VIDEO - Technology Update July 2018

July was hectic month for the overarching technology sector, with companies across all of its verticals making headlines.

One of the biggest stories in July were drastic market cap losses that social networks faced following their second quarter 2018 results.

Both Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) and Twitter (NASDAQ:TWTR) suffered heavy blows but the major point would be of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook setting an infamous record of losing US$120 billion in market cap.

In addition to drastic market cap dip, Facebook’s earnings call caused more panic from investors.

The shares of Facebook dipped over 18 percent after the social media giant revealed that its revenue growth rate will decelerate in the second half of 2018. This was compounded by the fact that GDPR has hurt the user base growth in Europe while stalling in North America.

Similar fate awaited Twitter as the shares of the social networking site dipped 20 percent following the revelation of slow user growth on its platform. It has to be noted that the losses of these two social media giants not only impacted them but also dragged the index down for two consecutive days.

In terms of cleantech, the major news in this sector happened in Canada with Ontario Premier Doug Ford announcing the government will be winding down 750 renewable energy contracts and agreeing to fight the federal carbon tax.

Towards the end of the month, Alliant Energy (NYSE:LNT) and NextEra Energy (NYSE:NEE) announced it will be ceasing operations of its nuclear plant in Iowa by 2020 to pursue renewable energy.

Looking over to cybersecurity, the US is one step closer to adopting its National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2019 that puts more emphasis on cybersecurity which notably has a provision for US to respond to malicious cyber activities targeting the country.

The bill is significant because President Trump initially suggested Russia might not be responsible for whatever happened in the previous elections. In a tweet, however, Trump suggested Russia could have an impact on the midterm election.

It has to be noted that for the bill to be made official, Trump has to put his signature on it.

Shifting focus to organizations, Fiserv (NASDAQ:FISV) has formed an alliance with BlueVoyant to help financial institutions to secure their systems by overcoming several challenges, including: shortage of of cybersecurity talent and, most importantly, tailoring a cybersecurity solution for their needs.

Finally, in the world of graphene, there were two key stories in this sector and these two stories could potentially have a long term impact. The first one is from a Canadian company NanoXplore (TSXV:GRA), which got a boost for its proposed graphene plant set to be the world’s largest graphene production plant.

The second graphene story of the month came from First Graphene (ASX:FGR)entering into an agreement with FlexeGraph for the supply of graphene. The deal between the two companies is to test the suitability of graphene as a cooling product for use in batteries and high performance computing products.

It’s been said that nanofluid coolant represented a technology breakthrough in 90 years as this form of cooling represented an 60 percent improvement in thermal conductivity as compared to traditional form of cooling.

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Securities Disclosure: I, Bala Yogesh, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.