- WeWork culls 3% of its workforce for ‘performance-related’ reasons. Although its bonds are trading at a lower offer price year to year, Softbank committed an additional $2 billion earlier this January, bringing its total investments up to $10 billion.
SpaceX successfully launches Crew Dragon in an uncrewed flight test. It is the first of SpaceX’s spacecrafts meant to transfer humans to and from the International Space Station. On 3 Mar morning, it is scheduled to dock to the station, then complete a return trip to Earth on 8 Mar. Musk indicates concern on how it would perform during its high-speed re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.
- While the wedding industry brings in big money, tech companies find it hard to disrupt. One of the reasons acquisition cost, which recurs cyclically. The other is the inertia to use tech for merely one aspect of wedding planning. Of these, tech companies with carefully selected value propositions have thrived (albeit in limited numbers). The Knot – a wedding planning website, and now Zola: an e-commerce platform for couples and wedding goers to register for products from hundreds of brands. Success can partially be attributed to good timing: it came about the time when drop shipping was picking up.
- Tech innovations in law include: AI that reads through all case law and provides lawyers with a collection of cases required to develop legal positions (BakerHostetler); tech to enable data breach readiness, cybersecurity (Rajah & Tann Asia); operational automation like e-filing and e-billing, and data analytics (Jerrold Soh, Lex Quanta). Personally I find data security and analytics the most needed and willingly adopted aspects of legaltech. Note to read up more on this.
- Being an ex-avid user of ClassPass, I’ve always been curious about CP’s profit model and their value proposition to studios and users. This is a pretty comprehensive article that highlights how CP adjusts its offerings to increase its margins. I think as long as CP continues its path to data sophistication, and inform their pricing decisions based on solid data analysis, it has a great chance at survival and even profit.
- An interview with Michael Chui (MGI partner) on using AI for social good. Many of these revolve around disaster relief. He believes that, most of the time, the data exists – even in traditional forms (kept in a database). The challenge is in making it accessible for use.
Q.bit 