Analyse Asia Podcast: Five Predictins About Asia for 2016

From http://www.tech-thoughts.net/

• Reality dawns in unicorn-world as unit economics come into focus, leading to consolidation and possible down rounds for e-commerce and on-demand taxi hailing apps .
• Overheated markets become commoditized, value shifts to adjacent layer of value chain, e.g. in India, focus shifts from e-commerce to supply chain and logistics.  For example, Shotang, a B2B marketplace connecting unorganized retailers to distributors (disclosure: Sameer previously led a seed investment round into this company)

• What is SoftBank’s go to market strategy for Pepper? Note: Pepper has debuted in China, Taiwan and Singapore.
• Why are they not adopting the direct consumer approach?
• Google and Baidu lead in the artificial intelligence but don’t count IBM’s Watson and Microsoft.
• Machine learning algorithms are commoditized but data that feeds those algorithms becomes the most valuable component.

• Pokeman Go will be a success and spur Nintendo-DeNA to think outside the box.
• Winning Strategy: Enhance free gameplay by using real-world add-ons (in Pokeman Go’s case, the Pokeman Go Plus Wearable). Later, competitive events.
• Nintendo’s Innovator’s Dilemma: Are they too focused on console gaming and not thinking about mobile as its own thing?
• Is Nintendo’s future in gaming similar to Disney in media content? Does owning a portfolio of gaming content IP is the way to go for gaming companies?

• Chinese companies face a strategy tax when going global. For example, Xiaomi has to maintain two android systems, one for China and the other for the rest of the world. Reference: Episode 68 with Clay Shirky.
• Xiaomi puts recent patent purchases to use and expands to Europe and US aggressively.
• What are the implications on the Baidu-Alibaba-Tencent going global? For example, Alibaba’s cloud company, AliCloud and Tencent’s investment in Glu Mobile.

• The strategy tax for Facebook to enter China. 
• Given China has many players from WeChat to Weibo, should Facebook even bother?
• Facebook’s continued controversy with India on free basics. Reference: Episode 77 with Newley Purnell
• Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to India on free basics.
• The Indian community backlash and open letter against Mark Zuckerberg.

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