Even Lionel Messi couldn't help Apple score this week. Image created with Midjourney.
Not even Lionel Messi could help Apple this week. The week began happily when it was announced that the Argentine ball wizard's arrival in the MLS has resulted in one hundred and ten thousand new subscribers to Apple TV+, but that news was quickly forgotten when the Chinese government banned officials from using iPhones. Apple promptly lost $200 billion in stock market value and although it is comparing American apples to Chinese pear tea; that number is comparable to the gross national product of a medium-sized country. What is going on?
Apple v. Huawei is FC USA v. China United
To better understand the Chinese intervention in officials' phone use, we need to look a little further than an iPhone is long. At the Asean summit this week, China warned of the emergence of a new cold war, which was received by the delegations in attendance from Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, among others, as if someone walked in on a birthday, turned the heater up to the highest setting and then sighed, "hot huh guys, why always us?".
The Chinese government has long been displeased with the measures taken mainly by the US but also the Netherlands to deny China access to the latest technology to make chips. It was recently announced that the Chinese market is now the largest market in the world for Apple; 24% of all iPhones, i.e. 1 in 4 iPhones, are sold in China.
This week, therefore, was the perfect time for the Chinese government to strike back: Huawei launched the new Mate 60 Pro, the intended Chinese-made iPhone killer, not entirely coincidentally just before Apple introduces the new iPhone 15 in a few days at its ostentatiously titled Wonderlust event. What could be more fun for the Chinese government than to disrupt that American party with a ban on iPhone use by Chinese officials?
Apple runs into the Great Wall of China. Image created with Midjourney.
Apple lost 6% of its stock market value, a whopping $200 billion. The message China is sending with this is clear; block our access to Western markets and we will block the Chinese market for your products. If China can so easily ban the most sought-after product in the world, from the largest company in the world, from the most powerful country in the world, then obviously the same applies to any product from any company from any country. That's why most tech stocks fell this week, but more on that later.
China shines in ... Bavaria?
Traditionally, southern Germany is the beating technological heart of the German automobile industry. Stuttgart has been crowned with the Mercedes star, and Audi and BMW are as Bavarian as mugs of beer and drunk guys at Oktoberfest. But September became the month of the Chinese car in German automotive land: as many as 50 Chinese car brands presented themselves at the leading IAA Mobility car show in Munich.
In August, as many as 37% of all cars sold in China were electric, and those huge volumes and low-cost production capacity give Chinese automakers an unbeatable competitive advantage. According to a UBS estimate, Chinese automakers will double their global market share from 17% to 33% by 2030, with European companies suffering the biggest loss of market share.
It is numbers like these that the Chinese government dreams of in other advanced markets, such as the market for smartphones.
Midjourney turns down investors, Imbue raises $200 million
In the great geopolitical battle, it is nice to come across a company in Midjourney that is trying to find its own way in a completely organic way. Wonderful examples of what experts can create with Midjourney's photo creation tool are the Instagram accounts of Chaos Dreamland and David Szauder.
Some critics think their work is not art, but it reminds me of the rise of hip hop, when samples were first used to create new work. Venture capitalist Ben Evans wrote an excellent analysis on intellectual property and AI.
Like all AI companies, Imbue has a wonderful mission: 'At Imbue, we develop AI systems that can reason and code, giving computers intelligence and human values, so they can help us achieve greater goals in the world.' History teaches us that you have to critically follow people who clamor to achieve greater goals in the world.
Claude v. Chat
Meanwhile, the better-known AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic have found themselves in direct competition. OpenAI is making $80 million in revenue per month with ChatGPT Plus, though growth in reach has been faltering for several months. Anthropic can't be left behind and launched Claude Pro, for $20 a month. I haven't been able to test Claude yet because the service is only available to users from the U.S., UK, Gibraltar and, seriously, St. Helena and the Falkland Islands (also called the Malvinas by world champions). With this, Claude proves that being intelligent and being smart are two different things. Why not Guernsey? And what about Claude in the Lofoten Islands?
Last post this week on funding and AI companies: the world's best-known business incubator, Y Combinator, held its famed Demo Days last week (where Airbnb, Dropbox and Coinbase once debuted), and over 65% of the chosen startups engaged in AI. The majority of Y Combinator's summer cohort, a total of 134 startups, build tools around AI, enabling healthcare claims automation, customer service automation, sales operations, coding and game design.
With any other incubator, you might think it's blindly riding on the hype, but Y Combinator's track record is too impressive for that: nearly 5% of their companies achieve acclaimed unicorn status (company value of more than $1 billion) and the total revenue of Y Combinator companies in 2022 was over $50 billion.
Spotlight 9: Apple's Chinese problem depresses tech sector
Apple took a hit, but Nvidia also lost after its extreme rise this year.
It was interesting to see how different Wall Street analysts assessed Apple's problems in China. The prevailing opinion was that the Chinese moves show that even a company with a good relationship with the Chinese government, such as Apple, and a large presence in the world's second-largest economy is not immune to rising tensions between the two countries. And that depressed the share prices of leading tech companies.
However, there is also a current that believes Apple's share price drop was an overreaction by the markets. "We believe Apple's two-day -6% share price indicates that the market thinks the recent Chinese headlines will evolve into something broader," wrote an analyst at Morgen Stanley on Friday. "We think this is unlikely ... The share movement has been exaggerated." The entire tech world is hoping he is right.
In conclusion
At the end, one link to a topic that has nothing to do with technology, yet is relevant to every reader: 'My 95-year-old Japanese grandfather is a former cardiologist - his 8 'non-negotiables' for a long, happy life.' He blogs, uses social media to keep in touch with his family and takes naps - what a role model!
This week there was no news that stood out everywhere, so I made a top 10 of things that caught my eye. The great little magician from Argentina is, of course, number one.
If Lionel Messi worked from home. Image: Midjourney
No one will have failed to notice that Lionel Messi has been playing for Inter Miami, the club owned by Posh Spice's husband, for a few weeks now. But there is another owner, Jorge Mas, and he was retweeted (or rex-ed, what's that actually called since Twitter was renamed X?) by Apple CEO Tim Cook this week. The occasion was the doubling of subscribers to MLS League Pass, the pay subscription Apple offers worldwide to people who want to watch the U.S. soccer league.
Neither Apple nor the MLS disclose how many subscribers the service has, although as recently as last month it was suggested that the number was close to 1 million, before Messi's arrival. In any case, Apple is clearly pleased with Messi's impact on MLS Season Pass, because that's not how often Tim Cook retweets/rex-ed messages from people outside Apple.
You only have to buy Messi to be retweeted by Tim Cook
CNET analyzed Apple's strategy on streaming sports and is one of the first media outlets that seems to understand that the subscription to the MLS is an additional upsell; MLS matches and thus Messi's matches are not free for Apple TV+ subscribers. A monthly subscription to the MLS costs $12.99 or $49 for the rest of the season. It is extraordinary to read back now that as recently as April, there was laughter about the deal between Apple and the MLS.
Of course, it is odd that Messi is the only player in a team sport to benefit from the growth of subscribers to Apple TV+'s MLS subscription. The question is whether this will be replicated in other sports. Another question, of course, is how much Messi earns from each MLS subscriber and for how long; is it part of a subscriber's lifetime value or a flat fee per subscription?
There is plenty of speculation whether the Saudi league, which currently attracts any player who loves money, sand and shopping malls, will follow the same strategy as the MLS. That, of course, makes no sense: the MLS and its franchisees need money. The Saudis want to buy respect, charisma and reach and are even more likely to pay for worldwide broadcasts of their matches, rather than charge money for them.
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'Forget AI. For a while, Silicon Valley was obsessed with floating bricks.' So headlined the Washington Post in a fine article about the craziness in recent weeks surrounding LK-99, the material hoped to be the room-temperature semiconductor that would change the entire world.
The article rightly states that the technology world is diligently looking for fundamental breakthroughs, such as AI, after a decade of few spectacular new applications became apparent. Hopefully, investment in companies working on carbon reduction and decarbonization will continue to increase.
Unfortunately, halfway through, the journalist briefly hits the mark: 'Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology have been through several cycles of hype, but have yet to fundamentally change any sector except crime and money laundering. Technology designed to combat climate change, such as carbon capture and storage, has made no major progress for years.'
There is zero evidence that crime and money laundering have changed because of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. Zero. On the contrary: every transaction, while anonymous, is always visible on the blockchain, so the entire trail of transactions from a wallet is forever traceable to anyone on the Internet. Try that with the old-fashioned bank accounts through tax havens (Panama Papers, remember) or with the piles of cash of Pablo Escobar and consorts.
Following a state regulatory agency ruling, San Francisco will have robot cars on its streets 24/7. Good analysis explaining that this is a pivotal moment for the auto industry. Again from the Washington Post, which has excellent coverage of technology when you would rather expect that newspaper to focus on politics.
Once again, someone completely misses the point in this article, this time a mayor. " What will happen to our workforce if AI and driverless vehicles both come online at the same time? " she says. A bigger problem, of course, is that virtually no right-thinking person wants to be in politics by 2023, so we'll be stuck with mayors who talk about self-driving cars like retarded people talked about stagecoaches in 1910.
A populist politician's phony question has been the same for hundreds of years when confronted with innovations: 'But what will happen to the employment of the (choose your own preferred profession that no longer exists) chimney sweep/miner/video store worker?'
The answer is simple and has been the same for centuries: new occupations are emerging but hopefully advancing mechanization will eliminate heavy physical work and the work week can be further shortened to more time for fun things or self-development. There are people who got time to write a newsletter that way. No one benefits from further spreading the Chinese 9-9-6 culture: 9 to 9, 6 days a week.
The hope with self-driving cars, of course, is not that everyone will have their own self-driving car, but that transportation will be on demand; it is madness that the average car sits idle 95% of the time. Fewer cars means less CO2 emissions for car production and oh my goodness, this means unemployment for all the craftsmen in factories who currently screw antennas into the roofs of cars to receive FM radio.
While technology experts are sounding the alarm about the pace at which artificial intelligence is evolving, philanthropists - including established foundations and technology billionaires - have responded with an increase in donations.
In the camp of the faithful include former Google top executive Eric Schmidt and founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman. In the other corner of the ring, for example, is Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, along with the Ford, MacArthur and Rockefeller Foundations. For those with doubts about this topic - and those doubts are very understandable and also justified - I again recommend this piece by Marc Andreessen. But AI and crypto are not scary, just as it was not scary that humans learned to read
The first half of this excellent podcast from colleagues of the aforementioned Marc Andreessen is about how AI could benefit from crypto, and the second half about how crypto could benefit from AI - but the common thread is the tension between centralization vs. decentralization.
This again touches on the point about whether cash or crypto is worse for crime: the arguments opponents use always end up with a centralized system, without actually analyzing the problem.
The podcast also discusses where the intersection of crypto and AI can bring about things that are not possible by either alone. Together, the fields of AI and crypto have major implications for how we live our lives every day; so this episode is for anyone curious, or already building in this sector.
PayPal came out with its own crypto currency that is pegged in value to the dollar. From a financial standpoint, using stablecoins is not much different from using a gift card: you can use your dollars to buy stablecoins and then use those stablecoins to buy various cryptocurrencies or make other online purchases.
Downright funny was to see the reactions. Some think the PayPal stablecoin is more important than a Bitcoin ETF arguing that PayPal is uniquely positioned to solve the huge opportunity for fiat onboarding - they have the banking relationships, regulatory framework and infrastructure to sign up millions of dollars to millions of wallets. Thestreet.com even calls PayPal the crypto leader for the next decade because it links 400 million customers to crypto. The question, of course, is how many of those 400 million ever use crypto. Those 400 million customers also have access to stamps, and how often does anyone moisten the back of such a sticky note?
PayPal's stablecoin is totally unimportant, says Bank of America but that name alone does not have the aura of total neutrality on this topic. He is often quoted in this newsletter and once again Michael Casey of Coindesk has the most thorough analysis: why the timing feels right.
I expect there will be great resistance from Washington to the PayPal stablecoin, because anything pegged to the dollar is, in the eyes of the average bureaucrat, not owned by the citizen, but by the state.
Speaking of citizen ownership, whose is identity? I've written about Worldcoin before because I think the idea of an anonymized affirmation of a human identity is important and fully endorsed. There is so much unnecessary fraud and deception on the Internet that an anonymized digital identity and reputation can be crucial. Suppose you buy something on eBay from someone who has done few transactions there but has an immaculate reputation on Etsy, Uber or on Airbnb, for example; then confirmation of such a good "portable" reputation would be extremely valuable for buyer and seller.
What Worldcoin is doing now is linking a human identity to an iris scan in exchange for obtaining free Worldcoin tokens. There is no useful application whatsoever as I describe above. It leads to harrowing scenes worldwide, such as in Kenya: 'Some people in line told local media they had traveled miles after friends said "free money" was being handed out. They admitted they didn't know why they had to scan their irises and where that information would go, but they just wanted the money.'
Surely someone with the intelligence of Sam Altman, the former top executive of business factory Y Combinator and founder of Open AI, should be able to couple that intelligence with the common sense to not want to do this with Worldcoin?
In June, I wrote that Nvidia's Keith Strier told the ATX Summit in Singapore that Nvidia has more orders than it can deliver, and that companies and even countries have been placing orders years in advance to ensure longer-term deliveries. Strier wrote about it himself:
'This is about compute, not just chips. AI requires a highly specialized compute infrastructure, a combination of hardware and software. Most importantly, the supply is finite. [...] NVIDIA GPUs (the chips, MF) are more than gold, they are the "rare earth elements" of AI. That is why the world's most advanced AI companies are raising capital to secure the supply of accelerated computing. Whether an enterprise or even a country, it is important to plan and budget for the computing power that will be needed to achieve and sustain leadership in AI.'
Strier was referring to this order, among others, as Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance (owner of TikTok and Lemon8) ordered for $5 billion, including $1 billion this year and $4 billion in 2024. There are countries and companies already trying to place orders with Nvidia for 2025 through 2028.
The Chinese companies are playing catch-up and are pulling out all the stops to continue their "old-fashioned" growth. ByteDance is trying to link TikTok with Lemon8 in an effort to boost usage of that app, and Alibaba, which along with Tencent Holdings and Baidu is responsible for the birth of China's Internet industry, is trying to persuade investors to support the policy of splitting the company into no less than six parts.
8. WeWork doesn't work, Zoom just does
Interest in WeWork has always completely passed me by; it always seemed like overpriced office space with moderately comfortable furniture. The absurd valuation to value a real estate marquee as a technology company came to a screeching halt around the failed IPO, and now the board is reporting, in part due to increased interest rates, that a bankruptcy of WeWork is not ruled out.
Meanwhile, Zoom is asking staff who live within 80 kilometers of the office to come to the office at least two days a week. A reasoned request, interpreted by the media as the end of working from home. It seems like some journalists don't speak to people; I hardly know anyone who works in an organization where working from home is possible, where the pre-pandemic work culture has been restored. It won't be every day, but working from home has become part of working.
9. The investor is on vacation
The investor is sitting on the beach.
Despite the billion-dollar order from China, Nvidia was the week's decliner, but that's not surprising after all the gains this year so far. Otherwise, it was doom and gloom for tech companies, so I thought it would be nice to look at what's happening at companies in the pre-IPO stage. This article on crowdfunding in Europe illustrates the increased interest in climate tech, in technology that combats climate change.
With the stock market climate continuing to allow few major IPOs in the coming months, it is especially interesting to follow which companies are being acquired rather than going public. With every company where a buyer knocks on the door, mild panic ensues. Therefore, this is an excellent article, explaining the steps to follow the moment a buyer comes forward.
10. A Steph Curry summer
Speaking of vacations; the summer hit of 2023 is obviously Roxy with "Anne-Fleur Vacation," but the one with the most extraordinary summer is undeniably basketball player Steph Curry. First he hit a hole in one at a charity tournament and last week he was on stage at his own Chase Center in San Francisco with the band Paramore. And the conclusion was: what a basketball this man can play.
Wishing all readers another Steph Curry summer, see you next week!
I don't normally write about my own work, preferring to try to share background, tips and insights that I hope will be of use to you as a reader. But because it is often asked for, this time I like to tell you about two investments I am excited about. Of course, I also cover notable things in the tech world, such as the jubilant crypto world about Ripple, Elon Musk's new AI company, traffic jam dodging by drone and Lionel Messi's deal with Apple. But now first, iXora and Unveil.
Ede-based iXora has developed a form of liquid cooling technology(immersion cooling) that allows data centers to save more than 30% in energy and space, because it eliminates the need for fans as with the usual air cooling of computers. And the latest generation of chips gets so hot that air cooling becomes too inefficient and expensive, but also socially unacceptable given the CO2 emissions. That makes the market potential of iXora huge worldwide.
Amsterdam-based Unveil links top photographers to collectors through its own marketplace based on blockchain technology. Through a careful curation process, collectors worldwide find new high-quality work in a user-friendly way. Collectors can buy the physical work, a print, a digital version in the form of an NFT, or both. Unveil can play a crucial role in the explosion of AI-generated fakes; it guarantees authenticity.
I have previously worked with these entrepreneurs with great pleasure and success, their companies are forerunners in fast growing global markets and sustainability is an important part of their proposition. And not unimportantly, there is also an opportunity for you to participate as an investor even with a small amount, whereas this is usually reserved only for vc funds with very deep pockets.
Please note that this is not an advertisement for investing in these companies. I explain what my considerations were for investing, but I want to emphasize that investing in startups has the very highest form of risk. Simply put, my advice is: only do it with money you could lose. And above all, do it because you support the companies' goals.
Why does Warren Buffett store in the Veluwe?
Earlier this year at CES in Las Vegas, iXora signed a licensing deal with the American company Lubrizol, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company of the legendary Warren Buffett. Why would such a global player license technology from a Dutch startup?
Hypotherm Rack Management (HRM) from iXora. Server in and done. Crucial: fits into a standard 19-inch rack, the standard in data centers worldwide.
The answer is that huge demand for energy-saving solutions has accelerated worldwide since de Russia's invasion of Ukraine the helmeted Russian neighbor visit. On top of that, energy consumption in data centers plays an extremely large role, because next to real estate and equipment, energy costs are the biggest expense. Data centers are still full of energy-guzzling fans, which will become obsolete with iXora's liquid cooling.
When using the iXora solution, a data center can accommodate more servers per square foot, with lower energy costs and therefore a reduced carbon footprint. Add to this the huge increase to cloud and streaming services in recent years and the current explosion of AI applications, making it irreversible that heavy server-intensive applications will dominate the market. Conclusion: immersion cooling is hot.
Own experience with data centers
My personal experience with data centers goes way back, for example, I was a very satisfied customer with Flabber and 925 for many years with the innovative hosting company True. (Jort Kelder and I even shot a lightly humorous movie in their data center 15 years ago.) So when True founder Vincent Houwert, after selling True and some wanderings in the Caribbean, couldn't resist getting back into business and started iXora, I was immediately interested.
With Planet Internet, I have been a customer and reseller of data center services for many years, and in the process I have experienced, through trial and error, how complex data centers operate. Although it is a multi-billion dollar business, it is one in which every dime is turned over. I always compare data centers to drinking water from the tap: everyone needs it and uses it, but every penny spent on it is a penny too much so the margins are thin.
Data center owners hate risks and opaque investments. This is precisely why I find iXora so interesting: it is the only party in the world that enables immersion cooling in the existing infrastructure of a data center.
In a billion-dollar market, of course, there are plenty of competitors, but they either only cool the chip, leaving the rest of the motherboard to give off heat and fans remain necessary, or their solutions require the installation of entire jacuzzis into which the servers are submerged.
But I know from experience that data center owners have a huge aversion to this kind of geekiness, because there is a chance of leaking fluids into their data centers where miles of cables run under the raised floors. And no one wants to use robotic arms to hoist a server out of such a bathtub, which is necessary just to replace a simple hard drive.
iXora's solution is deliberately designed for easy installation and maintenance. Nothing robotic arm or bathtub: an iXora chassis fits into the globally common 19-inch rack, and anyone who can lift a computer can slide a server into an iXora HRM.
The team knows the customer
That simplicity in the solution is rooted in the experience of the iXora team, which has literally and figuratively grown up in data centers. Besides inventor Vincent Houwert, who previously founded hosting company True, iXora's founders are CEO Job Witteman, previously founder and 17-year CEO of the Amsterdam Internet Exchange AMS-IX, and CCO Vincent Beek, who has decades of commercial experience in the international technology world. And Erwin Bleeker joined iXora in February as Compute Specialist after spending a few years at Dell explaining how a data center works ;-).
iXora webinar Thursday, June 20
More information about the opportunity to participate in iXora is in this two-page summary. Investing is possible from as little as €5,000 and depending on your contribution there is a bonus of up to 30%. If you want to know more about iXora, I recommend watching the webinar next Thursday, July 20 at 8 p.m. in which CEO Job Witteman explains what iXora does with immersion cooling. why it is important for the world and how you can contribute to .
I write a lot about AI because it is the market in which the most progress is currently being made, with the largest potential market, which is virtually every earthling. At the same time, I worry about how AI will make it possible to manipulate all forms of sight and sound.
As you may know, I have a great love for photography, a passion that unfortunately comes with a commensurate lack of talent. My former colleague Alexander Sporre with whom I worked at business site 925, though, is a talented photographer. But Alexander is also a talented entrepreneur, and he and a number of partners have jumped into a big hole in the market with Unveil.
I believe in Unveil's proposition, in the explosion of AI-generated photos, to act as a beacon and marketplace of originality and authenticity.
What makes Unveil unique?
The developments in the field of AI are so rapid that there is a huge need worldwide for an independent party to guarantee the authenticity of digital work. Without such an independent party as Unveil, it is already no longer possible to tell whether a photo is real, or generated with AI.
Third generation marketplace
I see Unveil as a third-generation marketplace. In the first form, marketplaces were generic, think Marktplaats in the Netherlands and Craigslist in America, with a large unfiltered supply. (Both, by the way, bought by eBay for hundreds of millions.) The second generation marketplaces were a curated part of a large generic offering, think Uber Black and Airbnb Plus, or the Dutch Catawiki, effectively a curated version of eBay.
In the latest generation of marketplaces, of which Unveil is a forerunner, you will only see a carefully curated, high-level offering with a select small group of providers, who are often exclusively affiliated with a platform. Unveil has already attracted over 1,500 photographers, including a large number of top international photographers such as Bastiaan Woudt and Paul Cupido.
Global market, always traceable
Unveil connects digital art with physical prints on the blockchain, making art photography traceable as a globally tradable product, with the goal of providing royalties to the creator on the one hand and guaranteeing to the collector that the work purchased is authentic, with guarantees about the number produced. This solves a huge problem worldwide.
Proven business model: marketplace
From a financial perspective, it is crucial that the business model of a marketplace is proven and highly profitable, especially in this market, based on a 12.5% commission. Such a solid commission combined with the prices that renowned photographers receive for their work offers very good prospects for Unveil.
The team
Besides Chief Product Officer Alexander Sporre (ex-Richemont, co-founder Stories, art photographer), Unveil's founders are also Chief Commercial Officer Titus de Jong (ex-Salesforce, ex-HP) and Chief Creative Officer Julian Mollema (award winning designer, Ex-Build in Amsterdam). All entrepreneurs with a solid track record in their respective fields. Crucially, there is also a lot of interest in Unveil from the art world. For example, the Head of Photography at Sotheby's EMEA has joined Unveil's Advisory Board.
Participating in Unveil
More information about the opportunity to invest in Unveil is in this two-page summary. If you would like to learn more about Unveil, I would be happy to put you in touch with the founders.
Spotlight 9: Judge finds XRP is, oh no it's not, an investment
Every week in this column, I go over the highs and lows of the most important assets in technology. Never before has the financial world been so dominated by crypto news as it was Thursday, when an early global happy hour erupted in the cryptoscene following a U.S. judge's incomprehensible ruling in the case brought by the SEC against Ripple Labs.
Imagine if XRP had won the case outright....
The judge ruled that Ripple Labs' sale of the XRP cryptocurrency to institutional investors violated securities laws. But, the judge said, there was nothing illegal about the sale of XRP by Ripple Labs to individual traders on crypto exchanges. As if professional investors need information, transparency and protection but consumers don't?
This schizophrenic statement was not understood outside the crypto world. "Securities laws are designed specifically to protect individual investors, based on the idea that they cannot stand up for themselves," James Carlson, an adjunct professor of securities regulation at New York University, told The Information. "Large institutional investors don't need the protection of securities laws. This ruling effectively turns that philosophy on its head," Carlson said.
"Securities laws are designed specifically to protect individual investors, based on the idea that they cannot advocate for themselves. Large institutional investors don't need the protection of securities laws. This ruling effectively turns that philosophy on its head."
James Carlson, New York University
Chance of 'boiler room' fraud
The implications of this part of the ruling are troubling. As Carlson said, "The potential for 'bucket shop' or 'boiler room' fraud is alarming." Think of the Wolf of Wall Street in a black crypto t-shirt. Carlson outlined a scenario in which a crypto company issues tokens to large institutional investors, who are given detailed information required by securities laws, but then resells them through crypto exchanges to individual traders, who are not given this information. The decision is likely to be appealed, so this may not be the end of the story.
XRP rose nearly 80% within a day, gave back some of the gains over the weekend but still rose nearly 50% in the last week.
It had been coming for a while: Elon Musk has entered the AI battlefield with x.AI and has become CEO of his third company, in addition to Tesla and SpaceX, Musk's space company that was valued at a whopping $150 billion in a private sale last week. The man may have driven on a few blocks past the "eccentric" exit, but it's still mind-boggling how he combines it all. The goal of x.AI is "to understand the true nature of the universe." Musk talked more on Twitter about the goals and possible collaboration with Tesla, shared few details. To be continued, no doubt.
That doesn't head nicely, but with Code Interpreter, ChatGPT can analyze data, create graphs, solve math problems and edit files, among other things. It also supports file uploading and downloading, which previously was not possible in ChatGPT. Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, author of an excellent newsletter by the way, says Code Interpreter can do things he used to spend an unimaginable amount of time on.
I did a little test by downloading a .csv file of XRP price data on Friday and asking Code Interpreter to display the key information from it in a graph. I found the result amazing, especially since Chat GPT is text-based and until recently the output was also limited to text. So not anymore because Code Interpreter spit out three relevant graphs within seconds!
Code Interpreter from ChatGPT generated these graphs from a .csv file I had uploaded. Saves a lot of time and effort!
Anthropic, which raised just under half a billion dollars from investors in May, launched a new version of their Chat GPT competitor Claude.ai. Decrypt makes a good comparison between Claude.AI, ChatGPT and Google Bard. Officially, Claude is only available in the US and UK, but with a good VPN it works fine. I'd love to hear who experiences major differences between ChatGPT and Claude, personally I see little difference in quality.
My favorite guru Gary Vaynerchuk doesn't think Threads is a Twitter-killer either, but points out that it could attract a new audience. Just try it, he advises. For now, my feed on Threads is still filled with second-hand posts from Instagram.
In 2014, I got to know Taco Carlier of VanMoof when we spent a week together walking around SXSW. Apart from being an incredibly nice guy with whom I have a pleasant contact to this day, I find the news about a possible bankruptcy of VanMoof very sad because the company was the big booster of the e-bike as a replacement for the car.
In my experience, integration of all components into a hardware product is extremely complex, Taco and I talked about that several times. He mentioned Tesla as an example of almost complete vertical integration. But crucially, what do you do at the moment when a product continuously fails and you experience quality problems to such an extent that customers become dissatisfied and the service department is overwhelmed. I won't bore you with stories from the old box about the woes called ISDN that I had to contend with, in the transition era between modems and broadband, but sometimes you have to dare to kill a product to survive as a company. Hopefully Vanmoof will survive the current malaise.
In other electric transport news, it was noticed that Lee Soo Man, founder of Korean K-pop institution SM Entertainment, invested $23 million with partners in passenger transport via drones. The EH216 can carry two passengers and flies without a pilot, leading to extraordinary videos. Just too bad about that bombastic music, therefore here, from SM Entertainment's stable, Red Velvet with Future, theme song from the popular Korean series Start-Up - yes, about Internet startups.
The high-quality sports site The Athletic (acquired last year by the New York Times, which last week dissolved its entire sports editorial staff) produced a nice long read about Lionel Messi's transfer to Miami, made possible by Apple. It remains extraordinary that Messi is the only player to benefit from the growth of subscribers to Apple TV+'s MLS subscription. The question looms as to when Apple will move more seriously into sports entertainment and move to acquire more sports rights, such as the Premier League, the NFL and the Olympics. And whether there will be more athletes then who will directly share in subscriptions to streaming services, separate of their clubs or leagues.
I want to reiterate that investing in startups carries the very highest form of risk. However, I did want to share my considerations for investing in iXora and Unveil. But simply put, my advice is: always do it only with money you can afford to lose and only in companies whose mission you support, then you will enjoy it the most. Profits remain uncertain.
I can't resist playing with MidJourney. This image is a combination of a photo I had uploaded, with an image generated by MidJourney.Result of the prompt in MidJourney to put an iXora HRM in a room like the final scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Looks more like a Transformer on steroids.
