The Lookback, Issue 3

Linkedin IPOs, Facebook IPOs, Lenovo buys Motorola

The Lookback, Issue 3
(As usual, find out what this is in the last part of this post)

Volume 1 Issue 3: 20 May 2016

A look back, to learn what’s next. By Augur.

The tech world is naturally attracted to novelty. But all too often, this makes it easy to lose perspective. How can we understand the importance of the events of today without considering those that got us here?

Every seven days, we take a look at this week’s news in previous years to see what we can learn. Feedback to augur+lookback@augur.london


2011

Amazon.com Says Kindle E-Book Sales Surpass Printed Books
Amazon.com Inc., the largest online retailer, said sales of electronic books have overtaken those of printed versions…

Not featured in this piece: the fact Amazon has run this story in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012.

LinkedIn: Biggest Internet IPO Since Google
LinkedIn and its investors are selling $352.8 million worth of stock in its IPO, marking the Facebook-for-work as the…

Five years later, Feb 2016 saw the stock plummet on poor forecasts — but by April, it was on a PR offensive again,

Lady Gaga hits record TEN MILLION followers
Celebrities who bombard fans with Twitter updates are likely to have shorter careers than those who maintain an aura of…

Just goes to show the change of scale with social networks now. She’s at about 60M on Twitter now, 17M on Instagram — and 61M on Facebook.


2012

Facebook valued at $104bn as share price unveiled
Facebook has priced its shares ahead of one of the most eagerly-anticipated share flotations in recent stock market…
Facebook shares close 11% below flotation price
Shares in Facebook closed well below the price at which they were floated amid doubts that the newly-listed company can…

From the time: “The challenge is this will sully the long-term brand of Facebook, and in five years time people will look back on the IPO and have a negative connotation and none of that is good for the Facebook brand and the Facebook service itself.”

The stock has climbed to nearly 3x that opening day now.


2013

Apple 'among largest tax avoiders in US'
Apple has been accused of being "among America's largest tax avoiders". A Senate committee said Apple had used "a…

One revealing trend for this exercise is that these tax issues are coming up year after year, week after week. First with rumblings in these more distant years, then with concessions from the tech giants more recently.

Google Glass review
But at Google's I/O conference in San Francisco, a number of things are obvious. When enough people have Glass that it…

4/5 stars. “The effect is so uncool as to make a cynic wonder if Glass is somewhat over-hyped. But Google’s idea is obviously the future — the web should be more of a part of all our lives. Those who are scared of it will, I think, find it becomes ever more present because it is obviously useful and it in reality poses very few new threats. But this design is not yet small enough or quite fit for mass market consumption.”

Shows how hard it is to “review” radically different consumer tech.

HMRC are being 'bamboozled' by Google: MPs confront search giant
Google was branded "devious, calculating and unethical" by MPs who accused the internet giant of deliberately subverting…

2014

Hello Moto: The true story behind Lenovo's big buy
The news that Lenovo had snapped up Motorola Mobility for $2.1 billion earlier in the year was met with a number of…

“Why is Google selling this part of Motorola for a fraction of what it had spent on the whole company, given it bought it for $12.5 billion?

Lenovo quite rightly assumed that Google had bought Motorola purely for its patents, so decided to show its interest in the hardware side just in case a sell-off was on the cards.”


2015

Amazon starts paying corporation tax for UK sales in Britain, not
Online retailer Amazon has started paying UK corporation tax in Britain rather than in Luxembourg, after it came under…
Apple's About to Completely Change the Way You Use an iPad
Apple is reportedly working on a drastic redesign for the iPad, enlarging the screen to 12 inches and introducing a new…

This has become the way we create the template for the Lookback every week.


1891

Kinetoscope
The Kinetoscope is an early motion picture exhibition device. The Kinetoscope was designed for films to be viewed by…

The first public display of Thomas Edison’s prototype kinetoscope.


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