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May 6th, 2022
WeWork Differently Now
It wasn’t that long ago that WeWork’s rapid rise and fall was a regular feature in business and financial news but it soon faded into the background as the COVID-19 pandemic took center stage across all media. Taking the company out of the spotlight was likely already a strategy for Sandeep Lakhmi Mathrani when he […]
Massive Funding Rounds Flow into the Video Surveillance Market
Our smart buildings and smart cities are now being designed to sense and understand the world around them much like humans do. Networks of sensors hear via microphones in voice control, smell via air quality or gas monitors and feel via temperature, humidity, or pressure sensors. However, like in humans, sight is generally accepted as […]
Convenience Store Retrofits Enable a Checkout-Free Shopping Experience
This article was written by Daphne Tomlinson, Senior Research Associate at Memoori. There is a surge of interest in autonomous checkout technology for convenience stores, as the retail industry struggles more than most through this extended global crisis. The pandemic has helped bolster the case for a checkout-free contactless shopping experience, which mitigates the spread […]
Will SPACs Offer an Alternative Exit Route for Companies in the Smart Buildings Space?
This article was written by Daphne Tomlinson, Senior Research Associate at Memoori. In 2020, an alternative to a conventional IPO – Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) – took the innovation landscape by storm, according to Michael Holman of Lux Research. “A SPAC is an alternative to a conventional initial public offering (IPO) in which an […]
End of the Road for WeWork? Recession Spells Uncertain Times for Co-Working
In August 2017, a New York co-working startup named WeWork was squeezed into a unicorn outfit and hurled on to the world stage by a $4.4 billion investment from Japanese conglomerate Softbank. By August 2018, as WeWork’s astronomical growth continued, we started to question our assumptions of this as a fad, contemplating WeWork as the […]
The WeWork Carnival, Softbank & the Future of Co-Working
“I think I’ve run out of the words to describe what’s been going on, from surreal to crazy to unbelievable to — someone texted me yesterday — “bonkers,” all of those things are true and yet the reality is that we’re still here and we’re still here together. I just want to remind all of […]
We-Don’t-Work: Neumann Cast Adrift as Sharks Continue to Circle
The WeWork saga continues as the co-founder and CEO, Adam Neumann, stepped down yesterday amid a torrent of corporate and personal scandal in the wake of the firm’s postponed IPO; which Scott Galloway described as ‘flinging feces at retail investors visiting the unicorn zoo’! This may just be another story of an over-indulgent startup with […]
‘We’ Don’t Sell Flexible Office Space, ‘We’ Sell Modern Urban Lifestyles
WeWork has created a lot of buzz with its flexible contracts and millennial-hipster style branding for what is essentially a “Regus-esque” office real-estate play. Its sister firms in the education and residential spaces have not troubled the stance of critical investment experts who have sometimes painted WeWork as the symbol of over-funding in the startup […]