This week in everything from the ASX to Silicon Valley

WEEK STARTING NOVEMBER 5

Happy Friday! It's good to be back. Amazon and Facebook are gettin' physical as the Christmas retail wars begin to heat up, while this week's Melbourne Cup caused many a headache for betters (or for worse). Giddy up: 

AUSTRALIAN FINTECH & STARTUPS

Neobanks 'Xinja' and 'Up' are expected to get their restricted banking licenses in the next few months

Melbourne-based headphones company 'Nura' raises $21m series A. The headphones tailor sound to an individual set of ears, or so I've heard

Afterpay now has 900 retailers and 300k customers in the USA

Data 61 released a draft Open Banking API

GAFA

Facebook is opening 9 small business pop up stores within Macy's. The pop up stores are selected by Facebook and allow previously-online businesses to have a physical presence 

Amazon opened another retail store in Berkeley

Apple will stop reporting on unit sales. This suggests they are more strategically aligned with their services (OS, Apple Pay, iCloud) than hardware. Proof: their latest OS still runs on the 5S (released in 2013). Updating your phone once a year = far less friction than having to buy a new one every year

POTPOURRI

The Melbourne Cup crashed the Sportsbet and Ladbrokes apps. Totes unacceptable

Australian Robyn Denholm becomes Tesla's new chair(wo)man, replacing Musk

HQ trivia lost half of its user base this year

Long read: Startup Pivot Success Stories. This looks at the history of Instagram, Slack etc and what their original value propositions were. YouTube was intended to be a dating site?

COOL STARTUP OF THE WEEK

PredictHQ, a Kiwi startup that analyses how major events will impact business. It links together real time and scheduled data and then predicts how that will affect a service, such as Uber. For example, if there's a conference on in Las Vegas, Uber could connect to PredictHQ to understand when demand is going to occur most, and re-route their drivers to a specific area to accommodate demand e,g, by aggregating flight information, weather, hotel locations, conference times (yes, 'surge' does this, but it's at a cost to the customer and a highly reactive approach to demand). PredictHQ is essentially a value-added service that saves a business having to build out their own predictive analytics capability. They just raised $10m for their global events API and have partnered with Uber and Qantas. What a story!

MY BLOG POST

Long read: Earlier this year I restricted by use of social media before midday. I found some interesting results

TRIVIA
Extra questions accrued while I was away

(a) The name of which US state, when translated, means 'snow'?

(b) Aside from humans, what other three species have fingerprints?

(c) What is Mexico's northernmost state, with part of it's name meaning 'low'?

(d) In 2016, Apple reported it retrieved almost 1000kg of what valuable element from recycling broken iPhones and Macs?

(e) In which decade did Australia's population pass 10 million? Bonus point for the exact year.

(f) Which two sports that start with the letter 'C' were once part of the Summer Olympic Games?

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It's great to be back! You'll see the new blog section pop up every now and then to host some longer-form content that wouldn't fit in an email.

If you liked this week, why don't you send someone over to www.jimmygrafton.com and get them in the loop too?

Have a cracking weekend, you deserve it.