Amazon

We have done extensive research on which smart speaker is best. The ability to understand users, correctly answer their questions, and deliver responses in natural sounding speech is usually summed up by one word: intelligence. The IQ of the assistant…

Live streaming has exploded over the past few years as a dangerous competitor to traditional broadcasting and content streaming. While platforms like Twitch, YouTube Gaming, Facebook Live, Mixer, and Caffeine have predominantly featured gaming content, they’re quickly expanding into other…

A few days ago, we saw interesting research from RBC Analysts forecasting Amazon’s Go stores to be a $4.5 billion business by 2021. RBC’s work aligns with our $50B estimate for the total automated retail space, implying a 9% share…

1. Apple will be the best performing FAANG stock in 2019 (by Gene Munster) First, we believe the theme of Apple as a Service will slowly take root in 2019. Apple’s new reporting methodology will help focus investors on revenue…

Amazon published its annual post-holiday press release today. While the 1900-word release provided few concrete data points related to the Dec-18 quarter, it offered a handful of notable insights: The upbeat tone, as denoted by the “record-breaking holiday season” language, runs…

This is the third of a four-part series exploring the concept of the Metaverse. Authored by Loup Ventures analyst Pat Bocchicchio, Part III explains how the virtual universe’s economy could operate and all the new business opportunities that would come…

We recently tested four smart speakers by asking Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana 800 questions each. Google Assistant was able to answer 88% of them correctly vs. Siri at 75%, Alexa at 73%, and Cortana at 63%. Last year,…

We were wrong in predicting Amazon would acquire Target in 2018. It was the boldest of our 8 predictions for the year, and it was incorrect. However, we continue to believe the combination makes sense because Amazon needs to acquire a Target-like footprint…

On June 16, 2017, at 9:01 am ET, Amazon announced its agreement to acquire Whole Foods Market for $13.7B. Four minutes later, Walmart announced its agreement to acquire online brand Bonobos for $310M. While the announcements were coincidental, the strategies…

Amazon announced today that it is testing Alexa Answers, a program that crowdsources responses to questions that Alexa currently doesn’t have answers to. One of the principal issues with voice assistants is that they can do a lot, but not…

The TwitchCon 2018 keynote (Friday 10/26) shared impressive engagement metrics for the platform. There were 18.2B chat messages and whispers sent, 85M cheers and subscriptions, 3.2B interactions with extensions, and 150M clips created. Leading up to TwitchCon, we did a…

We think Twitch will pay streamers almost $75M in 2018 and see that number expanding to $180M by 2020. We tested streaming on Twitch to get a better sense of what it takes to be a streamer and reach Twitch’s…