Supplier Report: 9/7/2018
Amazon became the second company to be valued at one trillion dollars this week. As that news hit the airwaves, workers at Whole Foods (which was purchased by Amazon last year) are starting to organize a union citing Amazon’s poor working culture.
Jeff Bezos is also making news for going after Facebook and Google’s advertising revenues. The company is making a push for digital advertising profits and I personally see them being very successful at it.
Acquisitions
Artificial Intelligence
- AI robots can develop prejudices, just like us mere mortals
Over thousands of simulations, the robots learned new strategies by copying each other either within their own groups or by across the entire population. The study found the robots cribbed strategies that gave them a better payoff in the short term, indicating that high cognitive ability isn’t necessarily required to develop prejudices.
“Our simulations show that prejudice is a powerful force of nature and through evolution, it can easily become incentivized in virtual populations, to the detriment of wider connectivity with others,” wrote Cardiff University’s Professor Roger Whitaker, one of the study’s co-authors. “Protection from prejudicial groups can inadvertently lead to individuals forming further prejudicial groups, resulting in a fractured population. Such widespread prejudice is hard to reverse.”
https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/06/robots-prejudice-study-mit-cardiff/
Cloud
- Google will struggle if it re-enters China, says its former country head
“People [in China] aren’t looking for a new search engine or an app store, new companies are emerging addressing previously unknown customer needs [and] innovations are coming out,” Lee explained.
“The new graduates generally prefer to work for Chinese companies and then, lastly, the heads of multinationals are really just professional managers. If they were to compete against local entrepreneurs who are gladiators in this colosseum, I don’t think the American companies will have a high chance of succeeding in this environment,” he added.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/05/google-will-struggle-if-it-re-enters-china/
Security
- More U.S. Cities Brace for ‘Inevitable’ Hackers
“Compromise is inevitable,” said Christopher Mitchell, chief information security official, at a Houston City Council hearing last month. His presentation helped persuade local lawmakers they needed a $30 million cybersecurity insurance plan with a $471,400 premium, an example of a burgeoning trend across the country. Policies vary, but insurance can cover hackers’ extortion demands, legal liabilities, computer-forensics expertise and costs for problems like having government services knocked off line.
- Former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos: Being a CSO can be a ‘crappy job’
“It’s like being a [chief financial officer] before accounting was invented,” he said.
“When you decide to take on the [chief security officer] title, you decide that you’re going to run the risk of having decisions made above you or issues created by tens of thousands of people making decisions that will be stapled to your resume,” he said.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/06/alex-stamos-facebook-yahoo-security-officer/
Software/SaaS
- Commons Clause stops open-source abuse
Go to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and hover over the Products menu at the top. You will see numerous open-source projects that Amazon did not create, but runs as-a-service. These provide Amazon with billions of dollars of revenue per year.
For example, Amazon takes Redis (the most loved database in StackOverflow’s developer survey), gives very little back, and runs it as a service, re-branded as AWS Elasticache. Many other popular open-source projects including, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Postgres, MySQL, Docker, Hadoop, Spark and more, have similarly been taken and offered as AWS products.
To be clear, this is not illegal. But we think it is wrong, and not conducive to sustainable open-source communities.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/07/commons-clause-stops-open-source-abuse/
Datacenter/Hardware
- How Alternative DBs are Disrupting the Conventionals in 2018
There’s no question that Oracle has been a key reason why AWS has ascended to global IT heights in the first place. However, as AWS has scaled out, it now perceives a need for new-gen data storage inside DBs that are easier to manage, not as expensive to maintain, and more flexible in integrating and moving workloads.
NoSQL technology offers enterprises flexibility because NoSQL data stores can support structured, unstructured and semi-structured data for different types of business applications. Older SQL databases have issues with scripting languages, such as JSON, for example, and are more limited in scope than the newer ones.
Forrester has cited MongoDB as the most popular NoSQL database for the last couple of years. The open-source database is “popular among developers because it is easy to use, scales to meet the most demanding applications and offers the most comprehensive ecosystem of tools and partners,” the researcher said.
http://www.eweek.com/database/how-alternative-dbs-are-disrupting-the-conventionals-in-2018
Other
- Whole Foods workers seek to unionize, says Amazon is ‘exploiting our dedication’
In a letter addressed to Whole Foods employees, the group — members of Whole Foods’ cross-regional committee — wrote that they are “concerned about the direction” of Whole Foods in an Amazon era. The letter outlines several demands, including a $15 minimum wage for all employees, 401k matching, paid maternity leave, lower health insurance deductibles and more.
“We cannot let Amazon remake the entire North American retail landscape without embracing the full value of its team members. The success of Amazon and [Whole Foods] should not come at the cost of exploiting our dedication and threatening our economic stability,” they wrote.
- Amazon Sets Its Sights on the $88 Billion Online Ad Market
Amazon derives the bulk of its annual revenue, forecast to be $235 billion this year, from its e-commerce business, selling everything from books to lawn furniture. Amazon is also a leader in the cloud computing business, with Amazon Web Services, which accounts for around 11 percent of its revenue but more than half of its operating income. But in the company’s most recent financial results, it was a category labeled “other” that caught the attention of many analysts. It mostly consists of revenue from selling banner, display and keyword search-driven ads known as “sponsored products.” That category surged by about 130 percent to $2.2 billion in the first quarter, compared with the same period in 2017.
Those numbers are a pittance for Google and Facebook, which make up more than half of the $88 billion digital ad market. But they come with big and troubling implications for those two giants.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/03/business/media/amazon-digital-ads.html
- Alibaba’s Jack Ma, China’s Richest Man, to Retire From Company He Co-Founded
Mr. Ma is retiring as China’s business environment has soured, with Beijing and state-owned enterprises increasingly playing more interventionist roles with companies. Under President Xi Jinping, China’s internet industry has grown and become more important, prompting the government to tighten its leash. The Chinese economy is also facing slowing growth and increasing debt, and the country is embroiled in an escalating trade war with the United States.
In an interview, Mr. Ma said his retirement is not the end of an era but “the beginning of an era.” He said he would be spending more of his time and fortune focused on education. “I love education,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/technology/alibaba-jack-ma-retiring.html
Supplier Report: 8/24/2018
This week the news is very beverage focused: IBM wants robots to get you coffee and Pepsi bought Israeli company SodaStream.
Microsoft is under investigation for software fraud in Turkey while Amazon quietly gobbles up all of our energy (at a discounted rate).
Finally, Tesla is staying public because I am sure that was keeping everyone up at night.
Acquisitions
- Pepsi buys SodaStream for a future beyond cola
The deal will also help SodaStream expand its global reach. It currently distributes in 80,000 stores across 45 countries, with the bulk of its custom coming from Western Europe which is seeing an increasing backlash against single-use plastic. The company estimates their machines help consumers save up to 1,000 bottles and cans a year, no doubt a driver behind the extremely successful quarter it reported recently. Revenue climbed 31 percent to $171.5 million for the quarter to June 30, while net income jumped 82 percent. Of course Pepsi is going to want a piece of that.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/20/pepsi-buys-sodastream-for-a-future-beyond-cola/
It isn’t a tech deal, but it is Israeli-based (and I did a podcast about this topic).
Artificial Intelligence
- AI Can Manipulate Video to Make Everybody Dance Now
In a paper posted to the arXiv preprint server this week, researchers at the University of California Berkeley demonstrate how they designed AI that, given video of an expert dancer and an amateur, can transfer the moves from one to the other and create convincing video of the amateur pulling off some seriously impressive rug-cutting. But that’s not all.
“With our framework,” the researchers wrote, “we create a variety of videos, enabling untrained amateurs to spin and twirl like ballerinas, perform martial arts kicks or dance as vibrantly as pop stars.”
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43pebw/ai-can-manipulate-video-to-make-anybody-dance
- IBM has invented coffee drones – and they predict when you need a cup
IBM has secured a patent for a coffee drone that not only flies around public spaces to deliver cups of brew but also predicts which people need caffeine pick-me-ups.
According to paperwork filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the device could be used in an office, cafe or event setting, where a preordered cup of joe would be delivered to the drinker or where a thirsty individual would flag it down. Facial- or voice-recognition software, an electronic ID tag or Bluetooth from a person’s smartphone ensures the coffee gets to the right person.
Cloud
- Amazon is one of the largest consumers of electricity but is offloading costs onto others
Supporting the power requirements of astoundingly large data centers is no small feat. AWS is now responsible for nearly two percent of all electrical power consumption in the United States. Under secretive agreements between Amazon and energy providers, the true costs of running such massive data centers are well hidden from the public.
In Ohio, Amazon opened three data centers in 2016 that are all operating with secret electric rates. Only five representatives on a public utility commission, a private development agency known as JobsOhio, and Amazon know how much is being paid for a public service. Amazon claims that its discounted rates are a trade secret and therefore must be redacted in any requests for public records.
Security
- T-Mobile says hackers stole customer data in data breach
The cell giant, currently merging with Sprint, said in a statement that hackers customer stole names, billing zip codes, phone numbers, email addresses, account numbers, and account type — such as if an account was prepaid or postpaid — in what the company described as an “unauthorized capture of data.”
No customer financial or billing data was compromised, the company said.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/24/t-mobile-says-hackers-stole-customer-data-in-data-breach/
- Who needs democracy when you have data?
“No government has a more ambitious and far-reaching plan to harness the power of data to change the way it governs than the Chinese government,” says Martin Chorzempa of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC. Even some foreign observers, watching from afar, may be tempted to wonder if such data-driven governance offers a viable alternative to the increasingly dysfunctionallooking electoral model. But over-relying on the wisdom of technology and data carries its own risks.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611815/who-needs-democracy-when-you-have-data/
Software/SaaS
- Oracle’s Bad Boy Image
Oracle exercises its contractual right to audit the use of its software at customer locations. When an audit turns up a violation or potential violation of the license agreement, the sides work out a solution that often involves additional license purchases. No one likes this.
The process makes Oracle look bad in the eyes of the public, who think of licensing as supporting one or a few software deployments. However, although the audits are randomized, they often involve customers with hundreds, or even thousands, of licenses spread across far flung empires.
Datacenter/Hardware
- Big Spenders Pinch Chip Equipment Makers
The culprit? Semiconductor equipment companies live on the capital spending of chip makers. That spending has been cyclical historically, and has seen a big upswing over the past couple years thanks to booming demand for components like memory chips. But nothing lasts forever, and two of the world’s largest chip makers—Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing —seem to be trimming their outlays again.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-spenders-pinch-chip-equipment-makers-1534600801
Other
- Microsoft Hit With U.S. Bribery Probe Over Deals in Hungary
The investigation follows a series of similar probes into Microsoft business partners that surfaced in 2013 in five other countries. Microsoft made a push earlier this decade to expand in emerging markets, as well as smaller, middle-income countries like Hungary. In some cases, those bets have turned into legal and reputational challenges.
The U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are probing how Microsoft sold software such as Word and Excel to middleman firms in Hungary that then sold those products to government agencies there in 2013 and 2014, according to these people.
- Tesla will remain public, Elon Musk says
Musk’s go-private plan didn’t just cause consternation among his shareholders — it also interested the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to The New York Times. “is ramping up an investigation about whether he misled investors and violated federal securities laws,” The Times reported earlier today. Previous reporting in The Wall Street Journal suggested that the SEC was already investigating Tesla for possibly misleading investors about its Model 3 production. Tesla faces at least three investor lawsuits that accuse Musk’s August 7 tweet of being market manipulation.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/24/17780714/elon-musk-tesla-staying-public
Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
Supplier Report: 8/10/2018
Big mergers seems to be getting push back. The AT&T acquisition of Time-Warner is still under scrutiny (as is the Judge that approved it) and the Sinclair acquisition of Tribune was officially shut down. Elon Musk also might be over running a publicly traded company and is thinking about taking Telsa private.
In other news, IBM is still struggling with Watson and bots might pick your veggies in the near future.
Acquisitions
- AT&T Not Out of the Legal Woods Yet
In the original case, the government argued that AT&T would be able to dictate higher carriage fees to competing distributors by threatening to withhold its cable networks from rival pay-TV providers, leading to higher prices for consumers. Judge Leon concluded that the facts didn’t uphold that. Antitrust experts say the government is likely to argue that the judge defined the market too loosely, allowing AT&T’s argument that its competition includes tech firms like Netflix , Facebook and Amazon.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-t-not-out-of-the-legal-woods-yet-1533549600
DOJ’s Behind-the-Scenes Struggles With Judge in AT&T CaseJeffrey Jacobovitz, an antitrust lawyer with Arnall Golden Gregory LLP who isn’t connected with the case, said judges have their own styles for administering trials, though sidebar conferences generally happen more in jury trials, so jurors won’t be influenced. There was no jury in the AT&T trial.
“It’s unusual for a judge to have voluminous sidebars when it’s the judge resolving the ultimate issues,” Mr. Jacobovitz said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/dojs-behind-the-scenes-struggles-with-judge-in-at-t-case-1533682305
- Sinclair’s Bid to Monopolize Local TV News Is Officially Dead
Said behavior included what critics say were “sham” divestment deals, where Sinclair attempted to offload some stations to companies it still controlled in a bid to pretend the deal would fall within media ownership limits. Currently, the law states no one broadcaster can reach more than 38% of households (Sinclair would have reached 72% had the deal been approved).
Sinclair’s efforts were so brazen, they forced even the historically mega-industry-friendly FCC chief Ajit Pai to shovel the deal off to an administrative law judge, a move traditionally seen as a death knell for such megadeals.
- Elon Musk is seriously considering taking Tesla private
“The reason for doing this is all about creating the environment for Tesla to operate best,” Musk began. Being a public company means being subjected to wild swings in stock prices (it even spiked earlier today after his tweet talking about taking the company private), and such volatility can be a “major distraction” for both Tesla’s workforce and shareholders. It’s the latter Musk seems to want to mute by going private, as he lamented the pressure that putting out quarterly reports (which are mandated by law for public companies) puts on the company to make decisions that will look better in the short term but not serve Tesla best in the long run. He also noted that going private would avoid stock shorting attempts to harm the company.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/07/elon-musk-admits-want-take-tesla-private/
Artificial Intelligence
- Employees at Google, Amazon and Microsoft Have Threatened to Walk Off the Job Over the Use of AI
There is certainly a lot to worry about. Widespread use of facial-recognition technology by law enforcement can spell the end of speech, association and privacy rights (just think about the ability to identify, catalog and store thousands of facial images from a boisterous political rally). As O’Neill reminds us in her book, the algorithms employed in large chain store hiring processes and credit worthiness decision are opaque and lack self-correction mechanisms. They give off an air of objectivity and authority while encoding the prejudices of the people who programmed them. Weapons systems combining face recognition and social-media access can pick off opponents more efficiently than the most ruthless assassin. The images of swarm-drone warfare in Slaughterbots are the stuff of nightmares.
- Your vegetables are going to be picked by robots sooner than you think
Root AI is focused on the 2.3 million square feet of indoor farms that currently exist in the world and is hoping to expand as the number of farms cultivating crops indoors increases. Some estimates from analysis firms like Agrilyst put the planned expansions in indoor farming at around 22 million square feet (much of that in the U.S.).
While that only amounts to roughly 505 acres of land — a fraction of the 900 million acres of farmland that’s currently cultivated in the U.S. — those indoor farms offer huge yield advantages over traditional farms with a much lower footprint in terms of resources used. The average yield per acre in indoor farms for vine crops like tomatoes, and leafy greens, is over ten times higher than outdoor farms.
- IBM Has a Watson Dilemma
Recommending personal medical treatment is a taller order. The software needs to be trained with data on what has worked in the past, including details on patients’ medical histories and treatment outcomes. That information is often recorded in different formats and owned by different companies, and isn’t always complete or consistent.
Moreover, human doctors still have a lot to learn about the science of disease, including cancer.
Oncology won’t be “a great space for making [AI] products” until there’s better data about patients, spanning genetic, environmental, lifestyle and health information, said Bob Kocher, a medical doctor and partner at venture-capital firm Venrock in Palo Alto, Calif. In the near term, most of the benefits from AI in the health-care field will come in administrative tasks such as billing, he added.
Cloud
- AWS error exposed GoDaddy business secrets
The information involved in the security breach appeared to describe GoDaddy’s architecture, as well as “high-level configuration information for tens of thousands of systems and pricing options for running those systems in Amazon AWS, including the discounts offered under different scenarios,” according to UpGuard.
Configuration files for hostnames, operating systems, workloads, AWS regions, memory, CPU specifications, and more were included in the exposed cache, which described at least 24,000 systems.
“Essentially, this data mapped a very large scale AWS cloud infrastructure deployment, with 41 different columns on individual systems, as well as summarized and modeled data on totals, averages, and other calculated fields,” the cybersecurity firm said.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-error-exposed-godaddy-server-secrets/
- DXC Technology and AWS join forces for new integration practice
DXC Technology and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are joining forces to build a new integrated practice focused on delivering IT migration, application transformation and industry-specific cloud services.
The multibillion-dollar DXC – AWS Integrated Practice is part of a multi-year, global agreement that also encompasses joint development, marketing, sales, and delivery of AWS solutions. Specifically, these services include managed security and compliance services for AWS; dedicated VMware Cloud on AWS migration solutions and analytics and application services on AWS.
Security
- iPhone supplier TSMC shut down factories after virus attack
TSMC is the largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world, and supplies components for companies like ADM, Apple, Nvidia, and Qualcomm. The company told Bloomberg that the virus infected a “number of its fabrication tools,” but that the “degree of infection varies” from factory to factory. Several have resumed their operations, but others won’t come back online until tomorrow. The company indicated that its factories weren’t infected by a hacker.
Software/SaaS
- Oracle introduces autonomous transaction processing database – pounds on AWS
We’re the easiest database in the world to use. There’s nothing to learn, there’s nothing to do. It’s much much less labor involved so it’s much, much lower in cost. It’s truly elastic because you only pay for the infrastructure that you use. So when the application is not running then Oracle deactivates servers – it’s called a serverless system. And if you’re at a busy time then it will automatically add servers while the system is is still running.
- SAP Ariba Named a Leader in Gartner 2018 Magic Quadrant for Strategic
SAP Ariba today announced it has been positioned in the Leaders quadrant of the Gartner 2018 Magic Quadrant for Strategic Sourcing Application Suites. (Gartner, Inc. Magic Quadrant for Strategic Sourcing Application Suites, Magnus Bergfors, Patrick M. Connaughton, et al., August 1, 2018). In May, SAP Ariba was also recognized in the Gartner 2018 Magic Quadrant for Procure-to-Pay Suites alongside SAP Fieldglass.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180806005442/en/SAP-Ariba-Named-Leader-Gartner-2018-Magic
- Salesforce Promotes Keith Block to Co-CEO
Mr. Block, a former Oracle Corp. executive who joined Salesforce in 2013 as vice chairman and president, now will report directly to Salesforce’s board of directors. Mr. Benioff, who will go from being sole CEO to co-CEO, will continue leading the company’s “vision and innovation in areas including technology, marketing, stakeholder engagement and culture,” while Mr. Block will run the company’s “growth strategy, execution and operations,” Salesforce said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/salesforce-promotes-keith-block-to-co-ceo-1533704207
Datacenter/Hardware
- Samsung is still trying to make DeX happen
The idea of a pocketable laptop-like machine has its merits, and in theory, DeX is promising. It’s the combination of a small accessory for the Galaxy S8, Note 8 and S9 with a software mode (like on the Tab S4) that provides a faux desktop system. To minimize the number of loose accessories you have to carry around, Samsung introduced HDMI compatibility on the Note 9, so you can plug it into any supported display with an HDMI to USB-C converter and use the DeX software to immediately get to work. You can leave the converter cable on your desk or attached to the screen, so all you need to bring is your phone. Neat.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/10/samsung-dex-success-outside-mainstream/
I am all about this type of technology. It needs to happen and corporations should get behind it.
Other
- The greedy ways Apple got to $1 trillion
We still turn to Apple because it makes the best core products. But the edges of the customer experience have frayed like the wires of a Lightning cable. The key to Apple’s fortune is obviously selling high margin iPhones, not these ways it nickels and dimes us. But the company has an opportunity to raise its standards after this milestone, and win back the faith that could push it to a $2 trillion market cap.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/04/the-greedy-ways-apple-got-to-1-trillion/
Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash