Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending February 1, 2019

1. eCOMM: Business Insider's top 5 eCommerce predictions for 2019.
2. CHURN: Uh Oh! Apparently we’ve all been calculating churn rates wrong this whole time. Oh, and if your business has Churn problems, it may very likely be an on-boarding problem.
3. CUSTOMER/PRODUCT: We are currently in the age of the Customer. What exactly does that mean? Well if you are an acquisition focused business versus a customer focused business leveraging customer retention and monetization strategies, probably quite a lot of money. Patrick Campbell of Price Intelligently produced one of the most amazing presentations for me in 2018 with so many solid takeaways it’s hard to summarize but the REALLY big takeaway is on slides 41-44. Monetization and retention-based growth strategies FAR outpace acquisition based ones. Founders should look at this and ask themselves if they want to grow at 15% or 2%?
4. GAMING: Amazon are developing a Game Streaming service joining Microsoft and Google among others, who both have a much larger head start, putting Amazon at a competitive disadvantage (which is unusual for them with Cloud services). This is all indicative of a larger shift in the gaming industry, likely in anticipation of 5G networks coming one-line en-mass in the next 24 months.
5. PRIVACY: Complinace (and lack of of it) can really kill sales cadence when hunting larger customers. Plus it can land you a heft fine if they are in the European Union. Here is a complete guide to GDPR compliance with your data. Plus the fines are real, with Google facing a €50 fine for breaching European privacy rules.
6. Mobile phones and other devices are increasingly being used to shop
7. SERIES A BENCHMARKS: How well did Series A SaaS companies perform in 2018? My favorite VC analyst, Tomasz Tunguz take a look at Benchmarks for 2018 - couple fo highlights: Median ARR was $1.8m ARR, and growing at 250%!! However 22% of the businesses analyses manage to raise Series A capital with $0 ARR.
8. FAANG: Google is raising prices of it’s G-Suite productivity app 20 percent for the basic and business versions for the first time in a decade. Netflix is also raising it’s subscription price 18%
9. IoT: Adoption is expected to soar over the next few years as non-users expected to begin using IoT solutions. You can also download the full Internet of Things Report (as a PDF) here from Business Insider - NZTE download only. The underlying data can also be downloaded in excel format here. 
10. PRODUCT/MARKET: How does a business differentiate its product in an increasingly crowded market. Openview have provided a guide.

POD OF THE WEEK: How a small startup in Western Australia became one of Australia Unicorn Tech companies. How I built this features Melanie Perkins, founder and CEO of Canva

BONUS: Pitch your hardware project, online, or just join as a listener: StartupBlink are providing an online pitching event for Hardware/IoT founders on Feb 19th