September 15, 2024

🌶️ Hot Fudge Sunday for 2024-09-15

This week's edition dives into tech market insights, funding highlights, and fun, wacky finds!

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.)

🙏 A big thank you to our sponsors. 🙏
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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.

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Hot Fudge Daily Digest

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📈 Markets Monday for 2024-09-09

Reading Recommendation

The technology market can be hard to keep up with and if you aren’t reading Spyglass, you should be. As for why, the writer behind Spyglass is M.G. Siegler.

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

🔥 Hot Takes Tuesday for 2024-09-10

The numbers this week are big numbers.

The numbers are also spread across funds, funding, and M&A.

These five stories caught my eye.

Techmeme: Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström's Atomico raised $1.24B for its sixth batch of new funds, including a $754M growth-stage fund and a $485M early-stage fund (Ryan Browne/CNBC)

By Ryan Browne / CNBC. View the full context on Techmeme.

💰 + 🤖 That is a lot of capital to deploy and I wonder if this means Graphcore adjacent companies within the EU will see new infusions soon.

Techmeme: Safe Superintelligence, co-founded by ex-OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, raised $1B from a16z, Sequoia, DST, and others, sources say at a $5B valuation (Reuters)

From Reuters. View the full context on Techmeme.

💰 + 🤖 The Happy Fun Ball skit from SNL comes to mind but you have to wonder if adding the word “safe” to the name will jinx it.

Techmeme: Source: Sequoia Capital completed its $861M purchase of Stripe shares from Sequoia limited partners last week; Stripe didn't receive any proceeds (Dan Primack/Axios)

By Dan Primack / Axios. View the full context on Techmeme.

💰 + 💳 Stripe continues to defy patterns and I can’t wait to see what happens next even if what happens has nothing to do with IPOs.

Techmeme: Sources: Tokyo-based chip startup Rapidus seeks to raise ~$696M from existing and new investors by issuing new shares to finance its chip development efforts (Taro Fuse/Bloomberg)

By Taro Fuse / Bloomberg. View the full context on Techmeme.

💰 + 🍪 The balkanization and supply chain resilience around silicon is going to alter our understandings of “cheap as chips” and just how far intelligence will press to the edge of the network.

Techmeme: Glean, which uses AI to offer unified search across apps used at a company, raised $260M+ at a $4.6B valuation, after raising $200M+ at $2.2B in February 2024 (Amy Thomson/Bloomberg)

By Amy Thomson / Bloomberg. View the full context on Techmeme.

💰 + 🤖 Considering that agentic A.I. is already shifting to repackaging as “useful” A.I., these funding levels are probably in line with the expectations and burn rate that will be required to realize even 10% of those expectations.

🤪 Wacky Wednesday for 2024-09-11

Each Wednesday I go through dozens of Slack communities.

I then select the most interesting shared links.

This will always be a safe for work list. 🙈

Joey Chestnut Eats Entire Cast Of ‘Stranger Things’ In Under 10 Minutes - The Onion

LAS VEGAS—In a triumphant victory over longtime rival Takeru Kobayashi during a live-streamed Netflix special, competitive eater Joey Chestnut reportedly ate the entire cast of Stranger Things in under 10 minutes Thursday. “There were times in there when I didn’t know if I’d be able to choke down another one of those kids, but I just […]

Why There Are Only Two Escalators In All Of… | Cowboy State Daily

When it comes to escalators, Wyoming’s two — both in Casper — equal the number of the state’s U.S. senators and national parks, and are 255 times fewer…

The man who put Doom in a Lego brick is now playing it on a volumetric voxel display - The Verge

From “barely 3D” to “more 3D than most 3D games.”

tree.fm – Tune Into Forests From Around The World 🌳🔈

People around the world recorded the sounds of their forests, so you can escape into nature, while in lockdown or unable to travel. Use this site to chill, meditate or do some digital shinrin-yoku.

Google Is Losing Its Status As a Verb - Business Insider

Google's status as a verb is slipping among Gen Z, who prefer 'searching' over 'Googling', signaling a shift in how the internet giant is perceived.

🔙 Throwback Thursday for 2024-09-12

Telecom and the .com boom (and bust) days were part of my early career. 25 years ago, I was able to participate in an early approximation of a “cloud” by Intel that was called an Application Service Provider (ASP).

Yes. Intel.

In late 1999, Intel got into the web hosting business by launching Intel Online Services (IOS).

See if this part sounds familiar:

Second-Generation Hosting
Intel Online Services' main focus is its second-generation hosting, in which standard, hardware and software is integrated, validated, and managed by Intel Online Services. Using this approach, Intel Online Services provides not just the building, power and network connection - called co-location hosting - but also the servers, operating system software and basic applications. By providing and managing this second-generation hardware and software platform, Intel Online Services can offer a higher degree of predictability and reliability. This can also reduce the cost for customers, since they don't have to hire IT staffs, buy computers, configure software, or carry out other costly tasks. Intel Online Services, Inc., is an Intel subsidiary that intends to be a leading supplier of hosted Internet services, business applications, and e-Commerce services worldwide.

Source: Intel News Release, 2000

By 2000, IOS announced it would allocate $1B to bring 10 Internet Data Centers (IDCs) online.

By early 2002, IOS had signed customers with iconic brands such as Sony, eBay, BP, Tour de France, EMI, MSN, American Stock Exchange, Discovery Channel, TLC and Animal Planet, BBC, and others with partners like EMC that provided technology for hosting “multiple terabytes of storage” that seem rather quaint today but was bleeding edge a quarter century ago.

However, life moves fast and so did the .com boom. By late 2002, IOS was no more.

Of course “cloud” became wildly successful. Even conservative projections easily cross over into the trillions ($T) for the “cloud” market.

Today, A.I. is taking up a lot of the conversations about “cloud”.

Lately, Intel has apparently been finding what else to shed.

Techmeme: A look at the tough options before Intel's board, including scaling back factory projects, selling off subsidiaries, or splitting Intel's core operations (Ian King/Bloomberg)

By Ian King / Bloomberg. View the full context on Techmeme.

✅ Final Thoughts Friday for 2024-09-13

As of this update, my delegate duties at AI Field Day 5 for Tech Field Day are done but my notes will be published in the coming days / weeks. Over three days, I and fellow delegates took in updates from Keysight, Integrail, Cisco, VMware, Elastic, Arista, and Enfabrica as well as a Delegate Ignite Talk series and Delegate Roundtable!

I would like to give a HUGE shout out to the team that makes Tech Field Day possible and to Futurum Group as well the sponsoring companies for making the event possible. 🙏 🙏 🙏

What’s next?

1. Monktoberfest in Portland October 1-4, 2024
2. Cloud Field Day 21 in Silicon Valley October 23-25, 2024 for Tech Field Day
3. All Things Open in Raleigh October 27-29, 2024 for CLS

Once again, I am thankful for new and ongoing client work, meeting folks in person that I’d previously only known online, and catching up with past co-workers. While gym and hiking continues, my list of non-technology projects took a break this week due being on the road.

As I indicated, AI Field Day was a lot to take in this week. I’ll share more once I’ve consolidated my notes.

🔮 Sneak Peak Saturday for 2024-09-14

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: The White House plans to curb the “overuse and abuse” of the de minimis loophole used by Shein and Temu, which exempts packages worth $800 or less from tariffs (CNBC)

From CNBC. View the full context on Techmeme.

Insert Ceiling Cat Meme

Techmeme: Meta restarts training its AI systems on UK users' public Facebook and Instagram posts, having “incorporated regulatory feedback” to be “even more transparent” (Paul Sawers/TechCrunch)

By Paul Sawers / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.

Insert We're All Trying To Find The Guy Who Did This Meme

Techmeme: Some former CrowdStrike employees say they raised concerns about executives rushing deadlines and quality checks, more than a year before the July 2024 outage (Rachyl Jones/Semafor)

By Rachyl Jones / Semafor. View the full context on Techmeme.

Insert That Wasn't Me, That Was Patricia Meme

Techmeme: Elon Musk calls Australia's government “fascists” after it unveiled a bill to fine online platforms up to 5% of their global revenue for enabling misinformation (Renju Jose/Reuters)

By Renju Jose / Reuters. View the full context on Techmeme.

Insert Anthony Adams Rubbing Hands Meme

Techmeme: Sources: Sam Altman told OpenAI's staff that the company plans to move away from being controlled by a nonprofit sometime in 2025 (Kali Hays/Fortune)

By Kali Hays / Fortune. View the full context on Techmeme.

Note: Images via Unsplash

Disclosure

I am linking to my disclosure.