Singapore Airlines LTD has announced plans to invest "hundreds of millions" of dollars into its digital transformation as it attempts to stay competitive. Globally, the airline industry has become highly competitive and CEO Goh Choon Phong told the media that Singapore Airlines will turn to digital technologies to differentiate itself. The three year program will include an investment into automated technology to help decrease travel delays and reduce maintenance costs in order to help increase revenue.
The benefits of going digital for Singapore Airlines could be very substantial, with forecasts of boosted earnings being placed around $800 million. The airline has been struggling to compete against local competitors and low cost carriers with reported net profits of $350 million in 2017. Singapore Airlines will also institute other measures to support its transformation plan including consolidating the financial teams of its arm SilkAir with its own airline team, moving some routes to other carriers, and adding more seats to some of its airplanes. An initiative with the National University of Singapore (NUS) will target revenue management and demand patterns as it tackles other challenges currently facing its business. Click here to read the full article.
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Facebook has announced two major changes to its News Feed as it seeks to essentially crowdsource its trust rankings for news sources. Facebook will begin surveying users to determine the trustworthiness of publishers, and it will decrease how much news is in the News Feed from 5% to 4%. The survey will help Facebook determine the ranking of the News Feed, and will consist of two questions: Do you recognize the following websites? How much do you trust each of these domains? The goal is to effectively decrease the number of news articles on users' news feeds and attempt to ensure the remaining news articles are trust worthy.
Facebook has been at the center of many conversations regarding the unexpected negative consequences of social media after news that Russian Propaganda intended to disrupt the United States Presidential Elections in 2016 may have been shown to 140 million Americans. The number of exposed Americans was much larger than the initial projects of 10 million, and represents a staggeringly large percentage of the 214 million total Facebook users residing in the United States. Facebook has also announced plans to increase the number of employees actively working on ensuring the integrity of public elections. Facebook is the second largest ad revenue (close to $27 billion last year) platform in the world, and accounts for nearly 20% of global advertising when combined with Google (around $79 billion in ad revenue). Click here to read the full article. After close to one year of testing, Amazon has officially opened its checkout-free, queue-free, convenience store the public. Amazon Go, will allow consumers to enter the store using their cellphones, select their items, and walk out. Using sensors, cameras, and a computer vision system, the store monitors which customers select which items and charges their designated Amazon account after they complete their selections and walk out the door.
The technology used inside the store is the first of its kind and took Amazon four years to develop. The store underwent internal testing from Amazon employees for a year and heralds the kind of disruption Amazon has become known for. Amazon has made no public announcements of future implementations of the new technology into Whole Foods stores and has also not discussed opening more Amazon Go locations. Click here to read the full article. WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, has launched a new, free, separate application to help businesses deal with and respond to customer inquiries. The application is currently only available on Android within the United States, Britain, Mexico, Indonesia, and Italy. The business app is aimed at businesses who currently use WhatsApp to communicate directly with customers and will allow them to create a business profile, set up automatic responses and provide them with statistics about the number of messages read, delivered, and sent.
Over time, the currently free application is expected to begin to charge businesses for using it. WhatsApp was bought by Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion, with WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg deciding shortly after that the original messaging system should remain advertising free. Although WhatsApp temporarily experimented with a $1 a year subscription, the fee was discontinued in 2016 and the application in its current state has no source of revenue. WhatsApp is in a highly competitive market that considers WeChat and Facebook's own Messenger as competitors among many others worldwide. WhatsApp has expressed plans to release its new business app in other markets and on iOS soon. Click here to read the full article. As economic pressures and the number of disruptive entrants increase for traditional retailers, the value adding potentials of technology will become necessary to survive. Here are six of the ways in which new technology may affect the retail industry: hubs may replace shopping centers, customers will become even more powerful, personalization will become an industry standard, subscription models will be even more common, cutting edge tech will make its way into the hands of customers during the purchase process, and product delivery will become even more expedited.
Over 800 locations designated as high street shops closed in 2016, while e-commerce figures were stable. This context has been a driving force behind the introduction of technology as an instrument to help improve companies' value proposition. The expected continuation of that trend are changes in where and how customers purchase products. With the introduction of hub shopping locations and a continued shift to e-commerce customers will be increasingly able to efficiently allot their time towards making purchases. Shopping experiences will be improved as companies attempt to differentiate themselves through the service they provide alongside their products. These improvements will come from customers being offered higher tech, more personalized shopping experiences including even how products are bought. As the customer becomes more powerful, largely due to their ability to choose from more suppliers, changes will also come to payment and delivery services. These changes will be aimed at providing more diverse and efficient processes. The retail industry will need to become more customer centered as players try to keep and attract customers. Click here to read the full article. The International Consumer Electronics Show occurred last week and many of the top companies in the world were present. Here are ten of the top products on display.
Here are the Top 10 biggest stories from the technology sector in 2017: from technology stocks hitting all time highs to Amazon's dominance and the global crypto currency craze.
10. Softbank's Huge Investment Fund Was Involved In Over 50% Of The Largest Equity Startup Investments Billionaire Masayoshi Son announced his plan to unleash a $100 billion technology fund that was met with skepticism. But by the end of the year, investments in insurance, co-working, and robotics has many has left only believers behind. Softbank was involved in the top 3 rounds made to companies in the United States. 9. The Technology Stocks Surpass Dot-Com Highs The biggest tech giants (Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook) hit all time high stock prices, pushing past the previous dot-com records. Apple in particular is well on its way to hit a $1 trillion market valuation, bumping the $900 trillion this past year with a cash hoard bigger than GE. 8. Netflix Threat Triggers Fox-Disney Merger Disney followed up its announcement to pull all of its movie content from Netflix with a purchase of $54 billion in Twenty-First Century Fox stock. 7. The Chip Making Industry Heated Up The Semiconductor ETF was up 35 % over 2017, surpassing even the 31.7% gain seen in the Technology Select Sector ETF. 6. Uber Struggles A data breach in 2016 that affected 57 million people put a final cherry on top of Uber's terrible year that included drug use at organization events, CEO Travis Kalanick resigning, and the firing of 20 employees following an internal investigation. 5. Tech Industry Loses Trust Due To Data Breaches Data breaches from credit reporting firm Equifax and ride-hailing app Uber affected more than 202 million people, causing a drastic hit to trust among citizens. 4. Facebook Reputation Takes a Hit News surrounding Russian ads and ad-targeting technology that allowed racial discrimination caused Facebook's reputation over the year to take a turn for the worse. 3. #MeToo in Tech Silicon Valley saw its own string of sexual harassment allegations and statistics that brought light to the tech industry's gender imbalance. 2. Amazon Is On Everyone's Mind Jeff Bezos passed Bill Gates to become the world's richest man, as Amazon posted its best holiday season ever and is on every industry's radar. 1. Crypto Currency Craze Goes Global The crypto currency market boomed to $3 billion in initial coin offerings over 2017, up from $222 million in 2016. Click here to read the full article. Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs will be reimagining the modern digital city in their development of "Quayside," a 12-acre slice of waterfront in Toronto. Sidewalk Labs is Alphabet's urban innovation organization, and won the public Request for Proposal with a 196 page vision that transforms urban life across energy mobility, housing, social services, and shared public services.
An underlying goal of the project is to "serve as a model for sustainable neighborhoods around the world." Autonomous vehicles (provided by Waymo, another Alphabet Company) will serve as the primary motorized means of transit as it shuttles between some streets as parts of the neighborhood will prohibit non-emergency vehicles. Automated awnings and snow melters will ensure the usability year round of bike sharing stations, walking paths, and transit stops. The end results of the measures should enable "efficient alternatives to driving, all at lower costs than owning a car." Sustainability will be core to heating and disposal systems as well, with self-contained thermal grids transferring energy from fossil fuel free sources to cool and heat buildings. Buildings will be created with eco-friendly materials and will adapt to both industrial, retail and residential needs. Many of these goals and plans are familiar concepts, but Sidewalk Labs' digital ambitions aren't. Sidewalk Labs has planned a data harvesting "digital layer" that provides a "single unified source of information about what is going on." The centralized platform will monitor incredibly details such as kitchen appliances, trash bins, park benches, noise levels, and air quality to inform urban planning. Although Sidewalk Labs has announced a $50 million, one-year investment towards the development of an execution plan but it and Toronto can still back out. Click here to read the full article. As the autonomous vehicle industry heats up, Nvidia's AI platforms continue to acquire more users. Already tied to China's Baidu and Tesla, Nvidia has recently added Uber and Volkswagen to its growing list of partners. Known for its computer graphic chips, Nvidia's technology is helping Uber's vehicles to perceive the world and make decisions based on those perceptions. Volvo will be putting its technology into its future lineup. As of now, 320 companies are using Nvidia's Drive technology in their self driving car endeavors.
These developments has led to bets that Nvidia would become the leader in AI, autonomous vehicles. Its stock has doubled over the last year making the chip manufacturer the third strongest performer on the S&P 500 over that period. Click here to read the full article. Spotify announced yesterday through Twitter that their number of paying subscribers has officially hit 70 million. The milestone suggests that Spotify is steadily continuing to grow its lead over its next closest rival Apple Music. Apple Music revealed that its music subscription service had "well over 30 million subscribers" in September of 2017. The combined growth of market leaders Spotify and Apple Music demonstrates a shift in the way people consume their music- away from outright purchases towards flat fee based subscriptions.
The two leaders offer similar services with slight differences in delivery methods. Apple Music chooses to focus on exclusives and marketing to attract new subscribers while Spotify uses a free version (that comes with ads) to enable them to price their full service lower. The subscriber update unveiled by Spotify indicates that membership growth is increasing steadily. Membership increased from 40 million to 50 million in close to five months and from 50 million to 60 million in a similar time frame. Spotify passed 60 million at the end of July which means the update yesterday continues their trend of growing at around 10 million subscribers every five months. The International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) announced that the global market for recorded music in 2016 saw its quickest rise in two decades (5.9%). Streaming revenue also saw large growth as the IFPI recorded a 60 percent growth. Additional Note: Spotify has reportedly recently filed documents with the SEC indicating its planning a direct stock market listing. Click here to read about Spotify's subscription update and here to read about the music streaming industry. |
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