They haven't said why, but the reason seems commercial and not technical.
Unless a service is bringing in millions or maybe tens of millions of $$ in revenue, a big company like IBM would not find it to be attractive enough. And some big manager one day is gonna cut it down as part of 'house cleaning'.
Whereas for a smaller startup, that same 'millions of dollars' in potential revenue might be a VERY attractive opportunity.
To paraphrase Bezos, big company's need for scale is the startup's opportunity.
Spotted a game for Slack on Product Hunt the other day. We tried it out in our company workspace and it was quite fun. We loved the roasting game the most :D. Especially since our boss was playing and she was quite the sport.
Really liked this because I've always wondered how one could watermark content to track who distributed content they weren't supposed to. Could understand a fair amount in my first watch even though I don't code (although I have learnt basic programming over a decade ago).
How could you do this keeping in mind compression?
Most actively managed funds do not beat the index. For the average investor who doesn't have more than a couple of hours every week to figure out their investment strategy, just invest in indices. If you're in the US - the Nasdaq Composite or S&P 500. If you're in India, the Nifty 50 or Nifty 100. You can do this through ETFs.
However, it is not recommended you invest only in equity. Market crashes can result in your wealth eroding by 30-50% as seen recently and back in 2008. While it does recover in the long run, it is impossible to say how long a bear market will last which means your money will be locked in for quite some time. Further, your returns may not outperform inflation in a shorter time-frame. Also, if you have an emergency, the money is no longer liquid.
It is highly advisable to diversify your investment across asset classes. Having gold & fixed income (debt) in your portfolio will help protect during adverse market conditions and grow at a modest rate during bull markets. An example is this product which is available to investors in India: https://www.smallcase.com/smallcase/SCAW_0001. It is only an example to show you how asset allocation helps protect against market volatility/crashes.
It would be wise to create an emergency fund for anywhere between 6-12 months as a separate thing.
Once you're more confident, start exploring niche indices; there are many ETFs. For example, the Bessemer Emerging Cloud Index has performed extremely well since March. An astute investor would have realized that people locked-in and working remotely would result in an increase in productivity apps, video content consumption etc. These rely on cloud platforms for hosting and delivery. One would have invested in it and made some pretty good returns. An investment on March 1st would be up 21% compared with 4% in Nasdaq Composite.
But this requires you to keep an eye on what's happening in the world and being able to interpret it. There aren't shortcuts to this.
But to get started with, you can start learning about the basics of business & economics. This might help: https://learn.tickertape.in/
A very comprehensive resource for learning about investing can be found here: https://zerodha.com/varsity/ (there's a lot of modules on trading, ignore if you don't want to trade. Do modules 1, 3 & 11).
The capital markets in India (and elsewhere in the world) is highly regulated. It will take you at least a year to get a brokerage licence.
How do I know? I work in the space. It is dominated by traditional brokerages who are now facing the heat from discount brokerages, the largest of which is Zerodha.
In order to make any real money, you'll need to operate at scale. The cost of customer acquisition is very high and the average revenue per user very low which makes it impossible to get far without raising significant money. There are enough quality brokerages in the market and I don't see VCs backing another one.
I'm only sharing my insights, not discouraging you. But I'd highly recommend you look at building something with lesser regulatory overheads. You could even explore building on top of the brokerage layer - Zerodha has exposed their APIs and a number of startups have been built on this.
An idea for the meantime: OP could paper trade for early users. Prove the concept, improve the UX, and be ready to partner or have investment to manage the brokerage licensing etc.
