News Analysis

Adobe Delivers Generative AI With Adobe Firefly At Adobe Summit on March 21, 2023, Adobe announced and delivered its generative AI offering known as Adobe Firefly. Adobe Firefly, is a collection of generative AI models built for creative applications. The offering joins the platform’s AI services. The first Firefly model will focus on image generation and text effects, trained on the hundreds of millions of Adobe stock images, openly licensed content, and public domain content where copyright has expired. Adobe plans to integrate Firefly into their Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, and Adobe Express product lines.

The NASDAQ Composite closed out the week with its biggest two-day rally since 2008. CPI numbers hinted that inflation was subsiding and hope sprung that the Fed would take a less severe stance. Should the Fed hiking slow down from 75 basis points to 50 basis points, market watchers remain hopeful and some took advantage of the early signals of slowing inflation.

Disintermediate or Be Disintermediated On September 15, 2022, Adobe announced the largest acquisition of a private software company and the largest acquisition in Adobe’s history. In a half cash, half stock deal for approximately $20 billion, San Francisco-based Figma would be acquired by San Jose-headquartered Adobe. Adobe is paying a 50 times annualized recurring revenue (“ARR”) multiple for Figma which is expected to surpass $400 million in ARR exiting 2022.

Massive Dilemma In Taking Action As famously put by Peter Parker in Spiderman, "With great power comes great responsibility.". The digital giants are walking a thin-gauged tight rope.

Goodbye FAANG, Hello MATANA. The FAANG stocks (i.e. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) have had a great run as the large cap digital giant leaders. However, with Facebook and Netflix facing massive declines in year over year subscriber growth, their valuations have taken a hit along with the macro conditions of rising interest rates and global instability.

Microsoft's Biggest Acquisition Is All About Moving To Metaverse On January 18th, 2022, MIcrosoft announced its intent to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion in an all cash offer. As the metaverse economy heats up, this move gives MIcrosoft several advantages including:

Five Major Global ERP Vendors Join Shopify App Store Program On October 14th, 2021, Shopify announced a broad-based partnership with five leading ERP vendors to improve the data and workflow integration of Shopify Plus' commerce platform to key back office capabilities such as financials, order management, inventory, and supply chain.

CQ IS First To NLP On Quantum Via The lambeq Toolkit On October 13th, Cambridge Quantum released lambeq, an open-source toolkit and library for Natural Language Processing on Quantum (QNLP), named after Joachim Lambek, the late pioneering McGill University professor in mathematics and theoretical computer science.

From Crypto Friendly To Crypto Non Grata The policy makers in the CCP now consider cryptocurrencies as a considerable threat to CCP China's quest to become both a global reserve currency and an opportunity to dethrone the dollar. Just a few years back, the CCP government may have thought that crytpos would help unseed the dollar, but something has changed...

Crypto FOMO Drives Capital Flows Out Of Big Tech (For Now) Retail investors have taken money out of the equity market and rotated into crypto to catch the wave. With all crypto's now worth more than $2 Trillion in market cap and Bitcoin standing out at $1 trillion, this poses a risk to the US dollar dominance as the reserve currency.