Tag: Trump

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Supplier Report: 3/29/2019

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.”

    https://www.macrumors.com/2019/03/21/apple-reportedly-acquired-stamplay/

Artificial Intelligence

  • 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.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/18/trumps-views-about-crazy-self-driving-cars-are-at-odds-with-his-dot/

  • 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.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/19/oracle-adds-more-ai-features-to-its-suite-of-sales-tools/

  • What AI Is Still Far From Figuring Out

    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.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-ai-is-still-far-from-figuring-out-11553112473

Cloud

  • 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.”

    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/17/google-yeti-gaming-announcement-expectations.html

    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.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/23/18278450/apple-gaming-subscription-service-iphone-ipad-march-25-rumor
    Microsoft’s Xbox boss responds to Google Stadia, promises ‘we will go big’ for E3

    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.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/20/18273991/google-stadia-microsoft-xbox-phil-spencer-response-comments

  • 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.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/20/technology/military-contract-deap-ubhi.html

Security

  • 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.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/21/facebook-plaintext-passwords/
    What a surprise, an article about Facebook not properly managing personal data…

  • 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.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/us/politics/jared-kushner-whatsapp.html

Software/SaaS

  • 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.

    https://www.techiexpert.com/ibm-launches-a-blockchain-based-global-payments-network/

  • 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.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/22/how-salesforce-paved-the-way-for-the-saas-platform-approach/

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • 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.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pan48b/microsoft-says-the-fcc-overstates-broadband-availability-in-the-us

  • 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.

    https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/3/19/18272523/apple-256gb-ram-imac-pro-5200-update-configure-build

  • How phones went from $200 to $2,000

    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.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/18/18263584/why-phones-are-so-expensive-price-apple-samsung-google

Other

  • 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.

    https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/oracle-swings-the-layoff-axe-and-clearcuts-teams-of-engineers.amp.html

  • 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.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90322678/google-hit-with-another-eu-antitrust-fine-the-grand-total-now-comes-to-e8-2b

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

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News You Can Use: 1/16/2019

  • Government Employees Are Being Recruited On Social Media To Work For Lyft, Uber, And Postmates

    Companies like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Postmates, and Instacart offer these workers the opportunity to earn money as independent contractors without having to get a new job. Government employees are allowed to take outside work during the shutdown, as long as it doesn’t violate the government ethics rules that typically apply to their employment.

    Already in the Washington, DC, area — where 71% of IT workers said they’d jump ship from their current jobs to work for Amazon — government employees have reportedly been turning to Uber and Lyft. And Postmates has also seen a “significant spike” in applications for delivery roles since Dec. 20, a company spokesperson said in an email to BuzzFeed News, although they declined to provide details about the increase.

    https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/government-shutdown-recruit-gig-workers

  • What Can You Buy With 5.7 Billion Dollars? (Trump’s Wall Cost)
  • Older people more likely to share fake news on Facebook, study finds

    Those who shared the most content in general were less likely to share fake news, suggesting the problem is not that some people “will share anything”, the paper said. Instead, people who share a large number of links are more media-savvy, and able to distinguish real from fake online.

    That findings are backed up by the demographic data: over-65s, who came to the internet later in life, shared more than twice as many fake news articles as those in the second-oldest age group, even when controlling for ideology, education and the total number of links shared.

    The authors wrote: “As the largest generation in America enters retirement at a time of sweeping demographic and technological change, it is possible that an entire cohort of Americans, now in their 60s and beyond, lacks the level of digital media literacy necessary to reliably determine the trustworthiness of news encountered online.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/10/older-people-more-likely-to-share-fake-news-on-facebook

  • The Rise and Demise of RSS

    RSS was one of the standards that promised to deliver this syndicated future. To Werbach, RSS was “the leading example of a lightweight syndication protocol.” Another contemporaneous article called RSS the first protocol to realize the potential of Extensible Markup Language (XML), a general-purpose markup language similar to HTML that had recently been developed. It was going to be a way for both users and content aggregators to create their own customized channels out of everything the web had to offer. And yet, two decades later, after the rise of social media and Google’s decision to shut down Google Reader, RSS appears to be a slowly dying technology, now used chiefly by podcasters, programmers with tech blogs, and the occasional journalist. Though of course some people really do still rely on RSS readers, stubbornly adding an RSS feed to your blog, even in 2019, is a political statement. That little tangerine bubble has become a wistful symbol of defiance against a centralized web increasingly controlled by a handful of corporations, a web that hardly resembles the syndicated web of Werbach’s imagining.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mm4z/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss

Photo by Alessio Lin on Unsplash

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News You Can Use: 12/12/2018

  • By going public, dissidents at Google will face some huge risks

    The 60-some people who initially signed Never Again and the dozen who first signed the Dragonfly letter were taking the biggest risk–charging up the hill, not knowing if others would follow. Nevertheless joining a public statement–potentially an ultimatum–against your own employer is a courageous act no matter how many names precede yours.

    And at least some of them are risking the loss of their jobs–whether or not Google fires them. A readiness to resign was also a key element of Never Again. “If push comes to shove…and there’s no other way to stop them…there’s the commitment in the pledge to make the ultimate decision to resign rather than being complicit,” said Ka-Ping Yee, a former Googler and co-organizer of Never Again.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90273385/by-going-public-dissidents-at-google-will-face-some-huge-risks

  • Rudy Giuliani, a Trump cybersecurity adviser, doesn’t understand the internet

    Giuliani’s original tweet on November 30 (above) didn’t contain a period between sentences, which created a hyperlink to G-20.in. An eagle-eyed member of the public — named by the BBC as Atlanta-based marketing director Jason Velazquez — clicked through the link and, finding that it was blank, quickly registered the domain and created a website carrying the “a disgusting anti-President message” to which Giuliani referred.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/04/rudy-giuliani-doesnt-understand-the-internet/
    I am highlighting this not on political bias, but to point out that we need to elect people (and those elected people need to hire) tech-knowledgeable individuals to make policy.

  • How this drug lord created a hippo problem in Colombia
  • Apple Investigated Possible Business Misconduct in Its Supply Chain

    “We have over 2,300 operations employees in China and, while misconduct issues are rare, we take any allegations very seriously and investigate each one thoroughly,” the spokesman said. He declined to disclose what prompted the probe or its findings.

    Inside Apple, the supply-management team in China handling nonelectrical components for iPhones experienced some turnover this year. A top procurement executive left in May, and two junior members of the team exited Apple around that time, according to people familiar with the departures. The reasons for their exits aren’t clear. Apple declined to comment on the departures.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-investigated-possible-business-misconduct-in-its-supply-chain-1543620611

  • Is ethical tech a farce?

    If profits beat ethics, is ethical tech possible? Simply put, yes. There is a different genre of tech startup that values impact over profits. They are tech nonprofits. Rather than building products that satisfy animalistic behavior, from screen addiction to fear mongering, tech nonprofits are building technology to fill gaps in basic human needs — education, human rights, healthcare. Or as an early tech nonprofit Mozilla stated in its manifesto, technology that, “must enrich the lives of human beings.” Tech nonprofits are building tech products that serve customers where markets have failed.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/05/is-ethical-tech-a-farce/

Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash

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Supplier Report: 9/21/2018

The Source: China Trade Wars

The trade war with China might actually happen. Alibaba is backing off a promise to bring 1 million jobs to the United States due to President Trump’s impending tariffs. Some believe Jack Ma is using this latest news to back out of something he had no intention of delivering on.

Amazon might have a corporate espionage issue, Intel is having a hard time keeping up with demand, and some trendy tech firms are over San Francisco.

Acquisitions

  • Time Magazine Sold to Salesforce Founder Marc Benioff for $190 Million

    Nearly eight months after Meredith Corp.completed its purchase of Time Inc., the publisher has agreed to sell Time magazine for $190 million to Marc Benioff, co-founder of Salesforce.com , CRM and his wife Lynne Benioff.

    The proposed sale is expected to close within 30 days. The Benioffs are buying Time as individuals; the agreement is unrelated to Salesforce.com, where Mr. Benioff also serves as chairman and co-chief executive.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/time-magazine-sold-to-salesforce-founder-marc-benioff-for-190-million-1537137165?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • Adobe Buys Marketing-Automation Firm Marketo for $4.75 Billion

    The deal is expected to add scale to Adobe’s existing marketing-technology capabilities. It also will bolster the company’s clout with business-to-business brands, which make up the bulk of Marketo’s customer base. Reuters earlier reported that Adobe and Marketo were in talks.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/adobe-buys-marketing-automation-firm-marketo-for-4-75-billion-1537473995

  • MariaDB acquires Clustrix

    MariaDB, the company behind the eponymous MySQL drop-in replacement database, today announced that it has acquired Clustrix, which itself is a MySQL drop-in replacement database, but with a focus on scalability. MariaDB will integrate Clustrix’s technology into its own database, which will allow it to offer its users a more scalable database service in the long run.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/20/mariadb-acquires-clusterix/

Artificial Intelligence

  • Top Healthcare AI Trends To Watch

    AI faces both technical and feasibility challenges that are unique to the healthcare industry. For example, there’s no standard format or central repository of patient data in the United States.

    When patient files are faxed, emailed as unreadable PDFs, or sent as images of handwritten notes, extracting information poses a unique challenge for AI.

    But big tech companies like Apple have an edge here, especially in onboarding a large network of partners, including healthcare providers and EHR vendors.

    https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/ai-trends-healthcare/

Security

  • Your Network Has Been Hacked. You Have 72 Hours to Report It.

    The fast turnaround creates a challenge for companies. “The biggest challenge is knowing enough about the incident to actually report it,” says Jim Routh, chief security officer at Aetna Inc. AET -0.25% “We have to do some analysis to figure out what the scope or impact is, and it’s often days before we have that identified.”

    Aetna meets that challenge by informing regulators almost immediately upon learning of a possible breach and then updating them as the company learns more, Mr. Routh says.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/your-network-has-been-hacked-you-have-72-hours-to-report-it-1537322400

  • Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

    Employees of Amazon, primarily with the aid of intermediaries, are offering internal data and other confidential information that can give an edge to independent merchants selling their products on the site, according to sellers who have been offered and purchased the data, as well as brokers who provide it and people familiar with internal investigations.

    The practice, which violates company policy, is particularly pronounced in China, according to some of these people, because the number of sellers there is skyrocketing. As well, Amazon employees in China have relatively small salaries, which might embolden them to take risks.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-investigates-employees-leaking-data-for-bribes-1537106401

Software/SaaS

  • Oracle missed Wall Street revenue targets and the stock is tumbling.

    Business software maker Oracle Corp on Monday missed revenue estimates for the first quarter, as sales in its cloud services and license support unit disappointed, sending its shares down 5 percent in extended trading.

    Revenue from the unit, its biggest division by sales, rose 3.2 percent to $6.61 billion, missing the average analyst estimate of $6.71 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/r-oracle-first-quarter-revenue-up-1-percent-2018-9

  • Oracle Buys Its Way to Stability

    About $10 billion was spent during the quarter on 212 million shares, the company said in its conference call. That makes for a record amount for the company in a given quarter and brings the total spent on buybacks over the past 12 months to about $21 billion. Oracle has averaged a little more than $7 billion in buybacks on an annual basis over its past nine fiscal years, according to S&P Capital IQ.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/oracle-buys-its-way-to-stability-1537296117
    IBM was doing this for years and only just recently stopped.

Datacenter/Hardware

  • Intel’s Shortages Chip Away at Micron

    Intel, in other words, has many demanding customers competing for a finite amount of manufacturing capacity. And while the company has already boosted its planned capital expenditure for the year by $1 billion, such facilities can’t be expanded quickly—especially while the company is struggling to shift some of its production to a new, more advanced 10-nanometer process. That makes it difficult to respond to rapid changes in the market, like the recent surprising jump in PC demand. Second quarter PC shipments grew globally for the first time in six years, according to Gartner.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/intels-shortages-chip-away-at-micron-1537512343?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

Other

  • Trump Hits China With Tariffs on $200 Billion in Goods, Escalating Trade War

    The tariffs on $200 billion worth of products comes on top of the $50 billion worth already taxed earlier this year, meaning nearly half of all Chinese imports into the United States will soon face levies. The next wave of tariffs, which are scheduled to go into effect on Sept. 24, will start at 10 percent before climbing to 25 percent on Jan. 1. The timing of the staggered increase will partially reduce the toll of price increases for holiday shoppers buying Chinese imports in the coming months.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/17/us/politics/trump-china-tariffs-trade.html

    Alibaba will no longer bring 1 million jobs to the US, citing tariffs

    Ma told Chinese state-run news outlet Xinhua today that his promise was based on the assumption that the US and China would have “rational trade relations,” which is no longer the case. “This promise was based on friendly US-China partnership and rational trade relations,” Ma said. “The current situation has already ruined that. There is no way to complete the promise now, but we won’t stop working hard to promote the healthy development of China-US trade.” Last week, Ma announced his plans to retire this year and hand over the company to its current CEO. He denied rumors that he was being forced out.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/19/17879844/alibaba-us-jobs-tariffs

  • Tech expansion: Up and out of SF

    The unemployment and office vacancy rates in San Francisco are near historic lows, while tech stocks, including Salesforce, have set new highs. Housing prices continue to soar, with few homes coming on the market. For San Francisco’s fastest-growing businesses, there are two places to put employees: up or out. The answer is often both, with software engineers more typically getting the pricey space in new towers at headquarters and support and sales going to cheaper, roomier cities.

    https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/For-San-Francisco-s-fast-growing-tech-13227433.php

  • Google Employees Are Quitting Over The Company’s Secretive China Search Project

    When Poulson resigned in August, he said he only planned to share his concerns about Dragonfly with those inside Google. But when Google didn’t respond to a group of human rights organizations that presented it with a letter arguing that Dragonfly is unethical and asking the company to kill the project, Poulson felt compelled to share his opinion with the public.

    “I’m offended that no weight has been given to the human rights community having a consensus,” he said. “If you have coalition letter from 14 human rights organizations, and that can’t even make it into the discussions on the ethics behind a decision, I’d rather stand with the human rights organizations in this dispute.”

    https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/google-project-dragonfly-employees-quitting

Posted on

Supplier Report: 9/1/2018

The Source: Corporate Values and the open road

The fight between Oracle and Google isn’t over… according to Google. The company vows to fight the most recent software ruling (in favor of Oracle) all the way to the Supreme Court.

Apple bought a company focused on AR lenses. Will the company release “Apple Glass” and pretend they were first and everyone wearing AR glasses looks cool?

Microsoft is requiring suppliers in their supply chain to give employees paid family leave. This is another example (after Apple) of how a large company can promote benefits and well being outside of their organization.

Acquisitions

  • Apple buys startup focused on lenses for AR glasses

    Apple confirmed it acquired Longmont, Colorado-based Akonia Holographics. “Apple buys smaller companies from time to time, and we generally don’t discuss our purpose or plans,” the iPhone maker said in a statement.

    Akonia could not immediately be reached for comment. The company was founded in 2012 by a group of holography scientists and had originally focused on holographic data storage before shifting its efforts to creating displays for augmented reality glasses, according to its website.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-tech/apple-buys-startup-focused-on-lenses-for-ar-glasses-idUSKCN1LE2VS

  • Cognizant to Acquire SaaSfocus to Expand Salesforce Cloud Consulting Capabilities

    Cognizant (Nasdaq : CTSH ) today announced it has agreed to acquire SaaSfocus, a privately-held consulting firm specializing in digital transformation, leveraging the Salesforce Platform. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2018, subject to certain closing conditions. Financial details were not disclosed.

    SaaSfocus is one of the largest independent Salesforce Platinum consulting partners in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region with operations across Australia and India. The acquisition will expand Cognizant’s end-to-end digital transformation services and Salesforce cloud capabilities in these growing markets.

    https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cognizant-to-acquire-saasfocus-to-expand-salesforce-cloud-consulting-capabilities-300701228.html

  • Trump says Amazon, Facebook, and Google represent a ‘very antitrust situation’

    “I won’t comment on the breaking up, of whether it’s that or Amazon or Facebook,” Trump said, replying to a question on whether tech companies like Facebook and Google should be regulated and potentially broken up by the US government. “As you know, many people think it is a very antitrust situation, the three of them. But I just, I won’t comment on that.” Trump reiterated his claim that “conservatives have been treated very unfairly” by Google. “I tell you there are some moments where we say, ’Wow that really is bad, what they’re doing,’” he added.

    It is not clear why Amazon is included in this latest round of criticism, as it does not operate a communications platform, but it’s likely because Trump personally dislikes Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post, which Bezos owns, and has criticized Amazon frequently in the past over apparent tax issues.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/30/17802566/president-donald-trump-amazon-facebook-google-antitrust-silicon-valley-liberal-bias

Cloud

  • Thailand is becoming a critical country for blockchain

    To understand how a small country like Thailand can move so quickly in the blockchain space, it’s crucial to understand the strategy of regulators and local companies. Unlike their U.S. peers, most Asian blockchain companies and exchanges work with local regulators right from the beginning, even as they are first building their products and growing their communities. These teams use formal and informal relationships to get buy-in from their respective local governments in order to bolster their credibility. This pattern is particularly true for Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/31/thailand-blockchain/

Security

  • Yahoo, Bucking Industry, Scans Emails for Data to Sell Advertisers

    Yahoo’s owner, the Oath unit of Verizon Communications Inc has been pitching a service to advertisers that analyzes more than 200 million Yahoo Mail inboxes and the rich user data they contain, searching for clues about what products those users might buy, said people who have attended Oath’s presentations as well as current and former employees of the company.

    Oath said the practice extends to AOL Mail, which it also owns. Together, they constitute the only major U.S. email provider that scans user inboxes for marketing purposes.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/yahoo-bucking-industry-scans-emails-for-data-to-sell-advertisers-1535466959

Software/SaaS

  • Oracle v. Google ain’t over yet — Google vows it’ll appeal to Supreme Court

    The search giant said Tuesday that it’ll appeal the case to the Supreme Court, after a federal appeals court declined to rehear the case in which it determined the company’s use of Java software from Oracle went beyond the bounds of fair use. Oracle had previously asked for $8.8 billion in damages.

    “We are disappointed that the Federal Circuit overturned the jury finding that Java is open and free for everyone,” a Google spokeswoman said in a statement. “We will appeal to the Supreme Court to defend this principle against companies like Oracle, whose restrictive practices threaten to stifle the work of new generations of tech developers.”

    https://www.cnet.com/news/oracle-v-google-aint-over-yet-google-vows-itll-appeal-to-supreme-court/

Other

  • Amazon Is Beefing With Bernie Sanders Over Its Treatment of Employees

    Even Amazon’s attempt to quell concerns about its employees using the SNAP program fell flat. It starts by giving Sanders grief for referring to the program as food stamps, and then states that those numbers “include people who only worked for Amazon for a short period of time and/or chose to work part-time,” implying that part-time employees needing to rely on food stamps is reasonable.

    Sanders used Amazon’s rebuttals to fuel his fire, tweeting on Wednesday that the company should “prove” its claims by “mak[ing] public the number of people you hire through temporary staffing agencies like Integrity Staffing Solutions and make public the hourly rate and benefits those workers earn.”

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ev8eqp/amazon-is-beefing-with-bernie-sanders-over-its-treatment-of-employees

  • Microsoft to Require Its Suppliers, Contractors to Give Paid Family Leave

    The policy applies to Microsoft vendors with more than 50 employees and covers workers given substantial assignments for Microsoft. For example, a staffing agency that provides information-technology professionals to Microsoft and other clients would only have to cover employees assigned to Microsoft. It will impact thousands of workers around the country, the company said.

    The paid leave benefit requirement will be capped at $1,000 a week in compensation, and Microsoft suppliers have 12 months to implement the change.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-to-require-its-suppliers-contractors-to-give-paid-family-leave-1535635800?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

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