Supplier Report: 3/27/2020


Photo by Christopher Windus on Unsplash

As more travel and movement restrictions are announced, there is less technology news being released… which is disappointing as I am looking for any news other than Corona.

Thankfully there is SOME news out there.  I am glad to see that AT&T is canceling plans to buy back stock and keeping cash reserves for the impending financial doom that is likely to come.

SAP Ariba did hold a virtual version of their Ariba Live conference last week and I have been picking over the videos.

Acquisitions/Investments

  • The Airlines Want A $58 Billion Bailout After Spending $45 Billion On Stock Buybacks

    Help in the U.S. is needed because “this crisis hit a previously robust, healthy industry at lightning speed,” Airlines for America said in a statement. The trade group outlined a proposal for $50 billion for passenger airlines and $8 billion for cargo carriers.

    But the request for taxpayer assistance via loans, grants and tax relief comes after a decade of massive consolidation — and billions in profits — that put the industry in a far more robust condition than before.

    What’s more, from 2010 to 2019, U.S. airlines spent 96% of their free cash flow, some $45 billion, to purchase shares of their own stock, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The world’s largest carrier, American Airlines Group Inc., was the biggest buyer, spending $12.5 billion.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-17/airlines-58-billion-bailout-request-puts-past-under-scrutiny?sref=P6Q0mxvj

  • SoftBank reportedly balks at commitment to buy $3B in shares from WeWork shareholders

    Citing a notice sent to WeWork shareholders, the Journal reported that if SoftBank reneged on the buyback, it would not go back on its commitment to give the office sharing company a $5 billion lifeline.

    According to the Journal’s reporting, the deal to buy back shares isn’t canceled, and could just be an effort to renegotiate terms in light of the global economic slowdown caused by the world’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/17/softbank-reportedly-balks-at-commitment-to-buy-3b-in-shares-from-wework-shareholders/

  • AT&T Warns Coronavirus Financial Impact ‘Could Be Material,’ Nixes $4 Billion Stock-Buyback Plan

    AT&T called off plans to repurchase $4 billion in stock during the second quarter — and has halted all other buybacks — saying it has decided to keep the cash to invest in its networks and in taking care of employees during the coronavirus pandemic.

    The telco, which made the disclosure Friday in an SEC filing, said that while its business “continues to operate effectively” during the COVID-19 outbreak the ongoing crisis could have a material impact on financial results.

    “The COVID-19 pandemic has [affected] and will continue affecting economies and businesses around the world. The impacts of the pandemic could be material, but due to the evolving nature of this situation, we are not able at this time to estimate the impact on our financial or operational results,” AT&T said in the filing.

    https://variety.com/2020/biz/news/att-coronavirus-material-cancels-stock-buyback-plan-1203540168/

Software/SaaS

  • Google halts upcoming releases of Chrome and Chrome OS to keep things stable for everyone working from home

    It makes sense that Google doesn’t want to risk unforeseen bugs popping up and making life more difficult for Chromebook owners and everyone doing their work in Chrome during these stressful days. This is also an admission that it’s difficult to balance Chrome stability and new features with the team so decentralized. So Google is wisely prioritizing the former.

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/18/21185471/google-pausing-chrome-os-releases-coronavirus-work-schedules

  • SAP’s Ariba Live online: ‘The Network Effect for Buyers and Suppliers’

    Volume growth appears to be coming from three key areas — free supplier enablement options (for lower volume suppliers), general network/transaction growth for existing and new customers, and direct materials/EDI growth.

    However, from a network-value effect perspective, it is true that many of the benefits that we normally see in supplier portals and supplier networks are more oriented to the communication and exchange of documents between buyers and suppliers (rather than deeper and more complex collaboration) — with benefits generally being of greater value for the buyers than for suppliers.

    In Sean’s videoconference he mentioned that they have been working closely with its Supplier Advisory Board to understand what the most important supplier needs and wants are from an ecosystem perspective, and not surprisingly what suppliers want is more sales to drive more revenue and an easier way to use the Ariba Supplier Network (changing the way buyers & suppliers interact, better ways to manage the information, and more network-centric applications). It’s interesting that they didn’t mention a free network, at least for certain services and transactions; but that’s another story we’ve repeatedly addressed in Spend Matters’ coverage.

    https://spendmatters.com/2020/03/20/saps-ariba-live-online-the-network-effect-for-buyers-and-suppliers/

  • OK, Fine, Let’s All Get Back on Facebook

    It’s been almost exactly two years since Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal. It’s also around two years since I wrote about why Facebook didn’t need to listen in on our mics. After all that, I didn’t #deletefacebook, but I vowed to take a step back from its products.

    The reality is, the company collects more personal data than it needs to perform the services it offers users, and has been evasive and even dishonest when asked about all of that data collection.

    Yet just one week into self-isolation, I’m pointing a Facebook-connected camera at my son.

    It’s the ultimate test of what we’re willing to live with after all we’ve learned over the last two years: To make our lives better—or at least easier—will we give the tech giant a pass on its fast and loose take on privacy?

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/ok-fine-lets-all-get-back-on-facebook-11584763207

    Hell No… join Slack or get a Discord server.

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • YouTube joins Netflix in reducing video quality in Europe

    YouTube is reducing the quality of its videos in Europe, as an increase in home usage strains the continent’s internet during the novel coronavirus outbreak, Reuters reports. “We are making a commitment to temporarily switch all traffic in the EU to standard definition by default,” the company said in a statement.

    The decision comes after EU industry chief Thierry Breton called on streaming platforms to help reduce their load on the continent’s infrastructure. Internet traffic is increasing as more people spend time at home in line with social-distancing guidelines during the pandemic. There are fears about the strain this could place on the internet’s infrastructure, and cause further disruption to remote workers and e-learning activities now that businesses and schools have been shuttered.

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/20/21187930/youtube-reduces-streaming-quality-european-union-coronavirus-bandwidth-internet-traffic

Other

  • ‘They don’t care about safety’: Amazon workers struggle with pandemic demand

    Workers say the hectic pace of work amid the ongoing coronavirus outbreak is devastating for their physical and mental health as they try to keep up with massive new demand. They also have to deal with their own worries and problems coping with the pandemic.

    “My kids are off from school. A lot of businesses are letting workers work from home. But Amazon workers are going in extra time, we’re doing the opposite of what everybody else is doing and due to the nature of our work, it’s hands-on. We have to do that,” said an Amazon warehouse worker in Troutdale, Oregon, who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.

    “I usually work 40 hours a week, four 10-hour shifts. We’ve all been called in for a mandatory extra day, a 10-hour shift, which is usually reserved for holiday peak season,” the worker added.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/18/amazon-whole-foods-workers-stores-warehouses-coronavirus

  • Anthony Levandowski pleads guilty to one count of trade secrets theft under plea deal

    Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer and serial entrepreneur who was at the center of a lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, has pleaded guilty to one count of stealing trade secrets while working at Google under a plea agreement reached with the U.S. District Attorney.

    While Levandowski still faces a possible prison sentence of between 24 to 30 months, the outcome is much rosier than it could have been. In August, federal grand jury indicted Levandowski on 33 counts of theft and attempted theft. He was looking at a protracted legal fight and a trial that wasn’t expected to begin until 2021.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/19/anthony-levandowski-pleads-guilty-to-one-count-of-trade-secrets-theft-under-plea-deal/

Supplier Report: 9/13/2019


Photo by Luke Michael on Unsplash

The walls are once again closing in on Google.  For weeks I have been tracking rumors that the DoJ is going to hit the internet giant with an anti-trust investigation and rumors are that the Department of Justice is pulling in dozens of state-level attorneys general to kick off the investigation that could start within weeks.

The bad press keeps rolling as over 40 current and former Google employees are protesting former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote at a Stanford University artificial intelligence ethics conference citing Schmidt’s lack of “ethical conduct” in the field (specifically the company’s aborted plans for China).

Meanwhile Thomas Kurian is trying to get more attention, better sales people, and of course customers for Google’s cloud services – but all this bad press can’t be helping the company attract new business.

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Microsoft acquires cloud migration startup Movere to help companies transition to Azure

    Microsoft didn’t have to go far for its latest acquisition. The Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant today announced that it acquired Movere, an 11-year-old Seattle-area cloud migration startup. Microsoft will use the deal to help customers move their existing applications and infrastructure to Azure. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

    “Movere’s innovative discovery and assessment capabilities will complement Azure Migrate and our integrated partner solutions, making migration an easier process for our customers. We believe that successful cloud migrations enable business transformation, and this acquisition underscores our investments to make that happen,” Jeremy Winter, partner director for Azure Management, said in a statement.

    https://www.geekwire.com/2019/microsoft-acquires-seattle-cloud-migration-startup-movere-help-companies-transition-azure/

Cloud

  • Google Cloud has a new program to assign its best salespeople to go after the biggest customers — but Google employees say it makes it harder for current salespeople to advance

    This change is similar to how Oracle, where Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian most recently worked, handles its largest customers. However, this isn’t sitting well with current Google employees, sources said: It’s far easier for outsiders to get hired into these account-director roles than for an existing Google salesperson to step up, even if they have the right experience.

    Sources also said that there’s a perception among Google Cloud salespeople that the hiring process is “biased” toward Oracle veterans.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/thomas-kurian-google-cloud-sales-account-director-2019-9

Security/Privacy

  • Monster.com says a third party exposed user data but didn’t tell anyone

    The server contained résumés and CVs for job applicants spanning 2014 and 2017, many of which included private information like phone numbers and home addresses, but also email addresses and a person’s prior work experience.

    Of the documents we reviewed, most users were located in the United States.

    It’s not known exactly how many files were exposed, but thousands of résumés were found in a single folder dated May 2017. Other files found on the exposed server included immigration documentation for work, which Monster does not collect.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/05/monster-exposed-user-data-years/

Software/SaaS

  • Slack Intensifies a War of Words

    World-wide spending on collaboration software is expected to rise to $16.5 billion this year and eventually reach more than $26.6 billion in 2023, according to research firm International Data Corp.

    Mr. Bracelin said Slack has an advantage over Microsoft in helping businesses get more productivity out of workers by automating and streamlining routine tasks. Slack offers users more than 1,800 third-party applications that work on top of its software, compared with just a few hundred for Teams.

    Slack’s user-engagement numbers are another sign of strength, D.A. Davidson & Co. analyst Rishi Jaluria said. People spend an average of 90 minutes daily using its software, Slack said, far more than the average time spent with some popular consumer applications such as Facebook and the mobile game “Candy Crush Saga.”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/slack-intensifies-a-war-of-words-11567726192

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Antonio Neri and Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s cultural revolution

    Neri and HPE may actually have two North Stars. At the center of the company’s current strategy are two sets of platforms. The first is HPE’s Greenlake—an infrastructure management service for both cloud and on-premises that turns even local infrastructure into a “consumption-based” resource that can be scaled up and down (within limits) on demand.

    The second central tenet is HPE’s pair of analytics and machine-learning based automation tools: InfoSight and OneView. Combined, these two sets of technologies will tie into HPE’s new Primera storage platform, Aruba networking hardware, and even supercomputing resources such as Silicon Graphics (and, if the transaction completes, Cray) systems to create an “as-a-service” fabric. With these two tentpoles, Neri’s long-term goal for the company is what he calls “cloudless” computing—a unified “as a service” management of all compute, storage, and network resources transparently across all public and private clouds and “edge” devices.

    https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/antonio-neri-and-hewlett-packard-enterprises-cultural-revolution/

  • In the Race to Dominate 5G, China Sprints Ahead

    President Trump has said 5G is a race that the U.S. must win. But while American wireless carriers are leading in early deployment of the technology, some telecom-industry leaders say Beijing is poised to vault ahead in coming months.

    While U.S. wireless carriers shuffle from city to city to introduce 5G, China plans to blanket urban areas with it by the end of next year and the rest of the country soon after. A local manager at one carrier estimated that even Tongguan, which lacks modern plumbing, could get the superfast networks by 2021.

    “We look forward to 5G,” said Wu Shengmin, Tongguan’s baby-faced village chief. His locale boasts superb service on current 4G systems that would be the envy in much of the U.S., courtesy of a nearby cellular tower nestled in a tree-covered peak.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-the-race-to-dominate-5g-china-has-an-edge-11567828888

Other

  • Google could face far-reaching antitrust investigation as soon as next week

    The investigation is said to involve more than half of the nation’s state attorneys general. The Post says the Department of Justice has met with many of those state attorneys general, but it’s unclear whether it will be involved in the final lawsuit.

    The news follows comments late last month from the DOJ’s antitrust chief Makan Delrahim that suggested the agency would be working closely with state lawmakers and regulatory authorities on future antitrust probes. Regardless, the investigation would mark a further escalation in the US government’s attempts to rein in Big Tech, and it signals that authorities at both the federal and state effort are working concurrently on a number of investigations into Silicon Valley companies.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/3/20847798/google-antitrust-investigation-us-states-attorneys-generals-doj-ftc-regulation

    Google receives demand for documents from Justice Dept., acknowledging federal antitrust scrutiny

    Google said Friday that the Justice Department has requested records related to its prior antitrust investigations, marking the tech giant’s first major acknowledgment that it’s a subject of a federal competition probe.

    The civil-investigative demand — acknowledged in a securities filing and a blog post — comes weeks after Justice Department officials said they would open a broad review of big tech, including search. It also comes days before more than 30 state attorneys general are expected to announce a major antitrust investigation of Google, as The Washington Post first reported.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/06/google-receives-demand-documents-doj-acknowledging-federal-antitrust-scrutiny/

  • We Company (WeWork) reportedly mulls slashing its valuation ahead of its initial public offering

    SoftBank has already balked at putting more cash into The We Company ahead of the public offering, and it’s not clear whether the company will step in as a white knight now.

    What is clear is that We needs money and its long-term viability as a business is contingent on the infusion of massive amounts of cash.

    Indeed, the company has a $6 billion line of credit at stake, which would be pulled if the public offering underperforms.

    If the company fails to hit the $3 billion mark in its public offering, then the credit line promised from the big banks that are underwriting the public offering goes away. That would be a pretty devastating turn of events for a company that’s currently racking up losses in the billions of dollars.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/05/we-company-reportedly-mulls-slashing-its-valuation-ahead-of-its-initial-public-offering/
    We Company adds a director, ditches its $5.9 million naming deal with its CEO, remains a governance nightmare

    As part of the amended filing, The We Company also committed to add a director to the board that will increase the company’s gender and ethnic diversity.

    In the same amendment, the company said that it was unwinding the $5.9 million transaction between itself and a holding company — WE Holdings LLC, which held the trademark for the “We” brand and was owned by We Company’s chief executive, Adam Neumann.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/04/we-company-adds-a-director-ditches-its-5-9-million-naming-deal-with-its-ceo-remains-a-governance-nightmare/

  • AT&T Names Media Boss John Stankey as CEO Heir Apparent

    Mr. Stankey, 56 years old, will serve as president and chief operating officer starting next month. He will continue to serve as the head of WarnerMedia, the unit that houses HBO, the Warner Bros. studio and cable channels like CNN.

    He will report to Mr. Stephenson and is the front-runner to take over the top job, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Stankey joined one of AT&T’s predecessors in 1985 and spent most of his career in the telecommunications business.

    Mr. Stephenson, 59 years old, hasn’t indicated when he plans to retire, though he has been CEO for 12 years and there are discussions for and against his retirement at the board level, the people said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-t-names-new-president-and-chief-operating-officer-11567525692

Supplier Report: 9/6/2019


Photo by Sid Leigh on Unsplash

It seems that big companies used the holidays as a time to rest their wallets and take a break from the M&A activity of the last few weeks… or perhaps they were distracted with some other concerns.

Google contractors in Pennsylvania are attempting to unionize due to poor working conditions. The company was also hit with a $200M fine due to YouTube violating children’s privacy.

Speaking of privacy… Google called out a major security threat for Apple iPhones. Several websites were infected with in an injection attack that iPhones were particularly vulnerable to.

Acquisitions/Investments

Artificial Intelligence

  • The Next Hot Job: Pretending to Be a Robot

    More advanced systems require “human supervisory control,” where the robot or vehicle’s onboard AI does the basic piloting but the human gives the machine navigational instructions and other feedback. Prof. Cummings says this technique is safer than actual remote operation, since safety isn’t dependent on a perfect wireless connection or a perfectly alert human operator.

    For every company currently working on self-driving cars, almost every state mandates they must either have a safety driver present in the vehicle or be able to control it from afar. Guidelines from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration suggest the same.

    Most companies in the space have opted for something short of true teleoperation, which is dependent on an absolutely reliable and fast wireless connection as well as the skill of the human remote operator. Alphabet Inc. subsidiary Waymo’s remote operation system and another being tested by Nissan rely on humans to either confirm the vehicle’s choices when it’s unsure what to do or help it navigate around obstacles.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-next-hot-job-pretending-to-be-a-robot-11567224001

Cloud

  • How Microsoft and Oracle became cloud buddies, and what’s next for their improbable partnership

    The companies are counting on the cloud to fuel their growth, raising the stakes for their partnership. They describe the alliance, in part, as a way for their customers to avoid being locked into a single cloud vendor. In that way, the companies are effectively teaming up against their common competitors, the biggest of them being Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

    Oracle is playing catch-up in the cloud, aiming to expand beyond its legacy in databases to build out a fully-fledged public cloud platform, attempting to go toe-to-toe with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft for a wider range of cloud contracts. Oracle reportedly laid off hundreds of people from its cloud-focused Seattle office earlier this year in an indication of the uphill climb it faces.

    https://www.geekwire.com/2019/microsoft-oracle-became-cloud-buddies-whats-next-improbable-partnership/

  • Never tell me the odds! Oracle makes fresh appeal against $10bn JEDI ruling

    Dorian Daley, General Counsel, Oracle Corporation, released the following statement on its latest appeal:
    The Court of Federal Claims opinion in the JEDI bid protest describes the JEDI procurement as unlawful, notwithstanding dismissal of the protest solely on the legal technicality of Oracle’s purported lack of standing. Federal procurement laws specifically bar single award procurements such as JEDI absent satisfying specific, mandatory requirements, and the Court in its opinion clearly found DoD did not satisfy these requirements. The opinion also acknowledges that the procurement suffers from many significant conflicts of interest. These conflicts violate the law and undermine the public trust. As a threshold matter, we believe that the determination of no standing is wrong as a matter of law, and the very analysis in the opinion compels a determination that the procurement was unlawful on several grounds.

    The battle is likely far from over both regardless of the progress of the lawyers as the deal has also become a political football.

    US President Donald Trump weighed in when he belatedly heard the contract might go to a company partly owned by his arch-nemesis Jeff Bezos, also of course publisher of “fake news” provider The Washington Post.

    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/08/28/oracles_last_ditch_jedi_appeal/

  • Microsoft vendors win $7.6 billion government deal

    The federal government’s award of a massive 10-year, $7.6 billion computing contract to a trio of vendors led by General Dynamics Corp. to provide Microsoft Corp. office software for the Pentagon late Thursday is the latest indication that cloud-computing leaders are the preferred vendors of choice.

    The Defense Department and General Services Administration announced the winners of the coveted Defense Enterprise Office Solution (DEOS) following a months-long evaluation process by the GSA. DEOS would provide email, calendar, video-calling and other productivity tools to the U.S. military.

    https://www.marketwatch.com/story/microsoft-vendors-win-76-billion-government-deal-2019-08-29

Security/Privacy

  • Google to pay up to $200M to settle FTC YouTube investigation

    Privacy groups had complained to the FTC that YouTube violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by collecting personal information about minors and using it to target advertisements without getting consent from parents.

    The settlement dwarfs the FTC’s largest fine to date for COPPA violations: $5.7 million levied in February against the operators of Musical.ly, the China-based social video app that’s become a juggernaut since rebranding as TikTok.

    https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/30/google-ftc-investigation-youtube-1479044

  • Apple still has work to do on privacy

    On the surface, the notion of Apple having a stronger claim to privacy versus Google — an adtech giant that makes its money by pervasively profiling internet users, whereas Apple sells premium hardware and services (including essentially now ‘privacy as a service‘) — seems a safe (or, well, safer) assumption. Or at least, until iOS security fails spectacularly and leaks users’ privacy anyway. Then of course affected iOS users can just kiss their privacy goodbye. That’s why this is a thought experiment.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/31/apple-still-has-work-to-do-on-privacy/

    Malicious websites were used to secretly hack into iPhones for years, says Google

    The researchers found five distinct exploit chains involving 12 separate security flaws, including seven involving Safari, the in-built web browser on iPhones. The five separate attack chains allowed an attacker to gain “root” access to the device — the highest level of access and privilege on an iPhone. In doing so, an attacker could gain access to the device’s full range of features normally off-limits to the user. That means an attacker could quietly install malicious apps to spy on an iPhone owner without their knowledge or consent.

    Google said based off their analysis, the vulnerabilities were used to steal a user’s photos and messages as well as track their location in near-real time. The “implant” could also access the user’s on-device bank of saved passwords.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/29/google-iphone-secretly-hacked/

  • The frighteningly simple technique that hijacked Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account

    As it turns out, getting control of Dorsey’s phone number wasn’t as hard as you might think. According to a Twitter statement, a “security oversight” by the provider let the hackers gain control. In general terms, this kind of attack is called SIM hacking — essentially convincing a carrier to assigning Dorsey’s number to a new phone that they controlled. It’s not a new technique, although it’s more often used to steal Bitcoin or high-value Instagram handles. Often, it’s as simple as plugging in a leaked password. You can protect yourself by adding a PIN code to your carrier account or registering web accounts like Twitter through dummy phone numbers, but those techniques can be too much to ask for the average user. As a result, SIM swapping has become one of online troublemakers’ favorite techniques — and as we found out today, it works more often than you’d think.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/31/20841448/jack-dorsey-twitter-hacked-account-sim-swapping

Software/SaaS

  • Mozilla CEO Chris Beard will step down at the end of the year

    Beard was appointed interim CEO for Mozilla in April 2014, coming on as full-time chief executive in July of that same year. The company has seen a bit of a resurgence in recent years, after having ceded much of its browser market share to the likes of Google and Apple. Firefox has undergone something of a renaissance over the past year, as have the company’s security tools.

    “Today our products, technology and policy efforts are stronger and more resonant in the market than ever, and we have built significant new organizational capabilities and financial strength to fuel our work,” Beard said in the blog post. “From our new privacy-forward product strategy to initiatives like the State of the Internet we’re ready to seize the tremendous opportunity and challenges ahead to ensure we’re doing even more to put people in control of their connected lives and shape the future of the internet for the public good.”

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/29/mozilla-ceo-chris-beard-will-step-down-at-the-end-of-the-year/

  • Founders of Successful Tech Companies Are Mostly Middle-Aged

    Previous studies had documented that owners of small businesses tended to be in their late 30s and 40s. But most small businesses stay fairly small: restaurants, dry cleaners, retail stores and the like. They are important but aren’t central to innovation in the economy.

    The new study was able to zero in on high-flying start-ups by bringing together anonymized data collected by different agencies within the federal government. The government matched sales and employment data for start-ups collected by the Census Bureau with information on the founders extracted from Internal Revenue Service filings.

    After stripping identifying information, the government provided the researchers with a data set including 2.7 million business founders. The researchers calculated that the founders’ average age was 42. And for the founders of the 0.1 percent fastest-growing firms, the average age was 45. Firms that were successful enough to have an initial public offering or be acquired by a larger company showed the same pattern: Their founders were generally middle-aged.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/business/tech-start-up-founders-nest.html

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Amazon buys big in Virginia

    Amazon has paid six times over the valuation for prime land in the data center hotspot of Virginia.

    It bought nearly 90 acres in two plots in Loudoun County, in a part of Virginia outside the US capital Washington DC where Amazon has built nearly 40 data centers already. It paid $118m for land that had been valued at $19.7m, according to the County records office.

    “That’s the way things are going right now. Data centers are going up like hot cakes, ” Erik Larson, manager of the Loudoun County Land Records Office, told DCD.

    Amazon had 38 data centers in Virginia in 2015, according to a document leaked by Wikileaks last year. It had about 100 spread around the US and other countries. But approaching half of all them were in Virginia, close to the Beltway of Washington, where government and military contractors compete for business. It is where Amazon Web Services began operating in 2006.

    https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/amazon-buys-big-virginia/

Other

  • 20,000 AT&T Employees Are Striking

    CWA says AT&T is “bargaining in bad faith” and that it has “unfair labor practices.” AT&T sent to the bargaining table people who “do not have the real authority to make proposals or to reach an agreement” in addition to “changing our agreement about how we meet and bargain,” the union said in a blog post.

    CWA’s bargaining team has been fighting for the past few months to renegotiate the AT&T employee contract to share the company’s record-breaking profits. In 2018, AT&T promised to use the windfall from the Republicans’ corporate tax cut to “invest an additional $1 billion” to create “7,000 good-paying jobs for American workers.” The December tax cuts helped AT&T achieve a $19 billion profit in the fourth quarter and $3 billion in annual tax savings. But AT&T has had layoffs, cutting 23,000 jobs.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43kwyd/20000-atandt-employees-are-striking

  • Google Contractors Are Unionizing With a Steel Workers Union

    66 percent of the eligible contractors at a company called HCL America Inc., signed cards seeking union representation, according to the United Steel Workers union. With the help of the Pittsburgh Association of Technical Professions (PATP), they’re asking the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for a vote on union representation. The PATP is a project sponsored by the union aimed at “helping Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania workers in high-tech fields organize and bargain collectively.”

    “Workers at HCL deserve far more than they have received in terms of compensation, transparency and consideration, and it has gone on like this for much too long,” HCL worker Renata Nelson said in a press release. “While on-site management tries to do what they can, where they can, their hands are often tied by arbitrary corporate policy.”

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evjxjm/google-contractors-are-unionizing-with-a-steel-workers-union

  • Uber And Lyft Take A Lot More From Drivers Than They Say

    Ultimately, the rider paid $65 for the half-hour trip, according to a receipt viewed by Jalopnik. But Dave made only $15 (the fares have been rounded to anonymize the transaction).

    Uber kept the rest, meaning the multibillion-dollar corporation kept more than 75 percent of the fare, more than triple the average so-called “take-rate” it claims in financial reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

    Had he known in advance how much he would have been paid for the ride relative to what the rider paid, Dave said he never would have accepted the fare.

    “This is robbery,” Dave told Jalopnik over email. “This business is out of control.”

    https://jalopnik.com/uber-and-lyft-take-a-lot-more-from-drivers-than-they-sa-1837450373

Supplier Report: 5/24/2019

Foxconn offices in Wisconsin are still empty. This is after the company assured the press that said emptiness was not the case. With recent news that AT&T did not live up to terms to get a large tax refund, should we be asking if these rebate programs are a good thing for the cities and states that leverage them?

SalesForce had a massive outage last week due to a database configuration gone wrong. The company shut down services to address a configuration that “broke access permission settings across organizations and gave employees access to all of their company’s files.”

Finally – AI voice replication is getting really good.  Google voice translation has improved the ability to detect tone and intent and there is a company called Dessa that published a voice cloning of podcaster Joe Rogan that is eerily good (NSFW).

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise to Buy Supercomputer Maker Cray

    Hewlett Packard Enterprise on Friday said it agreed to buy supercomputer maker Cray Inc.  for $35 a share in cash in a deal valued at about $1.3 billion, net of cash.

    The deal represents a 17.4% premium to Cray’s Thursday closing price of $29.81.

    HPE said it expects the acquisition will add to adjusted operating profit and earnings in the first full year. The company said integration costs associated with the deal will be absorbed within its fiscal 2020 free cash flow outlook, which remains unchanged at $1.9 billion to $2.1 billion.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/hewlett-packard-enterprises-to-buy-supercomputer-maker-cray-11558094554

  • Amazon leads $575M investment in Deliveroo

    London-based Deliveroo operates in 14 countries, including the U.K, France, Germany and Spain, and — outside of Europe — Singapore, Taiwan, Australia and the UAE. Across those markets, it claims it works with 80,000 restaurants with a fleet of 60,000 delivery people and 2,500 permanent employees.

    It isn’t immediately clear how Amazon plans to use its new strategic relationship with Deliveroo — it could, for example, integrate it with Prime membership — but this isn’t the firm’s first dalliance with food delivery. The U.S. firm closed its Amazon Restaurants UK takeout business last year after it struggled to compete with Deliveroo and Uber Eats. The service remains operational in the U.S, however.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/16/amazon-takes-a-bite-into-deliveroo/

  • Apptio Acquires Cloudability Multi-Cloud Spending Management Software

    Bellevue, Washington-based technology business management software company Apptio Inc is acquiring Cloudability, a Portland, Oregon company that makes software to manage public cloud spending across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

    https://www.channele2e.com/news/apptio-buys-cloudability/

Artificial Intelligence

  • Google’s prototype AI translator translates your tone as well as your words

    Although capturing the inflection of a speaker’s voice is what’s most impressive to laypeople, Translatotron’s attraction for AI engineers is that it translates speech directly from audio input to audio output without translating it into the usual intermediary text.

    This sort of AI model is known as an end-to-end system, because there are no stops for subsidiary tasks or actions. Google says making translation end-to-end produces results faster while avoiding the risk of introducing errors during multiple translation steps.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/17/18628980/google-ai-translation-tone-cadence-voice-translatotron

  • Microsoft invests in seven AI projects to help people with disabilities

    Microsoft is awarding grants to AI projects meant to make the world more inclusive. The grants are part of a five-year initiative that will invest $25 million in AI-based accessibility tools. This year, seven recipients will receive access to the Azure AI platform (through Azure compute credits) and Microsoft engineering support.

    Over the next year, the recipients will work on things like a nerve-sensing wearable wristband. That device detects micro-movements of the hands and arms and translates them into actions like a mouse click. Another project seeks to develop a wearable cap that reads a person’s EEG data and communicates it to the cloud to provide seizure warnings and alerts. Other tools will rely on speech recognition, AI-powered chatbots and apps for people with vision impairment.

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/16/microsoft-ai-accessibility-grants/

  • IBM Unveils Watson-powered Supply Chain Management Tool at Gartner Summit

    The Business Transactional Intelligence (BTI) service is powered by Watson and aims to help businesses detect anomalies that could potentially interrupt a company’s supply chain distribution.

    BTI uses machine learning to identify velocity, volume and value patterns in an organisations data by ingesting all of the supply chain documents and transactions. Using this data it learns to spot patterns about which it can suggest optimisations, or it may detect anomalies causing it to send an alert to the client.

    https://www.cbronline.com/news/ibm-supply-chain-business-network-business-transactional-intelligence

Cloud

  • Faulty database script brings Salesforce to its knees

    At the heart of the outage was a change the company made to its production environment that broke access permission settings across organizations and gave employees access to all of their company’s files.

    According to reports on Reddit, users didn’t just get read access, but they also received write permissions, making it easy for malicious employees to steal or tamper with a company’s data.

    In a status update, the company blamed the issue on “a database script deployment that inadvertently gave users broader data access than intended.”

    Salesforce customers in Europe and North America were the most impacted by the company shutting down access to its own service.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/faulty-database-script-brings-salesforce-to-its-knees/

Security/Privacy

  • San Francisco Bans Facial Recognition Technology

    The action, which came in an 8-to-1 vote by the Board of Supervisors, makes San Francisco the first major American city to block a tool that many police forces are turning to in the search for both small-time criminal suspects and perpetrators of mass carnage.

    The authorities used the technology to help identify the suspect in the mass shooting at an Annapolis, Md., newspaper last June. But civil liberty groups have expressed unease about the technology’s potential abuse by government amid fears that it may shove the United States in the direction of an overly oppressive surveillance state.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/us/facial-recognition-ban-san-francisco.html

  • Intel Zombieload bug fix to slow data centre computers

    Intel has confirmed that new problems discovered with its processor chips mean that some computer owners face a performance slowdown.

    The company has said that data centres are likely to be worst affected by the fixes required. But it added that the impact on most PC owners should be minimal.

    The so-called Zombieload vulnerability follows the disclosure of the earlier Spectre, Meltdown and Foreshadow bugs last year.

    The latest flaw could theoretically allow an attacker to spy on tasks being handled by any Intel Core or Xeon-branded central processing unit (CPU) released since 2011.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48278400

  • Hacktivist attacks dropped by 95% since 2015

    According to IBM, security incidents caused by hacker groups operating under hacktivism causes has been on a decline since 2015, when the company recorded a peak, with 35 publicly reported incidents.

    Since then, incidents have gone down at a steady pace, with only five reported in 2017, two in 2018, and zero during the first months of the year.

    Attacks from hacktivist groups have continued to happen, but the number of actual incidents (successful breaches) has gone down at a constant pace.

    Researchers blame two factors for this decline — the death of the Anonymous hacker collective and a sustained crackdown by law enforcement officials that have thinned out hacktivist ranks

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/hacktivist-attacks-dropped-by-95-since-2015/

Software/SaaS

  • Adobe Tells Users They Can Get Sued for Using Old Versions of Photoshop

    Adobe this week began sending some users of its Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Premiere, Animate, and Media Director programs a letter warning them that they were no longer legally authorized to use the software they may have thought they owned.

    “We have recently discontinued certain older versions of Creative Cloud applications and and a result, under the terms of our agreement, you are no longer licensed to use them,” Adobe said in the email. “Please be aware that should you continue to use the discontinued version(s), you may be at risk of potential claims of infringement by third parties.”

    Users were less than enthusiastic about the sudden restrictions.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3xk3p/adobe-tells-users-they-can-get-sued-for-using-old-versions-of-photoshop

Other

  • One month ago, Foxconn said its innovation centers weren’t empty — they still are

    At the event announcing the Madison project, Foxconn’s Alan Yeung said the innovation centers were “not empty,” which prompted laughter from the crowd. Yeung also said The Verge’s story contained “a lot of inaccuracies” and that the company would issue a correction soon. He did not say what those inaccuracies were, and Foxconn never issued a correction, nor has it responded to repeated requests to clarify Yeung’s statement.

    One month after Yeung’s comments and promise of a correction, every innovation center in Wisconsin is still empty, according to public documents and sources involved with the innovation center process. Foxconn has yet to purchase the Madison building Yeung announced, according to Madison property records. No renovation or occupancy permits have been taken out for Foxconn’s Racine innovation center, though a permit has been taken out for work on the roof of another property Foxconn bought for “smart city” initiatives. There has been no activity in Foxconn’s Green Bay building, either.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/13/18565408/foxconn-wisconsin-innovation-centers-factories-empty-tax-subsidy

  • AT&T promised 7,000 new jobs to get tax break—it cut 23,000 jobs instead

    The corporate tax cut was subsequently passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump on December 22, 2017. The tax cut reportedly gave AT&T an extra $3 billion in cash in 2018.

    But AT&T cut capital spending and kept laying people off after the tax cut. A union analysis of AT&T’s publicly available financial statements “shows the telecom company eliminated 23,328 jobs since the Tax Cut and Jobs Act passed in late 2017, including nearly 6,000 in the first quarter of 2019,” the Communications Workers of America (CWA) said yesterday.

    AT&T’s total employment was 254,000 as of December 31, 2017 and rose to 262,290 by March 31, 2019. But AT&T’s overall workforce increased only because of its acquisition of Time Warner Inc. and two smaller companies, which together added 31,618 employees during 2018, according to an AT&T proxy statement cited in the CWA report.

    https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/att-promised-7000-new-jobs-to-get-tax-break-it-cut-23000-jobs-instead/

  • HCL to bring 2,000 IBM staff onboard as part of $1.8-billion deal

    As part of a $1.8-billion deal, HCL Technologies will take onboard nearly 2,000 employees of IBM. The deal between the two companies involved HCL acquiring some of IBM’s software assets. The move comes as the former company is strategising to shore up its IP-led business faster than the traditional software services.

    The deal is expected to be complete by June. The acquisition of IBM’s products would give HCL access to over 5,500 clients globally. Chief Human Resources officer for HCL Tech, Apparao VV said to Economic Times in an interview, “Mode 3, which is the products and platforms segment, has their own salesforce. (With the IBM products), we have inherited somewhere around 1,500-2,000 people.” Mode 2 and 3 are categories for the company’s emerging tech and IP-led businesses that garner more than 28 per cent revenue.

    https://www.businesstoday.in/current/corporate/hcl-2000-ibm-staff-part-1-8-billion-deal/story/346771.html

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

News You Can Use: 5/15/2019

  • Google walkout organizers demand company investigate HR department

    In a Medium post from the official walkout account, the employees released a series of demands. On the list: meeting previous demands made during the November walkout, having Alphabet CEO Larry Page address those demands, reversing alleged retaliation against organizers, and opening an investigation into the company’s “abysmal handling of employee complaints.”

    “Google seems to have lost its mooring, and trust between workers and the company is deeply broken,” the post reads. “As the company progresses from crisis to crisis, it is clear Google management is failing, along with HR.” The post demands that an investigation be conducted by a third party and that the results be released publicly.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/8/18536996/google-walkout-organizers-hr-retaliation

  • New study shows human development is destroying the planet at an unprecedented rate

    In the most comprehensive effort undertaken to date, some 145 expert authors from 50 countries working with another 310 contributing authors spent the last three years compiling and assessing changes in global biodiversity over a 50-year period for a study conducted under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

    They found there are now 1 million species that are threatened with extinction; that more than one-third of the world’s land surface and 75% of all freshwater resources are devoted to crop or livestock production; that 60 billion tons of renewable and non-renewable resources are extracted globally every year; that land degradation has reduced the productivity of global land surface area by 23% and roughly $577 billion worth of crops are at risk from pollinator loss annually; and, finally, that up to 300 million people are at increased risk of floods and hurricanes because of the loss of coastal habitats.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/06/new-study-shows-human-development-is-destroying-the-planet-at-an-unprecedented-rate/

  • We’re Running Out of Water
  • Slack’s head of workplace design thinks open floor plans “suuuck”

    At Slack we’ve done a lot of different things. We do have open offices—we’re actually making them smaller, the desk per square foot smaller, and swatches of open office much smaller. We also have a variety of privacy phone booth options, small quad and double rooms, and one-person rooms. Some of them are bookable, some are not bookable, so people can really drop in and book them.

    We also have the luxury of having a human right now. Her role is space and room planning, so if you need a space you can air a complaint. And we have a human being who has purview into all your rooms and spaces and is able to help you.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90341688/slacks-head-of-workplace-design-thinks-open-floor-plans-suuuck

  • Why AT&T Was Right About HBO. In a Word, We’re Talking … ‘Silos.’

    Now, consider the impact of silos on a startup. Whatever their cause, silos of all types — to my way of thinking — end up encouraging stagnation and stunting growth. When each department looks out for itself, employees come to fear outside opinions and new ideas because they threaten the security of the walled-off group.

    Silos are part of the reason Microsoft lagged behind when the world went mobile. They also played a part in some of Google’s big stumbles, such as the demise of Google Plus.

    Now, think again about startups: It’s not enough for a startup to grow; it has to be able to handle that growth. Silos tend to spring up when management fails to recognize that a company is no longer a handful of scrappy entrepreneurs but an increasingly large, successful organization. To ensure that growth doesn’t kill your startup, it’s important that you be proactive when it comes to breaking down these walls –before it becomes too late.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/333544

Photo by WestBoundary Photography chris gill on Unsplash