America's Road to Fame

Chapter 347 Siri Smart Speaker
And in this world, because the subprime mortgage crisis has been postponed for a full two years, it needs more recovery period, so Groupon may have a longer good time for group buying.

But the desolation of the group buying model is hard to avoid after all.

Therefore, William Chen has been prepared for a long time, and will make a band on Groupon depending on the situation.

His plan is to wait until Groupon goes public, and start selling his own stocks while the company is on the cusp of the group buying model and its market value is high.

Then, when Groupon’s business has shrunk and its market value has plummeted, after the group buying model has passed, it will buy stocks at a low price and try to adjust the company to local services. Next, it will be able to usher in the takeaway trend. If the transformation is successful , then Groupon can become the "Meituan" of the United States, which is also very valuable for investment.

Therefore, now that William Chen has this plan, there is no need to hold too high a proportion of Groupon's stock in his hands, otherwise, if he sells at a high price at that time, the impact on the stock price will be too great.

As for the shares held by Zoom, it will depend on the situation at that time. If the shares of his Meta investment company are liquidated and the stock price of Groupon is still relatively high, then it is not impossible to sell some of them.

If you think about this clearly, then this time, it is better to give the founding team of Groupon a favor and not participate in the next financing round.By the way, watch how the founder behaves. If it is too difficult to cooperate, it is time to kick him out of the company after Groupon's slump.

The companies owned by William Chen now include investment companies, related banks, and extended entertainment media and Internet industries. It can be said that they already have the size of a consortium.

Then after that, he will start to establish his investment style.As a consortium, he can mainly pursue economic interests when investing, which is the so-called financial investment; he can also pursue control over related industries, that is, to control the companies he invests in, at least he needs to have a certain right to speak .

Now William Chen's investment is to make some decisions about this, and to obtain corresponding rights for those investment projects related to his core industries.

In addition, certain important industries will also implement such a strategy. Only in some companies that have little correlation with his evil industries, he will focus on financial investment.

After all, he had passed the initial stage of wealth accumulation at this time, and his total wealth had reached an astonishing level.

It's just that a lot of wealth has been placed in offshore funds and investment companies by him in various ways at present, and it will not be placed under the sun as obviously as before.

Then what he needs to seek next is himself, the influence and control over many important industries.

Of course, it does not mean that he needs to hold so many shares like a subsidiary of the Meta Group, because it is true that in the environment of the United States, if you occupy too many shares and do not share profits with others, it must be difficult Developed, this is something he felt deeply during this period of time.

Regarding this, Bill Gates and others have talked to William Chen many times, but at that time, the development of companies such as Twitter and HOLA was good, so William Chen still maintains a state of full control, but until now When the development momentum of these companies has gradually weakened, William Chen began to feel that without allies, it has become more and more difficult to promote.

Because the other party does not hold shares and cannot gain benefits through the development of your company, why should they help you?Even when your track has been seen to have great potential, even many companies will try to invest in supporting your competing products in an attempt to get a share of this track.

On February 2th, William Chen came to Silicon Valley. The R&D center of Meta Technology had completed the commercialized version of Meta Cloud. On this day, it went public in a low-key manner.

At present, Meta Technology has established more than 10 large data centers around the world, and plans to continue to build data centers in the future for the configuration of Meta Cloud.

Initially, Meta Cloud mainly provided cloud services for Meta Technology’s products, including Twitter, HOLA, Siri, and Reddit, as well as streaming media platforms such as Spotify, Kugou, and Netflix invested by William Chen.

With the Meta cloud, the improvement process of Siri can be accelerated, and the intelligent voice speaker product proposed by William Chen and Siri Company before, may be realized.

In fact, it didn't take long before the experimental version of the Siri smart speaker was produced, but this experimental version, compared with those smart speakers that William Chen had seen in his previous life, was a bit huge. Compared with a few years later, the technical level still has some gaps.

However, this experimental version, which mainly completes the functions of smart speakers, will definitely be different when the official version is finalized and produced.

In fact, the realization of the main functions of smart speakers is not complicated. It is as if many computers in Internet cafes no longer have local hard drives and are directly retrieved from the server. The local components of smart speakers do not need to be so complete. Perform sound recognition and output, and then connect to the Meta cloud. All calculations, searches, and retrieval of relevant data are performed on the Meta cloud. The local smart speakers only need to receive the results from the Meta cloud and then communicate them by voice. Just give it to the user.

Originally, Siri’s voice recognition and intelligent voice output technology came from Nuance. William Chen also had the idea of ​​acquiring this company, but in the end he chose to hold a part of Nuance’s shares because of the low cost performance. Then by poaching people, Siri's technology in intelligent voice can catch up.

Up to now, this task has been basically completed. Nuance’s cooperation team with Siri has been rounded up and all joined Siri, becoming the foundation of Siri’s intelligent voice department. After more than a year of research, Although Siri's intelligent voice technology cannot be said to have reached the level of Nuance, it is very close.

Speaking of the experimental version of the Siri smart speaker, the core component is the main control chip made by technicians after modifying a mobile phone chip. The function of this chip is to integrate the various functions of the smart speaker and complete the preliminary calculation. , and control the various functions of the smart speaker, it can be said that it is the "brain" of the smart speaker.

If it is mass-produced, Siri will cooperate with corresponding chip manufacturing companies, such as "Texas Instruments" or "MediaTek", to produce dedicated main control chips for smart speakers.

The technical content of the next components is not so high. There are Bluetooth modules, WiFi modules, microphone modules, speaker modules, etc. If necessary, you can also add a control module for the LED light array, so that the smart speaker can achieve many effects through lighting.

However, these are issues that need to be considered in the later stage. The main goal at present is to adjust and experiment. After completing the relatively mature experimental version of the smart speaker, it will be promoted to the official version on the market. This process is still complicated, including every The selection of individual parts, the coordinated control after forming the whole, and the selection of the foundry...

It would be good for Chen William to leave it to professional people. He is only responsible for giving suggestions on the functions that smart speakers need to have based on his experience of using smart speakers in his previous life.

Of course, not all features will be included, but at least they will be developed.Because of some modules, due to the gap between the past two and three years, the current cost is not suitable for adding to smart speakers, otherwise the cost of the entire speaker will be too expensive.

Another important task is the product design of smart speakers.The experimental version is really ugly, and it's also very big, which can almost catch up with the size of some current computer speakers, which is not acceptable.

When the smart speaker product was first launched, the positioning will not become the price of cabbage as it did after the giants entered the market later.Now the smart speaker is still an epoch-making product, so it must reflect the style and give customers the feeling that it is like Apple's products, simple but not simple, the product is full of details, and the overall appearance gives people a high-end aesthetic.

For this reason, William Chen specially hired a designer from the Hermès Group to participate in the appearance design of this smart speaker. The goal is to be small and beautiful. Based on the current technology and cost control within a certain range, try to complete this goal as much as possible.

(End of this chapter)