The Taiwan flag emoji has disappeared from the latest iPhone versions for users in Hong Kong and Macau, the Hong Kong Free Press's Kris Cheng reports. 

Users on Hong Kong online forums spotted this change. The People's Republic of China claims Taiwan as one of its provinces and does not recognize it as an independent country. 

When Hong Kong and Macau users updated to iOS 13.1.1 or above, the emoji for the Republic of China flag, or Taiwan's flag, disappeared from the emoji keyboard. The iOS 13.1.1 rolled out at the end of September.

Previously, the Taiwan flag emoji was already not present for iPhones in mainland China. An article on the Apple blog Hiraku says that any device model with the "CN" or "ZA" region, meaning China and Hong Kong, will not be able to use the Taiwan flag emoji. The same applies if users have a device from another region but has been set to Hong Kong or Macau. 

Business Insider has reached out to Apple for comment. 

The hardware required to launch three people out to the moon, land two on the lunar surface, and then bring everyone home is monstrous. To that end during its Apollo program, NASA crafted the Saturn V rocket.

Each Saturn V stood about 363 feet (111 meters) tall and 33 feet (10 meters) wide. Such scale is hard to fathom, but it's like filling up a small office tower with enough liquid fuel and oxidizer to level a small town.

The giant machine powered the world's first crewed moon-landing mission — the Apollo 11 astronauts stepped onto the moon on July 20, 1969. Five more moon landings followed, though no one has returned in decades.

Blue Origin, founded by the billionaire Jeff Bezos, is competing for a lunar return with SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk.

On Saturday from Boca Chica, Texas — a relatively remote location at the southeastern tip of Texas, where SpaceX has created an evolving private launch site — Musk revealed the newest design for Starship.

Read more: A stirring new SpaceX animation of Starship launching shows how the rocket company plans to turn Texas into Earth's interplanetary transport hub

Starship is SpaceX's towering and ostensibly fully reusable solution to deep-space travel.

Over the past few years, Musk has shown several versions of the vehicle, which is envisioned as having two fully reusable (and thus absurdly cheap to launch) rocket stages: a 22-story booster, called Super Heavy, and a 16-story spaceship, called Starship.

Musk believes Starship would ferry about 100 people and 150 tons of cargo to Mars at a time starting in the mid-2020s — though he or SpaceX have yet to provide any specific plans for life support systems and other gear that's vital to keeping people alive in space and on another planet.

NASA is also planning to return humans to the lunar surface in 2024 with its own rocket system, called Space Launch System (SLS). But that program is years behind schedule and over budget by hundreds of millions of dollars, so Musk is pitching Starship as a capable alternative.

"This is gonna sound pretty crazy, but ... with an uncrewed vehicle, I believe we could land on the moon in two years," Musk told Time Editor at Large Jeffrey Kluger on July 12. "So then maybe within a year or two of that we could be sending crew. I would say four years at the outside."

Musk showed off his engineers' newest version of the Starship design on September 28 before an impressive, though rapidly assembled, prototype called Starship Mark 1 (Mk1).

Compared to his most recent presentation about the launch system, in September 2018, the vehicle's height hasn't changed too much. The spaceship shrunk about 16 feet (5 meters) and the booster grew by about as much. Stacked together, a final hypothetical craft would stand about 387 feet (118 meters) tall and 30 feet (9 meters) wide.

To make the booster-and-rocket-ship system a reality, SpaceX is developing and launching prototypes in South Texas. The illustration at the top of this story compares two of those early test beds (at left) with Starship, NASA's Saturn V, and the space agency's planned SLS.

Starhopper, which is not designed to go to space, finished three rounds of demonstration launches from April through August. During its final flight, the rocket soared to about 490 feet (150 meters) into the air, hovered toward a nearby beach, and then landed on a concrete pad. (It has proven an irresistible subject of photographers even after being stripped of its Raptor rocket engine and other equipment.)

The current plan is to make Starship out of stainless steel, which Musk has said would make the launch system more durable and far less expensive.

SpaceX finished the outer hull of the Starship Mk 1 prototype just before Musk's presentation. Musk has said that prototype could fly to 12.4 miles (20 kilometers) high in the next month or so, and possibly reach orbit by the end of the year.

"I think we want to try to reach orbit in less than six months," Musk said over the weekend — though government officials may pump the brakes on those aspirations due to the existence of a nearby hamlet, called Boca Chica Village.

Read more: New documents reveal SpaceX's plans for launching Mars-rocket prototypes from South Texas

If realized, a fully fueled Starship could weigh more than 9 million pounds (4 million kilograms) at the launch pad. That's about 30% heavier than a Saturn V, though Starship would belch out twice as much thrust from its Super Heavy booster rocket.

If SpaceX engineers can achieve fully reusability and minimal refurbishment with Starship, the system stands to topple the existing rocket-launch industry.

Musk calculated that, in an ideal scenario, one Starship system could launch to space and return three times per day, or about 1,000 times a year. Assuming each launch can fly about 150 tons of payload into orbit, that works out to about 150,000 tons per year.

That's more than 333 times the mass of the football field-size International Space Station. Meanwhile, he said, all of Earth's rockets launching today might together deliver no more than 300 tons into space.

"We're talking about something that is, with a fleet of Starships, 1,000 times more than all Earth capacity combined. All other rockets combined would be 0.1%, including ours," Musk said on Saturday. "But you kind of need that if you're going to build a city on Mars. It's gotta be done."

This story has been updated. It was originally published on July 19, 2019.

Even though Apple has spent less on lobbying than the other tech giants, CEO Tim Cook has forged close ties with President Donald Trump, the Wall Street Journal's Tripp Mickle reports. 

Since 2017, Apple has spent nearly $18 million on lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In comparison, Microsoft spent $24 million, Facebook spent $32 million, Amazon spent $36 million, and Alphabet spent $47 million.

Still, Cook attends dinners and meetings with Donald Trump, has close ties to Trump's senior adviser Jared Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump, and meets regularly with Trump administration officials like economic adviser Larry Kudlow, people close to Apple and the Trump administration told the Journal.

For example, in August, Cook reached out to Kushner to explain how upcoming tariffs would increase iPhone prices and hurt its competition with other phone companies like Samsung. Within days, the Trump administration exempted iPhones, along with other electronics products, from the tariff plan.

A person close to the administration told the Journal that Cook's call with Kushner influenced this decision.

Likewise, Trump refers to Cook as a friend, praises Apple and Cook's business abilities, and even called Cook to wish him a Happy Thanksgiving, a person familiar with the matter told the Journal.

Still, Cook disagrees with Trump on various issues, like immigration and climate change, and 97% of Apple employee donations in the 2018 midterm elections went to Democratic candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. 

Often, Cook or a member of Apple's public affairs team will alert the White House through Kushner or another senior White House official before publicly challenging Trump's policies, former administration officials told the Journal.

Read more: We checked out the neighborhood where Apple is building a new Seattle campus, just blocks away from Amazon HQ

For example, Cook communicated with Trump over his plan to exit from the Paris Climate Accord after Ivanka Trump called on Cook for help, current and former administration officials told the Journal. Trump didn't change his mind, but Cook later wrote an email to employees criticizing Trump's decision.

Cook's close ties to the administration may explain it's relatively low lobbying costs. 

Netflix's animated fantasy series "Disenchantment," from "The Simpsons" creator Matt Groening, is catching audiences' attention in its second season, which debuted in late September.

Every week, Parrot Analytics provides Business Insider with a list of the nine most in-demand TV shows on streaming services. The data is based on "demand expressions," Parrot Analytics' globally standardized TV demand measurement unit. Audience demand reflects the desire, engagement, and viewership weighted by importance, so a stream or download is a higher expression of demand than a "like" or comment on social media, for instance.

Below are this week's nine most popular original shows on Netflix and other streaming services:

McDonald's drive-thru wait times keep stretching longer and longer. But, the fast-food giant is willing to invest millions of dollars to reverse the trend. 

Earlier this week, QSR magazine released its annual Drive-Thru Performance Study. Across the industry, drive-thru times had increased by 20 seconds, with customers spending an average of 255 seconds from speaker to order window in 2019.

The average drive-thru time at McDonald's was 284 seconds, or almost five minutes — an increase of almost 11 seconds over last year's average time. 

Read more: Chick-fil-A's drive-thru service is among the slowest in a new survey — here's how 10 major chains rank

The day before, McDonald's had internally announced a new program aimed at preventing these drive-thru waits from getting any longer. In an internal memo dated September 30 and obtained by Business Insider, McDonald's announced a new, optional program intended to encourage franchisees with modernized locations and single-lane drive-thrus to upgrade their drive-thrus. 

"As we continue to look for opportunities to build our drive-thru business and capitalize on the success we've seen in drive-thru this year, we are introducing a new side-by-side drive-thru standalone program," the memo reads. 

The program essentially means that more locations will be encouraged to open a second lane, internally called side-by-side drive-thrus. In recent years, as McDonald's has increasingly emphasized kiosk and mobile ordering sales, locations were required to have 90 cars coming through during peak hours to be eligible for a side-by-side drive-thru; the new program lowers that figure to 70 cars during peak hours. 

McDonald's previously announced a program to encourage franchisees to update their restaurants as part of the company's "Bigger, Bolder Vision 2020" — or BBV 2020 — growth plan. While many franchisees pushed back against investments required by BBV 2020, such as restaurant redesigns, the National Owners Association said in January that drive-thrus were an aspect of the growth plan that "will actually produce a return on investment."

The new drive-thru program's commitment letter and implementation details have not been finalized. However, according to the memo, the new program will be funded similarly to BBV 2020 — franchisees who choose to participate will pay 10% of the costs upfront, then receive a five-year rent reduction equal to 40% of total project costs. 

McDonald's quest to fix drive-thru

McDonald's drive-thru times have been getting longer every year for the last six years, according to QSR magazine.

The slowdown has been part of an industry-wide shift, as wait times across the industry have grown longer, menus have gotten more complex, and executives have focused on in-store innovations such as tablets. Plus, more customers means longer wait times — and QSR found that Chick-fil-A and McDonald's tend to have the most people waiting in line. 

McDonald's declined to comment for this article. However, CEO Steve Easterbrook told investors on an earnings call in June that global directors and other executives decided earlier in the year it was time that the company make a serious effort to improve drive-thru. 

"We kind of had a white-of-the-eyes conversation at the start of March. And we collectively agreed that we were going to renew some emphasis on the drive-thru service times," Easterbrook said. "They've been going the wrong way with most of our markets for three or four years for reasons we can understand, as we've added more to our business, but we knew that wasn't a sustaining trend."

Later in March, McDonald's announced it would acquire artificial-intelligence startup Dynamic Yield in a $300 million deal.

Dynamic Yield's technology will allow drive-thru menus to update instantaneously. For example, if a customer is ordering a coffee, an AI-enabled drive-thru will be able to suggest that the customer add on an order of donut sticks, ideally convincing customers to spend more. McDonald's began testing the technology at drive-thrus in 2018 and plans to roll out the tech at drive-thrus by the end of the year. 

In September, McDonald's announced another acquisition that could assist in drive-thru: Apprente, a voice technology startup. According to a press release from the company, Apprente is "expected to allow for faster, simpler and more accurate order taking." 

Countless tweaks can cut seconds off drive-thru times

While the acquisitions have been McDonald's most clear-cut drive-thru investments, the fast-food giant has been making many behind-the-scenes tweaks to speed up drive-thru times.

"When you talk about progress in the drive-thru, I mean, frankly, it will improve," Easterbrook said in June. "We want to get incremental improvement week-to-week-to-week. So, each time a customer comes back, say a week or two later, they can notice a few seconds difference." 

Menu simplification has helped speed up service time, according to Easterbrook. In April, news broke that McDonald's was cutting its more expensive Signature Crafted Recipes burgers and sandwiches from the menu and slashing items from its late-night menu. 

Read more: Leaked documents reveal that McDonald's is about to slash items from its late-night menu 

McDonald's is trying to gamify the process with an incentive program that pits locations against each other as they compete for the fastest service times. According to the company, a competition between markets around the US earlier this year helped speed up service times and boost customer counts. 

McDonald's is also rolling out new technology and diagnostic tools that allow workers to have a better handle on what might be slowing down drive-thrus. 

"They can basically decompose the various elements of a drive-thru visit for a customer into its constituent seconds," Easterbrook said in June. "So, how long are we taking to take the orders? How long are we taking to take the payment? How long it takes us to gather the food and present it? How many cars are we asking to pull forward and bring the food later?"

Do you work at McDonald's or another fast-food chain and have a story to share? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. 

The social media website Reddit is made up of thousands of different forums, called "subreddits," devoted to different topics.

Like any online community that reaches a certain thresh hold of users, space is liable to becoming toxic. Reddit bills itself as "the front page of the Internet," so, unfortunately, it comes with all the problems that plague the rest of the Internet, including racism, misogyny, homophobia, and other things generally upsetting.

Outlets like The Atlantic and Jezebel have reported on how toxic Reddit can be for women, and this applies to just about every marginalized group. The website has a history of deeply offensive subreddits, many of which have been banned, like "FatPeopleHate," premised on being hateful towards people over their appearance, or "Creepshots," where (usually male) users post sexualized images of women without their consent.

Reddit has tried to be vigilant and update its anti-harassment rules, although this hasn't totally eliminated the problem. Even though these specific subreddits were shut down, people who frequented them can still post in other threads, and sexist, racist, homophobic attitudes pop up in other subreddits all the time in my experience.

These kinds of posts can make Reddit basically inaccessible for many people who don't want to face posts that dehumanize them. For survivors of sexual violence, for example, the violent words and imagery can be triggering, and finding fun posts on Reddit is not worth the potential risk of seeing something terrible.

Subreddits exist for nearly every topic you can think of. Some are dedicated to posters asking for advice from the wider Reddit community on a variety of topics. On r/relationships, people post asking for advice on friendships, family, and romantic relationships.

R/AITA, which stands for Am I the A--hole, is a place for users to lay out a sometimes one-sided scenario, and hopefully get validation that they were not, in fact, the jerk in the situation. The legal advice subreddit is, as you'd expect, a place for people to ask for answers to their legal questions from members who don't always claim to be legal experts.

Some of the posts on these subreddits can be genuinely hilarious, the kind of thing you send in all your group chats. The problem comes in when you have to wade through sad, offensive, or just annoying posts to get to the good stuff. For every funny but benign relationship post, there are a few that have been upvoted to the top of the page that seem too outlandish to be real or have genuinely upsetting details that only a professional would be qualified to comment on.

Well, what if there was a way to get a curated feed of only the best posts on these and your other favorite subreddits?

Enter: Twitter.

Each of these subreddits has Twitter accounts that almost exclusively tweet posts from the forums. But these aren't bots, uncritically reposting everything. Instead, the people running these accounts handpick the best of the best. It's not a perfect system — someone still has to read through the whole subreddit to find the posts worth sharing — but it saves most of us from reading through depressing post after depressing post. 

You might think the millions of followers that popular social-media influencers have come from expensive equipment and years of experience.

But some of the internet's top creators say one of the best tools to use, especially starting out, is simply your smartphone. 

Although many smartphones today, like some of the latest Apple iPhones at an upwards of $1,000, can cost as much as a fancy DSLR camera, 81% percent of Americans already own a smartphone, according to the Pew Research Center. And it's likely the smartphone you already own is good enough to start with. 

We spoke to top influencers ranging from Benji Travis, who has been creating content online for over a decade, to recent internet stars like Jennelle Eliana Long, who rose to fame in just under a month, on what tools they used to get started.

They debunked the misconception that you need tons of money to begin and shared their personal experiences building a business empire online.

From using the camera on your phone and a $30 video editing app to get started on YouTube, to utilizing popular apps like Instagram to get in touch with your favorite brands and build a potential sponsorship, here's how to start an influencer career from your smartphone. 

To read the full posts, subscribe to Business Insider Prime.

Read the full post here: How to start a YouTube career without spending tons of money, according to a creator with millions of subscribers

Tyler "Ninja" Blevins is the most recognizable professional gamer in the world, and on August 1, he announced that he would be leaving his 14 million Twitch followers behind for an exclusive streaming deal with Microsoft's Mixer.

The move was seen as a major gamble, since Twitch is by far the most dominant platform for video game streaming, and Mixer has struggled to find a foothold in the industry since its launch in 2016. After a well-publicized debut, Ninja has managed to earn more than 2.3 million followers on Mixer, making him the platform's most popular content creator by far.

Since Ninja arrived, Mixer has also seen a large influx of new streamers giving the platform a chance. According to data from Newzoo, total hours of gaming content streamed on Mixer increased to 32.6 million during the last three months, a 188% increase from the three months prior.

Read more: Jessica Blevins, the 27-year-old manager and wife of the most popular video-game player in the world, reveals the inside story of Ninja's move to Microsoft's Mixer

However, the excitement among streamers hasn't translated into more viewers. Mixer saw a 10.6% decrease in total hours watched during the last three months, according to Newzoo. Data from StreamElements shows that Mixer had less hours watched in September (29.6 million), a month after Ninja arrived, than it did in July (37.7 million), the month before his exclusive deal began.

Newzoo notes that Mixer has more than doubled its viewership since last year, but the situation demonstrates just how hard it is to wrestle viewers away from Twitch. Closing the gap between Twitch and Mixer will take more than just one popular channel, even if its a superstar streamer like Ninja.

"One thing worth noting about Mixer's signing of Ninja is that regardless of his impact on hours watched, it was a smart move to promote the Mixer brand, especially with Ninja doing extensive interviews about it." StreamElements CEO Doron Nir said.

Amazon's streaming juggernaut had 777.6 million hours watched during September, meaning Twitch had more than 20 times the viewership of Mixer. YouTube Gaming's streaming content was in a distant second place in terms of viewership with 175 million viewers in September.

This likely means that Ninja will struggle to reach the same sort of viewership he saw on Twitch in the near future, but the exclusive deal with Microsoft has other benefits. Ninja's manager and wife Jessica Blevins told Business Insider that he chose to leave Twitch so he could expand his brand beyond streaming. Since joining Mixer, Ninja has released a book, announced an apparel deal with Mixer, and appeared on an episode of Fox's "The Masked Singer."

Some streamers who supported Ninja's decision on social media felt it was important for creators to be able to build an audience across different platforms, and for Twitch to have more competition. While none of the potential challengers are currently a threat to Twitch's dominance, having viable alternatives is essential for streamers to leverage their popularity and earning power.

Earth's most powerful tool for detecting ripples in spacetime is getting a major upgrade.

An observatory in Japan is joining three giant detectors in Washington, Louisiana, and Italy to form a global network of high-powered observatories that study ripples in spacetime. The network will enhance a field of science born just four years ago, when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) solved a 100-year-old mystery posed by Albert Einstein. 

In 1916, Einstein predicted that accelerating massive objects, like neutron stars or black holes, would create ripples or "waves" in the fabric of space and time. However, he didn't think these gravitational waves would ever be detected — they seemed too weak to pick up amid all the noise and vibrations on Earth. For 100 years, it seemed Einstein was right.

In the late 1990s, LIGO's machines in Washington and Louisiana were built as an attempt to pick up the signals Einstein thought we'd never detect. 

Finally, after 13 years of silence, LIGO detected its first gravitational waves in September 2015: signals from the merger of two black holes some 1.3 billion light-years away. The discovery opened an entirely new field of gravitational-wave astronomy and earned a Nobel Prize in Physics for three researchers who helped conceive of LIGO.

Since then, LIGO and its Italian companion Virgo have detected two other catastrophic collisions. After the black-hole merger, the observatories detected the merging of two neutron stars in October 2017, followed by what they believe was a black hole swallowing a neutron star in August. Altogether, the observatories have detected likely gravitational waves more than 30 times. 

Read more: An experiment that solved a 100-year-old mystery posed by Einstein is about to turn back on — and it's more powerful than ever

Now LIGO and Virgo are getting another partner: the Kamioka Gravitational-wave Detector (KAGRA) in Japan.

With the help of KAGRA, scientists expect to narrow down the location of massive collisions with three times more accuracy. That would make it much easier for telescopes on Earth to confirm the collision responsible for the waves the network picks up. Representatives from each observatory signed an agreement on Friday.

"The more detectors we have in the global gravitational-wave network, the more accurately we can localize the gravitational-wave signals on the sky, and the better we can determine the underlying nature of cataclysmic events that produced the signals," David Reitze, executive director of the LIGO Laboratory, said in a press release.

The new global network could ultimately detect 100 collisions per year, Vicky Kalogera, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University and LIGO, previously told Business Insider. 

How observatories detect gravitational waves

KAGRA will operate similarly to LIGO. The animation below, created by LIGO researchers, explains how that works.

Each L-shaped gravitational-wave detector consists of two 2.5-mile-long arms. The detector shoots out a laser beam and splits it in two. One of those split beams is sent down a 2.5-mile long tube while the other goes down an identical, perpendicular tube.

 

The beams bounce off mirrors and converge back near the beam splitter. The light waves return at equal length and line up in such a way that they cancel each other out to the detector. 

But when a gravitational wave comes through, it warps spacetime — briefly making one tube longer and the other shorter. This rhythmic stretching-and-squeezing distortion continues until the wave passes. When that happens, the two waves of light don't wind up converging at equal lengths, so they don't neutralize each other. That leads the detector to record some flashes of light.

 

Measuring those changes in brightness thus allows physicists to measure and observe gravitational waves that pass through Earth.

Then once a signal is detected, astronomers alert telescopes around the globe to zero in on the cosmic event that likely triggered the waves.

"This has opened a new window to what we can detect in the universe," Imre Bartos, a physicist at Columbia University and LIGO, previously told Business Insider. "We can detect this — we can now see gravitational waves. But the real exciting things are what we discover with these gravitational waves."

KAGRA brings new approaches to noise problems

KAGRA is expected to come online in December. It will start out slow, operating at levels not sensitive enough to detect gravitational waves. After scientists fine-tune its instruments, they expect it to fully join the hunt sometime in 2020. 

By making the global gravitational-wave detection network more robust, KAGRA will improve its accuracy.

In the 2017 merger of two neutron stars, scientists traced the event's location to a patch of sky 30 square degrees in size — that's less than 0.1 percent of the sky. But with KAGRA's help, researchers expect to narrow that kind of estimate down even more, to just 10 square degrees. That will give telescopes a much more specific location in which to search for the wave-triggering event.

The observatory will also use new approaches to make it less prone to false detections.

Because LIGO and Virgo are extraordinarily sensitive — when a wave passes by, the arms' length changes by less than 1/10,000th of the width of a proton particle — they can easily be disturbed by the vibration of trucks driving on nearby roads or a slight breeze. Even the microscopic movements of atoms in the detector's mirrors can mimic the signal of a gravitational wave.

That's why LIGO has two locations and works with Virgo: If they all detect a signal at exactly the same time, that's likely a gravitational wave passing through Earth.

KAGRA will lend yet another instrument to help verify those detections, and it will operate underground to be better insulated from the interference of wind, Earth's rumbles, and passing trucks.

It will also be the first detector to cryogenically chill its mirrors — the practice of using liquefied gas to achieve temperatures below minus 150 degrees Celsius ( minus 238 degrees Fahrenheit) — to reduce noise from the mirrors' own atoms. (Atoms are always vibrating — the energy of that vibration is what we call heat. So cryogenics will cool the material enough that the molecules almost stop vibrating.)

"These features could supply a very important direction for the future of gravitational-wave detectors with much higher sensitivities," Takaaki Kajita, a principal investigator with the KAGRA project who shared the 2015 Nobel Prize, said in the release.

Yet another observatory, LIGO India, is expected to join the global gravitational-wave network in 2025.

As someone who uses the latest and greatest smartphones from companies like Apple, Samsung, and LG every year, you could argue that I'm a little jaded.

Most new smartphones are great, and they come with cool new features sometimes. But the element of surprise and wonder of a new device is unfortunately mostly lost on me. I grab a box containing a $1,000 smartphone from the Business Insider mail room as if it was a pizza delivery — there's slight excitement for the contents, but it's commonplace and not incredibly special.

Lo, the perils of being a tech reporter.

But twice a year, new phones from OnePlus reignite that missing sense of excitement in a new smartphone. The excited question I ask myself whenever a new OnePlus phone comes out is: "How can this company possibly top the previous phone while keeping it at an attainable price?"

In early 2019, it was the OnePlus 7 Pro. Now, towards the end of 2019, it's the OnePlus 7T. 

Well, they've done it again. Not necessarily with crazy features or things that absolutely no other phone can do; it's that the OnePlus 7T is so good and such a good price.

Here's how OnePlus and the OnePlus 7T continues to surprise me while my drawer is full of the top smartphones from the biggest tech companies:

Joining an unknown startup was not unusual in 1997, at the height of the dot-com boom. But when Rami Rahim accepted an offer to be the 32nd employee  at a "small little upstart" called Juniper Networks, he said some people thought it was a bad idea.

Juniper was building new networking equipment with which it planned to challenge  Cisco, the Silicon Valley giant Rahim described as "an incumbent that was very big and very well-established."

"Let's just say people coached me against trying to take on this intense competition," Rahim told Business Insider. But he joined Juniper anyway. "It was a leap of faith."

That leap of faith paid off. Juniper turned out to be one of the most successful startups of the dot-com era. The networking company also became Rahim's professional home for the next 22 years, as he built his careers. Five years ago, employee number 32 officially became its fourth chief executive.

Today, Rahim is leading Juniper through another tricky transition — one that likely involves another leap of faith.

The company sells networking gear; the plumbing that connects a computing network within an organization and externally to the internet.

It's a tougher market these days than it used to be. With the rise of the cloud, businesses, including major corporations, are now able to set up and maintain networks in web-based platforms run by the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Google. This has allowed them to scale back or even abandon their private data centers, which means dramatically less demand for the hardware from companies like Juniper or Cisco. 

'Juniper is in a difficult spot'

Networking has also become a more competitive space, and one in which Juniper has lost share recently.

In the first quarter of 2018, Juniper was number 4 with 10.4% share in the $3.6 billion market for routers, which are used to connect a network to other networks, according to IDC. It was number 7 with 2.4% share in the $6.8 billion switch market for gear used to connect devices within a network. Both markets are dominated by Cisco, even as Juniper is slugging it out with other players, including Huawei and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. 

"My sense is that Juniper is in a difficult spot," IDC President Crawford Del Prete told Business Insider. 

Beyond the rise of cloud computing, networking gear makers also have had to grapple with the trend called software-defined networking, or SDN. This model allows businesses to use software to squeeze more performance and features out of even cheaper, commodity hardware, making it unnecessary for many to buy pricey, specialized networking gear. This trend is "lowering the margins in the network equipment space, even for service providers, Juniper's core customer set."

"This means that Juniper needs to lower costs in order to compete while at the same time offer value added services to customers – which means heavily investing in R&D," he said. Juniper also has a "more limited set of products" which means it doesn't have the scale of a rival like Cisco.

"My sense is that the company has been trying hard to move into higher value segments as the core networking market becomes more competitive," he said.

Focusing on a big inflection point in networking

Juniper is focused on what Rahim says is "a big inflection point" in networking, which is largely rooted in newer trends in cloud computing. 

One is the hybrid cloud, in which businesses set up some of their infrastructure on a public cloud platform like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, while maintaining some of their network on their own servers and data centers. Another is multi-cloud, which, as the name suggests, involves using multiple of those cloud platforms.

For these models to work, companies need to build networks that straddle different platforms, plus private data centers. "The problem is that's easy to say but much harder to do," Rahim said. 

That's that new market opportunity Juniper is focused on as it develops products aimed at the solving challenges posed by a multi-platform world. The company has struggled with revenue declines as it focused on a new strategy based on new products. Juniper has been reporting revenue declines since late 2017. In June, the company posted second quarter revenue of $1.1 billion, down 8% from the year-ago quarter.

But his team is focused on the long game, Rahim said.

"It is very important for us to play a disruptive game even if in the short term it disrupts us," he said. "From a share standpoint it might appear that Juniper  is losing share because share is measured on a revenue basis, but the more important underlying trend is we're retaining our relevance."

In March, Juniper bought Mist Systems, an AI-powered networking gear maker, for $405 million. Gartner says buying Mist strengthens Juniper's position in wireless local area networking where it had previously relied on partnerships. Mist is considered a top vendor in the space — but that particular market is still dominated by Cisco's Meraki, which was itself a key acquisition, too.

He joined Juniper by accident

As CEO, Rahim can draw many lessons from his own experience as a Juniper pioneer. He was born in Lebanon and grew up in Canada where he became "enamored by technology" in the 1980s. He was a Stanford engineering graduate student during the dot-com boom of the 1990s.

He came across Juniper by accident. A recruiter called him as a reference check for his Stanford roommate who was being considered for a job at the startup. Rahim ended up being hired too.

It was a gamble for another reason. "Back then, Juniper was in stealth mode so they didn't really share that much about what they were doing," Rahim said. "They couldn't share that much, especially with a college grad who they didn't really trust that much."

Eventually, he found out Juniper's game plan: build "a brand new core router from scratch" and challenge Cisco.

"When I say from scratch, it was really from scratch," Rahim said. Building a new product wasn't the only problem. Juniper also had to convince customers to try it out -- which isn't easy, Rahim said. "At the end of the day, nobody is going to bet on an upstart in a way that says, 'I'm going to rip out my existing core network and put an entirely new network."

But enough customers did Juniper's first product, the M40 router, that it became a big hit at a time when companies were struggling to cope with intensifying network traffic from the newly unleashed World Wide Web. 

"Even the most conservative buyers in the world back then were dealing with an insane amount of traffic growth and had no choice but to bet on an upstart that was trying to enter the market," Rahim said. "Quite frankly, our timing was very good."

He lived through the dot-com boom and bust

But the dot-com boom subsequently turned into a bust. That turned out to be Rahim's first major experience with market cycles which he quickly learned can be sudden and dramatic.

"There have certainly been ups and downs in my career here at Juniper," he said. "We went through the dot-com boom, then survived the dot-com bust that destroyed many companies in the valley and elsewhere."

Rahim has witnessed even more ups and downs over the past two decades, as the tech industry went through more dramatic changes. As CEO, he is also navigating the impact of the US-China trade conflict and broader economic uncertainties. There are many factors, Rahim said, that he and his team simply do not control.

"I approach with a certain amount of paranoia everything that we do," he said. "Ultimately our success will depend on our capabilities, our own execution as well as the appetite of our customers to consume."

But it's clear that Juniper will have to chart a new course and make new bold bets like the ones it took and made it successful two decades ago.

"What made us successful in the past was not going to be the thing that makes us successful in the future because of the changes that are happening around us in the industry," he said.

Got a tip about Juniper or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., message him on Twitter @benpimentel. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that the all-electric car maker is totally, completely uninterested in building a motorcycle. 

He points to his own youthful experiences as a rider, including at least one incident when he claimed he was nearly killed at the tender age of 17 in a close-miss accident. The lucky break clearly affected him; he's declared that Tesla, the world's best-known and most successful electric-vehicle company, would never do an electric two-wheeler.

Missed opportunity, if you ask me (I won't argue with Musk's background because motorcycles are a lot more dangerous than cars, but most riders are aware of that and have accepted the risks). Motorcycle sales declined substantially before and after the Great Recession and haven't shown signs of recovering any sort of upward trajectory. For roughly the past 10 years, half a million bikes had been sold annually in the US.

That plateau, combined with an aging demographic for brands such as Harley-Davidson, has led to widespread speculation that the motorcycle industry could be entering a period of slow, structural decline. The only long-term solution to that problem is to get younger riders interested in throwing a leg. 

I think there are five ways to speed up that solution — and critically, I think Tesla is what the market needs to rebound. Here's why:

Snapchat has finally added Spotify into its platform, playing catch-up more than a year after Instagram added a feature making it even easier to share music from the streaming giant.

Since the beginning of September, Snapchat has been rolling out a new integration onto its platform that makes it easier to share with friends the songs, playlists, or podcasts you've been listening to. Music is a key player in the world of social media — just look at the popularity of streaming services and music-based apps like TikTok — and Snapchat has finally taken some notice.

Instagram integrated music into Stories — which ironically, it copied from Snapchat — well over a year ago, and users have taken advantage of it to share their favorite songs or what track symbolizes their current mood. With Snapchat, the new Spotify integration works with not only songs, but playlists, podcasts, artists, and albums.

Here's how to use the Spotify widget to share what you're listening to with your friends on Snapchat:

The Disrupt conference in San Francisco, organized by Tech Crunch, is a longstanding showcase for cutting-edge startups and products. But the star of this year's show was not a buzzy new app for swapping selfies or a new cloud platform; it was an arcane process for companies to sell their stock to the public. 

The so-called direct listing was inescapable during the three-day conference, debated on stage by venture capital investors and founders, and discussed in the halls by the software developers, journalists and other guests.

With the conference taking place just days after WeWork shelved its highly-anticipated initial public offering, the focus on going public — a celebrated milestone in the startup world — was not entirely surprising. And in the wake of a string of disappointing IPOs this year, from Uber and Lyft to Peloton, there was a palpable need among the guests to commiserate about the state of affairs, prognosticate about the future and find someone, or something, to blame.

Some VCs at the event were quick to point the finger at financial institutions like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs — these banks overhyped companies like Uber and Lyft, they argued, running up private valuations so much ahead of the IPOs that there was nowhere for them to go on the public markets but down. 

For many of the VC investors on hand, the remedy was simple: a direct listing, that sidesteps the traditional, banker-controlled IPO process.

"As someone who invests in companies that are upending the status quo, there is something innately appealing about a financial vehicle, an instrument, that is upending how things have been done for a long time," said Spark Capital's Megan Quinn, during a panel.

"Rather than having underwriters, lineup investors set the price themselves, you just let the market have at it and come what may," Quinn said.

In all, direct listings were discussed in at least three major panels throughout the first two days of the Disrupt conference. 

In a direct listing, a company simply lists its shares on a public exchange and the stock begins trading. Unlike in an IPO, there is no bank underwriting the offering, setting a price and selling it to institutional shareholders. The startup does not actually raise any money in a direct listing, but its employees and early investors can sell their shares right away. 

While not an option for every startup, GV's David Krane explained that a direct listing is an appealing option for startups and investors hoping to bypass the traditional IPO process with those big banks

It doesn't hurt to be able to exercise your options on the first day, either, he added.

Several investors told Business Insider that Slack's direct listing in June helped prove the strategy a reliable option for a wider range of private companies than previously thought.

Still, in a panel with Slack cofounder Cal Henderson and Spark Capital's Quinn, the pair reiterated that a direct listing is best for a startup that doesn't need an influx of cash that normally comes with a traditional IPO, and so would not work for a company like WeWork, which is facing a cash crunch.

The discussions at the Disrupt conference are the latest signs of a shifting landscape in Silicon Valley, after years of skyrocketing private market valuations that produced hundreds of "unicorns" — the glittering startups valued at $1 billion or more in the private markets. 

On Tuesday, a dozen VC firms organized a private summit with guest speakers such as the author Michael Lewis to discuss direct listings and other IPO alternatives.

For the entrepreneurs and techies who convened at the Disrupt conference, the fixation on the direct listing underscored the eternal optimism that runs through Silicon Valley. The biggest IPOs are flopping, but there's an explanation and a solution. 

And as long as VCs are still writing checks, for many startups at the event, there was no reason to panic.

Once a quarter, Justin Stefano and Philippe von Borries would gather Refinery29's staff to celebrate victories and share the goals of their women's lifestyle media company.

At one of these meetings a few years ago, they introduced a spaceship as a metaphor for the company. Each part of the ship represented a portion of the business that helped it soar. Employees got stickers of astronauts and stars. 

While the symbolism was clear — this was a soaring company shooting for the stars — the reality was different.

By 2017, Refinery29 had already had at least one round of layoffs. More would soon follow as the company cast about for a new revenue stream. Digital advertising had sustained the company up until then, but it was getting harder to win business against tech giants like Facebook and Google.

By 2019, people with direct knowledge of the company's finances said Refinery29 was running out of money. In the spring, Refinery29 raised $8 million in the form of debt. This past week, it found a savior in the much bigger Vice Media, which agreed to acquire Refinery29 for mostly stock.

It's an uneasy marriage. Refinery29 presents itself as the voice of female empowerment. It was early in publishing stories celebrating body positivity and ethnic diversity. Vice Media has a mostly male audience and is known for its edgy content, and it has historically fought a reputation that suggests its culture is hostile toward women. 

Read more: Read the memo Refinery29 leaders sent to staff about Vice Media buying the company

Both publications are losing money. Media is consolidating, and there are few buyers willing to pay cash for such companies, particularly when they've been valued at hundreds of millions and billions of dollars by venture capitalists. The theory is that slapping together two unprofitable companies can help both live to see another day by cutting overlapping costs and having a bigger, broader audience that makes the remaining entity more attractive to advertisers.

"If this [merger] means Refinery29 can keep going, let's try it," one Refinery29 employee said.

Refinery29 execs declined to comment for this story. But Business Insider spoke with numerous current and former employees and other people close to the company who described the rise and disappointing exit of Refinery29.

They described it as a publisher that became one of too many midsize options for readers and advertisers, and struggled to stand out to both readers and advertisers on social platforms. 

The founders were accidental publishers

Co-CEOs Justin Stefano and Philippe von Borries were media outsiders and accidental fashion publishers when, in their early 20s, they left their jobs in law and politics, respectively, to start the company.

They created Refinery29 in 2005, along with Piera Gelardi and Christene Barberich. Living in Brooklyn, New York, they saw Refinery29 as a way to spotlight the up-and-coming designers and creative types surrounding them, like Steven Alan and Rag & Bone.

The "29" referred to the 29 most interesting brands and designers of the time.

Initially trying to appeal to men as well as women, they ended up focusing on fashion companies and boutiques because those benefited the most from Refinery's exposure, and women, who responded the most to their stories. They made money via advertising and providing a digital storefront for those companies.

Venture-backed digital-media companies often get a bad rap for expanding too quickly, fueled by millions in funding and cheap Facebook traffic. Refinery was different in a couple ways. As first-time entrepreneurs, the founders bootstrapped the company for eight years, until 2013, when they raised $4.2 million from First Round Capital, Floodgate, Lerer Ventures, and Hearst.

Read more: Vice Media shuffles leadership at its agency as another key exec heads for the exit

Also, Facebook hadn't yet become a major force for publisher distribution. Refinery29 built its audience around an email newsletter that they used to promote the fashion boutiques. The founders said the newsletter roots meant they had a deep connection with their audience. 

Combining commerce and content is hard, though, and the company eventually ditched that approach to focus on being an ad-supported publisher with click-to-buy links integrated into its articles. The company became overwhelmingly ad-driven.

Building a sustainable, ad-supported media company brought other challenges. Refinery29 had to scale up, which it did by expanding to other content categories, including news and sports. 

Refinery29 bootstrapped, then attracted big media investors

Along the way, the company started to attract more investment from traditional media companies that wanted the young audiences Refinery29 and other digital-media companies, like Vice Media and BuzzFeed, commanded. In 2015, Refinery29 raised its biggest round of financing to date, $50 million, led by Scripps Networks and WPP Ventures. Turner followed in 2016, leading a round of $45 million, which theoretically valued it at $500 million. 

Then-Turner President David Levy, who was a big champion of Refinery29, at the time cited its "highly coveted following of millennial-minded women, strong capabilities in digital products, event marketing, and content creation, as well as an attractive advertiser base." 

By 2019, Refinery29 had raised $133 million. It made around $100 million in revenue last year and was still growing, though not profitably.

Refinery29 was still a midsize media company, though. And its early advantage from email newsletters didn't last as social apps like Facebook and Snapchat took over how people engaged with media. 

So, like many other digital-media companies, Refinery29 started taking advantage of the cheap distribution Facebook offered. Writers were pushed to pump out lots of quick hits to feed the social news feed and, later, Google search. 

Refinery29's founders also wanted the site to be known as more than just a fashion destination. Around 2015, they started pushing into hard news under the direction of Kaelyn Forde, a news vet, but she soon left. They played up a 2015 interview with Hillary Clinton on the presidential campaign trail and pushed for awards. "They were obsessed with winning a Pulitzer," Susie Banikarim, a veteran journalist who interviewed for a senior editorial role there, said. 

Insiders spoke of aggressive publishing goals

The reality was somewhat different. Starting in 2015, Facebook was sending less and less traffic to publishers as it cut back on the articles it showed people in its news feed. In January 2017, Refinery29 was averaging 5.6 million interactions a month on Facebook, according to CrowdTangle; by this month, that figure was below half a million. Other digital publishers have seen similar trajectories.

To maintain traffic, staffers said they were told they had to bank one or two stories a day for each day they were on vacation. Stories on the net worth of famous people became a running joke because they would guarantee traffic.

"It felt like we were playing catchup with the whims of Facebook and Google," one veteran said. 

As Refinery29's online growth slowed, with 27 million monthly unique visitors in 2016 compared with 25 million a year earlier, its leadership tried to find new ways to make money off the audience. In 2015, the company launched 29Rooms, a made-for-Instagram series of galleries that made money from sponsorships and ticket sales, which would become a widely imitated template for others. It started to expand internationally.

But the big priority for publishers like Refinery29 to become sustainable was video. Facebook and other platforms, like Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon, were emerging as new marketplaces for long-form video. With the $45 million in Turner-led funding in 2016, Refinery29 joined the industrywide shift. 

Jason Anderson, the founder of Quire, a strategic-advisory firm, was hired to advise Refinery29 on video. "They wanted to do something that felt like Condé Nast TV — shows around personality and lifestyle that would resonate with the Refinery29 woman," Anderson said. "Once you stop scaling, and you're under 50 million uniques, you have to figure out other things, like 29Rooms, and, 'How do we get the audience to touch us in different ways?'"

Video became only 7% of revenue

Newer investors who were from the media and ad world believed video was worth the bet and pushed ahead, over the hesitation of earlier investors on the board who were antsy to see a return and could see digital-media companies like Mashable and Mic starting to hit a wall. 

Anderson said Refinery29 leadership seemed distracted, though, and things didn't go according to plan. Other digital-media companies saw 15% of revenue from long-form video as a benchmark to strive for; by 2018, video was only 7% of Refinery29's revenue. Refinery was still largely ad-dependent, with 70% of revenue coming from advertising, down from 100% in 2016.

Refinery made headlines with its events, but the margins on that kind of business are slim. Refinery29 didn't try selling subscriptions, another way digital-media companies are trying to diversify revenue streams — some more successfully than others.

Part of the problem was that Turner still only owned 10% of the company, which limited its ability to push the video plan forward. People close to the company said Refinery29 also lost big allies when Levy and Turner CEO John Martin left Turner after its parent company, Warner, was acquired in mid-2018 by AT&T. The Turner investment was not just financial; the two companies were supposed to work together on content creation and development, as well as ad sales. In an ideal situation, Turner would've provided distribution for Refinery29 shows, and vice versa.

"Long-form linear video never became a huge part of Refinery's revenue," Anderson said. "The hard, grind-it-out execution didn't happen. This was one of the biggest opportunities the company had, and it just felt like there was so much going on."

Other signs of trouble were mounting. The company went through a fourth round of layoffs in fall 2018. Several senior sales executives, including Kate Hyatt and Ashley Miles, left this year. Employees noticed little things, like the quality of snacks seeming to diminish, and Refinery29 sat out this year's NewFronts, an annual digital-video-sales showcase put on for advertisers.  

Secret meetings stirred speculation

There were news reports over the summer that Refinery29 was in talks to sell to its fellow digital-media company Group Nine, then Vice, and leadership met in conference rooms with papers tacked up to cover the glass doors, stirring speculation of a deal. Still, leadership was tight lipped. Employees felt tense.

On Wednesday, the founders gathered staff to discuss the long-awaited Vice deal. The official line was optimistic: The company was excited to benefit from Vice's resources, and the deal would ensure the brand's continuation. Barberich appeared emotional in a meeting with the whole editorial staff. There were many questions about whether there would be layoffs and how much help Vice would really provide.

"I hope it means the company has a future," one attendee said.

That will depend on whether Vice and Refinery's combination offsets the consolidation of digital advertising. Advertisers are spending more of their dollars with fewer companies and favoring ad platforms that can ensure accountability and results, especially with a potential economic downturn coming, said Doug Rozen, the chief media officer at the digital agency 360i.

"To me, this is further evidence that a quick activation, no matter how cool, is just not sustainable," he said. "Sure it can drive headlines, but the question is: Can it drive enduring sales? I suspect brands will be shifting away these type of activations for greater accountability, especially with a potential economic downturn looming."

Justin Stefano and Philippe von Borries were media outsiders and first-time entrepreneurs when, in their early 20s, they left their jobs in law and politics, respectively, to start Refinery29 with Piera Gelardi and Christene Barberich.

The company ultimately became a progressive voice for women that was early in embracing body positivity and diversity. Its live events, 29Rooms, became a template for other made-for-Instagram experiences.

This past week, it came to a crashing end as an independent company with its mostly-stock sale to Vice Media.

Business Insider spoke to numerous current and former employees and other people close to the company, who described the rise and disappointing exit of Refinery29.

They describe it as a publisher that became one of too many mid-sized options for readers and advertisers, struggling to stand out to both readers and advertisers against social platforms.

Click here to read the rest of the story.