H.E.R.O.’s Journey in Tech (19 September 2018) – Delta Electronics Shrinks Power Supply with Transphorm’s High-Voltage GaN FETs + Seneca quote on endurance

H.E.R.O.’s Journey in Tech (19 September 2018) – Delta Electronics Shrinks Power Supply with Transphorm’s High-Voltage GaN FETs + Seneca quote on endurance

Companies

• Trend Micro Launches Managed Detection and Response Service in Singapore and APAC (BI)
• Illinois-Based Daifuku Wynright Picks Hobart for Manufacturing Complex and Growth (OAOA)
• Kakao Games calls off IPO (Investor)
• Taiwan government mulls additional incentives for Taiwanese manufacturers to leave China; Delta Electronics, New Kinpo Group, and Merry Electronics have began to switch some of their Chinese manufacturing to Southeast Asia. (Taiwan News)
• Innodisk Moving at Full Speed towards IoT Integration at InnoTrans 2018 (PRNews)
• Sigurd enjoys strong high-end chip probing demand (Digitimes)
• Delta Electronics Shrinks Power Supply with Transphorm’s High-Voltage GaN FETs (Business Wire)

BATTSS – Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, TSMC, Softbank, Samsung

• Alibaba’s incoming chairman puts data at heart of business (Nikkei)
• What Alibaba’s investments say about its plans for the future (TIA)
• Jack Ma says it’s his responsibility to let Alibaba go, warns of protracted US-China trade war (SCMP)
• Of the 10 companies worth more than $100 billion that analysts predominantly rate as buy, Tencent has by some distance had the worst 2018 (Bloomberg)
• Tencent releases open platform to help drive AI projects at other companies (SCMP)

FAANNMG – Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Nvidia, Netflix, Microsoft, Google

• Microsoft introduces HoloLens to businesses through Dynamics 365 apps (Reuters)

Asia Tech & Innovation Trends

• China Tech Inc.’s Annus Horribilis: Fully Charged (Bloomberg)
• China’s tech boom leaves wide rich-poor chasm (Nikkei)
• China’s Waymo challenger Pony.ai hits the accelerator to speed up to a robotaxi fleet of 200 (SCMP)
• Luxury e-commerce in China has loads of room to grow, thanks to the country’s tech-savvy, cash-rich millennials (SCMP)
• Octopus’ transport payment monopoly under threat? – 8 in 10 passengers would pay by e-wallet or QR code if they had the option, claims Visa (SCMP)
• Indian patient-doctor platform DocPrime gets $50M for city expansion (Techcrunch)
• China Goes for Broke in Indonesian E-Commerce: Mainland tech giants are snapping up online-retail startups, but it’ll be hard to make a profit. China’s internet giants have stakes in four of Indonesia’s five largest e-commerce operators (Bloomberg)

Global Tech & Innovation Trends

• Why Zillow Addicts Can’t Look Away; Brokers say that Zestimates can be off base, but that doesn’t stop sellers from obsessing over what the website says their home is worth. (NYT)
• Walmart is borrowing luxury’s playbook to gain an edge on Amazon in fashion (qz)
• Food delivery start-up Postmates cracks $1bn valuation; Unicorn status reached after latest $300m fundraising. Postmates expects its footprint to grow from about half of US households now to 70-75 per cent by year’s end (FT)
• The 3D fine print (Forbes)
• The Tension Is Building Between Spotify and the Music Industry (Bloomberg)
• World Economic Forum Takes On China Tech Regulation; Its Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution will serve as a think tank and testing ground for emerging-technologies policy (WSJ)
• Indigo Raises $250 Million to Bring Tech to Big Agriculture (Bloomberg)
• Set Free by Naspers, African TV Giant MultiChoice Plots Path (Bloomberg)
• Zalando’s Real Problem Isn’t Sun. It’s Amazon: Reliance on third-party labels leaves it vulnerable to comparison shopping. (Bloomberg)
• ASML optimistic about litho equipment demand in China (Digitimes)
• Microcontroller Fortunes Rise with IoT (EETimes)

Life

• Lessons From Da Vinci on Work and Life. (Medium)
• Predicting the Future with Bayes’s Theorem (Farnam Street)
• Seneca quote on endurance (VIW)
• Seeking unpredictable value creation (II)
• Future Founders, Here’s How to Spot and Build in Nonobvious Markets (First Round)