The trade war with China might actually happen. Alibaba is backing off a promise to bring 1 million jobs to the United States due to President Trump’s impending tariffs. Some believe Jack Ma is using this latest news to back out of something he had no intention of delivering on.
Amazon might have a corporate espionage issue, Intel is having a hard time keeping up with demand, and some trendy tech firms are over San Francisco.
Acquisitions
- Time Magazine Sold to Salesforce Founder Marc Benioff for $190 Million
Nearly eight months after Meredith Corp.completed its purchase of Time Inc., the publisher has agreed to sell Time magazine for $190 million to Marc Benioff, co-founder of Salesforce.com , CRM and his wife Lynne Benioff.
The proposed sale is expected to close within 30 days. The Benioffs are buying Time as individuals; the agreement is unrelated to Salesforce.com, where Mr. Benioff also serves as chairman and co-chief executive.
- Adobe Buys Marketing-Automation Firm Marketo for $4.75 Billion
The deal is expected to add scale to Adobe’s existing marketing-technology capabilities. It also will bolster the company’s clout with business-to-business brands, which make up the bulk of Marketo’s customer base. Reuters earlier reported that Adobe and Marketo were in talks.
- MariaDB acquires Clustrix
MariaDB, the company behind the eponymous MySQL drop-in replacement database, today announced that it has acquired Clustrix, which itself is a MySQL drop-in replacement database, but with a focus on scalability. MariaDB will integrate Clustrix’s technology into its own database, which will allow it to offer its users a more scalable database service in the long run.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/20/mariadb-acquires-clusterix/
Artificial Intelligence
- Top Healthcare AI Trends To Watch
AI faces both technical and feasibility challenges that are unique to the healthcare industry. For example, there’s no standard format or central repository of patient data in the United States.
When patient files are faxed, emailed as unreadable PDFs, or sent as images of handwritten notes, extracting information poses a unique challenge for AI.
But big tech companies like Apple have an edge here, especially in onboarding a large network of partners, including healthcare providers and EHR vendors.
https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/ai-trends-healthcare/
Security
- Your Network Has Been Hacked. You Have 72 Hours to Report It.
The fast turnaround creates a challenge for companies. “The biggest challenge is knowing enough about the incident to actually report it,” says Jim Routh, chief security officer at Aetna Inc. AET -0.25% “We have to do some analysis to figure out what the scope or impact is, and it’s often days before we have that identified.”
Aetna meets that challenge by informing regulators almost immediately upon learning of a possible breach and then updating them as the company learns more, Mr. Routh says.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/your-network-has-been-hacked-you-have-72-hours-to-report-it-1537322400
- Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes
Employees of Amazon, primarily with the aid of intermediaries, are offering internal data and other confidential information that can give an edge to independent merchants selling their products on the site, according to sellers who have been offered and purchased the data, as well as brokers who provide it and people familiar with internal investigations.
The practice, which violates company policy, is particularly pronounced in China, according to some of these people, because the number of sellers there is skyrocketing. As well, Amazon employees in China have relatively small salaries, which might embolden them to take risks.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-investigates-employees-leaking-data-for-bribes-1537106401
Software/SaaS
- Oracle missed Wall Street revenue targets and the stock is tumbling.
Business software maker Oracle Corp on Monday missed revenue estimates for the first quarter, as sales in its cloud services and license support unit disappointed, sending its shares down 5 percent in extended trading.
Revenue from the unit, its biggest division by sales, rose 3.2 percent to $6.61 billion, missing the average analyst estimate of $6.71 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
https://www.businessinsider.com/r-oracle-first-quarter-revenue-up-1-percent-2018-9
- Oracle Buys Its Way to Stability
About $10 billion was spent during the quarter on 212 million shares, the company said in its conference call. That makes for a record amount for the company in a given quarter and brings the total spent on buybacks over the past 12 months to about $21 billion. Oracle has averaged a little more than $7 billion in buybacks on an annual basis over its past nine fiscal years, according to S&P Capital IQ.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/oracle-buys-its-way-to-stability-1537296117
IBM was doing this for years and only just recently stopped.
Datacenter/Hardware
- Intel’s Shortages Chip Away at Micron
Intel, in other words, has many demanding customers competing for a finite amount of manufacturing capacity. And while the company has already boosted its planned capital expenditure for the year by $1 billion, such facilities can’t be expanded quickly—especially while the company is struggling to shift some of its production to a new, more advanced 10-nanometer process. That makes it difficult to respond to rapid changes in the market, like the recent surprising jump in PC demand. Second quarter PC shipments grew globally for the first time in six years, according to Gartner.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/intels-shortages-chip-away-at-micron-1537512343?ns=prod/accounts-wsj
Other
- Trump Hits China With Tariffs on $200 Billion in Goods, Escalating Trade War
The tariffs on $200 billion worth of products comes on top of the $50 billion worth already taxed earlier this year, meaning nearly half of all Chinese imports into the United States will soon face levies. The next wave of tariffs, which are scheduled to go into effect on Sept. 24, will start at 10 percent before climbing to 25 percent on Jan. 1. The timing of the staggered increase will partially reduce the toll of price increases for holiday shoppers buying Chinese imports in the coming months.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/17/us/politics/trump-china-tariffs-trade.html
Alibaba will no longer bring 1 million jobs to the US, citing tariffsMa told Chinese state-run news outlet Xinhua today that his promise was based on the assumption that the US and China would have “rational trade relations,” which is no longer the case. “This promise was based on friendly US-China partnership and rational trade relations,” Ma said. “The current situation has already ruined that. There is no way to complete the promise now, but we won’t stop working hard to promote the healthy development of China-US trade.” Last week, Ma announced his plans to retire this year and hand over the company to its current CEO. He denied rumors that he was being forced out.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/19/17879844/alibaba-us-jobs-tariffs
- Tech expansion: Up and out of SF
The unemployment and office vacancy rates in San Francisco are near historic lows, while tech stocks, including Salesforce, have set new highs. Housing prices continue to soar, with few homes coming on the market. For San Francisco’s fastest-growing businesses, there are two places to put employees: up or out. The answer is often both, with software engineers more typically getting the pricey space in new towers at headquarters and support and sales going to cheaper, roomier cities.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/For-San-Francisco-s-fast-growing-tech-13227433.php
- Google Employees Are Quitting Over The Company’s Secretive China Search Project
When Poulson resigned in August, he said he only planned to share his concerns about Dragonfly with those inside Google. But when Google didn’t respond to a group of human rights organizations that presented it with a letter arguing that Dragonfly is unethical and asking the company to kill the project, Poulson felt compelled to share his opinion with the public.
“I’m offended that no weight has been given to the human rights community having a consensus,” he said. “If you have coalition letter from 14 human rights organizations, and that can’t even make it into the discussions on the ethics behind a decision, I’d rather stand with the human rights organizations in this dispute.”
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/google-project-dragonfly-employees-quitting