Today, Apple announced a $1 billion investment into China's leading ridesharing service, Didi Chuxing. While this makes Apple a minority investor in Didi (with an ownership stake well below 5%), this investment is notable for a few reasons. For one, it is Apple's largest strategic investment since their $3 billion acquisition of Beats two years ago. It also comes at a time when VC money has been moving away from companies with high burn rates and excessively reliance on subsidies (a fairly accurate description of Didi's business). However, understanding Apple's rationale for this deal is tricky.

Apple's stock has been battered over the past year due to fears about iPhone unit sales growth. Yesterday's fiscal Q1 2016 results finally give us some data to understand how realistic these fears are. Apple reported iPhone shipments of 74.8 million units in the quarter, growing marginally over fiscal Q1 2015. However, Apple also increased iPhone channel inventory by 3.3 million over the quarter compared to a decline of 0.2 million in the same quarter last year. Keeping in mind that Apple reports sell-in (shipments), not sales to end users, this implies that iPhone sell-through actually declined by 4.3% YoY, from 74.7 million to 71.5 million units. This is the first such decline in the history of the product.

Last week, I came across an interesting piece by Jan Dawson about self-driving cars. In it, he argued that Tesla's (and possibly Apple's) approach of incremental improvements in automation was vastly superior to Google's goal of achieving full automation. His primary argument is that consumers need to purchase and experience semi-autonomous vehicles before they can trust the technology enough to purchase fully autonomous vehicles (especially given the likely cost of purchase). While this does appear to make some sense, there is a key flaw in this argument. The goals and business models of companies following these two approaches are dramatically different.

Google made some interesting announcements yesterday that could have a profound impact on the existing app interaction model and even how we think of apps. Google search now has the ability to search for app-only content, an outcome of Google's app indexing efforts over the past two years. More importantly, Google announced an experimental program to "stream" a limited set of apps directly from the Google app. This appears to be an attempt to make apps behave more like the web, in effect removing friction from the existing app paradigm.

Yesterday, Apple unveiled two of their most interesting products in years. No, I'm not talking about the pink Apple Watch or the iPhone 6S. Rather, Apple finally made a concerted upmarket push into content creation and productivity with the iPad Pro. In addition, Apple also refreshed the Apple TV with a new interaction model and an SDK / app store which allows developers to build and distribute native apps. This obviously has implications for media and gaming, but it could also have a profound impact on advertising and commerce.

After months of speculation, Apple finally released some vague numbers related to the Apple Watch. As a part of their fiscal Q3 2015 earnings release, Apple announced that revenue from "Other Products" including the Apple Watch, iPod, Apple TV and other accessories totaled $2.64 billion during the quarter. This compares to roughly $1.69 billion in fiscal Q2 2015, before Apple Watch sales began. Combined with some comments from Tim Cook, this should help us get to a rough estimate of Apple Watch shipments (if not sales) for the quarter. We can then also compare this estimate with the third party data sources I highlighted in my last post.

It has been roughly 3 months since the Apple Watch hit the market and, as we expected, we have received no hard sales figures from Apple. However, there have been multiple reports from third party analysts and analytics firms that give us some sparse data about its progress. Joining these disparate pieces of data may give us some insight into the current state of Apple Watch demand.

A discussion about Google I/O and Apple WWDC 2015, and how some of the announcements will impact Asia as a whole. And a deep dive into the investment climate in Asia and how it differs from the US. Is the asset inflation problem in Asia worse than it is in the US?

Now that the Apple Watch's launch is behind us, we may finally have the opportunity to study its (early) impact. The lack of data certainly poses a challenge as Apple has declined to reveal sales figures of its new wearable. However, there are public resources, notably Google Trends, that could give us some measure of insight about how this launch compared to those of the iPhone and iPad. While Google search volumes may not necessarily reflect real-world sales with any degree of accuracy (my own work proves as much), it does give us some directional insight.

In this episode, we discuss the following topics:

1. Apple Watch in Asia
• Who's buying it? Why is there no smartwatch market?
• Understanding the luxury business from the perspective of Apple and LVMH. 
• The problem with Apple competing with Tag Heuer in a luxury watch market.
• Misconceptions of western analysts on the Apple Watch in China.
• How can developers invent new kind of apps on the Apple Watch platform if they are subject to the same constraints?
• What kind of new interaction models could we conceive for smartwatches?
2. Mobile in Asia
• Firefox OS – Should they build a desktop version to compete with Chrome OS?
• Web app vs Native app world – the indexing proposition for Google.
• Google’s lacklustre Android growth – why are OEMs ganging up against them by working with Microsoft? Why has Micromax adopted Cyanogen?
• The next billion problem in Tech (including Google and Facebook): Why apps like Duolingo are better suited to monetize the next billion. Also read Google and Facebook’s vision for mobile.
3. Facebook and Social
• Facebook cloning WeChat
• What is Facebook’s strategy for Whatsapp?
• Content is being commoditized on Facebook and the future of news and media.
• Meerkat vs Periscope (with Twitter's backing) and why Facebook has not made a move on Meerkat.

A few months ago, I wrote a post comparing the early sales of smartwatches to those of tablets and modern smartphones (early iPhone and Android models). As I expected, the numbers didn't bode well for smartwatches. Now that we have another year's worth of data to play with (from Canalys this time), we have an opportunity to test the validity of my previous analysis.

Benedict Evans recently wrote an insightful piece exploring new questions for the mobile industry. Among the 5 questions he brought up, I believe that the evolution of interaction models and messaging will end up being the most important. I don't have anything to add there as think Benedict's analysis here was excellent. However, I do think that three of his questions could benefit from deeper analysis. I also think that he may have missed a crucial question brought on by the scale of the mobile industry.