Monday Highlights: IBM earnings fail; Big Blue also considers acquiring Weather Channel's "digital assets"
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The Weather Company Is in Talks With IBM About Sale of Digital Assets (Re/code)
I'm no sure why IBM would want to buy slow-growth TWC, But I guess you nave to learn to "think different", as somebody used to say. Comcast/NBC owns about one third, along with private equity.
Possible Watson play for IBM?
Clarification: IBM just wants to buy "digital assets", which I guess means Al Roker is safe. Interestivvbng thought: such a deal might put a higher valuation on AccuWeather.
IBM Drops 4%: Q3 Rev Misses, EPS Beats; Cuts Year Profit View (Barron's Tech Trader Daily)
IBM: No plans to change despite declining sales (Fortune)
Your one-minute guide to IBM's financial future – or just imagine a skier tumbling down a slope (The Register)
Amazon's Jay Carney rips New York Times report on company culture (Fortune)
Razorfish CEO Tom Adamski Dies at 43 (Adweek)
Had also served as CEO of Rosetta.
Arris-Pace Delay ‘Not a Show Stopper’: Analyst (Multichannel News)
NewSpring Capital Leads Investment in Verisma (NewSpring Capital)
Broomall firm testing robo-adviser for launch (Philadelphia Inquirer)
Philly Tech People News 10/18: Westphal stepping down as CEO of Berywn-based Vertex
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Family firm CEO steps down, saying he's a creator, not a builder
(Philadelphia Inquirer)
Jeff Westphal said he would step down as CEO of the global tax software firm his family founded in favor of the company's executive vice president, David DeStefano. Vertex is probably the most powerful enterprise software + data firm based in the Philadelphia area that most people have never heard of.
Lars Dalgaard: Build Trust by Daring to Show That You’re Human (New York Times)
Dalgaard built and ran SuccessFactors before and after its acquisition by SAP.
Comcast’s Tony Werner Elected Chairman of SCTE Board (Multichannel News)
SCTE Staffs Up(Multichannel News)
The SCTE is based in Exton.
Marty Roberts Leaves thePlatform (Multichannel News)
PJM's CEO Transition Complete; Andrew Ott Assumes Duties Of President And CEO (PR Newswire)
Archer CEO Bryan Dori Announces Addition of CFO
–Ted Pastva, Jr. Joins Archer from GrubHub (Business Wire)
MEDECISION APPOINTS KATHLEEN D’AMARIO CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER (Medecision Website)
Sunday Morning Tech Fix 10/18/2015: Latest on FanDuel/DraftKings; Dorsey's two companies: Square files S-1 while Twitter gets boost from Ballmer
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. And sometimes don't finish on time.)
FanDuel and DraftKings, the twin purveyors of fantasy sports gambling (sorry, I know I shouldn't use that word, since it really doesn't apply) that I wrote about last week, have been getting plenty of heat since allegations came out that that a DraftKings employeee won a good deal of money using what was in effect inside information in a FanDuel competition. Both companies were ordered to stop operating in Nevada, and are likely to face increased scrutiny elsewhere.
Nevada officials cited a Reddit Q&A chat involving three DraftKings execs, quoting one of them as comparing his site to a casino and describing the concept as a mashup between poker and fantasy sports. But both DraftKings and FanDuel have insisted their sites aren't gambling and are legal under a 2006 federal law that exempted fantasy sports from an online gambling prohibition.
Comcast Ventures and, separately, NBC Sports are among the numerous investors in FanDuel.
Square, Jack Dorsey's other company (on Tuesdays and Thursdays?) filed an S-1 for an IPO, as expected. Josh Kopelman, after first offering than passing on Twitter when the terms went up on a seed stage, swore he'd never miss out on another Dorsey-led venture, so he got right in on Squere, though FRC's stake is less than 5% at this point (because it wasn't named in the filing). The jury on Square and its attractiveness as a public offering in trying to at least match its private company valuation of $6 billion in its last funding round, is still out. The company has been a cash eater to build, and though it has a sweet spot in the market it isn't quite the niche that it was originally intended for. So we will see.
Speaking of Dorsey-led ventures, the other one, Twitter, got a big boost from that famed market mover Steve Ballmer (just think of what he did for the Clippers) when he announced on Friday he had accumulated a 4% stake in the social media company over the past few months. Twitter rose 4.9% on Friday.
Critics of Comcast were quick to take note when the Electric Power Board (EPB) of Chattanooga began offering 10Gbps symmetrical Internet service for $299 per month. But Chattanooga's system has depended heavily on municipal bond salss and Federal subsidies, they are not so quick to note.
And some people look at local tech incubators as a leading indicator of the area tech industry's strength at a given point in time. And there were those who thought a shake out was inevitable. But the reasons for the closing of Brad Denenberg' Seed Philly don't necessarily indicate a trend.
Denenberg told Techical.ly Philly by email that he had below market rent in a building that had recently sold, and he had been operating under month-to-month terms under the new ownership. And they terminated the leaase. Denenberg says he has no plans at present to open a new facility.
Amazon Web Services re:Invent 2015: The year everybody realized what a monster it was; PTN reporting & analysis
Tom Paine
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The real race: Amazon Web Services vs Salesforce
Highlights from AWS re:Invent 2015-Day 1
AWS re:Invent Day 2 10/7: AWS intros Kinesis, 'Snowball'; Financial updates reveal stunning growth
AWS re:Invent Day 3: 10/8: AWS intros IoT platform; Fears of accumulating too much power
AWS re:Invent Wrap 10/9: AWS' new found relationship with Accenture; GE and Capital One endorse AWS
Amazon Web Services: Staggering numbers: dominant now, but nothing lasts forever (I think)
Saturday Highlights: Weinberg says DuckDuckGo "is profitable without tracking you"
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DuckDuckGo: We're profitable without tracking you (Fortune)
The Deals That Made Daily Fantasy Take Off (Wall Street Journal)
News Roundup: Dell-MC, drone destruction and AI concept cars (IDG Connect)
Arris-Pace Deal Hits Speed Bump (Multichannel News)
Highlights 10/16: Comcast, Maybe Apple, Aim To Get Skinny TV Right; Comcast: We'll take an incremental approach to deploying 100G
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Should Comcast Woo Unhappy AT&T DSL Subscribers? (Investor's Business Daily)
Are Verizon and AT&T ‘locking up’ the market for business Internet? The FCC will investigate. (Washington Post)
Comcast, Maybe Apple, Aim To Get Skinny TV Right (Investor's Business Daily)
Comcast: We'll take an incremental approach to deploying 100G (FierceTelecom)
NBC10 and union agree on new contract, ending camera operators' strike
(Philadelphia Inquirer)
SAP's Orca leaps from the depths early, Needled by Amazon (The Register)
Amazon makes nice (sort of) with hybrid cloud crowd (Fortune)
Prediction: VMware competitors will cash in on the heels of Dell/EMC merger
(Tech Republic)
So how much is Uber really worth? (CNBC)
Philly Tech News Tweets & Quotes: 10/16/2015: McDermott, Roberts, Texas governor Abbott
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"It really is an industry I have enormous personal regard for — and even more heightened respect now, for the first responders, the nurses, the doctors. This is an unbelievably caring system.
In every single meeting, you have to repeat the entire story all over again, because there’s no one electronic medical record that comes before you — or follows you — throughout a case,”
-SAP CEO Bill McDermott, speaking of his recent healthcare experiences at SAP’s Palo Alto campus on a panel Wednesday about "Personalized Medicine."
"You can't keep raising the price forever." said Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, adding that "these things have a way of correcting and balancing out before something draconian happens."
-Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, speaking at a Goldman Sachs conference in mid-September.
Creating a list of Chief Digital Officers. Oddly some of them aren't on Twitter.
— Jonathan Becher (@jbecher) October 6, 2015-SAP Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Becher.
"My main motivation is not the money — [previous venture] Dronecast is working," Singh said. "I want to do something really impactful. Uber is worth $51 billion. I really just want to hurt their business, in a way. I expect a call from [Uber CEO] Travis Kalanick this afternoon."
-Self-styled Philly entrepreneur Raj Singh, on his proposed free Uber competitor, NoMoCab, that would rely on advertising and tips for income. In one quote, evidently stripped from one publication, Singh said something like NoMoCab was "about to be valued at $100M."
Can you say "Mission Accomplished?" The Royals came back to win the game, and eventually the series. The premature tweeting was apparently attributed to a younger staffer.
"As in the past, they are nearly unanimous in sentiment. The difference now is that their sentiment is fear."
-Fortune writer Dan Primack, on his latest trip to Silicon Valley a couple of weeks back, on his talks with the 'investor class' mainly concerning large, unicorn-like private investments.
“Apple is having conversations with everyone about doing their own streaming services. We have had those conversations, as have the other networks. Do I think something will happen? Probably, but I do not know when".
-CBS CEO Les Moonves.
“That’s just proven to be a loser of an approach in a lot of other domains I’m not arguing this from first principles. There are 40 years’ worth of examples.”
-MIT professor David Mindell, questioning the design approach taken by developers of Google's self-driving cars, interviewed by the publication MIT News .
"Features of automated self-driving cars will appear incrementally and organically, with vehicles eventually driving themselves. This will make the cars affordable and encourage public adoption."
- Raj Rajkumar, professor of electrical and computer engineering and the co-director of the GM Collaborative Research Lab at Carnegie Mellon.
Thursday highlights: McDermott's first-hand views on healthcare system
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SAP’s CEO gets personal in Palo Alto about his own recent health ordeal, delivers a call to action (Silicon Valley Business Journal)
AT&T Reorganizes Ahead Of Earnings, Wireless Split (Investor's Business Daily)
Verizon tries to avoid building more fiber by redefining the word “pass”
(Ars Technica)
NBCUniversal announces a new streaming comedy channel, SeeSo
(LA Times)
Altice Files Cablevision Deal With FCC (Multichannel News)
Chattanooga boosts citywide broadband capacity to 10 gigabits (Chattanooga Times Free Press)
But, of course, service is made possible by a large Federal grant.
Cisco, EMC Pledge 'Complete Commitment' To VCE In Wake Of Dell Deal (CRN)
Ben Franklin (Northeastern Pennsylvania) issues new round of business funding (Allentown Morning Call)
Highlights 10/14: Comcast All-IP Video Target Is Q1
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Comcast: All-IP Video Target Is Q1 (Light Reading)
CBS's Moonves Says Content Deal With Apple TV Is Likely (Bloomberg)
Netflix is blaming slow US growth on the switch to chip-based credit cards (Quartz)
Michael Wolff on the Wild West of TV Metrics and the New War on Nielsen (Hollywood Reporter)
SAP Bests Oracle, Other Rivals in Shift to Cloud Computing (Bloomberg)
HOW MOVEN HELPS KEEP A LID ON ONLINE SPENDING (Pymnts)
Raises $12 million more, and building growing development staff in Radnor, Technical.ly Philly reports.
CHF and LSF Announce Merger (PR Newswire)
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