H.E.R.O.’s Journey in Tech (16 February 2019) – Purchases With Plastic Get Costlier for Merchants-and Consumers; Visa and Mastercard plan to raise fees on credit and debit cards, putting new strain on retail + Strategies for Seizing the Day

February 16, 2019 Leave a comment

H.E.R.O.’s Journey in Tech (16 February 2019) – Purchases With Plastic Get Costlier for Merchants-and Consumers; Visa and Mastercard plan to raise fees on credit and debit cards, putting new strain on retail + Strategies for Seizing the Day

Companies

  • GaAs IC foundry Win Semiconductors expects robust demand for 3D sensing and 5G related applications to drive its mid- and long-term business growth. (Digitimes)
  • FPCB firm Flexium gearing up for 5G (Digitimes)

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

  • Buying WorldFirst gives Ant the technology it needs to service an international marketplace. That’s good news for Alibaba’s growth plans. (Bloomberg)
  • Alibaba acquires 8% stake in Bilibili to double down on content-driven e-commerce (Technode); Alibaba buys into online video-sharing site Bilibili to tap young consumers (KRA)
  • TSMC takes $550m hit from defective chemical at chip plant; Company cuts earnings outlook after troubles supplying Apple and Huawei (Nikkei)
  • Seizing on Huawei’s troubles, Samsung bets big on network gear (Reuters)

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

  • Apple acquires talking Barbie voicetech startup PullString (TC)
  • Amazon, Western Union debut PayCode to sell goods in emerging markets and let shoppers pay in cash (TC)
  • Amazon launches UPI payments in India, taking on Paytm, Walmart and Google (Forbes)
  • Google’s AI plan to understand everything about humans can go wrong: expert (Investor)

Asia Tech & Innovation Trends

  • Forbes India Conversations: AI is one technology where India can fully leverage its people (Forbes)

Global Tech & Innovation Trends

  • Purchases With Plastic Get Costlier for Merchants-and Consumers; Visa and Mastercard plan to raise fees on credit and debit cards, putting new strain on retail (WSJ)
  • Postscript wants to be the Mailchimp for SMS (TC)
  • Vimeo Chases Video Producers With Its First Big Ad Campaign; A video platform pursues creators’ budgets instead of viewers’ wallets (WSJ)
  • The Oracle of Omaha has given up on Oracle, the company (qz)
  • The era of general purpose computers is ending (NP)
  • Looking to Reverse Its Slide, Austrian iPhone Supplier Pushes Beyond Apple (Barron’s)
  • 4 Stocks to Play the Data-Center Boom (Barron’s)
  • 5 Ways to Invest in the Robotics Revolution (Barron’s)
  • Is Yelp a business or a howl of pain? The reviews site blames Google for its problems but investors see another culprit (FT)
  • Uber posts $50 billion in annual bookings as profit remains elusive ahead of IPO (Reuters)
  • Zillow Wants to Flip Your House; A new breed of high-tech real estate flippers is using algorithms (and a healthy dose of Silicon Valley venture capital) to buy at massive scale. (Bloomberg)

Life

  • Strategies for Seizing the Day (RH)
  • Hong Kong’s securities watchdog freezes brokerage accounts for suspected involvement in misleading data (SCMP)
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Filed under Innovation

About bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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