Category: Supplier Report

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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: 12/20/2019


Photo by Jose Rago on Unsplash

Oracle has been having an interesting year.  Between trying to sue the Government over the JEDI cloud contract procurement process and losing one of their CEOs, it is not the most stellar time for the company.

Normally Oracle has less press than their peers but this week they kept showing up in articles. From a financial perspective, the company published mixed Q2 results. Sole CEO Safra Catz stated she expects much better performance next quarter (but how?).

Oracle also made headlines due to a former employee saying the company is cheating their customers by selling software that does not do what it claims to do. This does link up with stories about Oracle’s early days in the book Softwar.

Finally Oracle is moving their big annual conference “OpenWorld” from San Francisco to Las Vegas. This move is costing San Fran over $60M annual, but that city is too damn expensive.

Artificial Intelligence

Cloud

  • Oracle Posts Mixed 2nd-Quarter Results

    The database giant registered second-quarter earnings per share of 90 cents, up 12% year-over-year. Wall Street had projected earnings of 88 cents per share. Revenue during the same period stood at $9.61 billion. Revenue grew 1% year-over-year but did not live up to Wall Street’s expectation of $9.65 billion. Reflecting on the quarter’s performance, Oracle’s CEO Safra Catz commented:

    “We had another strong quarter in our Fusion and NetSuite cloud applications businesses with Fusion ERP revenues growing 37% and NetSuite ERP revenues growing 29%. This consistent rapid growth in the now multibillion dollar ERP segment of our cloud applications business has enabled Oracle to deliver a double-digit EPS growth rate year-after-year. I fully expect we will do that again this year.”

    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-posts-mixed-2nd-quarter-161331753.html

Security/Privacy

  • New Orleans declares state of emergency following cyberattack

    Officials are running many services on pen and paper until it’s deemed safe for computers to come back online, although the Orleans Parish Communication District (which handles both 311 and 991 lines) and courts weren’t affected. The city added that emergency services’ communications were still active, and that it could still obtain footage from public safety cameras if there was an incident.

    It’s unclear when computers will go back online, when the state of emergency will be lifted, or who the culprits were. City-scale ransomware attacks like those using SamSam have frequently been the work of extortionists hoping only for a windfall profit, although there are concerns hostile countries might use malware to bankroll programs. Louisiana’s government faced its own ransomware attack in November and had to shut its Office of Motor Vehicles for days, although the state got back online without caving in to the attackers’ demands.

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/12/14/new-orleans-cyberattack/

  • Microsoft details the most clever phishing techniques it saw in 2019

    Microsoft said that phishing attempts grew from under 0.2% in January 2018 to around 0.6% in October 2019, where 0.6% represented the percentage of phishing emails detected out of the total volume of emails the company analyzed.

    While phishing attacks increased, the number of ransomware, crypto-mining, and other malware infections went down, the company said at the time.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-details-the-most-clever-phishing-techniques-it-saw-in-2019/

  • FBI secretly demands a ton of consumer data from credit agencies. Now lawmakers want answers

    The FBI regularly uses these legal powers — known as national security letters — to compel credit giants to turn over non-content information, such as records of purchases and locations, that the agency deems necessary in national security investigations. But these letters have no judicial oversight and are typically filed with a gag order, preventing the recipient from disclosing the demand to anyone else — including the target of the letter.

    Only a few tech companies, including Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, have disclosed that they have ever received one or more national security letters. Since the law changed in 2015 in the wake of the Edward Snowden disclosures that revealed the scope of the U.S. government’s surveillance operations, recipients have been allowed to petition the FBI to be cut loose from the gag provisions and publish the letters with redactions.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/14/fbi-national-security-letter-credit-agencies/

Software/SaaS

  • A former employee is suing Oracle, alleging the company sold customers phantom products and forced him out when he complained

    A former Oracle product manager has sued the tech giant, claiming it sold phantom or broken products as part of a cloud service geared to universities.

    Tayo Daramola said the company retaliated against him “reporting what was in fact a pattern of criminal acts,” the suit said.

    He said he resisted participating in what he described as “misrepresentation and likely fraud,” and subsequently filed a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the suit said.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-manager-lawsuit-university-education-practices-2019-12

Other

  • How consulting companies like McKinsey optimized American inequality

    Broadly speaking, management consulting firms advise other organizations how to do their jobs better. They are hired, as CNBC’s Abigail Hess notes, “to assess and address problems, such as downsizing, acquisition or restructuring.”

    The key to management consulting firms’ function is in the word management. Management consultants work for a company’s executives, not its employees, and the hiring of one is often a sign that layoffs are imminent. Wendell Potter, a former vice president at a health insurer, says “it was clear that when [a management consulting firm] was brought in there would be layoffs. In my own department, there were times when I had to lay people off because off because of McKinsey’s work.”

    As Duff McDonald, author of “The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business,” once put it: “McKinsey might be the single greatest legitimizer of mass layoffs in history.”

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/13/how-consulting-companies-like-mckinsey-optimized-american-inequality/

  • Oracle Won’t Return to Dual-CEO Structure

    Oracle Corp. ORCL -3.47% said it won’t replace its late co-CEO, Mark Hurd, leaving Safra Catz as the sole top executive leading the software giant after years of operating with an unusual, two-chief structure.

    In the company’s first earnings report since Mr. Hurd’s death in October, Oracle founder and Chairman Larry Ellison said it is working to strengthen its management team, to develop a group of executives who are “potential CEOs when both Safra and I retire, which is not anytime soon.” But he described the two-CEO setup as unusual and not something Oracle is looking to repeat.

    Ms. Catz now leads Oracle as sole CEO. Mr. Ellison, who ceded the CEO post to Mr. Hurd and Ms. Catz in 2014, remains active as chairman and chief technology officer.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/oracle-reports-higher-profit-11576186408

  • Salesforce promotes Bret Taylor to president and COO

    Salesforce announced today that it has named Bret Taylor as president and chief operating officer of the company. Prior to today’s promotion, Taylor held the position of president and chief product officer.

    In his new position, Taylor will be responsible for a number of activities, including leading Salesforce’s global product vision, engineering, security, marketing and communications. That’s a big job, and as such he will report directly to chairman Marc Benioff.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/12/salesforce-promotes-bret-taylor-to-president-and-coo/

  • SoftBank’s China strategy wobbles as key bets disappoint

    In fairness to SoftBank, many China IPOs have stumbled, hurt by a sharp slowdown in economic growth and trade tensions with the United States.

    But investors and some bankers looking at China-related deals say SoftBank’s involvement, once a sign of promising prospects, was now viewed as a red flag that a company was likely overvalued.

    “SoftBank has become a signal that the market has peaked,” said one person involved in the OneConnect IPO.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-softbank-group-china-analysis/softbanks-china-strategy-wobbles-as-key-bets-disappoint-idUSKBN1YH28R

  • The Money Men Who Enabled Adam Neumann and the WeWork Debacle

    Little of WeWork’s trajectory would have been possible were it not for the collection of veteran executives and financiers from the upper echelons of Wall Street and Silicon Valley who enabled Mr. Neumann, a charismatic 40-year-old with little prior business experience.

    Mr. Neumann mesmerized them with his pitch, which offered a vision for the property-leasing company as a tech startup with limitless potential to transform how people work and live.

    Investors poured capital onto Mr. Neumann’s business bonfire and ceded control, rarely pushing back with any force despite mounting problems and year after year of missed projections.

    Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank Group Corp., who helped inflate WeWork’s valuation to $47 billion, pushed an already wild-spending Mr. Neumann to act bigger and crazier. JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO James Dimon and other bankers, instead of injecting a dose of reality, spent years championing Mr. Neumann and the company as they battled for the coveted IPO assignment.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-money-men-who-enabled-adam-neumann-and-the-wework-debacle-11576299616

  • For Tech Jobs, the Rich Cities Are Getting Richer

    Researchers from the Brookings Institution and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a tech-industry-backed think tank, arrived at their conclusion by looking at a fairly narrow slice of jobs—13 industries that involve the highest rate of research and development spending and STEM degrees per worker. That includes much of the software industry, as well as jobs in areas like pharmaceuticals and aerospace. The researchers found that, between 2005 and 2017, five metro areas—San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego, and Boston— not only added lots of jobs, they were also becoming more dominant in those industries overall.

    https://www.wired.com/story/tech-jobs-rich-cities-getting-richer/

  • Oracle will move its annual OpenWorld conference to Las Vegas because San Francisco is too expensive

    According to an email that the San Francisco Travel Association (SFTA) sent to its members on Monday, Oracle has signed a three-year agreement to bring its flagship event to the Caesars Forum in Las Vegas.

    “Oracle stated that their attendee feedback was that San Francisco hotel rates are too high,” the email, which was viewed by CNBC, said. “Poor street conditions was another reason why they made this difficult decision.”

    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/10/oracle-moving-openworld-from-san-francisco-to-las-vegas-caesars-forum.html

    Oracle is right to move the conference away from San Fran (although I do not like Las Vegas). San Francisco needs to change.

Posted on

Supplier Report: 12/13/2019


Photo by Marten Bjork on Unsplash

Google’s founders are leaving the company at a time when employees are actively protesting leadership decisions and the US Government is building a monopoly case. Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is going to be very busy.

Google is not the only IT firm with labor issues… The Labor Department’s case against Oracle for underpaying women and minorities is underway and Oracle isn’t looking very woke (is that still a thing?).

Finally… It seems that the e-Scooter fad is slowing down. Bird, one of the more popular companies is laying off staff after an acquisition and a knock-off company named Unicorn is closing their doors before they ever even ramped up (I hope this is a sign of things to come).

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Adobe is buying the Oculus Medium VR sculpting app

    Why is Oculus selling Medium? It could be Facebook scaling back its non-gaming VR efforts. But Medium is also slightly redundant for Oculus. The company also launched a professional-oriented art app called Quill, which was relaunched as Quill 2.0 in August with expanded animation capabilities. And where Quill is a 3D painting app in the style of Tilt Brush (which is owned by Google), Medium works a lot more like a traditional 3D modeling program, so it fits better with Adobe’s existing offerings. As for its impact on VR in general, it depends on where Adobe takes the product in 2020 — and how deeply it integrates Medium into its larger creative suite.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/6/20999185/adobe-facebook-oculus-medium-vr-sculpting-app

Cloud

  • Google Co-Founders Page, Brin Give Up Management Roles

    Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped down from active management of the internet giant’s parent, surrendering immediate control to a low-key company veteran who must navigate global regulatory threats as well as employee discontent.

    Page and Brin, who had been chief executive and president, respectively, of Google parent Alphabet Inc., said Tuesday they would hand control immediately to Sundar Pichai, Google’s existing CEO. They remain on Alphabet’s board and will still together control a majority of voting power over company decisions under Alphabet’s dual-class share structure.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/sundar-pichai-to-replace-larry-page-as-ceo-of-alphabet-11575409229

    Why Alphabet’s days could be numbered under its new CEO

    Shielding Google from those “other bets” such as driverless cars no longer seems so urgent. Alphabet and other tech titans — particularly those effectively controlled by their founders — have a relatively long leash from investors to invest in both the projects that generate earnings now and on whatever comes next. Amazon, for example, spent $14 billion to buy a niche grocery store chain, and it’s investing in far-flung businesses such as health care and entertainment.

    Amazon has always received a longer leash to tinker than most other companies, but I think Google’s cash firepower also lets it experiment without creating an artificial structure to shield Google from its less mature corporate cousins. There may be a reason that Alphabet never became a blueprint for other technology companies that wanted to keep up with the times.

    https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/12/5/20995520/alphabet-obsolete-sundar-pichai-ceo-page-brin

Security/Privacy

  • How Ring Went From ‘Shark Tank’ Reject to America’s Scariest Surveillance Company

    Although there’s no credible evidence that Ring actually deters or reduces crime, claiming that its products achieve these things is essential to its marketing model. These claims have helped Ring cultivate a surveillance network around the country with the help of dozens of taxpayer-funded camera discount programs and more than 600 police partnerships.

    When police partner with Ring, they are required to promote its products, and to allow Ring to approve everything they say about the company. In exchange, they get access to Ring’s Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal, an interactive map that allows police to request camera footage directly from residents without obtaining a warrant.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmjp53/how-ring-went-from-shark-tank-reject-to-americas-scariest-surveillance-company
    A World With a Billion Cameras Watching You Is Just Around the Corner

    The report, from industry researcher IHS Markit, to be released Thursday, said the number of cameras used for surveillance would climb above 1 billion by the end of 2021. That would represent an almost 30% increase from the 770 million cameras today. China would continue to account for a little over half the total.

    Fast-growing, populous nations such as India, Brazil and Indonesia would also help drive growth in the sector, the report said. The number of surveillance cameras in the U.S. would grow to 85 million by 2021, from 70 million last year, as American schools, malls and offices seek to tighten security on their premises, IHS analyst Oliver Philippou said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-billion-surveillance-cameras-forecast-to-be-watching-within-two-years-11575565402

Software/SaaS

  • SAP customers are revolting – here’s why

    The problem for both customers and SAP can be summed up in the words of a retiring executive with close on 30 years SAP experience. He said that his greatest disappointment is that SAP has not really delivered what it promised in terms of end to end integrated business processes and that the addition of many new acquired technologies only makes the ability to create a seamlessly integrated landscape nigh on impossible. The R/3 days when integration was a reality are long gone. It should therefore be no surprise that even showcase customers like Jazz describe a business technology landscape that includes SAP, Workday and Salesforce.

    Equally worrying for me was the degree of frustration across the SAP ecosystem at what one partner described as ‘appalling communication’ around what SAP is doing to help customers get across the S/4 line. Hillary Blinds, an early Suite for HANA customer for example shrugged at the prospect of moving to S/4, despite its commitment to SAP across departments other vendors could own.

    https://diginomica.com/sap-customers-are-revolting-heres-why

  • Oracle allegedly underpaid women and minorities by $400 million. Now the details are set to come out in court.

    The first witness, former employee Kirsten Hanson Garcia, who worked for Oracle for more than 16 years, most recently in human resources as senior director of talent development, testified that during a meeting in the mid-2000s with top executives, the head of human resources said, “Well, if you hire a woman, she will work harder for less money.”

    Palantir, a data-mining company, settled the claims in 2017, while the department’s investigation into Google has been mired in a dispute over access to compensation data. That makes the Oracle hearing a rare airing of testimony from the employees who allegedly faced discrimination, as well as compensation data at a major tech company. Oracle and Google are also facing private pay, promotion, or hiring discrimination lawsuits filed by current and former employees.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/05/oracle-allegedly-underpaid-women-minorities-by-million-now-details-are-set-come-out-court/

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Bernie Sanders’ Broadband Plan Is Comcast’s Worst Nightmare

    The plan would restore the FCC’s authority and net neutrality rules stripped away by the Ajit Pai FCC, subjecting ISPs to far greater oversight. It also proposes banning ISPs from imposing arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps and overage fees, which critics have long said are little more than punitive price hikes on captive customers.

    But Sanders’ plan also spends a lot of time advocating for community broadband. First by proposing $150 billion in new funding to aid the growing roster of towns and cities that have begun building their own networks after years of industry neglect. Secondly by eliminating the 19 protectionist state laws big ISP lobbyists have used to try and crush those efforts.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evjjmn/bernie-sanders-broadband-plan-is-comcasts-worst-nightmare
    Love the idea Bernie – but where is the $150B coming from? How does this idea become reality?

  • Ericsson to pay over $1 billion to resolve U.S. corruption probes

    The bribery took place over many years in countries including China, Vietnam and Djibouti, the department said. The total charges include a criminal penalty of more than $520 million, plus $540 million to be paid to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in a related matter.

    The company admitted it had conspired with others to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) from at least 2000 to 2016 by engaging in a scheme to pay bribes and to falsify books and records and by failing to implement reasonable internal accounting controls, the Justice Department said in a statement.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-ericsson/ericsson-to-pay-over-1-billion-to-resolve-u-s-corruption-probes-idUSKBN1YA2HU

Other

  • Elon Musk Cleared by Jury in Defamation Case Over ‘Pedo’ Tweet

    The legal battle stems from Mr. Musk’s involvement in a high-profile effort to rescue a youth soccer team trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand last year. British cave explorer Vernon Unsworth, who helped in the early days of the operation, criticized Mr. Musk’s effort to use a mini-sub to save the boys as a public-relations stunt. The device was never used, and Mr. Unsworth told CNN that Mr. Musk could “stick his submarine where it hurts.”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-cleared-by-jury-in-defamation-case-over-pedo-tweet-11575678498

  • Amazon Leases New Manhattan Office Space, Less Than a Year After HQ2 Pullout

    The giant online retailer said it has signed a new lease for 335,000 square feet on Manhattan’s west side in the new Hudson Yards neighborhood, where it will have more than 1,500 employees. The new lease represents Amazon’s largest expansion in New York since the company stunned the city by abandoning plans to locate its second headquarters in the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City.

    The deal comes the same day The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook is in talks to lease 700,000 square feet in a neighborhood nearby. Combined with Facebook’s other recent deals in the city, such a move would catapult the social-media company into the top ranks of the city’s largest corporate tenants, alongside JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp. , which have had a major presence in New York for many years.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-leases-new-manhattan-office-space-less-than-a-year-after-hq2-pullout-11575671243

  • Bird lays off several Scoot employees

    Bird has laid off less than two dozen employees, The San Francisco Chronicle first reported. The layoffs affect employees Bird brought on board as part of its ~$25 million acquisition of Scoot earlier this year.

    Those affected were salaried employees and/or people with technical backgrounds, according to Bird.

    “The integration of Bird and Scoot does not impact or change our previous or future commitments to San Francisco or to providing its residents and visitors access to the highest quality and most reliable shared micromobility vehicles and services,” a Bird spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We are planning to relocate a number of Scoot team members to our Santa Monica headquarters while also maintaining an office in San Francisco for our operations and maintenance teams as well as a number of regionally specific roles.”

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/06/bird-lays-off-several-scoot-employees/

    I was hoping this stupid scooter fad was dying down, but this is just corporate restructuring. Oh wait…
    Unicorn, e-scooter startup from co-creator of Tile, shuts down with no money for refunds

    Unicorn, the electric scooter startup from the co-creator of gadget tracker Tile, is shutting down operations after blowing all its cash on Facebook and Google ads but only receiving 350 orders for its glossy white e-scooters, it claims. In an email to customers, the company says it lacks the resources to deliver any of its $699 two-wheelers, and won’t be issuing refunds “as we are completely out of funding.”

    In a remorseful email, Unicorn CEO Nick Evans said the company had “totally failed as a business” and has also “spread the cost of this failure to you, the early customers that believed in us.”

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/7/21000094/unicorn-electric-scooter-shut-down-refund-tile

Posted on

Supplier Report: 12/6/2019


Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash

Google, a company that has changed the world – or at least the internet, has been in a bad way for months. The company continues to clash with their own employees over ethical growth and how HR addressed several employee issues (poorly).

Even as these issues unfold, Google is pushing forward their Kubernetes container platform, their enterprise cloud strategy, and their hardware initiatives. But… all of this other noise has to impact operations.

Meanwhile Amazon warehouse operations have their own HR issues with reports that the company has skirted around safety issues and violations for years.

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Palo Alto Networks acquires Aporeto for cloud security

    Palo Alto Networks on Monday announced plans to acquire Aporeto Inc., a machine identity-based microsegmentation company, for $150 million in cash. Aporeto’s technology should bolster Palo Alto’s cloud security suite, Prisma. The deal is expected to close during Palo Alto’s fiscal second quarter.

    Founded in 2016 and based in San Jose, Calif., Aporeto uses identity-based access control to secure workloads across all infrastructures. Its technology should help strengthen the Prisma suite of cloud security services, which it launched earlier this year.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/palo-alto-networks-acquires-aporeto-for-cloud-security/

  • Intel Seeks Buyers for Home Connectivity Chips Unit

    The chipmaker has hired a financial adviser and is seeking to sell the unit that has annual sales of about $450 million, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private.

    Intel Chief Executive Officer Bob Swan has said he’s looking at the company’s operations and will explore options for areas where it isn’t competitive. The company sold its smartphone modem business to Apple Inc. in a $1 billion deal in July. Swan has pointed to the money-losing memory business as an area where he might look for a partnership.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-26/intel-is-said-to-seek-buyers-for-home-connectivity-chips-unit

  • Panasonic to Sell Semiconductor Unit to Taiwan’s Nuvoton Technology

    The $250 million deal is expected to close by June next year, subject to approvals by authorities, Panasonic said.

    Japanese companies used to dominate the global semiconductor market but have become sidelined by an aggressive push by rivals from China and Taiwan. Panasonic has one of the longest histories in making semiconductor products, but it has recently scaled back operations.

    Panasonic said it would be difficult to keep up with the high levels of investment needed for the business.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/panasonic-to-sell-semiconductor-unit-to-taiwans-nuvoton-technology-11574965055

Cloud

  • ‘Kubernetes’ Is the Future of Computing. What You Should Know About the New Trend.

    To understand the trend, let’s start with the changing dynamics of software in the cloud. Cloud apps increasingly run in aptly-named containers. The containers hold an application, its settings, and other related instructions. The trick is that these containers aren’t tied down to one piece of hardware and can run nearly anywhere—across different servers and clouds. It’s how Google manages to scale Gmail and Google Maps across a billion-plus users.

    **

    Gartner says more than 75% of global companies will run containerized applications by 2022, from less than 30% today. Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for these managing containers.

    “As enterprises modernize their infrastructure and adopt a hybrid multicloud strategy, we see Kubernetes and containers rapidly emerging as the standard,” Jason McGee, chief technology officer of IBM Cloud Platform, told Barron’s in an email.

    https://www.barrons.com/articles/kubernetes-is-the-future-of-computing-heres-why-51574863351

Security/Privacy

  • SMS Replacement is Exposing Users to Text, Call Interception Thanks to Sloppy Telecos

    The Rich Communication Services (RCS) standard is essentially the replacement for SMS. The news shows how even as carriers move onto more modern protocols for communication, phone network security continues to be an exposed area with multiple avenues for attack in some implementations of RCS.

    “I’m surprised that large companies, like Vodafone, introduce a technology that exposes literally hundreds of millions of people, without asking them, without telling them,” Karsten Nohl from cybersecurity firm Security Research Labs (SRLabs) told Motherboard in a phone call.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j5ywxb/rcs-rich-communications-services-text-call-interception

  • Ordered by Singapore, Facebook Posts a Correction

    Appearing near the bottom of a post from earlier this month, the notice—which Facebook called a label—reads, “Facebook is legally required to tell you that the Singapore government says this post has false information.”

    The government had ordered the notice Friday on the post, which alleges authorities had made a wrongful arrest. The government said no such arrest had been made.

    With governments world-wide seeking to tackle social media’s darker consequences—concerns range from privacy violations and election interference to killings provoked by misinformation and hate speech—Singapore is testing new terrain in online regulation.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-complies-with-order-under-singapore-fake-news-law-11575116149

Other

  • Amazon dodged workplace safety regulators for years, investigation shows

    In at least a dozen cases, Amazon either ignored these employee requests or provided only partial records, in apparent violation of federal regulations. Amazon told some workers that they were entitled only to the records for the time period they worked there; an OSHA spokesperson, Kimberly Darby, said that’s incorrect. And when Amazon did provide records, warehouse managers used identical language to call them confidential and request they be kept secret. Yet OSHA guidance says, and Darby confirmed, that employers are not allowed to restrict workers from sharing the records. Some workers said they felt intimidated by the notice, fearing they might get sued by Amazon for sharing the records with a news organization.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/26/20983452/amazon-workplace-safety-report-injuries-osha-investigation

  • Firing 4 Google Workers Is ‘Illegal Retaliation,’ Organizers Say

    Organizers say Google recently revamped its policies around accessing certain documents with vague and purposefully unclear language in order to target organizers when necessary, as they claim to be the case with the “Thanksgiving Four.” The organizers deny that the fired workers leaked the content of internal documents.

    “With these firings, Google is ramping up its illegal retaliation against workers engaging in protected organizing,” Google organizers said in response to the firings. “This is classic union busting dressed up in tech industry jargon, and we won’t stand for it….They think this will crush our efforts, but it won’t.”
    **
    Last month, Google also installed a tool on internal web-browsers that flags calendar events involving more than 100 participants or 10 meeting rooms. Many employees believed the browser extension was being used to monitor labor organizing.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb5wa3/firing-4-google-workers-is-illegal-retaliation-organizers-say
    Google is accused of union busting after firing four employees

    Bloomberg reports that Google sent out a company-wide memo today confirming that it had fired four employees for “clear and repeated violations of our data security policies,” saying those workers “were involved in systematic searches for other employees’ materials and work,” continued to do so after warnings, and leaked some of that information outside the company. Google confirmed to Bloomberg and The Verge that the memo was legitimate.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/25/20983053/google-fires-four-employees-memo-rebecca-rivers-laurence-berland-union-busting-accusation-walkout

Posted on

Supplier Report: 11/29/2019


Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash

Black Friday is upon us and consumers are not the only ones out shopping. Several acquisitions were announced this month such as Google buying yet another cloud company and PayPal snapping up Honey.

But just like Thanksgiving, families come together to celebrate (SalesForce and AWS are forming a tighter partnership) and they also fight (Google vs. their own employees).

As we start to wrap up 2019 and start to look towards the future, will 2020 be a boom year or will we see cuts and decline (WeWork announced 2,400 job cuts)?

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Google buys a small cloud partner to make it easier for customers to use VMware on its cloud

    Google has bought yet another small business to build its cloud-computing unit: CloudSimple, whose software enables companies to run computing workloads that are based on VMware’s widely used server virtualization technology. Terms were not disclosed.

    The deal follows the buys of data integration company Alooma, storage company Elastifile and cloud migration company Velostrata. Kurian’s biggest deal to date has been the $2.6 billion acquisition of privately held data analytics company Looker, which, like CloudSimple, had been a partner prior to the deal. The Looker deal hasn’t closed yet, however, and the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust division moved to seek information from the two companies as part of a review, Bloomberg reported last month.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/18/google-buys-cloudsimple-which-helps-run-vmware-workloads.html

  • PayPal to acquire shopping and rewards platform Honey for $4B

    PayPal announced today it has agreed to acquire Honey Science Corporation, the makers of a deal-finding browser add-on and mobile application, for $4 billion, mostly cash. The acquisition, which is PayPal’s largest to date, will give the payments giant a foothold earlier in the customer’s shopping journey. Instead of only competing on the checkout page against credit cards or Apple Pay, for example, PayPal will leap ahead to become a part of the deal discovery process, as well.

    Currently, Honey’s 17 million monthly active users take advantage of its suite of money-saving tools to track prices, get alerts, make lists, browse offers and participate in an Ebates-like rewards program called Honey Gold. Its users tend to be younger, millennial shoppers, both male and female.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/20/paypal-to-acquire-shopping-and-rewards-platform-honey-for-4-billion/

  • HP Rejects Xerox Offer but Remains Open to a Deal

    HP Inc. rejected a $33 billion takeover offer from Xerox Holdings Corp. as too low, but the PC and printer maker made clear it is interested in discussing a deal to combine with its smaller rival.

    Xerox’s unsolicited offer of $22 a share significantly undervalues the company, HP’s board said in a public letter to Xerox Chief Executive John Visentin on Sunday. It also voiced concern about the debt a transaction would put on the combined company and said it needs more information about Xerox’s business, known as due diligence.

    Still, HP said it recognizes the benefits of consolidation and is “open to exploring a potential combination with Xerox.”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/hp-rejects-xerox-offer-but-remains-open-to-a-deal-11574027722

  • Celonis, a leader in big data process mining for enterprises, nabs $290M on a $2.5B valuation

    Celonis was founded in 2011 in Munich — an industrial and economic center in Germany that you could say is a veritable Petri dish when it comes to large business in need of digital transformation — and has been cash-flow positive from the start. In fact, Celonis waited until it was nearly six years old to take its first outside funding (prior to this Series C it had picked up less than $80 million, see here and here).

    The size and timing of this latest equity injection is due to seizing the moment, and tapping networks of people to do so. It has already been growing at a triple-digit rate, with customers like Siemens, Cisco, L’Oréal, Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone among them.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/21/celonis-a-leader-in-big-data-process-mining-for-enterprises-nabs-290m-on-a-2-5b-valuation/

  • Report: Charles Schwab in talks to buy TD Ameritrade

    Brokerage firm Charles Schwab is in talks to buy rival TD Ameritrade, reports CNBC. The organization cites a source who said the deal could be announced today. The two brokerage firms are the largest publicly traded houses, with Charles Schwab having a market cap of $57.5 billion and TD Ameritrade at $22.4 billion.

    The retail brokerage industry has gone through upheaval in recent months as all of the major brokers have moved, or are moving, to commission-free trades in order to lure customers. CNBC says Charles Schwab was the first to do so, followed by TD Ameritrade.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90434433/report-charles-schwab-in-talks-to-buy-td-ameritrade

Cloud

Security/Privacy

  • Facebook and Google’s pervasive surveillance poses an unprecedented danger to human rights

    “The internet is vital for people to enjoy many of their rights, yet billions of people have no meaningful choice but to access this public space on terms dictated by Facebook and Google,” said Kumi Naidoo.

    “To make it worse this isn’t the internet people signed up for when these platforms started out. Google and Facebook chipped away at our privacy over time. We are now trapped. Either we must submit to this pervasive surveillance machinery – where our data is easily weaponized to manipulate and influence us – or forego the benefits of the digital world. This can never be a legitimate choice. We must reclaim this essential public square, so we can participate without having our rights abused.”

    This extraction and analysis of people’s personal data on such an unprecedented scale is incompatible with every element of the right to privacy, including the freedom from intrusion into our private lives, the right to control information about ourselves, and the right to a space in which we can freely express our identities.

    https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/11/google-facebook-surveillance-privacy/

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • HPE Dumps Recent Acquisitions Into Its Container Platform

    The turnkey platform taps into HPE’s acquisition of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data software vendor BlueData last year and MapR in August.

    BlueData makes a software platform that uses Docker containers to make it easier for companies to deploy large-scale machine learning and big data analytics environments. MapR, which HPE “rescued” from the brink of collapse, provides enterprise-grade file system and cloud-native storage services.

    HPE’s Container Platform uses BlueData software as the control plane for container management and the MapR distributed file system and object store for persistent data with containers. It then uses Kubernetes for container orchestration. This package supports the containerization of cloud-native, microservices-architected applications and on-premises applications with persistent data.

    https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/hpe-dumps-recent-acquisitions-into-its-container-platform/2019/11/

Other

  • Google Workers Protest Company’s ‘Brute Force Intimidation’

    Roughly 200 workers gathered about 11 a.m. local time Friday outside a Google office overlooking San Francisco bay.

    “Over the past two years, many of my coworkers have asked the company to take meaningful action to curtail sexual harassment and systemic racism, improve the working conditions of temps, vendors and contractors, and divest from harmful tech,” said Zora Tung, a Google software engineer. “Instead of listening to us, the company has chosen to silence us.”

    The Google workers who protested also said the company had unjustly put Laurence Berland and Rebecca Rivers on indefinite administrative leave without warning. They demanded that Google bring the employees back to work immediately.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-22/google-workers-protest-company-s-brute-force-intimidation

  • WeWork lays off 2,400 employees

    In a statement, a WeWork spokesperson said the cuts were being made as part of the company’s efforts to “create a more efficient organization” and refocus on the core office-sharing business. The job reductions represent 19% of WeWork’s total workforce, which amounted to 12,500 employees as of June 30, according to an SEC filing.

    “The process began weeks ago in regions around the world and continued this week in the U.S.,” the spokesperson said. “This workforce reduction affects approximately 2,400 employees globally, who will receive severance, continued benefits, and other forms of assistance to aid in their career transition. These are incredibly talented professionals and we are grateful for the important roles they have played in building WeWork over the last decade.”

    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/21/wework-lays-off-2400-employees.html

  • When John Legere Leaves, Say Goodbye to the Old T-Mobile

    Make no mistake, the CEO transition will usher in a new T-Mobile. That’s not because the visions of the two men are so different — they aren’t, and Legere has been grooming Sievert, 50, for quite some time. But T-Mobile is no longer the industry upstart, and Legere’s departure suggests that he feels his work there is almost done. The last step is to complete the acquisition of Sprint Corp., which is being held up by a group of state attorneys general rightly concerned about the potential harm the transaction may cause consumers.

    Legere, 61, made clear that he isn’t retiring — nor is he turning his “Slow Cooker Sunday” Facebook Live series into a full-time gig. While he said the rumors of him joining WeWork aren’t true, he has fielded a “tremendous amount” of interest from companies seeking the expertise he’s demonstrated at turning around a troubled business and generating broad enthusiasm for a brand. “I’ve got 30 or 40 years and five or six good acts left in me,” Legere, the class clown of corporate events, said on Monday’s call.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/when-john-legere-leaves-say-goodbye-to-the-old-t-mobile/2019/11/18/a1a595ea-0a33-11ea-8054-289aef6e38a3_story.html

  • Amazon Is America’s CEO Factory

    There’s one element some ex-Amazonians are leaving behind: the harsher parts of Amazon’s culture, such as hiring practices that favor skills over collegiality.

    Amazon is known for disregarding social cohesion in interviewing candidates, former employees said, elevating other traits over an ability to work well with colleagues. Mr. Gordon of Latchel originally embraced that tenet.

    “We approached hiring this way and it was a big, big mistake,” he said. He had to fire one employee he had hired who was capable but couldn’t get along with the team. “We need social cohesion and to like each other because we have to put in lots of additional hours and time because it’s a startup,” Mr. Gordon said.

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/amazon-is-americas-ceo-factory/ar-BBX3hhE?li=BBnb7Kz