Analytics Weekly - Issue #24

Probably the loudest story of the week on how Facebook handled its crisis. Spoiler alert: just as usual.

There’s a new generation of startups that want to disrupt Google Docs (and Microsoft Office as well). Airtable has just raised another funding round and became a unicorn, Coda is still in beta and raised over $60M, Notion hasn’t raised any funding yet but its capabilities include the other two companies’ feature sets. Yet another sign of the ‘unbundling’ trend in startups: new companies take on a small part of the incumbent’s larger solution and make it 10x better for that specific audience that needs it — and expands from that.

Autonomous vehicles rely on several advanced technologies to self-navigate and it is a great opportunity for complementary startups (including lvl5). CB Insights unbundles the main needs and the companies that want to cover those.

The court has ruled that San Diego chipmaker Qualcomm must license some of its technologies to rivals such as Intel. It might sound boring but Qualcomm is one of the main reasons we don’t have 4G directly in our laptops. As soon as Apple outperformed them with their own CPUs and Intel released a decent modem for them, Apple sued Qualcomm.

Disney is working on its own streaming service as they soon will have one of the largest databases of content through the acquisition of Fox. Looks like the golden age of steaming will be over soon and people would start paying the same amount of money they’d pay for a fat cable package.

The world of cryptocurrencies brings exciting news angles to the world. There was a huge turmoil regarding the upcoming fork of Bitcoin Cash (which itself is the fork of Bitcoin).

Essentially, a rogue group proposing an alternative software claimed that they’d take any hash power they could get to seize control of the chain and ensure the canonical one (mainly supported by Bitmain, one of the largest manufacturer of mining equipment) will be eliminated.

Bitcoin Cash’s chain split scheduled for today has been activated at block number 556,766. Around three hours after the split, it appears as scheduled, Bitcoin Cash has split into two digital assets. It seems that the uprising has failed.