewer cars on the road. […]
