🌶️ Hot Fudge Sunday for 2024-09-29
This week, I highlight market trends, tech insights, and a nostalgic look back at smartphones.
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. 🙏
(Scroll to the end…)
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 2024-09-23
Reading Recommendation
The software development and DevX market can be hard to keep up with and if you aren’t reading Coté's Wunderkammer, you should be. As for why, the writer behind Coté's Wunderkammer is Michael Coté .
Quick Recap
For Market Monday, I look at the same key indicator that I take from a simple Yahoo Finance webpage each week. It’s how I look at things at the closing bell on Monday.
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 2024-09-24
The numbers and stories caught my eye were global.
Techmeme: Israel Innovation Authority: since October 7, Israeli tech companies have raised $9B, third behind Silicon Valley and NYC; tech is 16% of Israel's employment (Steven Scheer/Reuters)
By Steven Scheer / Reuters. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 🇮🇱 $9B makes sense if you consider deal flow and technology are global and not exclusively about the US market as well as the long running cybersecurity track record of Israel.
Techmeme: Akur8, which uses AI to automate the generation of insurance pricing models, raised a $120M Series C led by One Peak, bringing its total raised to $180M (FinTech Global)
From FinTech Global. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 🇫🇷 Speaking of outside the US markets, the rendering of actuarial insights technologies are going to be changing with these AI times and few countries offer the uniquely simplified intellectual property protections of France.
Techmeme: Phoenix-based Virtuous, which offers a CRM and a marketing platform to help nonprofits increase donations, raised $100M from Susquehanna Growth Equity (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)
By Marina Temkin / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 🇺🇸 It is fascinating to see a large raise for a nonprofits enablement platform in the United States that isn’t (yet?) owned by Blackbaud.
🤪 Wacky Wednesday for 2024-09-25
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. 🙈
Lab-grown diamonds - Works in Progress
Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and vastly cheaper than mined diamonds. Beating nature took decades of hard graft and millions of pounds of pressure.
The First Nuclear Clock Will Test if Fundamental Constants Change | Quanta Magazine
An ultra-precise measurement of a transition in the hearts of thorium atoms gives physicists a tool to probe the forces that bind the universe.
Caffeinated Ramen Noodles Are Here
Nippon launched Boost Noodles, Taipa-style ramen to solve the age-old problem of how you can eat ramen while also simultaneously participating in an online gaming battle all night.
The buttons on Zenith’s original ‘clicker’ TV remote were a mechanical marvel - The Verge
The Space Command fixed problems we still live with today.
Barcelona is turning subway trains into power stations | Grist
Barcelona is using the regenerative braking of its subways to power trains, stations, and neighborhood EV chargers. Could New York do it too?
🔙 Throwback Thursday for 2024-09-26
In these modern times of $1000+ smart phones, it is interesting to look back 15 years to when an iPhone 3GS sold 1M units in a weekend.
It was also just 15 years ago that you could get a Palm Pre which sold… only 0.1M units in an entire week.
The Palm Pre ran webOS. Today, webOS is running on 150M+ devices that are much larger than a phone.
The iPhone 3GS ran iOS. By comparison, iOS is now running on 2B+ devices ranging from the size of a phone to the size of a tablet… but tvOS is probably running on less than ~100M devices connected to flat panel TV screens.
✅ Final Thoughts Friday for 2024-09-27
As of this update, I am still wrapping up publishing my AI Field Day 5 delegate notes on Keysight, Integrail, Cisco, VMware, Elastic, Arista, and Enfabrica.
Once again, I am thankful for new and ongoing client work and catching up with past co-workers. Weather this week meant more indoors time for digging into my non-technology projects.
The biggest stories this week that caught me eye:
The market for selling $1 for $0.74 is massive.
More companies will be compelled to tell you that you own nothing.
Open source can take steps forward in dramatic and different ways.
Techmeme: Docs: OpenAI's monthly revenue hit $300M in August, up 1,700% since 2023 beginning; it expects ~$3.7B in 2024 sales but may lose ~$5B, and had 350M MAUs in June (New York Times)
From New York Times. View the full context on Techmeme.
Techmeme: California Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 2426, which forces digital stores to tell customers they are getting a revocable license when “buying” digital media (Emma Roth/The Verge)
By Emma Roth / The Verge. View the full context on Techmeme.
Techmeme: Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg: WP Engine is a “cancer to WordPress” and profits off the confusion between the WordPress project and WP Engine's paid services (Paul Sawers/TechCrunch)
By Paul Sawers / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.
🔮 Sneak Peak Saturday for 2024-09-28
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: Current and former staff say OpenAI has rushed product announcements and safety testing, lost its lead over rivals, and Altman is detached from the day-to-day (Deepa Seetharaman/Wall Street Journal)
By Deepa Seetharaman / Wall Street Journal. View the full context on Techmeme.
Insert Ceiling Cat Meme
Techmeme: The US DOJ charges two Russians for operating $1B+ money laundering services for cybercriminals; one is accused of operating the Joker's Stash marketplace (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)
By Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer. View the full context on Techmeme.
Insert We're All Trying To Find The Guy Who Did This Meme
Techmeme: Microsoft details how it has overhauled its controversial AI-powered Recall feature, including making it opt-in and giving users an option to uninstall (Tom Warren/The Verge)
By Tom Warren / The Verge. View the full context on Techmeme.
Insert That Wasn't Me, That Was Patricia Meme
Techmeme: Source: Apple is no longer in talks to participate in an OpenAI funding round that is expected to raise as much as $6.5B (Wall Street Journal)
From Wall Street Journal. View the full context on Techmeme.
Insert Anthony Adams Rubbing Hands Meme
Techmeme: Stripe data: AI startups took a median 11 months to hit $1M in annualized revenue after their first sales, vs. 15 months for the previous gen of SaaS startups (Madhumita Murgia/Financial Times)
By Madhumita Murgia / Financial Times. View the full context on Techmeme.
Note: Images via Unsplash
Disclosure
I am linking to my disclosure.