Commentary on some of the interesting numbers in the news
(Photo credit: Flickr/morebyless under CC-BY 2.0)
5
Market capitalization (“market cap”) is calculated by multiplying a company’s shares outstanding by its price per share. Market cap is the most straightforward method for determining a public company’s valuation, and on August 1, 2016, “the five biggest companies in the world by market value were all U.S. tech companies.”
For one day, Facebook’s market cap overtook that of Exxon Mobile. It joined Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon to round out the list of the world’s five largest public companies. This is the first time tech firms have claimed all of the top five spots.
Data source: Y charts
Exxon Mobile returned to its #5 position on August 2 and has subsequently remained there. While there will inevitably be fluctuations over time in both the companies and industries at the top of the market, this day provided a glimpse of the current dominance of the technology industry in our social and economic landscape.
17%
Our most recent analysis of IaaS price trends indicates that we may be near a pricing floor for base infrastructure offerings. In the previous iterations of the analysis, nearly all providers showed downward momentum in their prices; however, this update indicates that the trend of ever downward price pressures seems to be alleviating.
The average hourly price of a base IaaS instance in 2014 was $0.23/hour. It was $0.27/hour in 2016, a 17% increase.
100%
The attempt to protect the Olympic brand has led to social media outcry. In addition to banning gifs, this exchange around hashtags sparked a outrage across Twitter.
It turns out that the @Official_Rule40 tweetbot was not officially sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee and has since been suspended.
However, the whole exchange made me wonder about the actual contents of Rule 40. Based on said rule, here is a list of some of the “Olympic-related” words that cannot be used by non-official sponsors if their usage implies an association with the Olympics:
– 2016
– Rio / Rio de Janeiro
– Medal
– Gold / Silver / Bronze
– Effort
– Performance
– Challenge
– Summer
– Games
– Sponsors
– Victory
So while the IOC itself didn’t lecture the Pope about the brand usage, they are in fact attempting to control global use of the current year, the name of a major city, a season, and numerous words that are basic parts of speech. I’m truly not sure how Rule 40 is enforceable, but it is 100% crazy.
Disclosure: AWS and Microsoft are RedMonk clients.
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