Friends –
Happy week after Thanksgiving.  Black Friday was down, they say; San Francisco’s Union Square was full of deals;  and parents now debate whether their kids (or they, or the FAA) are ready for drones, or hoverboards, in the house.  

Work for NICT

We are happy to announce work for Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, helping with the commercial go-to-market for some very compelling R&D initiatives.

San Francisco election post mortem

We talked about the San Franciso election at length in our last newsletter.  (Can’t remember that? Re-read it here.) As has been well covered, AirBnB, despite occasionally tone-deaf marketing, turned back the Prop F tide. We were particularly interested in Prop E, aka The Sunshine and Open Government Act. Real-time streamed, interactive, simultaneously translated city meetings? We would have had ‘em, along with all the likely unintended consequences. Alas, it was voted down. For those who like to see San Francisco teeter on the bleeding edge, this was a disappointment.

Shocker: AT&T and Verizon really do make more money

We were shocked SHOCKED (Claude Rains voice) to read Chetan Sharma’s analysis that Sprint and T-Mobile’s aggressive subscriber acquisition and pricing campaigns means they’re losing money per subscriber on a monthly basis. We aggregated Big 4 national carriers’ latest quarterly earnings in the chart below. Healthy competitions? Justification for further consolidation? Let us know!

US Big 4 carrier earnings, most recent quarter

Zero after 3000?

We had an enjoyable tweet-flurry with the AP’s Yuri Kageyama and Japan Intercultural Consulting’s Rochelle Kopp – on Japanese “Minister in charge of Overcoming Population Decline and Vitalizing Local Economy in Japan” (seriously) Shigeru Ishiba’s comments that Japan’s population could shrink to 3000 by the year 3000. Minister Ishiba is trying to ring some alarm bells. We applaud his effort. We put part of the blame on the broad use of low-paid temps, who, for basic economic reasons, aren’t marrying and having kids. More on this subject.

Only 24 shopping days until Christmas; where’s Sandro?

Blumberg Capital lit the holiday lights with its holiday party.

Thanks to everyone who came to our @BlumbergCapital holiday open house last night. We truly had a wonderful time. pic.twitter.com/3lFJyQ2X7p

— David Blumberg (@davidblumberg) November 18, 2015

Astute Blue Field watchers will recognize some familiar profiles in the photo. Where’s Sandro??
On we go to the race to get stuff done before the holidays. Black Friday down? Do your part!

As always, for those visiting San Francisco from out of town, come see us.

from Team Blue Field

世界的課題の水をテーマにシリコンバレーで技術コンテスト (Japanese; Singularity University’s Drought Impact Challenge); Phil Keys, Nikkei Technology Online, November 27)