Category: Industry News

Posted on

News You Can Use: 7/17/2019


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  • How U.S. Tech Giants Are Helping to Build China’s Surveillance State

    The OpenPower Foundation — a nonprofit led by Google and IBM executives with the aim of trying to “drive innovation” — has set up a collaboration between IBM, Chinese company Semptian, and U.S. chip manufacturer Xilinx. Together, they have worked to advance a breed of microprocessors that enable computers to analyze vast amounts of data more efficiently.

    Shenzhen-based Semptian is using the devices to enhance the capabilities of internet surveillance and censorship technology it provides to human rights-abusing security agencies in China, according to sources and documents. A company employee said that its technology is being used to covertly monitor the internet activity of 200 million people.

    https://theintercept.com/2019/07/11/china-surveillance-google-ibm-semptian/

  • These Tech Companies Are Giving Millions To Politicians Who Vote Against LGBTQ People

    The group, Zero for Zeros, analyzed the contribution data between 2010 and 2019 of the top-scoring companies on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. It found 49 corporate PACs that gave a combined $5,837,331 to members of Congress who had received ratings of zero on the HRC’s legislative scorecard. These elected officials include Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who introduced legislation in 2018 that would make it legal for businesses and nonprofits to discriminate against same-sex couples, unmarried couples, and single parents.

    Companies like Google, through their corporate PACs, gave a combined $178,500 to politicians who scored zeros on the HRC legislative scorecard. Google, which has faced scrutiny for refusing to crack down on anti-LGBTQ speech, donated $10,000 to Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee. In 2014, Lee said that the progressive agenda “rejects the enviable right to life according to one’s religious convictions, and is utterly blind to the moral and economic consequences of our nation’s growing marriage crisis.”

    https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/leticiamiranda/these-tech-companies-are-giving-millions-to-politicians-who

  • Why aren’t Millennials buying homes?
  • The 3 Essential Negotiation Tactics According to Researchers

    The guilt and petty politics of socials debt can be a nightmare. But when it comes to negotiations, reciprocity can be used to give yourself some serious leverage, especially if you’re smart about it. Marketing and persuasion expert Robert Cialidini found that waiters offering their patrons an after dinner mint increased tips by 3%. For wait staff who added, “for you nice people, here’s an extra mint,” tips jumped by a whopping 23%.

    This isn’t just for beguiling the other side, but for guilting them as well. Katherine Shonk, editor of Harvard Business School’s Negotiation blog, asserts that you should be specific about the things you’re giving up. Why? Well, in spite of people’s instinct to be even, you can’t always count the opposing side recognizing when you’re making a compromise or how important of a point you’re folding on. Getting a fair deal means making people understand exactly what you’re exchanging. As strong as reciprocity is, to really make it work for you, you need to make the exchange felt for it to have any effect.

    https://www.primermagazine.com/2019/earn/negotiation-tactics

  • Workers waste half their time as they struggle with data

    Organizations are suffering from inefficiencies and ineffectiveness as they turn to data as the lifeblood of their digital transformation — and the workforce is struggling.

    About 54M data workers around the world face challenges associated with the complexity, diversity and scale of their company’s data. These data workers represent a quarter of knowledge workers around the world.

    Four out of five (80%) of organizations take advantage of data across multiple organizational processes, but despite increases in innovation, workers waste 44% of their time each week due to unsuccessful activities because of lack of collaboration, existence of knowledge gaps and resistance to change.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/workers-waste-half-their-time-as-they-struggle-with-data/

Posted on

News You Can Use: 7/3/2019


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  • Transitioning From Solopreneur to a Team Leader

    Additionally, self-awareness is the key to entrepreneurial success. For starters, it helps you realize your strengths and weaknesses. Knowing this allows you to surround yourself with the right people. Ideally, they complement your strengths and pick up the slack in your weaker areas.

    Furthermore, being self-aware can assist you in aligning the strength of your team to the business. It guides you in developing your authentic brand and will aid you in making faster and more efficient decisions. Self-awareness reveals you to you — and helps you keep your emotions in check.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/335357

  • The DO MORE mindset is ruining the planet
  • I used to believe in hustle porn, and now I think it’s the antithesis of the American Dream

    But something has happened in recent years to our idea of a good work ethic in this country. Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit, dubbed it “hustle porn.” At a November 2018 web summit in Lisbon, he said, “This idea that unless you are suffering, grinding, working every hour of every day, you’re not working hard enough . . . this is one of the most toxic and dangerous things in tech right now.”
    **
    There is nobility in hard work no matter the profession. One should take pride in a job well done. But we shouldn’t encourage a culture that is all work and no play. We shouldn’t equate liberty with exhaustion, and we shouldn’t worship at the altar of professional achievement and money.

    We need corporate leaders to build cultures that embrace the values on which our country was founded. I’m talking a culture that values excellence and keeps work in its rightful place, but also encourages employees to tend to their own mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health. I’m talking about a culture that trusts that employees will be more productive when they take care of themselves first.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90366162/hustle-porn-and-the-american-dream

Posted on

News You Can Use: 6/26/2019


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  • To Take Down Big Tech, They First Need to Reinvent the Law

    For decades, antitrust regulation has been overwhelmingly focused on the welfare of the consumer. No cost to the consumer, no problem. That opened the door for Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon — which offered digital services that were cheap or free — to become immensely profitable and powerful.

    Now a backlash is mounting as renegade scholars try to reverse years of established doctrine that they say does not appropriately take the clout of those companies into account. Economic absolutism is making way for other considerations as antitrust goes back to its roots.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/technology/tech-giants-antitrust-law.html

  • GDPR Has Been a Boon for Google and Facebook

    The rules have also made it harder for third parties to collect lucrative personal information like location data in Europe to target ads. This gives the tech giants another advantage: They have direct relationships with consumers that use their products, allowing them to ask for consent directly from a much larger pool of individuals.

    “GDPR has tended to hand power to the big platforms because they have the ability to collect and process the data,” says Mark Read, CEO of advertising giant WPP PLC. It has “entrenched the interests of the incumbent, and made it harder for smaller ad-tech companies, who ironically tend to be European.”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/gdpr-has-been-a-boon-for-google-and-facebook-11560789219

  • Why a great education means engaging with controversy
  • How 13 Became the Internet’s Age of Adulthood

    In his initial bill, then-Rep. Markey said a child was someone under 16. But there was pushback from e-commerce companies about cutting off their access to this lucrative market. Those companies found an unlikely ally in civil liberties groups.

    The fear: Requiring teens to obtain parental permission might curtail their ability to access information about birth control and abortion, or resources for getting help in abusive situations, according to Kathryn Montgomery, who ran the Center for Media Education, the group that had nudged the FTC to investigate kids’ sites in the first place. “I agreed that those were concerns,” she said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-13-became-the-internets-age-of-adulthood-11560850201

Posted on

News You Can Use: 6/19/2019


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  • Does Amazon Really Pay No Taxes? Here’s the Complicated Answer

    So is Amazon getting a $129 million refund?
    Not necessarily. There are indications Amazon paid little or no federal income taxes for 2018. Its federal net operating loss carryforwards—accumulated losses that offset future taxable income—rose to $627 million at the end of 2018 from $226 million a year earlier, according to securities filings. Its federal tax credit carryforward—accumulated credits that offset future taxes—rose to $1.4 billion from $855 million, largely because of the research-and-development credit.

    Those are signals that Amazon accumulated losses and tax credits faster than it generated income and tax liability. The law lets carryforwards smooth tax payments across business cycles and a company’s lifespan.

    “Because we are in a low-margin industry and invest in innovation and infrastructure, we don’t make as much pretax profit as other tech companies, so our taxes are lower,” Amazon said in a statement.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/does-amazon-really-pay-no-taxes-heres-the-complicated-answer-11560504602

  • Is It a Good Idea to Be Friends With Your Employees? This Entrepreneur Says Yes
  • Determine if a Hot Dog Is a Sandwich With the Cube Rule
    There are legitimate tax conversations around a variety of different sandwich-like foods, and the entire conversation is insane:

    Things start off reasonably enough—a single starch at the base makes a food “toast,” an additional starch on top makes something a sandwich, and a base plus two parallel walls means you’re dealing with a taco (which means a hot dog is a taco). But then you get to the fourth image, and you realize this chart is trying to classify an enchilada as “sushi.” Things get even crazier (and intentionally contradictory) if you go to cuberule.com, where they list nigiri sushi (a piece of raw fish on top of rice) as “toast.” It’s almost as if this rule wasn’t meant to be helpful.

    Verdict: The cube rule is wack in terms of identifying foods, but it’s a hack in that it identifies the utter futility of trying to fit things into neat little boxes (or cubes). Being technically correct isn’t always useful, and pedantry very rarely wins one any friends. Just as you would never suggest going out for enchiladas to satisfy a sushi craving, you probably wouldn’t suggest hot dogs if someone said they were in the mood for a sandwich. It doesn’t matter if a hot dog is a sandwich; a hot dog is good. And that, I think, is all we need to know.

    https://skillet.lifehacker.com/determine-if-a-hot-dog-is-a-sandwich-with-the-cube-rule-1835581739

Posted on

News You Can Use: 6/12/2019


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  • A look at the many ways China suppresses online discourse about the Tiananmen Square protests

    Online discourse is already strictly controlled by the Chinese government, which requires all websites to do real-name checks on users when they register an account (for example, by linking phone numbers, which are tied to government-issued IDs). Discussions on Douban E Zu often center around politics, which may have prompted heavier restrictions. Real-time comments (called “bullet screens”) on Bilibili and AcFun are harder to monitor for banned content and even though the government recently issued new guidelines for screening comments on bullet screens, censors may still be working on ways to maintain control on them.

    Most recently, WeChat, the ubiquitous messaging, games and e-commerce platform, blocked users from changing their headshots, alias and What’s Up status. Then this weekend, users began reporting connection issues with their VPN services, which are used to get around mainland China’s “Great Firewall” and access forbidden sites.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/03/a-look-at-the-many-ways-china-suppresses-online-discourse-about-the-tiananmen-square-protests/

  • ‘I’ve paid a huge personal cost:’ Google walkout organizer resigns over alleged retaliation

    “I made the choice after the heads of my department branded me with a kind of scarlet letter that makes it difficult to do my job or find another one,” she wrote in an email to co-workers announcing her departure on 31 May. “If I stayed, I didn’t just worry that there’d be more public flogging, shunning, and stress, I expected it.”

    “The message that was sent [to others] was: ‘You’re going to compromise your career if you make the same choices that Claire made,” she told the Guardian by phone. “It was designed to have a chilling effect on employees who raise issues or speak out.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/07/google-walkout-organizer-claire-stapleton-resigns

  • Your boss wants you to lose weight
  • I create presentations at Microsoft. Here’s how I avoid “Death by PowerPoint”

    As soon as you put up a slide filled with too much text, people stop paying attention to you—they’re trying to read the slide. Ultimately, you want people to focus on the speaker rather than trying to dissect the slide. The slide is there to support the speaker and guide the audience through the content.

    The audience is there to listen to the speaker, no matter how great your PowerPoint. Yet at the same time, you want the presentation itself to have meaning and utility, so it stands on its own. Balancing these forces is the eternal question—what should go on the actual deck versus the role of the speaker?

    The answer is generally the well-known KISS rule. Break large chunks of information down to high-level text that just covers the topic, and then speak to the rest of it. And, keep it simple. Less is always more.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90355066/i-create-presentations-at-microsoft-heres-how-i-avoid-death-by-powerpoint