Tag: Apple

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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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Supplier Report: 11/2/2018

Companies are trying to find a way to make money in a world where customers are shrinking and costs continue to rise.

IBM’s purchase of Red Hat shows the company has to focus less on their AI goals and get back to software and services.

As people hold on to their phones and computers longer, Apple is raising prices to ensure the cash flow increases. The laws of supply and demand ring true as phone prices rise, demand has dropped. Is this a chicken and egg situation?  Only time will tell.

Acquisitions

  • IBM to Acquire Red Hat for About $33 Billion

    IBM plans to pay $190 a share for Red Hat in what IBM said would be its largest acquisition ever. IBM plans to use cash and debt to make the acquisition. At the end of the third quarter, it held $14.7 billion in cash.

    IBM is paying an unusually large premium in the deal, at 63% above Red Hat’s closing stock price of $116.68 on Friday. IBM said that the deal, including debt, is worth $34 billion. Using Red Hat’s most recently disclosed number for shares outstanding, the equity value of the deal is just under that.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-in-advanced-talks-to-buy-red-hat-1540751279?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

Cloud

  • Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy Pays Off

    The cloud-computing business, called Azure, grew 76%–still healthy but the slowest pace of growth since Microsoft began regularly disclosing the percentage gains about three years ago. Microsoft doesn’t disclose revenue figures for the business, but Stifel Nicolaus & Co. analyst Brad Reback estimated Azure revenue totaled $2.69 billion for the quarter.

    Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud segment, which includes Azure and server products, grew 24% to $8.57 billion, about $300 million above analysts’ expectations. “This absolutely shows Microsoft’s hybrid-cloud strength,” Mr. Reback said.

    Overall, revenue rose 19% to $29.08 billion.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsofts-profit-revenue-rise-even-as-cloud-business-growth-slows-1540413172

Security

  • Private messages from 81,000 hacked Facebook accounts for sale

    The perpetrators told the BBC Russian Service that they had details from a total of 120 million accounts, which they were attempting to sell, although there are reasons to be skeptical about that figure.

    Facebook said its security had not been compromised.

    And the data had probably been obtained through malicious browser extensions.

    Facebook added it had taken steps to prevent further accounts being affected.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46065796

  • Sen. Ron Wyden Introduces Bill That Would Send CEOs to Jail for Violating Consumer Privacy

    Wyden’s bill proposes that companies whose revenue exceeds $1 billion per year—or warehouse data on more than 50 million consumers or consumer devices—submit “annual data protection reports” to the government detailing all steps taken to protect the security and privacy of consumers’ personal information.

    The proposed legislation would also levy penalties up to 20 years in prison and $5 million in fines for executives who knowingly mislead the FTC in these reports. The FTC’s authority over such matters is currently limited—one of the reasons telecom giants have been eager to move oversight of their industry from the Federal Communications Commission to the FTC.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8xjwjz/sen-ron-wyden-introduces-bill-that-would-send-ceos-to-jail-for-violating-consumer-privacy

Software/SaaS

  • IBM is betting the farm on Red Hat, and it better not mess up

    As Jon Shieber pointed out yesterday, it was a tacit acknowledgement that company was not going to get the results it was hoping for with emerging technologies like Watson artificial intelligence. It needed something that translated more directly into sales.

    Red Hat can be that enterprise sales engine. It already is a company on a $3 billion revenue run rate, and it has a goal of hitting $5 billion. While that’s somewhat small potatoes for a company like IBM that generates $19 billion a quarter, it represents a crucial addition.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/29/ibm-is-betting-the-farm-on-red-hat-and-it-better-not-mess-up/

  • Box takes on OpenText, Microsoft as enterprise content hub

    “The next five years in content management will be completely different from the last 20,” said Jeetu Patel, chief product officer at Box. Gone are the days of self-contained repositories that simply store, produce and archive business documents. The key to success entails knowing where your content resides, how to best access it and weaving the content into high-value experiences that solve business problems. The enterprise content hub is where that all begins, and Box is positioning itself to become that focus.

    https://searchcontentmanagement.techtarget.com/feature/Box-takes-on-OpenText-Microsoft-as-enterprise-content-hub

  • Linus Torvalds is back at Linux while GNU’s Stallman unveils a “kindness” policy

    Torvalds’s apparent speedy return and Stallman’s not-explicitly-pro-diversity not-quite-a-code-of-conduct seem to show the open source and free software movements are intent on taking their own approaches to diversity and gender relations. There’s no doubt this side of computing, which has historically been male and white and somewhat insular, is feeling the impact of external critiques. But so far, the projects have made relatively bland moves toward change that may not be enough to satisfy their critics or make would-be contributors who’ve felt excluded see themselves as welcome.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90254836/linus-torvalds-is-back-at-linux-while-gnus-stallman-unveils-a-kindness-policy

Datacenter/Hardware

  • Apple Raises Prices, and Profits Keep Booming

    Apple said Thursday that it sold about as many iPhones in the latest quarter as it did a year earlier but that iPhone revenue rose 29 percent. That was because customers paid nearly 29 percent more for the devices. (The average selling price is now $793.)

    The price increase helped propel Apple’s profits 32 percent higher, to $14.13 billion.

    But after those figures were reported, Luca Maestri, Apple’s chief financial officer, said in a conference call that the company would no longer disclose how many iPhones, iPads or Mac computers it sold. As a result, journalists and analysts will no longer be able to track how Apple’s swelling prices are improving its profits.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/technology/apple-quarterly-results.html

Other

  • Google Walkout: Employees Stage Protest Over Handling of Sexual Harassment

    But employees’ discontent continued to simmer. Many said Google had treated female workers inequitably over time. Others were outraged that Google had paid Andy Rubin, the creator of the Android mobile software, a $90 million exit package even after the company concluded that a harassment claim against him was credible.

    That led some Google employees to call for a walkout. The organizers also produced a list of demands for changing how Google handles sexual harassment, including ending its use of private arbitration in such cases. They also asked for the publication of a transparency report on instances of sexual harassment, further disclosures of salaries and compensation, an employee representative on the company board, and a chief diversity officer who could speak directly to the board.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/technology/google-walkout-sexual-harassment.html

Photo by Taylor Grote on Unsplash

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News You Can Use: 10/31/2018

  • A groundbreaking study reveals how we want machines to treat us

    In a new study published in Nature, they show that when it comes to how machines treat us, our sense of right and wrong is informed by the economic and cultural norms of where we live. They discovered three general geographic areas with distinct ethical ideas about how autonomous vehicles should behave: West (which includes North America and Christian European countries), East (which includes Far East countries and Islamic countries), and South (which includes much of South America and countries with French influences). These groups also have their own subclusters, like Scandinavia within the West and Latin American countries within the South. As the study’s interactive graphic shows, Brazilians tend to prefer sparing passengers over pedestrians; Iranians are much more likely to spare pedestrians; Australians are more likely to spare the physically fit than the average.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90259513/a-groundbreaking-study-reveals-how-we-want-machines-to-treat-us

  • Upgrade? No Thanks. Americans Are Sticking With Their Old Phones

    Pricier devices, fewer subsidies from carriers and the demise of the two-year cellphone contract have led consumers to wait an average of 2.83 years to upgrade their smartphones, according to data for the third quarter from HYLA Mobile Inc., a mobile-device trade-in company that works with carriers and big-box stores. That is up from 2.39 years two years earlier.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/upgrade-no-thanks-americans-are-sticking-with-their-old-phones-1540818000?ns=prod/accounts-wsj
    Samsung Chalks Up Another Record Profit, but Phones Are a Worry

    In an earnings release, Samsung said smartphone shipments were flat and the profit drop was attributable to “increased promotional costs and a negative currency impact.”

    Consumers are balking at $1,000 phones and holding on to their devices longer than ever. But the South Korean technology giant was surprised this year by poor sales for its flagship Galaxy S9 handsets, a device marketed around its animated human emojis. To rejuvenate sales, Samsung moved up the release of its large-size Galaxy Note 9 to Aug. 24, weeks earlier than the prior-year model.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/chips-displays-drive-samsung-to-another-record-profit-1540946737

  • Why whistleblowing is the loneliest and most courageous act in the world
  • Wisconsin’s $4.1 billion Foxconn factory boondoggle

    But what seemed so simple on a napkin has turned out to be far more complicated and messy in real life. As the size of the subsidy has steadily increased to a jaw-dropping $4.1 billion, Foxconn has repeatedly changed what it plans to do, raising doubts about the number of jobs it will create. Instead of the promised Generation 10.5 plant, Foxconn now says it will build a much smaller Gen 6 plant, which would require one-third of the promised investment, although the company insists it will eventually hit the $10 billion investment target. And instead of a factory of workers building panels for 75-inch TVs, Foxconn executives now say the goal is to build “ecosystem” of buzzwords called “AI 8K+5G” with most of the manufacturing done by robots.

    Polls now show most Wisconsin voters don’t believe the subsidy will pay off for taxpayers, and Walker didn’t even mention the deal in a November 2017 speech announcing his run for re-election.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/29/18027032/foxconn-wisconsin-plant-jobs-deal-subsidy-governor-scott-walker

  • FCC Falsely Claims Community Broadband an ‘Ominous Threat to The First Amendment’

    More than 750 such networks have been built in the United States in direct response to a lack of meaningful broadband competition and availability plaguing America. Studies have routinely shown that these networks provide cheaper and better broadband service, in large part because these ISPs have a vested interest in the communities they serve.

    In his speech, O’Rielly highlighted efforts by the last FCC, led by former boss Tom Wheeler, to encourage such community-run broadband networks as a creative solution to private sector failure. O’Rielly subsequently tried to claim, without evidence, that encouraging such networks would somehow result in government attempts to censor public opinion.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bj49j8/fcc-falsely-claims-community-broadband-an-ominous-threat-to-the-first-amendment

Photo by Yucel Moran on Unsplash

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Supplier Report: 10/26/2018

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.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/22/oracle-acquires-datafox-a-developer-of-predictive-intelligence-as-a-service-and-a-trove-of-company-information/

  • 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.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/24/baidu-challenges-google-with-ai-that-translates-languages-in-real-time.html

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.

    https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/microsoft-crushes-quarterly-earnings-as-cloud-revenues-rise/

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.

    https://www.apnews.com/2af6d21f80aa4e9483fa32e26f03417c

  • 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.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/25/amazon-shares-fall-as-record-profits-are-offset-by-conservative-holiday-forecasts/

  • 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