TV streaming services see 212% jump in viewing hours over past year

Live-streaming TV services, like Sling TV, PlayStation Vue, Hulu with Live TV and others, are gaining steam in the U.S. as more consumers cut the cord with traditional pay TV. According to a new report from Conviva out this morning, these services (called virtual MVPDs) now account for more than three-quarters of all plays and viewing hours in the U.S. That growth has come at the expense of dedicated apps from individual publishers, the report found.

Over the past 12 months, streaming TV services — the virtual MVPDs like Hulu with live TV, Sling TV, or PlayStation Vue — have seen a 292 percent increase in plays and a 212 percent increase in viewing hours, while publisher apps have seen declines of 16 percent and 19 percent, respectively, across those fronts.

The services have also been improving over time. Many suffered from glitches and outages at launch — and this continues today, on occasion. But overall, they’re more stable than in the past.

The report found that across these streaming TV services, there’s been a 22 percent decrease in video start failures, a 7 percent shorter wait time for video to start playing, 25 percent higher picture quality and 63 percent less buffering.

The draw of streaming TV services is a cable TV-like experience with added benefits, like the ability to watch across devices, record shows to a cloud DVR that’s not (in theory) limited by disk space on a set-top box, integration with your smartphone’s notification system for alerts about favorite shows or events and more.

But the ability to tune into live content — like live events and sports — is a major draw for cord cutters, as well.

Year-over-year, live TV content has seen a 49 percent increase in plays and a 54 percent increase in viewing time. The NFL is a huge part of this, with plays up 72 percent and viewing hours up 83 percent in Q3 2018, versus the year-ago quarter.

In the weeks that games were airing, NFL viewership accounted for 3 percent of total plays and 2.8 percent of all viewing hours in the U.S.

Because many viewers tune in at the same time to watch a live broadcast, compared with other content, there’s still room for improvement on this front. The firm also found that live television streams take 10 percent longer for videos to start, and see 72 percent more exits before the video starts, as a result.

The way consumers are watching streaming TV services is changing, too, the study said.

Though one benefit of these newer services is no longer being tied to a TV for viewing, it seems many still prefer it. While mobile viewing continues to grow — it’s up 57 percent year-over-year — it no longer dominates.

Connected TVs — such as those connected to Roku players, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, etc. — now account for as many streaming TV plays (38 percent on TVs) as mobile devices (39 percent). They also account for more than twice the viewing hours, with a 56 percent share to mobile’s 25 percent share.

Viewing on the PC is down by 18 percent, meanwhile.

Conviva, like other reports, has found that Roku leads the market — in this case, in terms of viewing hours. Roku accounted for 40 percent of viewing hours, but Amazon Fire TV gained. Amazon’s connected TV device platform increased its share of viewing hours from 3 percent to 18 percent over the past 12 months, and increase its share of plays from 4 percent to 19 percent.

The report is a snapshot of the industry that comes from Conviva’s global footprint of 50 billion streams per year across 3 billion applications and 200 million users. The company works with brands like Sling TV, HBO, Sky, Turner, Hulu, Discovery, CBS, Canal Digital and others. That gives it deep insight into the streaming TV space to see trends, but not a complete look as not all providers are Conviva customers.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/31/tv-streaming-services-see-212-jump-in-viewing-hours-over-past-year/

The first 1,000 are the most difficult

For years, I’ve been explaining to people that daily blogging is an extraordinarily useful habit. Even if no one reads your blog, the act of writing it is clarifying, motivating and (eventually) fun.

A collection of daily bloggers I follow have passed 1,000 posts (it only takes three years or so…). Fortunately, there are thousands of generous folks who have been posting their non-commercial blogs regularly, and it’s a habit that produces magic.

Sasha, Gabe, Fred, Bernadette and Rohan add value to their readers every day, and I’m lucky to be able to read them. (I’m leaving many out, sorry!) You’ll probably get something out of reading the work of these generous folks, which is a fabulous side effect, one that pays huge dividends to masses of strangers, which is part of the magic of digital connection.

What I’ve found is this–after people get to posting #200 or beyond, they uniformly report that they’re glad they did it. Give it a try for three or four months and see what happens…

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/577700036/0/sethsblog~The-first-are-the-most-difficult/

Just because you don’t understand it

…doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

…doesn’t mean it isn’t important.

If we spend our days ignoring the things we don’t understand (because they must not be true and they must not be important) all we’re left with is explored territory with little chance of improvement.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/577638640/0/sethsblog~Just-because-you-dont-understand-it/

As stock rises on a slim earnings beat, eBay tells analysts to focus on payments and ads

Despite increasing competition from traditional retailers like Walmart and Target, which have invested heavily in e-commerce, and the whupping it’s routinely taking from Amazon among pure e-commerce companies, eBay the 20-year-old lumbering Pez dispenser of an e-tailer, keeps plugging along.

Now, as it manages to eke out another earnings win by matching analysts’ expectations, the company is telling the bankers that watch it to look to advertising and payments for its future growth.

The company met analysts’ estimates of revenue totaling $2.65 billion, up from $2.41 billion in the year-ago period. That amounts to adjusted earnings of 56 cents per share, up from 48 cents per share in the year-ago period and beating analyst estimates of 54 cents per share. Profits for the company hit $720 million for the quarter.

The news sent shares up over 4 percent in trading after the market closed on Tuesday.

But more interesting than the the tepid results was its outlook for the future. Right now, eBay is at a crossroads as it tries to get a new group of users to forget about its past as a marketplace for used goods and resellers — and as a more pure e-commerce company.

“This quarter we continued to make foundational investments to improve the long-term competitiveness of our marketplace while setting the stage for significant growth opportunities,” said CEO Devin Wenig in a statement. “We will continue to innovate the customer experience while executing our growth initiatives in Payments and Advertising to position eBay for future success.”

The fact is, eBay is growing. It saw the number of active buyers across the platform increase by 4 percent, and has 177 million global active buyers. While that number is dwarfed by Amazon’s over 300 million global buyers (as of 2017), it’s one of the largest retailers in the U.S. The company’s StubHub business saw revenues of $291 million, up 7 percent from the year-ago period and sales of $1.2 billion. Its classified payments also grew.

As eBay looks ahead, payments and advertising are going to receive a bulk of the company’s internal investment dollars as it tries to complete the rollout of a new payment experience in the wake of its divorce from PayPal and its embrace of Adyen, Apple Pay, and the technology-based financial services company, Square.

Ebay to add support for Apple Pay, partners with Square Capital on seller financing

The company has already processed $38 million in payments and through the partnership with Apple Pay has grown that payment method to 12 percent on the platform. Advertising on eBay has seen 400,000 sellers promote over 160 million listings.

“We continue to grow the inventory on the marketplace,” Schenkel. “Just recently we rolled out a direct from brand and direct from authorized resellers… Brands want choice and they want to sell on a marketplace with 177 million users that doesn’t compete with them.”

The company will also continue to have an aggressive investment and mergers and acquisitions strategy, the executives said. Especially since the company found its earnings buoyed by the $1 billion it brought in from the sale of its stake in Flipkart, href="https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/09/walmart-confirms-16b-flipkart-investment-giving-it-77-in-indias-e-commerce-leader/"> when it was bought by Walmart for $16 billion.

Walmart confirms $16B Flipkart investment, giving it 77% in India’s e-commerce leader

What’s somewhat interesting is that there are new companies in the retail space that are making a mint doing things that eBay once dominated. Vinted and DePop are both used-clothing e-tailers that have enviable cache and significant revenues, while LetGo and OfferUp are also raiding used goods to turn trash into treasure.

A quick trip to eBay’s homepage shows that the company has all but consigned its collectible past to the trash heap. Given the death and dissolution of so many of its peers from the first generation of internet giants, it’s worth keeping an eye on eBay if only to see how the 20-something company approaches middle age as an independent entity.

“We have a unique situation. [The] eBay brand is very well recognized and not as well understood. We’re seeing this; that new buyers are responding really well to the changes that we made in the last few years and we need more of them and part of that is messaging our brand,” said Wenig on the earnings call with investment analysts.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/30/as-stock-rises-on-a-slim-earnings-beat-ebay-tells-analysts-to-focus-on-payments-and-ads/

The hybrid cloud market just got a heck of a lot more compelling

Let’s start with a basic premise that the vast majority of the world’s workloads remain in private data centers. Cloud infrastructure vendors are working hard to shift those workloads, but technology always moves a lot slower than we think. That is the lens through which many cloud companies operate.

The idea that you operate both on prem and in the cloud with multiple vendors is the whole idea behind the notion of the hybrid cloud. It’s where companies like Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Oracle are placing their bets. These died-in-the-wool enterprise companies see their large customers making a slower slog to the cloud than you would imagine, and they want to provide them with the tools and technologies to manage across both worlds, while helping them shift when they are ready.

Cloud-native computing developed in part to provide a single management fabric across on prem and cloud, freeing IT from having two sets of tools and trying somehow to bridge the gap between the two worlds.

What every cloud vendor wants

Red Hat — you know, that company that was sold to IBM for $34 billion this week — has operated in this world. While most people think of the company as the one responsible for bringing Linux to the enterprise, over the last several years, it has been helping customers manage this transition and build applications that could live partly on prem and partly in the cloud.

As an example, it has built OpenShift, its version of Kubernetes. As CEO Jim Whitehurst told me last year, “Our hottest product is OpenShift. People talk about containers and they forget it’s a feature of Linux,” he said. That is an operating system that Red Hat knows a thing or two about.

With Red Hat in the fold, IBM can contend that being open source; they can build modern applications on top of open source tools and run them on IBM’s cloud or any of their competitors, a real hybrid approach.

Microsoft has a huge advantage here, of course, because it has a massive presence in the enterprise already. Many companies out there could be described as Microsoft shops, and for those companies moving from on prem Microsoft to cloud Microsoft represents a less daunting challenge than starting from scratch.

Oracle brings similar value with its core database products. Companies using Oracle databases — just about everyone — might find it easier to move that valuable data to Oracle’s cloud, although the numbers don’t suggest that’s necessarily happening (and Oracle has stopped breaking out its cloud revenue).

Dell, which spent $67 billion for EMC, making the Red Hat purchase pale by comparison, has been trying to pull together a hybrid solution by combining VMware, Pivotal and Dell/EMC hardware.

Cloud vendors reporting

You could argue that hybrid is a temporary state, that at some point, the vast majority of workloads will eventually be running in the cloud and the hybrid business as we know it today will continually shrink over time. We are certainly seeing cloud infrastructure revenue skyrocketing with no signs of slowing down as more workloads move to the cloud.

In their latest earnings reports, those who break out such things, the successful ones, reported growth in their cloud business. It’s important to note that these companies define cloud revenue in different ways, but you can see the trend is definitely up:

• AWS reported revenue of $6.7 billion in revenue for the quarter, up from $4.58 billion the previous year.
• Microsoft Intelligent Cloud, which incorporates things like Azure and server products and enterprise services, was at $8.6 billion, up from $6.9 billion.
• IBM Technology Services and Cloud Platforms, which includes infrastructure services, technical support services and integration software reported revenue of $8.6 billion, up from $8.5 billion the previous year.
• Others like Oracle and Google didn’t break out their cloud revenue.

Show me the money

All of this is to say, there is a lot of money on the table here and companies are moving more workloads at an increasingly rapid pace.  You might also have noticed that IBM’s growth is flat compared to the others. Yesterday in a call with analysts and press, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty projected that revenue for the hybrid cloud (however you define that) could reach $1 trillion by 2020. Whether that number is exaggerated or not, there is clearly a significant amount of business here, and IBM might see it as a way out of its revenue problems, especially if they can leverage consulting/services along with it.

There is probably so much business that there is room for more than one winner, but if you asked before Sunday if IBM had a shot in this mix against its formidable competitors, especially those born in the cloud like AWS and Google, most probably wouldn’t have given them much chance.

When Red Hat eventually joins forces with IBM, it at least gives their sales teams a compelling argument, one that could get them into the conversation — and that is probably why they were willing to spend so much money to get it. It puts them back in the game, and after years of struggling, that is something. And in the process, it has stirred up the hybrid cloud market in a way we didn’t see coming last week before this deal.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/30/the-hybrid-cloud-market-just-got-a-heck-of-a-lot-more-compelling/

The problem with people is that they outnumber you

It doesn’t make any sense to spend your life proving them wrong, it’s a losing battle.

Far more effective is the endless work of building connection, forming alliances and finding the very best you can in those you engage with.

You can’t possibly know what it’s like to be someone else, but it’s also true that no one knows what it’s like to be you.

One more reason to put in the effort to find the good.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/577427914/0/sethsblog~The-problem-with-people-is-that-they-outnumber-you/

AmazonSmile has raised $100 million for charity

A little good press goes a long way for a company like Amazon. The company routinely gets knocked for things like warehouse conditions, tax breaks and impact on smaller retail outlets. AmazonSmile’s helped to counteract that a bit, raising money for legitimately good causes, skimmed off purchases from the site.

The online retail giant announced this morning that it’s made $100 million in charitable donations through the program, since launching almost exactly five years ago.

Amazon hasn’t broken down how much each participating charity has raised through the campaign, only that “hundreds of thousands of charities have been able to expand their meaningful work thanks to the donations they’ve received through AmazonSmile,” according to Amazon CEO Worldwide Consumer, Jeff Wilke.

Amazon’s also pumping up the incentives for this week. Purchases between now and November 2 will quality for a donation of five-percent of eligible products. That’s apparently around 10 times the normal donation rate, according to the company.

The are currently north of one million charities to chose from.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/29/amazonsmile-has-raised-100-million-for-charity/

Eaze co-founder Keith McCarty raises $5M for his new B2B cannabis startup

Keith McCarty couldn’t stay out of the booming weed business for long.

The co-founder and former chief executive officer of the well-funded marijuana delivery startup Eaze has launched WAYV, a B2B cannabis logistics and compliance platform that delivers inventory to cannabis retailers. Today, the company is announcing its first round of funding, a $5 million seed round led by David Sacks at Craft Ventures. The round represents the former PayPal executive’s first investment in the cannabis technology sector.

Other investors in the round declined to be named.

McCarty and Sacks previously worked together at Yammer, a private social networking tool used by businesses created by Sacks in 2008. The company sold to Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion, giving McCarty and several others enough cash to experiment. For McCarty, that meant exploring the hazy and uncharted territory that was marijuana delivery.

McCarty, however, mysteriously left Eaze right as the company gained significant traction. Neither the company nor McCarty ever explained the shake-up; McCarty was quickly replaced by another former Yammer employee, Jim Patterson, the founder and former CEO of Zinc. In a conversation with TechCrunch, McCarty didn’t clarify the nature of his exit.

He did say that the idea for WAYV came from observing the difficulties of cannabis supply chain logistics during his time at Eaze.

Headquartered in Los Angeles, WAYV connects licensed cannabis companies to licensed brands and provides next-day delivery of cannabis products — it’s essentially Eaze for the cannabis enterprise not the average cannabis consumer. The startup was founded last year and has so far delivered to retailers in California only.

As a second-time cannabis founder, McCarty said building WAYV has been a lot different than launching Eaze, which was one of the first big-name marijuana tech companies.

“Back in 2014, [Eaze was] one of the first to raise venture capital, it was kind of unheard of,” McCarty told TechCrunch. “Now, the majority of Americans favor legalization. For medical, it’s 90 percent and for adult recreational, it’s more than 60 percent. As we Americans continue to favor legalization and that stigma is removed, not just medical but also adult use, it’s going to draw attention and also investment.”

Venture capital investment in cannabis startups has continued to climb, most notably after the state of California voted to legalize recreational marijuana use in 2016. According to Crunchbase, $700 million has been funneled into the space since 2014.

“The industry is moving at such a fast cadence, it’s really exciting to be a part of,” McCarty added.

Metrc, whose tracing system helps regulators track cannabis from seed to sale, just raised $50 million, including from Tiger Global

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/29/eaze-co-founder-keith-mccarty-raises-5m-for-his-new-b2b-cannabis-startup/

Vimeo subscribers can now publish videos directly to LinkedIn

Vimeo announced today a new feature that will allow videos to be published directly to LinkedIn. The added support is a part of the company’s “Publish to Social” feature, which already offers publishing to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and is available to paid subscribers. The expansion to LinkedIn is another example of the company’s shift in focus from being a video destination site to one that sells tools and services to professional and semi-professional video creators.

The company last year scrapped its plans for a subscription video-on-demand service, promoted its creator business lead Anjali Sud to CEO, and acquired live video streaming platform Livestream, as a part of its broader plan to serve the video creator community through services.

Earlier this year, it announced “Publish to Social,” a tool that support uploading videos to multiple sites at once, as a part of all Plus, PRO, Business, and live plans.

Now it’s adding LinkedIn to its list of supported sites, which makes it the first video platform to integrate with LinkedIn, the company says.

The move also follows Microsoft’s earlier announcement that LinkedIn would open to video uploads as part of a larger video push on its part. Last summer, LinkedIn launched a new feature that allowed users to upload videos to the site from its iOS or Android mobile app – the idea being that users could highlight their work  projects or demonstration products, for example.

With Vimeo’s integration, however, the focus is on uploading to Company Pages, where businesses may be using video in a variety of ways to connect with their customers, prospective employees, and others.

“Video has become one of the key drivers for member engagement on LinkedIn, and businesses who want to start a conversation with their audiences are increasingly turning to Company Page videos,” said Peter Roybal, principal product manager at LinkedIn, in a statement about the partnership with Vimeo. “Our new integration with Vimeo is an exciting step for anyone who wants to gain more exposure, and understand their reach to LinkedIn’s highly-engaged professional audiences,” he added.

In addition to the ability to publish to LinkedIn, Vimeo will also provide creators with analytics on the videos, including things like video viewership, engagement, and performance stats. These are available on the Vimeo dashboard, alongside the metrics for other social platforms, as well as other websites and blogs, allowing creators to compare their campaigns’ performance across various destinations.

Creators can also take advantage of Vimeo’s other marketing tools from this dashboard to further customize and monetize their content, the company says.

Using video on LinkedIn can be a big boost for businesses. According to LinkedIn’s own data, LinkedIn Company Page videos see 5x the engagement than any other type of post. And because today’s social platforms favor native uploads, the ability to push a video from Vimeo to sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in that same manner means creators are likely also expanding their reach, rather than using embeds or links.

 

 

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/29/vimeo-subscribers-can-now-publish-videos-directly-to-linkedin/

Blue Apron gets a much-needed boost with Jet.com partnership

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. That explains a coming-together between two startups today after Jet.com announced it will give beleaguered Blue Apron a leg-up by introducing its meal kits for customers in New York.

The deal will an initially rotating selection of four meal kits from Blue Apron made available as part of Jet’s ‘City Grocery’ experience. The kits — which will rotate every six weeks — will be available for same-day or next-day order in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, as well as Jersey City and Hoboken.

Jet — which is the first e-tailer partner for Blue Apron — said the kits are designed specifically for its customers based on “extensive feedback” based around what they want to eat, how they want to make it, etc. As a part of that focus, all of the kits take less than 30 minutes to prepare.

The initial selection includes the following:

• Seared Steaks & Peperonata with Fregola Sarda Pasta & Grana Padano Cheese (2 servings, 28 oz) – $22.99
• Dukkah-Spiced Beef & Couscous with Tahini-Dressed Broccoli (2 servings, 41 oz.) – $20.99
• Togarashi Popcorn Chicken with Sweet Chili Slaw & Jasmine Rice (2 servings, 32 oz.) – $18.99
• Italian Farro Bowl with Roasted Vegetables & Mozzarella (2 servings, 32 oz.) – $16.99

“We are delighted to be the first e-retailer to offer the Blue Apron on-demand kits, kicking off in NYC,” said Jet President Simon Belsham in a statement. “Adding the on-demand kits to our newly launched City Grocery experience provides another layer of convenient services and products that helps make people’s lives easier, and it’s a great example of how Jet will continue to differentiate itself.”

That was echoed by Brad Dickerson, who become CEO late last year. Dickerson hinted that the company has more planned for its “channel expansion strategy.”

Despite going public in June, 2017 was a tough year for Blue Apron.

The company listed at $10 per share after originally hoping to go public between $15 and $17. But, more significantly, Amazon threw a spanner in the works when it purchased Whole Foods just days before Blue Apron’s debut, giving investors concerned the alliance would negatively impact the company, piling on more doubt that had surfaced around the viability of its customer retention strategy.

Things have only gotten worse for Blue Apron since then, with its shares currently valued at just $1.14 as of the close of market on Friday. But there is some positive sentiment around the Jet deal with the share price up nearly 22 percent in pre-trading, according to Yahoo Finance.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/29/jet-com-blue-apron/

Southeast Asia’s Grab pulls in $200M from travel giant Booking

Fresh from a strategic investment from Microsoft, Southeast Asia’s ride-hailing leader Grab is back in the money again after it closed $200 million in fresh capital from Booking Holdings, the travel firm formerly known as Priceline.

The investment is part of an ongoing round of funding that Grab said is on course to reach $3 billion before the end of the year. Grab raised $2 billion for the round — including a $1 billion check from Totoya — but it continues to add strategic partners, like Microsoft and Booking. Grab — which bought Uber’s regional business in March and is present in eight countries — is valued at $11 billion and we understand that hasn’t changed with this round.

The deal — which mimics Booking’s recent $500 million investment in China’s Didi — will lead to the two companies team up to offer reciprocal services. That’ll see Grab’s transportation services integrated into Booking’s apps and services with support for Grab Pay. On the other side, Grab said that Booking’s travel accommodation services will come to its app sometime in 2019, although Grab customers in “multiple markets” will get rewards and offers in the app before the end of this year.

Besides Booking.com and Agoda, Booking also operates Kayak, Priceline.com, Rentacars.com and OpenTable. The firm rebranded from Priceline in February 2018.

The tie-in makes sense on both sides. Ride-hailing services are a prime channel for travel companies — Didi and Grab both dominate their respective markets, Grab claims over 110 million downloads — while the idea of pre-ordering a Grab to meet you after a flight has landed, or having one take you to your hotel will be logical for many.

Grab started out offering taxis, but it has since expanded to private car vehicles, motorbikes and a range of non-transportation services that include payments and food delivery. In addition, the company opened its platform to third-parties this summer in an effort to develop a ‘super app’ for Southeast Asia’s rapidly growing internet population, which is already larger than the entire U.S. population.

It hasn’t all been plain-sailing for Grab in its post-Uber world. Both Uber and Grab were fined a collective $9.5 million by Singapore’s watchdog for the merger — they got a lighter rap on the knuckles in the Philippines — while some users have complained about a bloated app, inferior service quality and higher fees in recent months. Grab disputes the latter claim that it has increased prices, but it has pledged to do better by its customers.

Grab’s chief rival is Indonesia Go-Jek, which is said to be raising $2 billion more to support a regional expansion plan. Go-Jek has already moved into Vietnam and Thailand, while this week it opened sign-ups for drivers in Singapore.

Southeast Asia’s Grab partners with MasterCard to offer prepaid cards

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/29/grab-raises-200m-booking/

Non-profit overhead

Skeptical non-donors often point to the amount a charity spends on non-direct spending as a reason to hesitate in contributing. It’s easy to imagine that a cause that spends 90% of what it raises on direct action (not HQ, not salaries, not fundraising) is better than one that spends 80%.

We say we care about overhead, but what we really care about is impact, or status, or momentum. What we measure isn’t a simple percentage, it’s a lot deeper than that.

Waste isn’t a good thing. Of course not. But leaving aside the football teams and the jets at some colleges, those high salaries at some non-profits might just be buying insights and effort that you can’t get any other way. And those leaders might be bringing strategic insights and efficiencies to their cause that a well-meaning bootstrapper just can’t deliver.

Everywhere else in our lives, we happily invest in the best solution to our problem. Whether it’s surgery, vegetables or a designer, we seek to invest in expertise and resources that not only fit our budget but get the job done.

If a problem is worth solving, it’s worth engaging with the right people to solve it with urgency, isn’t it?

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/577252880/0/sethsblog~Nonprofit-overhead/

Forget Watson, the Red Hat acquisition may be the thing that saves IBM

With its latest $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, IBM may have found something more elementary than “Watson” to save its flagging business.

Though the acquisition of Red Hat  is by no means a guaranteed victory for the Armonk, N.Y.-based computing company that has had more downs than ups over the five years, it seems to be a better bet for “Big Blue” than an artificial intelligence program that was always more hype than reality.

IBM to buy Red Hat for $34B in cash and debt, taking a bigger leap into hybrid cloud

Indeed, commentators are already noting that this may be a case where IBM finally hangs up the Watson hat and returns to the enterprise software and services business that has always been its core competency (albeit one that has been weighted far more heavily on consulting services — to the detriment of the company’s business).

Also read as IBM taps out on Watson as its growth engine and returns to basics ie financial engineering and distribution https://t.co/nD7gHyYhQf

— Sunil Rawat (@_sunilrawat) October 28, 2018

Watson, the business division focused on artificial intelligence whose public claims were always more marketing than actually market-driven, has not performed as well as IBM had hoped and investors were losing their patience.

Critics — including analysts at the investment bank Jefferies (as early as one year ago) — were skeptical of Watson’s ability to deliver IBM from its business woes.

As we wrote at the time:

Jefferies pulls from an audit of a partnership between IBM Watson and MD Anderson as a case study for IBM’s broader problems scaling Watson. MD Anderson cut its ties with IBM after wasting $60 million on a Watson project that was ultimately deemed, “not ready for human investigational or clinical use.”

The MD Anderson nightmare doesn’t stand on its own. I regularly hear from startup founders in the AI space that their own financial services and biotech clients have had similar experiences working with IBM.

The narrative isn’t the product of any single malfunction, but rather the result of overhyped marketing, deficiencies in operating with deep learning and GPUs and intensive data preparation demands.

Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

That’s not the only trouble IBM has had with Watson’s healthcare results. Earlier this year, the online medical journal Stat reported that Watson was giving clinicians recommendations for cancer treatments that were “unsafe and incorrect” — based on the training data it had received from the company’s own engineers and doctors at Sloan-Kettering who were working with the technology.

All of these woes were reflected in the company’s latest earnings call where it reported falling revenues primarily from the Cognitive Solutions business, which includes Watson’s artificial intelligence and supercomputing services. Though IBM chief financial officer pointed to “mid-to-high” single digit growth from Watson’s health business in the quarter, transaction processing software business fell by 8% and the company’s suite of hosted software services is basically an afterthought for business gravitating to Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon for cloud services.

To be sure, Watson is only one of the segments that IBM had been hoping to tap for its future growth; and while it was a huge investment area for the company, the company always had its eyes partly fixed on the cloud computing environment as it looked for areas of growth.

It’s this area of cloud computing where IBM hopes that Red Hat can help it gain ground.

“The acquisition of Red Hat is a game-changer. It changes everything about the cloud market,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, in a statement announcing the acquisition. “IBM will become the world’s number-one hybrid cloud provider, offering companies the only open cloud solution that will unlock the full value of the cloud for their businesses.”

The acquisition also puts an incredible amount of marketing power behind Red Hat’s various open source services business — giving all of those IBM project managers and consultants new projects to pitch and maybe juicing open source software adoption a bit more aggressively in the enterprise.

As Red Hat chief executive Jim Whitehurst told TheStreet in September, “The big secular driver of Linux is that big data workloads run on Linux. AI workloads run on Linux. DevOps and those platforms, almost exclusively Linux,” he said. “So much of the net new workloads that are being built have an affinity for Linux.”

 

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/28/forget-watson-the-red-hat-acquisition-may-be-the-thing-that-saves-ibm/

Forget Watson, the Red Hat acquisition may be the thing that saves IBM

With its latest $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, IBM may have found something more elementary than “Watson” to save its flagging business.

Though the acquisition of Red Hat  is by no means a guaranteed victory for the Armonk, N.Y.-based computing company that has had more downs than ups over the five years, it seems to be a better bet for “Big Blue” than an artificial intelligence program that was always more hype than reality.

IBM to buy Red Hat for $34B in cash and debt, taking a bigger leap into hybrid cloud

Indeed, commentators are already noting that this may be a case where IBM finally hangs up the Watson hat and returns to the enterprise software and services business that has always been its core competency (albeit one that has been weighted far more heavily on consulting services — to the detriment of the company’s business).

Also read as IBM taps out on Watson as its growth engine and returns to basics ie financial engineering and distribution https://t.co/nD7gHyYhQf

— Sunil Rawat (@_sunilrawat) October 28, 2018

Watson, the business division focused on artificial intelligence whose public claims were always more marketing than actually market-driven, has not performed as well as IBM had hoped and investors were losing their patience.

Critics — including analysts at the investment bank Jefferies (as early as one year ago) — were skeptical of Watson’s ability to deliver IBM from its business woes.

As we wrote at the time:

Jefferies pulls from an audit of a partnership between IBM Watson and MD Anderson as a case study for IBM’s broader problems scaling Watson. MD Anderson cut its ties with IBM after wasting $60 million on a Watson project that was ultimately deemed, “not ready for human investigational or clinical use.”

The MD Anderson nightmare doesn’t stand on its own. I regularly hear from startup founders in the AI space that their own financial services and biotech clients have had similar experiences working with IBM.

The narrative isn’t the product of any single malfunction, but rather the result of overhyped marketing, deficiencies in operating with deep learning and GPUs and intensive data preparation demands.

Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

That’s not the only trouble IBM has had with Watson’s healthcare results. Earlier this year, the online medical journal Stat reported that Watson was giving clinicians recommendations for cancer treatments that were “unsafe and incorrect” — based on the training data it had received from the company’s own engineers and doctors at Sloan-Kettering who were working with the technology.

All of these woes were reflected in the company’s latest earnings call where it reported falling revenues primarily from the Cognitive Solutions business, which includes Watson’s artificial intelligence and supercomputing services. Though IBM chief financial officer pointed to “mid-to-high” single digit growth from Watson’s health business in the quarter, transaction processing software business fell by 8% and the company’s suite of hosted software services is basically an afterthought for business gravitating to Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon for cloud services.

It’s this area of cloud computing where IBM hopes that Red Hat can help it gain ground.

“The acquisition of Red Hat is a game-changer. It changes everything about the cloud market,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, in a statement announcing the acquisition. “IBM will become the world’s number-one hybrid cloud provider, offering companies the only open cloud solution that will unlock the full value of the cloud for their businesses.”

The acquisition also puts an incredible amount of marketing power behind Red Hat’s various open source services business — giving all of those IBM project managers and consultants new projects to pitch and maybe juicing open source software adoption a bit more aggressively in the enterprise.

As Red Hat chief executive Jim Whitehurst told TheStreet in September, “The big secular driver of Linux is that big data workloads run on Linux. AI workloads run on Linux. DevOps and those platforms, almost exclusively Linux,” he said. “So much of the net new workloads that are being built have an affinity for Linux.”

 

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/28/forget-watson-the-red-hat-acquisition-may-be-the-thing-that-saves-ibm/

The largest software acquisition ever: IBM to buy Red Hat for $34B

At a price typically reserved for semiconductor companies, telecoms, and pharmaceutical giants, IBM announced today it would pay a record $34 billion in cash and debt to acquire enterprise open source provider Red Hat. Eclipsing Microsoft’s $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, this is the biggest software acquisition in history. It’s not the biggest tech acquisition ever, though, as that title belongs to Dell’s $67 billion buyout of data storage business EMC.

You can learn about what IBM is buying Red Hat to become a hybrid cloud company in TechCrunch editor Ingrid Lunden’s deep dive here:

IBM to buy Red Hat for $34B in cash and debt, taking a bigger leap into hybrid cloud

So how does the IBM-Red Hat deal (if it closes), stack up against the other largest acquisitions of all time?

Top Tech Acquisitions

1. $67 billion – Personal computer company Dell buys EMC data storage
2. $37 billion – Semiconductor company Avago Technologies buys and renames as semiconductor giant Broadcom
3. $34 billion (pending) – IBM computers buys open source software provider Red Hat
4. $31.4 billion – Japanese conglomerate SoftBank acquires semiconductor company ARM Holdings
5. $26.2 billion – Software company Microsoft buys professional social network Linkedin in 2016

Top Software Acquisitions

1. $34 billion (pending) – IBM computers buys open source software provider Red Hat in 2018
2. $26.2 billion – Software company Microsoft buys professional social network LinkedIn in 2016
3. $22 billion – Social network Facebook buys messaging app WhatsApp in 2014
4. $13.5 billion – Security software maker Symantec buys storage management software maker Veritas in 2004 ($18 billion adjusted for inflation)
5.  $11 billion – Database company Oracle buys human resources software company PeopleSoft in 2004 ($14.7 billion adjusted for inflation)

Top Acquisitions Ever

1. $202 billion – British telecom Vodafone buys German telecom Mannesmann in 2000 ($296 billion adjusted for inflation)
2. $165 billion – ISP AOL buys media conglomerate Time Warner in 200 ($241 billion adjusted for inflation)
3. $111.8 billion – Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer buys pharmaceutical company Warner Lambert in 1999 ($164 billion adjusted for inflation)
4. $130 billion – Telecom Verizon Communications buys Vodafone and Bell Atlantic’s Verizon Wireless in 2013
5. $130 billion – Dow Chemical buys chemical company DuPont in 2015

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/28/biggest-software-acquisition/

Ambidextrous

Anthropologists have found that we’re very motivated to divide into teams, and once on a team, we’ll work hard to degrade the other team. Over the smallest differences. For the smallest possible stakes. Even when we get no other benefit than thinking that we won something.

We spend a lot of time sorting people into buckets. We label them in order to treat them differently and establish expectations for how they’ll respond. Mostly to figure out which team they’re on. An email from a stranger causes us to spend some time guessing their status, gender and connection to us.

Which team?

Strangely, we don’t care so much about whether someone is right handed or left handed. We don’t waste cycles on dividing people by whether they can curl their tongue or even if they can play the piano.

I totally understand our caring about Yankees vs. Red Sox. About seeking out team affiliation when team affiliation is a choice, when it’s intentionally competitive, when it tells us something about what’s going to happen next.

But if we’re not sure of someone’s gender, religion, citizenry, sexual preference or race, we can get very uptight. Ambidextrous (unsorted) in these areas is a problem, apparently, even though there’s no relationship (zero) between the things that matter (attitude, skills, talents) and the easily measured team affiliation that we all seem so concerned about.

And that leads to a great opportunity. If you can be the person who coordinates the work of people regardless of their designated unasked-for affiliation, you’ll be able to find brilliant contributors that others foolishly overlook.

The room has more room than ever for those willing to be ambidextrous, to follow a path that’s not previously defined. Work with them or get out of their way.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/577101326/0/sethsblog~Ambidextrous/

Stet

There’s a term in copyediting called “stet.”

That’s what you write when you want the copyeditor to not make the indicated change. It’s probably Latin for, “leave my best work alone, please.”

Too often, in a committee, we bend to the fear of those that would prefer we fit in, dumb it down and average it out.

Better, I think, to simply say, “stet.” No drama, no explanation. Simply, “stet.”

Your work is worth it.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/576962384/0/sethsblog~Stet/