Weekly Roundup 12th July 2020
Interesting news articles that I read in the past week.
1.Zoom launching hardware products for video conferencing. Hardware As A Service- HAAS
Looks like Zoom is taking the path of a vertically integrated company by building products end-to-end to distinguish itself from other companies? Should be interesting to see how this works. Providing free hardware and then tying up customers to monthly or yearly revenue would be a good business model for any company I guess?
https://blog.zoom.us/zoom-launches-hardware-as-a-service-program/
2.Google has launched a new organization to manage trademarks for open source projects. And not every one is happy.
Google has launched a new organization to manage trademarks for open source projects. It is a bit different and Google gives its own reason for the necessity of different trademark. But not everyone is on-board with the idea and IBM is not very happy with Google going back on its words with Istio, the open-source project to which IBM contributed.
https://developer.ibm.com/components/istio/blogs/istio-google-open-usage-commons/
3. Google’s balloon internet service, Project Loon is finally launching commercially in Kenya
Heard about Google’s Loon project - the service that promised to offer internet to remote parts through balloons. After so many years, the project has come to a reality with Google Loon powering Kenya’s third-largest telecommunication provider. But the financial viability of this service for Google is not very clear though. It is also only today that I got to know that Project Loon has been helping with offering internet service in disaster stuck zones in the last few years.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/world/africa/google-loon-balloon-kenya.html
4. The internet is changing drastically for Hong Kong’s citizens
With China passing a rather unfavourable law on Hong Kong, the country may very well be going the China way behind the firewall and many tech companies would now be pondering as to what to do next.
5. A new world war over technology
Nations and companies around the world are being sucked into a running battle over the future of technology between the United States and China, forcing them to choose sides in a conflict that is fracturing global supply chains and pushing businesses out of lucrative markets.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/10/tech/us-china-global-tech-war-intl-hnk/index.html
6. Sad story of Dell outsourcing everything for a better bottom line and inventing a new competitor
How Dell outsourced everything to improve the bottom line to a small component manufacturer who slowly built learned the tricks of the trade and then built its own PC later and became a competitor to Dell in the process. And that company is Asus.
https://narrative.com.sg/storytelling/blog/storytelling-the-sad-story-of-dell-inc/
7.Storage-on-rent in demand as WFH techies leave Bengaluru
Corona and work from home mean paying rent unnecessarily without using any of the infrastructures. New companies are mushrooming that are offering storage spaces for employees, start-ups and other companies to keep their stuff for rent. Quite an innovative business model.
That’s all for this week.