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5G is coming, and wireless networks are poised for transformation thanks to its blazing fast connections, near-instantaneous response times, and massive device support. The networks will support over 1.5 billion 5G phones in use worldwide by 2024.

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Companies across the digital space need to know what this generational shift will do to enable new practices, expand revenue streams, and embed their technology even deeper into consumer's lives and enterprise workflows. And 5G won't be acting alone: The development of AI technologies will fuel the rise of autonomous cars and trucks and the growth of smart speakers, all of which are acting alongside one another and ushering in a transformed world.

To help navigate this fast-changing landscape, Business Insider Intelligence has forecast the key figures that will define the next five years for telecommunications and technology leaders. The Telecoms & Tech Forecast Book gives you the data you need to make decisions on how to navigate the quickly evolving mobile, communications, and technology space.

Here are some examples of the forecasts included in the deck:

Don't expect Netflix to make any big acquisitions anytime soon.

That was the word from CEO Reed Hastings Tuesday on a webcast following the streaming media giant's first-quarter earnings report. In its more than 20 years of existence, Netflix has only made a few minor acquisitions, he noted. It's not planning on changing its ways now and getting more active in the mergers-and-acquisition market, he said.

"I don't think investors have too much to worry about there," Hastings said. Netflix, he continued, has "no big appetite, no big need."

Hollywood has seen some big mergers of late. On Monday, Hulu announced that it had bought AT&T's shares in the streaming company. Last month, Disney completed its purchase of 21st Century Fox. Last year, AT&T snapped up Time Warner.

Meanwhile, some analysts have been urging Apple, which is due to launch its own streaming media service later this year, to buy some studios or content producers to bulk up its library of movies and TV shows.

Read this:The 'clock has struck midnight' for Apple: It needs to buy a major Hollywood studio this year or lose the streaming war to Netflix and Amazon

But Hastings doesn't think Netflix needs to play in that market. Despite being the largest streaming video service with 149 million paid subscribers worldwide, it has plenty of room to get bigger, he said.

"We've got clear sailing ahead," Hastings said. "If we can produce the world's best content, if we can deliver it with the best user interface, then we can grow for many, many years ahead. So that's what we're focused on."

Netflix's first-quarter results beat Wall Street expectations, but it warned that its second-quarter subscriber growth would be slower than analysts expected. It also said it expected its operations and investments to burn through $3.5 billion in cash this year, about $500 million more than it previously projected.

Chipmaker Intel said on Tuesday that it is exiting the 5G modem business, effectively ceding the market for smartphones on the eve of what's expected to be the biggest wireless market technology transition in years.

The company said it will focus its 5G wireless efforts on network infrastructure. But, when it comes to the smartphone modem business, CEO Bob Swan said in a statement, "it has become apparent that there is no clear path to profitability and positive returns."

Shares of Intel was up as high as 4% in after hours trading following the announcement.

The news came on the same day that iPhone maker Apple and Qualcomm settled litigation involving 5G modems.

Apple had previously selected Intel to supply the modem chips for its future 5G smartphones. But Intel said in its announcement on Tuesday that it "does not expect to launch 5G modem products in the smartphone space."

The timing of the Apple settlement and the Intel announcement did not appear to be a coincidence and was quickly remarked upon by industry observers.

"We just don't know which one came first," said Patrick Moorhead, the president and principal analyst of Moor Insights & Strategy.

"Did Apple say 'Intel is too much, I need to go back with Qualcomm' or was this Intel saying 'This business isn't great and I don't want to pour more resources into it'?" Moorhead said.

Intel appeared to be having trouble with its schedule for producing the 5G chips, Moorhead said. As a result, Apple was putting its iPhone business at risk if by relying on Intel for the modem chips.

"Qualcomm's core business is modems and modem IP," he said. "It's their core business, it's what they do."

The news represents the first major strategy change by Swan since taking the reins as permanent CEO in January, after Brian Krzanich resigned following a company investigation into a past relationship with an employee.

Intel's decision to pull the plug on modem chips means the company is effectively abandoning the market for smartphones, the most popular platform used by consumers for computing today. It's a remarkable turn of events for a company that once provided the microprocessors at the heart of roughly 80% of the world's PCs and was synonymous with consumer computing devices.

Birth control delivery startup Nurx now offers an at-home HPV testing kit

In 2018, the United States saw millions of reported instances of child sexual exploitation on the internet. Many of these harrowing stories have escaped public notice, said Julie Cordua, the CEO of Thorn, a nonprofit that builds technology to defend children from sexual abuse.

Cordua works with the company's co-founder, Ashton Kutcher, to encourage companies to weed out abuse on their online platforms.

Read more: These two tech startups are changing the world — and they're backed by Hollywood stars

On Tuesday, Thorn became one of eight groups to receive funding f rom the Audacious Project, a TED-sponsored fund giving away $280 million to organizations with bold ideas for solving the world's most pressing issues.

Thorn was awarded the money to help in its quest of eliminating child sexual abuse material from the internet.

In 2017, Kutcher testified about the issue before Congress, recalling a phone call his team received from the Department of Homeland Security, which was searching for a seven-year-old victim of sexual abuse.

Cordua said the child had been featured in hundreds of sexually abusive images, but the authorities were unable to locate her perpetrator.

"We started brainstorming all the different ways that we could help, what technologies could help," Cordua told Business Insider. "We realized that there was nothing designed to help with these kinds of cases."

Kutcher testifying before Congress. YouTube/ABC News

Funding from Audacious will help Thorn build out its technology, which helps law enforcement agencies identify trafficked children and gives companies the tools to stop the spread of abusive content.

"Child sexual abuse obviously is a human crime, but the Internet is introducing this entirely new dynamic," Cordua told Business Insider. "Now you can find entire chat rooms and places where there are people who will convince you that this type of behavior is okay."

Thorn's software is being beta tested by companies like Imgur and Flickr, but Cordua said it can be used by "any platform that allows you to upload an image, upload a video, share a chat, [or] connect with people around the world."

One challenge to rolling out the software, she said, is that many companies are fearful of discovering abusive content on their platform. But Cordua envisions a future where companies will be rewarded for shutting down traffickers.

"Most entrepreneurs only think amazing things about their technology, which is why they're great innovators," said Cordua. "[But] at some critical tipping point, if certain people or organizations haven't taken action, then that's questionable."

Funding from the Audacious Project could bring Thorn closer to achieving that tipping point, Cordua said.

The project, now in its second year, has already helped scale the efforts of organizations like the Environmental Defense Fund, which used the prize to further its goal of launching a methane-tracking satellite, and the Bail Project, which has posted bail for more than 4,000 people.

In addition to Thorn, this year's recipients include three scientific organizations (the Institute for Protein Design, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and the END Fund), one environmental group (The Nature Conservancy), two educational organizations (Educate Girls and Waterford UPSTART), and the Center for Policing Equity, a criminal justice group.

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Augusto Marietti thinks his company is in the right position to benefit from one of the biggest trends in software development.

At the heart of most contemporary software development are application programming interfaces, which are the bits of code that programmers use to build features into their apps or services. Though created by specific developers or platform makers, they're frequently shared with other app and service makers. For example, developers use Facebook's APIs to allow users to log in to their apps with Facebook credentials.

Marietti's startup, Kong, offers a service that allows companies to control the use of their APIs. Its service acts as a kind of gatekeeper; it can restrict access to particular developers, limit the number of times particular APIs are accessed, and keep track of how often particular ones are being used.

In recent years, there's been an explosion in APIs, "which creates the need for an API broker like Kong to exist," he said.

Kong has actually been around for about a decade, albeit not in its present form. In 2009, Marietta launched Mashape, which was intended to be a marketplace for APIs. But he and his team soon found that they needed a way to manage all the requests for those APIs. They called the technology they built — a kind of firewall or proxy for APIs — Kong.

Two years ago, Marietti and his team shifted their focus to building on the API proxy technology. They sold off the marketplace and renamed their startup Kong.

"It was a 10-year journey," he said. "But in reality, Kong is a two-year's baby."

The basic Kong proxy service is available free as open-source software. But the startup sells on a subscription basis a more advanced version that offers additional features, including a graphical interface, enhanced security, and the ability to analyze incoming requests.

Customers basically redirect incoming API requests to Kong. The company's paid service can monitor incoming requests and alert customers to potentially harmful ones. It can also process incoming requests to filter out sensitive information, such as credit-card numbers, or to format them so customers' computers can process them more easily.

Investors have been enthusiastic about Kong's revised business model. The San Francisco company raised $18 million in a series B funding round around the time it switched gears two years ago. And last month, it announced it had raised another $43 million in a series C round that was led by Index Ventures.

Read more: This CEO was so broke he had to crash on Travis Kalanick's couch — now he's raised $18 million from Andreessen Horowitz

Marietti plans to invest about 80% of the new funds in two areas — research and development and sales and marketing — with the rest going to operations. The company's 10- to 20-year vision is to build what he calls a service-control platform, which would allow customers to manage all of their services from creation to testing to implementation.

That envisioned offering is "much bigger than a load balancer, API management, or integration market," he said.

Here's the pitch deck Marietti and his team used to raise their $43 million in new funding:

Sony officials tell the Wall Street Journal that the gaming giant updated its policy for approving new PlayStation games worldwide, in response to the cultural shifts brought about by the #MeToo movement and the increased visibility of video game livestreaming.

Per the report, Sony wants to avoid promoting games that disparage and objectify women, or that contain sexual content. The company is particularly concerned about being associated with Japanese titles that feature sexualized images of underage girls.

"Sony is concerned the company could become a target of legal and social action," a spokesperson for Sony in the United States told the Journal. Business Insider has reached out to Sony for further comment on the new policies, and will update if we hear back.

Sony's home market of Japan has a reputation for having a higher tolerance for erotic games — games that might be considered risqué, or outright offensive, in the United States.

In the past, Sony restricted many of those games for sale to Japanese PlayStation users, but livestreaming platforms like YouTube and Twitch can give any game the possibility to go viral around the world. Meanwhile, in the United States, response to the #MeToo movement has encouraged a more thoughful approach critique of how women are represented in video games and other popular media.

And so, Sony is changing its rules to distance itself from games that might be found problematic. However, these new rules are reportedly being implemented in a way that some developers and gamers find confusing or inconsistent.

Here's what you need to know:

Dara Khosrowshahi could get a huge payday — totaling more than $100 million according to a source — if Uber's IPO valuation hits $120 billion and stays at that level for 90 consecutive days.

The Uber CEO will also get the payout for selling the company for $120 billion, according to a disclosure the company's its S-1 documents.

Read: Here's who's getting rich on Uber's massive IPO

Although we know that Khosrowshahi is seeking the $120 billion valuation, Uber publicly confirmed the figure in the S-1's footnotes about Khosrowshahi's compensation and financial incentives, as first spotted by Axios's Dan Primack.

The CEO will be granted 1.75 million in stock options that he can buy for $33.65 a share that vest over four years, should the company's market capitalization reach $120 billion for 90 consecutive days, the company said. Plus the CEO will be instantly awarded 185,735 shares that are otherwise earmarked to be doled out over time as part of his performance-dependent shares.

This is in addition to other batches of options and performance-based grants. Because Uber hasn't yet released key details about its IPO, we don't know how much money Khosrowshahi stands to gain from buying 1.75 million shares at that $33.64 strike price, but all told, it's a package worth at least $100 million, a source tells us.

This is backed up by our own back-of-the-envelope math based on when Softbank bought its 16% stake in Uber at about $33 a share. That share price valued the company at $48 billion. So if Uber can more than double that valuation, and the stock price doubles, those 1.75 shares would be worth over $117 million.

Khosrowshahi currently holds 200,000 shares and was paid a $1 million salary last year, plus a $2 million cash bonus. Uber also covers a number of his expenses such as help with his tax bill ($98,357 in 2018 for that).

Then again he gave up over $180 million of stock options when he left Expedia to take the Uber job, Primack notes.

The question is: how does Khosrowshahi convince investors that Uber is worth $120 billion today? Especially when looking at the financials: $11.3 billion in revenue in 2018, a $3 billion loss on operations (although it logged $987 million in net income, mostly from $5 billion worth of divestitures, it said, such as selling its Southeast Asia business to Grab). On top of that, Uber has $6.9 billion in long-term debt.

Answer: It needs to show Wall Street a big, huge growth story.

This growth story rests on a couple of pillars: 1) the rideshare business, in which Uber is already the dominant player. Uber is telling investors that this is a "$5.7 trillion market opportunity" in its prospectus.

2) Its meal delivery business, Uber Eats, which Uber says is a $795 billion opportunity.

3) The Uber Freight business, in which Uber's software matches carriers with shippers — a $700 billion market opportunity, Uber says.

And, last but far from least, investment in "advanced technologies, including autonomous vehicle technologies," it says.

Uber describes a world where its fleet of robot taxis work arm-in-arm with human Uber drivers. It has not put a market value on self-driving cars. But one person tells us that Uber's self-driving car unit could be valued internally by investors at $10 billion minimum.

For comparison, GM's Cruise (backed by Honda) was valued at about $15 billion in 2018, according to Pitchbook while one Wall Street analysts pegged Google spinoff Waymo at roughly $75 billion in 2018.

Netflix's cash-burn problem is going to get even worse before it gets better, the company warned on Tuesday.

The streaming video service provider now expects its operations and investments to burn up $3.5 billion in cash this year, company officials said in a letter to shareholders. That's about $500 million more than its operations and investments consumed last year — and about $500 million more than the company projected in January.

Netflix made a change to its corporate structure that will increase its taxes this year, the company said in the letter, which it released as part of its first-quarter earnings report. The company also plans to invest more than previously expected in real estate and other infrastructure, it said.

Read this: Netflix slides after beating Q1 subscriber growth estimates but giving weak guidance for the months ahead

But Netflix promised the company's free-cash flow, which represents the net amount of money a company generates from or consumes in its operations less the amount it invests in property, equipment, and other long-term assets, would start to turn around next year.

"We're still expecting free cash flow to improve in 2020 and each year thereafter, driven by our growing member base, revenues, and operating margins," the letter said.

Despite recording regular profits, Netflix has posted negative free cash flow every year since 2011. The difference between its reported bottom line and its cash outflow is largely due to an accounting issue that's a result of its huge and ongoing investments in original shows and movies. The company typically makes those investments — and spends real cash — on such content years before it has to recognize their cost on its income statement.

In order to finance its cash deficits, the company has repeatedly gone to the bond market to sell debt. The company's long-term debt now stands at $10.3 billion, up from $6.5 billion at the end of the first quarter last year.

Many startups are born out of an idea for a new product or an insight into a potential business opportunity.

But not Airtable.

Before its founders figured out the service it would offer or how it would make money, they talked through the principles that would guide the company they were creating, CEO Howie Liu told Business Insider in a recent interview. He and his cofounders believed that a company's culture and values were more important to its longterm success than its initial product or business model. Indeed, they felt like those values could help guide the development of its business model and products.

"We were very ... intentional on day one in terms of talking through what is going to be the guiding principle set for our company many years down the road," Liu said.

Airtable offers something that, at first glance, looks a lot like a simple spreadsheet. So you might think that Liu and his cofounders were focusing on upending the the market for Excel or Google Sheets.

But in reality, they had much broader ambitions, Liu said. And those aims were ones they talked about right from the beginning, even before they launched their service. They wanted to focus on disrupting the traditional method of writing software and make it more accessible to everyday people, he said.

"In the same way that Apple democratized personal computing, we wanted to democratize the act of software creation," Liu said in a follow-up email.

The bet on values seems to be paying off

The bet Liu and and cofounders made to focus on values seems to be paying off. Airtable is one of the hottest enterprise software startups around. It raised $160 million in venture funding last year— most recently at a $1.1 billion valuation, and has some 80,000 customers, including half of the Fortune 1,000. It's generating enough revenue and cash flow now that Liu says it can continue to run its business without any more outside financing.

Read this:The CEO of hot startup Airtable says that the company's financials are strong enough to go public, even though he doesn't want to

The decision of Liu and his partners to initially focus on values came out of years of conversations with his cofounders and from their collective experiences in the tech industry. The three met in college at Duke, where they bonded while brainstorming startup ideas.

After college, Liu founded a startup that was eventually acquired by Salesforce. Andrew Ofstad, his cofounder and Airtable's chief product officer, worked for giant consulting firm Accenture, helping clients develop products before joining Google product team. Liu's other cofounder, Emmett Nicholas, Airtable's chief technology officer, worked as an engineer at Stack Overflow, the mega-popular Q&A site for developers.

Through their various experiences in the tech industry, three continued to talk about startup ideas, both about products and the kinds of companies they wanted to build. While they officially launched Airtable's product in 2015, the discussions that led to the company started more than two years before that, Liu said.

"In Airtable's case, [the launch of the product] was very organic," he said. The idea for the company, he continued, "developed slowly over the course of years."

Airtable is increasingly resembling its founders' vision

As Airtable's service has evolved, its founders' vision has become more apparent. Its service has evolved into a kind of advanced database program that allows users to input not just text and numbers, but digital objects ranging from photos to documents.

And customers can now use its service to create bespoke applications. Hollywood studios are using it to help manage the post-production process with their films, major festivals are using it to track lost-and-found items, and people are using it to help plan their weddings.

Focusing on values and principles before products and business models may seem a bit odd, almost like putting the cart before the horse, Liu acknowledged. But he and his team wanted to avoid the mistakes other entrepreneurs had made, he said.

Founders who start with a product often end up with something that becomes an accidental business, something that's more of a feature than the foundation of a real company. By starting out with guiding principles, Liu and his founders felt they could focus instead on building a sustainable and influential business.

"In some sense, it's a little bit contrived to talk about [values and principles] before you actually have anything — like, you haven't even gotten to basic product-market fit, you have zero employees, you have, like, nothing," Liu said in the interview. "But at the same time ... it's almost especially important to talk about it then, because otherwise once you get moving and into the thick of things, if you don't have that clear set of values ... it becomes really hard to retrofit that."

In Airtable's case, the company's initial values have helped steer Liu and his team ever since, helping them to focus on their longterm vision.

"We knew from day one that we had to value excellence over expedience, craft over convenience," he said. "We weren't just replicating existing products," he continued, "but creating something new and truly original. That required us to value open-ended, imaginative thinking."

Got a tip about a startup or other 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 @troywolv, or send him a secure message through Signal at 415.515.5594. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Since John Krafcik became the CEO of Google's self-driving car project, now called Waymo, in 2015, the company has achieved two significant milestones.

The first came in 2016, when the company gave the first ride in a fully self-driving vehicle on public roads in Austin, Texas. The second followed in 2018, when Waymo launched Waymo One— the first commercial, autonomous ride-hailing service in the United States — in parts of Arizona.

Waymo One has positioned the company as the leader in the autonomous-driving industry, according to the research and consulting firm Navigant Research, which in a 2019 report ranked Waymo first among companies developing self-driving technology in strategy and execution. And according to a report Waymo submitted to the California Department of Motor Vehicle, its safety drivers had to manually take over their test cars, because of safety concerns, about once every 11,000 miles in 2018 — the best rate of any company testing autonomous vehicles on public roads in California.

Read more: The 10 people transforming how the world gets around

Increasing the scale of its business is still a priority for Waymo, but so is expanding its scope into trucks, personal vehicles, and hardware sales. The company has a self-driving truck unit, known internally as Husky, and said in March that it would begin selling lidar sensors to companies that don't compete with Waymo One.

"Anything that has wheels and moves along the surface of the earth is something that we, in the future, could imagine being driven by Waymo," Krafcik said.

As Waymo's ambitions grow, it still has to reckon with the obsessive attention to detail autonomous vehicles require. Self-driving cars must be able to handle small details in complex environments, like parking lots, which are challenging because they feature cars and pedestrians moving in unpredictable patterns and don't have road markings, Krafcik said.

Beyond mastering technical details, Waymo also has to anticipate the preferences of its customers. The company had thought passengers who were traveling to a grocery store, for example, would want to be picked up where they were dropped off — at the front door. But the front door is a major source of foot-traffic at grocery stores, and passengers told Waymo that they felt self-conscious loading bags into a car in such a busy area.

"We rarely had thought about very specific things like: What happens when one of our riders wants to go to the Albertsons grocery store and get dropped off, and then later be picked up with six bags of groceries?" Krafcik said. "It wasn't obvious."

Krafcik said Waymo has improved the performance of its vehicles in parking lots, citing the example as a reason why the company is ahead of its competitors.

"I haven't heard other self-driving car companies talk about this," Krafcik said.

But Waymo is not seeking to capitalize on its first-mover advantage at all costs. Safety is a priority, Krafcik said, a point the company emphasizes to new employees.

"We have to be safe. We have to be extremely careful and methodical in our approach in how we go to market, but we also have to be urgent, because the world is waiting."

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This week we published our first list of 100 people transforming business, including 10 each from the worlds of advertising and media.

The $221 billion US ad industry is being upended by the rise of digital ad giants, fragmented consumer attention, and marketers' pressure for results, while media industry is undergoing a grand convergence with tech giants, telecoms, startups and legacy companies competing to set the cultural agenda.

These visionaries range from P&G's Marc Pritchard, who's pushing to clean up digital advertising; to showrunner Shonda Rhimes, who's changing the balance of power in the TV industry. You can check out the full list here.

The deadline for nominations for the most innovative chief marketing officers is April 29. We want to hear from you. Submit your nominations here.

Elsewhere, Lauren Johnson dug into Publicis' $4.4 billion deal for data company Epsilon. Here are the takeaways: