A different point of view on Comcast / Disney / 21st Century Fox outcomes

Dan Primack (Axios Pro Rata) gives an alternative view on Comcast/Disney/Fox:


Unconventional wisdom: It may be time for Brian Roberts and Bob Iger to put their animosity and egos aside, and at least consider a Comcast-Disney merger. It would largely solve each company's primary problem (content for Comcast, distribution for Disney) and the added firepower could let them overpay for Sky without also overpaying for Fox (thus guaranteeing Comcast much of the international distribution it craves). It's not a perfectly elegant solution, particularly since ABC would probably have to be carved out. But, as things currently stand, the only person who knows he'll be smiling at the end is Rupert Murdoch.



https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-pro-rata-a94f3b40-b748-4864-9249-
bf09e37c39eb.html

Comcast is fighting hard to remain a top-tier media/telecom firm, but Primack suggests it
may not have enough financial weight to maintain that status during the ongoing consolidation.

Sunday Morning Tech Fix 10/11/2015: Bubble Up? GE IoT & software moves

Tom Paine

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(Where I somehow try to answer questions I haven't been able to answer the rest of the week, at a time when I'm least capable of doing so.)

I'll be periodically posting updates on the so-called 'bubble scare' of 2015, trying to emphasize facts rather than gossip, mostly as it concerns private equity and private tech companies.

As always in a hot market, there are people who want to keep talking it up, and others who want to talk it down to cool off values a bit. And some (few) are straight shooters.

Fortune's Dan Primack, on his visit to Silicon Valley last week, said of the investment class there, speaking primaarily of unicorns (private startups valued at $1 billion or more), "As in the past, they are nearly unanimous in sentiment. The difference now is that their sentiment is fear."

Mattermark's (an emerging business information and research company) Danielle Morrill gets specific and names some unicorns that might be in trouble, including the FanDuel/DraftKings duo that have been spending huge amounts to batter each other's brains out. Some suggest that merging the two is the only solution.

Boston or Wilmington-based SevOne, which has very legitimate value, announced it had closed its latest round at $50 million (the Form D filed before the close indicated up to $60 million) and failed to indicate clearly to anyone whether it had reached unicorn status, which it was on the brink of. Which is probably just as well, since the attention that brings you may be more negative than positive now.

Of course, all of this is unicorn talk, and Philadelphia is neither Silicon Valley or New York. So I will try to focus future installmments on somewhat more micro indicators most of us need to know about.

I'm still trying to decipher all the moving parts involved in GE's enormous announcents about both its Internet of Things platform and its Predix software venture. Such as what it means for PTC's ThingWorx, which has a big role to play at least in IoT (not sure about Predix), and what it means for ERP players and the software industry in general. I think ThingWorx has to be fairly quiet, following the interests of GE and its own corporate parent.

I also noticed that ThingWorx had a presence at AWS re:Invent 2015, where it was a sponsor, though it wasn't prominently mentioned in AWS' releaeses about its new IoT platform, which was built upon the acqusition of anoter IoT platform vendor. But GE says it outsources much of its processing to AWS.


Also, waiting for some clarifcaion on Quentin Clark's new role at SAP. On SAP's website for at least the past few days, he has been listed as Chief Business Officer, rather than CTO (his prior position) though no trace of an external announcement has been found. SAP did post about two other significant appointments last week.

Boston's tech identity issue versus Philly's

Tom Paine

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So you think its just Philadelphia that has a tech industry inferiority complex?

Dan Pimack / Fortune TermSheet

Well, then read this article, What's really wrong with Boston tech? by Fortune's Boston-based Dan Primack (a Haverford College grad no less), who covers the PE business globally, on Boston's somewhat diminished national status in the tech world, although they are still much bigger than us (according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers & the National Venture Capital Association based on Thomson Reuters data for 2013, New England ventures raised $3.3 billion versus $420 million for Philadelphia Metro). Although Primack notes a recovery from the meltdown of the old Route 128 minicomputer era, and a much more engaged and vibrant urban tech scene, he still wonders where the next big things are coming from.

As he sees it, some of the problem can be attributed to the lack of tech media based in Boston, although he notes the exceptions of a couple of Boston websites and one or two
people assigned to the beat from national tech blogs. While Silicon Valley is covered
to the hilt, on the east coast he perceives a New York media bias of sorts, in that since
so many media organizations are based New York, more reporters are based there and tend to hype up the next hot New York startup, which in a virtuous or vicious circle of sorts creates a stonger ecosystem for the New York tech scene. (That is my rough interpretation of his words, not his).

Of course Philly has, in addition to its local outlets (with due credit to Technically Philly), several well known tech reporters from national websites based around the area, though most are not here specifically to cover the Philly scene. In some cases, they only
live in the area due to its proximity to New York - at least that's my impression.

My point of view is that while a strong local tech media is important, it is also important that it is independent and objective in its coverage, rather than engaging in boosterism.

If you've got good stuff, you don't need to overhype it.