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For those who have not followed David Einhorn's crusade against central bank money printing, and the epic bubble these cluless academic hacks have created, his views on the "enormous tech bubble" we are currently living through and published in his latest letter to investors of his Greenlight hedge fund (which returned 5.9% in Q3) will provide some unique perspective.

To everyone else who is familiar with how his fund has been hammered by his tech short basket - and especially Tesla - over the years as the most overvalued tech stocks in history continued to rip higher year after year, we doubt his latest thoughts will come as a surprise, although his observations on the endgame are certainly remarkable, if for no other reason that he now declared the time of death of said "enormous tech bubble" as Sept 2, 2020.

Bubbles tend to topple under their own weight. Everybody is in. The last short has covered. The last buyer has bought (or bought massive amounts of weekly calls). The decline s

A Timeline of Future Technology

Making predictions about future technology is both fun and notoriously difficult.

However, such predictions also serve a very practical purpose for investors and business leaders, since failing to adapt to changing industry paradigms can completely decimate a business venture, turning it into the next Blockbuster, Kodak, or Sears.

Today’s infographic from Futurism rounds up some of the most interesting predictions about the future, from trusted sources such as Scientific American and The National Academy of Sciences.

Machines,Big and Small

The confluence of robotics, artificial intelligence, and increasing levels of automation is a prevailing trend throughout the projected timeline of future technology.

In less than 10 years, we will be able to control machines based on eye movements, while ingesting nano-sized robots to repair injuries from within our bodies. Later on, it’s also expected that the next wave of AI will be a reality: by 2036, predictive AI

Y Combinator, one of best-known Silicon Valley accelerators, has an impressive track record of success. With well-timed investments in Dropbox, Stripe, and Airbnb, the startups in the company’s portfolio are now worth an aggregate of $600 billion in market capitalization.

While Y Combinator has made a clear impact on the tech sector, the company also launched an internal side project in 2007 that would end up becoming highly influential in a different and surprising way.

Its user-powered news aggregator called Hacker News, which is now visited by 20 million people per month, has become a mainstay for entrepreneurs, tech professionals, and venture capitalists around the world. Using a Reddit-like interface, users can upvote and downvote articles that they think have the most relevance to trends and issues affecting the tech sector.

Data Mining For Trends

Today’s charts come to us from Variance Explained, and they help to paint a picture of what topics have been trending on Hacker News o

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a significant downtick in the number of IPOs issued by companies, but will 2017 break that trend? So far this year we have seen five companies go public on a U.S. stock exchange, and today we saw the first tech IPO of the year with Snap, Inc.

Snap, Inc. is technology and social media company known for its mobile app Snapchat, which allows users to share photos and videos with friends for moments to hours before disappearing. Founded in July 2011, what began as a tech start-up garnered 23 active investors and raised around $2.6 billion in venture capital backing.

Now that Snap, Inc. has gone public with an IPO priced at $17 per share, ahead of the expected $14-$16 a share range, it’s trickier to forecast its performance. Looking at some of Snap’s numbers, investment attractiveness it likely to be in the eye of the beholder.

The company’s year-over-year sales growth as well as its EBIT growth are certainly noteworthy. Snap’s year-over-year sales growt

Every year the silicon computer chip shrinks in size by half and doubles in power, enabling our devices to become more mobile and accessible. But what happens when our chips can't get any smaller? George Tulevski researches the unseen and untapped world of nanomaterials. His current work: developing chemical processes to compel billions of carbon nanotubes to assemble themselves into the patterns needed to build circuits, much the same way natural organisms build intricate, diverse and elegant structures. Could they hold the secret to the next generation of computing?

The image was startling, but a look into what could be tech's immediate future.

After being ostracized by the tech industry for most of the election year, there sat venture capitalist Peter Thiel, beaming, to the left of President-elect Donald Trump at the Trump Tower Tech summit in mid-December.

Around him was a ring of glum-faced and pensive tech titans, including Apple's Tim Cook, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Alphabet CEO Larry Page and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Silicon Valley's billionaire leaders had disavowed Trump during the campaign, throwing their weight behind rival Hillary Clinton. Only Thiel stumped for the real-estate mogul, and after the tech industry had turned on him for that and his role in Gawker's failure, he was luxuriating in the I-told-you-so moment.

The display of power portends a roiling year or two in tech. Trump railed against Amazon and Apple in tweets about corporate taxes and cyber security; now, he's likely to shape those issues as well as immigration reform,

Imagine shopping with no lines and no check out?  All you need is a smart phone with the AMZN app and you're ready to go.  Welcome to Amazon Go.  The first Amazon Go store in Seattle sells ready-to-eat meals, snacks and locally-prepared bakery items but just imagine if this came to your local grocer?  Amazing what technology will bring.

Alphabet's investment arm, Google Capital, has quietly made an investment in Snapchat parent company, Snap Inc. 

The investment was only revealed after Google Capital rebranded itself to CapitalG on Friday and added the Snapchat logo to its portfolio page. Business Insider confirmed that it is a portfolio company of the growth equity arm of Alphabet. Snap Inc did not immediately respond to comment. 

The two companies have had a cozy relationship. In 2013, it was rumored that Google once tried to buy Snapchat for $4 billion after it turned down a Facebook acquisition. To this day, Snapchat remains one of the largest users of Google's cloud infrastructure, although it's recently brought a data center specialist in house. 

Before it renamed itself to Snap Inc in September, Snapchat had most recently raised $1.81 billion in a May 2016 round of funding. That funding round valued the company around $20 billion. 

Courtesy of BusinessInsider

"Just setting up my twttr" – those were the words that Jack Dorsey, founder and CEO of Twitter, tweeted on this day ten years ago to begin yet another social media success story. Twitter, with its simplicity and unique 140-character limit, hit a nerve and quickly gained a following among the tech- and media-savvy. In 2011, Twitter passed the 100-million user milestone and in late 2013 the company went public with huge fanfare.

Everything was well in the Twitter universe, but soon after the company’s successful IPO, the sentiment turned sour. Twitter’s user growth was tapering off quickly and the company continued to lose money. In 2015, Twitter’s share price began to tumble and has been on a downward trajectory ever since. It is becoming increasingly clear that, contrary to earlier projections, Twitter is not a second Facebook and probably never will be.

When Facebook celebrated its 10th anniversary a little more than two years ago, the company was much bigger in almost every aspect.

With crowd source funding, your arm may become the next place to locate directions via GPS with a pico projector or the way you stay in touch with social media........without ever touching your phone.  Up for a donation; get a discount.  Imagine the possibilities.

Courtesy of Cicret Project

Apple has owned up to a rare incursion of malicious software into its App Store, forcing it to pull some of the most widely used mobile apps in China from the service.

Late on Sunday in California, the iPhone and iPad maker confirmed reports by security researchers who had warned that a swath of popular Chinese apps had been created using developer tools that were infected with the malware, resulting in the compromised apps.

“Hundreds of millions” of users of the popular Chinese apps were at risk of having their personal data exposed, including people who use Tencent’s WeChat mobile messaging service and ride-hailing app Didi Kuaidi, according to Palo Alto Networks, a US cyber security company.

Apple said it had removed the infected apps, which had been created with what it said was a fake version of its software for app developers, known as Xcode.

It did not explain how developers of a large number of China’s most widely used mobile services had all been infected with the same piece o

Today’s factories are highly automated and use amazing robotic machines to do the work of thousands of men. These factory machines don’t look like the robots in the movies. They are a very specialized breed called CNCs, which stands for Computer Numerical Control machines. These sophisticated machine tools are operated by computer programs.

But these aren’t new toys, by any means. CNCs have been around since the early 1970s when computer-controlled systems were introduced.

The first modern-day industrial robot, the Unimate, was put into use by General Motors in 1961. The Unimate was a 4,000-pound robotic arm that attached to a giant steel drum and did things like pour liquid metal into die casts, weld auto bodies, and lift 500-pound car bodies.

The Unimate performed tasks that humans often found dangerous or boring, and did them with speed and exacting detail. The robot never called in sick, asked for a raise, or went on strike. Plus, it worked 24 hours a day. As you can imagine, robo

The jury's still out on Apples new watch launch, especially it's longer term demand and shortages due to two suppliers have already shown.  I thought though (thanks to SeekingAlpha) we could take a look at it's current suppliers:

• iPhone/iPad combo chip supplier Broadcom (NASDAQ:BRCM) is providing a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/NFC/FM radio combo chip for the Apple Watch (NASDAQ:AAPL), according to an ABI Research teardown of the Watch's S1 chip module. As expected, NXP supplies a complementary NFC controller.
• The teardown also uncovered a 6-axis STMicroelectronics (NYSE:STM) motion sensor (accelerometer/gyproscope). There has been some debate about whether InvenSense (NYSE:INVN) will be a motion sensor supplier for the Watch, as it is for the iPhone 6.
• Analog Devices (NASDAQ:ADI) supplies a touch controller IC. Barclays reported in March ADI had scored multiple design wins to enable Apple's Force Touch pressure-based response feature (supported by the Watch) on future iPhones/iPads.
• IDT (NASDAQ:ID