Wednesday, January 26 2022
The US Fed Speaks. Markets Give a Head Fake. VCs drop cash into minIO. Verizon 5G UW for $232
The US Fed concluded its meeting today with a message: Rate rises will begin in March of this year. Markets went up on the news and then down, hard, on the Q&A that followed. According to the FT in a story written by Nicholas Megaw, Naomi Rovnick, Jennifer Creery, and Leo Lewis J. Powell’s words sinking the days trading activity amounted to no guarantee the US Fed will hold back from raising rates at every meeting this year. A big ask in my opinion. Given the ginormous increase in the “value” of the typical investor portfolio since the March 2020 bottom Powell makes sense.
What is minIO? As of 11am today I had to own up to “I dunno” & some frustration reading stories on this startup in VentureBeat and zdnet. The news triggering stories came from minIO announcing it had successfully closed a Series B funding round hauling in $103 million. Not shabby, But what job does this business do for customers? Not easy to find out from either the Venturebeat or zdnet stories.
Here’s my take: Customers are buying minIO to protect cash already sunk into custom code built for Amazon S3 storage. They are adding cloud resources from other vendors (Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM, Oracle, SAP, etc). With minIO they can save a bundle because the code will work perfectly for any other cloud resource. Since minIO is built on Kubernetes demand on local memory to run it is nice and minimal - another definite plus.
Takeaway: customers are willing to pay to capture some tangible benefit dangled in front of them by an Amazon competitor. minIO is helping them succeed.
“Can I sell you a Verizon 5G UW plan for $232 per month?” Having bought a couple of Google Pixel 4A 5G UW phones from Verizon back in 2020, but no opportunity to use the UW capability, I have read with interest a number of stories on how Verizon plans to use the midband between “plain old" 5G and UW to deliver substantially faster speeds to customers. T-Mobile has been doing this already. I used the “myverizon” app on my phone to chat with a Verizon agent on the topics of availability & cost for the new 5G UW plan Verizon is rolling out.
Here’s what I learned: (I should start by noting I’m currently paying $172 per month for 2 phones & 10 gbs of data, unlimited talk and text) For an uplift in monthly cost of 35% ($232) I can upgrade our plan to include 50 gbs of “high speed” data per line, unlimited “hot spots” and, get this, Disney +, Hulu, ESPN “for free for as long as you maintain the plan”, 6 mos of Apple Music, and more. (Sidebar: Disney +, Hulu & ESPN are all Disney properties. How much is Verizon paying Disney for these perks?) When I asked if I could try it out, the response was a “no”. You have to buy it sight unseen. You can cancel at any time. My conclusion: I’m not buying it. How about you?