🌶️ Hot Fudge Sunday for 2024-09-08
This edition dives into tech market insights and fascinating throwbacks!
Welcome to the latest Hot Fudge Daily. Each day of the week you get thematic value.
🌶️ Spicy Edition Sunday FREE (Hot Fudge Sunday weekly newsletter captures the best of Hot Fudge Daily and the most clicked links for the week.)
📈 Markets Monday $ (Hot Fudge Daily: What is moving markets and why does it matter for the week ahead?)
🔥 Hot Takes Tuesday $ (Hot Fudge Daily: Get fast unfiltered thoughts on news of the day with just a dash of snark.)
🤪 Wacky Wednesday $ (Hot Fudge Daily: Catch up on the wild and wooly memes from a variety of deep web #random channels.)
🔙 Throwback Thursday $ (Hot Fudge Daily: Examine recent news in a thought provoking Shot and Chaser format.)
✅ Final Thoughts Friday $ (Hot Fudge Daily: A clear eyed look back on the week that was and could have been.)
🔮 Sneak Peak Saturday $ (Hot Fudge Daily: Steady and sober unpacking of the slow news day where muted press releases and disclosure stories try to get buried before the weekend takes all the attention.)
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Hot Fudge Sunday 🤔 💡 🤯 🤓 is a free weekly newsletter containing a digest of the Hot Fudge Daily paid newsletter at hot.fudge.org in a single easy to reach URL. This free weekly edition is posted every… wait for it… Sunday.
Hot Fudge Daily Digest
📈 Markets Monday for 2024-09-02
Labor Day is an important national holiday and important part of the relatively short history of the United States. 🇺🇸
History of Labor Day | U.S. Department of Labor
Reading Recommendation
The technology market can be hard to keep up with and if you aren’t reading The Stack, you should be. As for why, check out this article from Ed Targett.
SaaS firm spends $25m on IPv4 addresses as cloud costs bite
FinOps... CapEx? Access to IPv4 reserve pool protects it from “being forced to purchase these in an ad hoc manner”...
Markets Monday Memories
Speaking of IPv4 address costs…
My career has seen a lot of post-merger integration work and one instance involved one (1) Class B network. During PMI, I discovered that there should have been two (2!) Class B networks conveyed with the acquisition and eventually the acquiring company ended up owning the second Class B too. 💰
For perspective, in today's post February 1, 2024 AWS IPv4 address per hour dollars, two (2) Class B would be worth up to ~$6M per year. That’s a lot of operating capital to set fire to which is perhaps yet another reason to try harder to sunset IPv4 and move to IPv6. 💸
Logically Isolated Virtual Network - Amazon VPC Pricing - Amazon Web Services
Learn about pricing for Amazon VPC, a service that lets you launch AWS resources in a logically isolated virtual network that you define.
Quick Recap
As a Market Monday reminder and recap, what I try to do each week is look at the same key indicator that I take from a simple yahoo finance webpage. It’s not much but it’s how I look at things and this is what I saw today after the bell closed.
Previously, I decided on a view from Yahoo Finance. For example, this was a view of intraday in Technology which usually gets around a dozen or so interesting companies.
If you are using Yahoo Applied Filters for Stocks screener you can bookmark your own heat map view.
- % Change in Price (Intraday):greater than 4
- Region: United States
- Market Cap (Intraday): Mid Cap and Large Cap and Mega Cap
- Price (Intraday):greater than or equal 5
- Volume:greater than 15000
- Sector: Technology
- Industry: Software—Infrastructure and Information Technology Services and Computer Hardware and Software—Application and Communication Equipment and Electronics & Computer Distribution and Consumer Electronics and Electronic Components and Scientific & Technical Instruments and Semiconductor Equipment & Materials and Semiconductors
Update: Here’s what this chart looked like just before building this digest for Sunday September 1, 2025.
🔥 Hot Takes Tuesday for 2024-09-03
First… an observation and a question.
By the time our industry achieves ubiquitous AI infrastructure that is as agile, elastic, cost-effective, and TRiSM mature when compared to current non-AI infrastructure, will practitioners have moved on to another non-AI technology marvel (shiny object! squirrel!) or will AI be the defining specialization of the next several decades?
If you are reading this question in your internal voice of wonder, I’d love to get your thoughts in a reply.
And now, back to our regular Hot Takes Tuesday…
Funds, Funding, and M&A
Let’s take a look at where the money is flowing.
Techmeme: Sources: OpenAI is in talks to raise funding at a $100B+ valuation; Thrive Capital is leading the round, set to invest ~$1B, and Microsoft is expected to invest (Wall Street Journal)
From Wall Street Journal. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 🤖 BIG numbers are only big until they are not and I’m curious to see if Thrive’s thesis for OpenAI turns into a unicorn, decacorn, etc. cut down valuation trend a year from now on everything else that was similar to Tiger’s this time last year.
Techmeme: Magic, which makes AI tools for coding and to automate software development tasks, raised $320M from Eric Schmidt and others, bringing its total raised to $465M (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
By Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 🤖 Speaking of BIG numbers, the amount of implied spending by Magic on Google Cloud alone is remarkable and seems to mimic what Poolside seems to imply in their published interviews around A.I. coding tools.
Techmeme: Codeium, which offers enterprise AI coding tools, raised a $150M Series C at a $1.25B post-money valuation, and reports 700K+ users and 1K+ enterprise clients (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
By Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 🤖 Speaking of A.I. coding tools, Codeium is a unicorn 🦄 now too and the market could still absorb a few dozen more like it if (when?) the specialization around A.I. demands more coding tools for more challenges ahead.
🤪 Wacky Wednesday for 2024-09-04
Each Wednesday I go through dozens of Slack communities and select the most interesting shared links. This will always be a safe for work list. 🙈
Early Bookcases, Cupboards & Carousels - Lost Art Press
Scholars, translators, transcribers and writers have always needed to have multiple books and other resources within easy reach. Illustrated manuscripts give
Thomas’ Froot Loops™ Mini Bagels | Thomas' Breads
Introducing a favorite breakfast flavor in a whole new format! Try our limited-edition Thomas' Froot Loops Mini Bagels for a burst of fruity flavor in the morning.
Deepwater Submarine Recovers Roman Battering Ram From Ancient Battle
The 2,200-year-old artifact was used in a famous battle between Rome and Carthage as part of the Punic Wars.
The Pentium as a Navajo weaving
Hurrying through the National Gallery of Art five minutes before closing, I passed a Navajo weaving with a complex abstract pattern. Suddenl...
The 15 Weirdest Things We’ve Sent to Space
15 human space oddities.
🔙 Throwback Thursday for 2024-09-05
My early career in the late 1990s was in telecommunications. I worked for a company called Nortel Networks before I pivoted to become a global road warrior / consultant during the .com boom.
Back then a “cloud” on a network diagram was often meant to depict the Sprint frame relay network. Times have changed a bit since then and “cloud computing” became “the cloud” we know today.
Over the years, traditional telecom wireline business (copper telephone lines) fell into a less desirable category as mobile, broadband, high speed fiber optics networks, and cloud computing took hold of investor attention.
If you remember AT&T at SXSW 2009, the mobile carrier was trying but was unable to keep up with all the Internet connected mobile devices. The following year the lessons learned from many thousands of mobile phones trying to reach the Internet in one small city went into motion for SXSW 2010 using many COWs.
Of course, AT&T wasn’t the only mobile carrier. There was also Verizon.
For example, if you were to look at my writing back in 2010, you might have associated Verizon with cutting edge technology. You might have even considered Verizon to be a developer oriented company.
In fact, Verizon got into the cloud business in 2011. Verizon Cloud was born!
Verizon Completes Terremark Acquisition | Featured News Story | Verizon
Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE, NASDAQ: VZ) today closed its previously announced acquisition of Terremark Worldwide, Inc., clearing the way for Ve
So too did AT&T have cloud ambitions, but that’s for another Throwback Thursday. We’ll get there.
However, cloud computing had been pioneered at Amazon, Google, and Microsoft for over a decade and by 2017, Verizon got out of the cloud computing business it had acquired in 2011.
Techmeme: IBM to buy Verizon's cloud and managed hosting services for an undisclosed sum (Liam Tung/ZDNet)
By Liam Tung / ZDNet. View the full context on Techmeme.
Oh, and remember Sprint and that version of the original “cloud”?
Well, $26B later in 2020 dollars…
T-Mobile Completes Merger with Sprint to Create the New T-Mobile - T-Mobile Newsroom
Also, the cloud within the US market is now firmly associated with companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, and a growing number of niche providers from REITs to XaaS players.
Still, within the US market, the largest names associated with telecom became AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.
However, there were many other telecom brands that were operating as well but far below the size of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.
Fast forward to the present… What old is what’s new again.
Techmeme: Verizon agrees to acquire rival telecom operator Frontier Communications for an enterprise value of $20B including debt; Frontier reported $5.8B in 2023 revenue (Christopher Palmeri/Bloomberg)
By Christopher Palmeri / Bloomberg. View the full context on Techmeme.
✅ Final Thoughts Friday for 2024-09-06
As a reminder, I’ve committed to four events for the remainder of this year.
- AI Field Day 5 in Silicon Valley September 9-13, 2024 for Tech Field Day
- Monktoberfest in Portland October 1-4, 2024
- Cloud Field Day 21 in Silicon Valley October 23-25, 2024 for Tech Field Day
- All Things Open in Raleigh October 27-29, 2024 for CLS
Once again, the week in review is about being thankful for new and ongoing client work, catching up with folks I haven’t spoken to for years, and meeting new folks. Gym and hiking continues as I plan to reach personal goals in a list of non-technology projects.
Switching gears back to technology, the bigger tech stories this week seemed to be BGP, Internet Archive, Salesforce + Own(Backup), and YouTube/Google. My thinking is this:
Techmeme: The White House publishes a roadmap to shore up the weak security of the Border Gateway Protocol, which has long been vulnerable to route hijacking (Thomas Claburn/The Register)
By Thomas Claburn / The Register. View the full context on Techmeme.
The thing about BGP and this coverage is that years have passed since the last time this was considered a big deal. By that, I mean the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) published metrics are reaching the 5 years old mark and even got a footnote in the PDF from the White House.
Techmeme: The Internet Archive loses its appeal of a US district court ruling that favored publishers in a copyright dispute over the nonprofit's ebook lending program (Kate Knibbs/Wired)
By Kate Knibbs / Wired. View the full context on Techmeme.
Some pundits have called this the two tier system of justice where it is IA doing something wonderful for humanity vs. well funded “techbro” AI training on anything it wants and asking for forgiveness later. My takeaway is that if IA gets this kind of treatment, the various purveyors of GenAI/LLM training using published materials better save some of that funding, get lawyered up — and quickly, and get ready for the pain train of precedent.
Techmeme: Salesforce agrees to acquire Own Company, which provides data management and protection services, for ~$1.9B in cash; Own was valued at $3.35B in August 2021 (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
By Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.
Not a lot of folks may realize this, but Salesforce never had their own native way of doing back up and recovery until very recently. That's right! Previously, it was only third-party companies and managed service providers that dealt with how to backup, protect, and recover Salesforce data. Many of these providers have expanded or started in other SaaS data management and data protection services. My takeaway is that Salesforce now has, arguably, one of the best of these third-party manage service providers that was and is vastly more successful with Salesforce customers than the native Salesforce Backup and recovery service it launched a year ago. As for Own customers using Own for other SaaS backup and recovery related services… (i.e. possible Salesforce wallet share/shift “competitors” like ServiceNow and Microsoft…) well, that might be another story or possibly a carve out to be determined.
Techmeme: YouTube takes down Tenet Media and four other channels after the US DOJ alleged that Russia was paying US right-wing political influencers to produce content (Gerrit De Vynck/Washington Post)
By Gerrit De Vynck / Washington Post. View the full context on Techmeme.
YouTube has truly amazing content on the one hand and on the other it often seems become a place where you can look up a tame benign topic.. and the feed algorithm will look at the most banal heuristic like an IP address to flood you with awful suggestion published by some not so nice people. So, this is clearly a shocking thing that nobody paying attention was shocked to see confirmed.
Techmeme: The judge in the Google monopoly ruling says he'll take until August 2025 to determine remedies in the case and asks the DOJ to propose fixes by the end of 2024 (Cecilia Kang/New York Times)
By Cecilia Kang / New York Times. View the full context on Techmeme.
Speaking of being shocked, it is probably not shocking that Google monopoly ruling remedies can has been kicked down the road for another year from now.
🔮 Sneak Peak Saturday for 2024-09-07
By Friday, everything seems to be reaching the peak of getting news turned in before a deadline or dread-line. It sometimes seems like we reach a fever pitch in news coverage throughout the week.
Peak 🏔️ vs. Peek 👀
Then there is a trope, cliché, or bromide about slow news days and the quietly mentioned news updates sent on a Friday — to try and sneak it past wider coverage. Or, in a nutshell, peak patronizing publishing.
In that spirit, here are a few stories that you might have missed on the slow news of a Friday.
Insert Let's See Who This Really Is Meme
Techmeme: Meta not disclosing which select creators it pays to post on Threads undermines trust in everyone's motivations, as users assume others are “engagement farming” (Ben Werdmuller/Werd I/O)
By Ben Werdmuller / Werd I/O. View the full context on Techmeme.
Insert Ceiling Cat Meme
Techmeme: Donald Trump says Elon Musk has agreed to lead a government efficiency commission, which would let Musk influence federal agencies that regulate his companies (Wall Street Journal)
From Wall Street Journal. View the full context on Techmeme.
Insert We're All Trying To Find The Guy Who Did This Meme
Techmeme: Leaked documents show an AI upgrade led to an incident where Alexa seemed to favor Kamala Harris over Donald Trump; Amazon says the “error” was “quickly fixed” (Caroline O'Donovan/Washington Post)
By Caroline O'Donovan / Washington Post. View the full context on Techmeme.
Insert That Wasn't Me, That Was Patricia Meme
Techmeme: YouTube takes down Tenet Media and four other channels after the US DOJ alleged that Russia was paying US right-wing political influencers to produce content (Gerrit De Vynck/Washington Post)
By Gerrit De Vynck / Washington Post. View the full context on Techmeme.
Insert Anthony Adams Rubbing Hands Meme
Techmeme: S&P Global announces that Dell and Palantir will join the S&P 500, effective on September 23, 2024; DELL jumps 5%+ and PLTR jumps 7%+ after hours (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
By Jordan Novet / CNBC. View the full context on Techmeme.
Note: Some images via Unsplash
Disclosure
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Cuthrell Consulting LLCAttn: Jay Cuthrell1903 Live Oak St #92Beaufort, NC 28516-0092
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