A week after Bob Muglia's surprising exit as CEO of Snowflake, two top execs leading the company's legal and HR teams are leaving the $3.5 billion data-storage startup. Snowflake has also brought in two new execs from ServiceNow, the cloud computing company that was previously led by new CEO Frank Slootman.

Margo Smith, Snowflake's chief legal officer, and Kathy O'Driscoll, the chief people officer, are "transitioning out," a company spokeswoman told Business Insider.

Rob Specker, who just left his position as general counsel at ServiceNow, is joining Snowflake in the same role. Shelly Begun, who had been senior vice president for human resources at ServiceNow, has joined Snowflake as vice president of HR.

Read more: Famous exec Bob Muglia is out as CEO of $3.5 billion Snowflake, just weeks after saying an IPO isn't imminent

"We have made some leadership changes- these include a new leader for HR and general counsel," Alisa MacDonnell, Snowflake's vice president for corporate marketing, told Business Insider. She also said Snowflake co-founder and chief technology officer Benoit Dageville is taking on a bigger role as president of products.

"This will all be reflected externally in the near future," she said.

Muglia's sudden departure sparked speculation that he was forced out — just weeks prior to the announcement, Muglia had told an interviewer that Snowflake had enough funding and was not planning to go public for at least another year or two.

Constellation Research analyst Ray Wang speculates that this may have been the case, and that Slootman was brought on by Snowflake's board of directors specifically to accelerate the IPO timetable. He also theorized that the hiring of former ServiceNow execs shows Slootman trying to consolidate his power at Snowflake.

"He wants his own team," he told Business Insider. "They want Slootman to take the company public, and he doesn't want someone else coming in to replace him after he takes the company public."

Former Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia Snowflake

Wang isn't alone in this belief: At the time of the CEO change, Business Insider reported that an analyst who knows both Muglia and Slootman believes that it was a change designed to get the company more ready to go public. Slootman, of note, led ServiceNow and other previous employers to big exits, both via IPO and acquisition.

MacDonnell of Snowflake disputed the view that Slootman was brought on specifically to take the company public.

"I have heard nothing of the sort," she said. "It is my understanding that Frank has been brought onboard because he has the perfect experience and knowledge to successfully lead the company through its next phase."

A Slack director who said the company will be "one of the most important tech companies in the world" is in hot water with the Securities and Exchange Commission for making "unauthorized statements" ahead of the company's IPO.

Slack, which filed to go public last month, disclosed in an SEC filing on Monday that director Chamath Palihapitiya's remarks in a television interview with CNBC were not endorsed by the company.

His comments appeared to violate "quiet period" rules that govern companies that have filed to go public.

Slack announced that it plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "SK" through a direct listing, in which private shareholders, including investors and employees, will be able to sell shares directly to the public.

In an April 30 interview, Palihapitiya shared his insights into Slack's IPO, heaped praise on Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield and declared that the office-messaging company is on track to becoming a major player in tech.

"You know, one of our biggest investments is a company called Slack, and I still think to myself, why did we not just lead every single round and write the entirety of the fund into that company," he said. "It was obvious from day one that Stewart Butterfield is an iconic CEO, and that Slack is going to be one of the most important tech companies in the world."

CNBC host Scot Wapner also asked: "You brought up Slack, so let's go there. You own 10% of the company? You're on the board. I know you're limited about what you can say as a result of all of that, but when can we expect it, and why the direct listing, and do you agree with that decision?"

"I love it," Palihapitiya said. "I mean, I think that the decision making that Stewart has taken is incredible, both in the way that he's built the company."

"He is transforming the culture," he added. "He understands the product to a level of sophistication that I have not seen since Facebook."

Palihapitiya then elaborated on the strengths of Facebook and of another startup that just went public, Zoom.

"You know, when I was in the bowels of Facebook building that machinery, what I saw was a team that really understood product market fit, and the power of network effects, and why that created an incredibly subsidized business, a thing that could expand all over the world at marginally zero cost," he said.

"The only company in the world that looks like that today that is not yet public is called Slack, and it will be soon. And so, from that perspective I think it is the most incredible business that we have seen probably the next closest thing to it is a company that just went public recently, which is Zoom."

In April, Tesla CEO Elon Musk had harsh words for the sensor technology that most self-driving cars companies rely on, but on Wednesday executives at Alphabet's Waymo,who pioneered that tech defended their approach.

Musk's attack was centered on the honeycomb-looking sensors — known as lidar — that Waymo and other companies like Uber, Ford, and GM Cruise use in conjunction with cameras to give their self-driving cars an understanding of the road and what's on it.

Musk said Tesla's autonomous approach will solely rely on built-in cameras. "lidar is a fool's errand," Musk said. "Anyone relying on lidar is doomed."

Read more: Elon Musk says Tesla will have 1 million robo-taxis on the road next year, and some people think the claim is so unrealistic that he's being compared to PT Barnum

On Wednesday at an event for Google's developer's conference conference, I/O, Waymo's Principal Scientist Drago Anguelov said that Musk's decision to use only cameras and leave out lidar was "very risky." Lidar continuously bounces light waves around to help the car measure distances and "see" what's around it.

"You can imagine doing [autonomous] driving just with cameras, but you would need the best camera systems to really handle it," Anguelov said. "So that's a very big bet that you can achieve it. And it's very, very risky, and it's not necessary."

Anguelov said lidar sensors help Waymo create a safer experience for the passenger.

"We have much richer data and much more accurate. It's easier to build the right simulation environments," he said. Llidar also helps cars determine how other vehicles and objects in the road are interacting with each other and "all of this is considerably harder if you just use cameras, and more limiting," he said.

Dmitri Dolgov, Waymo's CTO and VP of engineering, echoed the message of safety that its sensors, alongside its cameras, bring to its autonomous approach.

"It's not one or the other — it's both," Dolgov said. "So it's all about taking the best of both worlds and combining them in an intelligible way to have the most capable and the safest system that you can have."

These engineers also tried putting to rest Musk's accusations that the high-price for lidars was one of its major downsides. Dolgov admitted that early versions of the lidar were "hugely expensive," but that the high costs were no different to most new technology when it's first developed.

"There's nothing fundamentally expensive about lidars," Dolgov said. "We've reduced the price from the first generation to [the current] generation of lidars by a huge margin. And you can imagine what the savings will be like as we scale."

In March, Waymo announced that it would start selling its lidar sensors to customers who don't compete with the company's autonomous ride-sharing services. The additional channel could help Waymo increase economies of scale through greater production, eventually bringing down the price of making the component for its own cars even further.

In terms of when the company will expand its autonomous ride-sharing service — Waymo One — outside of its initial testing market in the Phoenix area, Waymo execs were tight-lipped on a timeline.

"We have a roadmap and some plans to expand to locations beyond Phoenix," Dolgov said. "But as always, our deployments will be gated by safety."

On the flip side, Musk — who's ride-hailing plan lacked many important details — said Tesla would have 1 million autonomous taxis on the road "next year."

Intel CEO Bob Swan kicked off his first shareholder meeting as the chip giant's new boss with a display of humility after a downbeat earnings report that sparked doubts about the company's direction.

"We let you down," Swan told investors at the company's headquarters in Santa Clara on Wednesday. "And we let ourselves down."

Swan, who had served as Intel CFO, was named permanent CEO in January after serving on an interim basis following the resignation of Brian Krzanich. In late April, Intel reported disappointing earnings, highlighted by weak data center business revenues.

Despite Swan's comments, Intel shares slipped after hours on Wednesday. Wedbush analyst Joel Kulina pointed to Intel's projection of low-single digit percentage growth in the next three years as a possible reason why.

"Still lingering concerns over Swan as CEO vs bringing in tech/turnaround type of guy," he said in a note to clients following the meeting.

Analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategy said the Intel CEO's show of humility was not surprising, given Swan's past role as the chipmaker's chief financial officer.

"I think this is classic Bob Swan," he told Business Insider. "If anyone understands Intel investors, it's him."

Martinwolf Analyst Marty Wolf said Intel is clearly still struggling to bounce back after missing recent opportunities. For example, Intel stunned the business world by announcing that it was exiting the 5G modem business. Swan reaffirmed that decision at the investor meeting, saying, "we didn't see a path to make money."

The company's data center business, which was supposed to lead Intel to a new growth period, turned out to be a disappointment, posting its first revenue decline in at least five years.

"They have long development lead times, and they missed not one but multiple cycle entry points," Wolf told Business Insider.

Acast launches Acast Access to make paywalled podcasts available on any player

On Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook joined SAP CEO Bill McDermott on stage at SAP's annual tech conference for a mutual love-fest between the two executives.

They were there to explain how they've expanded their years-long partnership, which included bringing some of SAP's business apps to Apple's iOS operating system and helping enterprises build custom iOS apps. Next up, the executives announced, SAP will be bringing more apps to the Mac, too.

The two showered each other with compliments, with Cook saying that SAP's finance software helped Apple get out of its malaise during the company's darkest days in the '90s. McDermott, ever the charming salesman, called Cook a friend, and praised everything from Apple devices to Cook's strong stance on user privacy.

Yet the gist of the news is this: SAP and Apple will be helping enterprises build augmented reality apps for iPhone or iPad, using Apple's on-device CoreML and ARkit tools, as well as SAP's machine learning tech Leonardo. With these apps, you don't need a Microsoft HoloLens, or any other kind of augmented reality goggles that project digital imagery over the real world; just point the iPad's camera around, as with "Pokémon Go."

McDermott also highlighted that SAP had brought several of its big enterprise apps to iOS, including the HR app SuccessFactors, expense-report tool Concur, and a system for the IT department called Asset Manager. He said that SAP is in the process of building an iOS version of Ariba, its enterprise procurement app, and says that more iOS SAP apps are coming.

That's a considerable promise. While SAP is best known for its enterprise-planning resource (ERP) financial software, as the world's largest maker of enterprise software, SAP actually has hundreds of applications, similar to its rival Oracle and its frenemy Microsoft.

The real point of the partnership

For the most part, though, SAP's partnership with Apple — which began in 2010 — hasn't really been about bringing SAP's own software to iOS. It's been about helping SAP's 437,000 customers worldwide build custom iOS apps to use in their own companies.

In fact, SAP is one of Apple's largest enterprise customers, and has built handfuls of custom apps for its own employees.

"We have 100,000-plus Apple devices running around SAP. We love 'em," McDermott told Cook on stage.

And, in a similar approach to that of IBM, another Apple partner, SAP has focused on building industry-specific apps for its customers such as retail, aviation and the like. It offers enterprises a development kit so they can write their own iOS software. This kit will be upgraded to include the CoreML machine learning tool and ARkit augmented reality tool.

Cook offered two examples of the kind of apps that could be built.

One is a retail app for managing inventory on shelves. Such "planograms" are often pieces of paper today, as Cook showed in this picture:

Apple

But once SAP helps retailers builds their fancy new machine learning/AR app, the iPad will be able to identify the inventory, discover which items are missing or need to be restocked, which ones are in the wrong spot, and so on.

Cook showed this photo:

Apple

He also showed photos of using the iPad with AR in the field to replace repair manuals.

Apple

Of note here is that Microsoft has been pitching similar uses for its HoloLens 2 goggles — so Apple and SAP working on AR tools for the iPad or iPhone might take some of the shine off of that pitch.

SAP coming to the Mac

And, in another blow to Microsoft Windows PCs, SAP said it plans to bring more enterprise apps to the Mac.

SAP was vague as to its commitment as to which apps it would be particularly bringing to the Mac, though. It didn't promise to bring any of its core apps to the Mac. It discussed new apps, similar to the ones it has brought to iOS, though it remains to be seen what, exactly, this push will entail. Like all other vendors, SAP is working like mad to get customers to buy cloud versions of its software. These would run on any device through a browser, and not need to be installed onto each server and PC.

However, the idea here is to beef up the Mac in the enterprise with new apps that make it more useful to workers.

It's another sign at how many employees at enterprises are choosing Macs over Windows when they are given a choice. As Cook pointed out on stage, that according his research, when companies give their employees a chance to choose their own computers: "Three out of four will pick a Mac," Cook said, joking, "I don't know what the other one is doing."

Most companies still run a lot of their business on Windows apps, and there are far more enterprise apps for Windows than for Macs. Enterprises remain a Microsoft Windows PC stronghold.

But looks like Apple is trying to change that, and its grabbed a powerful industry partner in SAP to help.

There's more bad news in Viceland.

The Walt Disney Company disclosed on Wednesday a $353 million write down of its stake in Vice Media, when Disney reported earnings for its second quarter of 2019. This is Disney's second Vice-related write down in less than a year. The company also wrote down $157 million of its Vice investment in the September 2018 period. Disney had an 11% direct ownership interest in Vice, as of its last annual filing in September 2018.

The disclosure comes as Vice raised $250 million in debt in May as it works to make the digital-media outfit profitable, The Wall Street Journal first reported. Vice was last valued at $5.7 billion in 2017, but Disney appears to be valuing it at significantly less.

Vice previously raised around $1.4 billion through several rounds of funding, in addition to the $250 million in debt announced this month. Disney originally invested $400 million in the company in 2015.

Vice is "on target to meet, if not exceed, its financial targets for the third straight quarter," a Vice spokesperson told Business Insider, in response to Disney's write down. "Our new executive team's strategic plan is well underway and with the recent capital raise, we will continue investing in the long-term growth of our five global businesses — television, studio, digital, news and our advertising agency, Virtue."

Google Assistant is arguably the smartest voice assistant out there, thanks to Google's long history of building up its artificial intelligence and search prowess. Google Assistant is available in a range of products, including the Google Home smart speakers, and the Home Hub smart display (now rebranded as Nest Home and Nest Hub, respectively).

For a limited time, the Hub is on sale at Best Buy for a very affordable $99— plus it comes with a free Google Home Mini smart speaker. The duo makes a great pair for bringing smarts to your home. Walmart has also discounted the Hub to $99, but you won't get a free Mini with it.

On the Hub's 7-inch touchscreen, you'll be able to see information displayed visually, including the weather, upcoming appointments on your calendar, and your commute. You can even watch YouTube videos and play music on the Hub. It's the perfect companion for anywhere in the home.

The sound quality of the Google Home Hub is pretty good, too, though it's not quite for audiophiles. You'll get decent bass response and enough high-end to offer some clarity. You can tweak the frequency response, too, thanks to the built-in EQ.

Usually, the Google Home Hub costs $149 and it doesn't always come with a free Google Home Mini speaker, so this deal really is a good one. This particular deal is at Best Buy, but you can also get the discounted Google Home Hub from Walmart for $99 (it's listed with its new Google Nest Hub name) — you won't get a free Mini, though.

Buy the Google Home Hub (AKA Google Nest Hub) from Best Buy (with free Google Home Mini), $99 (originally $149) [You save $50 and get a free Home Mini]

Buy the Google Home Hub (AKA Google Nest Hub) from Walmart, $99 (originally $149) [You save $50]

Facebook is relaxing its ban on crypto-related ads.

On Wednesday, the social networking giant announced that it was loosening its rules around blockchain and digital currencies. Some types of ads will remain banned, or, at the very least, require pre-approval. But users will now be able to run ads "related to blockchain technology, industry news, education or events related to cryptocurrency" no approval required, Facebook said.

The change comes 16 months after Facebook first banned all ads for bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and ICOs amid a wave of scams and shady schemes in the industry. It subsequently allowed some ads related to the tech, but only if they were pre-approved.

And the change of heart arrives as rumours swirl about Facebook's own ambitions in the crypto space, and news leaks out about the efforts of its secretive blockchain team.

On Wednesday, Bloomberg came out with a new report that said the company could announce its own cryptocurrency to power payments in the third quarter of 2019, and that project head David Marcus (former PayPal president) is quietly building a 50-strong team comprised in part of ex-PayPal employees.

Facebook has thus far stayed mum about the direction its blockchain team is taking, and it was conspicuously absent from F8, Facebook's major developer conference, earlier this month.

On the ads side, Facebook says it will still require pre-approval for advertisements that directly promote cryptocurrencies or cryptocurrency exchanges, and that ads for ICOs (initial coin offerings, a form of crypto-powered fundraising) will remain banned.

"We're committed to preventing misleading advertising on our platforms, especially in the area of financial products and services. Because of this, people who want to promote cryptocurrency and closely related products like cryptocurrency exchanges and mining software and hardware, will still have to go through a review process," the company said in a blog post announcing the change.

"This process will continue to take into account licenses they have obtained, whether they are traded on a public stock exchange (or are a subsidiary of a public company) and other relevant public background on their business."

Do you work at Facebook? Got a tip? Contact this reporter via encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 (650) 636-6268 using a non-work phone, email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Telegram or WeChat at robaeprice, or Twitter DM at @robaeprice. (PR pitches by email only, please.) You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Selected stories:

Priya Saiprasad is a millennial. She teaches hip hop dancing at her alma mater, University of California, Berkeley. She has a distaste for buzzwords, a love for math, and is a Yelp Elite member.

She's also Mayfield Fund's newest partner.

The 50-year-old Silicon Valley institution brought on 29-year-old Saiprasad to lead the firm's early-stage enterprise investments starting May 14. Before joining Mayfield, she was a founding team member at M12, Microsoft's independent investment fund, where she led Series A and Series B investments in startups that created artificial intelligence and machine learning products for industries that have historically shied away from tech.

Read More: Many traditional VCs are hesitant to buy into cannabis startups, but these investors are taking the plunge

In a conversation with Business Insider, Saiprasad said she hopes to dispel the myth that women do not create enterprise tech companies. At M12, she launched the firm's female founder competition for women in enterprise tech, which received an overwhelming response.

"It's just a personal passion of mine," Saiprasad told Business Insider. "I just want women, and men, to have equal amount of access to capital and statistics show that that is not true today. So I want to do whatever is in my power and ability to be able to move that statistic to a more fair and equitable manner."

Math is a universal language

Saiprasad was born in Chennai on Indian's southeastern coast. Her father worked for an oil company, and the family moved between 12 countries before Saiprasad turned 12. With each move, Saiprasad said she learned a new language, attended a new school, and made new friends.

"The only thing that was constant for me was math," Saiprasad told Business Insider. "Math is kind of the same in every country. Math was something that always drove me and I've always been really analytical; numbers just come very naturally to me. That's been one constant in my life."

Saiprasad's father eventually accepted a job in the Bay Area, and the family settled into a routine. Her mother was a macroeconomist, and worked primarily from home while she and her sister were growing up.

"Growing up in my household, the dinner table conversations were, well, you could either think of them as really riveting or really boring," Saiprasad said. "I always just wanted to find out what makes successful companies successful and unsuccessful companies not achieve that same degree of success, and I thought maybe an undergraduate degree in business could help me further explore that."

Read More: Carta, the startup building a stock exchange for startups, says its own valuation increased nearly $1 billion in 5 months

Not keen on another move, Saiprasad attending UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business with a minor in math. After graduating in 2010, she went into investment banking before landing at payments startup Square, ahead of her career at Microsoft's M12.

Analyzing Silicon Valley

Early enterprise tech startups struggle most with a clear path to profitability, Saiprasad told Business Insider. She is on the board of three enterprise software startups and believes an analytical approach to funding what she calls next-generation founders is key to bringing new ideas to the enterprise tech market.

"I think it's very obvious, but first-time entrepreneurs bring a non-jaded perspective, and they bring that raw enthusiasm and scrappiness that really can help accelerate at the early stage," Saiprasad said. "And that sort of glee that you see in those first time entrepreneurs, especially the younger generation of entrepreneurs, is fantastic."

According to Crunchbase, Mayfield counts 116 exits in its 50-year history, a majority of which were enterprise startups. As Saiprasad looks to join the team, she thinks her approach will help the firm continue its successful streak.

"I think, as a younger VC, there's a lot of perceptions that [other investors] have about Millennials," Saiprasad told Business Insider. "I don't think [Millennials want] entitlement, I think we want equity and fairness. It's actually a positive where we will fight so hard for our entrepreneurs to have fairness in every stage of the process."

Saiprasad is planning to focus on startups working in "underhyped" industries that have not traditionally embraced technological innovation, such as real estate, construction, manufacturing, and legal technology.

"It's not necessarily the most exciting spaces but there's actually so much innovation over there because there's a data moat that exists," Saiprasad said. "Whenever there's a data moat, there's so much opportunity to optimize and build an optimization engine on top of it."

Cloud analytics startup Sumo Logic has raised $110 million in a Series G round led by Battery Ventures, giving it a valuation over $1 billion, the company announced Wednesday

Sumo Logic is a platform for developers working to secure their cloud software. It provides real-time visibility into the various cloud platforms including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Its customers range from Airbnb to the Pokemon Company.

"We have proven that we are the platform of choice for not only cloud-native companies, but also enterprise companies and their cloud migration initiatives," Ramin Sayar, CEO of Sumo Logic, said in a statement. "It's great to have such a powerful set of leading investors and ecosystem partners as we accelerate our category leadership."

Read more: UiPath raises $568 million in new funding at a mega $7 billion valuation, making it the most valuable artificial intelligence startup in the world

While the average consumer many not know or use Sumo Logic, it's been a hit with venture capitalists.

The company is backed by an all-star cast of Sand Hill Road investors, including Accel Partners, DFJ, Greylock, IVP and Sequoia, as well as Sapphire Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures. With its latest round, Tiger Global Management and Franklin Templeton also joined the mix.

The company said it surpassed $100 million in revenue in fiscal year 2019, and has over 2,000 customers.

With a valuation exceeding $1 billion, Sumo Logic joins a growing cohort of enterprise tech companies gaining strong positions in the market as more and more companies move onto the cloud.

PagerDuty, a platform that lets IT professional monitor networks and notifies them when something has gone asque, went public last month with a $1.76 billion valuation. The company now has a $3.6 billion market cap.

Another enterprise tech favorite, the video conferencing company Zoom, went public one week later with a $9.2 billion valuation. Zoom now has a market cap just under $20 billion.

Google's decision to add more privacy tools to its Chrome browser while cutting back on cookie-based ad targeting is sending ripples through the ad-tech world.

On Tuesday, Google announced that it would let consumers block and choose how advertisers use third-party cookies to target them with ads. Google didn't say when these tools would be available, but that it would limit how ad-tech companies use third-party data to serve ads. Specifically, Google will restrict fingerprinting, where advertisers use information like consumers' location or device type to target them with ads, even if a consumer has opted out of third-party tracking.

Google also said that it plans to roll out a browser extension to let consumers see the data that's used to serve them ads on publishers' websites. The company also plans to include the browser extension into software that other ad-tech companies can use to tell consumers what information is collected on them.

Depending on how widely people adopt third-party blocking, the changes could be a blow for ad-tech companies that specialize in retargeting like Criteo, Rubicon, and AdRoll.

Read more: Google is overhauling how it sells programmatic advertising, and some marketers are concerned it means that the tech giant could steal more ad share

Chrome dominates the browser market with about a 60% share, per Statcounter, versus Safari's 15%. That means Google's move could be far more sweeping than Apple's similar changes to Safari in 2017, said Jay Wells, senior director of strategy at Merkle.

"If third-party tracking is deprecated across the browser, that's a significant amount of data that the programmatic industry needs to create identity," he said during a panel hosted by ad-tech company TripleLift on Wednesday. "That would look like 70% of traffic is gone. The winners in the short-term will be [companies] who can create first-party data."

Here's who stands to gain and lose from Google's changes.

Facebook and Google

Google naturally stands to win in favoring first-party data since it has reams of its own data across its own search, email and video services that can be used for ad targeting.

Its decision could also end up helping other big tech companies like Facebook. Facebook and Google often get hammered by advertisers who complain that the platforms are walled gardens in terms of how data is stored and shared. With Google limiting ad-tech companies that can operate in Chrome, the move suggests that walled gardens aren't likely to come down for advertisers.

Plus, Facebook has money to fend off regulation that ad-tech companies do not have.

"The more complex and onerous regulations are, the more it hurts smaller businesses, the startups and less funded companies," Wells said.

Publishers with first-party data

Under regulation like the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the upcoming California Consumer Privacy Act, high-end publishers including The Guardian have focused on collecting first-party data from readers over using third-party data from ad-tech companies. Such publishers could benefit if advertisers start buying directly from them in the wake of Google's changes, Wells said.

Michael Balabanov, SVP of sales for The Guardian US, said advertisers may shift to serving ads to consumers based on articles that they've read.

But first-party data also comes with targeting limitations, and less targeted ads are typically cheaper for advertisers. Since Apple rolled out changes to third-party tracking, he said that The Guardian's cost per thousand (CPM) have fallen 40% for ads served to Safari browsers, and he worries that the impact from Google will be more significant.

"If Chrome came out rolling the same protections, that would be really worrisome for a lot of publishers," he said. "Buyers need to change the way the way that they're buying to more contextual aspects."

Consumers

Google's changes reflect how regulations and privacy are pressuring Google to be more transparent about how it uses data.

It's not clear how significantly consumers will seek out Google's tools to change their preferences, but it could be a step in the right direction in helping consumers understand how their data is used.

"Our experience shows that people prefer ads that are personalized to their needs and interests — but only if those ads offer transparency, choice and control," Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP of Google ads and commerce, wrote in a blog post. "However, the digital advertising ecosystem can be complex and opaque, and many people don't feel they have enough visibility into, or control over, their web experience."

Ad-tech companies that specialize in retargeting

Ad networks and ad-tech companies that specialize in cross-device targeting including Criteo, The Trade Desk, and MediaMath stand to be some of the biggest casualties of Google's move.

"They need to come up with Plan B, fast," Matt Prohaska, CEO and principal of Prohaska Consulting, said of retargeters.

In a statement to Bloomberg First Word, the French ad-tech company Criteo said that it expected Google's changes to have a "neutral to potentially low single-digit negative" impact.

Tech firms working to solve attribution

Joella Duncan, director of media strategy for global consumer solutions for North America at Equifax, said multi-touch attribution companies that Equifax uses to help marketers pinpoint which of their ads drove a sale would get less data back, making their models less accurate.

Duncan did not name any such vendors but research firm Forrester lists companies like Neustar, Analytic Partners and IRI as examples of attribution companies.

Consumers, again

With less third-party data for advertisers to work with, Prohaska said consumers could wind up seeing more spammy ads that are less targeted than they have been.

"The upside of personalized content and monetization should outweigh privacy concerns," he said. "There's going to be a pendulum swing of 'get this away from me.' And we'll have punch-the-monkey ads and a lot of untargeted garbage. We don't need to go back to that."

Amazon was the target of an "extensive" fraud last year, the company revealed in a filing with a UK regulatory board in November. The filing was unearthed by Bloomberg on Wednesday.

Money intended for loans to be sent from Amazon to third-party sellers and businesses — likely hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth — was redirected by malicious actors. They reportedly hacked into about 100 seller accounts and took the loan money, which was intended to be used for business and startup costs.

The hackers were able to get into these accounts and change the payment details to their own bank accounts. The filing did not reveal how much money was taken or how the accounts were accessed, according to Bloomberg. Individual online accounts are often accessed maliciously through phishing scams that trick holders into handing over account details unknowingly.

The fraud occurred over a period of six months, the filing said, with the first instance of fraud occurring in May 2018.

Read more: Amazon reveals how third-party sellers are kicking its butt on sales as part of small business charm offensive

The practice of Amazon giving out loans to its third-party sellers is widespread in the markets where it operates. It revealed in its annual small and medium business report on Tuesday that it gave out more than $1 billion in loans to its third-party sellers and partners in 2018.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the case but said that any seller who believes they have received a phishing email should send a message to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Lora DiCarlo’s debut product, Osé, set to release this fall. The company says the device is currently undergoing changes and may look different upon release.

China is beating the US on AI, says noted investor Kai-Fu Lee