The Future of Virtual & Augmented Reality

Follow the below link for a fascinating interactive slide presentation highlighting the future of "reality" as we know it. Who are the major players? What do they do? How big can this market become and what could be the largest applications?

All of these questions (and more) are answered below:

http://www.fastcompany.com/3052209/tech-forecast/vr-and-augmented-reality-will-soon-be-worth-150-billion-here-are-the-major-pla#1

Bad Unicorn?

Last week we discussed the headlines caused by Fidelity Funds marking their investments to market and resulting in large paper losses for their investments in Snapchat and other unicorns. A few points to note on this: 

1. For most of Fidelity's investments they are still very much in the blue (i.e. have made money on their investment)
2. Fidelity funds are required to mark their securities to market each month, but the data is only available to the general public a month later... this means that the values we were seeing in recent weeks were actually the values through the end of September, when global markets were taking a bath... valuations have subsequently been marked up as global equities have recovered. 
3. For the skeptics out there, these mark ups are not a knee jerk reaction to the headlines that were caused following the initial markdowns. (Many feared that this would signal the end of mutual funds participating in late stage rounds because entrepreneurs wouldn't want their valuations publicly disclosed and subject to markdowns such as the ones in late September.) The valuations are established by an independent team at Fidelity and not subject to the inputs of the fund managers themselves. 

One positive development from all of this is that late stage unicorns are slowly being subject to more public pricing scrutiny as they move closer to the public markets. This is a good thing, and will allow investors to distinguish between "good and bad" unicorns. The bad unicorns will find their days of free spending and poor business management are numbered, and will need to improve in order to survive. This, in turn, will be good for consumers. 

You can read more here - http://fortune.com/tag/term-sheet/

Location Based Services - Thoughts on Value, Hyper Local Advertising, and the Checking Out of Checking In

Location based services enjoy widespread acceptance with over 70% of mobile users saying that they use location based services, but adoption has been stagnant in the past few years. In order to increase adoption and use, location based services need to ensure that they provide the user with significant value (i.e. Waze).

Below is a link to an article that provides a thorough overview of the location based services industry. It includes interesting insights around the reduced popularity of mobile check-ins, the link between local advertising and in store purchases, and strategies used to segment audiences and target consumers base on location.

Check it out.

http://www.businessinsider.com/top-local-mobile-marketing-strategies-3-2014-3