Month: February 2018

I saw Ring debut on “Shark Tank” – Boy! They really missed this one! Fox Business Channel reports that Amazon will pay one BILLION for the company!

Amazon is buying smart doorbell maker Ring

TechCrunch – By: Greg Kumparak – “With Nest’s first smart video doorbell right around the corner, Amazon is busy buying up the competition.

After acquiring Blink just two months ago, Amazon is now acquiring Ring, makers of the self-titled Ring doorbell (plus a bunch of other security gear, like solar security cameras, floodlight cams and an in-home alarm system).

GeekWire broke the rumor this afternoon, and we’ve just received independent confirmation.

Details on the deal are still pretty light; the financial terms of the deal, for example, haven’t trickled out just yet. Update: Reuters is reporting, via tweet, that the sale price was more than $1 billion. The company had raised around $209 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

This acquisition makes plenty of sense. Amazon has already built a few connected cameras of its own — but hardware is, as they say, hard, and that’s not going to change. With nearly a dozen solid products to its name, the Ring team has proven themselves more than capable of building hardware (and I’m sure its array of patents doesn’t hurt, either.) With Amazon, Google, Apple et al. all duking it out for physical space in and around your home, someone was going to make a big offer — and I’d be surprised if Amazon was the only bidder in the mix. Plus, who on earth is responsible for more doorbell presses than Amazon?

(Fun bit of trivia: Ring debuted to the world on Shark Tank back in 2013, then known as ‘DoorBot.’ They wanted $700,000 for 10 percent of the company, but no one took the deal.)

This is pretty cool!

Google Assistant will soon detect what language you’re speaking in

The Verge – By: Jacob Kastrenakes – “Google Assistant is getting some important language upgrades this year. By the end of 2018, Google says it’ll be able to understand and speak 30 languages, enough to cover 95 percent of Android users. And sometime later this year, the Assistant won’t be limited to speaking one language at a time. It’ll automatically detect your language each time you speak and respond in kind. So if you’re multilingual, you’ll no longer have to pick only a single language to use with the Assistant.

The Assistant launched widely this time last year, but it was only available in one language — English — at the time. It now supports eight languages — French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese — so Google has 22 more to add over the next 10 months. Nick Fox, product lead for Assistant, says the company doesn’t plan to stop at 30. But 30 offers enough coverage that the team feels comfortable saying Assistant has ‘really gone global at that point.’

Among the new languages will be Danish, Dutch, Hindi, Indonesian, Norwegian, Swedish, and Thai. They’ll be added ‘in the next few months.’

Being able to switch between languages on the fly is a big improvement, too. Previously, you had to completely change Android’s language settings in order to change what language the Assistant was in, which essentially meant you were stuck speaking only one language since switching was a hassle. One thing the Assistant still can’t do, though, is decipher multiple languages in the same sentence; it’s still one language at a time. The multilingual feature will be limited to English, French, and German at launch but is supposed to expand to more languages ‘over time.’

Expanding to 30 languages also helps the Assistant catch up to the one area it really lagged behind Siri. Apple’s voice assistant currently supports 20 languages, several of which are in a number of different dialects (there are nine for English, for example). Siri also works in Cantonese and Mandarin, major languages Google has yet to add.

In addition to the new language features, Google is also announcing the launch of routines and some new integrations for Assistant. It’s going to begin working with Android hardware manufacturers to integrate Assistant with their devices, so it’ll be able to launch specific camera features, for instance. Google’s going to start working with phone carriers so that the Assistant can be used to check your current data usage and other plan details.”

This actually makes me want to get in on the Stock Market! I am a big Dropbox fan!

The Dropbox IPO filing is here

TechCrunch – By: Katie Roof – “It’s official, the Dropbox IPO filing is here.

Going public is a huge milestone for Dropbox and has been one of the most anticipated tech IPOs for several years now. The cloud storage company has been around since 2007 and has raised more than $600 million in funding.

We knew that it had already filed confidentially, but the company has now unveiled its filing, meaning the actual IPO is likely very soon, probably late March.

The company says it will be targeting a $500 million fundraise, but this number is usually just a placeholder.

The filing shows that Dropbox had $1.1 billion in revenue last year. This compares to $845 million in revenue the year before and $604 million for 2015.

The company is not yet profitable, having lost nearly $112 million last year. This shows significantly improved margins when compared to losses of $210 million for 2016 and $326 million for 2015.

Dropbox has been cash flow positive since 2016.

Dropbox, which has a freemium model, says it has 11 million paying users, just a small fraction of the more than 500 million registered users who use its cloud services for free.

Its average revenue per paying user is $111.91.

The big question is whether the company will achieve the $10 billion valuation it raised in the private markets. Part of its success will be measured relative to Box, which went public in 2015 and will be considered a comparable.

The prospectus warns of the competitive landscape.

‘The market for content collaboration platforms is competitive and rapidly changing. Certain features of our platform compete in the cloud storage market with products offered by Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, and in the content collaboration market with products offered by Atlassian, Google, and Microsoft. We compete with Box on a more limited basis in the cloud storage market for deployments by large enterprises.’

Box CEO Aaron Levie chatted with us on our ‘Equity’ podcast, sharing his immediate reaction to competitor Dropbox’s filing.

With the filing we see that the largest shareholder is Sequoia Capital, which owned 23.2 percent of the overall shares outstanding. This is a large stake. Accel owned 5 percent overall.

Founder and CEO Drew Houston owned 25.3 percent of the company.

The company is listing on the Nasdaq, under the ticker ‘DBX.’

Others vying to go public soon will keep an eye on the performance of Dropbox. Investors place weight on the ‘IPO window,’ and view recent debuts as a test for appetite for tech listings.

Spotify is gearing up to go public around the same time, but will be shunning the traditional IPO process by listing without doing a fundraise.”

Uh oh! The chickens are coming home to roost, so to speak!

First Intel, now AMD also faces multiple class-action suits over Spectre attacks

ZDNet – By: Liam Tung – “Intel rival AMD is also facing a number of class-action lawsuits over how it’s responded to the Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws.

As The Register reports, four class-action complaints have been filed against the chip maker seeking damages on behalf of customers and investors.

The suits follow a warning from AMD in late January that warned investors that it is ‘also subject to claims related to the recently disclosed side-channel exploits, such as Spectre and Meltdown, and may face claims or litigation for future vulnerabilities’.

Intel revealed last week that it now faced 32 class-action lawsuits over its handling of the Meltdown and Spectre issues and three additional lawsuits over alleged insider trading.

AMD chips aren’t affected by the Meltdown attack but, like Arm and Intel, its processors have the same design flaws in its use of speculative execution that enable the Spectre attacks.

Three of the four cases represent customers who’d bought AMD processors. The complaints note that AMD continued to market its processors as high-performance chips despite knowing that this level of performance was unattainable without exposing users to the Spectre attack, and that mitigations would slow down performance.

‘Plaintiff and members of the Class would not have purchased or leased — or would have paid substantially less for — AMD processors (or devices containing AMD processors) had they known of the Spectre defect and the reduction in processing performance associated with efforts necessary to mitigate the substantial security risks presented by the Spectre defect,’ reads one complaint.

The shareholder complaint seeks damages on behalf of anyone who bought AMD shares in the year leading to January 11, 2018, the date AMD admitted its processors were vulnerable to both variants of the Spectre attacks and its share price fell by 0.99 percent. Following the first media reports of the flaws AMD suggested it wasn’t vulnerable at all.

Another of the customer complaints calls out AMD’s marketing for the high-performance Rizen Threadripper 1950X and 1920 processors which were launched in July and August 2017.

AMD said they delivered ‘uncompromising performance’. Google’s Project Zero researcher Jan Horn is said to have told AMD about the flaws in early June 2017.

‘Despite its knowledge of the Spectre Defect, AMD continued to sell its processors to unknowing customers at prices much higher than what customers would have paid had they known about the Spectre Defect and its threat to critical security features as well as on the processing speeds of the devices they purchased,’ the complaint reads.

Two of the law firms have also filed class-action lawsuits against Intel, similarly alleging it is profiting from products that it knows are defective and don’t perform as advertised.”