Tag: Amazon

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News You Can Use: 1/9/2019

  • Stanford professor: “The workplace is killing people and nobody cares”

    There is a tremendous amount of epidemiological literature that suggests that diabetes, cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome—and many health-relevant individual behaviors such as overeating and underexercising and drug and alcohol abuse–come from stress.

    And third, there is a large amount of data that suggests the biggest source of stress is the workplace. So that’s how Chapman can stand up and make the statement that CEOs are the cause of the health care crisis: You are the source of stress, stress causes chronic disease, and chronic disease is the biggest component of our ongoing and enormous health care costs.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90282735/the-workplace-is-killing-people-and-nobody-cares

  • Amazon, to Win in Booming Rural India, Reinvents Itself

    Amazon’s efforts here face direct competition from Walmart Inc. and local startups, who are all trying to capture customers jumping directly to e-commerce thanks to the recent rollout of 4G mobile internet across India. Amazon expects the number of online shoppers in India to triple in the next few years, most of them from rural areas. More than 80% of its new customers this year are from outside India’s biggest cities, it said.

    The Seattle giant has modified its app to work with inexpensive smartphones and patchy cellular networks. It has added hundreds of thousands of Indian language descriptions of products and videos for those who can’t read, and it has opened physical Amazon stores to walk people through the process of ordering online. It brought on tens of thousands of local distributors to deliver packages, often by bicycle down dirt roads, where it will accept cash or digital payment on delivery.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-to-win-in-booming-rural-india-reinvents-itself-11546196176

  • Corporations are getting political… and it sucks
  • Amazon Promised Drone Delivery in Five Years… Five Years Ago

    Of course, there’s nothing wrong with dreaming big, especially when it comes to tech that has the potential to help humanity. But this 60 Minutes segment about Amazon’s vaporware delivery drones never should’ve seen the light of day. Drone delivery is certainly a technological possibility today just as it was in 2013, but just like so many other billionaire-led pipedreams (anyone remember the Hyperloop?), the hurdles are more political than technological. As the Associated Press notes, federal rules that would allow drones to be flown outside of an operator’s line of sight are probably at least 10 years away.

    https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/amazon-promised-drone-delivery-in-five-years-five-ye-1830818625

  • Want to Be a Great Leader? Here’s Why Personal Mastery Is the Single Best Place to Start.

    “One of the tragedies of workplace politics and turf wars is that nobody wants them, but we all get caught up in them and feel powerless about it,” says Hughes. “We assign blame to someone else, or the organization as a whole.”

    The goal, according to Hughes, is for executives to learn to recognize ways they’re inadvertently and involuntarily perpetuating this dynamic. By becoming comfortable with self-diagnosing their contribution to the problem and talking about turf wars with their staff and colleagues in a more transparent way, they can begin to reduce the powerlessness people feel over it.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/310795

Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash

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Supplier Report: 1/4/2019


This edition of Supplier Report is a bit more reflective than forward facing thanks to several end-of-year posts. This week we get some context on how Huawei grew and how Amazon is potentially hiding its growth. There is speculation about acquisitions and what some companies are doing with their excess cash.

And I can’t properly close out 2018 without some Larry Ellison news!

Acquisitions

  • Will Microsoft Acquire Oath (Verizon Media Group)?

    The business unit, Verizon Media Group, faces tough competition. Revenue for the division fell from $2.2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2017 to $1.8 billion in the third quarter of 2018.

    Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg, who joined the business in August 2018, set out to restructure the company. He told investors during the third quarter investors’ call that he doesn’t expect to meet the company’s “previous target of $10 billion of [annual] revenue [for Oath] by 2020.”

    Apparently, the company really just wants to build Oath’s technical capabilities such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and virtual reality into its other businesses across Verizon. But the company could license those patents from Microsoft, if they choose to sell the assets to the Redmond, Washington-based company.

    https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/329813/will-microsoft-acquire-oath-verizon-media-group.html

  • 3 Tech Companies That Are Spending Billions to Buy Back Their Own Stock

    Earlier this year, memory specialist Micron announced a share-repurchase program good for $10 billion. While that’s not quite in the same ballpark as Microsoft’s $40 billion buyback, let alone Apple’s enormous $100 billion share-repurchase authorization, the size of a buyback needs to be considered in the context of a company’s market capitalization. Microsoft’s and Apple’s market capitalizations are each north of $700 billion, while Micron’s is currently around $35 billion.

    https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/12/30/3-tech-companies-that-are-spending-billions-to-buy.aspx

Artificial Intelligence

  • The Verge 2018 tech report card: AI

    This reckoning has been most visible as a parade of negative headlines about algorithmic systems. This year saw the first deaths caused by self-driving cars; the Cambridge Analytica scandal; accusations that Facebook facilitated genocide in Myanmar; the revelation that Google helped the Pentagon train drone surveillance tools; and ethical questions over the tech giant’s human-sounding AI assistant. The research group AI Now described 2018 as a year of “cascading scandals” for the field, and it’s an accurate, if disheartening, summary.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/30/18137429/2018-tech-recap-artificial-intelligence-robot-machine-learning-facial-recognition

Cloud

  • What Amazon Isn’t Telling Investors About Its Revenue

    The rule doesn’t require companies to break down their revenue in any specific way. But if they discuss particular sources of revenue in earnings announcements or conference calls, or if they provide their top decision-makers with particular details about revenue, such as how individual products are selling, then they are supposed to consider breaking out the revenue on that basis for investors too.

    In Amazon’s case, the SEC noted in an August letter that the company said publicly it had topped 100 million paid Prime members globally and shipped more than five billion items with Prime world-wide in 2017. It asked Amazon to disclose its percentage of sales attributable to Prime members.

    Amazon declined, telling the SEC it didn’t believe sales to Prime customers was useful information and that Prime membership is “only one element” of its business. An Amazon spokeswoman declined to comment further.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-amazon-isnt-telling-investors-about-its-revenue-11545480000

Software/SaaS

  • How Facebook Keeps Messenger From Crashing on New Year’s Eve

    In addition to shifting loads, the Messenger team has developed other levers that it can pull “if things get really bad,” says Ahdout. Every new message sent to a server goes into a queue as part of a service called Iris. There, messages are assigned a timeout—a period of time after which, that message will drop out of the queue to make room for new messages. During a high-volume event, this allows the team to quickly discard certain types of messages, such as read receipts, to focus its resources on delivering ones that users have composed.

    “We set up our systems so that if it comes to that, they start shedding the lowest-priority traffic,” says Ahdout. “So if it came to it, Iris would rather deliver a message and drop the read receipt, rather than drop the message and deliver the read receipt.”

    https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/software/how-facebooks-software-engineers-prepare-messenger-for-new-years-eve

Datacenter/Hardware

  • Intel to get 700 million shekel grant for Israel expansion

    Israel will give Intel Corp (INTC.O) a 700 million shekel ($185 million) grant in return for a planned $5 billion expansion of its production operations in Israel.

    Intel is one of the biggest employers and exporters in Israel, where many of its new technologies are developed. Earlier this year it submitted plans to upgrade its Kiryat Gat manufacturing plant in southern Israel.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-intel-idUSKCN1OO0JD

  • 911 emergency services go down across the US after CenturyLink outage

    CenturyLink, one of the largest telecommunications providers in the U.S., provides internet and phone backbone services to major cell carriers, including AT&T and Verizon. Data center or fiber issues can have a knock-on effect to other companies, cutting out service and causing cell site blackouts.

    In this case, the outage affected only cellular calls to 911, and not landline calls.

    Several states sent emergency alerts to residents’ cell phones warning of the outage.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/28/911-service-outage-centurylink/

Other

  • How Huawei Took Over the World

    In its early days, Huawei was accused of stealing technology, including by Cisco Systems Inc. in a 2003 lawsuit, which Huawei settled without admitted wrongdoing. Now it has the biggest R&D budget of any tech company in China, pouring $13 billion last year into developing its own technologies, outpacing Intel Corp. and spending almost as much as Google parent Alphabet Inc. Huawei says that 80,000 people—45% of its employees—work on R&D. They make chips, design phones and work on 5G technology.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-huawei-took-over-the-world-11545735603

  • JD.com Tries to ‘Change the Narrative’ With Business Restructuring

    Investors have become increasingly worried about Mr. Liu’s unusually tight grip over his company. He controls nearly 80% of the company’s voting rights and the board can’t meet without him unless he recuses himself. His concentration of authority became a focus of concern among some analysts after Mr. Liu’s brief arrest in August and during the subsequent months when accusations against him were pending.

    JD.com’s American depositary receipts have fallen 49.1% in the past year, closing at $21.10 on Wednesday. While shares of the nation’s large tech firms have been beaten down by concerns about China’s slowing economy and government regulation, JD.com’s fall was especially dramatic. Some analysts attributed the swoon to the uncertainty surrounding a criminal prosecution.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/jd-com-to-change-the-narrative-with-business-restructuring-11545902638?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • Tesla adds Oracle founder Larry Ellison to board of directors

    Tesla is Ellison’s second-largest investment as of October, Ellison said then. Ellison owns 3 million shares in the company, according to the announcement. He also said that he and Musk are close friends. Wilson-Thompson spent 17 years as an executive at the Kellogg Company, and currently serves as the executive vice president and global chief human resources officer of the Walgreens Boots Alliance, the holding company that sits above Walgreens.

    Tesla was required to add two new independent board members as part of the settlement Elon Musk and the company signed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) earlier this year. The SEC had charged Musk with securities fraud in September over the “false and misleading” statements he made on Twitter in August, when he suddenly announced plans to turn Tesla back into a privately held company. He quickly settled with the agency two days after rejecting its initial offer.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/28/18158832/tesla-larry-ellison-board-of-directors-oracle-founder

Photo by Thomas Lipke on Unsplash

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Supplier Report: 12/21/2018

Verizon is taking a $4.6B write down of their AOL and Yahoo acquisitions, discovering what most people said at the time of their Yahoo purchase – they made a bad decision.

The company also announce over 10,000 Verizon employees will be volunteering to leave their positions.

Oracle continues to struggle with their cloud position in the wake of Thomas Kurian leaving for Google. The company continues to protest and take legal action against the DoD over the way they conducted the JEDI RFP… because that’s how you endear yourself to someone you want to do business with later.

Acquisitions

  • Intel and TPG in talks to sell McAfee to Thoma Bravo for significantly more than $4.2 billion

    Private equity firm Thoma Bravo is in early discussions to acquire security software company McAfee from TPG and Intel for a significant premium over the company’s 2016 $4.2 billion valuation, according to people familiar with the matter.

    Talks may still fall apart and a deal announcement isn’t expected soon, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/14/intel-tpg-in-talks-to-sell-mcafee-to-thoma-bravo.html

  • SoftBank invests in parking startup ParkJockey pushing valuation to $1 billion

    Along with the SoftBank investment news, ParkJockey also announced that it was acquiring two of the largest parking operators in North America. The startup, with help from Abu Dhabi-based Mubadala Capital and debt financing from Owl Rock, said it had reached an agreement to acquire Imperial Parking Corporation, a North American-based parking management company often referred to as Impark. The agreement follows ParkJockey’s acquisition of parking management operator Citizens Parking Inc.

    The investment puts the ParkJockey valuation to more than $1 billion, reported Miami Herald.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/10/softbank-invests-in-parking-startup-parkjockey-pushing-valuation-to-1-billion/

  • GE Announces New Industrial IoT Software Business

    In establishing GE Digital as a separate, wholly owned subsidiary, GE CEO Larry Culp is giving GE Digital perhaps its best chance of survival. He’s also creating an opportunity for GE shareholders to leverage any success down the road. But can GE Digital be successful as a standalone company?

    The opportunity before a new GE Digital is to capitalize on the reputation of Predix as a solid platform for industrial IoT. Unencumbered by having to supply IT services to the various GE industrial divisions, the new GE Digital should be more nimble and responsive to market opportunities.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/forrester/2018/12/14/ge-announces-new-industrial-iot-software-business/#fc03cc94b1ce

  • Trello acquires Butler to add power of automation

    What Butler brings to Trello  is the power of automation, stringing together a bunch of commands to make something complex happen automatically. As Trello’s Michael Pryor pointed out in a blog post announcing the acquisition, we are used to tools like IFTTT, Zapier and Apple Shortcuts, and this will bring a similar type of functionality directly into Trello.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/10/trello-acquires-butler-to-add-power-of-automation/

Artificial Intelligence

  • The Deadly Recklessness of the Self-Driving Car Industry

    The newest and most glaring example of just how reckless corporations in the autonomous vehicle space can be involves the now-infamous fatal crash in Tempe, Arizona, where one of Uber’s cars struck and killed a 49-year-old pedestrian. The Information obtained an email reportedly sent by Robbie Miller, a former manager in the testing-operations group, to seven Uber executives, including the head of the company’s autonomous vehicle unit, warning that the software powering the taxis was faulty and that the backup drivers weren’t adequately trained.

    “The cars are routinely in accidents resulting in damage,” Miller wrote. “This is usually the result of poor behavior of the operator or the AV technology. A car was damaged nearly every other day in February. We shouldn’t be hitting things every 15,000 miles. Repeated infractions for poor driving rarely results in termination. Several of the drivers appear to not have been properly vetted or trained.”

    https://gizmodo.com/the-deadly-recklessness-of-the-self-driving-car-industr-1831027948

Cloud

  • Oracle earnings: Chronic cloud concerns create crisis of confidence

    In a quarterly survey of 36 Oracle partners, J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Murphy found most results to be “underwhelming.”

    “In the aftermath of former President Thomas Kurian’s departure to Google, metrics are listless and dull for Pace of Business, Revenue Expectation, and Oracle’s Momentum / Technology Vision,” Murphy wrote. “‘Failure to innovate’ is being mentioned.”

    “Amazon, Microsoft MSFT SAP SAP and Google are most frequently mentioned as becoming more competitive with Oracle,” the J.P. Morgan analyst said. “Partners view Oracle as being ‘way back in the cloud arms race’ and ‘not sure they can catch up at this point.’”

    https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/1FF18130-FD69-11E8-95C1-5E5DFA743B98

  • Amazon Intervenes in Oracle’s JEDI Lawsuit

    In addition to the alleged conflicts of interest, Oracle’s lawsuit takes issue with the Pentagon’s decision to award the contract to a single company, similar to arguments it made in a bid protest the Government Accountability Office denied in November.

    In its motion to intervene, AWS called Oracle’s allegations “meritless” and contended it has “direct and substantial economic interests at stake” in the lawsuit; the granted motion gives AWS the legal right to defend its proprietary, financial and reputational interests that could arise in the case.

    https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2018/12/amazon-intervenes-oracles-jedi-lawsuit/153559/

  • Verizon Admits Defeat With $4.6 Billion AOL-Yahoo Writedown

    The wireless carrier slashed the value of its AOL and Yahoo acquisitions by $4.6 billion, an acknowledgment that tough competition for digital advertising is leading to shortfalls in revenue and profit.

    The move will erase almost half the value of the division it had been calling Oath, which houses AOL, Yahoo and other businesses like the Huffington Post.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-11/verizon-writes-down-4-6-billion-of-value-of-aol-yahoo-business

Security

  • Chinese Hackers Breach U.S. Navy Contractors

    The data allegedly stolen from Navy contractors and subcontractors often is highly sensitive, classified information about advanced military technology, according to U.S. officials and security researchers. The victims have included large contractors as well as small ones, some of which are seen as lacking the resources to invest in securing their networks.

    One major breach of a Navy contractor, reported in June, involved the theft of secret plans to build a supersonic anti-ship missile planned for use by American submarines, according to officials. The hackers targeted an unidentified company under contract with the Navy’s Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-navy-is-struggling-to-fend-off-chinese-hackers-officials-say-11544783401

  • Equifax breach was ‘entirely preventable’ had it used basic security measures, says House report

    The report confirmed most of what was already known, but added new color and insights that were previously unreported. The credit agency failed to patch a disclosed vulnerability in Apache Struts, a common open source web server, which Homeland Security had issued a warning about some months before. The unpatched Apache Struts server was powering its five-decades-old(!) web-facing system that allowed consumers to check their credit rating from the company’s website. The attackers used the vulnerability to pop a web shell on the server weeks later, and managed to retain access for more than two months, the House panel found, and were able to pivot through the company’s various systems by obtaining an unencrypted file of passwords on one server, letting the hackers access more than 48 databases containing unencrypted consumer credit data.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/10/equifax-breach-preventable-house-oversight-report/

    The people at Equifax want you to forget about this, we have to keep reminding ourselves that this was not acceptable and ensure other companies with this data are held to higher standards.

Software/SaaS

  • IBM Hopes To Strengthen ‘Do Not Call’ Registries With Blockchain

    The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India is hoping that by using blockchain to keep tabs on the system, it will make it easier to figure out who is abusing the system and how. The proposed platform would record who made a “Do Not Call” request, the telephone numbers accused of violating the request, and mobile telephone portability data. By having this information on a shared ledger, it will theoretically be easier to identify fraud quickly.

    https://www.ethnews.com/ibm-hopes-to-strengthen-do-not-call-registries-with-blockchain

Other

  • Verizon announces 10,400 employees will voluntarily leave the company

    Verizon today announced 10,400 employees are taking buyouts to leave the company. That’s about 7 percent of the company’s worldwide workforce. This is part of an effort to trim the telecom giant’s workforce ahead of its push toward 5G.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/10/verizon-announces-10400-employees-will-voluntarily-leave-the-company/

  • Why Apple Chose Austin, Seattle and Culver City for Its New Jobs Push

    Each location where it announced expansion plans Thursday reflects a different facet of Apple’s evolving model. Culver City gives Apple a Hollywood homebase as it pushes into video programming. Seattle is a machine-learning hub where it can develop algorithms that personalize streaming-music playlists and improve Siri. San Diego and Austin offer semiconductor engineers who can advance the customized-chip efforts that help Apple wring more money out of its iPhones, iPads and Macs.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-new-job-push-reflects-shifting-strategy-and-changing-identity-11544792403

  • Why the Amazon Invasion in New York and Virginia Will Be Slow

    Before workers can move in, Amazon needs to remodel temporary offices it is leasing in Long Island City and Crystal City, which will take several months. Amazon already has plenty of office space in both metro areas, so it won’t need to rush construction, these people said. It could take roughly two years before Amazon is able to break ground on its new New York campus, and potentially a little sooner for Northern Virginia, due to various needed site approvals and other preconstruction

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-amazon-invasion-in-new-york-and-virginia-will-be-slow-11544697000

  • Huawei CFO freed on bail ahead of extradition

    A British Columbia Supreme Court justice has granted Meng bail after her attorney and family made a case for her conditional release. She’s paying $10 million CAD ($7 million of it in cash) and must stay in the province, report to a supervisor, agree to around-the-clock surveillance, pay for security, live in a Vancouver area house owned by her husband (Liu Xiaozong) and remain home between 11PM and 6AM.

    Liu also promised both $1 million in cash as well as the $14 million value of two Vancouver homes.

    https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/11/huawei-cfo-freed-on-bail/

    Inside Huawei’s Secret HQ, China Is Shaping the Future

    In the past two years, the largest internet companies formed semiconductor units to improve their cloud offerings and AI applications, such as image recognition and voice assistance. Huawei’s chip design unit, HiSilicon, has been around since 2004. It started working on customized chips to handle complex algorithms on hardware before the cloud companies did. Research firm Alliance Bernstein estimates that HiSilicon is on pace for $7.6 billion in sales this year, more than doubling its size since 2015.

    “Huawei was way ahead of the curve,” said Richard, the analyst.

    Yet in terms of sales and operations, Huawei’s cloud business is meager next to its larger rivals. The company spent about $13 billion on research and development in 2017, up more than 17 percent from the previous year. Its rivals in the cloud market have cut similarly sized checks. “Huawei has concluded that if it does not offer future solutions via the cloud, where its customers are migrating, someone else will,” said Siow Meng Soh, a research manager for GlobalData Plc.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-12/huawei-furthers-china-s-grand-tech-ambitions-amid-meng-detention

Photo by Lubo Minar on Unsplash

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News You Can Use: 12/19/2018

  • American Entrepreneurs Who Flocked to China Are Heading Home, Disillusioned

    Now disillusion has set in, fed by soaring costs, creeping taxation, tightening political control and capricious regulation that makes it ever tougher to maneuver the market and fend off new domestic competitors. All these signal to expat business owners their best days were in the past.

    The Trump administration is making a hard-nosed challenge to China using trade tariffs, investment controls and prosecution of technology thieves, and many in American business are cheering, if silently, having soured on the market after years of trying.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/american-entrepreneurs-who-flocked-to-china-are-heading-home-disillusioned-1544197068?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • 24 Amazon Workers Hospitalized After Robot Punctures Bear Spray In Warehouse

    One worker was in critical condition, ABC News reported, and 30 more were sickened and treated on the scene. The primary cause for hospitalization was difficulty breathing, according to NBC New York. Bear spray contains concentrated capsaicin, the primary ingredient in pepper spray for humans.

    Robbinsville town spokespeople initially said that a can of bear spray had fallen off of the shelf in the Amazon fulfillment center, NBC New York reported, but officials later said that the cause of the accident was a robot.

    An investigation revealed that “an automated machine accidentally punctured a nine-ounce bear repellent can, releasing concentrated capsaicin,” Robbinsville public information officer John Nalbone told ABC News. It’s unclear how the incident occurred.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qvqe85/24-amazon-workers-hospitalized-after-robot-punctures-bear-spray-in-warehouse

  • The opioid crisis is profitable. Blockchain tech can end that
  • The limits of coworking

    So why is everyone trying to turn your favorite neighborhood dinner spot into a part-time WeWork in the first place? Co-working offers a particularly compelling use case for under-utilized space.

    First, co-working falls under the same general commercial zoning categories as most independent businesses and very little additional infrastructure – outside of a few extra power outlets and some decent WiFi – is required to turn a space into an effective replacement for the often crowded and distracting coffee shops used by price-sensitive, lean, remote, or nomadic workers that make up a growing portion of the workforce.

    Thus, businesses can list their space at little-to-no cost, without having to deal with structural layout changes that are more likely to arise when dealing with pop-up solutions or event rentals.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/15/the-limits-of-coworking/

  • Foxconn and the village: the $10B factory deal that turned one small Wisconsin town upside down

    I think that they were basing a lot of the deal on assumptions. When you ask them, “Hey, the size of this incentive package that you’re offering is so very large, and you have a village whose budget is usually between $18 to $20 million, and you guys are offering an incentive package of $760 million, something you have to change is the state law to allow the village to do because it’s considered beyond the prudent borrowing ratio.” They say it was justified because the size of the deal was so large.

    Meaning, Foxconn is offering them $10 billion, which is so much money, and so we obviously had to come back with an equally sweet deal to get them here. I mean, the problem with that is, when you talk to people who study Foxconn, or you just look at the way Foxconn has operated in other countries, is that they often come with a very large deal, and they walk back the deal to a place that seems comfortable for them.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/6/18128133/foxconn-deal-wisconsin-factory-mount-pleasant-trump-reply-all-sruthi-pinnamaneni

Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash

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Supplier Report: 12/7/2018

FAANG companies continue to struggle with their employees’ perceptions of long-term business goals. Google once again is facing a public disagreement between employees over their plans for China – with some employees for and others against Project Dragonfly.

In the wake of Diane Greene’s departure at Google. insiders are saying that the company needs to start purchasing companies quickly (and that they already missed out on critical acquisitions that would better enable competition with AWS and Microsoft).

Acquisitions

  • United Tech to Break Itself Into Three Companies

    The company, which makes everything from Otis escalators to Pratt & Whitney jet engines, said Monday that it plans to spin off to shareholders its Otis division and Carrier building systems businesses. The Wall Street Journal had earlier reported on the plans to break apart.

    The separation is expected to be completed in 2020 and leave UTC as a pure-play aerospace company, following its acquisition of airplane-parts maker Rockwell Collins Inc. That $23 billion cash-and-stock deal closed Monday after lengthy antitrust reviews in the U.S. and China.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/united-technologies-to-separate-into-three-independent-companies-1543272920

  • Logitech isn’t buying Plantronics after all

    “Logitech approached Plantronics regarding a potential acquisition and, consistent with the Plantronics Board’s fiduciary duties, the Company entered into discussions with Logitech,” Plantronics’ own statement reads. “Those discussions have ended. Plantronics will not comment further on this matter.”

    A $2.2 billion deal would have been Logitech’s biggest acquisition to date by far, although it wouldn’t necessarily have reflected a particularly high valuation of Plantronics’ consumer business. Earlier this year Plantronics itself bought out video-conferencing solutions maker Polycom for $2 billion, which had to have been the main factor in Logitech’s willingness to pay so much.

    https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/11/25/18111967/logitech-plantronics-deal-acquisition-off

  • Billion-dollar deal: Google pays $1 billion for huge Mountain View business park

    Google’s Mountain View purchase means that in the two years since the search giant began to collect properties in downtown San Jose for a proposed transit village, the company has spent at least $2.83 billion in property acquisitions in Mountain View, Sunnyvale, downtown San Jose and north San Jose alone.

    Adding to the eye-popping numbers: Google’s spending activity in those four markets reaches $3 billion when including the company’s pending purchase in downtown San Jose of several government-owned parcels, along with the minimum value of a big set of surface parking lots that Google intends to buy from Trammell Crow, also downtown near its proposed transit village.

    https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/11/26/billion-dollar-deal-google-pays-1-billion-for-huge-mountain-view-business-park/

Cloud

  • Google Cloud Needs Acquisitions To Challenge Amazon, Analyst Says

    “It’s time to tap Alphabet’s piggy bank to boost GCP (Google Cloud Platform),” Baird analyst Colin Sebastian said in a report Monday. “As Google seeks to carve out greater share in the expanding enterprise cloud services market, we believe the company should embark on a more aggressive shopping spree.”

    The Google cloud unit should mull acquisitions of companies such as Workday(WDAY), ServiceNow (NOW), Atlassian (TEAM) and Salesforce.com (CRM), Sebastian said.

    https://www.investors.com/news/technology/google-cloud-acquisitions-enterprise-market/

  • It turns out some Google staff do believe in controversial plan to re-enter China

    Excerpt from a letter written by a Google employee:
    Dragonfly is well aligned with Google’s mission. China has the largest number of Internet users of all countries in the world, and yet, most of Google’s services are unavailable in China. This situation heavily contradicts our mission, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. While there are some prior success, Google should keep the effort in finding out how to bring more of our products and services, including Search, to the Chinese users.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/28/google-dragonfly-letter/
    Except…
    We are Google employees. Google must drop Dragonfly.

    Our opposition to Dragonfly is not about China: we object to technologies that aid the powerful in oppressing the vulnerable, wherever they may be. The Chinese government certainly isn’t alone in its readiness to stifle freedom of expression, and to use surveillance to repress dissent. Dragonfly in China would establish a dangerous precedent at a volatile political moment, one that would make it harder for Google to deny other countries similar concessions.

    https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-employees-google-must-drop-dragonfly-4c8a30c5e5eb

  • IBM CEO Ginni Rometty Criticizes Big Internet Platforms for Mishandling Customers’ Data

    “The genesis of the trust crisis is the irresponsible handling of personal data by a few dominant consumer-facing platforms,” Ms. Rometty said Monday. The websites “have more power to shape public opinion than newspapers or the television ever had, yet they face very little regulation or liability.”

    “If there are specific companies that misbehave, steps need to be taken,” she said. “I would use a regulatory scalpel, not a sledgehammer” that affects the whole industry.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-ceo-ginni-rometty-criticizes-rivals-for-mishandling-customers-data-1543257453

Security

  • Marriott reveals massive database breach affecting up to 500 million hotel guests

    Marriott is revealing a massive database breach today, affecting up to 500 million guests of its Starwood hotels the company first acquired in 2016. A security investigation has concluded that there was “unauthorized access” to a database holding hotel guest records. “Marriott learned during the investigation that there had been unauthorized access to the Starwood network since 2014,” says a statement from the company. The Starwood security breach affects a number of branded hotels owned by Marriott, including W Hotels, Sheraton, St. Regis, Westin, and more.

    The breach includes 327 million records of “some combination” of name, mailing address, phone number, email address, passport number, Starwood Preferred Guest (“SPG”) account information, date of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date, and communication preferences.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/30/18119403/marriott-database-breach-starwood-hotels

  • Facebook might not sell user data, but internal documents suggest it certainly considered it

    Back in April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told congress unequivocally that, “We do not sell data.” But these documents suggest that it was something that the company internally considered doing between 2012 and 2014, while the company struggled to generate revenue after its IPO.

    In one case, an employee suggested shutting down data access unless companies spent “$250k a year to maintain access.” In another email, a Facebook employee talked about having a “strategic” talk with Amazon to avoid a “disappointing conversation” about it getting less data in the future. Concerns raised by the Royal Bank of Canada about restricted data access prompted a Facebook employee to ask in an email about how much the bank had agreed to spend on advertising. It’s unclear whether these emails were sent by one or multiple staff members.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/29/18117582/facebook-six4three-internal-documents-emails-selling-user-data

  • Google accused of GDPR privacy violations by seven countries

    The complaints, which each group has issued to their national data protection authorities in keeping with GDPR rules, come in the wake of the discovery that Google is able to track user’s location even when the “Location History” option is turned off. A second setting, “Web and App Activity,” which is enabled by default, must be turned off to fully prevent GPS tracking.

    The BEUC claims that Google uses “deceptive practices” to get users to enable both these options, and does not fully inform users of what doing so entails. As such, consent is not freely given.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/27/18114111/google-location-tracking-gdpr-challenge-european-deceptive

Software/SaaS

  • Amazon will reportedly sell software that reads medical records

    The program scans medical files to pick out relevant information such as the medical condition and patient’s procedures and prescriptions. While other algorithms that try to do the same thing have been stymied by doctors’ abbreviations, Amazon claims to have trained its system to recognize the idiosyncrasies in how doctors take notes, sources told the WSJ. The company had already developed and sold this same software to other businesses, including ones focused on travel booking and customer service. For Amazon, this is another move into the health care market on the heels of the retailer buying the online pharmacy PillPack in June.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/27/18115077/amazon-electronic-health-records-software-text-analysis-medical

Datacenter/Hardware

  • Microsoft wins $480M military contract to outfit soldiers with HoloLens AR tech

    The company just won a $480 million military contract with the U.S. government to bring AR headset tech into the weapon repertoires of American soldiers.

    The two-year contract may result in follow-on orders of more than 100,000 headsets according to documentation describing the bidding process. One of the contract’s tag lines for the AR tech seems to be its ability to enable “25 bloodless battles before the 1st battle,” suggesting that actual combat training is going to be an essential aspect of the AR headset capabilities.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/28/microsoft-wins-480m-military-contract-to-outfit-soldiers-with-hololens-ar-tech/

Other

  • US charges ex-Autonomy boss Mike Lynch with fraud over $11bn sale to HP

    Prosecutors have accused Lynch and former Autonomy vice president of finance Stephen Chamberlain of providing HP with false financial statements to make the company seem like a better deal to acquire than it actually was.

    Lynch faces up to 20 years in prison if he is successfully convicted on the 14 charges of conspiracy and fraud in a case filed by prosecutors in a federal court on Thursday. The DoJ is also asking that Lynch forfeit $815m if he’s convicted.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-charges-ex-autonomy-boss-mike-lynch-with-fraud-over-11bn-sale-to-hp/

  • Microsoft Is Worth as Much as Apple. How Did That Happen?

    But the more enduring and important answer is that Microsoft has become a case study of how a once-dominant company can build on its strengths and avoid being a prisoner of its past. It has fully embraced cloud computing, abandoned an errant foray into smartphones and returned to its roots as mainly a supplier of technology to business customers.

    That strategy was outlined by Satya Nadella shortly after he became chief executive in 2014. Since then, Microsoft’s stock price has nearly tripled.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/technology/microsoft-apple-worth-how.html

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