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Supplier Report: 8/3/2018

Joey Lombardi: Apple hits a trillion

Apple crossed over the line to become a TRILLION dollar company. Will they stay at level or dip down? When will Microsoft or Amazon join them in the Trillion Dollar Club?

Google is rumored to be creating a censored search engine for China. Upon the news being released, several Google employees expressed their disdain for the project.

With Jan Koum gone, Facebook is finally monetizing WhatsApp. Will the platform continue to thrive under Facebook or fail due to competition from Signal and other messaging clients?

Acquisitions

  • GE Puts Digital Assets on the Block

    The Boston-based company has hired an investment bank to run an auction for the operations, which produced $500 million or more in revenue last year and lost money, according to people familiar with the matter.

    Though proceeds of a sale aren’t expected to mean much for a company with a market value of more than $100 billion, the move to unload the operations is symbolic of a dramatic reversal of fortune at GE, which has stumbled badly after a series of missteps.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/ge-puts-digital-assets-on-the-block-1532972822?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • Cisco is buying Duo Security for $2.35B in cash

    Duo Security was founded in 2010 by Dug Song and Jonathan Oberheide and went on to raise $121.M through several rounds of funding. The company has 700 employees with offices throughout the United States and in London, though the company has remained headquartered in Ann Arbor.

    Co-founder and CEO Dug Song will continue leading Duo as its General Manager and will join Cisco’s Networking and Security business led by EVP and GM David Goeckeler. Cisco in a statement said they value Michigan’s “resources, rich talent pool, and infrastructure,” and remain committed to Duo’s investment and presence in the Great Lakes State.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/02/cisco-is-buying-duo-security-for-2-35b-in-cash/

  • Logitech is buying Blue Microphones

    Logitech today announced its intention to acquire Blue Microphones, the hardware company behind popular podcasting microphones like the Yeti and Snowball. It’s a pretty logical acquisition, as far as these things go — Logitech already operates in the audio space, with speakers and gaming headsets.

    The acquisition of Blue would add an important dimension to that category and help the company take on a rapidly expanding space. Blue’s best known products aren’t high-end, exactly, but they’ve become the go-to choice for upstart podcasters looking to get in on the ground floor in the medium.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/30/logitech-is-buying-blue-microphones/

  • DocuSign acquires SpringCM for $220M to continue evolution beyond electronic signatures

    DocuSign says the acquisition will help its growth beyond its bread and butter work in electronic signatures to modernizing what it calls the System of Agreement. That includes everything from preparing, signing, executing, and managing agreements.

    “DocuSign pioneered the e-signature category, and has built a strong SaaS business around that capability. We’ve also started to offer solutions that connect and automate the entire agreement lifecycle,” DocuSign CEO Dan Springer said in a statement. “We’ve done this with Spring CM as a partner across hundreds of joint commercial and enterprise customers. And we have many more DocuSign customers asking us to provide these capabilities natively as part of our platform. That’s why we believe today’s announcement makes such great business sense.”

    https://www.geekwire.com/2018/docusign-acquires-springcm-220m-continue-evolution-beyond-electronic-signatures/

Artificial Intelligence

  • ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI alarmingly wrong

    According to Lipton, in recent years broader interest in topics like “machine learning” and “deep learning” has led to a deluge of this type of opportunistic journalism, which misrepresents research for the purpose of generating retweets and clicks – he calls it the “AI misinformation epidemic”. A growing number of researchers working in the field share Lipton’s frustration, and worry that the inaccurate and speculative stories about AI, like the Facebook story, will create unrealistic expectations for the field, which could ultimately threaten future progress and the responsible application of new technologies.

    Exaggerated claims in the press about the intelligence of computers is not unique to our time, and in fact goes back to the very origins of computing itself.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/25/ai-artificial-intelligence-social-media-bots-wrong

Software/SaaS

  • Facebook is making its first serious move to monetize WhatsApp

    WhatsApp has rolled out three new ways for customers to connect quickly with businesses: a shortcut button to immediately start a conversation, the ability to have businesses send you information like a boarding pass on WhatsApp, and real-time support, the company said today.

    At the same time, Facebook will now display ads of businesses that link out to WhatsApp. That means that businesses can purchase ads that lead people directly to an already loaded chat with the business on WhatsApp, and they can start talking from there. Businesses can respond to customers for free if they answer within 24 hours but Facebook will charge them for any response after 24 hours. It looks to be another way for Facebook to cash in on its many apps.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/1/17636418/facebook-whatsapp-ads-monetize

  • Amazon reportedly plans to end its reliance on Oracle — but Oracle says Amazon bought $60 million of its tech just a year ago

    “We don’t believe that Amazon Web Services has any database technology that comes close to the capabilities of the Oracle database. That’s why our biggest competitors like Salesforce.com, SAP, and Amazon continue to rely on the Oracle database to run their business,” she said.

    The conflict between Amazon and Oracle has intensified in recent years: Amazon Web Services, the largest player in the cloud market, is attacking Oracle’s core business with tools designed to steal customers away. Oracle, for its part, has made the cloud a big strategic focus for the company, as it works to get a leg up on Amazon.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-oracle-databases-reliance-2018-8

Other

  • Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal

    The project – code-named Dragonfly – has been underway since spring of last year, and accelerated following a December 2017 meeting between Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai and a top Chinese government official, according to internal Google documents and people familiar with the plans.

    Teams of programmers and engineers at Google have created a custom Android app, different versions of which have been named “Maotai” and “Longfei.” The app has already been demonstrated to the Chinese government; the finalized version could be launched in the next six to nine months, pending approval from Chinese officials.

    https://theintercept.com/2018/08/01/google-china-search-engine-censorship/

  • Apple is now a $1 trillion company

    Apple hit the $1 trillion mark early this morning when its stock crossed $207.05 per share at 11:48am ET (the stock has since dropped back down slightly). Given the volatile nature of the market, however, it’s possible Apple may not stay a $1 trillion company for very long, or it could bounce back and forth over the $1 trillion mark in the coming days. It technically also isn’t the first to hit $1 trillion, either — PetroChina briefly reached $1 trillion back in 2007, although the stock soon fell below that mark.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/2/17638764/apple-worlds-first-1-trillion-company-market-cap-stock-price
    Joey Lombardi: Apple hits a trillion

Photo: Ronaldo De Oliveira

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News You Can Use: 8/1/2018

The Source: A New Y2K? Joey Lombardi

  • Tesla asked suppliers for money back to boost profitability

    In a memo sent to several suppliers requesting money back, Tesla said the cash back would be necessary for Tesla’s “continued operation” and that it was an investment in “long-term growth.”

    Of course, this news won’t make Tesla investors happy. If a company needs to request money back from its supplier to achieve profitability, that doesn’t seem like a sustainable business model. That’s not to mention that it is sure to make future suppliers leery of working with Tesla. As one manufacturing consultant who isn’t involved with Tesla told the WSJ: “It’s simply ludicrous and it just shows that Tesla is desperate right now. They’re worried about their profitability but they don’t care about their suppliers’ profitability.”

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90206411/tesla-asked-suppliers-for-money-back-to-boost-profitability

  • You Need a Strategy If You Hope to Keep Your High Performers

    High performers are put on the hardest projects — over and over again. You know they can deliver and really, it’s only logical to put your best people on the most important projects. But when top employees are under constant pressure while also being asked to help out with smaller ad hoc tasks that aren’t related to their work, these demands can be a fast track to burnout. Communicating with your high performers and taking the time to rein in some of these additional projects and requests will not only show your top performer that you are a source of support who values their time, but it’ll also clear their desk to work on the projects that really matter.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/316963

  • John Oliver Calls Facebook ‘History’s Most Profitable Data-Harvesting Machine’ – NSFW
  • Big tech warns of ‘Japan’s millennium bug’ ahead of Akihito’s abdication

    The Japanese calendar counts up from the coronation of a new emperor, using not the name of the emperor, but the name of the era they herald. Akihito’s coronation in January 1989 marked the beginning of the Heisei era, and the end of the Shōwa era that preceded him; and Naruhito’s coronation will itself mark another new era.

    But that brings problems. For one, Akihito has been on the throne for almost the entirety of the information age, meaning that many systems have never had to deal with a switchover in era. For another, the official name of Naruhito’s era has yet to be announced, causing concern for , calendar printers and international standards bodies.

    It’s why some are calling it “Japan’s problem”.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/25/big-tech-warns-japan-millennium-bug-y2k-emperor-akihito-abdication

  • Forbes suggested Amazon should replace libraries, and people aren’t having it

    A Forbes contributor wrote a short piece titled “Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries to Save Taxpayers Money,” arguing that libraries should be shuttered in return for Amazon opening bookstores in local communities. At the gist of the writer’s argument is that Starbucks has replaced libraries as a friendly place to go and read and streaming services like Amazon Prime Video have replaced video rentals, which many local libraries had provided.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90206403/forbes-suggested-amazon-should-replace-libraries-and-people-arent-having-it

Photo by Roberto Nickson (@g) on Unsplash

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News You Can Use: 7/25/2018

The Source: Joey Lombardi: Raise negotiating

  • The do’s and don’ts of raise negotiating

    If you feel a raise is in order, the first step is to track your accomplishments on a regular basis in an achievements journal, where you note major projects and successes, or an itemized spreadsheet or calendar, says Elaine Varelas, managing partner at Keystone Partners.

    “At the beginning or end of each week, review the meetings, appointments and projects you were involved in, and summarize them in two or three concise, resume-style bullets,” Varelas says. “These documents will serve you well at review time, as you review your annual goals, and will also help you make sure you are moving your agenda forward.”

    https://www.cio.com/article/2438603/careers-staffing/careers-staffing-10-mistakes-to-avoid-when-negotiating-a-raise.html

  • Why There Is No Substitute for the Annual ‘Offsite’ With Your Team

    With the context for the last year in place, you can talk about goals and objectives for the year to come with questions about what can be improved, both interpersonally (relationships that need repair or better maintenance) or in regards to team dynamics. There’s also a chance to look at financial numbers, hires or even to do a bit of a brand audit. If you’ve created enough of an element of trust by giving people a safe space to share ideas, you’ll also hear about things that simply have not been given an outlet to be discussed previously. An annual offsite can provide you with that catch-all opportunity for quiet conversations about topics of real, but not necessarily obvious, importance.

    There’s a fair amount of ridicule around exercises like trust falls — this shouldn’t be used to create a false social dynamic that doesn’t already exist, but to build on what already does. The last thing you want is for feuding employees to be given the opportunity to shoot each other in an airsoft competition or drive each other off the track in a go-kart race. The activities you choose should celebrate collaboration and team thinking, not individual showmanship.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/316338

  • What America gets wrong about China and the rest of Asia
  • New York-London in 3½ Hours? Supersonic Travel May Be Back

    Backers include Boeing Co. , Lockheed Martin Corp, and closely held Colorado startup Boom Technology Inc., which aims to start flying a reduced-size demonstration craft late next year. An initial goal for Boom’s proposed airliner is to slash the time for transcontinental trips by more than half. Round trips between the U.S. West Coast and Asia could be completed within the same day, for business travelers—the plush cabins would offer only premium seats—in a real hurry.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-london-in-3-hours-supersonic-travel-may-be-back-1531906323?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • How to use Slack to onboard new hires

    Start by launching a new hire or welcome channel (we call ours #yay), and encourage new employees to introduce themselves. You can then urge others to create a welcoming environment by responding to these messages–whether through text or emoji.

    Another idea is to use Donut, an app that randomly pairs up teammates and invites them to meet over coffee, donuts, lunch, or what have you. Simply create a dedicated channel for Donut (like #newbie-donuts), and employees can opt into and out of the program by joining and leaving the channel as they wish.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90201350/how-to-use-slack-to-onboard-new-hires

Photo by Andre Mouton on Unsplash

Posted on

Supplier Report: 7/20/2018

The Source: Joey Lombardi: This Dude Loves Mainframes

Amazon’s super-hyped Prime Day was successful, but the extra traffic shut down Amazon.com for a few hours. There are reports that data-center employees were scrambling to find unused servers and equipment to keep the site running.

Google is facing another massive fine ($5B) from the EU over their android operating system. Assuming the EU is successful after appeals, what are they going to do with all that money?

IBM is reporting improved financial performance and mainframe sales are at the center of this success.

Acquisitions

  • Ajit Pai Finds a Spine, Sends Sinclair-Tribune Deal to Merger Purgatory

    Current law prohibits any one company from reaching more than 39 percent of all U.S. TV households in a bid to protect competition and local reporting. Sinclair had petitioned the FCC to eliminate the ownership cap entirely, but the FCC lacks the authority to overturn federal law (that apparently wasn’t stopping the FCC from considering the move anyway).

    In case that failed, Sinclair had a backup plan. Consumer advocates highlighted how Sinclair had hoped to offload numerous stations to either shell companies, subsidiaries, or allies, letting it limbo under the ownership cap.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/594b73/ajit-pai-sinclair-tribune-deal

Cloud

  • Big Tech’s Growth Comes With a Big Bill

    Apple, for instance, is expected to boost its R&D spending by 17% to $14 billion for this calendar year, outpacing the 10% revenue growth analysts expect for the same period. The iPhone maker’s R&D bill has been steadily climbing over the last several years as it seeks out new hit products to offset its slowing smartphone and tablet businesses. But Apple still underspends Google-parent Alphabet as well as Microsoft and Amazon in both whole dollars and in percent of revenue, leading Toni Sacconaghi of Bernstein to note last week that the company may still be “underinvesting in innovation.”

    Capital spending will also rise sharply—especially for companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google that have to keep building out network infrastructure to deliver their growing list of cloud-based services. Google’s capex bill alone is projected to surge more than 50% this year, while analysts expect increases of more than 30% for Microsoft and Amazon. And most projections for Amazon exclude the capital leases that the company also uses.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-techs-growth-comes-with-a-big-bill-1531819800?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • DuckDuckGo slams Google following EU antitrust decision

    The allegation came in a series of tweets from the DuckDuckGo Twitter account as a response to the fine. In them, the search engine claims that the company’s “anti-competitive search behavior isn’t limited to Android,” but it also exists in other products, like the Chrome browser as well. “Every time we update our Chrome browser extension, all of our users are faced with an official-looking dialogue asking them if they’d like to revert their search settings and disable the entire extension,” the tweet said.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/20/17595612/google-antitrust-eu-duckduckgo-chrome
    Update: Google owns Duck.com, but it’ll give rival DuckDuckGo a shoutout anyhow

    But after a new round of complaints this Friday, Google has relented. Google comms VP Rob Shilkin just quacked tweeted that a new landing page will give people an opportunity to click from Duck.com straight through to DuckDuckGo. Or to the Wikipedia page for ducks, because that’s only fair.

    https://www.cnet.com/news/google-owns-duck-com-but-itll-give-rival-duckduckgo-a-shoutout-anyhow/
    The Source: Joey Lombardi: Duck Duck No

  • Amazon’s EC2 gets faster processors, new high-memory instances

    Not only can you now run EC2 inside a Snowball Edge device, but the company also announced a bunch of new EC2 instance types in the cloud. Thanks to these new instance types, developers now have access to a new instance type (Z1d) with custom Xeon processors that can run at up to 4.0 GHz, as well as new memory-optimized instances (R5) that run at up to 3.1 GHz and that feature up to 50 percent more CPU power and 60 percent more memory than their predecessors. There also are some bare metal variants of these instances, as well as an R5d version that features local NVMe storage.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/amazons-ec2-gets-faster-processors-new-high-memory-instances/

Security

  • What Stays on Facebook and What Goes? The Social Network Cannot Answer

    In exchanges with reporters and lawmakers over the past week, its leaders — including Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive — have been comically tripped up by some of the most basic questions the site faces. Mr. Zuckerberg, in an interview with the journalist Kara Swisher that was published Wednesday, argued that Facebook would not ban Holocaust denialism on the site because “there are things that different people get wrong.” He later explained there were many other ways that Holocaust deniers could be penalized by Facebook — yet lucidity remained elusive.

    Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments fit a larger pattern. Presented with straightforward queries about real-world harm caused by misinformation on their service, Facebook’s executives express their pain, ask for patience, proclaim their unwavering commitment to political neutrality and insist they are as surprised as anyone that they are even in the position of having to come up with speech rules for billions of people.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/technology/facebook-misinformation.html
    Zuckerberg: I didn’t intend to defend Holocaust deniers

    Earlier today, Recode’s Kara Swisher released an extensive interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg covering the platform’s struggles during a long, scandal-ridden year. Nestled inside was an exchange where Swisher pressed the executive on why it allows some conspiracy theorists to be allowed to post on the platform, regardless of the truth of their statements — and he explicitly explained that these users, including Holocaust deniers, deserve a voice. This predictably kicked up a ruckus online, and Zuckerberg emailed a clarification to Recode reaffirming that he finds Holocaust deniers “deeply offensive” and didn’t intend to defend them. But he did state Facebook’s goal: Not to stop fake news, but prevent it from spreading.

    https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/18/zuckerberg-i-didn-t-intend-to-defend-holocaust-deniers/
    The Source: Joey Lombardi: Zuck has no answers

Datacenter/Hardware

  • Internal documents show how Amazon scrambled to fix Prime Day glitches

    The e-commerce giant also had to add servers manually to meet the traffic demand, indicating its auto-scaling feature may have failed to work properly leading up to the crash, according to external experts who reviewed the documents. “Currently out of capacity for scaling,” one of the updates said about the status of Amazon’s servers, roughly an hour after Prime Day’s launch. “Looking at scavenging hardware.”

    A breakdown in an internal system called Sable, which Amazon uses to provide computation and storage services to its retail and digital businesses, caused a series of glitches across other services that depend on it, including Prime, authentication and video playback, the documents show.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/19/amazon-internal-documents-what-caused-prime-day-crash-company-scramble.html

  • Mainframes the Unlikely Star of IBM’s Q2 Earnings

    It was systems hardware that really stood out though: the company’s IBM Z line of mainframes was up 100 percent year-on-year, “reflecting high adoption rate of [the] z14 and strong demand for new workloads”, IBM revealed in a slideshow.

    (The new IBM z14 single frame model mainframes can process 850 million encrypted transactions per day in the space of two floor tiles, and are a popular choice for data centers; it can deliver 100 percent encryption of application, cloud service and database data and allow open source machine learning to run on it.)

    https://www.cbronline.com/news/ibm-q2-mainframes

  • Amazon denies it will challenge Cisco with switch sales

    “Cisco and AWS have a longstanding customer and partner relationship, and during a recent call between Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins and AWS CEO Andy Jassy, Andy confirmed that AWS is not actively building a commercial network switch,” a Cisco Systems Inc. spokesman told MarketWatch on Wednesday.

    https://www.marketwatch.com/story/exclusive-amazon-denies-it-will-challenge-cisco-with-switch-sales-2018-07-18
    The Source: Joey Lombardi

  • Google builds its own subsea cable from the US to France

    As Google notes, owning the cable means it can lay it exactly where it needs it to be to connect its data centers — without having to take into account the needs of other consortium partners. Owning the cable also means that Google owns all the bandwidth for the lifetime of the cable (usually 15 to 25 years).

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/google-builds-its-own-subsea-cable-from-the-us-to-france/

Other

  • Google fined a record $5 billion by the EU for Android antitrust violations

    Google has been hit with a record-breaking €4.3 billion ($5 billion) fine by EU regulators for breaking antitrust laws. The European Commission says Google has abused its Android market dominance in three key areas. Google has been bundling its search engine and Chrome apps into the operating system. Google has also blocked phone makers from creating devices that run forked versions of Android, and it “made payments to certain large manufacturers and mobile network operators” to exclusively bundle the Google search app on handsets.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/18/17580694/google-android-eu-fine-antitrust
    Again I ask – what would the EU do with this money? How does this fine help the people and companies Google impacted?

  • IBM Rides Newer Businesses to Higher Revenue, Profit

    The Armonk, N.Y., company’s profit rose 3.1% to $2.4 billion. Excluding special items, IBM had a profit of $3.08 a share. Analysts polled by FactSet were expecting an adjusted profit of $3.04 a share.

    IBM shares, down 6% over the past year, rose 2.8% to $148.50 in after-hours trading on Wednesday.

    Despite reporting higher revenue and profit in the latest quarter, IBM still faces challenges on several fronts. In its Cognitive Solutions segment, which includes services tied to the Watson supercomputer, sales fell 1% after adjusting for currency moves to $4.6 billion.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-rides-new-businesses-to-higher-revenue-profit-1531946666?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

Photo by Jj Mendez on Unsplash