Category: Business & MBA

Business related notes.

Apple may have to work alone on its electric car after failing to find a partner

The Apple-Car has been a rumor for years. And mobility is one of the hottest bets for the future. Car manufacturers, in particular premium brands, are in a good position to defend their pool position. The techradar.com news therefore does not sound surprising. At all.

From techradar.com

Some Apple gossip is pure fantasy, but some of the hearsay has roots in the real world. The Apple car falls into the latter category, and if a new report from Korean site mk.co.kr is accurate, the company now plans to shoulder the entire development process of the autonomous and/or electric car on its own.

Source: techradar.com

Sixt, Mobileye and Nio announce autonomous Taxis

Sixt announced this on their official LinkedIn Profile earlier today. Traditional news outlets like Focus are picking up the news. The announcement was made at the Internationale Automobilausstellung (IAA)

Movie Car (Source: FOCUS Online)

Autonom unterwegs, das war bisher etwas für Menschen, die im gemütlichen Zuckeltempo vom Bahnhof Bad Birnbach zum Ortskern wollen. Oder in der Hamburger Hafencity von einer Straßenecke zur nächsten. Ab 2022 schalten die Intel-Tochter Mobileye, der chinesische Autohersteller Nio und der Autovermieter Sixt in München einen Gang höher: Sie führen echte Robotaxis ein.

Source: FOCUS Online

Apollo Funds Complete Acquisition of Yahoo

Yahoo! was sold again:

Apollo Global Management, Inc. (NYSE: APO) (together with its consolidated subsidiaries, “Apollo”) today (6 September) announced that funds managed by its affiliates (the “Apollo Funds”) have completed the acquisition of Yahoo – formerly Verizon Media – one of the world’s premier global technology and media companies.

Source: Apollo Funds Complete Acquisition of Yahoo

IAA Day 1 Announcements

While the “Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung” moved to a new place and introduced a new concept, following the pandemic, Day 1 is still a traditionally good day to make announcements just like with any other fair. Here are a few of the headlines that emerged:

Volkswagen’s electric ID.Life concept car doubles as a gaming console

Volkswagen is leveraging its partnership with Pittsburgh-based Argo AI to build an autonomous version

Mercedes unveils their new EV Lineup at IAA

Basemark launches Rocksolid Core Automotive OS – While BMW calls for a joint OS between Mercedes and VW

appfleet joins Cloudflare

appfleet is a Poland based company that develops and offers edge hosting of containerised apps. Edge computing is a trend that emerged a few years back and allows to bring applications closer to the end user, therefore reducing latency and improving user experience. Cloudflare, a player strong in this space, now acquired appfleet, augmenting it’s portfolio of workers with container capabilities. No details of the deal have been made public, however, we will see more of these type of acquisitions with the market starting to consolidate.

appfleet console

Summary: Due to a great synergy between our products, I am happy to announce that Cloudflare and appfleet are joining forces! The appfleet platform is shutting down, with all clusters going offline on October 31st 2021. Long story: When we started working on appfleet our goal was to build an

from the article

Source: appfleet joins Cloudflare

Contentful valued $3B++

Contentful Logo

Contentful, a Content-Management SaaS company, raised another round of financing. With the latest investment the Berlin founded and Headquartered is valued at over $3B.

Contentful locked in a $175 million Series F and a $3 billion-plus valuation as it looks to take advantage of a more digital-first marketplace

From Crunchbase

Source: Contentful Hits $3B-Plus Valuation After Tiger Global-Led $175M Round – Crunchbase News

Fastly Global CDN Disruption

Fastly is one of the major CDN vendors globally. As a regular consumer you wouldn’t be aware of their service, until a failure hits. Today the service faced a configuration issue, that apparently hit global pages like NYTimes and Bloomberg, but also Amazon, Reddit and Twitter, as reported in multiple sources. The issue is reported resolved by the vendor as of this writing. Details on their status page:

Fastly’s Status Page – Global CDN Disruption.

Source: Fastly Status – Global CDN Disruption

Google Data Cloud Summit – Recap

Google’s Data Cloud Summit took place May 26th, 18PT. The summit is home to their big data products and offerings, that aim to help customers succeed in data driven businesses. Here is a summary of news and announcements:

  • Dataplex, an intelligent data fabric. The product allows management of data across multiple sources, including data lakes, data warehouses and data marts for the goal of centralizing management and governance. From there, Dataplex allows to make data available for analytics and data science.
  • Datastream, a server-less change data capture (CDC) and replication service. The service allows to syncronize datasets across multiple systems by transferring changes alone, thus reducing the amount of data transferred and increasing performance and reliability.
  • Announcement of Analytics Hub, a fully-managed service built on BigQuery. The service aims to provide an open ecosystem for sharing and exchanging data across organisations at scale. Part of the offering will be controls and monitoring over data usage and sharing. The hub will offer self service and monetization for data owners, while reducing the need to operate infrastructure for data owners.
  • Dataflow Prime, a no-ops, serverless data processing platform. Dataflow Prime is a managed offering of Apache Beam based data processing pipelines. The product will autoscale infrastructure.
  • Cloud Spanner will allow more flexible and granular instance sizing
  • Key Visualizer, an interactive monitoring tool to analyze usage patterns in Cloud Spanner
  • Cloud Bigtable lifts SLA to 99.999% and introduces new security features. Security features are namely customer managed encryption keys (Googles acronym CMEK) and audit logs. Alongside with SLAs, the product now aims at compliance with regulated industries.
  • Sessions are available on demand. 
Google Data Cloud Summit

Join us to learn how leading companies are powering innovation with our data solutions. Attend sessions, demos, and live Q&As to discover how data can help you make smarter business decisions and solve your organization’s most complex challenges.

Google Data Cloud Summit

Source: Home – Data Cloud Summit

Amazon Buys MGM Studios

MGM Logo

Apple will regret they didn’t snap up MGM. Today Amazon buys MGM Studios for US$9 billion. There are only few other content outlets of this quality, and prices for all others will go up.

Amazon now owns James Bond Photo: Mladen Antonov/AFP (Getty Images)

It’s official folks— Jeff Bezos now owns James Bond . After murmurs earlier this week, Amazon announced today that it had acquired MGM in an $8.45 billion deal that will bolster the e-commerce giant’s Hollywood ambitions.

Gizmodo on Amazon buying MGM

Source: Amazon Buys MGM Studios for $9 Billion

The news also appeared on lots of other channels, like The Verge or TechCrunch.