Alphabet - Goodbye blue sky pt Ii
It looks like SoftBank needs to really beef up its robotics expertise if it wants to be a player in this space which is what these two acquisitions should start to accomplish.
Alphabet has reached a deal to sell both Boston Dynamics and Schaft to SoftBank leaving it more focused on its core business of collection and monetisation of Internet data. Boston Dynamics is a robotics company that specialises in robots that are autonomous as far as navigating and adjusting to their immediate environment. SoftBank is also acquiring Schaft from Google which is a humanoid robotics company that was spun out of the University of Tokyo. These robots can move around with relative ease but how they would be able generate value for Alphabet shareholders was always unclear. At the end of the day Alphabet is a data and analytics company whose objective is to categorise and understand every piece of digital information that users generate and to sell those insights to marketers. Every other piece of hardware that Alphabet makes from Google Home to Pixel and Internet Balloons, have the capacity to collect huge amounts of data and thereby generate can value to the core business.
Read more...The strategy around the smart home is bang on and it has created the right product
Home is where the heart is. Whilst not fans of Essential Products’ phone, the strategy around the smart home is bang on and it has created the right product. The phone simply does not do anything particularly special in a brutal commodity market and given the company’s overall strategy, we see no real need why it can’t make use of the phones of others. However, the Home product is something else, and although it may not succeed, it has a good chance. This is because, has been designed to explicitly address the two biggest problems with home automation that exist today.
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