Hej, last week posted several question marks about how the tech space and especially the Swedish one is doing right now.
Some good comments were provided by Swedish Financial News magazine Dagens Industri’s journalist Jonas Leijonhufvud on how the private tech companies are loosing ground in valuations as well as revenues and profitability – yet the ones that go public outperform the index by multiples – a reason for caution? DiDigital
Tech
– One third of all Google searches are now for local results making Google bring ads to Google Maps SearchEngineLand
– Twilio – the mobile communications API partner goes public with this S-1 filing and shows some powerful data on its customers in the same
– WSJ speaks to how start-ups make it without venture capital
– Swedish Kivra brings in another SEK 50M in funding DiDigital
– Nordic VC funds beat the public index in 2015 DiDigital
– Tesla’s Model 3 won’t get free Supercharging Recharge
– Uber raised another (!) USD 3.5Bn from Saudi Government fund WSJ
– Swedish Qlicktech went public on the NASDAQ DiDigital
– Walmart teams with Lyft and Uber for grocery delivery test Fortune – now this is potentially huge for the three of them and worse for Amazon and Google
– Nest founder Tony Fadell is leaving Google two years after the acquisition WSJ
– Norway to ban sales of fueled cars in 2025 Twitter @elonmusk
– Snapchat (150M) now has more DAUs than Twitter (est. 140M) Bloomberg
And some of the cutbacks of last week in the Swedish Tech space:
– Schibsted to close the business of Mobilio acquired 6 months ago DiDigital
– Widespace retract expansion plans, fire 30 of its 220 employees and aim for profitability DiDigital
– Brisk to close its business Breakit
Media
– Apple opens up Siri with SDK to develop rival to Amazon’s Echo TheInformation
– The newsletter startup theSkimm run by former NBC-producers Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin raised USD 8M in Series B funding TechCrunch
– American ambassador wife in Sweden Natalia Brzezinski fronts Daniel Ek and Ash Pournori’s event Symposium Stockholm next week in Stockholm Breakit
– The first real review of Oculus Rift by TheVerge
– Mikael Persbrandt to stop his joint-venture 13 won’t become a venture capitalist Breakout
– Spotify hosted its #CelebrationX last week in Stockholm Breakit bringing the whole firm to the city
– Instagram will implement algorithmic feeds for all users Instagram
– 22% of the 1.9Bn mobile smartphone users actively used ad blockers in 2015 PageFairReport
– Ericsson released its 2016 Mobility Report stating video will account for 70% of mobile traffic in 2021 Ericsson
