Things Have Changed (2025)

16/03/2022

Apple's AirPods Business Is Bigger Than You Think 🤯

Bigger than some really big companies!

The Cupertino giant sold 27 million pairs of its newest version of the AirPods, for a total of 90 million sold during the holiday quarter of 2021, according to a report over the weekend from top Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of TFI Asset Management Limited.

The sales will translate to 20% year-over-year revenue growth Apple’s wearable gadget business, Kuo said.

Estimated Airpods Annual Rev = $18 billion
Airbnb Annual Rev = $5.3 billion
Snap Annual Rev = $4.1 billion
Shopify Annual Rev = $4.2 billion

14/03/2022

Can The Mouse Beat Netflix In The Streaming Wars?

Total streaming subscribers:
- Netflix: 221.8M (growing 9% y/y)
- Disney: 196.4M (growing 34% y/y)

Netflix is still the king of streaming, but Disney’s most recent quarter shows its all-important streaming service is adding subscribers at a much faster rate than Netflix.

10/03/2022

Why is battery storage key to reaching net zero? 🔋

Governments and Companies across the world, have set ambitious goals to achieve net zero emissions in Transportation, Heating and Cooling and even the Industrial sectors by the middle of the 21st century. This move to renewable energy means that the future of batteries is inextricably linked to the overall energy transition.

Batteries are a key enabling technology, and in many cases considered the 'glue of the clean-energy economy”. The electrified world requires batteries to store and power the future, and from what we've seen in the past few decades, there's lots to be optimistic about.

Our latest season is one of the most hopeful climate-related deep dives we’ve had in a while.
The first episode features Nicholas Yiu and Yen Yeh, two of the most credible voices within the climate tech space.

Recently, Nick and Yen, through their organizations Intercalation and BatteryBits (Volta Foundation) have published the 2021 Battery Report, which is an accessible overview of the latest battery research, policy and business landscape.

07/03/2022

Battery costs have plummeted 📉

According to BloombergNEF, Lithium-ion battery pack prices, which were above $1,200 per kilowatt-hour in 2010, have fallen 89% in real terms to $132/kWh in 2021.

 Continuing cost reductions bode well for the future of electric vehicles, which rely on lithium-ion technology. However, the impact of rising commodity prices and increased costs for key materials such as electrolytes has put pressure on the industry in the second half of 2021.

Continued investment in R&D alongside capacity expansion across the supply chain will help to improve battery technology and reduce costs over the next decade.

01/03/2022

What Technologies are Essential to a Zero Emission Future? 🔋

Governments and Companies across the world, have set ambitious goals to achieve net zero emissions in Transportation, Heating and Cooling and even the Industrial sectors by the middle of the 21st century. This move to renewable energy means that the future of batteries is inextricably linked to the overall energy transition.

Batteries are a key enabling technology, and in many cases considered the 'glue of the clean-energy economy”. The electrified world requires batteries to store and power the future, and from what we've seen in the past few decades, there's lots to be optimistic about.

Our latest season is one of the most hopeful climate-related deep dives we’ve had in a while.
The first episode features Nicholas Yiu and Yen Yeh, two of the most credible voices within the climate tech space.

Recently, Nick and Yen, through their organizations Intercalation and BatteryBits (Volta Foundation) have published the 2021 Battery Report, which is an accessible overview of the latest battery research, policy and business landscape.

25/02/2022

Microsoft - The Netflix of Gaming?

Microsoft's all you can play subscription gaming service, Game Pass, has been a big hit!

23/02/2022

The EV revolution is gaining steam ⚡️

The International Energy Agency released a new report looking at car sales around the world and confirmed that EV market share jumped from 4.11% in 2020 to 8.57% in 2021.

The agency wrote about the impressive electric vehicle growth rate over the last 3 years:

Growth has been particularly impressive over the last three years, even as the global pandemic shrank the market for conventional cars and as manufacturers started grappling with supply chain bottlenecks.

EVs account for all the net growth in global car sales in 2021.

21/02/2022

Used car prices have surged 45% in a year!

19/02/2022

Facebook has lost nearly $400 Billion in value in just 6 months 📉

Meta’s shares are down more than 45% from it's peak in September 2021. Specifically, the company is facing headwinds to its core business model of online advertising.

Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) announced that it is following Apple (AAPL) in introducing privacy rules for their mobile operating systems. This would put a dent in digital advertising and was a factor behind the biggest selloff in Wall Street history in terms of value erased for a company.

18/02/2022

Cyber Attacks were shockingly brazen in 2021, targeting everything from hospitals, schools, to critical infrastructure at an alarming rate.

As more of the economy goes digital, individuals, businesses, and even governments are increasingly vulnerable to cybercriminals. Major corporations such as Colonial Pipeline and JBS USA had to dole out millions and millions of dollars in ransom payments, after they found their systems hacked and seized. This prompted governments across the globe to step up their approach in fighting computer crimes.

As individuals and organizations struggle to safeguard their data, we at THC break down the state of cybercrime over the past few years, the mammoth payments to sophisticated coordinated cyber criminals and also mention a few nifty everyday "cyber hygiene' practices to protect yourselves from these blatant digital crimes.

16/02/2022

Households and businesses face rocketing costs this year 🛢

The cost of oil has increased by a staggering 60% in the last 12 months amid ongoing global tensions and oil production struggling to keep pace.

The rise has been driven by growing demand for crude following the easing of Covid-19 travel restrictions, as oil production among the world’s biggest suppliers has struggled to keep pace. Tensions between Ukraine and Russia, which is the world’s third-biggest oil producer, have also fueled higher oil prices.

Some estimates expect crude prices to hit $120 a barrel, which would break historical records!

14/02/2022

Gaming makes a lot of money. Tech wants a piece of it 🎮

In the last decade, the gaming industry has been smashing Hollywood’s earnings out of the park! Just in 2021, the Global “Games Market” had a whopping $180BN in revenue. In fact, Gaming is bigger than Hollywood and the music industry combined.

Top games are earning more than the big blockbusters. The top sellers include Grand Theft Auto V, Red Dead Redemption Two, Fall Out 4 and the Call of Duty franchise. Looking into the numbers...
The Grand Theft Auto V game has raked in more than $6BN, according to Marketwatch.
Compare that to Avatar, the highest grossing movie ever at $2.8BN.

As a result, Video game companies have become hot commodities and we break down the feeding frenzy that has taken over the gaming industry

Link in Bio!

12/02/2022

Amazon is a major force in the ad industry!

Amazon Ads generated $31.2 billion in revenue in 2021, with fourth-quarter sales rising 32%, according to the retailer’s fourth-quarter earnings statement.

This is still small by Amazon standards, representing just 7% of total revenue in the 4Q, according to the company’s earnings statement.

What's staggering is that, advertising gives Amazon twice the revenue that physical stores do, and it’s more sizable than the company’s subscription services, which include Prime.

With Google reporting blowout ad numbers as well, it proves that search advertising is truly the best and most profitable form of advertising.

09/02/2022

There's been a data revolution in sports in the past few years...

From the Oakland A’s & Houston Rockets in American sports to European football heavyweights like Liverpool, Barcelona, and Bayern Munich, sports teams have increasingly caught the data bug.

They have sharpened their technology focus, and have begun collecting huge swarths of data to not only analyze past events but also predict future trends with greater accuracy.

This week on , and spoke with , Co-Founder & CEO of , a technology company on a mission to build the future of racket sports, specifically, Badminton.

Badminton is played by 300 million people around the world, and Kari was actually a professional badminton player for over 3 years before embarking on his entrepreneurial journey. Today, Kari and his team believe technology can empower players, coaches, and fans with better performance insights and greater social experiences.

Tune in to our latest episode to learn more about Kari's journey and how data analysis is changing the sport of badminton.

Link in bio!

28/01/2022

As reported by Axios, bogus cryptocurrency investments led to an unprecedented increase in online scams last year, according to new data from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

Cryptocurrency is an easy target because while it's surging in popularity, there's still a lot of confusion about how it works. This is especially true among younger people who are digitally savvy but less financially literate.

Investment-related scams on social media represented 37% of all reported losses, followed by romance scams and online shopping scams. "People send money, often cryptocurrency, on promises of huge returns, but end up empty handed," the FTC writes.

While investment scams are by far the most costly for consumers, they aren't the most common. The greatest volume of complaints filed came from rackets related to online shopping.

Fraud cases from social media now account for roughly 25% of all fraud cases in the U.S., up 18x from 2017. Last year, more than 95,000 people reported losing around $770 million to fraud schemes on social media.

The FTC highlighted the role Facebook and Instagram play in social media fraud, noting that more than a third of people who reported losing money to an online romance scam said it began on one of those platforms. Nearly 9 out of 10 named Facebook or Instagram as the platform in which online shopping scams related to undelivered goods originated, the agency said.

27/01/2022

Apple is planning a new service that will let small businesses accept payments directly on their iPhones without any extra hardware.

The company has been working on the new feature since around 2020, after paying $100 million for a Canadian startup called Mobeewave.

In order to accept payments on an iPhone today, merchants need to use payment terminals that plug in or communicate with the phone via Bluetooth. The upcoming feature will instead turn the iPhone into a payment terminal, letting users such as food trucks and hair stylists accept payments with the tap of a credit card or another iPhone onto the back of their device.

The move could impact payments providers that rely on Apple’s iPhones to facilitate sales, such as Square (Block Inc.), which dominates the market. If Apple requires merchants to use Apple Pay or its own payment processing system, that could compete directly with Square.

Shares of Block fell 3.4% as the market opened in New York on Thursday; Apple advanced 2.1%.

Apple may begin rolling out the feature via a software update in the coming months, the people said.

26/01/2022

Yikes... things aren't looking good in the public markets 😰

24/01/2022

2021 was a breakthrough year for crypto assets…

We’ve seen Bitcoin hit multiple new all-time high prices and more institutional buy-in from major companies. Coinbase went public. Even the U.S. government has increasingly expressed interest in new regulations for cryptocurrency.

All the while, people’s interest in crypto has skyrocketed; it’s a hot topic not only among investors but in popular culture too, thanks to everyone from long-standing investors like Elon Musk to that kid from your high school on Facebook.

So what changed? “Productization” of crypto.

Crypto is a much larger ecosystem that goes beyond Bitcoin as a “store of value”, which has been the prevailing crypto-ownership narrative.

With decentralized finance or DeFi, for example, a user may transact, borrow, or lend using an interface that is increasingly closer to that of a traditional banking app. The industry is on its way to provide user-friendly products from base layer complexities.

We’re seeing real use cases and adoption of blockchain beyond mere price speculation as blockchain technology is used to disrupt multiple industries.

What's been fascinating to see is the adoption in developing countries. In a study done by Blockchain Analysis company Chainalysis, worldwide adoption of crypto jumps over 880% with huge uptick in cryptocurrency usage in emerging markets.

Corporations too made big bets on the blockchain in 2021. Visa moved to allow payment settlements using cryptocurrency with PayPal & Venmo following suit. But the big news that sent shockwaves across the traditional and crypto markets was when Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors, revealed that it had allocated a sizable portion, $1.5 billion of its balance sheet to Bitcoin.

To dive deeper into the subject, tune into our latest podcast episode with and

Things Have Changed