When do the January sales start? When January begins and check your calendar, as today is the day!
We've plundered through the Amazon January sales, summarised the best Currys January deals and checked out the top options from John Lewis (and others) to boot.
The Boxing Day sales lasted for a lot longer this year
Read more: The best January sales 2020: grab one of these final deals
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One of the new chips in this yearcrop of iPhones is the U1; it provides Ultra Wideband (UWB) connectivity that, in conjunction with Internet of Things (IoT) technology, could offer a myriad of new services for enterprises and consumers.
As Apple puts it, UWB technology offers &spatial awareness" & the ability for your phone to recognize its surroundings and the objects in it. Essentially, one iPhone 11 user can point his or her phone at another and transfer a file or photo.
While the technology isn't new, Appleimplementation marks the first time UWB has been used in a modern smartphone.
UWB is a short-range, wireless communication protocol that & like Bluetooth or Wi-Fi & uses radio waves. But it differs substantially in that IT operates at a very high frequency. As its name denotes, it also uses a wide spectrum of several GHz. One way to think of it is as a radar that can continuously scan an entire room and precisely lock onto an object like a laser beam to discover its location and communicate data.
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Read more: Ultra Wideband (UWB) explained (and why it’s in the iPhone 11)
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Itthe mid-&90s, and this pilot fish is the sole IT employee for a barebones operation. Ita small agricultural nonprofit, and his job includes networking, user support, IT purchasing and application development — the kind of job where you learn a ton but work your butt off.
Therea remote rural location, and fish manages an upgrade of sorts of its hand-me-down hardware: two refurbished desktops, one for a small quality lab and another for the receptionist/bookkeeper, and a server running Netware 3.12 thatno longer needed in the main office. Fish tells the remote users to be sure to store all the accounting files, documents and quality records on the server and not their workstations. He also installs an external tape backup unit on the laboratory computer so it can do double duty at night as the server backup workstation. And therean ancient 80286 laptop sitting in a spare room running a dialup email gateway to the organizationISP.
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Look, this is the last post I&m writing in 2019 and I&m tired. But I can&t let the year close without taking stock of how well tech stocks did this year. It was bonkers.
So letmark the yearconclusion with some notes for our future selves. Yes, we know that the Nasdaq has been setting new records and SaaS had a good year. But we need to dig in and get the numbers out so that we can look back and remember.
Letcap off this year the way it deserves to be remembered, as a kick-ass trip &round the sun for your local, public technology company.
We&ll start with the indices that we care about:
Next, the highest-value U.S.-based technology companies:
Now letturn to some companies that we care about, even if they are smaller than the Big Five:
And so on.
The technology industryepic run has been so strong that The Wall Street Journal noted this morning that, powered by tech companies, U.S. stocks &are poised for their best annual performance in six years.& The Journal highlighted the performance of Apple and Microsoft in particular for helping drive the boom. I wonder why.
How long will we live in the neighborhood of Nasdaq 9,000? How long can two tech companies be worth more than $1 trillion at the same time? How long can the biggest tech companies be worth a combined $4.93 trillion (I remember when $3 trillion for the Big Five was news, and I recall when the group reach a collective value of $4 trillion).1
But the worst trade in recent years has been the pessimists& gambit. No matter what, stocks have kept going up, short-term hiccoughs and other missteps aside.
For nearly everyone, that is. While tech stocks in general did very well, some names that we all know did not. Letclose on those reminders that a rising tide lifts only most boats.
Several of the most lackluster public tech companies were 2019 technology IPOs, interestingly enough. Who didn&t do well? Uber earns a spot on the naughty list for not only being underwater from its IPO price, but also from its final private valuations. And as you guessed, Lyft is down from its IPO price as well, which is not good.
Some 2019 IPOs did well in the middle of the year, but fell a little flat as the year came to a close. Pinterest, Beyond Meat and Zoom meet that criteria, for example. And some SaaS companies struggled, even if we think they will reach $1 billion in revenue in time.
But it was mostly a party. The public markets were good, and tech stocks were great. This helped create another 100+ unicorns in the year.
Such was 2019. On to 2020!
Read more: Tech’s biggest companies are worth ~$5T as 2019’s epic stock market run wraps
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The Pallone-Thrune TRACED Act, a bipartisan bit of legislation that should make life harder for the villains behind robocalls, was signed into law today by the president. Itstill possible to get things done in D.C. after all!
We&ve covered the TRACED Act several times previously, as robocalls are, in addition to being horribly annoying, a uniquely annoying high-tech threat. Using clever targeting and spoofing technology, scammers are placing millions of calls that at best irritate and at worst take advantage of the vulnerable.
The new law won&t end that practice overnight, but it does add some useful tools to regulators& toolboxes. Herehow I summarized the billprovisions earlier this month:
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) took a break from other business to laud the enactment of the law:
And FCC Chairman Ajit Paipraise was effusive in a statement his office sent along:
I applaud Congress for working in a bipartisan manner to combat illegal robocalls and malicious caller ID spoofing. And I thank the President and Congress for the additional tools and flexibility that this law affords us. Specifically, I am glad that the agency now has a longer statute of limitations during which we can pursue scammers and I welcome the removal of a previously-required warning we had to give to unlawful robocallers before imposing tough penalties.
And I thank the American people for never letting us forget how fed up they are with scam, spoofed robocalls. Ittheir voices that power our never-ceasing push to fight back against the scourge of robocalls and malicious spoofing.
Of course the new law isn&t a magic wand; The FCC is still limited in what it can do and how quickly it can act. Even major fines like this $120 million one have had a negligible effect on the nefarious industry. &Like emptying the ocean with a teaspoon,& said Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel at the time.
Herehoping the TRACED Act amounts to more than a bigger spoon. We&ll find out as regulators and the mobile industry grow into their new capabilities and begin the long process of actually applying them to the problem. It may take months or more to see any real abatement, but at least we&re taking concrete steps.
Read more: TRACED Act signed into law, putting robocallers on notice
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