Marques Brownlee tested the Apple Vision Pro and has a nuanced conclusion
Innovation is rarely valued by investors, many of whom live with a 24 hour horizon. Apple introduced a revolutionary new form of computing this week with the Apple Vision Pro and lost $70 billion in stock market value. Amazon sold a lot of stuff in the fourth quarter (gosh) and Meta attracted a lot of advertisers and announced dividends; little innovative, but together they gained $270 billion in market cap. Maybe nice for investors, but totally uninteresting for fans of innovation.
Whirlwind tech week on Wall Street
It was another tumultuous week for Tesla, as growth stalls and hassles surround Elon Musk's compensation. It even led Tesla's lawyer to burst into tears, so unfair did the darling think it was that the court intended to force a $56 billion bonus through Musk's nose.
The funny thing is that, according to the judge, the teardown showed precisely that Musk is not surrounded by independents at Tesla who also have the best interests of the company and other shareholders at heart. It is not known whether Musk himself shed a tear over missing out on his $56 billion thirteenth month.
Furthermore, it was another special week on Wall Street for tech companies. Shares of Amazon and Meta jumped, while Apple, on the other hand, paid a hefty price for continued uncertainty over access to the Chinese market.
Google sold fewer ads than hoped and investors were shocked by Google's investments in AI, as servers for AI applications are screamingly expensive to buy and use. On the other hand, Google's AI assistant, Bard, is now making great strides against rival OpenAI's ChatGPT. But that apparently did not interest investors, who are focused on the short term.
Apologies from Zuckerberg to parents who lost their children on Wednesday and 20% rise in Meta shares on Thursday
Memorable week for Zuckerberg
Meta's Mark Zuckerberg experienced a bizarre week. On Wednesday, he testified with CEOs of other social media companies in the U.S. Congress and apologized for the horrific things that happened to children on his social media networks. Parents of children who committed suicide after the misery happened to them were not impressed.
Zuckerberg has a long history of apologizing for all the out-of-control incidents on his networks. I hold out hope that one day a bell will ring with him that a company can have more goals than just linking addictive algorithms to click-hungry advertisers.
Does such an embarrassing display in Congress matter to investors? No, because the next day Meta announced a 25% increase in profits, with a promise to pay dividends from now on, and so Meta could add $196 billion to its stock market value. Zuckerberg himself, who owns about $350 million in shares in Meta, will receive an additional $175 million in dividends and will be able to earn an additional $700 million annually.
In tech stocks, choosing based on size (in market value) is often not the best investment
SMCI stock is super, though, not micro
While Meta and Amazon attracted most of the attention, it almost went unnoticed that the engine behind all AI developments, chipmaker Nvidia, has nearly overtaken Amazon and Alphabet in market value. Almost silently, Nvidia has already risen as much this year as Meta, so beloved by investors this week: 37%. But Nvidia did so without putting minor customers over the top.
There's another fascinating stock from a much lesser-known chipmaker: Super Micro (SMCI). Do yourself a big favor today and click on that link: surely it's enjoyment from such a website, seemingly created by the CEO's nephew during a grade 6 homework assignment?
In the chart above, Super Micro is almost invisible among the tech giants with a market value of "only" $32 billion, but the company is rapidly emerging as a mini-Nvidia.
Super Micro (SMCI) Nvidia (NVDA)
last 5 years: 3.664% 1.686%
1 year: 587% 214%
year to date: 103% 37%
Super Micro is the cheaper alternative to Nvidia and doubled sales, driven by the global hunger for chips that can handle AI applications, combined with a 71% increase in profits. As a result, SMCI shares have already risen as much as 103% this year. On the stock market, Super Micro has been winning over Nvidia for five years.
It is not possible to write cheerfully about new innovations when the world is on fire. Especially not when the world's most widespread innovation of this century, social media, is being used by terrorists and imbeciles to spread hatred and prevent peace.
What is the most important story on Meta's news page?
Historian Yuval Noah Harari aptly summed up the misery on CNN: the goal of Hamas and related clubs is simple, namely, "to assasinate any chance of peace." Spreading their atrocities through social media is a deliberate tactic in doing so. The hatred and disgust evoked by the images will eradicate any sense of compassion, let alone willingness to compromise. Exactly the intention of Hamas.
It proved virtually impossible on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Youtube last week to avoid the topics of Israel and the Gaza Strip. This seems logical at first, were it not for the fact that I was continuously served messages from all sorts of people I do not follow at all. No matter what I clicked away and pushed away, the distasteful nonsense from Gaza experts, many of whom were self-proclaimed AI experts until last week and NFT insiders last year, kept flooding my timeline.
Facebook and TikTok respond only after warnings
It took until Friday for Western governments to issue warnings. The EU ordered Meta to do something about all the disinformation being poured out over the world via Facebook and Instagram. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, understands that you have to move then, just as someone running a red light always pretends to cross as fast as possible. TikTok received a similar warning, as did YouTube.
The statement Meta issued is so saltless and heartless that it must have been written by a bad AI application. But look especially at where Meta places that statement: small in the right-hand column. The most important place on a website, big in the middle with animated visual, is still dedicated to the boring chatbots that were already announced on Sept. 27.
Next time a Facebook livestream by Hamas terrorists wearing smart Ray Bans?
Zuckerberg was able to chat with Lex Fridman in a promotional podcast about his Metaverse efforts last month, but where was he last week when terrorists broadcast child murders over his networks? Sure, it's brave for a nerd to spar with professional cage fighters, but it takes real courage to go live on CNN to talk to Christiane Amanpour about your contribution to the spread of terrorist outrages.
Meta's news page pays more attention to the new Meta Smart Ray Bans, which allow live streaming from a camera in those glasses on Facebook and Instagram, than to what Meta will do against abuse by groups like Hamas.
If Zuckerberg doesn't intervene, the wait is on for a Hamas idiot (fighter is the wrong word for someone who kidnaps a girl at a music festival) with a fashionable 'Rebel Black Headliner Ray-Ban Meta' smart glass on his head committing mass murder; because it's easier to operate your Kalashnikov when you have your hands free while going live on Insta.
The business model of social media is free popular content
It's crude, but at its core, Hamas delivers what social media loves: lots of viewed free content. Meta's business model is to sell advertising through Facebook and Instagram to people who watch content for which Meta pays nothing. That's much more lucrative than all that cumbersome stuff from Disney or Netflix, who have to create expensive content.
At its core, Meta doesn't care what that content is, as long as they don't get hassled about it by advertisers. As Zuckerberg likes to say, "move fast and break things. The world has been able to see how that works out.
The problem is not new
Once a young Internet entrepreneur said:
"We are largely similar to the phone company. We only transmit information; we don't have a say about what is transmitted. We only select a little bit: if we passed on everything on the Internet, our computers would crash. And we also rejected a discussion group that did spread child pornography very clearly. But we could only tell that from the name of that group, because it would be impossible to read everything said in it."
That young Internet entrepreneur, that was me. And I said this in newspaper Trouw in November 1995, almost 30 years ago. I was 27 at the time and I sincerely believed that the operator of a network had no business meddling in the content that people transmitted over this network.
Not long after, several of our subscribers began distributing child pornography through newsgroups devoted to innocent topics such as bird watching or stamp collecting.
We had worked for years as communications science graduates to build an Internet provider that would provide Internet access to everyone in the Netherlands, allowing people to communicate and gain knowledge, but a certain group of subscribers decided to spread the worst imaginable misery through our network.
Filter freedom of speech
In all civilized countries there is a limit to freedom of speech somewhere. I didn't know then and I don't know now exactly where that line is, but we all know when it is crossed by miles.
We actively reported our own child pornography distributing subscribers to the vice police, which led to several criminal cases. It was the darkest period of my time as an entrepreneur and they were the worst things I have ever seen. I was deeply impressed by the commitment and professionalism the police showed in these cases. The detectives always looked immediately to see if the images were already known, so that hopefully there were no new victims. Fortunately, this was true in all cases.
With pain in our hearts, we closed access to many newsgroups, thus limiting both subscribers' access to information and their ability to disseminate information. The good people suffered from the bad people, because 99% of the messages could be classified as normal communications.
Therefore, I can well understand that Mark Zuckerberg and other entrepreneurs and executives who have worked hard to build their networks find it difficult to now have to limit and control what they have built. But global reach and influence comes with commensurate responsibility, to which Zuckerberg in particular seems blind.
No new glasses, but working filters
Meta, X, TikTok and YouTube should now not focus at all on developing technology that will make it even easier for everyone to distribute even more content, such as via an avatar in the Metaverse or with smart glasses with built-in cameras; the focus should be on regulating which users broadcast what content over their networks and who has access to viewing that content.
The same kind of algorithms that YouTube and Facebook use to see what content is going viral and promote it faster can also be used to estimate what content needs to be looked at more closely for objectionable substance. Good use of the lightning-fast developments in AI and text and image recognition should be able to limit spread of much misery.
Meta's market cap is over $800 billion and the company makes tens of billions in profits. That's more than enough budget to build functioning systems. The same is true for YouTube and TikTok, while the ailing X is surely able to get a loan from its owner Elon Musk.
Over the past week, children around the world have seen images on Instagram and TikTok that no one should ever see. Preventing that misery is what Zuckerberg, Musk and the other chiefs of social media should focus on.
Four years ago, Zuckerberg had a long conversation with Yuval Noah Harari. It would be good for them to talk again now. The value of democracy is at stake.If America (Meta, YouTube, X) has moral superiority over China (TikTok), now is the time to prove it.
Threads, the intended Twitter-killer from Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, is out and I spent all of Saturday morning trying to figure out what's special about it. The answer is: nothing. With virtually unlimited resources, Mark Zuckerberg has managed to develop an extremely limited product.
Investor Fred Wilson rightly notes the importance of Twitter getting competition, and that it is positive that Threads has announced that it will support the open source protocol ActivityPub. That would mean that if a Threads user leaves Threads, it would be fairly easy to switch to another server that also supports ActivityPub, such as Mastodon - or hopefully another, more user-friendly variant than that app, which they would have been better off calling Masochist.
So in theory, a Threads user has "account portability" and is not forever stuck in the endlessly branched rabbit holes that Zuckerberg is trying to dig from Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Threads. Only ... there is no support at all for ActivityPub in Threads yet. That's like a car manufacturer proudly announcing at the introduction of a new car that safety is paramount, but brakes won't be installed until the next model.
How fun, good or useful is Threads?
To use Threads, you must have an Instagram account. Yet every Threads user gets a number under their Instagram account with a link to the Threads account. Why? You already have a name for your Instagram account, so why do you get a number on Threads? (Leaving aside the fact that for people with any sense of history, the ostentatious display of a personal registration number evokes unpleasant associations.)
Zuckerberg likes to make human products, according to user eighty million four hundred and forty-four thousand two hundred and forty-nine
Of course, there is only one reason for this and that is that Zuckerberg wants to shout from the rooftops that you are not alone on Threads, that there are over 80 million people who have already created an account. When I created an Instagram account a week after Instagram launched in October 2010, I was already happy to see a few cute pictures made by other people. It took almost three months for Instagram to grow to one million users. For that time, that was tremendously fast.
Threads, through the roughly two billion Instagrammers, is going to get hundreds of millions of users very quickly who, like me, are going to take a look at what it is and how it works. But the question is how often and how intensively Threads will be used. The reason I am hardly active on Twitter anymore is the bickering of predictable people. Under the reign of Elon Musk, that trend only seems to be encouraged, and that leaves room for Meta to launch Threads successfully.
So, what is the experience of spending a morning on Threads?
Although I have already accepted my followers on Instagram, I have to do this again on Threads and then one by one. My Instagram account has been on 'open' for a while now and anyone who would like can follow me. But on Threads I have to scroll and tap my way through a blood blister because the application is only available as an app on your phone, and I even have to confirm that my own brother is allowed to follow me. Although we have confirmed each other as brothers on Facebook.
So what is the point of the Instagram link and the fact that Threads is part of the Meta Empire? As a user, I get little benefit from it. The integration of all data within Meta is solely to feed Meta's ad engine with additional data about users, not for better usability for average brothers.
There is no chronological timeline so I can get a "live" sense of what people are talking about, which is precisely Twitter's strength. On all of these crucial aspects of a good user experience, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri, also responsible for Threads, says it is being worked on. By the way, he says that on Twitter, not on Threads.
I haven't noticed it myself, but it's been widely complained that Threads posts in your timeline from accounts you don't follow at all. It could be that these misery 'feature' will first be tested in the U.S. before being unleashed on the world. Of course, Meta is trying to use this to keep the user hooked for longer in a way copied from TikTok.
Most of the posts in my timeline on Threads consist of photos. Often the same photos that the account owner has previously posted on Instagram, and since I have added everyone I follow on Instagram on Threads as well, I feel like I am watching a repeat. Not a pleasant experience.
Threads is currently a muddled product in which text and images are mixed in an unnatural way. This is to be expected since the vast majority of users come via Instagram, which is not a conversation or discussion platform like Twitter was in its best days.
Unlike Instagram, where filters can be laid over photos that smooth out wrinkles so well that even miss Piggy can look like Jessica Rabbit, there are no filters that make text messages on Twitter or Threads smarter or more fun. So it quickly becomes chatter or complaining.
The upside for Meta is that Instagram has a huge installed base and hundreds of millions of people will try Threads. The downside is that turning image-sensitive Instagram users into text-producing Threads people will be about as natural as making a shot putter run.
For now, Threads will not be a threat to Twitter in terms of usage, audience and form of communication. The number of accounts will be huge, but usage relatively infrequent. It simply adds too little.
The social media hierarchy in which there is no room for Threads
Threads chief Mosseri, by the way, claims that Threads' goal is not to replace Twitter, either. No, the noble goal, according to Mosseri, is to "create a public square for communities on Instagram that have never embraced Twitter and for communities on Twitter and other platforms that are interested in a less angry place for conversations but not all of Twitter.
Apologies, there I am again, I was away for a while; I was sitting barefoot with self-picked buttercups in my hair, connecting with the earth, while already tree-hugging, reciting a sonnet to the universe. That is how much I liked this description of "a public square" on Threads.
but... 'the average price per ad decreased by 16% year-over-year'
And there we are at the core. Because the total number of users of Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram is still growing only a few percent per year, and revenue per ad is falling many times more sharply.
With Threads, Zuckerberg has two goals: first, to create a new platform through which to sell more ad space, even though the estimated revenue of, say, Twitter this year at $3 billion is a decimal rounding for Meta. No doubt Zuckerberg thinks he can get a much higher revenue per user on Threads, than Musk does on Twitter. Advertisers are not eager to advertise next to a discussions about politics. It just doesn't sell well.
But with the wealth of new data that large scale use of Threads could provide about its users, Zuckerberg hopes to make his real move and charge higher ad rates; because with the heightened privacy requirements that Meta is facing, especially in Europe, unscrupulous selling of user privacy as in Meta's current business model is becoming increasingly difficult.
This is also the same reason why Zuckerberg is trying to pressure the EU to adjust the regulations for Meta. And one way he is doing that is by not yet releasing Threads in EU countries, referring to the "unclear regulations on the use of data across multiple platforms.' Because that's what Zuckerberg is all about; he wants to fill each user's social and interest graph as richly as possible for his advertisers. But Europeans can rest assured: you really aren't missing anything from Threads.
Threads doesn't want discussions about news, because advertisers don't like that, so here is our puppy Nala.
$40 billion in the bank and Zuck makes the AliExpress version of Twitter
It's intensely sad. Zuckerberg still has nearly 80,000 employees after all the rounds of layoffs, including an army of talented programmers. Combine that talent with that $40 billion in the bank and there are every opportunity to develop a new, beautiful product. But what is the result of its first self-developed product in nearly two decades?
No more than a slapdash version of Twitter, which in itself is a waste of Elon Musk's talents. I still hope for once that man gets angry about Alzheimer's, cancer and mental health of humanity and uses his talents to solve those problems, for example with a biotech company. Musk has mastered development of software, hardware and mechanical innovations, how difficult would biotech be for him? That would be really fascinating to follow.
Zuckerberg stable borrowed the idea for Facebook from his friends co-founders, bought Instagram for $1 billion, Oculus for $2 billion and Whatsapp for $19 billion. Nice detail: Ukrainian Jan Koum, founder of Whatsapp, who emigrated to the U.S. at the age of 16, signed that sales deal from which he himself made just under $7 billion, for the office where he once got his food stamps received.
Zuckerberg has grown from a creative programmer to an experienced CEO. Only not from a technology company that develops its own valuable solutions, but from a private equity fund that copies or buys other people's ideas. Then all the talent from the acquired companies leaves, though that voluntary departure cost Whatsapp's Brian Acton no less than $850 million. Surely Zuckerberg must ask himself at times why such talent is so eager to leave Meta?
Instagram Stories was a total imitation of Snapchat but at least it worked fine. Threads, on the other hand, looks like a loveless, hastily made product. I hold out hope that one day Zuckerberg will rediscover himself as the leader of a team of talented developers and develop a beautiful, meaningful, original product. Threads is certainly not that; it is currently the AliExpress version of Twitter.
Talented YouTubers push boundaries
Speaking of meaningful, original products, two of my favorite YouTubers, Cleo Abram and Marques Brownlee, visited ZeroSpace in New York, a cross between a laboratory and a studio where the most extraordinary special effects are created where real and fake cannot be distinguished. What I found most extraordinary was the technique where up to six scenes can be shot simultaneously with different camera images(at 6 minute 11).
Cleo and Marques discuss a sensitive issue after Marques takes the guise of Cleo: what happens when every actor can be simulated by a computer and soon you won't know whether you are watching a real scene with fantastic acting, or a complete simulation? Will the Oscar for best actress soon go not to Meryl Streep, as it should, but to the programmer who generates the digital Meryl Streep from bits, pixels and audio clips?
Cleo's report is here and this is Marques' report. The wait is for a full movie with fake actors in a fake environment, but hopefully one with a good script because they remain difficult to write, even with AI.
Also check out this tour of Marques' $1 million studio, in which each room is set up to solve a specific video-making problem. If you have the idea that YouTubers are still making videos with a cap on backwards in their parents' attic in pajamas, be sure to check out the quarter-million-dollar robotic arm for making quick camera movements.
Midjourney update is impressive
Crunchbase summed up the bizarre first six months in terms of funding for AI companies well.Despite the billions invested in AI, the total amount invested in technology companies dropped a whopping 51% compared to 2022.
With the investment money in AI companies, extraordinary achievements are being made. Two weeks back, I wrote briefly about Photoshop's amazing "generative fill," which uses AI to add complete sections of an image in a way that is indistinguishable from the real thing.
Manu.Vision created this phenomenal combination of art and technology
As if Midjourney were not already stunning enough, that company has released an incredibly good "Zoom Out" update that enables such extraordinary images that designer Kalson Kalu has compiled a brilliant top 10 of them. This top 10 is also impressive. Here's a detailed description of how the Midjourney v5.2 update works and what else we can expect in the near future.
All Sequoia companies are working on AI
Investment firm Sequoia (Apple, Atari, Google, Instagram, Whatsapp etc) asked 33 of the portfolio companies about their developments in AI. The findings are very worth reading. As many as 65% of the companies have AI applications in production and 94% use a "foundation model API" such as Chat GPT from OpenAI to do so.
Character.ai's chatbots even lead to adventure games
Bloomberg came out Friday with this excellent article about character.ai, the maker of chatbots that was recently valued at $1 billion but whose usefulness escapes me for now. It doesn't help when the CEO then blurts out texts like "I joke that we're not going to replace Google. We're going to replace your mother".
The founders are AI experts who did very clever things at Google, so I still struck up conversations with various characters on character.ai including Einstein, a banana and Darth Vader. Copyright and other intellectual property infringement aside, one psychologist already pointed out the danger of allowing any willful leip with lots of free time to pose as a psychologist, like this chatbot.
Things got surprisingly funny after all when I struck up a conversation with SM64 Mario, the chatbot based on the Nintendo 64 Super Mario. The creator of this bot does more than chat, he asks you along on an adventure.
In my case, Super Mario said, 'help me save Princess Peach, defeat Bowser, and bring Peach back safely to her castle. We will also visit many different worlds, each with their own unique challenge.' Then the text appeared: Mario walks over to a painting, and enters the painting portal, inviting Michiel to come with him.
This implementation of a chatbot reminded me of a textual adventure, like the first MUDs thirty years ago when I was just getting into the Internet. Try it for yourself, Super Mario is waiting for you here.
Spotlight 9: Nvidia holds its own
After my longer analysis last week on the first half of what can be called a jubilant year so far for tech stocks, in crypto equally, this week was downright soporific. Everyone knows by now that Apple is worth $3 trillion and it seems like investors are banking on that exact market value.
It was a soporific week of technology trade shows
Yet the old adage "sell in May and go away, but remember to come back in September" does not hold true for the "chipmaker for the AI stars": Nvidia. Over the past month, NVDA shares rose more than 10% and its market value has increased to more than $1 trillion, to be precise, to $1,050 billion.
Right now, Amazon ($1.3 trillion) and Alphabet (Google's parent company, $1.5 trillion) are still worth a few hundred billion more than Nvidia, but if things continue like this, Nvidia could end the year as the third most valuable technology company in the world, behind Apple and Microsoft. No one could have foreseen that at the beginning of the year.
It probably hasn't escaped your notice that there is a lot going on right now at the intersection of technology, economics and innovation. With the fall of Silicon Valley Bank, my favorite bank where I was once a customer, being the recent low point. But precisely because there are many great things going unexposed, I started a weekly newsletter about what has caught my eye in the tech world. Below is the content of the first newsletter, dated April 10, 2023.
Silicon Valley Bank was my favorite bank What kind of banks are Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic? There has been much media coverage of Silicon Valley Bank's pike dive, with its counterpart, First Republic Bank, often mentioned in the same breath. But there are fundamental differences between these San Francisco Bay Area banks. Early this century, I was a very satisfied Silicon Valley Bank customer with a startup that later failed ingloriously. As soon as you were accepted as a client at a good law firm in San Francisco, the lawyer would normally grab the phone and call his relationship at Silicon Valley Bank. That's how we ended up in a far too small cubicle opposite a jovial account manager at Silicon Valley Bank the very same day our firm was founded. The work instruction there was clear: "any customer can be the next Apple or Microsoft, so even though 98% of companies don't survive the first five years, treat your customers as if they were that successful 2%. Every Dutch bank could learn from the way Silicon Valley Bank treated customers. SVB's failure also has nothing to do with creative accounting or strange products as in the banking crisis, but with treasury management failures and rising interest rates. In short: watching one's own pennies carefully. Already it appears that Silicon Valley Bank is being missed, for example in financing climate tech companies, the very startups needed to combat climate change.
First Republic does something very different First Republic Bank, on the other hand, excels at lending money to founders and C-level management of successful startups. So not in lending money to startups, as Silicon Valley Bank did. People like Mark Zuckerberg were offered particularly low mortgages, for example. Why does a billionaire need a $6 million mortgage? Founders of successful companies prefer to hold on to all their shares as long as possible, as long as the prices are rising. So they borrow money from banks with shares in their own companies as collateral. For example, there is still a persistent rumor in Silicon Valley that Zuckerberg even borrowed a few billion, yes, billion, from First Republic, in part to finance his own charitable foundation. Rather pay a percent interest than sell shares that, until last year, rose many times faster than interest.
Spotlight: iXora immersion cooling
I often get asked which Dutch startups are interesting. That the driving solar car Lightyear received so much media attention made sense, because everyone understands what cars are and where the sun is, but there were two reasons why few professional investors believed in a solar-powered car.
First of all, it costs not millions but billions to set up a car company, let alone on a new energy source, see Tesla. No investor in the Netherlands puts the roulette ball on red or black at that kind of sum. Perhaps more importantly, a regular sized car cannot carry enough solar panels to provide enough propulsion, range and some geeky extras like headlights and brake lights with the current generation of solar panels. I like to be surprised but don't see Lightyear doing well.
Cooling is cool One startup that did successfully develop a relevant product for a huge market is Ede-based iXora. The company led by CEO Job Witteman (founder and for years CEO of the Amsterdam Internet Exchange AMS-IX, I know him from his time before that at British Telecom) has developed a solution where data centers can save a lot of space and energy. iXora's liquid cooling technology eliminates the need for space- and energy-consuming air cooling (fans). Warren Buffett's company Lubrizol bought a worldwide license and it would not surprise me if iXora reaches unicorn status within three years (cliché alert!), or becomes worth more than a billion Euros. Because energy consumption of data centers must be reduced and it is in their best interest to cut costs and reduce CO2 emissions. iXora's solution is as simple as it is effective and can easily be fitted into standard data centers, which is why it seems logical that the company will eventually be acquired by a party such as Dell, for example, in order to be able to offer an iXora chassis to all its data center customers, as an extra box to check on the order form. Similar to how EMC once acquired VMWare and even took it public a few years later. A startup on its own could never reach that global customer base so quickly.
Friends & family investment round iXora is currently holding an investment round and from 5,000 Euro you can participate. I'm not giving advice, but my maxim is that you should think of an investment in a startup as money that you are definitely losing now and that very possibly one day will come back - but hopefully a bit more than you put in. I do like this kind of low-stakes opportunity, usually the minimum entry point is many times higher. Note that this is not investment advice and you are investing outside AFM supervision, there is no licensing and prospectus requirement. And the founders of iXora are friends of mine, so I am far from neutral in this.
The iXora HRM chassis can house multiple servers. HRM, by the way, does not stand for good old Personnel in a new guise, but for Hypotherm Rack Mount. It is so named because these liquid-cooled cabinets fit into standard 19″ racks common worldwide. This allows data centers to quickly fit them into their infrastructure, unlike competitors' open tanks full of liquid.
Good event calendar
Where are the events and conventions you absolutely must attend? That always remains tricky and I have felt at many a congress that I had ended up at the wrong party. That is why the event calendar of Luna PR from Dubai is so handy, it lists all the important congresses, parties and meetings in the field of crypto and Web 3. The sisters Nikita (CEO, right) and Nisheta (COO, left) Sachdev usually know where it is happening.
Finally, a look at the major share prices in tech. Google is the winner of the week with 7.5% rise. Viewed from the beginning of this year, we don't yet have to tip our hat to Mark Zuckerberg, who just last year lost $30 billion in assets in one day, because his Meta is now up 76% after the annus horribilis 2022. And you don't hear much about it, but those who bought Bitcoin and Ethereum on Jan. 1 would also have experienced 69% and 56% increases by now:
Next Week Among other things: why the U.S. government's lawsuit against Binance is important for the future of crypto as part of the mainstream economy. I wrote about the ongoing problems at Binance exactly a year ago. And spotlight on Unveil, an Amsterdam-based startup focused on the intersection of two huge markets: the art world and the market for NFTs.
Facebook, sorry, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced yesterday that in the coming months it will become possible to mine and trade NFTs on Instagram. It is an attempt by Zuckerberg to stay relevant to young people and appease the stock markets, dwarfed by TikTok on the one hand and, on the other, the huge market value of NFT marketplaces like OpenSea.
Engadget reports this about the session with Zuckerberg at the leading festival SXSW:
"We're working on bringing NFTs to Instagram in the near term," he said. He didn't detail exactly how that would take shape, but suggested people would be able to show off their existing NFTs and potentially mint new ones. "I'm not ready to kind of announce exactly what that's going to be today. But over the next several months, the ability to bring some of your NFTs in, hopefully over time be able to mint things within that environment."
It was never a poet.
SXSW has increasingly changed from the springboard where revolutionary tech talents take the axe to the carrot of ruling powers such as the Facebook empire, into a kind of bar-dancing where mom and dad also have a dance after Friday afternoon bingo. That can be a lot of fun, and Uncle Frackers himself has organized regular dings during SXSW. But it was no coincidence that the session with Zuckerberg, who likes to present himself as a great technological visionary, was also open to convention attendees with a film and music badge, with the recommended knowledge level: "beginner.
Level: Beginner
Meta's biggest money-maker was always Facebook, which has now turned into a kind of online SBS6 for people over 50. Instagram is also moving hard in that direction, while Whatsapp remains difficult to monetize. The playful vistas Zuckerberg paints about the Metaverse have already spooked investors: this year, FB (short for Meta, cough) shares fell as much as 43%. That came after Meta estimated revenue figures for 2022 much lower than the market expected, primarily a result of Apple's tightened privacy measures. In short, Apple is making it harder for Meta to track and stalk you everywhere online.
With that have come some new problems for Zuckerberg. First, it is clear that his weapon in the battle for youth, Instagram, is being completely outpaced by TikTok. Every successful feature of TikTok is copied by Instagram while it itself hardly introduces any innovations that TikTok adopts. Instagram also turns out not to yield good conversions for advertisers, in other words: nice for branding like a billboard along a busy highway, but not a marketplace where people make transactions on which Zuckerberg pockets a percentage each time.
But there is a fast-growing marketplace achieving huge revenues and good margins: OpenSea, the marketplace for NFTs that was recently valued at over $13 billion. Zuckerberg has obviously followed the rise of TikTok and OpenSea closely and hopes to kill two birds with one stone with NFTs on Instagram. That desire is not surprising, as young TikTok users are largely crypto users and the primary target audience for NFTs. TikTok is a meeting place for the digital vanguard, just as OpenSea is for traders in NFTs.
Zuckerberg's announcement about NFTs on Instagram is very reminiscent of the puffed-up marketing copy he churned out about Libra. That was that crypto currency from Meta that was going to be the whole thing and died a quiet death within three years. For as unimaginably long as it seems, Libra was only announced three years ago, in 2019, and has already been buried without fanfare.
It's not to say that NFTs on Instagram are definitely going to fail, just that all the conditions for total failure are there: a poorly converting medium for transactions, an aging target audience that comes for very different things than NFTs, and stronger competitors on the chessboards where it counts: the active youth at TikTok and the NFT merchants at OpenSea. The wait is for TikTok to do something with NFTs. Perhaps in a partnership with OpenSea, the dream scenario for traders who go short on Meta.
No, the more important crypto and NFT news of the past few days was elsewhere than Meta. Singapore announced it was going to impose income tax on NFTs, very pragmatic and logical. It shows how big NFTs already are in Southeast Asia. And Consensys, maker of tools like Metamask, raised $450 million from investors. Now if Consensys would use those tokens to develop user-friendly crypto wallets, the breakthrough of crypto and NFTs to the general public is near.
