Tekedia Institute welcomes the team from Wellahealth to Tekedia Mini-MBA which begins Sept 13 to end Dec 6, 2021. Wellahealth partners with insurance companies to offer micro health insurance for high occurrence disease in Africa starting with malaria in Nigeria.
At Tekedia Mini-MBA, we co-learn the mechanics of business systems, mastering innovation, understanding how to accelerate business growth, and becoming agents for advancing communities.
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Dear Member,
Greetings. We are providing guidance on timelines for the next Tekedia Capital Syndicate cycle, planned for mid-October 2021 to late November 2021. We continue to source for great businesses (full calendar with dates in the board for members). If you plan to join us, click and complete your registration. We have amazing companies in our pipeline.
Your membership covers 12 months or 4 investment cycles if we do not do 4 cycles in 12 months. Our focus here is not quantity but quality.
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Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, has filed a lawsuit in federal court against NASA, over the $2.9 billion lunar lander contract awarded to Elon Musk’s SpaceX earlier this year.
Blue Origin had complained that NASA had awarded the contract to SpaceX without following due process, which mitigated the chances of other bidders to win the contract.
“This bid protest challenges NASA’s unlawful and improper evaluation of proposals,” Blue Origin’s lawyers wrote in its court filing.
The protest, filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims on Monday, is the latest move by Blue Origin to overturn the lunar lander contract. A Blue Origin spokesperson told CNBC that it is looking “to remedy the flaws in the acquisition process found in NASA’s Human Landing System.”
“We firmly believe that the issues identified in this procurement and its outcomes must be addressed to restore fairness, create competition, and ensure a safe return to the Moon for America,” Blue Origin said.
Blue Origin’s filing in court comes a couple of weeks after the U.S. Government Accountability Office denied the company’s protest, upholding NASA’s decision. Bezos had last month, offered to give NASA $2 billion if it would reconsider its decision on the lunar lander contract, after the space agency cited its own funding shortfalls as part of the reasons for awarding the contract to SpaceX.
NASA rejected bids from Blue Origin and Dynetics, against expectation that it would share the contract between two companies. It chose only SpaceX citing the company’s proven record of orbital missions and other factors. Kathy Lueders, a senior NASA official said the factors represented “what’s best value to the government.”
Following this decision, Blue Origin filed a complaint with the GAO on the claim that NASA gave SpaceX an unfair advantage by allowing it to revise its pricing. Blue Origin said then that the decision “not only delays but also endangers America’s return to the moon.”
Blue Origin was counting on the GAO to reverse the contract decision but was disappointed when the watch dog’s ruling backed NASA’s decision.
Blue Origin has not hid its obsession to win a contract under NASA’s HLS program, even though it has yet no record of successful orbital missions. Before the April contract award, NASA had handed out nearly $1 billion in concept development contracts – with SpaceX receiving $135 million, Dynetics $253 million, and Blue Origin receiving $579 million.
The company’s court filing on Monday comes as Blue Origin has stepped up a public relations offensive against NASA using SpaceX’s next-generation Starship to land astronauts on the moon. CNBC reported a series of comparative infographics, where Blue Origin has emphasized the “unprecedented number of technologies, developments, and operations that have never been done before for Starship to land on the Moon.”
Blue Origin last week released an infographic that added that Starship is “a launch vehicle that has never flown to orbit and is still being designed.”
Musk, in response to Blue Origin’s infographic, gave his view of Bezos’ company and its criticism.
“The sad thing is that even if Santa Claus suddenly made their hardware real for free, the first thing you’d want to do is cancel it,” Musk wrote in a tweet.
The Blue Origin lawsuit is also coming barely a week after Amazon, another company owned by Bezos, won a controversial $10 billion government contract. Amazon Web Services won the $10 billion service contract from the National Security Agency and Microsoft filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office.
Microsoft claims that NSA did not conduct proper evaluation while considering a provider for its new project code-named WildandStormy. The software’s firm move is considered vindictive because Amazon had taken the same step when the Defense Department awarded a $10 billion Jedi contract to Microsoft. The contract was eventually cancelled after years of legal battles, and Microsoft said Amazon is to be blamed for it.
This is super amazing and I want you to join me to congratulate them: “the 2Africa consortium, comprised of China Mobile International, Facebook, MTN GlobalConnect, Orange, stc, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone and WIOCC, announced today the addition of four new branches to the 2Africa cable. The branches will extend 2Africa’s connectivity to the Seychelles, the Comoros Islands, and Angola, and bring a new landing to south-east Nigeria. The new branches join the recently announced extension to the Canary Islands”.
I am using this medium to ask the governors in South East Nigeria to give these companies all the support to make this a reality. I thank MTN which continues to serve. I thank Facebook which is amazing. I thank China Mobile for this voyage. I thank Orange which remains beautiful. To stc, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone and WIOCC, thank you for remembering the land of the rising sun. Well done.
If the future includes digital commerce, every part of Nigeria needs good internet – and these companies have promised to extend the capabilities everywhere, one by one, and for that I say BIG Salute.
Remaining part of the press release
2Africa, which will be the largest subsea cable project in the world, will deliver faster, more reliable internet service to each country where it lands. Communities that rely on the internet for services from education to healthcare, and business will experience the economic and social benefits that come from this increased connectivity.
Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) has been selected to deploy the new branches, which will increase the number of 2Africa landings to 35 in 26 countries, further improving connectivity into and around Africa. As with other 2Africa cable landings, capacity will be available to service providers at carrier-neutral data centres or open-access cable landing stations on a fair and equitable basis, encouraging and supporting the development of a healthy internet ecosystem.
Marine surveys completed for most of the cable and Cable manufacturing is underway
Since launching the 2Africa cable in May 2020, the 2Africa consortium has made considerable progress in planning and preparing for the deployment of the cable, which is expected to ‘go live’ late 2023. Most of the subsea route survey activity is now complete. ASN has started manufacturing the cable and building repeater units in its factories in Calais and Greenwich to deploy the first segments in 2022.
Egypt terrestrial crossing already completed
One of 2Africa’s key segments, the Egypt terrestrial crossing that interconnects landing sites on the Red and the Mediterranean Seas via two completely diverse terrestrial routes, has been completed ahead of schedule. A third diverse marine path will complement this segment via the Red Sea.
Google is seeking to dismiss the suit brought against it by the State of Ohio’s attorney general, who claimed the tech giant’s search engine service is a public utility.
The web search company said the popularity of its search service doesn’t in anyways equal a public utility.
“To claim, as Ohio does, that Google Search is a ‘public utility’ is to declare it a business that Ohio could acquire, construct, own or operate. But that is absurd,” Google said in its filing. “The State could not possibly undertake such a burden for countless reasons, not the least of which is that it has no business dictating the online information it wants people to see.”
In June, Ohio attorney general Dave Yost filed a landmark lawsuit asking the court to declare Google a public utility, reining in the ways the powerful search engine provides search results to the people of the State. The attorney general accuses Google of being anticompetitive, forcing Ohioans to use its products in the first of its kind case.
It is one of the many antitrust legal cases Google is battling. Yost said Google uses its dominance of internet search to steer Ohioans to Google’s own products, which is discriminatory and anti-competitive.
“When you own the railroad or the electric company or the cellphone tower, you have to treat everyone the same and give everybody access,” he said.
Google’s failure to treat everyone equally means its search function will be regulated like a public utility – the same as water, electricity, and transportation companies, according to Yost.
In its response on Friday, Google said the State’s request “has no more validity under the law than a request to declare Fox News, the New York Times, or Walmart a ‘public utility’ because most people in a particular town prefer to get their news or groceries from them instead of someone else.”
The search company added that its results were protected under First Amendment because they were editorial decisions. It said “the State cannot interfere with this protected expression, let alone try to control what Google must or must not include on its Results Page.”
Moreover, Google has argued that it cannot be classified under Ohio law as a “common carrier” since it doesn’t actually carry anything or anyone. Users’ data are moved by internet service providers.
“Google search is not shipping a commodity product, but constantly working to provide useful information in response to people’s unique queries,” the company said.
Antitrust campaign against the big tech has been upped recently, with watchdogs around the world dolling out targeted fines and penalties against big names in the tech industry, and it is expected to aggravate in the future.
In June, Lina Khan, a 32 year-old antitrust scholar and law professor was appointed as chair of the Federal Trade Commission, becoming the youngest person to occupy that position. Her appointment is driving uneasy feelings through the tech industry, as she has been, prior to her appointment, a big critic of the tech giants.
Facebook and Amazon had requested that Khan recuse herself from FTC’s antitrust investigations into their companies, on the argument that her past criticisms of them meant she “wouldn’t be a neutral or an impartial evaluator” of antitrust issues.
Khan believes that antitrust enforcement in the US has been lax for years, allowing the big tech to indulge in anticompetitive and monopolistic practices unchallenged. This has seen them record unprecedented growth in short periods of time, bullying and crippling smaller companies along the way. For instance, in 2020, Apple became the first American company to reach $2 trillion value. Amazon and Google crossed the $1 trillion milestone while Microsoft was valued at $1.6 trillion.
Khan’s appointment as the FTC chair means it will no longer be business as usual for the Silicon Valley big names. Already there has been uptick in both lawsuits and legislative moves against the tech giants, including the recent bill to break up the tech companies.