Supplier Report: 3/20/2020
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Tired of reading about the Corona virus? Me too.
Unfortunately, the virus is causing major changes…everywhere. In the United States, workers are being sent home, the stock market is a complete roller-coaster, and infection rates are starting to climb.
The one bright spot of all this Corona virus talk is that Xerox seems to be backing off HP (too soon to be making jokes?)
Acquisitions/Investments
- Unity acquires Dublin-based deep learning startup Artomatix
The Dublin startup builds developer tools that allow game studios to more easily create deep learning-enhanced textures that scale more convincingly.
Developers can use the startup’s ArtEngine platform to bring real-world materials to their game worlds, adapting the visual patterns to their 3D worlds more quickly than existing toolsets while eliminating seams and irregularities. ArtEngine uses AI to identify visual flaws in replications and saves developers from having to endlessly tweak environments.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/11/unity-acquires-dublin-based-deep-learning-startup-artomatix/
- How the coronavirus outbreak will stress-test startups
According to a Dun & Bradstreet whitepaper released this week, 94% of Fortune 1000 companies have key elements of their supply chain housed directly within the epicenter of the outbreak in China. Supply-side shocks are much more difficult for central banks to contain by moves such as interest-rate cuts or financial stimulus. These typically serve to catalyze demand (through increased cash or borrowing power), but do not directly alleviate the kind of production paralysis capable of hamstringing global commerce.
Startups are especially vulnerable to such supply-side disruptions, each of which is worth considering independently. Operating through lean organizational structures in which personnel often occupy cross-functional roles, decreases in staff productivity can create significant issues for interdependent activities at startups. The diversion of attention — due alternatively to the need to attend to personal needs (such as family caregiving, healthcare issues, or household concerns) or societal requirements (such as monitoring the development of the virus and state or federal reactions to it) — can make a cumulative impact over the days, weeks, and months of the outbreak.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/10/how-the-coronavirus-outbreak-will-stress-test-startups/
- Xerox Pauses Campaign to Take Over HP as Coronavirus Pandemic Escalates
The company said Friday it is postponing additional presentations, interviews with the press and meetings with HP shareholders.
“In light of the escalating Covid-19 pandemic, Xerox needs to prioritize health and safety of its employees, customers, partners and affiliates over and above all considerations, including its proposal to acquire HP,” Xerox Vice Chairman and Chief Executive John Visentin said.
The company said it doesn’t consider the market decline since it put out its bid or the temporary suspensions of HP shares in recent days as a result of marketwide circuit breakers as a failure of any condition to acquire HP. Xerox said it would take the same view in future trading halts.
- Oracle Tees Up Another $15 Billion In Buybacks
The company reported revenue for its quarter that ended Feb. 29 of $9.79 billion, up from $9.61 billion in the comparable period a year earlier. That surpassed forecasts from analysts polled by FactSet.
Oracle also reported a profit of $2.57 billion, or 79 cents a share, compared with earnings of $2.75 billion, or 76 cents a share, for the same quarter a year ago. Excluding stock-based compensation and certain other expenses, Oracle reported earnings of 97 cents a share, a penny more than forecasts from analysts.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/oracle-tees-up-another-15-billion-in-buybacks-11584047813
JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup and other major banks suspend stock buybacks due to pandemicBank stocks have been pummeled so far this year as the virus has spread around the world. Shares of JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley are both down more than 25% since the start of 2020, while shares of Citi have fallen more than 36%.
As the pandemic has sharply slowed down economic activity in certain industries, such as travel, major companies like Boeing have announced that they will draw down their major credit lines from banks.
“The decision on buybacks is consistent with our collective objective to use our significant capital and liquidity to provide maximum support to individuals, small businesses, and the broader economy through lending and other important services,” the Forum said.
Software/SaaS
- Oracle-SAP Showdown: Will Larry Ellison Rip Huge ERP Customer from SAP as Promised?
Oracle announces its fiscal-Q3 earnings tomorrow afternoon. That would be the ideal time for it to disclose this cutover customer whose defection from SAP will trigger, according to Ellison, a mass move of other big SAP ERP customers to Oracle.
Adding to the drama is SAP’s complete dismissal of these claims, which I wrote about several weeks ago in Oracle-SAP Showdown: SAP Calls BS on Larry Ellison Claim of Snatching Huge SAP Customer.
While the public wrangling between these two head-on competitors still run by founders with very healthy egos and little love for the other has been going on for years, it’s never taken a twist quite like this one about an imminent Pied-Piper wave of defections.
Ellison’s predictions about trouble brewing for SAP came in Oracle’s mid-December earnings call, during which Ellison claimed that “SAP’s customer base is up for grabs.” And before a quick recap of Ellison’s promise about a showcase customer defection, bear in mind that SAP co-CEO Christian Klein totally dismissed such a possibility, saying “And actually we double-checked and honestly, I couldn’t find any customer who moved away from SAP ERP.”
https://cloudwars.co/will-oracle-steal-huge-erp-customer-from-sap-larry-ellison/
- Microsoft Teams goes down — just as everyone starts working from home
The technology giant left a cryptic message — which at least is more than its users can do right now — on Twitter, stating that it’s “received reports that impact associated with TM206544 is ongoing.”
“We’re investigating the issue,” said Microsoft.
It’s Microsoft Team’s second outage in as many months after the software giant forgot to renew a TLS (HTTPS) certificate, forcing the service offline and users unable to communicate with colleagues for hours.
Other
- France Fines Apple $1.2 Billion for Antitrust Issues
France’s competition regulator, which had been examining wholesalers who sell Apple’s products in the country, said the company had unfairly divided products and customers between two wholesalers, Tech Data Corporation and Ingram Micro. The regulator accused Apple of making its wholesalers charge the same prices for products offered in Apple’s own retail stores and abusing its broad economic power over the firms.
Isabelle de Silva, the president of the French Competition Authority, said in a statement that dividing duties among the wholesalers also had the effect of “sterilizing the wholesale market for Apple products.” Tech Data and Ingram Micro were each fined millions of euros.
An Apple spokesman, Josh Rosenstock, said in a statement that the company plans to appeal the decision.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/technology/france-apple-antitrust-fine.html
- Bill Gates to Leave Boards of Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway
Most recently, Mr. Gates spent a lot of his time at Microsoft on devising tools that could make businesses more productive, said S. Somasegar, a former Microsoft corporate vice president who left in 2015 and is now a managing director at Seattle venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group. Microsoft has been one of several tech companies to promote so-called low-code tools to make it easier for regular employees to write software applications.
Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett, who has a long-running friendship with Mr. Gates, said former American Express Co. CEO Kenneth Chenault would replace Mr. Gates on the conglomerate’s board. Mr. Chenault, who joined Facebook Inc.’s board in 2018, won’t seek re-election, the social-media company said Friday.
Supplier Report: 3/13/2020
Photo by DDP on Unsplash
The Coronavirus continues to dominate the news feeds this week. Several companies are pulling out of or cancelling conferences and directing employees to stop traveling and work from home.
Articles from the New York Times and other respected news outlets are calling these preventative measures “unprecedented”. These actions beg the question, when will things go back to normal and how do firms plan around a global pandemic?
Acquisitions/Investments
- BMC Software buys Compuware from Thoma Bravo
By combining with Compuware, BMC said the companies will be better equipped to serve the enterprise technology stack. Together they plan to focus on mainframe operations, cybersecurity, application development, data, and storage as part of their enterprise DevOps strategies.
“BMC continues to be focused on evolving and investing in our portfolio to address and even anticipate the needs of our customers, helping them to succeed today and into tomorrow,” said BMC chief executive Ayman Sayed. “It’s the ideal time to bring Compuware into our portfolio as the traditional mainframe AppDev market transitions to DevOps. We’re excited to welcome the Compuware team as we build best-of-breed modern mainframe solutions.”
https://www.zdnet.com/article/bmc-software-buys-compuware-from-thoma-bravo/
- Nvidia acquires data storage and management platform SwiftStack
Nvidia today announced that it has acquired SwiftStack, a software-centric data storage and management platform that supports public cloud, on-premises and edge deployments.
The company’s recent launches focused on improving its support for AI, high-performance computing and accelerated computing workloads, which is surely what Nvidia is most interested in here.
The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition, but SwiftStack had previously raised about $23.6 million in Series A and B rounds led by Mayfield Fund and OpenView Venture Partners. Other investors include Storm Ventures and UMC Capital.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/05/nvidia-acquires-data-storage-and-management-platform-swiftstack/
- HP Rejects Xerox’s Raised Takeover Offer
Xerox this week launched an effort to acquire all HP shares outstanding, valuing HP at nearly $35 billion, or $24 a share in cash and stock. It had raised the offer from $22 a share. HP said the value of the offer’s equity component poses a risk to the company and would lead to uncertainties.
The offer would leave Xerox “burdened with an irresponsible level of debt and which would subsequently require unrealistic, unachievable synergies that would jeopardize the entire company,” HP Chairman Chip Bergh said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hp-rejects-xerox-takeover-offer-11583408223
Cloud
- Judge says Amazon is ‘likely to succeed’ on key argument in Pentagon cloud lawsuit
The document provides the first indication of how Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims might rule in a high-stakes bid protest over the Pentagon’s JEDI cloud computing contract, which was awarded to Microsoft in October following intervention from the White House and members of Congress.
In a blow to Microsoft and the Defense Department, Campbell-Smith recently ordered the Pentagon to halt work on JEDI. In a lengthy opinion explaining her reasoning, she sided with Amazon’s contention that the Pentagon had made a mistake in how it evaluated prices for competing proposals from Amazon and Microsoft.
Security/Privacy
- Halting $9.8 Billion in Theft Is Key to Crypto Growth, KPMG Says
At least $9.8 billion in digital assets have been stolen by hackers since 2017 because of lax security or poorly written code, the accounting firm wrote in a report released Monday. Adoption of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether among institutional investors has led to competition for a place in portfolios, making safeguarding the tokens more important that ever, KPMG said.
“Institutional investors especially will not risk owning crypto assets if their value cannot be safeguarded in the same way their cash, stocks and bonds are,” Sal Ternullo, co-leader of KPMG’s crypto-asset services and co-author of the report, said in a statement. Among the first companies to offer custody services for crypto are Fidelity Investments and units of the exchanges run by Intercontinental Exchange Inc., Coinbase Inc. and Gemini Trust Co.
Infrastructure/Hardware
- Honeywell says it will soon launch the world’s most powerful quantum computer
Honeywell has long built the kind of complex control systems that power many of the world’s largest industrial sites. It’s that kind of experience that has now allowed it to build an advanced ion trap that is at the core of its efforts.
This ion trap, the company claims in a paper that accompanies today’s announcement, has allowed the team to achieve decoherence times that are significantly longer than those of its competitors.
**
The result of this is a quantum computer that promises to achieve a quantum Volume of 64. Quantum Volume (QV), it’s worth mentioning, is a metric that takes into account both the number of qubits in a system as well as decoherence times. IBM and others have championed this metric as a way to, at least for now, compare the power of various quantum computers.
So far, IBM’s own machines have achieved QV 32, which would make Honeywell’s machine significantly more powerful.
- HPE Reports Sales That Miss Estimates on Weak Server Demand
HPE Chief Executive Officer Antonio Neri has sought to fuel growth at the hardware company by moving to a subscription business model and investing in more sophisticated server technologies. The strategy may take years to pay off. In the meantime, HPE is exposed to China, the origin of the coronavirus, through its supply chain and its H3C server joint venture in the country. The company opted not to give a profit forecast for the current period due to uncertainty over the effects of the outbreak.
HPE’s server sales decreased 16% to $3.01 billion in the period ended Jan. 31 because of macro uncertainty, supply chain disruption and a factory consolidation, Neri said in an interview. Businesses have reduced the pace of purchases for major information technology products amid slowing global economic growth.
CoronaVirus (Breaking it out into its own section)
- eBay bans face mask and hand sanitizer listings to halt coronavirus price gouging
eBay is escalating its fight against online price gouging during the coronavirus outbreak with a new outright ban on all sales of face masks, hand sanitizer, and disinfectant wipes. The new policy, outlined in a notice to sellers posted Friday, applies both to new listings and existing ones. eBay says it is in the process of removing current listings for these items as well as listings that mention the coronavirus, COVID-19 (the illness it causes), and other popular variations of the phrases like 2019nCoV.
“We will continue to monitor the evolving situation and quickly remove any listing that mentions COVID-19, coronavirus, 2019nCoV (except books) in the title or description,” the notice reads. “These listings may violate applicable US laws or regulations, eBay policies, and exhibit unfair pricing behavior for our buyers.”
- SXSW cancels its 400K-person conference due to coronavirus
SXSW has officially announced it will cancel its tech and music conference slated for March 13th to 22nd in Austin, Texas due to concerns around coronavirus, though it’s exploring rescheduling. “Based on the recommendation of our public health officer and our director of public health . . . I’ve gone ahead and declared a local disaster in the city and associated with that, have issued an order that effectively cancels SXSW,” said Austin Mayor Steve Adler at a press conference today.
- SAP has cancelled all in-person events and says bookings on its Concur travel platform is down 20% due to coronavirus crisis
SAP said the cancelled events include its Concur Fusion conference in Orlando which was supposed to take place next week and its SAP Ariba Live convention in Las Vegas scheduled later this month.
SAP also will not participate in the upcoming SXSW gathering in Austin, Texas next week.
SAP said its own data underscore “the impact of COVID-19,” the company said in a blog post: “We have seen travel transactions in our SAP Concur network down 20% year-over-year.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/sap-cancelled-in-person-events-due-to-coronavirus-crisis-2020-3
- As coronavirus pandemic spreads, demand for remote-work startups spikes
Switching to a remote-work setup isn’t easy. Smartsheet’s Mark Mader told TechCrunch that the “challenge of remote work isn’t just about physical location,” continuing to say that it is “also about the need for people to feel connected and stay informed.” That means intelligent tooling, and smart workplaces norms and practices. (Mader also stressed low-code and no-code tooling as a possible way to empower remote workers).
The remote-work boom was recently highlighted in Zoom’s earnings report. Its results bested expectations, and in its earnings call, the company said that it was seeing rising demand for its product in the wake of COVID-19, even if most of that rising usage was for its free service. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said that in light of the spread of the coronavirus, many companies had quickly come to understand the need for a tool like Zoom. The CEO added that he expects more companies to deploy remote work tooling like his video service in the future.
- Google recommends Washington State employees work from home, citing coronavirus risk
The software giant has not closed the offices outright, nor is it planning to make an official statement regarding the recommendation, but the news certainly points to broader trend of serious precautions around the novel coronavirus outbreak. The move follows a similar decision by Lyft, which sent home employees in its San Francisco office.
Google maintains a number of different offices throughout the state. Washington has become a major concentration for the spread of the virus in the U.S. Seventy cases have been reported, resulting in 10 deaths. The majority have been in King County, which includes both Seattle and Kirkland — both homes to Google offices.
Other
- Elizabeth Warren, big tech’s sworn foe, drops out of 2020 race
Warren’s campaign raised early red flags for tech’s giants, which are now recalibrating for the threat from Sanders.
Through the 2020 race, the elite upper echelons of tech — executives, venture capitalists and the like — sought a moderate alternative to the economic upheaval they feared would be bad for business, even as their own workers aligned with the contest’s most progressive candidates.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/05/big-techs-sworn-foe-drops-out-of-2020-race/
- Amazon Warehouse Workers Are Abandoning Their Jobs in Droves
Between 2011—the year the first fulfillment center opened in California— and 2017, the turnover rate in five counties with Amazon warehouses leaped from 38 percent to 100 percent, according to the report. In other words, more warehouse workers departed from their jobs each year in counties with an Amazon presence than the total number of warehouse jobs.
“What emerges is a troubling picture of Amazon’s business model—one in which the company views its workers as disposable and designs its operations to foster high turnover,” the report’s authors wrote. “The particularly high rate [of turnover for Amazon] workers as compared to the rate for similar workers suggests that Amazon’s presence has had a unique impact.”
By comparison, overall turnover rates for warehouse workers in California are 20 percent lower than they are in counties without Amazon warehouses, at 83 percent.
Supplier Report: 3/6/2020
Photo by Jérémy Stenuit on Unsplash
The COVID-19 virus – which is rapidly earning pandemic status – has already caused massive disruption to the IT industry. As the virus spreads globally, companies are cutting back travel and pulling out of conferences.
The physical supply chain continues to be impacted with no timeline or solutions emerging other than “wait until after April”.
Acquisitions/Investments
- DocuSign acquires Seal Software for $188M to enhance its AI chops
DocuSign says it will continue to sell Seal’s analytics tools. What’s surely more important to DocuSign, though, is that it will also leverage the company’s AI tools to bolster its DocuSign CLM offering. CLM is DocuSign’s service for automating the full contract life cycle, with a graphical interface for creating workflows and collaboration tools for reviewing and tracking changes, among other things. And integration with Seal’s tools, DocuSign argues, will allow it to provide its customers with a “faster, more efficient agreement process,” while Seal’s customers will benefit from deeper integrations with the DocuSign Agreement Cloud.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/27/docusign-acquires-seal-software-for-188m-to-enhance-its-ai-chops/
- Xerox Edges Closer to Fixing Its HP Printer Jam
Were HP to become the acquirer, the new firm would emerge with significantly less debt. The Xerox offer as it stands would likely load the new entity with debt representing at least five times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. In the unlikely event that HP were to pay cash for Xerox (there would almost certainly be a stock component), then it would have debt of less than four times Ebitda.
That includes the impact of a $15 billion buyback that HP announced today. The biggest risk for Xerox was that HP would essentially become the counterbidder for itself. By using his own balance sheet to boost shareholder value, Lores is doing just that. A $15 billion repurchase might buy back 50% of the shares, based on HP’s valuation before Xerox’s first bid. That could lift the share price well above the $24 a share of Xerox’s most recent offer.
Artificial Intelligence/Robotics
- IBM and Microsoft support the Vatican’s guidelines for ethical AI
The pledge, presented to Pope Francis today, calls for AI that safeguards the rights of all humans, especially the underprivileged, and for new regulations in areas like facial recognition. It asks tech leaders to “humanise technology and not ‘technologise’ humanity,” Novena News reports.
“The Vatican is not an expert on the technology but on values,” Francesca Rossi, IBM’s global AI ethics leader, said in a statement. “The collaboration is to make the Vatican and the whole society understand how to use this technology with these values.”
The pledge is part of a larger workshop on ethical AI led by the Pontifical Academy for Life in the Vatican this week. The Academy hopes governments, NGOs, industry leaders and other associations will join the “Rome Call for AI Ethics,” along with tech companies like IBM and Microsoft.
https://www.engadget.com/2020/02/28/ibm-microsoft-vatican-ai-ethics-pledge/
Cloud
- Oracle has been outed as a donor for the Internet Accountability Project
Database software giant Oracle Corp. has been outed as one of the donors of the Internet Accountability Project, which is a conservative organization that’s been throwing its weight behind a growing call for tougher privacy rules and stronger regulation of big tech companies.
The IAP had always refused to say who was funding it, but it revealed in a disclosure on its website that Oracle donated between $25,000 and $99,000 last year, according to a Bloomberg report Tuesday.
Oracle has been funding the IAP as part of its long-running campaigns against tech rivals such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google LLC. Oracle has been gunning for Amazon and its cloud business for years, while it’s also involved in a lengthy legal battle with Google regarding the use of patents relating to the Java programming language it owns.
https://siliconangle.com/2020/02/26/oracle-outed-donor-internet-accountability-project/
Security/Privacy
- ICE has run facial-recognition searches on millions of Maryland drivers
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have been permitted to run facial-recognition searches on millions of Maryland driver’s license photos without first seeking state or court approval, state officials said — access that goes far beyond what other states allow and that alarms immigration activists in a state that grants special driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants.
More than 275,000 such licenses have been issued statewide since 2013, when the state became the first on the East Coast to defy federal guidelines and allow undocumented immigrants to obtain a license without having to provide proof of legal status. The technology now under scrutiny could let an ICE official run a photograph of an unknown person through the system and see if any potentially undocumented immigrants are returned as a match.
Software/SaaS
- Oracle to pay $12 million to settle ERISA suit
Oracle Corp. agreed to pay $12 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed against the firm for allegedly breaching its fiduciary duties in managing its $16.5 billion 401(k) plan.
The suit, filed in 2016, alleged that Redwood City, Calif.-based Oracle caused participants of its 401(k) savings and investment plan “to pay unreasonable record-keeping and administrative fees” to its record keeper, Fidelity Management Trust Co.
https://www.pionline.com/courts/oracle-pay-12-million-settle-erisa-suit
- Expedia cuts 3,000 jobs, including 500 at new Seattle HQ
Expedia said at the time that it was targeting $300 to $500 million of annual cost savings, but hadn’t previously announced explicit plans for job cuts.
The layoffs come across the company and globe. About 500 people will be let go in Seattle, where Expedia recently moved to a new 40-acre waterfront campus and employs more than 4,000 people. Expedia said it will eliminate certain projects and activities, and reduce the use of vendors and contractors. It will provide impacted workers with severance packages that include extended healthcare.
“Moving forward, we will exert more discipline in setting priorities and allocating resources, simplify our business processes and inter-dependencies, raise the bar on performance standards, and demonstrate and demand accountability for results,”
Infrastructure/Hardware
- Apple Loses Pair of Key Operations, Supply Chain Executives
Nick Forlenza, a vice president of manufacturing design, has retired from Apple, while Duco Pasmooij, another vice president who worked on operations, is discussing an exit in the near future, according to people familiar with the moves. Pasmooij left the operations team over a year ago, moving into a role reporting to the company’s head of augmented reality efforts, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing personnel.
Apple has about a hundred vice presidents across the company who help Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and the senior executive team run one of the world’s most profitable companies. An Apple spokesman declined to comment. Forlenza and Pasmooij didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Other
- Disney’s Iger Is Now in a Rare Role: Executive Chairman
Such arrangements work when an executive chairman cedes enough control to give the new CEO autonomy, while remaining present as a sounding board, says Anthony Abbatiello, who heads the leadership and succession-planning practice at Russell Reynolds Associates, an executive-search firm. Transitions can crumble if the newly installed chairman insists on micromanaging operations, he said.
When Jim McCann, the founder and longtime CEO of 1-800-Flowers.com Inc., became executive chairman in 2016 and handed the reins to his brother, Chris McCann, he says he tried to clearly separate the roles. He stopped attending some meetings and quarterly gatherings of managers, and refrained from participating in corporate earnings calls. Instead, he took on projects focused on innovation and better serving customers, leaving his brother to handle day-to-day operations.
A mentor advised the two executives to never let others drive a wedge between them. “That’s rung in our ears,” Jim McCann said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/disneys-iger-is-now-in-a-rare-role-executive-chairman-11582840014
- Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block steps down
Block stepped into the co-CEO role in 2018, after a long career at the company that saw him become vice chairman, president and director before he took this position. Block spent the early years of his career at Oracle . He left there in 2012 after the release of a number of documents in which he criticized then-Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, who passed away last year.
Industry pundits saw his elevation to the co-CEO role as a sign that Block was next in line as the company’s sole CEO in the future (assuming Benioff would ever step down). After this short tenure as co-CEO, it doesn’t look like that will be the case, but for the time being, Block will stay on as an advisor to Benioff.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/25/salesforce-co-ceo-keith-block-steps-down/
- Amazon tells employees to pause nonessential travel in U.S. due to coronavirus
Amazon sent the notification to employees on Friday. In a separate internal communication, Dave Clark, who runs Amazon’s retail operations, told employees to hold off on planning group or team meetings that require travel until at least the end of April, when he estimated that the company will have a better sense of the virus, its spread and its impact.
In January, Amazon said it was restricting employee travel to China “until further notice” amid the coronavirus outbreak. The company also recommended that employees who are expected to travel back from one of the affected provinces of China work from home for two weeks. Amazon urged employees who experienced any symptoms to seek medical attention before returning to the office.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/28/amazon-pauses-non-essential-travel-in-us-due-to-coronavirus.html
Coronavirus concerns prompt cancellation of Facebook F8 developer conference“This was a tough call to make — F8 is an incredibly important event for Facebook and it’s one of our favorite ways to celebrate all of you from around the world — but we need to prioritize the health and safety of our developer partners, employees and everyone who helps put F8 on,” Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Facebook’s director of developer platforms and programs, said in a statement.
https://www.cnet.com/news/coronavirus-concerns-prompt-cancellation-of-facebook-f8-developer-conference/
GDC 2020 has been canceledIn recent days, nearly all of the event’s top corporate sponsors announced that they would not be sending employees to the event due to concerns surrounding coronavirus. Microsoft, Unity, Epic, Amazon, Facebook and Sony had all bowed out of the event. GDC’s statement did not reference the virus.
The company behind GDC detailed that they will be refunding conference and expo attendees in full, though a blog post details that the group hopes to host a GDC event later in the summer, noting, “We will be working with our partners to finalize the details and will share more information about our plans in the coming weeks.”
Supplier Report: 11/15/2019
Photo by Andres Urena on Unsplash
Xerox is looking to combine with HP Inc, which brings me back to the early days of this blog. There were rumors that HP Inc and Xerox were going to merge way back in 2015 but then Xerox got involved with Fuji Film and then they were no longer involved with Fuji Film. I am not sure how this deal would work considering Xerox wants to acquire HP which has the bigger market cap.
Google’s growing pains continue as critics ponder why the company is pushing so hard to get into hardware while the Government investigates them.
After years of fending off Microsoft, Slack is looking vulnerable due to poor paid growth projections. Everybody seems to be loving Microsoft at the moment, but they know how to be aggressive when they want to be, and they seem to want Slack out of the way.
Acquisitions/Investments
- HP confirms it has received a proposal from Xerox about being acquired
The Wall Street Journal got things rolling earlier today when it published a report that Xerox was interested in the printer company, reporting the offer could be for more than $27 billion. That’s a lot of money and the company has to at least consider it (assuming it’s accurate).
HP acknowledged there are ongoing discussions between the two companies and that it received an offer letter from Xerox yesterday. What’s odd about this particular deal is that HP is the company with a much larger market cap of $29 billion, while Xerox is just a tad over $8 billion. The canary is eating the cat here.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/06/hp-confirms-it-is-having-discussions-with-xerox-about-being-acquired/
Xerox to Sell Stake in Joint Venture to Fujifilm for About $2.3 BillionXerox has agreed to sell its 25% stake in the venture, Fuji Xerox, to Fujifilm as part of a deal that will bring Xerox total proceeds of $2.3 billion, the companies said.
Xerox has also agreed to sell a majority stake in a smaller joint venture to an affiliate of Fuji Xerox and extended the timeline of an agreement allowing Fujifilm to be a major supplier to Xerox, the companies said.
- Workday to acquire online procurement platform Scout RFP for $540M
The acquisition builds on top of Workday’s existing procurement solutions, Workday Procurement and Workday Inventory, but Workday chief product product officer Petros Dermetzis wrote in a blog post announcing the deal that Scout gives the company a more complete solution for customers.
“With increased importance around the supplier as a strategic asset, the acquisition of Scout RFP will help accelerate Workday’s ability to deliver a comprehensive source-to-pay solution with a best-in-class strategic sourcing offering, elevating the office of procurement in strategic importance and transforming the procurement function,” he wrote.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/04/workday-to-acquire-online-procurement-platform-scout-rfp-for-540m/
- T-Mobile’s latest merger gambit isn’t subtle
The three programs T-Mobile announced are contingent on the merger. The company will only provide these services if it is able to complete its merger with Sprint. These programs are each cleverly designed to give T-Mobile instant rebuttals to potential criticisms of the merger. They’re so well-crafted that I can’t help but applaud how genius they are as pieces of propaganda. Even calling them “propaganda” makes me the asshole!
https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/8/20954479/t-mobiles-5g-publicity-stunt-firefighters-merger-sprint
Artificial Intelligence
- OpenAI has published the text-generating AI it said was too dangerous to share
GPT-2 is part of a new breed of text-generation systems that have impressed experts with their ability to generate coherent text from minimal prompts. The system was trained on eight million text documents scraped from the web and responds to text snippets supplied by users. Feed it a fake headline, for example, and it will write a news story; give it the first line of a poem and it’ll supply a whole verse.
It’s tricky to convey exactly how good GPT-2’s output is but the model frequently produces eerily cogent writing that can often give the appearance of intelligence (though that’s not to say what GPT-2 is doing involves anything we’d recognize as cognition.) But play around with the system long enough and its limitations become clear. It particularly suffers with the challenge of long-term coherence; for example, consistently using the names and attributes of characters in a story, or sticking to a single subject in a news article.
- Google’s AI education tool makes it easy to train models for your projects
Google’s Teachable Machine is no longer just a handy lesson in AI — you can now put it to work. The tech giant has launched Teachable Machine 2.0 with the ability to use your machine learning model in apps, websites and other projects. You can upload your model if you need it to work online, or save it if you’d rather have it on-device. You could create your own Not Hotdog app without having to craft an AI system by hand.
Teachable Machine can also accept more than just images. You can train AI models based on sound and poses in addition to the usual image data (including photos, not just webcam images). Want to determine whether or not your music is metal enough? Now you can. The system also lets you upload your own data sets if you have some on hand, and can train more than three classes per model if necessary.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/11/07/google-teachable-machine-2/
Cloud
- Indeed says Deloitte, IBM, Accenture top hirers for blockchain staff
The report observed that software roles make up the highest percentage of crypto and blockchain jobs. Deloitte, IBM, Accenture, Cisco and Collins Aerospace are the top five companies hiring for crypto and blockchain roles. Another consultancy, EY, comes in at number six. But the proliferation of blockchain technology is not limited to one industry and startups are popping up everywhere.
The data covered both blockchain and cryptocurrencies, and the top six appear to be firmly in the enterprise blockchain camp. One startup – ConsenSys – falls into both sectors. Earlier in the year it was in the top ten but has now fallen to number 13 on the list of top hirers.
https://www.ledgerinsights.com/indeed-says-deloitte-ibm-accenture-top-hirers-for-blockchain-staff/
Security/Privacy
- With a Laser, Researchers Say They Can Hack Alexa, Google Home or Siri
Researchers in Japan and at the University of Michigan said Monday that they had found a way to take over Google Home, Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri devices from hundreds of feet away by shining laser pointers, and even flashlights, at the devices’ microphones.
In one case, they said, they opened a garage door by shining a laser beam at a voice assistant that was connected to it. They also climbed 140 feet to the top of a bell tower at the University of Michigan and successfully controlled a Google Home device on the fourth floor of an office building 230 feet away. And by focusing their lasers using a telephoto lens, they said, they were able to hijack a voice assistant more than 350 feet away.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/technology/digital-assistant-laser-hack.html
- Google’s cybersecurity project ‘Chronicle’ is in trouble
The employees Motherboard talked to said people have been leaving the company due to “a distant CEO” and “a lack of clarity about Chronicle’s future.” A former employee called Gillett a figurehead who didn’t care what everyone did outside of money matters. Sales and engineering people have apparently been finding other roles in Google or leaving the company entirely, because they have no product roadmap.
Gillett himself already left for another role inside Google, while co-founder and chief security Mike Wiacek exited the tech giant. “Chronicle had one of the most healthy and vibrant corporate cultures I could imagine. Things were never perfect, but that’s important,” Wiacek wrote in his farewell note. Motherboard says Will Robinson, the Chief Technology Officer, also announced internally that he’s leaving the company.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/11/09/google-chronicle-trouble/
Software/SaaS
- Microsoft reveals the future of OneNote and it’s all about Fluid and desktop
So what does this mean for the separate OneNote for Windows 10 app? Hodes didn’t reveal exactly what Microsoft is planning, but Mike Tholfsen, a Microsoft product manager, says “there will still be a Desktop and separate Windows 10 app.” It’s hard to imagine that two OneNote apps will exist to confuse Windows 10 users, but Microsoft does still have two Skype apps. It’s far more likely that at some point Microsoft will put development of this dedicated version on hold, as the company will start installing OneNote 2016 by default with Office 365 installs in March.
Microsoft experimented with universal Office apps for Windows 10, but the company put these apps on hold last year. “We are currently prioritizing development for the iOS and Android versions of our apps; and on Windows, we are prioritizing Win32 and web versions of our apps,” explained a Microsoft spokesperson at the time.
- Slack continues to sink as analysts worry Microsoft will kill it
The Microsoft threat is a big reason why Slack’s stock, which debuted in late June through a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange, has plunged in the past few months. It’s a classic David vs. Goliath story — except that most investors don’t believe Slack has a big enough rock to slay the giant from Redmond, Washington.
Slack shares fell 2% Friday and dipped below $20, hitting an all-time low that is 25% below the stock’s reference price of $24 on the day of its Wall Street debut. The stock has plummeted more than 50% from its peak of $42, which it reached on its first day of trading.
The company reported a big loss and slowing sales growth in September, news that spooked investors.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/08/investing/slack-stock-microsoft-teams/index.html
Infrastructure/Hardware
- Why Google, a software giant, is spending billions to get into gadgets
Despite the billions Google has spent to get into hardware, the tech giant is still a small player in gadgets. Its Android smartphone operating software is in more than three times the number of global devices as Apple’s, but Google continues pushing its Pixel-brand phones, a laggard in market share. Advances in hardware like GPS and radar mean gadget makers are increasingly the gatekeepers for companies that make software for mobile phones. In terms of data collection, having customers using both the device and the operating system is akin to owning the mall rather than just the department store in it.