Tidbits today but not all of them are about telecom.
From James Altucher: "Automation is eating the world. Every time a line of software is written, a job is lost." VR, 3D printing, AI and robotics will make us all unemployed soon. what then?
Sports Authority is closing all its stores. Macy's, Sears, K-Mart and B&N have been closing stores for a couple of years now. Retail - even luxury retail - is declining. Not all of it is online shopping. In the future, what do malls look like? Basically entertainment and food courts.
Dollar stores are taking share away from even Wal-Mart.
The rise of the minimum wage is supposedly a problem for business owners, but all of the complainers have cash stockpiled and executive pay has flourished. Hmmmm... The amount of money available to keep the economy spinning is lagging.
We have an economy that runs on two elements: service (consumer spending) and technology/The Internet. [Good read here by Dixon on the Internet Economy]
As most businesses and consumers consume the Internet, the number of subscription services we pay for is increasing. Our monthly spends are going up with our bandwidth consumption.
The number of contractors or freelancers has increased to more than 35% in the US. As that keeps increasing imagine what happens to annual income, stability, savings, retirement...
I will just leave it there.
Research on the brain is cool. What words do to your brain HERE.
Two things that people talk about are ecosystems and blockchains. These are two systems that investors look for in startups.
"Consumers don't hate advertising; they dislike how the advertising is distributed." "According to an April 2016 report by Accenture, 84% of digital consumers complain that advertising too frequently interrupts their content consumption, 40% plan to remove these interruptions either via paid subscription or ad blocking software in the next twelve months." from mynfo, a Tampa startup that just closed $6.8 million in Series A financing!
Most business models - newspapers, magazines, car companies, schools, VARs - have not changed much in the last 20 years. So as change comes (not IF, but WHEN that change comes) it will disrupt most of the players.
Rovi Buys TiVo in $1.1 Billion Deal. Is Roku next?
Verizon's brand is taking big hits due to 3 things: (1) the strike; (2) vandalism of systems creating big outages; and (3) Frontier taking over a large chunk of FiOS customers. Frontier's take over was a cluster, like every other take over has been. What shocked me the most is how few people outside the industry actually knew that Verizon had sold off its assets to Frontier. Even fewer knew that Bright House was being bought by Charter. Telecom is at the very bottom of what people think about.
Already seeing UC providers moving away from Polycom since the merger announcement with Mitel. Fuze/thinkingphones went with Yealink. Birch is hollering about Panasonic. A few smaller players are testing out Grandstream. The move away from Polycom has started. Add in a move to softphones and mobile apps and what is MITEL buying?
Sangoma launched a line of phones for FreePBX and its newly launched PBXact UC, a premise based UC&C appliance.
"I never expected to witness the slow suicide of a country, a civilization. I suppose nobody does." [The author is talking about Venezula] "Hate, as a political strategy. Law, used to divide and conquer. Regulation used to punish. Elections used to cement dictatorship. Corruption bleeding out the lifeblood in drips, filling the buckets of a successive line of bureaucrats before they are destroyed, only to be replaced time and again." <- sound familiar?
