Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending January 25, 2019

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1. FUNDING IN REVIEW: VC funding in 2018 eclipsed $100b for the first time since the dot-com era with $130.9B invested by US VCs. PwC and CB Insights also report what happened in Q4 2018 globally with their quarterly VC report. The fewer-but-larger deal trend continues into the new year (more money being spent into less deals) and this infographic can save you a read about this trend. Also, evidently, there still remains a massive gender bias in Startup Funding.
2. IoT: Business Insider's top 5 IoT predictions for 2019 - 5G is coming!
3. Customer Success: Do you know a business needing to deploy a Customer Success team? Here is breakdown of how to structure the first 90 days
4. Go to Market: Finding go-to-market strategies are hard and require strong packaging paired with pricing and using the freemium strategy has fluctuated from being hot to hated. This article takes a deep dive into Freemium as a strategy and asks Is it time to rethink Freemium as a SaaS Go-To-Market strategy?
5. AI: What did the mice say? Project “DeepSqueak" uses AI to translate ultrasonic vocalizations of rats and mice. OK, Why? Well you can’t make this stuff up - DeepSqueak is designed to help researchers figure out what rodents are saying during drug experiments (and the work is already yielding insights).
6. SaaS REVENUE: How (and when) to convert bookings into revenue recognition - knowing this is key to understanding Cash at hand.
7. Digital Advertising: Amazon's online ad business is set to more than quadruple by 2023 —Amazon made roughly $9 billion from advertising spend in 2018 and expects to hit $38 billion by 2023.
8. Microsoft: Microsoft has performed a massive Business model turn around over the past 4 years and proved to be an incredibly resilient Tech company from an investors perspective, especially given the Stock Market behavior of the past few months. CB Insights serves up a massive (67 page) report of Microsoft's recent transformation (downloadable PDF).
9. SALES DEEPDIVE: Just how do tech companies measure and reward sales teams? Well we wrote a neat summary based on last years Bridge Groups Sales Development Metrics and Compensation Research Report, hopefully giving you a digestible read. BONUS: Download compensation calculators (as an Excel sheet) here for SDR's and here for AE's.
10. Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg’s New Years resolution for 2019 is to host a series of public discussions about the future of technology in society. He has been setting an annual personal goal for himself since 2009 and this comes from a year where Facebook and Zuckerberg faced a barrage of criticism worldwide about their business practices. Mark Benioff (CEO Of Salesforce) also compared Facebook to Smoking in comments earlier this week at the World Economic Forum.

POD OF THE WEEK: From a16z, Brian McCoullough chronicles the history and evolution of the internet

BONUS FROM GOOGLE: For the Good of NZ? Google has launched an artificial intelligence contest for social good. Please share with any companies who you think may be a good fit.