H.E.R.O.’s Journey in Tech (20 February 2019) – Automating Office Tasks Using Software Bots Made RPA Holdings’ Tomomichi Takahashi $360 Million + The journey won’t be easy, but there is no greater legacy than to live a life and make creations that reduce suffering for others. (Mission)

H.E.R.O.’s Journey in Tech (20 February 2019) – Automating Office Tasks Using Software Bots Made RPA Holdings’ Tomomichi Takahashi $360 Million + The journey won’t be easy, but there is no greater legacy than to live a life and make creations that reduce suffering for others. (Mission)

Companies

• Liu Qingfeng, chairman of iFlytek Co, can say he has done what he promised President Xi Jinping five years ago. (TT)
• Amazon’s China unit in merger talks with NetEase’s Kaola: report (Reuters)
• Buffett’s China Ride Is Losing Power With Investors; BYD had all the advantages of an electric-car pioneer in the world’s largest auto market. It’s failed to consolidate them. (Bloomberg)
• Automating Office Tasks Using Software Bots Made RPA Holdings’ Tomomichi Takahashi $360 Million (Bloomberg)
• Marvel and Toei came to a three- year licensing agreement that would allow each company to use one another’s properties (THTS)
• What Robots Mean for the Future of American Manufacturing; Fanuc (6954.Japan) has a “Zero Down Time” initiative that virtually links its robots together. (Barron’s)
• CJ ENM denies Netmarble’s US$2b stake sell-off rumors (Investor)
• Koh Young discusses the company’s outlook and new product offerings for 2019 including their Koh Young Process Optimizer (KPO), which won an award at IPC APEX EXPO 2019 for the process control software category. (iconnect)
• A former refugee who came to Australia without a word of English is now worth $300 million after shares in his software company Altium soared to a record high on the back of a bumper half year result. (SMH)
• SaaS contract wins boost Citadel Group’s revenue, profits (CRN)
• WiseTech shares fall on lower-than-expected earnings (AFR)

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

• Why Baidu Is the Tech Giant That’s Most Vulnerable to a China Downturn (Bloomberg)
• Baidu bucks the capital winter to play catch-up to Alibaba, Tencent in outside investments; Nasdaq-listed company made a total of 92 investments in 2018, compared to 41 the previous year (SCMP)
• Alibaba Takes Stake in Bank Backed by Tencent; Alibaba has accumulated a 4.84% stake in China International Capital Corp.; Tencent took a 4.95% stake in 2017 (WSJ)
• Tencent-backed Chinese second-hand car platform Renrenche denies bankruptcy rumors (Technode)
• WeDoctor Considers Listing a Spinoff on New Tech Board (Bloomberg, SCMP)
• More gaming companies to bring anti-addiction systems to mobile (Technode)
• Rivalry between Chinese social media giants intensifies as ByteDance’s Douyin follows Tencent with mini game; Douyin’s first in-app game looks similar to WeChat’s viral jumping title from 2017 (SCMP)
• China regulator requests pause in new game applications to clear backlog – sources (Reuters)

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

• Facebook’s AI Chief Researching New Breed of Semiconductor (Bloomberg)
• Google to buy data migration company Alooma in cloud push (Reuters)
• Netflix isn’t talking about itself like a tech company anymore (qz)

Asia Tech & Innovation Trends

• Growing a in a mature market: Six directions for China’s tech giants (Technode)
• China’s Silicon Valley Blueprint Has Plenty of Holes; The plan gives scant detail on how Hong Kong and Macau will be integrated without eroding their special status. (Bloomberg)
• Money can’t buy China’s chip industry much love (Reuters)
• 5G Is a Winner for Chinese Companies-at Least at Home; Out of favor with the Trump administration, Chinese companies like ZTE and Huawei are getting a boost from Beijing (WSJ)
• SendBird raises US$52m funding to ‘go beyond simple messaging’ (Investor)
• Will 5G era really revolutionize the world? (Investor)

Global Tech & Innovation Trends

• A.I. Judges: The Future of Justice Hangs in the Balance; Automation is creeping into the courtroom, and it’s going to change the way we think about the law (Medium)
• Roku Stock Can Keep Rising Because Customers Keep Growing, Analyst Says (Barron’s)
• PayPal Stock Could Rally on Strong User Growth, Analyst Says (Barron’s)
• Fragmentation of internet likely to last indefinitely; Stalling of adoption of new Internet Protocol will hamper network integration, report finds (FT)
• Opendoor files to raise another $200M at a $3.7B valuation, documents show (TC)
• AI Pioneer Sees Chip Renaissance; Unsupervised neural nets move beyond MACs, tensors (EET)
• AV Safety Quest: Vehicle Software Updates; to guarantee safer vehicles, many more advancements must happen in software (EET)

Life

• If you see a problem or suffering in the world, you can learn the skills and create the technology to solve those problems. The journey won’t be easy, but there is no greater legacy than to live a life and make creations that reduce suffering for others. (Mission)
• Buffett on Losing your competitive position… Generally speaking, if you lose your competitive position — the Packard Motor Company had the premier car in the mid-’30s. The Cadillac was not the premier — it was the Packard. And then they went downscale one year and they never came back. They jumped their sales that one year because everybody wanted to own a Packard, and now you could own one a little cheaper. But they never regained that upscale image again. And certain department stores have done that, too. They’ve had a upscale image. And you can always juice up your sales, particularly if you’ve got a great upscale image, by having, you know, this sale or that sale, and going downmarket. It’s very hard to back upmarket again, and you’ve seen some great department stores that have had that — or specialty stores — that had that problem. (VIW)
• Auditor’s role not to ‘detect all instances of fraud’: KPMG’s Andrew Yates (AFR)
• The Greatest Investor You’ve Never Heard Of: An Optometrist Who Beat The Odds To Become A Billionaire; Instead of concentrating on the metrics in financial statements, Wertheim is devoted to reading patents and spends two six-hour blocks each week (Forbes)