The smart home is still more of a concept than anything else. Those expecting one product or service to transform homes into smart homes have been left disappointed. The same goes for those who prematurely crowned a winner in the smart home race. The smart home remains the Wild West and is turning into a long-term play for the tech giants with strategy goals measured in multi-year increments.

The battle being waged…

Snap continues to be an interesting company. Thanks to spending years in Facebook’s shadow, the social media company has a credible claim to being perennially underestimated. Snap’s $96 billion market cap is just one-tenth of Facebook’s ($946 billion).

Snap is all about rethinking the way we use mobile cameras. Smartphones turned cameras, once used for memory capture, into communication tools. This shift helps explain Snap’s “we are a camera company” mantra. Although…

The tech industry sees its fair share of head fakes – items and trends that consensus thinks will be the next big thing but which fail to meet lofty expectations. 3D TVs, consumer drones, and voice computing are three such head fakes. The pandemic has introduced a few new head fakes in tech – the biggest one being work from home.

Companies have been carefully walking a thin line when it comes…

A retailer (Amazon), social media company (Facebook), and information services company (Google) now capture more than half of all advertising spending in the U.S. The Inside Orchard essay “The Advertising Triopoly” focused on how the three were able to reach such a milestone: establish formidable ecosystems powered by not only software, but also customer data.

Today’s advertising empires are built on tracking our behavior and activity online. The degree of…

Elon Musk continued his streak of being unlike any other CEO by guest hosting Saturday Night Live this past weekend. For those who have followed Musk over the years, including his Twitter activity, the show went pretty much as one would expect.

The acting skits, most of which were connected to one of Musk’s various interests, played off of his personality. Not surprisingly, Musk’s appearance was the story of the weekend, occupying…

With the 1Q21 earnings season coming to a close, we have a good view of how the world’s largest companies performed during the first three months of 2021. Impressive would be the word. Consider the following year-over-year revenue growth figures:

There are the usual caveats associated with revenue recognition. In addition, each of the preceding companies have unique margin and capex profiles…

Last week’s essay was focused on the rise of new financial bubbles. This week’s essay is about an asset that is showing signs of being an anti-bubble: residential real estate.

The U.S. real estate market is displaying some of the strongest fundamentals in nearly two decades in terms of supporting price appreciation. Instead of crazy and unfounded speculation driving home prices higher, a severe supply and demand imbalance is strongly favoring sellers…

Last week, there were a number of events that caught my attention.

The press has come to rely on a very wide net when describing “tech” companies. Some of this is to be expected as tech continues to invade new industries. However, there is something wrong found with using “tech” to describe any company making money one way or another from software and data. My stance on “tech” is that it has lost much of its descriptive meaning when it comes to business models…

Humans are social creatures. We don’t want to avoid social interaction. There is a gravitation that pulls us together. One characteristic that has been part of the exchange of ideas in the physical world is a social construct to push fringe ideas and opinions to the edges – out of town squares and into back alleys.

Social media has redefined the way we come together to share and exchange ideas. Companies ranging…

NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are the digital equivalent of signed art. Instead of using fiat money to pay for physical art, cryptocurrency is used to pay for NFTs. While there are more technical and expansive definitions for NFTs involving digital ledgers, complexity ends up adding unnecessary noise to the discussion. 

In recent weeks, NFTs have had their moment. Auctions involving NFTs for digital art have reached shocking totals with one NFT going for…

Everything is going Clubhouse’s way, or so it would seem.

The social media start-up playing in the audio space is apparently doing everything right. The combination of an invite-only system, which is one of the more effective ways to create buzz, and a big embrace from celebrities including everyone from Elon Musk and Drake to Bill Gates and Oprah, completes the unicorn status of the latest tech darling. 

Despite glowing articles and…

Kmart was at one time the second-largest retailer in the U.S. After two bankruptcies, one as a Sears subsidiary, and a growing number of store closures, the big box department store finds itself on a gradual slide into liquidation.

After 43 years in the same location, a local Kmart closed its doors at the end of 2019. The 45,000-sq foot store – far too small of a store footprint for Walmart or…

Every few years, an event occurs that captures society’s mindset for a week or two. This past January, we saw the latest example of this with what is being called the GameStop frenzy. A group of unknown composition used the web to coordinate trades, targeting buying pressure towards a few heavily shorted companies. The goal was to increase share prices and in the process, squeeze hedge funds that were short the stock…

The number of people paying good money for music continues to rise. In the U.S. alone, 75 million people are paying on average $90 a year to listen to music through a streaming service. On its own that’s a great thing, and music rights holders are riding decades-long emotional (and financial) highs. However, we are seeing what amounts to music’s destruction continue to unfold before our eyes.

How much is a song…

The premise behind a site like The Wirecutter, bought by the New York Times for $30 million in 2016, may make complete sense on paper. Have an “expert,” who apparently knows everything there is to know about a product category, test out an arbitrary number of products spanning the price and feature spectrums in that product category. Relying on experience and perspective, the expert issues a verdict as to the “best” product…