Writing Review for Week of Dec 17, 2018

We are fast approaching Christmas - hope everyone has a great holiday season.

With today’s IPO sinking, a year of highs and lows for SoftBank

A very comprehensive overview of one of the largest newsmakers this year. SoftBank is a telco, a venture fund, and owns huge swaths of the infrastructure companies that make smartphones work. So its actions and strategy this year are critical to understand for Silicon Valley. Some great news around their assets like ARM, but a tough debt situation is going to make 2019 a tough year with stocks looking primed to go down.

The GPS wars have begun

GPS is a crucial technology for smartphones, but the United States has had a practical de-facto monopoly over the technology. Now, a bunch of countries including China, India, Japan, and the UK are exploring building out their own competitors. That puts smartphone designers like Apple in a bind — does it create separate units for each of these markets, or does it fall behind local players on one of the smartphone’s most valuable features.

Layer1 wants to thrive in the age of the crypto crash

Crypto prices have crashed this year, leaving detritus behind. Layer1 has an approach it sees as not only financially-sound, but poised to take advantage of this bear market.

Image by jun560 used under Creative Commons