According to a White House statement, Mr Trump’s order aims to “protect America from foreign adversaries who are actively and increasingly creating and exploiting vulnerabilities in information and communications technology infrastructure and services”.
It gives the secretary of commerce the power to “prohibit transactions posing an unacceptable risk to the national security”, the statement adds.
The move was instantly welcomed by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, who called it “a significant step toward securing America’s networks”.
In a statement to the Chinese state-run Global Times, Huawei said: “If the U.S. restricts Huawei, it will not make the U.S. safer, nor will it make the U.S. stronger. It will only force the U.S. to use inferior and expensive alternative equipment, lagging behind other countries . . . and ultimately harming U.S. companies and consumers.”
The company also tried a bit of de-escalation diplomacy, saying it was willing to “communicate with the U.S. to ensure product security.” Where this goes from here is anyone’s guess, but it’s certain that the Trump administration will leverage all the power in its arsenal to try to rein in foreign companies it sees as a threat to U.S. interests.
One possible response to this is that the algorithm is neutral, that it is just a vehicle for the ad, automatically responding to how people use it; algorithms aren’t racist, people are racist. But the algorithm is built in a way that also confirms implicit biases that exist in the real world, and it does so over and over again. The assumption that African American people are less trustworthy than white people is a commonly held form of implicit bias. It has real-world implications in a whole range of ways, from the success of job applicants to the split-second decisions made by police when pointing their guns at people. In Sweeney’s study, we see this attitude reproduced in the world of digital technology, intentionally or otherwise. This is not a mystery or an unfathomable outcome. Google is not entirely responsible for racism having an impact on automated advertising, but it cannot shirk responsibility for it. Ford was not solely responsible for hundreds, possibly thousands of cases of people being burned alive in their Pintos, but the court of public opinion rightly felt that it could have easily prevented them if it had designed the car differently.
Sri Lanka Has Blocked Most Major Social Networks After A Facebook Post Sparked Anti-Muslim Riots
The move comes three weeks after jihadist bombers killed at least 300 people in the country, sparking fears of sectarian violence against the country’s minority-Muslim population.
On Twitter, Sri Lanka’s largest mobile carrier, Dialog Axiata, confirmed that it had restricted the websites and apps according to a directive from Sri Lanka’s telecom regulator. NetBlocks, a nonprofit organization that tracks internet outages, tweeted that this was the third time in weeks the country had banned social media in the wake of religious tension.
“Zombies” who use their cellphones at crosswalks could be fined under proposed NY law
Under the proposal, people crossing the street with their nose buried in their phone could face fines of between $25 to $250. The legislation targets people “using a portable electronic device while crossing a roadway,” and makes exceptions for emergency response and other medical personnel.
“[The bill] does not say you can’t talk on the phone,” the bill’s sponsor, New York state senator John Liu, told the Guardian. “We’re talking about handheld devices … you can wait the five seconds to get to the other side.”
There is growing public pressure on Facebook to make some kind of change. Former employees and government officials want to break up the company calling it a monopoly, but are Facebook’s services essential?
Seeing this drama unfold, Google is quickly pivoting to privacy-based position. In recent weeks the company is allowing users to limit tracking and delete information Google has stored about usage. Very smart move… but is it enough?
Meanwhile Oracle just can’t give up on Project Jedi.
Acquisitions
Apple buys companies at the same rate you buy groceries
This weekend, CEO Tim Cook told CNBC that Apple purchases a new company every two to three weeks on average, and has bought between 20 and 25 companies in the last six months alone.
That’s roughly as often as I bought groceries during some… oh, let’s just call them “fresh vegetable adjacent” periods of my life.
You know how human beings never fail to be surprised when they get to the cash register and see how much of their paycheck is about to turn into food? I wonder if Apple ever feels that way. I’d guess not, considering how the company’s reportedly sitting on $225.4 billion dollars of cash on hand alone — enough to settle a historic array of lawsuits with Qualcomm 50 times over, if push came to shove.
Marvell to Acquire Aquantia, Eying Automotive Networking Market
Marvell on Monday announced that it had reached an agreement to buy the networking specialist firm Aquantia for $452 million. The acquisition will allow Marvell to significantly augment their current networking capabilities, with the company intending to use Aquantia’s technology in future PC, enterprise, and especially in-vehicle applications.
Under the terms of the deal, Marvell will pay Aquantia shareholders $13.25 per share in cash, bringing the total value of the deal to $452 million. The transaction has already been approved by board of directors of both companies, and subject to regulatory approval, is expected to close by the end of calendar year 2019.
The Morning After: All the important stuff from Google I/O
An AI-powered assistant that responds to voice commands faster than you can type or swipe, even offline? That’s what Google promised at I/O, with demos showing off how its next-generation assistant could operate across and through several apps, using voice control almost exclusively to get the information users need when they need it. Plus, it learns what you like and can even make restaurant or menu suggestions based on those preferences. Expect to see these features roll out on Pixel phones first later this year.
Oracle Alleges AWS Recruited DoD Officials To Influence JEDI Cloud Award
After Oracle first raised the issue, the DoD Inspector General, assisted by the FBI’s Public Corruption Squad, reopened a prior investigation and again concluded those potential improprieties didn’t impact the integrity of the process. A previous Government Accountability Office investigation also found no flaw warranting a change in how the military was selecting a cloud vendor.
But Oracle argued Tuesday the military’s contracting officer was wrong to take Ubhi’s claims at face value during the investigation, noting he actively sought to return to AWS, where he previously worked, during his short stint at DoD, where for a time he worked as a JEDI project manager.
SAP embraces cloud customization – with interesting partners
SAP is launching SAP Embrace, a new initiative to enable users of the SAP S/4 HANA ERP system to move it to the cloud, with platform, software, services and infrastructure customized to their specific industry needs. Interestingly, SAP is collaborating with cloud competitors Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud. SAP Embrace customers will be able to select one of those three cloud services providers as a hyperscaler, and also leverage SAP’s network of global strategic service partners.
Google plans to permit users to navigate its maps, watch videos on YouTube and search for information in “incognito mode,” limiting the amount of information shared with the company. It will also allow users to delete web and app activity history automatically after three months or 18 months.
Google added incognito mode to its Chrome browser a decade ago.
The company also said it would make it easier for users to find and delete information they have shared with the company, including location data in maps. For its Android operating system, Google said a new update would simplify how to limit the sharing of location data with app providers.
Symantec CEO Abruptly Resigns Amid Financial Turmoil
Symantec CEO Greg Clark abruptly resigned yesterday immediately before the embattled security company reported its fourth-quarter 2019 earnings, which included weak enterprise sales and disappointing forecasts for the first quarter and full 2020 fiscal year.
The company appointed Richard Hill, current Symantec director and former chairman and CEO of Novellus Systems, as interim president and CEO, effective immediately, and said it will begin a search to find a permanent CEO.
IBM sells $28.6b of bonds to help fund Red Hat buy
The Red Hat purchase will push the combined company’s borrowings above $US60 billion with debt that’s more than three times a key measure of earnings, said Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Robert Schiffman and Mike Campellone. Though IBM won’t buy back shares in the next two years, it still risks a potential downgrade to the BBB range, the tier of corporate debt that’s just above junk, they wrote.
IBM took out a $US20 billion bridge loan to fund the Red Hat deal and will use some of its cash pile, the company said in October when the transaction was announced. S&P Global Ratings and Fitch Ratings cut IBM one level to A at the time, the sixth-highest investment-grade rating, while it remains on review for downgrade at Moody’s Investors Service.
Microsoft open-sources its quantum computing development tools
This move, the company says, is meant to make “quantum computing and algorithm development easier and more transparent for developers.” In addition, it will make it easier for academic institutions to use these tools, and developers, of course, will be able to contribute their own code and ideas.
Unsurprisingly, the code will live on Microsoft’s GitHub page. Previously, the team had already open-sourced a number of tools and examples, as well as a library of quantum chemistry samples, but this is the first time the team is open-sourcing core parts of the platform.
Apple’s would-be sapphire glass supplier charged with fraud
Apple loaned $578 million to a company called GT Advanced Technologies, which was supposed to build highly scratch-resistant screen covers from synthetic sapphire crystals. Instead, it produced flawed “boules” of sapphire that couldn’t be cut into displays and went bankrupt months after it started. Now, the SEC has announced that it’s charging the company and its ex-CEO with fraud for allegedly withholding key information from stockholders.
Facebook co-founder, Chris Hughes, calls for Facebook to be broken up
The tl;dr of Hughes’ argument against Facebook/Zuckerberg being allowed to continue its/his reign of the internet knits together different strands of the techlash zeitgeist, linking Zuckerberg’s absolute influence over Facebook, and therefore over the unprecedented billions of people he can reach and behaviourally reprogram via content-sorting algorithms, to the crushing of innovation and startup competition; the crushing of consumer attention, choice and privacy, all hostage to relentless growth targets and an eyeball-demanding ad business model; the crushing control of speech that Zuckerberg — as Facebook’s absolute monarch — personally commands, with Hughes worrying it’s a power too potent for any one human to wield.
Hughes and others have cited historical precedents such as the government’s breakup of Standard Oil and AT&T as a justification for stricter antitrust regulation against tech giants. But these companies not only had clear monopolies with pricing power that hurt consumers, they also offered products that were vital to the economy.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are only three of many ways people can communicate digitally, and while many people spend hours every week using them, they are replaceable and inessential — and, in fact, getting away from Facebook and Instagram might make people happier. Even Hughes acknowledges, when he finds himself scrolling through Instagram at idle hours, “The choice is mine, but it doesn’t feel like a choice.”
Elon Musk is going to trial for calling a cave diver a pedophile on Twitter
Defamation law doesn’t apply to opinions or derogatory hyperbole, and Judge Wilson concluded that Musk’s case would be stronger if he’d simply tweeted an insult. But Musk “did not call [Unsworth] a ‘pedo guy’ and leave it there,” writes Wilson. “Rather, he made follow-up statements indicating that he believed his statements to be true.” That included the emails to BuzzFeed, where Musk “purported to convey actual facts and even suggested that the BuzzFeed reporter call people in Thailand to confirm his narrative.”
The decision doesn’t mean Musk is guilty, but it means Unsworth’s case is strong enough to deserve a trial. A pre-trial conference will take place on October 7th. This won’t be the first time Musk has gone to court for some bad tweets. He recently settled a separate lawsuit with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which accused him of making misleading financial statements on Twitter.
A few years back, for example, Amazon essentially monopolized the market for e-books. Major book publishers fought back by teaming up to take on the bigger company and the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against them. Why? Well, Amazon was using its power in the marketplace to keep e-book prices low. The publishers, the government argued, were trying to form a cartel to force Amazon to raise prices. And, indeed, even though the publishers ended up settling with the government, the introduction of more competition into the e-book marketplace (primarily from Apple) has had the impact of making e-books more expensive than they were when Amazon ruled the roost. The standard, in other words, isn’t that one company dominating a market is bad. It’s that it’s bad if a company’s market domination leads to bad outcomes for consumers.
Back to Facebook and Instagram. At the time, few observers saw how significant this deal was. But technology industry analyst Ben Thompson told the Code Conference audience last year that allowing this acquisition was “the greatest regulatory failure of the last 10 years” by allowing Facebook to entrench its dominance of social media. Yet under the contemporary antitrust framework, one might argue there’s no harm to consumers here — Facebook and Instagram are both free, so there’s after all no increase in prices. Yes, the fact that the combined entity is such an advertising juggernaut, pulling in $17 billion last quarter, is a big problem for other companies trying to sell ads (such as publishing companies that use ad revenue to fund actual journalism, for example) — but that’s not necessarily a problem for consumers.
Facebook Faces a Big Penalty, but Regulators Are Split Over How Big
The F.T.C.’s five commissioners agreed months ago that they wanted to pursue a historic penalty that would show the agency’s teeth. But now, the members are split on the size and scope of the tech company’s punishment, according to three people with knowledge of the talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The division is complicating the final days of the talks.
Along with disagreement about the appropriate financial penalty, one of the most contentious undercurrents throughout the negotiations has been the degree to which Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, should be held personally liable for any violation of a 2011 agreement, according to two of the people.
‘Resulting’: Don’t mistake a bad outcome for a bad decision
Ajit Pai admits FCC got broadband growth figures wrong
The impressive broadband growth numbers the FCC reported in February were actually off by millions, and now the agency has admitted in a revised draft that its figures were indeed inflated. It was advocacy group Free Press that originally revealed (PDF) the inaccuracy in March, though commission chief Ajit Pai didn’t even mention its role in the discovery. The organization found that a new ISP called BarrierFree falsely told the FCC that it has started serving 20 percent of the country just six months after it opened.
That mistake led the agency to announce that the number of Americans lacking access to a fixed broadband connection was down to 19.4 million by the end of 2017 from 26.1 million the year before. Turns out, the correct figure is 21.3 million — a big difference, for sure, but not big enough for Pai to backpedal on his declaration that the changes he implemented led to massive broadband growth.
‘996’ Is China’s Version of Hustle Culture. Tech Workers Are Sick of It.
Across the different groups, the basic strategy is to push, but not so hard that the Chinese government feels compelled to react.
That means no strikes and no demonstrations. In one group on the messaging app Telegram, references to Marx and Lenin are forbidden. The philosophies of communism’s leading lights often run contrary to the way China is run today. The government cracked down against a labor rights movement in the tech hub of Shenzhen this year.
Instead of sit-ins, the tech workers are harnessing the power of memes, stickers and T-shirts. Some have pushed for a holiday to celebrate beleaguered software engineers. Mr. Zhuge is rallying workers to mail paper copies of China’s labor law to Mr. Ma of Alibaba.
Google continues to make moves in the cloud with new hires and policy changes that should make their services more attractive under the leadership of Thomas Kurian but news continues to leak about failing AI ethics boards and past behavior with open source competitors that makes me wonder if Google is actually evil (sometimes). But there is good news… Google’s streaming beef with Amazon seems to be squashed…for now.
Meanwhile, T-Mobile is facing an uphill battle with the DOJ on their Sprint merger plans and Wisconsin might actually push back against Foxconn.
Acquisitions
T-Mobile-Sprint Deal Runs Into Resistance From DOJ Antitrust Staff
The nation’s third- and fourth-biggest carriers by subscribers are facing challenges on several fronts, but their most immediate hurdle comes from the Justice Department’s antitrust division, which is considering whether the deal would present an unacceptable threat to competition.
In a meeting earlier this month, Justice Department staff members laid out their concerns with the all-stock deal and questioned the companies’ arguments that the combination would produce important efficiencies for the merged firm, the people said.
Salesforce is buying MapAnything, a startup that raised over $84 million
The companies did not reveal the selling price, and Salesforce didn’t have anything to add beyond a brief press release announcing the deal.
“The addition of MapAnything to Salesforce will help the world’s leading brands accurately plan: how many people they need, where to put them, how to make them as productive as possible, how to track what’s being done in real time and what they can learn to improve going forward,” Salesforce wrote in the statement announcing the deal.
Why it just might make sense that Salesforce.com is buying Salesforce.org
Salesforce has always made a lot of hay about being a responsible capitalist. It’s something it highlights at events and really extends with the 1-1-1 model it created, which gives one percent of profit, time and resources (product) to education and nonprofits. Its employees are given time off and are encouraged to work in the community. Salesforce.org has been the driver behind this, but something drove the company to bring Salesforce.org into the fold.
While it’s easy to be cynical about the possible motivations, it could be a simple business reason, says Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research. As he pointed out, it didn’t make a lot of sense from a business perspective to be running two separate entities with separate executive teams, bookkeeping systems and sales teams. What’s more, he said there was some confusion over lack of alignment and messaging between the Salesforce.com education sales team and what was happening at Salesforce.org. Finally, he says because Salesforce.org couldn’t issue Salesforce.com stock options, it might not have been attracting the best talent.
Microsoft acquires Express Logic for its real-time internet of things operating system
Microsoft today announced that it’s acquired Express Logic, a 23-year-old San Diego, California-based developer of real-time operating systems (RTOS) for internet of things (IoT) and edge devices powered by microcontroller units (MCUs), for an undisclosed amount.
“With this acquisition, we will unlock access to billions of new connected endpoints, grow the number of devices that can seamlessly connect to Azure and enable new intelligent capabilities,” wrote Microsoft’s director of IoT Sam George in a blog post. “Express Logic’s ThreadX RTOS joins Microsoft’s growing support for IoT devices and is complementary with Azure Sphere, our premier security offering in the microcontroller space.”
CloudBees acquires Electric Cloud to build out its software delivery management platform
CloudBees, the enterprise continuous integration and delivery service (and the biggest contributor to the Jenkins open-source automation server), today announced that it has acquired Electric Cloud, a continuous delivery and automation platform that first launched all the way back in 2002.
The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition, but CloudBees has raised a total of $113.2 million while Electric Cloud raised $64.6 million from the likes of Rembrandt Venture Partners, U.S. Venture Partners, RRE Ventures and Next47.
The most overlooked path to commercialize AI is for companies to do it themselves
Scaling these teams is expensive and operationally intensive. Going full stack opens up opportunities for companies to integrate labeling workflows into other jobs. Employees traditionally tasked with performing a consumer or enterprise service can take on the extra task at reduced expense. And if their role is assisted by a machine, they will gradually become more productive over time as their assistive models get more accurate with more labeled data.
A second and inherently related benefit of going full stack is that these startups are able to generate — and own — powerful virtuous data feedback loops. Owning data flows creates more impressive moats than merely locking down static data sets. Deep Sentinel has a natural moat in the consumer security space, for example, as it not only has accurate classifiers, but accurate classifiers that continue to improve with real-world data generated in an environment it can control.
Amazon is currently working with six business partners — Livongo, Express Scripts, Cigna Health Today, Swedish Health Connect, Atrium Health and ERAS, a program of Boston Children’s Hospital — to help customers make appointments, access medical instruction, track a prescription and other services. It’s a big step for one of the world’s most powerful companies, giving it a stronghold in the $3.5 trillion health care industry.
Amazon had been working for some time to develop software that would meet federal HIPAA regulations, and it even created a health team within its Alexa division a year ago to work on the project, according to Business Insider. Meeting HIPAA standards is important, but the professors questioned whether it is enough.
“I’m not sure that Amazon’s checking off the regulatory box on HIPAA compliance begins to answer the privacy concerns that we ought to have,” Rosoff said.
Google Cloud brings on 27-year SAP veteran as it doubles down on enterprise adoption
Unsurprisingly, Kurian is also looking to put his stamp on the executive team, too, and today announced that former SAP executive Robert Enslin is joining Google Cloud as its new president of Global Customer Operations.
Enslin’s hire is another clear signal that Kurian is focused on enterprise customers. Enslin, after all, is a veteran of the enterprise business, with 27 years at SAP, where he served on the company’s executive board until he announced his resignation from the company earlier this month. After leading various parts of SAP, including as president of its cloud product portfolio, president of SAP North America and CEO of SAP Japan, Enslin announced that he had “a few more aspirations to fulfill.” Those aspirations, we now know, include helping Google Cloud expand its lineup of enterprise customers.
Facebook admits harvesting 1.5 million people’s email contacts without consent
Facebook has admitted to accessing and storing the email contacts of as many as 1.5 million of its users without their consent. Business Insider reports that between May 2016 and last month, the social media platform asked some of its new users to verify their email address by providing the password to their email account. After doing so, the users’ contacts would be automatically imported, without any option for the user to opt out.
Responding to the report, a Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider that email contacts were “unintentionally uploaded” as part of the process. They said that these contacts had never been shared with anyone, and that the company is now deleting the contacts that were uploaded. Facebook also claims to have fixed the “underlying issue” that led to the problem.
Former Mozilla exec: Google has sabotaged Firefox for years
“Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We’ll fix it soon. We want the same things. We’re on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe?”
“I’m all for ‘don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence’ but I don’t believe Google is that incompetent. I think they were running out the clock. We lost users during every oops. And we spent effort and frustration every clock tick on that instead of improving our product. We got outfoxed for a while and by the time we started calling it what it was, a lot of damage had been done,” Nightingale said.
Goldman Sachs analysts said they were encouraged by IBM’s results, but added that investors remain skeptical of the company’s ability to sustain improvements. Cloud revenue accounted for one-quarter of IBM’s total revenue over the past 12 months, up from 22% a year earlier, an IBM representative said.
Shares in IBM fell 4.2% to $139.11 on Wednesday. The stock is down 14% over the past year.
IBM’s year-over-year revenue had fallen in virtually every quarter since Ms. Rometty took over until the last quarter of 2017. The company also posted revenue growth in the first half of last year, but that turnaround proved short-lived: Revenue declined again in the last two quarters of 2018.
Apple and Qualcomm settle dispute, paving way for 5G iPhone
The two U.S. companies have been negotiating details of the settlement for weeks, sources told the Nikkei Asian Review. They have agreed to drop all litigation worldwide and struck a six-year licensing agreement, that will ensure the launch of the first 5G iPhone in 2020. The settlement included an undisclosed payment to Qualcomm by Apple, which several weeks ago asked its suppliers to begin testing the chipmaker’s 5G modems, sources said.
Intel followed up news of the settlement by announcing its exit from 5G chips and raising questions over the future potential of the next generation technology, which the smartphone industry is hoping will help to revive a market suffering its third consecutive year of decline.
Intel to Exit 5G Smartphone Modem Business, Focus 5G Efforts on
Network Infrastructure and Other Data-Centric Opportunities
The company will continue to meet current customer commitments for its existing 4G smartphone modem product line, but does not expect to launch 5G modem products in the smartphone space, including those originally planned for launches in 2020.
“We are very excited about the opportunity in 5G and the ‘cloudification’ of the network, but in the smartphone modem business it has become apparent that there is no clear path to profitability and positive returns,” said Intel CEO Bob Swan. “5G continues to be a strategic priority across Intel, and our team has developed a valuable portfolio of wireless products and intellectual property. We are assessing our options to realize the value we have created, including the opportunities in a wide variety of data-centric platforms and devices in a 5G world.”
Microsoft’s green plan: Our data centers will run on 60% renewable energy by 2020
With the 60 percent milestone in sight, the company is now targeting over 70 percent renewable energy for its data centers by 2023.
Microsoft is aiming to cut its carbon emissions by 75 percent by 2030 and as part of that effort has raised its internal carbon ‘tax’ to $15 per metric ton on all carbon emissions, which is nearly double the current rate for carbon emissions, according to Microsoft president Brad Smith.
Microsoft has had a carbon tax in place since 2012 that puts the burden on business divisions financially to cut their own carbon emissions.
Gov. Tony Evers wants to renegotiate Foxconn deal, says company won’t employ 13,000
“Clearly the deal that was struck is no longer in play and so we will be working with individuals at Foxconn and of course with (the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.) to figure out how a new set of parameters should be negotiated,” Evers told reporters in his Capitol office.
He said it was premature to say what specific changes he would be seeking. Under existing deals, the state and local governments could provide the company up to $4 billion to establish a massive facility in Racine County and create up to 13,000 Wisconsin jobs.
Google and Amazon end their ridiculous streaming video spat
This should mark the end of a long, contentious relationship between Amazon and Google. For a while, Amazon declined to sell Google’s Chromecast devices, products that compete directly with Amazon’s own Fire TV products. Amazon also didn’t include support for Google Cast in the Prime Video app, which made it essentially impossible to get Prime Video on bigger screens if you used Google products. Google responded by pulling support for the YouTube apps on Fire TV as well as the Echo Show
The EU has officially passed its controversial copyright law
A total of 19 European Council members, including France and Germany, voted in favor of the new Copyright Directive. Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Finland and Sweden voted against adopting the directive, whereas Belgium, Estonia and Slovenia abstained — but their opposition ultimately didn’t matter. EU countries now have 24 months to apply the directive to their national legislations.
Under the new rules, the likes of YouTube, Facebook and Instagram will be required to obtain licenses for copyrighted works from rights holders in order to host their content. They’ll also be forced to police copyrighted material through the use of tools such as filters. Critics, including Google, fear a surge in takedown requests could turn the web into a ghost town. Internet campaigners, meanwhile, have warned that the resulting censorship could quell unique forms of online expression, from GIFs to memes.
The tech industry is focused on playing games. Google has dedicated significant time and energy on a cloud-based gaming platform, and Apple is rumored to be announcing a service soon. Meanwhile, gaming veteran Microsoft is expected to have a major service update as well.
These companies are spending tons of money on retail, consumer-based services. Xbox shows it can be profitable, but is there money if the market keeps splintering?
Meanwhile Oracle is quietly going through a round of job eliminations and the President of the United States and his staff continue to struggle with technology.
Acquisitions
Apple Has Reportedly Acquired Italian Startup Stamplay
Stamplay describes itself as a “low code workflow automation platform, empowering organizations to streamline manual work by integrating data and business applications used every day.” The “API-based development platform” enables developers to build and launch “full-featured cloud-based web apps.”
Trump’s views about ‘crazy’ self-driving cars are at odds with his DOT
Just last week during SXSW in Austin, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao announced the creation of the Non-Traditional and Emerging Transportation Technology (NETT) Council, an internal organization designed to resolve jurisdictional and regulatory gaps that may impede the deployment of new technology, such as tunneling, hyperloop, autonomous vehicles and other innovations.
“New technologies increasingly straddle more than one mode of transportation, so I’ve signed an order creating a new internal Department council to better coordinate the review of innovation that have multi-modal applications,” Chao said in a prepared statement at the time.
Oracle adds more AI features to its suite of sales tools
Rob Tarkoff, who had previous stints at EMC, Adobe and Lithium, and is now EVP of Oracle CX Cloud says that the company has found ways to increase efficiency in the sales and marketing process by using artificial intelligence to speed up previously manual workflows, while taking advantage of all the data that is part of modern sales and marketing.
For starters, the company wants to help managers and salespeople understand the market better to identify the best prospects in the pipeline. To that end, Oracle is announcing integration with DataFox, the company it purchased last fall. The acquisition gave Oracle the ability to integrate highly detailed company profiles into their Customer Experience Cloud, including information such as SEC filings, job postings, news stories and other data about the company.
The basic technique is to give the computer millions of examples of games, images or previous judgments and to provide feedback. Which moves led to a high score? Which pictures did people label as dogs? What did the curators or judges decide in particular cases? The computer can then use machine learning techniques to try to figure out how to achieve the same objectives. In fact, machines have gotten better and better at learning how to win games or match human judgments. They often detect subtle statistical cues in the data that humans can’t even understand.
But people also can decide to change their objectives. A great judge can argue that slavery should be outlawed or that homosexuality should no longer be illegal. A great curator can make the case for an unprecedented new kind of art, like Cubism or Abstract Expressionism, that is very different from anything in the past.
Google is about to reveal its plan to take on the $140 billion gaming industry, but experts are skeptical it has a chance
Google’s streaming service could change that model by letting users stream top games to the devices they already own, like a laptop, smartphone or streaming box connected to a TV.
“Cloud gaming will enable publishers to broaden their reach even further by potentially taping into new audiences on any device and any screen,” Forrester vice president and principal analyst Thomas Husson told CNBC. “Beyond music or video, gaming represents another opportunity to offer recurring streaming revenues for companies in the gaming ecosystem. For cloud platforms like Amazon, Google or Microsoft, it will also become an opportunity to offer cloud storage and services to game publishers, who spend more and more in their IT infrastructure.”
Apple might reveal its game subscription service at Monday’s event
For the game bundle subscription, Bloomberg notes that Apple is “likely considering” paid games only. Any titles that depend on a freemium model — free-to-play but with in-app purchases — won’t be part of the deal. That would result in hits like Fortnite and PUBG Mobile being left out, but Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Heads Up!, Monument Valley 1 and 2, and NBA 2K19 are all the kind of paid games that could be eligible.
Customers would be charged monthly to access a bundle of those premium games, and game developers would be paid based on how frequently members of the service play their title. “The company would collect these monthly fees, then divide up the revenue between developers based on how much time users spend playing their games,” Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said.
Thurrott has published the full memo, and it reveals that Spencer feels validated by Google’s efforts. “Their announcement is validation of the path we embarked on two years ago,” says Spencer. Microsoft is also creating its own cloud gaming service, dubbed xCloud, that will rival Google and many others for streaming games to phones, tablets, PCs, and TVs. Microsoft recently demonstrated xCloud publicly for the first time, and it’s promising trials of the service later this year.
“There were no big surprises in their announcement although I was impressed by their leveraging of YouTube, the use of Google Assistant and the new WiFi controller,” explains Spencer in his memo. Google is leveraging YouTube to allow people to view game clips and then instantly launch the game, or share an exact game save to the video service.
Giant Military Contract Has a Hitch: A Little-Known Entrepreneur
The software giant Oracle, which is widely considered ill equipped to land the deal, has aggressively criticized the one-vendor approach. As part of its opposition, the company is arguing in federal court that Mr. Ubhi’s ties to Amazon shaped the contract in the company’s favor
Before the case was filed last year, the Pentagon found that Mr. Ubhi had no improper influence, and it continued evaluating the proposals despite Oracle’s lawsuit. But in late February, the government said it had received “new information” about Mr. Ubhi that it needed to investigate, essentially delaying the process.
A Pentagon spokeswoman, Elissa Smith, declined to say what new information about Mr. Ubhi had been brought to the department’s attention. The Pentagon had said that the winner of the contract was projected to be announced in April. But Ms. Smith said the inquiry into Mr. Ubhi was “expected to impact the award date.”
Facebook admits it stored ‘hundreds of millions’ of account passwords in plaintext
Facebook confirmed Thursday in a blog post, prompted by a report by cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs, that it stored “hundreds of millions” of account passwords in plaintext for years.
The discovery was made in January, said Facebook’s Pedro Canahuati, as part of a routine security review. None of the passwords were visible to anyone outside Facebook, he said. Facebook admitted the security lapse months later, after Krebs said logs were accessible to some 2,000 engineers and developers.
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump Use Private Accounts for Official Business, Their Lawyer Says
The chairman, Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, said that a lawyer for Ms. Trump, President Trump’s daughter, and Mr. Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, told the committee late last year that in addition to a private email account, Mr. Kushner uses an unofficial encrypted messaging service, WhatsApp, for official White House business, including with foreign contacts.
Mr. Cummings said the lawyer, Abbe Lowell, also told lawmakers that Ms. Trump did not preserve some emails sent to her private account if she did not reply to them.
IBM Launches A Blockchain-Based Global Payments Network
IBM has now revealed a World Wire, which is a real-time global payments network for the regulated financial institutions, that is accessible in a growing number of markets.
The payment system which is designed to simply optimize and accelerate the foreign exchange, remittances and cross border payments. World Wire is the first blockchain network as of now its kind to integrate the payment messaging, clearing and settlement on a single unified network, which even allows the participants to dynamically choose from a wide range of digital assets for settlement.
World Wide has also enabled payment location in more than 70 countries, with 44 bank points and 47 currencies. Some of the local regulations will continue to guide the activation, and IBM is now actively growing the network with additional financial institutions across the globe.
How Salesforce paved the way for the SaaS platform approach
It turns out that Force.com was actually the culmination of a series of incremental steps after the launch of the first version of Salesforce in February, 2000, all of which were designed to make the software more flexible for customers. Company co-founder and CTO Parker Harris says they didn’t have this goal to be a platform early on. “We were a solution first, I would say. We didn’t say ‘let’s build a platform and then build sales-force automation on top of it.’ We wanted a solution that people could actually use,” Harris told TechCrunch.
Microsoft Says the FCC ‘Overstates’ Broadband Availability in the US
Microsoft this week was the latest to highlight the US government’s terrible broadband mapping in a filing with the FCC, first spotted by journalist Wendy Davis. In it, Microsoft accuses the FCC of over-stating actual broadband availability and urges the agency to do better.
“For example, in some areas the Commission’s broadband availability data suggests that ISPs have reported significant broadband availability (25 Mbps down/3 Mbps up) while Microsoft’s usage data indicates that only a small percentage of consumers actually access the Internet at broadband speeds in those areas,” Microsoft said.
Apple will let you add 256GB of RAM to an iMac Pro for $5,200
You could buy a second iMac Pro for the cost of that single RAM upgrade. To put that in perspective compared to Apple’s other RAM upgrades, the iMac Pro comes with 32GB of RAM by default. Upgrading to 64GB costs an extra $400, and upgrading to 128GB costs an extra $2,000. Both of those prices are dwarfed by the new 256GB option.
That’s in large part because phones are getting harder to sell. Far more people own a smartphone today than just a few years ago, and people are holding on to their phones for longer (perhaps because they’re so good, or perhaps because those two-year contracts are dead). That’s left smartphone makers with an option if they don’t want to see their revenues fall: sell more phones or sell more expensive phones. Obviously, they’ve chosen the latter.
We’ve seen options for bigger screens and more storage push the price for flagship phones into the $1,500 range. Even the starting price for today’s flagships is closer to $1,000 than the $649 of just a few years ago.
Oracle Swings the Layoff Axe and Clear-cuts Teams of Engineers
Rumors are flying, but the count appears to be heading into the thousands worldwide, with the lowest estimate at 500. One anonymous poster on theLayoff.com, a site that hosts discussion boards for people affected by layoffs, appeared to offer real numbers, indicating that the total target is 10 percent of Oracle’s global head count, which in 2018 was around 137,000. Cuts will be made in three phases this year, he indicated, with around 5000 employees cut in this first phase.
Layoffs are nothing new for Oracle; in 2017 the company slashed nearly 1000 jobs in Silicon Valley, mostly from its SPARC and Solaris teams. But the sudden and secretive nature of this layoff operation came as a surprise to employees and observers. The lack of transparency and abruptness of the operation was reminiscent of IBM’s waves of layoffs in the past.
Google hit with another EU antitrust fine: The grand total now comes to €8.2B
This morning, the European Union slapped Google with a €1.5 billion fine, which comes to a little over $1.7 billion. This latest fine was over its antitrust practices with its advertising business.
Essentially, for years Google didn’t allow its AdSense customers to feature rival search engines on their sites. Over the years, the company eased up on these rules, but European officials still decided the practice amounted to illegal behavior. This may be an especially tough blow for Google, since AdSense’s contribution to the company’s overall revenue has been steadily decreasing over the last six-plus years, according to Bloomberg.
