A Formulated Technology Column
“We didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost.” Former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop Over the last few years, as the lean startup methodology gained traction amongst the Silicon Valley and startup types, an interesting idea that runs contrary to how things have been done in the past took root — because the lean startup methodology encourages […]
TL;DR: Spend enough time in Silicon Valley and you will hear the phrase (or some variation thereof) “ideas are cheap, execution is the only thing that matters” hundreds, if not thousands, of times. It’s one of those phrases easy enough to throw around while still sounding somewhat sophisticated and intelligent. Most of the time, the person […]
Today, in China, Tencent functions as a door to the Internet: it often is the very first app people download when they get a smartphone. It connects them to banking services, games, e-commerce sites, taxis/ride-sharing services, hotel and flight booking services, and much more. This metaphorical door manifests itself in real life in the form of a messaging […]
Steve Jobs treated every Apple event like an Apple product: masterful, deliberate, and often times, surprisingly delightful. Every act in a Steve Jobs presentation was calculated to maximize the audience’s attention and joy. No one doubted that the products Jobs was going to unveil in each event was going to be anything less than great… but they […]
The Financial Times is usually a terrific source for financial news. It’s straightforward, unbiased and most of the time, accurate. Unfortunately, the paper fails to live up to that standard on occasions, such as when it published an article by Dan McCrum yesterday titled “Bitcoin’s place in the long history of pyramid schemes“. Being an alarmist […]
Is Silicon Valley currently in a bubble? Is the party over? Some very smart people are arguing yes. Others are saying no. But what’s clear is this: we’re at the peak of this ~10 year cycle, and every boom comes with a bust. The players in the game (mainly, VCs and startups) have already began bracing for this cycle’s […]
The screenshot above came from TechCrunch Editor-in-Chief Matthew Panzarino’s personal blog, Robot Tuxedo (unfortunately, the blog seems dead). In just a single sentence, Panzarino succinctly explained why Apple charges customers the price they do — in part to fatten their bottom line, in part to offset future R&D costs, in part to please investors. Recently, there has been a huge outcry over Apple’s […]
If Apple ever to launches an iPhone that fails to live up to customers’ expectation, the company may be done for. While Apple, to its credit, has been trying to diversify its product offerings (with the car and Watch projects), it is still very much beholden to its iPhone product line, which generated 63.2% of the company’s reported $49 billion […]
Apple has spent millions, or even billions, of dollars developing and eventually producing the Apple Watch. But just don’t ask the company what the purpose of the Apple Watch is… because it doesn’t seem to know. Internally, the reason to sell the Apple Watch (in fact, one of the major things that justified the Apple […]
Yesterday, we said not to focus too much on the gold Apple Watch (officially called the “Collection Edition”) the company is due to announce in a couple of hours for one main reason: you most probably can’t afford it. Instead, Apple wants you to focus on the other (more affordable) editions, so that even if the company […]