Amazon became the second company to be valued at one trillion dollars this week. As that news hit the airwaves, workers at Whole Foods (which was purchased by Amazon last year) are starting to organize a union citing Amazon’s poor working culture.
Jeff Bezos is also making news for going after Facebook and Google’s advertising revenues. The company is making a push for digital advertising profits and I personally see them being very successful at it.
Acquisitions
Artificial Intelligence
- AI robots can develop prejudices, just like us mere mortals
Over thousands of simulations, the robots learned new strategies by copying each other either within their own groups or by across the entire population. The study found the robots cribbed strategies that gave them a better payoff in the short term, indicating that high cognitive ability isn’t necessarily required to develop prejudices.
“Our simulations show that prejudice is a powerful force of nature and through evolution, it can easily become incentivized in virtual populations, to the detriment of wider connectivity with others,” wrote Cardiff University’s Professor Roger Whitaker, one of the study’s co-authors. “Protection from prejudicial groups can inadvertently lead to individuals forming further prejudicial groups, resulting in a fractured population. Such widespread prejudice is hard to reverse.”
https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/06/robots-prejudice-study-mit-cardiff/
Cloud
- Google will struggle if it re-enters China, says its former country head
“People [in China] aren’t looking for a new search engine or an app store, new companies are emerging addressing previously unknown customer needs [and] innovations are coming out,” Lee explained.
“The new graduates generally prefer to work for Chinese companies and then, lastly, the heads of multinationals are really just professional managers. If they were to compete against local entrepreneurs who are gladiators in this colosseum, I don’t think the American companies will have a high chance of succeeding in this environment,” he added.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/05/google-will-struggle-if-it-re-enters-china/
Security
- More U.S. Cities Brace for ‘Inevitable’ Hackers
“Compromise is inevitable,” said Christopher Mitchell, chief information security official, at a Houston City Council hearing last month. His presentation helped persuade local lawmakers they needed a $30 million cybersecurity insurance plan with a $471,400 premium, an example of a burgeoning trend across the country. Policies vary, but insurance can cover hackers’ extortion demands, legal liabilities, computer-forensics expertise and costs for problems like having government services knocked off line.
- Former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos: Being a CSO can be a ‘crappy job’
“It’s like being a [chief financial officer] before accounting was invented,” he said.
“When you decide to take on the [chief security officer] title, you decide that you’re going to run the risk of having decisions made above you or issues created by tens of thousands of people making decisions that will be stapled to your resume,” he said.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/06/alex-stamos-facebook-yahoo-security-officer/
Software/SaaS
- Commons Clause stops open-source abuse
Go to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and hover over the Products menu at the top. You will see numerous open-source projects that Amazon did not create, but runs as-a-service. These provide Amazon with billions of dollars of revenue per year.
For example, Amazon takes Redis (the most loved database in StackOverflow’s developer survey), gives very little back, and runs it as a service, re-branded as AWS Elasticache. Many other popular open-source projects including, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Postgres, MySQL, Docker, Hadoop, Spark and more, have similarly been taken and offered as AWS products.
To be clear, this is not illegal. But we think it is wrong, and not conducive to sustainable open-source communities.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/07/commons-clause-stops-open-source-abuse/
Datacenter/Hardware
- How Alternative DBs are Disrupting the Conventionals in 2018
There’s no question that Oracle has been a key reason why AWS has ascended to global IT heights in the first place. However, as AWS has scaled out, it now perceives a need for new-gen data storage inside DBs that are easier to manage, not as expensive to maintain, and more flexible in integrating and moving workloads.
NoSQL technology offers enterprises flexibility because NoSQL data stores can support structured, unstructured and semi-structured data for different types of business applications. Older SQL databases have issues with scripting languages, such as JSON, for example, and are more limited in scope than the newer ones.
Forrester has cited MongoDB as the most popular NoSQL database for the last couple of years. The open-source database is “popular among developers because it is easy to use, scales to meet the most demanding applications and offers the most comprehensive ecosystem of tools and partners,” the researcher said.
http://www.eweek.com/database/how-alternative-dbs-are-disrupting-the-conventionals-in-2018
Other
- Whole Foods workers seek to unionize, says Amazon is ‘exploiting our dedication’
In a letter addressed to Whole Foods employees, the group — members of Whole Foods’ cross-regional committee — wrote that they are “concerned about the direction” of Whole Foods in an Amazon era. The letter outlines several demands, including a $15 minimum wage for all employees, 401k matching, paid maternity leave, lower health insurance deductibles and more.
“We cannot let Amazon remake the entire North American retail landscape without embracing the full value of its team members. The success of Amazon and [Whole Foods] should not come at the cost of exploiting our dedication and threatening our economic stability,” they wrote.
- Amazon Sets Its Sights on the $88 Billion Online Ad Market
Amazon derives the bulk of its annual revenue, forecast to be $235 billion this year, from its e-commerce business, selling everything from books to lawn furniture. Amazon is also a leader in the cloud computing business, with Amazon Web Services, which accounts for around 11 percent of its revenue but more than half of its operating income. But in the company’s most recent financial results, it was a category labeled “other” that caught the attention of many analysts. It mostly consists of revenue from selling banner, display and keyword search-driven ads known as “sponsored products.” That category surged by about 130 percent to $2.2 billion in the first quarter, compared with the same period in 2017.
Those numbers are a pittance for Google and Facebook, which make up more than half of the $88 billion digital ad market. But they come with big and troubling implications for those two giants.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/03/business/media/amazon-digital-ads.html
- Alibaba’s Jack Ma, China’s Richest Man, to Retire From Company He Co-Founded
Mr. Ma is retiring as China’s business environment has soured, with Beijing and state-owned enterprises increasingly playing more interventionist roles with companies. Under President Xi Jinping, China’s internet industry has grown and become more important, prompting the government to tighten its leash. The Chinese economy is also facing slowing growth and increasing debt, and the country is embroiled in an escalating trade war with the United States.
In an interview, Mr. Ma said his retirement is not the end of an era but “the beginning of an era.” He said he would be spending more of his time and fortune focused on education. “I love education,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/technology/alibaba-jack-ma-retiring.html
