Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending April 12, 2019

1. FINTECH 2019 5/5: The final part of a Five part series on the Future of Fintech by Business Insider. This one covering both AI and blockchain which are making the leap from hype to reality.
2. ROBOTS: APAC will reign as the hub of demand for steadily growing robotics market. Annual shipments of industrial robots in the three markets leading adoption are set to surpass 1.2 million by 2024, up from an estimated 525,000 in 2019
3. CLOUD: This may come as a surprise to some, but with massive data breaches constantly in the news (and the trending topic at last months RSA!), cloud storage can actually be much more secure than onsite solutions. Also - guess who is adopting cloud faster than other industries?. It’s the Financial Sector. (According to Nutanix, hybrid cloud deployment has reached 21% penetration among financial services firms, compared to a global average of 18.5%)
4. SALES: Cognitive bias is everywhere and often are of the biggest obstacles to navigate during the sales process. This blog post from the team at Sales Hacker describes some of the biases sellers face and how to use navigate through them.
5. SERVICES: Microsoft did it, Apple are in the process of doing it (here is a deeper dive on why) Other big brands are finding new life and new growth opportunties in services based revenue over traditional products. Fender are now also in the game, which is validating the business model of NZ’s own Melodics. This article breaks down the pricing and unit economics model of Fenders new service.
6. WOMEN IN TECH: By the numbers, Bethany Crystal takes a look at women VC’s around the world (and where they are, which is apparently not in NZ). 
7. WELLNESS: Being a founder of a startup is far from smooth sailing and can take a pretty hefty toll on personal wellbeing . First Round Capital discuss this in detail and in particular discuss the need to admit to being vulnerable and accessing great mentorship and coaching.
8. ANGELS and VC’s: A majority of all tech companies are at relatively early (seed/pre seed) stages of growth and all face challenges raising capital. This article and complimentary google doc outlines the current state of this stage of the capital market by asking the question "Should companies raise their pre-seed round from angels or VCs?”. Meanwhile US VC funding remained strong in Q1 2019 as investors deployed $32.6 billion across 1,853 deals
9. VOICE: Amazon is now letting companies create voice skills for use in the office with the launch of Alexa for Business, where users can use existing blueprints to create their own voice-activated commands onto of Alexa without having to write code……..."Alexa, create a Discover Canvas"
10. ZOOM: Our favorite collaborative tech tool is set to go public later this month (forecast at $8.25 Billion!) and at $425m in ARR and growing, Jason Lemkin and the SaaStr team take a close look at what make Zoom really super impressive: a) it has fantastic unit economics and, b) is very profitable, unlike other IPO businesses. Weirdly enough, in 2018, the profitability of companies that IPO had the INVERSE impact on price.

POD OF THE WEEK: The road to success is paved with failure, Freakonomics talk to creatives on how to fail like a pro

BONUS: Amazon are running a free online conference for Voice developers and designers on May 2nd (Pacific)