Information from the IPO dossier of Rockley Photonics, a British startup led by Andrew Rickman that develops health parameter sensors, provides insight into its relationship with Apple — its main customer — and leads The Telegraph to speculate that the next Apple Watches could incorporate additional sensors to measure glucose, blood alcohol levels and blood pressure.
These sensors, coupled with existing heart rate monitoring, electrocardiograms, algorithms for determining certain arrhythmias and calculation of blood oxygen concentration, would turn the Apple Watch into a “doctor on your wrist”, enabling comprehensive monitoring of critical health parameters for many patients. This would make…
Writing two days after an election for control of the Madrid regional government, it’s depressing to report that the issue of the Spanish capital’s chronic air pollution and other environmental issues have once again been overwhelmingly absent from the debate.
The green agenda has become one of the most important policy statements in defining how we will live in cities, but given so many people’s ignorance of the issues, most politicians prefer to avoid the subject, seeing it as a vote loser.
Practically every politician who knows what’s going on in the world should be raising issues such as the…
Attitudes globally toward big tech seem to be shifting. Until now, the European Union had pretty much set the regulation benchmark, while the United States and China have been much more tolerant of the excessive growth of the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon, or their Chinese equivalents, Alibaba, Baidu or Tencent, among others. …
Among other things, Amazon’s 2021 first quarter results confirm its long-standing strategy, which I first talked about early in 2018 and touched on again toward the middle of 2019: vertical integration as a logistics operator.
The company revealed an 80% increase in its capital investments earmarked for logistics-related operations, both in its fleets of vans, planes and trucks, as well as new warehouses, with the aim of becoming its own end-to-end logistics operator, which would be a huge coup for both private courier companies and, in many countries, national mail operators. …
Verizon is divesting itself of those once-proud symbols of the internet of the ’90s, AOL and Yahoo!, which it picked up at bargain prices compared to the valuations they reached in their heyday with the idea of becoming an advertising behemoth. After selling the pair for less than half of what it paid for them ($4.4 billion for AOL in 2015 and $4.5 billion for Yahoo! in 2017), Verizon announces that it will do what telecom companies should do, and focus on building its 5G network.
The $5 billion Verizon will receive from Apollo Global Management for what’s left of…
A great article in Harvard Business Review, “Don’t let platforms commoditize your business”, expands on my longstanding advice to companies, executives and students: attractive as it may seem to use an established online platform for selling online or better reach for your content or brand, it makes more sense to build up your own online presence and to use them only as a way to support what you do, not as a replacement.
Over the years, moreover, I have seen time and again that when you are completely dependent on a platform, you are not working for yourself, but for…
The recent launch of Airtags and iOS version 14.5, which uses Apple Watch to unlock an iPhone when the user is wearing a mask, again highlights Apple’s vocation for creating product ecosystems where the differentiating feature is the interconnection between different elements of the range.
The feeling of using not one product, but an ecosystem made up of several devices that “talk” to each other is by no means new. …
Few stories in the business world are really about good guys and bad guys. There are always nuances, shades of gray, different interpretations that tilt the analysis one way or the other.
But no matter how hard I probe Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) initiative, launched on Monday on iPhones updated with iOS 14.5, all I see is crystal clear, without nuances of any kind: Apple is trying to give users choices so they can make decisions about their privacy and about the exploitation of their data. …
Launched in 2017, Substack is a service for monetizing newsletters sent via email. Basically, it’s a platform with some similarities to Medium with work by people who write about the topics you’re interested in to whom you can pay a subscription for a minimum of $5 a month or $30 a year, which writers receive in full, minus the company’s 10% commission.
In the first year of its launch, Substack attracted 25,000 users who began to use it to pay for their content subscriptions. That number has since grown to 500,000, leading many authors, in many cases well-known, to leave…
On April 17, when NASA revealed the result of its competition to develop a spacecraft to take astronauts back to the moon, it was clear that Elon Musk’s strategy of leveraging economies of scale had passed yet another milestone.
The competition pitted three proposals: Dynetics, a regular supplier to the Department of Defense; Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ aerospace company, which had partnered with usual suspects in the aerospace world like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper; and Musk’s SpaceX.
Usually, NASA chooses more than one company for this type of arrangement, so as to cover its back and avoid any…
Enrique Dans
Professor of Innovation at IE Business School, blogger at enriquedans.com and Senior Contributor at Forbes
