Zoominfo (not Zoom) skyrockets in IPO
The first tech IPO since the beginning of the coranavirus lockdown soared on Thursday, with an 80% price increase over the opening on day one. The tool uses AI to help companies find contact information for their target markets – an essential tool for sales. CNBC
dis-rup-shun: It was a bold move to test the public markets during times of uncertainty, and especially during a week of tremendous unrest over racial injustices — when many businesses are closed or closing early. The IPO’s success shows, aside from the fact that quality companies are rewarded, that our online/virtual economy is functioning quite well. Businesses that rely on in-person transactions and physical locations are clearly suffering, but our virtual business transactions are carrying on.
Slack and Amazon form alliance
It’s all about scale, and the new alliance increases Slack’s footprint across the entirety of Amazon, while ensuring more business from Slack for Amazon’s Web Services, the cloud engine powering Slack. CNBC
dis-rup-shun: Remember Microsoft Azure cloud’s alliance with Fedex to help counter the dominance of Amazon Web Services and growing delivery network? The Amazon empire strikes back as it allies with friend Slack in an effort to beat down Microsoft — both its cloud services (Slack runs on AWS) and its Teams shareware — an existential threat to Slack. There is no earthly power that can beat Microsoft’s advantage of bundling Teams for free into its still very dominant Office suite, but this buys Slack more runway to differentiate and find new business models.
WiFi: the standard that enabled the smart home generation
CNET offers a look back over the past 25 years of tech, and discusses that the barrier to growth of the smart home was a lack of a home wiring standard. That standard arrived in the form of no-wires, with the advent of WiFi and eventual deployment of the standard first by tech savvy consumers buying WiFi antennas, then by telcos building WiFi into home routers.
dis-rup-shun: It is hard to imagine life without WiFi. It has become a commodity only slightly less-important than electricity, and just as expected. Streaming video and cord cutting is causing the de-coupling of Internet services (and WiFi) from the cable and telco, which will only accelerate with 5G providers who will offer fixed-mobile 5G alternatives to wires-to-the-home WiFi. We will all benefit greatly from this new competition.