Amazon’s stock took a hit this week due to analysts’ lowered expectations about Q4 spending despite record profits. Will that retail downturn leak into corporate spending?
Oracle is having a moment thanks to their annual “Oracle World” conference. The company announced the acquisition of an AI company and maintained their tradition of s**t talking about their competitors in the press.
Acquisitions
- Oracle acquires DataFox, a developer of ‘predictive intelligence as a service’ across millions of company records
Oracle today announced that it has made another acquisition, this time to enhance both the kind of data that it can provide to its business customers, and its artificial intelligence capabilities: it is buying DataFox, a startup that has amassed a huge company database — currently covering 2.8 million public and private businesses, adding 1.2 million each year — and uses AI to analyse that to make larger business predictions.
Terms of the deal do not appear to have been disclosed but we are trying to find out. DataFox — which launched in 2014 as a contender in the TC Battlefield at Disrupt — had raised just under $19 million and was last valued at $33 million back in January 2017, according to PitchBook. Investors in the company included Slack, GV, Howard Linzon, and strategic investor Goldman Sachs among others.
- Facebook on Hunt for Big Cybersecurity Acquisition
In its current acquisition efforts, the company is most likely to look at software that it could wrap into its own systems, including things like analytics or tools to flag unauthorized access, people familiar with its thinking said. Companies in these categories include Demisto, JASK and Swimlane, each of which are privately held and would likely cost somewhere in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It could also look for technology that could help users keep their accounts more secure or add privacy features, the people said. Some companies in this category include ZeroFOX and SafeGuard Cyber, both of which help assess accounts for risk of attack or prevent attacks. ZeroFOX has raised more than $80 million to date and SafeGuard Cyber $14.9 million.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facebook-on-hunt-for-big-cybersecurity-acquisition
Artificial Intelligence
- China’s Baidu challenges Google with A.I. that translates languages in real-time
Baidu is China’s largest search engine and for that reason has often been compared to Google. Its latest product comes over a year after Google unveiled the Pixel Buds, a set of wireless headphones that it claims can do live translation.
Huang said Baidu is looking to integrate the AI interpreter into its Wi-Fi translator, a product it unveiled earlier this year which is both a portable internet hub and translator. The company will also use this technology to translate speeches at its annual Baidu World Conference on November 1 in Beijing, China.
Cloud
- Oracle’s Larry Ellison keeps poking AWS because he has no choice
This was about showmanship. It was about chest beating and it’s about going after the market leader because frankly, the man has little choice. By now, it’s well documented that Oracle was late to the cloud. Larry Ellison was never a fan and he made it clear over the years, but today as the world shifts to a cloud model, his company has had to move with it.
To make matters worse, Oracle’s late start puts it well behind market leader AWS. Hence, Ellison shouting from the rooftops how much better his company’s solutions are and how insecure the competitors are. Synergy Research, which follows the cloud market closely, has pegged Amazon’s cloud market share at around 35 percent. It has Oracle in the single digits in the most recent data from last summer (and the market hasn’t shifted dramatically since it came out with this data).
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/24/oracles-larry-ellison-keeps-poking-aws-because-he-has-no-choice/
- Microsoft crushes quarterly earnings as cloud revenues rise
Azure revenue grew 93 percent during the company’s fiscal third quarter and 89 percent during its fourth quarter ended in June. Microsoft does not break out specific revenue dollar figures for Azure.
Microsoft’s commercial cloud business — which combines Azure with subscription cloud-software services Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 — also grew at a slightly slower rate than during the previous quarter, but still increased 47 percent to $8.5 billion.
Security
- Yahoo to pay $50M, other costs for massive security breach
Yahoo has agreed to pay $50 million in damages and provide two years of free credit-monitoring services to 200 million people whose email addresses and other personal information were stolen as part of the biggest security breach in history.
The restitution hinges on federal court approval of a settlement filed late Monday in a 2-year-old lawsuit seeking to hold Yahoo accountable for digital burglaries that occurred in 2013 and 2014, but weren’t disclosed until 2016.
- Japan and China Are Getting Along Better, but Not When It Comes to Tech
Yet Japanese government and business leaders express views in line with Vice President Mike Pence’s recent depiction of China as a nation that seeks technological dominance “by any means necessary” including “forced technology transfer [and] intellectual property theft.”
China is “making unacceptable demands and seeking to exclude foreign businesses,” said a top Japanese official.
One response, the official said, would be to block Chinese tech companies from global markets.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-rivalry-shadows-japan-china-summit-1540306548?ns=prod/accounts-wsj
Software/SaaS
- Linus Torvalds is Back With Linux
Almost exactly a month after Torvalds’ self-imposed exile, he is back at the helm of the project he started nearly three decades ago. In a note sent to the Linux Kernel mailing list on Monday, Greg Kroah-Hartman, a lead Linux developer, said that he is “handing the kernel tree back” to Torvalds.
“These past few months has [sic] been a tough one for our community, as it is our community that is fighting from within itself, with prodding from others outside of it,” Kroah-Hartman wrote. “So here is my plea to everyone out there. Let’s take a day or two off, rest, relax with friends by sharing a meal, recharge, and then get back to work.”
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3km9qb/linus-torvalds-is-back-with-linux
Datacenter/Hardware
- Investigating Implausible Bloomberg Supermicro Stories
In this article, we have shown why the technical details of the Bloomberg alleged hack are inaccurate and/or implausible. These technical details were offered to Bloomberg through anonymous sources, so we have no way of doing further fact-checking. We showed why, even if a chip can be produced and placed it would not work as Bloomberg reports. CEOs such as Tim Cook of Apple and Charles Liang of Supermicro and all of the named companies have said that the reporting was untrue or inaccurate. The three security experts named in the two Bloomberg pieces have expressed reservations about what and how Bloomberg has presented the story.
Bloomberg is standing by their piece, citing 17 sources and over 100 interviews. It seems 9 sources between Apple and Supermicro have contradicting evidence offered by CEOs with a duty to make truthful statements about their companies. There are 2 cited security experts who have reservations, as does the lynchpin expert in the follow-up piece but we do not know if they are included in the tally.
https://www.servethehome.com/investigating-implausible-bloomberg-supermicro-stories/
Other
- SoftBank Chief Is Said to Have Canceled Appearance at Saudi Conference
Word of Mr. Son’s decision not to attend came on Tuesday, the first day of the conference. A representative for SoftBank, the Japanese internet, energy and financial conglomerate, did not immediately respond to a request for comment
However, Saleh Romeih, an executive with Softbank’s Vision Fund, the biggest technology fund on record, spoke on a panel at the conference on Tuesday, a spokesman for the fund said. The Saudi government is providing $45 billion of the Vision Fund’s nearly $100 billion.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/23/business/saudi-investment-softbank.html
- Amazon shares fall as record profits are offset by conservative holiday forecasts
Amazon is still raking in the cash, but its slower than expected customer growth in its web services offerings and a weaker than expected sales outlook for the holiday season shook investor confidence and caused the stock to slide around 5 percent in after-hours trading.
Profits for the company continued to soar, reaching $2.9 billion, or $5.75 per share, up from $2.5 billion in the second quarter, and handily beating analysts’ estimates of $3.14 per share. Those earnings were offset by slower revenue growth at $56.6 billion versus the $57.1 billion analysts had expected.
- Silicon Valley’s dirty secret: Using a shadow workforce of contract employees to drive profits
It’s not only in Silicon Valley. The trend is on the rise as public companies look for ways to trim HR costs or hire in-demand skills in a tight labor market. The U.S. jobless rate dropped to 3.7 percent in September, the lowest since 1969, down from 3.9 percent in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Some 57.3 million Americans, or 36 percent of the workforce, are now freelancing, according to a 2017 report by Upwork. In San Mateo and Santa Clara counties alone, there are an estimated 39,000 workers who are contracted to tech companies, according to one estimate by University of California Santa Cruz researchers.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/22/silicon-valley-using-contract-employees-to-drive-profits.html