A Wee Pin Drop

Fascinating follow up by the WSJ on Daryl Morey’s Oct. 4 pro-HK Tweet: It indicates that around 50% of the Tweets at him came from accounts with 0-13 followers, and 4,855 of those users had never Tweeted previously. Where did all those new tweets come from??

Earnings season for the quarter is in full swing.

IBM had Q3 revenue of $18B, down 3.9% YOY, with Red Hat sales of $371M, and cloud revenue up 11%. Netflix, Q3 revenue of $5.25B, up 31% YOU with 158M paid subscriptions globally.

Huawei, overall sales at $86B, up 25% YOY, smartphone shipments up 26% YOU (to 185M units through Sept of this year).

Some noteworthy funding…Invoca, AI-powered call tracking and conversational analytics firm, raised $56M bringing its total financing to $116M

Galileo Financial raised $77M Series A led by Accel and provides APIs for backend integration for fintech startups.

One from India, MyGate, a Bangalore startup with a security and community management app for gated communities: $56M Series B from Tencent, others.

Ex-Cisco-ites raised $145M for Pensando Systems, which builds custom hardware for processing data at the edge.

Oh, and one other wee bit of news: The U.S. FCC has approved the merger between T-Mobile and Sprint.

Did you hear the pin drop?

The Sprint to T-Mobile

Can you hear that pin drop?

That’s the sound of two telecommunications giants attempting to become one.

Over the weekend, T-Mobile US Inc. agreed to acquire Sprint Corp. for $26.5 billion in stock, according to a report from Bloomberg.

This mashup would reduce the U.S. wireless industry to three major competitors from four, writes Bloomberg, which it said ensures “heavy scrutiny from regulators.”

T-Mobile CEO John Legere explained “We’re going to have an impact on America…We are going to drag the rest of the players kicking and screaming to the prize, which is American leadership in fifth-generation (5G) networks.”

Some details:

Operating as T-Mobile, the company would have about $74 billion in annual revenue and 70 million wireless subscribers. Verizon is the largest U.S. carrier with $88 billion in 2017 wireless revenue and 111 million subscribers, and AT&T would be No. 2 with $71 billion in wireless revenue and have 78 million regular subscribers.

Fascinating to see the “America First” spin geared towards both regulators and the Trump Administration (obviously to help them navigate and get the blessing of regulators).

Axios picks it up there:

• Executives stressed the deal would help America outpace China and others in 5G wireless development. “The combination of the 600 megahertz [in wireless spectrum] and other assets that we have are critical building blocks of what America needs to deploy to take its rightful place,” said T-Mobile CEO John Legere.
• Many in D.C. worry about China outpacing America in 5G development. Earlier this year, a now-departed senior official in the National Security Council circulated a planto nationalize a 5G network.
• The company’s project job growth in retail and customer service operations, with an emphasis on rural areas.

So, to recap: This deal helps us beat China to the 5G punch (National security!), is GREAT for consumers (even though there will now be one less player on the U.S. telecom chessboard), and it will create new jobs in rural ‘Merica.

IBM SmartCamp Finalist Profile: ConnectM — Sensing Opportunity In The Towers

If you’ve ever been to India, you could drive yourself crazy trying to count the number of cellphones (although you could count the traffic lights in Bangalore nearly on one hand!).

Vivek Khemani, CFO, ConnectM delivers his company's pitch for remote sensing analytics for the telecommunications industry during the IBM Smart Camp Global Finals.

India’s telco deregulation in the late 1980s helped the Indian telecommunications industry leapfrog traditional wireline phone infrastructure, and instead you now have 350,000+ cell phone towers spread across the span of the sub-continent.

IBM SmartCamp Finalist ConnectM has a vision for better utilizing all those towers: To become a leading energy management solutions provider, leveraging business intelligence and analytics across the telecom tower and building infrastructure.

The company’s offering provides a remote monitoring and energy management solution for energy spend optimization, operations and management, asset management, and revenue assurance.

Sounds mundane? Well, the market for solutions that manage and optimize energy alone is an estimated $16B worldwide, and ConnectM is utilizing its current leadership position in India, with an installed based of over 5,000 cell sites, to build a scalable and profitable business.

Before it even reached the IBM Smart Camp finals, ConnectM delivered annualized energy savings of over $4 million US to its current customers, including both India and India-based multinationals, demonstrating well before it came to requesting venture capital money, that it was already making money.