The New York Times released its first word-free game on Monday. It's called Tiles.

Tiles is a color and pattern matching game with tilesets — grids of patterned squares — that challenges players to select the longest possible sequence of tile pairs with shared elements, like this:

The game has different tilesets named after cities across the world. The "Kuala Lumpur" tileset pattern in pink and green is inspired by Peranakan tiles found in Malaysia and Singapore. "Lisbon" is a tessellation-like tileset of yellow and blue based on Parisian and Portuguese tiles. "New Haven," a color-block tileset, is based on the artwork of Josef Albers, a painter and color-theorist who taught at Yale. "Austin" in brown and mauve is inspired by 70s interior design and Op artist Bridget Riley. "Hong Kong," is inspired by blue and white Mahjong tiles.

Tiles pattern "Hong Kong" The New York Times

"Besides drawing inspiration from different visual styles and cultures, our tilesets also play around with different aspects of visual recognition and pattern matching," said Robert Vinluan, design technologist at the Times. "All the elements in the Hong Kong tileset are the same color, so you have to distinguish between different shapes and lines. The opposite is true of the New Haven palette, where everything is the same shape but you have to perceive differences in color."

The game is a free, but being a paid-subscriber to the New York Times crossword yields more settings. Non-subscribers are served a different pattern each day and get just six rounds of the game. Subscribers get access to "Zen Mode," which allows users to pick their tileset and have unlimited plays.

The Times' puzzle team was driven to create a game that is both accessible and serene.

"One additional strategy around launching Tiles is to reach users who may not be native English-language speakers," The Times wrote in its Tiles press release.

A zen game was the request of users, according to The Times Games Expansions team." The team "noticed that users were writing in late at night asking the company for a game that would help them zone out," according to AdWeek.

Sam Von Ehren, a game designer leading the Game Expansions team, says in creating Tiles, the team hoped to both "include more people" and give folks "an escape from the news."

"The crossword can sometimes feel really challenging — and that's what the appeal of it is — but here we're trying to welcome more people in" Von Ehren said.

In the few days since it became available, Tiles has won over some devotees.

You can play the game on your computer or phone by going to this special section of NYT website.

Tiles pattern "Austin" The New York Times

Reuters

Federal regulators are knocking at Big Tech's door.

The US Federal Trade Commission will oversee any antitrust probe into whether Facebook's practices hurt competition into the digital market, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month. The news sent the social network's shares plunging and dragged the entire technology sector lower.

Alphabet and Apple saw their stocks fall on similar press reports the same day that the US Department of Justice was preparing antitrust probes into each company. Meanwhile, Sen. Elizabeth Warren — the Massachusetts Democrat and US presidential candidate — proposed earlier this year a plan to break up big tech companies including Amazon, Google, and Facebook.

While it remains to be seen whether reported probes and proposals into antitrust matters and privacy concerns will mark a death knell for the likes of Facebook and Google parent Alphabet — as the exact scopes of the probes remain unclear — experts are warning against investors shrugging off possible risks.

A bonus just for you: Click here to claim 30 days of access to Business Insider PRIME

"From a strategic perspective, we believe that uncertainty is still too high to recommend investors avoid stocks in the regulatory spotlight," Goldman Sachs strategists led by Ryan Hammond said in a Tuesday note.

They added: "But while the impact of regulation on today's stocks will be case-dependent, similarities among historical outcomes suggest that investors should reduce exposure to any stock that becomes subject to an antitrust lawsuit."

The strategists pointed to past regulatory events, with shades of today's concerns, that ushered in material business losses.

For example, Microsoft's 1998 antritrust lawsuit ultimately led to a reversed court-ordered breakup and a settlement with the Department of Justice. The corporation then saw "substantially" lower sales growth following its 2001 consent decree that expired a decade later, according to Goldman. Meanwhile, they found IBM's antitrust lawsuit in 1969 kicked off a "steady decline" in revenue growth and margins. 

Goldman Sachs

Other investment firms are highlighting similar risks of which investors should be cognizant, even as the extent of various regulatory bodies' probes is a wildcard.

As issues like data security and the overall health of technology platforms becomes increasingly prevalent, companies face a "higher cost of doing business," Morgan Stanley strategists wrote in a late-May report.

"Outside of China, the risk of regulation limiting foreign investment in local companies may present a headwind to international growth and profitability for some of our companies," they wrote. 

Read more: Facebook shares drop sharply after unearthed emails reportedly show Mark Zuckerberg is aware of 'problematic privacy practices'

On the company level, the firm said the cost of compliance and regulatory overhang will remain a risk for Facebook and Alphabet, while Amazon may face "growing protectionist regulations" eating into potential international growth.

"Each government has its own nuanced approach to these issues and our universe may have to adapt to an environment in which protectionist/nationalist behaviors drive decision making as national regulatory and tax regime differences become more stark," the strategists wrote, adding that political rhetoric leading up to the 2020 US presidential election may inject volatility into the space.

AP

Some experts are skeptical big-tech companies will face breakups, but say risks still abound.

Court mandated break-ups have been infrequently implemented in US history and are unlikely to be seen here, according to Glenn Manishin, a managing partner at ParadigmShift Law and a former trial attorney for the DoJ's antitrust divison. He worked on the US vs. AT&T and Microsoft cases.

Facebook runs the highest risk of a split relative to other big-tech companies given its Instagram acquisition, followed by Google, Apple, then Amazon, Manishin said on a conference call this week with Instinet analysts.

Read more: The news industry is joining the attack against big tech companies like Google and Facebook

Specifically, the fact that Google's case started in the FTC and is now in the DoJ could have negative implications given the latter unit's focus on monopolization claims and the former's focus on unfair methods of competition. 

The risks hanging over big tech were underscored this week when Makan Delrahim, the assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice's antitrust division, addressed the matter at a conference in Tel Aviv, Israel.

"The Antitrust Division does not take a myopic view of competition," Delrahim said. "Many recent calls for antitrust reform, or more radical change, are premised on the incorrect notion that antitrust policy is only concerned with keeping prices low. It is well-settled, however, that competition has price and non-price dimensions."

Read more: A top DOJ official just outlined why the agency has everything it needs to go after Big Tech — and Facebook, Google, and Amazon should be nervous

The DoJ has "the tools we need to enforce the antitrust laws in cases involving digital technologies," he added, and said US antitrust law is flexible enough to apply to "markets old and new." 

This sent alarm bells off for Nicholas Colas, a veteran analyst and co-founder of DataTrek Research. Investors should get ready to hear Delrahim's name "a lot more," he told clients in a note this week.

"It's hard to read this speech and not think the Justice Department is lining up its arguments for a showdown with Big Tech," Colas wrote. "What comes from that is anyone's guess."

Now read more markets coverage from Markets Insider and Business Insider: 

Heineken and other drink stocks just got whacked after a warning bad weather in Europe will curb beers in the sun

GOLDMAN SACHS: Buy these 17 'superstar' stocks, which dominate sales in their industries and have been crushing the market

Americans are increasingly worried that Trump's trade wars will damage the economy and eliminate jobs

If you've ever liked a status on Facebook, tweeted from your phone, checked off an item on your to-do list on Asana, or pinned a photo on Pinterest, then you've crossed paths with React.

Today, many core features of some of the most popular apps today are quietly underpinned by React, a framework that was originally built by Facebook engineers and released as open source in 2013.

React is a tool for building user interfaces (UI), which is to say, what an application looks like and how people interact with it.

It's built on JavaScript, the most popular programming language according to the mega-popular code hosting site GitHub, which keeps tabs on such things. Users can reuse components that have already been built, such as buttons.

React started within Facebook, and the team used it for two years before releasing it as open source. That move opened up the doors to allowing anyone to use, modify, or download it for free. In the years since, React has become one of the most popular tools on the web, and is used by companies like Airbnb, Twitter, Uber, Asana, and Pinterest.

"There's a certain flexibility in it that you can use it for a variety of different things," KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, industry analyst at RedMonk, told Business Insider. "Any time you have a framework or a tool that's flexible in that way, the flexibility itself can be a draw."

Facebook's News Feed uses React. Facebook

It's still used by Facebook, but it's picked up a large, passionate community, which hosts scores of meetups, plenty of conference talks, and an innumerable number of blog posts devoted solely to React.

It's also spawned another version of React, called React Native, for developing apps for iOS and Android devices. That offshoot has also quickly picked up in popularity: According to GitHub, it's the second most popular open source project out there, with over 10,000 contributors.

Carl Bergenhem, product manager at software consultancy Progress, says that using React is like building a house with Lego — if someone else had already made the tricky parts like the roof for you ahead of time. You can build most of it to your liking, and then just click on the pre-made part at the end when you're ready. And if you use React to build a component that's really good, you can sock it away wholesale, and re-use it whenever you have need of it.

"If you're building some sort of website, you want to make sure it's something people want to work with," Bergenhem told Business Insider. "We kind of see a critical need for people not to have to reinvent the wheel."

How React started

In 2011, Jordan Walke, a software engineer at Facebook, created the first version of React — but only for Facebook's use. He was working on the codebase for Facebook advertising product, but at the time, ads were difficult to create and manage.

"That UI was very complex so there were a lot of forms that were interconnected," Dan Abramov, a software engineer in the React team at Facebook, told Business Insider. "It was pretty difficult to make it work correctly. There were always bugs that were hard to fix."

To fix this, Walke came up with the idea of creating a project that allows developers to write code using declarative syntax. This means that developers can simply type what they want the app to do — like creating a button, dropdown or animation effect — rather than having to bang out an entire set of instructions.

Dan Abramov, a software engineer in the React team at Facebook Facebook

It took off internally, and Facebook soon started using the React framework for some of its most popular features today, including commenting, liking and sharing on its news feed.

But when it was first released into the world as open source in 2013, it didn't catch on right away.

"A lot of people dismissed it. It did not get popular with users first," Abramov said. "A lot of people didn't really see its point. Eventually we tried to explain better why React is a good idea."

But that October, Pete Hunt, a former Facebook engineer who now works at Twitter, gave a talk called 'Rethinking Best Practices." Abramov calls it a "turning point" for React.

"He explained why React makes some unconventional choices and we might rethink that they're good choices," Abramov said. "There were several people who though maybe React is a good idea after all."

That was the moment that the engineering community at large realized that React was a notable part of what had led Facebook to its success.

"That's the reason why Facebook was as great of an application as it was," Bergenhem, the Progress product manager, said.

Read more: These are the top 25 people who will have the most influence in tech this year, according to a survey of over 30,000 developers

Smyte's Pete HuntYouTube/Facebook Developers

With a larger community of people using and making improvements to React, it was able to innovate and spread much faster.

At a certain point, it hit a critical mass — Abramov himself started using React, even before he worked at Facebook. Abramov says that the community started writing extensions and modifications to the open source React project that helped it spread, attracting even more developers to the fold in so doing.

"It hit the sweet spot of getting released at the right time. While it took a little while, it was around that time when we started looking into it more seriously since we saw a ton of people jumping onto it immediately and really enjoying the experience of working with React when it first came out," Bergenhem says.

React's impact

One of React's biggest impacts is that it popularized declarative programming, making designing applications much easier for developers. Today, Apple's most recent release SwiftUI uses this concept, as does Google's Flutter.

"Instead of telling the computer I want you to do this and then I want you to do this, you just tell the computer, hey I want the screen to look like this and it figures out all the commands and instructions it needs to generate that script," Chris Lloyd, a UI engineer at Pinterest, told Business Insider.

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann. Reuters/Brendan McDermid

Read more:Apple just announced a new tool that makes it way easier to write software in Swift, it's mega-popular programming language. Here's why developers are so excited about it.

The Facebook team is still working on creating new React features today. In 2017, the Facebook team released React 16, the latest version.

That version increased React's compatibility with other outside tools and programs, and improved performance — while also making sure that it's easy for developers using older versions of React to upgrade their apps to this current version.

Next up, as React nears version 17, the team is working on a new system called Hooks, which could make it easier for

And right now, Abramov says, the team is working on the Hooks API, which makes it even easier for people to reuse their custom-built components, as well as Suspense, which allows applications to load content more efficiently.

Why people love React so much

Guillermo Rauch, CEO and co-founder of ZEIT, says he first started working with React when he worked at WordPress.

He says the reason why React grew so fast is simply because it works. When he heard that Facebook was using React for its News Feed, he dug into the website's public-facing code, and came away impressed. Not long after, he started seeing it everywhere.

"I went to the awesome UI they created," Rauch said. "The News Feed is super interactive. They're walking the walk in addition to talking the talk...this React signature started popping up everywhere for me. It became a chain reaction."

He eventually started his own company, which developed NextJS — one of the most popular ways of putting React into real-life use, providing tools for developing apps that use the combination of JavaScript and React.

Phips Peter, software engineer at productivity tool maker Asana, even hosts a regular meetup about React. Peter teaches other engineers how to use React with TypeScript, the third-fastest growing programming language according to GitHub, and one that's similar to JavaScript.

Asana CEO and co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, who is also a Facebook co-founder Asana

"I think React offered a programming pattern that no one else really offered at the time," Peter told Business Insider.

Likewise, Pinterest has been using React for the last three and a half years for its web site and ad buying sites. Before, it had its own homegrown system, but it was too complex, and it ran into problems when engineers were working on the same features at the same time. React helped solve these problems, says Lloyd, the Pinterest engineer.

"It allows developers to do the right thing in the sense that it's easy to write a consistent fast user interface," Lloyd said. "You tell it what to do and it will do it and make it work really well."

Lloyd says that React makes rendering and scrolling through large images — an important aspect of Pinterest — much faster. In general, Lloyd says, the decision to bet on React was a smart one for Pinterest.

Pinterest's site uses React. Pinterest

"It's rare that we see a technology that's lasted as long as React has, and we are excited to keep supporting and using it for the next five years," Lloyd said. "It's really standing the test of time, which is incredibly rare."

Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, two tech moguls with grand visions for exploring and settling humans in space, have increasingly found themselves feuding over what our future in that final frontier should look like.

Their disagreements mainly arise because both are pursuing reusable rockets, next-generation spacecraft, and ambitious space-settling plans. In May, for instance, Bezos unveiled a moon lander design by his spaceflight company, Blue Origin; in that presentation, he criticized the idea of populating Mars — the overarching goal of SpaceX, Musk's rocket company.

That dig was made live onstage, but other times quarrels between Musk and Bezos appear on world stages like Twitter.

Most of the sparring seems innocuous. However, some of the billionaires' battles with the space companies they founded have worked their way into courts and government agencies.

The relationship between Bezos and Musk wasn't always so tense, though.

"As time has gone on and these companies have been successful, ambitions have grown," Ashlee Vance, who wrote a biography of Musk, told The Guardian in 2016. "Musk and Bezos used to be cordial, but they're vicious now."

Here's a short timeline of how they got to this point.

Once the rumors surrounding Google's upcoming Pixel 4 smartphone started emerging, Google itself wanted to join in on the fun and tweeted a teaser image of the device.

With Google's own image, there are at least a couple things about the Pixel 4 that we can confirm: It'll come with a dual-lens rear camera system, and it won't have a rear fingerprint sensor like the Pixel 3 does.

But by confirming a few things, Google actually raises more questions. What will the second camera lens do? And how will users unlock their phones? Will there be an in-display fingerprint sensor, or will the Pixel 4 rely on facial recognition?

The truth is that we don't know, but rumors at least points us down certain paths. We'll have to see if those paths lead to the actual Pixel 4, or if they lead us astray.

Check out the Pixel 4 rumors we've heard so far:

Oracle's internal reorganization is showing no signs of wrapping up four months after it started, causing lingering unease and uncertainty throughout the tech giant's global operations. According to people Business Insider has talked to, some job offers in the UK were revoked at the last minute amid a hiring freeze that may or may not be in effect.

The internal reorg began in the spring and has involved thousands of layoffs between March and this month. The company acknowledged the layoffs but hasn't given a total tally. Executives have not discussed the situation publicly.

From the half a dozen people Business Insider has talked to over the past few months about the reorg, one word comes to mind: endless.

For instance, we've heard from two people in the UK who had excitedly accepted job offers from Oracle, filled out the final paperwork, and waited a month to get their start date, only to be told instead that the offers were revoked. Both people told us that the reason given for the revoked offer was a hiring freeze in the UK.

Oracle's Seattle offices Google Earth One of the job offers was revoked in March, right before the company launched its first big layoff, that person told us. The other job offer was revoked earlier this month and that person was told the freeze would last for another three months.

All of the people we've talked to about the reorg since we first began reporting on it in March have worked for some of Oracle's fastest growing or most critical areas.

This includes its cloud infrastructure units, the Oracle Marketing Cloud (its competitor to Salesforce) and even its Adaptive Intelligence Apps, which are Oracle's artificial intelligence/machine-learning apps.

When we asked Oracle about a hiring freeze in the UK, the company told us it is hiring people globally, including in its cloud unit, known as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Generation 2 (OCI Gen2).

"Every year Oracle hires tens of thousands of employees and we are currently hiring globally and in every line of business, including OCI Gen2," an Oracle spokesperson said. "Enabling our customers' success has always been a top priority for Oracle. We are laser-focused on delivering the best cloud products that drive efficiencies, fuel innovation and impact the bottom line for our customers around the world."

Another person we talked to, this one in the US, told us that there was also a US hiring freeze for some units that began in February, affecting organizations like sales. While those units may be hiring again, this person said that the freeze also sidelined promotions.

A harsh situation

Oracle needs to get its workforce in shape so that it can survive in this new age of cloud computing, in which it's late to the game and playing catch up to cloud giant Amazon Web Serivces. Cloud has radically changed how Oracle's customers buy their tech. And cloud giant Amazon Web Services is on a warpath, trying to steal Oracle's customers.

Still, we can't help but feel empathy for the people who thought they had landed a role with the database giant only to be left jobless.

"I feel used and shamefully treated," one of the would-be employees told us. "I am not an aggrieved former employee but an individual contributor hired in an apparent growth area of business. And I never managed to start my position."

$432 million for restructuring costs

Oracle execs may say something more about the restructuring on Wednesday, June 19, when the company reports its fiscal fourth quarter earnings.

Q4 is always the most important earnings report for Oracle. The fourth quarter is when sales reps push to close deals to make their annual quotas. Analysts are expecting Oracle to report a modest year-over-year decline in sales for the quarter (-2%) and the year (-1%), according to Yahoo Finance.

Mark Hurd with recent college grad employees Oracle Even if execs don't give more details on who, what, and why they are restructuring, Oracle will likely include an updated disclosure on how much it has spent on its formal Fiscal 2019 Oracle Restructuring Plan.

When it reported third-quarter results in March, the company said it expected to spend $432 million total on this restructuring, primarily on employee severance, and at that point, it still had about 1/3 of that money left to spend. It said it planned to spend the rest through the end of fiscal 2020, which ends in May, 2020.

It's impossible to extrapolate how many jobs will be slashed based on $432 million in expenses, but the company did show that its cloud and software license is getting the brunt of it, accounting for $230 million.

Just for the heck of it, if each laid-off employee were to receive a generous $50,000 in severance (26 weeks of a $100,000 annual salary), $432 million would cover 8,640 jobs (assuming no other factors like benefits, bonuses and vacation pay). Oracle says it employs 138,620, so, at our $50,000 payout, that's enough to cover 6% of the workforce.

Some employees are happy, others are wary

Given how many months this restructuring has been going on, employees remain wary, according to chatter on anonymous chat app Blind, which an Oracle employee shared with Business Insider.

Oracle employees, Austin campus Business Insider The gossip internally is that the new cloud group based in Seattle won't generally pay as well as it had in previous years, when it was a skunkworks team trying to lure talent from Amazon and Microsoft.

The Seattle team has now become the main Oracle cloud engineering unit and their product is replacing the company's original cloud.

But as important as the Seattle team is to the success of the company, they weren't spared from layoffs. According to employees we talked to at that office, as many of as 300 of them were laid off in March.

Some people believe more cuts will come to the unit, too, according to posts on Blind by Oracle employees.

There are also employees on Blind who say they are happy with their jobs, their pay and the cloud products that their teams are building.

And there are others who say they joined recently, two months ago, indicating that whatever hiring freeze that may have hit the US earlier this year is now over.

More about Oracle's cloud and restructuring

Are you an Oracle insider with insight to share? We want to hear it. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., DM @Julie188 on Twitter, or send me a text via Signal.

This is the actual answer YouTube's CEO gave @pkafka when asked what it would mean if the company was spun off from Google due to antitrust: “I don’t know. I’ve been really busy this week working with all these other concerns… I don’t know. We would figure it out.” #CodeCon

— Alex Heath (@alexeheath) June 10, 2019

It’s a mostly stock deal so value is largely contingent on what happens to Bird from here https://t.co/dcTL9ovmeL

— Katie Roof (@Katie_Roof) June 13, 2019

In the highly competitive world of full-size pickups, there are three main players: the Ford F-150, the Chevy Silverado, and the RAM 1500. That's 1-2-3 in the usual sales ranking.

Behind that formidable trio, one finds the Toyota Tundra. When the Tundra first arrived in the US, it was a daring move. Toyota intended to build on its legacy for reliability and quality by attacking the most American of vehicle segments. The Tundra was the first full-size pickup from a Japanese brand, and it was built in the USA.

That was 20 years ago. The Tundra has been moderately successful, but it hasn't cracked the top-three party. The situation has only worsened for Toyota over the years, as Ford, Chevy, and RAM has effectively captured all the share to be had in the upper reaches of the market.

The Chevy Silverado. Matthew DeBord/Business Insider

The Silverado is usually number two, behind the F-150, and to maintain that position, Chevy has an all-new truck on dealer lots.

The Tundra, meanwhile, is completely not all-new. The 2007 second-generation design was upgraded in 2014, but the pickup is long in the tooth. That's not necessarily a bad thing for Toyota, as the company can continue to sell a lot of trucks without having to spend big money to steal customers from the Detroit Big Three.

So how does the Toyota Tundra match up against the Chevy Silverado? Glad you asked. I've driven both trucks. Here's how they compare:

Rumors are still flying about a potential tie-up between Group Nine Media and Refinery29, VC-backed media companies that have been valued at $500 million. But such a merger would face steep hurdles, according to M&A experts.

Chatter about a deal circulated earlier in the year after BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti floated the idea in The New York Times. Digital media companies including BuzzFeed, he stated, could gain leverage over titans like Facebook by combining forces.

Read more: Billions from VC companies like Lerer Hippeau and Lightspeed fueled the rise of digital media and stoked crazy expectations for growth — here's why insiders say that approach is killing companies

The logic for a merger is simple. Venture-backed digital media companies, which raised a ton of money on the belief that they would recreate publishing for the digital age, are struggling to reach profitability and justify big valuations. They can't raise more money because venture capitalists have lost interest in funding them, industry watchers say. Merging would be a way for companies to erase their losses and keep operating while they figure out a new, sustainable business model.

The financial pressure has led some digital media companies to consolidate already. One active buyer is Bustle Media Group, which recently purchased Mic and Gawker for a fraction of their peak valuations. Those remaining are trying to diversify their revenue mix away from advertising and into events, e-commerce, subscriptions or long-form video.

Group Nine wouldn't comment for this story. A Refinery29 spokesperson said: "We are having discussions with our industry peers about opportunities to come together; however, there are no immediate plans to do so at this time."

While there may be logic for it, a Group Nine-Refinery29 tie-up would be hard logistically to pull off.

'The hardest deals to get done'

The most likely outcome for a merger between money-losing companies is to combine in a stock deal where no money changes hands. And that's not a pretty scenario, experts said.

The people interviewed for this story said they didn't have direct knowledge of any sale activity. They spoke on the assumption that Refinery29 and Group Nine are still losing money and don't have cash on hand or the ability to raise money for a deal.

Refinery29 has said it isn't profitable yet and is out trying to raise $20 million, according to an SEC filing; Group Nine hasn't said, but it's widely assumed that it isn't profitable.

"All-stock transactions for money-losing companies are the hardest deals to get done ... and it is all emotion," said Corey Ferengul, who has led multiple deals as a buyer and seller over the years and is currently CEO of ad-tech company Magnetic. "And good luck valuing money-losing companies in an industry changing so rapidly."

In a stock sale, the companies would combine and the acquired company would get shares of the combined company. But they'd have to agree on their respective values, which is tough because there's no straightforward way to do so.

Everyone's losing money

It's also hard to get investors to agree on the value when the combined company (and their stakes) would be worth less than they were pre-merger.

The buying company would be incentivized to value the one it's acquiring as low as possible. The acquirer, for its part, would fight to keep its value as high as possible. It might argue that it should be valued high based on its contribution to the combined company's success over time. (Observers assume that Group Nine would be the acquirer in this scenario because it's the bigger of the two. It was formed through a previous rollup of four companies: Thrillist, NowThis, The Dodo, and Seeker.)

Either way, it's not a happy ending for anyone.

"They both end up with a small piece of a company and the stock would be less valuable than the last one," a longtime media operator said. "It creates an outcome that's not great for anyone involved."

A further complication comes in when there are multiple investors involved. Group Nine has raised $140 million in two rounds from Discovery Communications, along with (Business Insider parent) Axel Springer, and venture-capital firm Lerer Hippeau Ventures. Refinery29 has raised $125 million as of 2016 from Turner along with Scripps, Stripes Group, Floodgate, Lead Edge Capital, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures, and the Hearst Corp.

All the investors will see their investments dwindle, but each may have different appetites for losing money, which will impact their willingness to approve a deal. It depends on the terms of ownership, but usually just a majority of shareholders of each company has to approve a merger, although if it's more, that makes a deal harder, M&A experts said.

There are other reasons for investors to balk. It's typical for managers to be offered financial incentives to help get the deal done and/or stay on to help take the combined company forward. That can stoke resentment from shareholders who feel like they're already giving up a lot, though.

There will be blood-letting

Another difficult step is figuring out how the combined company will erase its losses, get profitable, and grow — even if the growth isn't as much as the investors initially hoped for.

The obvious path is to make massive staff cuts. But both companies will argue all their people are essential as neither wants to give up any more of its own staff than it has to.

On the other hand, a merger could be the best alternative, said Reed Phillips, managing partner of investment bank Oaklins DeSilva+Phillips.

"It makes immense sense for these two companies to combine because you can immediately reduce costs and extend the lifelines of both companies," Phillips said. "If the companies cannot sell now, a combination is the next best alternative and the logic should be easily explainable to investors."

Today's smartphones are more expensive than ever before. While the priciest version of Apple's newest iPhone would have started at $770 in 2016, today's top-of-the-line model begins at $1,100.

Android alternatives aren't much cheaper if you're looking at flagship smartphones from companies like Samsung, LG, and Google. Samsung's Galaxy S10 started at $900 when it debuted, for example, while Google's Pixel 3 was priced at $800 at launch.

But that doesn't mean you need to pay close to $1,000 to get a great smartphone. If you don't mind sacrificing certain features and opting for an older model, there are several noteworthy options that will only cost about half the price of the $1,000 iPhone XS, or even less.

Here's a look at five devices we ranked as being among the 20 best smartphones in the world that you can buy for $500 or less.

Deliveroo cofounder Will Shu has said cooking could be done solely for enjoyment within the next decade.

The 39-year-old, who serves as CEO of the buzzy British startup which secured backing from Amazon this year, was speaking at a Bloomberg conference on this week on the future of technology.

He said: "If I think about what the barriers to people using food delivery apps are, one of them is cooking. 100 years ago, cooking was 100% a necessity. 50 years ago, less [of a necessity]. Now, the average person goes out to restaurants a lot. I do see a world where, in maybe five or 10 years, cooking is purely a hobby.

"Of course, we [Deliveroo] want to promote that, and that's great. With the rise of things like Editions and with the rise of things like robotics over time, I do see, in the very long run - it's not going to happen soon - a scenario where getting a meal cooked and delivered may be the same price as going to the supermarket and buying it."

'Editions' is Deliveroo's pop-up kitchen initiative , which aims to serve customers who don't live near their favourite restaurants. Deliveroo

Shu also discussed the company's burgeoning relationship with Amazon at the conference. In May, Deliveroo raised $575 million in a funding round led by the tech giant.

He said Deliveroo plans use the capital to expand its 'Editions' initiative, under which pop-up kitchens are built by the firm to cater for people who don't live near their favourite restaurants. The kitchens allow restaurants' chefs to cook remotely, which in turn enables them to serve more customers.

Read more: Amazon's massive bet on Deliveroo is much bigger than Friday night takeout. It's about the death of the kitchen.

Furthermore, the company wants to use the money to continue its expansion into less densely-populated areas - both in the UK and overseas.

"We've been pretty efficient and thoughtful about how we've grown across different countries," he said. "We've been in the UK for six years, and we're currently reaching about 33%, maybe 35% of the UK population. We plan to take that to 50% by the end of the year.

"We're not just going to go out into city centres, but into suburbs but into some smaller towns. We're going to do [the same] in other European countries, too."

Amazon's investment takes Deliveroo's total fundraising to over $1.5 billion. Reuters / Drew Angerer of Getty Images

Amazon's development of drone delivery technology could eventually let Deliveroo reach truly rural areas, in Shu's view.

"If you look at the UK and France, where you definitely have people living in rural areas - and where population density is less than 500 people per square kilometre - I think unmanned aerial drones could actually make a really big difference. Amazon's certainly doing that. Thinking about how we reach those customers, where a bicycle or car doesn't always work, is pretty interesting.

"Amazon are really keen to help us build our business; to build our processes and systems," he continued. "In my view, Amazon are the best operators in the world. To the extent that we have access to senior people there, we can learn from them what they've managed to build over the last 25 years.

"Any time you make people's lives easier, and show them that they can get something they couldn't get before, adoption happens. I think you'll have different degrees of adoption [across] different generations, but overall, I think [Deliveroo] makes sense for all types of different people."

There are plenty of things keeping Depop CEO Maria Rega up at night, but recruiting US teens to use the shopping app isn't one of them.

This is because data shows that the 5 million or so teens that are already using the app in the US are actually more business-minded than their UK counterparts.

Raga told Business Insider in a recent conversation that, on average, US teens are listing more items to sell and are referring more people than their UK equivalents. She wouldn't comment on what this stems from, however.

But this is particularly relevant as Depop begins its quest to triple its user base in the US after raising $62 million in a recent round of funding.

Read more: Teens are making up to $300,000 selling secondhand clothes on this Instagram-like shopping app, which is now planning a huge US expansion. Here's how it works.

Gen Z is known for being an entrepreneurial generation whose spending habits have been shaped by growing up in the wake of the recession and seeing their parents and teachers live through hard times.

Experts say apps such as Depop and Poshmark have become big hits with the younger generation as they offer them an easy way to make money straight from their bedroom.

And for some, it's a highly lucrative business. Rachel Swidenbank, vice president of Marketplace at Depop, previously told Business Insider that some sellers can pull in as much as $300,000 a year on Depop and have been able to buy houses and cars before they've reached college age.

Marcie Merriman, executive director for growth strategy and retail innovation at EY, and an expert on this generation, told Business Insider that unlike millennials, Gen Z is driven out of "perceived financial need" versus "the aspirational or purpose-based pursuits of millennials."

"They are not sure what jobs will be available to them and don't want to count on others - whether parents or employers - for their livelihood," she said.

Merriman said it could be tied into the American Dream. The idea of working hard and building your own success has been ingrained into US teens from such an early age, she said, and now they have the technology and tools available to make their business dreams come true.

Their entrepreneurial spirit could also be tied to the glorification of technology start-ups and their founders, Merriman said.

"The teen social status symbol of my generation, Gen X, was the garage band. Gen Z's equivalent is the teen business maven," she said, adding that while this isn't unique to the US, the culture of success is different there.

"Look at any list of the top tech Unicorns (companies valued at $1B or above) and the vast majority are based in the US and China, with only a few launched out of the UK. This brings the potential home for the US teen," she said.

So for Raga, the biggest concern is not motivating these teens to join but keeping up with a market that moves at breakneck speed. "Things move a lot faster," she said, of the US. "You need to be super fast."