Tag: Foxconn

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Supplier Report: 4/17/2020


Photo by Eric Ward on Unsplash

The relationship between SoftBank and WeWorks is crumbling and it is extremely interesting to watch this situation implode.

As more information comes to light about how WeWork operated and their overall strategy of real estate manipulation, you can’t feel bad for either company’s failure (at least I don’t). Manipulate. Overvalue. Cash Out. I hope investors and reputable banks learn from this mess (hello Uber).

Meanwhile, Foxconn might actually use those manufacturing plants in Wisconsin for something useful… making respirators.

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Friendship Ended With SoftBank, Now Lawsuits Are WeWork’s Best Friend

    SoftBank’s reasoning for backing out includes concern about regulatory probes into WeWork and more technical details concerning an exchange of shares that SoftBank sabotaged in order to prevent this deal. WeWork is suing SoftBank, claiming that concern over regulatory troubles are not grounds for backing out because WeWork has been controlled by SoftBank for nearly half a year now. In WeWork’s own words:

    “The investigations were not a surprise, given Neumann’s conduct and the Company’s loss of billions in value. SoftBank had complete knowledge of the facts underlying the investigations when it executed the [Master Transaction Agreement]. … All of the investigations were known to SoftBank at the time that it signed the December 27, 2019 amendment to the MTA. But SoftBank did not raise the investigations as a basis not to consummate the Tender Offer until recently, as the approaching April 1, 2020 closing date caused it to become increasingly desperate.”

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/y3m7gy/friendship-ended-with-softbank-now-lawsuits-are-weworks-best-friend

  • German security firm Avira has been acquired by Investcorp at a $180M valuation

    The financial terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed in the companies’ joint announcement, but the CEO of Avira, Travis Witteveen, and ITP’s MD, Gilbert Kamieniecky, both said it gives Avira a total valuation of $180 million. The deal will involve ITP taking a majority ownership in the company, with Avira founder Tjark Auerbach retaining a “significant” stake of the company in the deal, Kamieniecky added.

    Avira is not a tech startup in the typical sense. It was founded in 1986 and has been bootstrapped (in that it seems never to have taken any outside investment as it has grown). Witteveen said that it has “tens of millions” of users today of its own-branded products — its anti-virus software has been resold by the likes of Facebook (as part of its now-dormant antivirus marketplace) — and many more via the white-label deals it makes with big names. Strategic partners today include NTT, Deutsche Telekom, IBM, Canonical and more.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/08/german-security-firm-avira-has-been-acquired-by-investcorp-at-a-180m-valuation/

Artificial Intelligence/Robotics

I mentioned it a few weeks ago, but it is very strange how there has been almost no news about AI and automation for the last 6 weeks.

Once would assume with people being unable to work, there would be some talk of automation (even if it is an uncomfortable topic with people out of work), but… crickets.

Software/SaaS

  • Our Government Runs on a 60-Year-Old Coding Language, and Now It’s Falling Apart

    The Government Accountability Office has repeatedly warned about the use of legacy programming languages for critical systems. In 2019, the GAO issued a report summarizing 10 federal computing systems that were in desperate need of an overhaul. For instance, the Department of Education’s system for processing federal student aid applications was implemented in 1973. It takes 18 contractors to maintain the system, and since it’s written in COBOL, it requires specific hardware and is difficult to integrate with newer software languages.

    GAO considers COBOL a legacy language, which means agencies have trouble finding staff that knows how to write the code at all. And when they can, the specialist contractors charge a premium.

    It also means that when a system breaks, there might not be somebody there to fix it. And that’s where New Jersey finds itself now, with a sagging system and lack of qualified engineers.

    https://onezero.medium.com/our-government-runs-on-a-60-year-old-coding-language-and-now-its-falling-apart-61ec0bc8e121

  • SAP the first of the enterprise software vendors to pre-announce
    • FRS Cloud Revenue Up 29% €2.01 billion €2.01 billion
    • Non-IFRS Cloud Revenue Up 27% €2.01 billion
    • Software Licenses Revenue Down 31% to €0.45 billion
    • Total Revenue Up 7% to €6.52 billion
    • IFRS Operating Profit Up More Than 100% to €1.21 billion
    • Non-IFRS Operating Profit Up 1% to €1.48 billion

    The decline in software licenses is steep but not wholly unexpected. SAP has all but stopped selling licenses and is moving rapidly to a subscription model.

    The question of just how fragile the ERP market has become will be the subject of much commentary on the earnings call. For the moment, SAP believes decisions are being ‘postponed,’ anticipating that conditions will remain very difficult through Q2 with a gradual recovery in Q3-4.

    https://diginomica.com/sap-first-enterprise-software-vendors-pre-announce

  • Microsoft thinks coronavirus will forever change the way we work and learn

    While usage continues to rise, Microsoft is releasing a new remote work trend report to highlight how work habits are changing.

    Naturally, more people are using the video and meetings capabilities of Teams, and Microsoft has seen a new daily record of 2.7 billion meeting minutes in a single day. That’s up 200 percent from 900 million minutes in mid-March, around the time many businesses shifted toward remote working. Unsurprisingly, people are turning on video in Teams meetings two times more than before, with video calls usage in Teams growing by more than 1,000 percent in March. Microsoft found that people in Norway and the Netherlands are more likely to turn on video with around 60 percent of calls including video, compared to 38 percent in the US and 47 percent in the UK.

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/9/21214314/microsoft-teams-usage-coronavirus-pandemic-work-habit-change

  • Google’s Hangouts Meet is now just Google Meet

    In an email to The Verge, Google confirmed that it has officially changed the service’s name. Google also confirmed that Meet is an independent part of G Suite, the portfolio of business services that also includes brands such as Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Drive. Hangouts Chat, the text-messaging arm of the Hangouts brand, is also part of the suite.

    The rebrand still appears to be a work in progress. As of this writing, the service is still called Hangouts Meet by Google in the iOS App Store, and its G Suite landing page also retains the old name. And while G Suite’s website lists “Meet” as an included service at the top of the page, “Hangouts Meet” is still referenced in a list lower down.

    The rebrand comes at a time when Google Meet has seen explosive growth as the COVID-19 pandemic forces workplaces to move their meetings online. Google Meet’s usage is currently 25 times what it was in January, Google revealed late last month, and the service is gaining more than 2 million new users a day.

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/8/21214059/google-hangouts-meet-rebrand-video-chat-conferencing

    Ugh… Google’s message tool strategy frustrates me so much.

Other

  • Foxconn will produce ventilators at its controversial Wisconsin plant

    Medtronic’s CEO was unable to share the numbers of ventilators that Foxconn will produce during his interview with CBNC. However, in a statement provided to Reuters, Foxconn said that it’s hoping to speed up production time so that the ventilators can be produced as soon as possible, and that medical and technical personnel from the two companies were working closely together. The partnership came about after Medtronic open-sourced the design for its PB-560 ventilator, which has been downloaded 70,000 times, according to Ishrak.

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/8/21213269/foxconn-ventilators-wisconsin-plant-medtronic-pb-560-open-source-design-covid-19

  • End of an Era: Microsoft Word Now Flagging Two Spaces After Period as an Error

    The change was received with mixed reactions by the user community, but many believe that using just one space after a period is something that makes total sense.

    “Consistency and efficiency won. Two spaces after a period is a relic of the typewriter world,” someone says. “There should always be two spaces unless you need to cut down to fit in the 280 limit. Readability improves with two spaces,” another Twitter user, who this time suggests we should all stick with two spaces after a period, explains.

    The new approach is without a doubt controversial, but while change is hard, it’s all just a matter of time until everyone adapts to the one-space rule.

    https://news.softpedia.com/news/end-of-an-era-microsoft-word-now-flagging-two-spaces-after-period-as-an-error-529706.shtml

Posted on

Supplier Report: 12/27/2019


Photo by Abbie Bernet on Unsplash

One holiday down, one more to go.

Security was a big theme this week. Philadelphia-favorite Wawa discovered a security breach in their payment systems going back to last March. The breach was plugged on December 12th (better check your credit card statements).

Meanwhile Facebook has agreed (under duress) to stop using the phone number you give for Two Factor Authentication to mine for data and suggest friends.

And finally… Foxconn continues to be a disaster in Wisconsin. They still haven’t committed to what type of factory they are building and Wisconsin (rightfully) is starting to push back on their tax rebate commitments. Why has it taken this long?

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Google buys game developer Typhoon Studios

    Google has been pretty vocal about its internal development efforts, including Stadia Studios led by former EA exec Jade Raymond. In an interview with Gamesindustry.biz, the exec detailed that Google was hoping to build out multiple first-party studios to release content on the platform.

    “We have a plan that includes building out a few different first-party studios, and also building up the publishing org to ship exclusive content created by indie devs and other external partners,” Raymond told the publication.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/19/google-buys-game-developer-typhoon-studios/

Artificial Intelligence

  • Finland is making its online AI crash course free to the world

    There are already quite a few sites for people looking to learn the basics of AI, but Finland’s offering seems worth your time if you’re interested in such a thing. It’s nicely designed, offers short tests at the end of each section, and covers a range of topics from the philosophical implications of AI to technical subjects like Bayesian probability. It’s supposed to take about six weeks to finish, with each section taking between five and 10 hours.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/18/21027840/online-course-basics-of-ai-finland-free-elements

    Link to the course:
    https://www.elementsofai.com/

Security/Privacy

  • Wawa hit with massive data breach, potentially affecting more than 850 locations, CEO says

    In a letter to customers Friday, chief executive Chris Gheysens said the company discovered malware capable of exposing card numbers, expiration dates and cardholder names at “potentially all Wawa in-store payment terminals and fuel dispensers” since March 4. Debit card PINs, credit card security codes and driver’s license information for verifying age-restricted purchases were not affected, he said.

    Gheysens said the convenience store chain is unaware of any unauthorized card use as a result of the breach, which was contained Dec. 12, two days after it was discovered. Wawa declined to tell The Washington Post how many customers or transactions were affected.

    “I want to reassure anyone impacted they will not be responsible for fraudulent charges related to this incident,” Gheysens said in a news release. “To all our friends and neighbors, I apologize deeply for this incident.”

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/20/wawa-hit-with-massive-data-breach-potentially-affecting-all-locations-ceo-says/

  • Facebook will stop using 2FA tool to harvest phone numbers for friend suggestions

    Facebook says it will soon stop its practice of using phone numbers provided to the company as part of its two-factor authentication (2FA) security tool to power a friend suggestion feature, Reuters reported on Thursday. According to the report, Facebook was using phone numbers users gave it specifically to protect their accounts from unauthorized access to try and encourage them to add members of their address book to their friends list.

    The company says the change is part of its broader privacy overhaul in response to a $5 billion Federal Trade Commission settlement reached in July over Facebook’s privacy practices. As part of that settlement, Facebook was barred from using phone numbers gathered from 2FA requests for advertising. Today’s change is an extension of that. Although not explicitly demanded by the FTC, Facebook’s use of phone numbers has come under scrutiny by the company’s internal privacy review team, led by chief privacy officer Michel Protti.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/19/21030068/facebook-friend-suggestions-2fa-security-phone-number-privacy-violation-ftc

  • U.S. Navy bans TikTok from government-issued mobile devices

    A bulletin issued by the Navy on Tuesday showed up on a Facebook page serving military members, saying users of government issued mobile devices who had TikTok and did not remove the app would be blocked from the Navy Marine Corps Intranet.

    The Navy would not describe in detail what dangers the app presents, but Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Uriah Orland said in a statement the order was part of an effort to “address existing and emerging threats”.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tiktok-navy-idUSKBN1YO2HU

Software/SaaS

  • Facebook is building an operating system so it can ditch Android

    Facebook doesn’t want its hardware like Oculus or its augmented reality glasses to be at the mercy of Google because they rely on its Android operating system. That’s why Facebook has tasked Mark Lucovsky, a co-author of Microsoft’s Windows NT, with building the social network an operating system from scratch, according to The Information’s Alex Heath. To be clear, Facebook’s smartphone apps will remain available on Android.

    “We really want to make sure the next generation has space for us,” says Facebook’s VP of Hardware, Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth. “We don’t think we can trust the marketplace or competitors to ensure that’s the case. And so we’re gonna do it ourselves.”

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/19/facebook-operating-system/

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • IBM aims to replace lithium batteries with batteries made from seawater

    Traditional lithium-ion batteries need heavy metals such as cobalt, manganese, and nickel to be produced. These materials pose a sizeable risk to the environment as they need to be mined. Not only is the sourcing of these materials a danger to the environment, but they also pose risk to the workers mining them. Heavy metals such as these are also limited and with the rise of battery-powered devices, it may be soon that these materials eventually run out.

    It was due to all of these circumstances that IBM Research scientists looked for other alternatives to Lithium-ion batteries. They were soon able to create a battery that runs on three new completely different materials that can be extracted from seawater. As such, sourcing of these materials are less invasive and pose a much smaller risk to the destruction of the environment.

    This new battery uses a “cobalt and nickel-free cathode material, as well as a safe liquid electrolyte with a high flash point”. The combination of these two materials was found to reduce the battery’s flammability which is a present issue for lithium-ion batteries. It was also found to charge much faster than regular lithium-ion batteries with the ability to charge up to 80% in a mere 5 minutes. These two new benefits from IBM’s batteries could prove to be very significant in the creation of low cost, fast-charging, less flammable batteries for electric vehicles.

    https://geekspin.co/ibm-aims-to-replace-lithium-batteries-with-batteries-made-from-seawater/

Other

  • The Bezos ‘relentless’ strategy at Amazon has been on full display this week

    Amazon has been steadily building out its own delivery network as it seeks to wean itself off of third parties like FedEx, UPS or the U.S. Postal Service. Bloomberg reported Tuesday that Dave Clark, the Amazon executive in charge of logistics, decided to cut out FedEx Ground because it wasn’t performing up to Amazon’s standards. And even though the block on FedEx Ground is temporary during the holiday rush, the decision was made at the height of the shopping season.

    And it doesn’t hurt that Amazon was able to stick it to its future shipping and logistics competitor, showing FedEx it can swing the stock whenever it wants.

    You see? Relentless.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/17/jeff-bezos-relentless-strategy-at-amazon-on-full-display.html

  • Foxconn Plays Tax-Credit Poker With Wisconsin in Troubled Deal

    It doesn’t matter why Foxconn changed its mind. Neither does the disagreement over whether 10.5G is a requirement for the tax credits that helped lure the company to the state. The point is that Wisconsin officials clearly believed a 10.5G plant was coming, and Foxconn did nothing to set them straight.

    What’s important now is both sides’ willingness to patch things up. The documents reproduced by The Verge show that Wisconsin is trying as hard as possible to make it work by offering to let the Taiwanese company rewrite the contract. Foxconn has steadfastly refused, arguing that its new plans hew to the original deal. Some marriage counselling is sorely needed.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/foxconn-plays-tax-credit-poker-with-wisconsin-in-troubled-deal/2019/12/18/eaf516fe-2166-11ea-b034-de7dc2b5199b_story.html

Posted on

Supplier Report: 11/1/2019


Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash

Microsoft pulled off the upset victory! They beat AWS for the lucrative $10B+ Government cloud project known as JEDI. Several large IT firms like IBM and Oracle protested the procurement process saying Amazon was favored. Did the Pentagon pivot to quiet down the criticism or did Microsoft really deliver the best solution?

Google continues to have a rough time. They are being investigated for anti-trust behavior (as is Facebook) and now their years-long effort to consolidate texting/chat protocols is moving forward without them. Mobile service providers have joined forces and agreed to adopt RCS but are pushing Google out. Many tech journalists are proclaiming this to be disaster for Google.

Finally, Foxconn continues to fail in Wisconsin. Those buildings are still empty and all those promised jobs still haven’t arrived.

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Amazon acquires Health Navigator for Amazon Care, its pilot employee healthcare program

    This is the second health startup acquired by Amazon. The first was online pharmacy PillPack, purchased by the company in 2018 for slightly less than $1 billion. PillPack’s services have also been integrated into Amazon Care, which offers deliveries of prescriptions with remotely communicated treatment plans.

    Health Navigator’s platform was created to be integrated into online health services, including telemedicine and medical call centers, to standardize the process of working with patients. Its platform includes natural language processing-based tools for documenting health complaints and care recommendations, and is integrated into apps with APIs.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/23/amazon-acquires-health-navigator-for-amazon-care-its-pilot-employee-healthcare-program/

  • Microsoft Acquires Cloud File-Migration Company Mover

    Microsoft commented that as customer demand continues to grow for moving content to the cloud, Mover should make it easier for customers to migrate files to Microsoft 365.

    The company is headquartered in Edmonton, Canada, has fewer than 11 employees and has raised less than $1 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. Owler estimates its annual revenue at $5.2 million.

    The Mover acquisition marks Microsoft’s ninth acquisition this year, according to data from S&P Capital IQ, as outlined below. Microsoft is making acquisitions in a several diverse areas, including data migration, business intelligence, coding, games and security.

    https://coresight.com/research/microsoft-acquires-cloud-file-migration-company-mover/

  • SoftBank says it has now invested $18.5 billion in WeWork, ‘more than the GDP’ of Bolivia, which has 11.5 million people

    One possible hitch that Claure understandably didn’t raise yesterday — one in addition to the countless obvious challenges WeWork faces in trying to generate forward momentum, including convincing corporate customers not to look elsewhere for office space — is the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or CFIUS.

    As Bloomberg reported last night, SoftBank will seek national security approval from CFIUS for its takeover, and the committee has stymied the Japanese conglomerate before.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/24/softbank-notes-it-has-now-invested-18-5-billion-in-wework-more-than-the-gdp-of-bolivia-which-has-11-5-million-people/

  • Smart home platform Wink is dying as Will.i.am’s tech company is low on money

    Will.i.am’s technology company i.am+ is running out of money, according to current employees, company emails, and documents obtained by The Verge. As a result, two current employees of smart home platform Wink — which i.am+ acquired in 2017 — tell The Verge that workers haven’t been paid in seven weeks, and that their office in Schenectady, New York has been temporarily closed. Wink users have also reported on Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook that all sorts of third-party devices have stopped working with the platform, and that the company’s customer support line is dead.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/25/20932055/wink-smart-home-problems-iamplus-william-black-eyed-peas

Artificial Intelligence

  • Why IBM Thinks Google Hasn’t Achieved ‘Quantum Supremacy’

    In a blog post published on Monday, IBM researchers Edwin Pednault, John Gunnels and Jay Gambetta disputed Google’s claim that it would take a state-of-the-art classical computer around 10,000 years to complete the sampling task Google used to demonstrate quantum supremacy on its Sycamore quantum computer. “Supremacy” here is the point at which a quantum computer can quickly complete tasks that would take a non-quantum computer more than a human lifetime to do.

    The researchers instead claim that IBM’s Summit supercomputer could perform effectively the same job in just 2.5 days, by using hard drive storage and “performance-enhancing techniques,” which Google allegedly did not consider in its estimation.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb5jxd/why-ibm-thinks-google-hasnt-achieved-quantum-supremacy

Cloud

  • Microsoft reports a strong fiscal first quarter, but Azure’s growth rate continues to decline

    Microsoft posted quarterly results today that were well ahead of analysts’ expectations, but Azure’s growth rate continues to decline as it competes with AWS.

    The company’s revenue for the first quarter of the fiscal year rose 14% year-over-year, to $33.1 billion. Net income increased 21% to $10.7 billion, or $1.38 per share.

    Revenue from Microsoft’s Productivity and Business Processes segment, which includes its Office products and LinkedIn, grew 13%, to $11.1 billion. LinkedIn’s revenue increased by 25%.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/23/microsoft-reports-a-strong-fiscal-first-quarter-but-azures-growth-rate-continues-to-decline/
    But Wait…
    In a victory over Amazon, Microsoft wins $10B Pentagon JEDI cloud contract

    Microsoft beat out Amazon in the final round for this lucrative contract after the two cloud giants beat out other competitors like IBM and Oracle in an earlier round. Most pundits considered Amazon to be the frontrunner to win the deal.

    “We’re surprised about this conclusion. AWS is the clear leader in cloud computing, and a detailed assessment purely on the comparative offerings clearly lead to a different conclusion,” an Amazon spokesperson told us in an emailed comment. “We remain deeply committed to continuing to innovate for the new digital battlefield where security, efficiency, resiliency, and scalability of resources can be the difference between success and failure.”

    The process to get to this point has been anything but uncomplicated, though, with various lawsuits, last-minute recusals and other controversies, with even the president getting involved at one point.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/25/in-a-victory-over-amazon-microsoft-wins-10b-pentagon-jedi-cloud-contract/

  • SAP teams up on cloud sales with Microsoft

    “We bundled SAP’s cloud platform services to support customers around the extension, integration and orchestration of SAP systems,” Morgan told reporters, adding that Microsoft would act as a reseller for the product.

    SAP said it expected annual revenues of around 75 million euros ($84 million) from the deal: “There’s no downside to those numbers – only upside,” she told analysts on a call.

    In the third quarter, SAP reported a 10% increase in revenue and a 15% rise in operating profit, after adjusting one-off items and currencies, helping it to achieve an expansion of 1.7% in its operating margins. The company reiterated its forecast for the year and through to 2023.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sap-results/sap-in-three-year-cloud-partnership-with-microsoft-idUSKBN1X00DR

  • Forty-six attorneys general have joined a New York-led antitrust investigation of Facebook

    Forty-six attorneys general have joined a New York-led antitrust investigation of Facebook, officials announced Tuesday, raising the stakes in a sweeping bipartisan probe of the tech giant that could result in massive changes to its business practices.

    The expanded roster of states and territories taking part in the investigation reflects lingering, broad concerns among the country’s competition watchdogs that “Facebook may have put consumer data at risk, reduced the quality of consumers’ choices, and increased the price of advertising,” New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) said in a statement.

    Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) added, “By working together, state attorneys general are leading the way in ensuring digital platforms respect consumer privacy and do not engage in anticompetitive behavior.”

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/22/forty-six-attorneys-general-have-joined-new-york-led-antitrust-investigation-into-facebook/

Security/Privacy

  • Comcast Is Lobbying Against Encryption That Could Prevent it From Learning Your Browsing History

    The plan, which Google intends to implement soon, would enforce the encryption of DNS data made using Chrome, meaning the sites you visit. Privacy activists have praised Google’s move. But ISPs are pushing back as part of a wider lobbying effort against encrypted DNS, according to the presentation. Technologists and activists say this encryption would make it harder for ISPs to leverage data for things such as targeted advertising, as well as block some forms of censorship by authoritarian regimes.

    Also

    Of course, it’s worth noting that, in 2017, ISPs lobbied Congress to make it possible to sell your browsing data without your consent.

    “Either, they are doing something with this data today that is not transparent to users, or they are working incredibly hard to protect a future business model,” Erwin said.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9kembz/comcast-lobbying-against-doh-dns-over-https-encryption-browsing-data

  • NordVPN confirms it was hacked

    “While this is unconfirmed and we await further forensic evidence, this is an indication of a full remote compromise of this provider’s systems,” the security researcher said. “That should be deeply concerning to anyone who uses or promotes these particular services.”

    NordVPN said “no other server on our network has been affected.”

    But the security researcher warned that NordVPN was ignoring the larger issue of the attacker’s possible access across the network. “Your car was just stolen and taken on a joy ride and you’re quibbling about which buttons were pushed on the radio?” the researcher said.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/21/nordvpn-confirms-it-was-hacked/

Software/SaaS

  • Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield says that Microsoft has been ‘surprisingly unsportsmanlike’ as a competitor

    In July, Microsoft said that it had had 13 million daily active users, indicating that it both had more users than Slack, and that it was growing faster. In October, Slack released a new figure of 12 million daily active users, while also saying that its users were highly-engaged with the chat app — which it said was as important, or more so, than user metrics.

    On stage at the conference, Butterfield said that it was “kind of crazy” for Microsoft to release those numbers while Slack was in the quiet period after its direct listing. He also highlighted the fact that several of the top Google search trends for Microsoft Teams are related to how to uninstall the app.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/slack-ceo-microsoft-sees-us-as-an-existential-threat-2019-10

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile have finally agreed to replace SMS with a new RCS standard

    Google is a fascinating and perhaps telling omission from the press release. Up until this point, the primary advocate for RCS has been Google, which bet on it as the only platform-level messaging service for Android. It was a bet that carriers haven’t backed until now. Verizon isn’t supporting RCS on the Pixel 4 after doing so on the Pixel 3, for example. Google recently stopped waiting for carriers in the UK and France and rolled out RCS support for Android phones using its own servers.

    Google was unable to immediately provide comment on the CCMI. That in and of itself is telling — as is the fact that the word “Google” appears precisely zero times in the carriers’ press release. Garland says the company continues to be an ecosystem partner and that this release was focused on the carriers.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/24/20931202/us-carriers-rcs-cross-carrier-messaging-initiative-ccmi-att-tmobile-sprint-verizon
    Somehow, Android’s messaging mess is about to get even worse

    At any time in the past five years, Google could have leveraged Android’s 80-plus-percent market share and told carriers that it was launching a default messaging service that works like iMessage, falling back to SMS only when necessary. It’s not in Google’s nature to push partners around (though it does make exceptions). For reasons that probably seemed reasonable every time, when it came to messaging Google always blinked.

    All that blinking and now the opportunity to simply fix Android’s messaging mess by fiat might have passed. By handing control of Android messaging over to the carriers, Google wasn’t just blinking — it was blinkered. Now the company has to scramble to make sure this entirely foreseeable outcome doesn’t end up wrecking the default texting experience on every Android phone sold in America.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/25/20931699/android-messaging-ccmi-rcs-mess-isis-google-fiascotastrophe

Other

  • Foxconn finally admits its empty Wisconsin ‘innovation centers’ aren’t being developed

    Beyond the halted innovation centers, Foxconn’s general Wisconsin plans are similarly in flux. The company announced a partnership in September with an automated coffee kiosk company to help manufacture its product domestically, with plans to add the coffee kiosk to its manufacturing contracts for the planned Mount Pleasant factory.

    But the factory doesn’t exist yet. The company is now aiming to open it in 2020 after repeatedly shifting its deadlines. It’s also reduced the planned number of jobs and the size of the factory from the original 13,000 jobs and 20 million square feet to a 1,500-employee, 1-million-square foot facility that will no longer produce the promised big-screen LCD TVs that were part of the initial contract. Earlier this month, the company announced, scrapped, and then re-announced plans to build a giant, nine-story glass orb that would serve as a data center.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/23/20929453/foxconn-innovation-centers-on-hold-wisconsin-mount-pleasant-trump-deal

  • Report: SoftBank is taking control of WeWork at an ~$8B valuation

    SoftBank, a long-time WeWork investor, plans to invest between $4 billion and $5 billion in exchange for new and existing shares, according to CNBC . The deal, expected to be announced as soon as tomorrow, represents a lifeline for WeWork, which is said to be mere weeks from running out of cash and has been shopping several of its assets as it attempts to lessen its cash burn.

    WeWork declined to comment.

    To be clear, it is reportedly the Vision Fund’s parent company, SoftBank Group Corp. that is taking control, with SoftBank International chief executive officer Marcelo Claure stepping in to support company management, per reports.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/21/report-softbank-is-taking-control-of-wework-at-an-8b-valuation/

  • Bill McDermott aims to grow ServiceNow like he did SAP

    It’s unclear how quickly the move came together but the plan for him is clear: to scale revenue like he did in his last job.

    Commenting during the company’s earning’s call today, outgoing CEO John Donahoe said that McDermott met all of the board’s criteria for its next leader. This includes the ability to expand globally, expand the markets it serves and finally scale the go-to-market organization internally, all in the service of building toward a $10 billion revenue goal. He believes McDermott checks all those boxes.

    McDermott has his work cut out for him. The company’s 2018 revenue was $2.6 billion. Still, he fully embraced the $10 billion challenge. “Well let me answer that very simply, I completely stand by [the $10 billion goal], and I’m looking forward to achieving it,” he said with bravado during today’s call.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/23/bill-mcdermott-aims-to-grow-servicenow-like-he-did-sap/

  • President of SAP Customer Experience departs

    Atzberger’s departure follows on the heels of Bill McDermott’s, who left his post as SAP CEO two weeks ago. McDermott was replaced by co-CEOs Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein. The change is not a surprise to some industry experts, but it raises questions about the future of SAP Customer Experience and its ability to compete with Salesforce in the CRM market.

    Morgan announced Atzberger’s departure in an email to SAP Customer Experience employees Tuesday. The email also said that enterprise industry veteran and former SAP employee Bob Stutz was joining SAP Customer Experience as president of engineering and operations.

    https://searchsap.techtarget.com/news/252472717/President-of-SAP-Customer-Experience-departs

Posted on

Supplier Report: 7/19/2019


Photo by Runde Imaging on Unsplash

Remember when Foxconn was supposed to bring 13,000 jobs to Wisconsin? The number is down to 1,500 according to the current Governor. Meanwhile Amazon thinks they are going to have a talent shortage in the future and is committed to re-training 1,000 workers in more advanced technical skills.

Oracle has lost their legal challenge to the Pentagon over their treatment in the never-ending JEDI cloud contract. With this ruling, Oracle is officially done and everyone can move on with our lives.

Finally – Facebook got fined $5B for all the security flaws and election issues it caused over the last few years (Facebook made $55B last year).

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Cisco to Buy Acacia Communications for About $2.6 Billion

    Acacia, a Maynard, Mass.-based maker of optical interconnect technologies like modules and semiconductors, derived roughly 14% of its $339.9 million in revenue last year from Cisco. Acacia was formed in 2009 and went public in May 2016.

    Cisco said Acacia’s technology will enable users of its hardware to drive more data over high-speed internet networks. Cisco executives said the company is looking to take advantage of a growing trend of customers migrating to pluggable technology from chassis-based systems. Pluggable modules give network operators a more efficient way to increase the data that runs over networks.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/cisco-to-buy-acacia-communications-for-about-2-6-billion-11562675698

  • Google acquires enterprise cloud storage provider Elastifile

    Google today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to purchase Elastifile, a Santa Clara, California-based provider of enterprise cloud file storage solutions, for an undisclosed price. (CTech cited an anonymous source as saying Google is paying around $200 million.) Assuming the acquisition passes regulatory muster, the search giant expects it to be completed later this year, at which point the Elastifile team will join Google Cloud.

    Perhaps uncoincidentally, this news comes on the heels of the launch of Elastifile File Service on Google Cloud Platform, a fully managed version of Elastifile optimized for Google Cloud Platform. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian wrote in a blog post that Elastifle will be integrated with Google Cloud Filestore in the coming months.

    https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/09/google-acquires-enterprise-cloud-storage-provider-elastifile/

  • IBM closes Red Hat acquisition for $34 billion

    IBM originally announced its intent to acquire the Linux developer in October of last year. The U.S. Department of Justice gave its stamp of approval in May, and the last big potential roadblock was removed when the EU gave its unconditional approval at the end of June.

    IBM says that Red Hat will stay under the watch of CEO Jim Whitehurst, with Whitehurst joining IBM’s senior management and reporting directly to IBM CEO Ginni Rometty.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/09/ibm-closes-red-hat-acquisition-for-34-billion/

Artificial Intelligence

  • AI smokes 5 poker champs at a time in no-limit Hold’em with ‘relentless consistency’

    With six players, the possibilities for hands, bets and possible outcomes are so numerous that it is effectively impossible to account for all of them, especially in a minute or less. It’d be like trying to exhaustively document every grain of sand on a beach between waves.

    Yet over 10,000 hands played with champions, Pluribus managed to win money at a steady rate, exposing no weaknesses or habits that its opponents could take advantage of. What’s the secret? Consistent randomness.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/11/ai-smokes-5-poker-champs-at-a-time-in-no-limit-holdem-with-ruthless-consistency/

Cloud

  • Oracle loses court challenge to $10 billion cloud contract

    Federal Claims Court Senior Judge Eric Bruggink dismissed the company’s argument that the contract violates federal procurement laws and is unfairly tainted by conflicts of interests.

    Bruggink said that because Oracle didn’t meet the criteria for the bid, it “cannot demonstrate prejudice as a result of other possible errors in the procurement process.”

    The decision is a major blow to Oracle, which risks losing a share of its federal defense business if the Pentagon awards the contract to another cloud company. The ruling also eliminates a headache for the Pentagon, which has been fending off challenges to its winner-take-all strategy in the cloud contract for more than a year.

    https://www.unionleader.com/news/business/oracle-loses-court-challenge-to-billion-cloud-contract/article_95e0b592-3b67-539f-923a-523fa9ced138.html

Security/Privacy

  • Facebook’s $5 billion FTC fine is an embarrassing joke

    That’s actually the real problem here: fines and punishments are only effective when they provide negative consequences for bad behavior. But Facebook has done nothing but behave badly from inception, and it has only ever been slapped on the wrist by authority figures and rewarded by the market. After all, Facebook was already under a previous FTC consent decree for privacy violations imposed in 2011, and that didn’t seem to stop any of the company’s recent scandals from happening. As Kara Swisher has written, you have to add another zero to this fine to make it mean anything.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20692524/facebook-five-billion-ftc-fine-embarrassing-joke

Other

  • Amazon to Retrain a Third of Its U.S. Workforce

    Amazon’s promise to upgrade the skills of its workforce—reported by The Wall Street Journal Thursday—represents one of the biggest corporate retraining initiatives on record, and breaks down to about $7,000 per worker, or about $1,200 a year through 2025. By comparison, large employers with 10,000 workers or more that were surveyed by the Association for Talent Development reported spending an average of $500 per worker on training in 2017.

    Amazon said it would retrain 100,000 workers in total by expanding existing training programs and rolling out new ones meant to help its employees move into more-advanced jobs inside the company or find new careers outside of it. The training is voluntary and mostly free for employees and won’t obligate participants to remain at Amazon, the Seattle-based company said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-to-retrain-a-third-of-its-u-s-workforce-11562841120

  • Foxconn will only create 1,500 jobs, says Wisconsin governor

    The Foxconn factory in Wisconsin will only create 1,500 jobs when it starts production next May, Gov. Tony Evers told CNBC yesterday. That’s the same number Foxconn has been saying since it shifted plans for the factory a few months ago, and far short of the 13,000 jobs that were promised when President Trump broke ground a year ago. Evers has been negotiating with Foxconn since he replaced former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, and he says he now has “clarity” on Foxconn’s plans.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/10/20689021/foxconn-wisconsin-governor-jobs-tony-evers-manufacturing

  • The Fortune 500 has a new woman CEO: Accenture’s Julie Sweet

    The consulting company said Thursday that Sweet, 51, will take the top job in September. She’s currently the head of Accenture’s North America business, which accounts for almost 50% of the company’s global revenues.

    “Julie is the right person to lead Accenture into the future, given her strong command of our business and proven ability to drive results in our largest market,” David Rowland, the company’s interim CEO and incoming executive chairman, said in a statement.

    Sweet joined Accenture (ACN) in 2010. She served as the company’s general counsel after 10 years as a partner at the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore.

    https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/12/business/accenture-julie-sweet/index.html

Posted on

Supplier Report: 5/24/2019

Foxconn offices in Wisconsin are still empty. This is after the company assured the press that said emptiness was not the case. With recent news that AT&T did not live up to terms to get a large tax refund, should we be asking if these rebate programs are a good thing for the cities and states that leverage them?

SalesForce had a massive outage last week due to a database configuration gone wrong. The company shut down services to address a configuration that “broke access permission settings across organizations and gave employees access to all of their company’s files.”

Finally – AI voice replication is getting really good.  Google voice translation has improved the ability to detect tone and intent and there is a company called Dessa that published a voice cloning of podcaster Joe Rogan that is eerily good (NSFW).

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise to Buy Supercomputer Maker Cray

    Hewlett Packard Enterprise on Friday said it agreed to buy supercomputer maker Cray Inc.  for $35 a share in cash in a deal valued at about $1.3 billion, net of cash.

    The deal represents a 17.4% premium to Cray’s Thursday closing price of $29.81.

    HPE said it expects the acquisition will add to adjusted operating profit and earnings in the first full year. The company said integration costs associated with the deal will be absorbed within its fiscal 2020 free cash flow outlook, which remains unchanged at $1.9 billion to $2.1 billion.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/hewlett-packard-enterprises-to-buy-supercomputer-maker-cray-11558094554

  • Amazon leads $575M investment in Deliveroo

    London-based Deliveroo operates in 14 countries, including the U.K, France, Germany and Spain, and — outside of Europe — Singapore, Taiwan, Australia and the UAE. Across those markets, it claims it works with 80,000 restaurants with a fleet of 60,000 delivery people and 2,500 permanent employees.

    It isn’t immediately clear how Amazon plans to use its new strategic relationship with Deliveroo — it could, for example, integrate it with Prime membership — but this isn’t the firm’s first dalliance with food delivery. The U.S. firm closed its Amazon Restaurants UK takeout business last year after it struggled to compete with Deliveroo and Uber Eats. The service remains operational in the U.S, however.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/16/amazon-takes-a-bite-into-deliveroo/

  • Apptio Acquires Cloudability Multi-Cloud Spending Management Software

    Bellevue, Washington-based technology business management software company Apptio Inc is acquiring Cloudability, a Portland, Oregon company that makes software to manage public cloud spending across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

    https://www.channele2e.com/news/apptio-buys-cloudability/

Artificial Intelligence

  • Google’s prototype AI translator translates your tone as well as your words

    Although capturing the inflection of a speaker’s voice is what’s most impressive to laypeople, Translatotron’s attraction for AI engineers is that it translates speech directly from audio input to audio output without translating it into the usual intermediary text.

    This sort of AI model is known as an end-to-end system, because there are no stops for subsidiary tasks or actions. Google says making translation end-to-end produces results faster while avoiding the risk of introducing errors during multiple translation steps.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/17/18628980/google-ai-translation-tone-cadence-voice-translatotron

  • Microsoft invests in seven AI projects to help people with disabilities

    Microsoft is awarding grants to AI projects meant to make the world more inclusive. The grants are part of a five-year initiative that will invest $25 million in AI-based accessibility tools. This year, seven recipients will receive access to the Azure AI platform (through Azure compute credits) and Microsoft engineering support.

    Over the next year, the recipients will work on things like a nerve-sensing wearable wristband. That device detects micro-movements of the hands and arms and translates them into actions like a mouse click. Another project seeks to develop a wearable cap that reads a person’s EEG data and communicates it to the cloud to provide seizure warnings and alerts. Other tools will rely on speech recognition, AI-powered chatbots and apps for people with vision impairment.

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/16/microsoft-ai-accessibility-grants/

  • IBM Unveils Watson-powered Supply Chain Management Tool at Gartner Summit

    The Business Transactional Intelligence (BTI) service is powered by Watson and aims to help businesses detect anomalies that could potentially interrupt a company’s supply chain distribution.

    BTI uses machine learning to identify velocity, volume and value patterns in an organisations data by ingesting all of the supply chain documents and transactions. Using this data it learns to spot patterns about which it can suggest optimisations, or it may detect anomalies causing it to send an alert to the client.

    https://www.cbronline.com/news/ibm-supply-chain-business-network-business-transactional-intelligence

Cloud

  • Faulty database script brings Salesforce to its knees

    At the heart of the outage was a change the company made to its production environment that broke access permission settings across organizations and gave employees access to all of their company’s files.

    According to reports on Reddit, users didn’t just get read access, but they also received write permissions, making it easy for malicious employees to steal or tamper with a company’s data.

    In a status update, the company blamed the issue on “a database script deployment that inadvertently gave users broader data access than intended.”

    Salesforce customers in Europe and North America were the most impacted by the company shutting down access to its own service.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/faulty-database-script-brings-salesforce-to-its-knees/

Security/Privacy

  • San Francisco Bans Facial Recognition Technology

    The action, which came in an 8-to-1 vote by the Board of Supervisors, makes San Francisco the first major American city to block a tool that many police forces are turning to in the search for both small-time criminal suspects and perpetrators of mass carnage.

    The authorities used the technology to help identify the suspect in the mass shooting at an Annapolis, Md., newspaper last June. But civil liberty groups have expressed unease about the technology’s potential abuse by government amid fears that it may shove the United States in the direction of an overly oppressive surveillance state.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/us/facial-recognition-ban-san-francisco.html

  • Intel Zombieload bug fix to slow data centre computers

    Intel has confirmed that new problems discovered with its processor chips mean that some computer owners face a performance slowdown.

    The company has said that data centres are likely to be worst affected by the fixes required. But it added that the impact on most PC owners should be minimal.

    The so-called Zombieload vulnerability follows the disclosure of the earlier Spectre, Meltdown and Foreshadow bugs last year.

    The latest flaw could theoretically allow an attacker to spy on tasks being handled by any Intel Core or Xeon-branded central processing unit (CPU) released since 2011.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48278400

  • Hacktivist attacks dropped by 95% since 2015

    According to IBM, security incidents caused by hacker groups operating under hacktivism causes has been on a decline since 2015, when the company recorded a peak, with 35 publicly reported incidents.

    Since then, incidents have gone down at a steady pace, with only five reported in 2017, two in 2018, and zero during the first months of the year.

    Attacks from hacktivist groups have continued to happen, but the number of actual incidents (successful breaches) has gone down at a constant pace.

    Researchers blame two factors for this decline — the death of the Anonymous hacker collective and a sustained crackdown by law enforcement officials that have thinned out hacktivist ranks

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/hacktivist-attacks-dropped-by-95-since-2015/

Software/SaaS

  • Adobe Tells Users They Can Get Sued for Using Old Versions of Photoshop

    Adobe this week began sending some users of its Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Premiere, Animate, and Media Director programs a letter warning them that they were no longer legally authorized to use the software they may have thought they owned.

    “We have recently discontinued certain older versions of Creative Cloud applications and and a result, under the terms of our agreement, you are no longer licensed to use them,” Adobe said in the email. “Please be aware that should you continue to use the discontinued version(s), you may be at risk of potential claims of infringement by third parties.”

    Users were less than enthusiastic about the sudden restrictions.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3xk3p/adobe-tells-users-they-can-get-sued-for-using-old-versions-of-photoshop

Other

  • One month ago, Foxconn said its innovation centers weren’t empty — they still are

    At the event announcing the Madison project, Foxconn’s Alan Yeung said the innovation centers were “not empty,” which prompted laughter from the crowd. Yeung also said The Verge’s story contained “a lot of inaccuracies” and that the company would issue a correction soon. He did not say what those inaccuracies were, and Foxconn never issued a correction, nor has it responded to repeated requests to clarify Yeung’s statement.

    One month after Yeung’s comments and promise of a correction, every innovation center in Wisconsin is still empty, according to public documents and sources involved with the innovation center process. Foxconn has yet to purchase the Madison building Yeung announced, according to Madison property records. No renovation or occupancy permits have been taken out for Foxconn’s Racine innovation center, though a permit has been taken out for work on the roof of another property Foxconn bought for “smart city” initiatives. There has been no activity in Foxconn’s Green Bay building, either.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/13/18565408/foxconn-wisconsin-innovation-centers-factories-empty-tax-subsidy

  • AT&T promised 7,000 new jobs to get tax break—it cut 23,000 jobs instead

    The corporate tax cut was subsequently passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump on December 22, 2017. The tax cut reportedly gave AT&T an extra $3 billion in cash in 2018.

    But AT&T cut capital spending and kept laying people off after the tax cut. A union analysis of AT&T’s publicly available financial statements “shows the telecom company eliminated 23,328 jobs since the Tax Cut and Jobs Act passed in late 2017, including nearly 6,000 in the first quarter of 2019,” the Communications Workers of America (CWA) said yesterday.

    AT&T’s total employment was 254,000 as of December 31, 2017 and rose to 262,290 by March 31, 2019. But AT&T’s overall workforce increased only because of its acquisition of Time Warner Inc. and two smaller companies, which together added 31,618 employees during 2018, according to an AT&T proxy statement cited in the CWA report.

    https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/att-promised-7000-new-jobs-to-get-tax-break-it-cut-23000-jobs-instead/

  • HCL to bring 2,000 IBM staff onboard as part of $1.8-billion deal

    As part of a $1.8-billion deal, HCL Technologies will take onboard nearly 2,000 employees of IBM. The deal between the two companies involved HCL acquiring some of IBM’s software assets. The move comes as the former company is strategising to shore up its IP-led business faster than the traditional software services.

    The deal is expected to be complete by June. The acquisition of IBM’s products would give HCL access to over 5,500 clients globally. Chief Human Resources officer for HCL Tech, Apparao VV said to Economic Times in an interview, “Mode 3, which is the products and platforms segment, has their own salesforce. (With the IBM products), we have inherited somewhere around 1,500-2,000 people.” Mode 2 and 3 are categories for the company’s emerging tech and IP-led businesses that garner more than 28 per cent revenue.

    https://www.businesstoday.in/current/corporate/hcl-2000-ibm-staff-part-1-8-billion-deal/story/346771.html

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash