Google's cloud computing efforts were a mixed bag in 2018 but the company on Monday said that it invested heavily in 2018, and will continue do so in 2019, albeit maybe not at the same pace.

During its year-end earnings report on Monday, Google revealed that it doubled its capital expenditures in 2018, to $25.5 billion, up from $12.6 billion in 2017. The hefty spending went towards everything from new office facilities to accommodate Google's growing workforce to bolstering its infrastructure such as datacenters and servers.

It's tough to say exactly who much of that capex went towards Google's cloud business specifically, but the company has made it clear that investing in the cloud is a priority. Google said it launched its 18th Google Cloud region in the fourth quarter and pointed to plans for continued expansion in the US and abroad.

In comparison, Amazon spent $11.3 billion cash on capex in 2018, split between fulfillment operations (like warehouses) and AWS, it said. And Microsoft said it spent $16 billion.

Google also hired madly for its cloud unit, with more than 4,000 new hires in the final three months of the year. "The most sizeable increases were in cloud, for both technical and sales roles," Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat said during the conference call.

Porat noted that spending on talent and equipment will continue in 2029, though the pace will cool off compared to 2018. Capex, she said, will "moderate quite significantly."

How does Google's cloud business compare?

Google is spending to catch up. Revenue from its cloud business lags Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, although Google does likely have a multibillion cloud business. It's a bit tough to tell because Google doesn't break out cloud revenue. It lumps it in its "other" category which also includes the revenue it makes from its Google play app store and its hardware devices like Google Home.

That "other revenue" category was $6.5 billion in the fourth quarter of 2018, up from just under $5 billion for the year-ago quarter and a sizeable portion of that is generated by its app store. Google noted on Monday that the number of Google Cloud Platform deals worth more than $1 million more than doubled in 2018 and that it ended the year with more than 5 million paying customers of its cloud productivity tools, but otherwise offered little new information by which to measure the size of its Cloud business.

For comparison, AWS generated $7.43 billion in net cloud sales for Amazon in the fourth quarter.

Microsoft also doesn't disclose specific revenue figures for its cloud, Azure, so a direct comparison here is even harder to noodle out. The unit that includes Azure is called "Intelligent Cloud" and it generated $9.38 billion in the same quarter. However, despite putting "cloud" in the unit's name, that unit includes a lot of classic software products, including Microsoft's popular database and Windows Server, its operating system for servers. Those are both older, massive businesses compared to Azure and are not what anyone would consider a cloud service.

Most market experts believe that AWS is way ahead. One researcher, Synergy, puts AWS at 40% market share in cloud.

Keep an eye on the new boss

Of course the big news for Google's cloud efforts in 2018 was its change of leadership. Near the end of 2018, Google board member Diane Greene left. Google hired Thomas Kurian to replace her. He left Oracle where he helped build Oracle into a database and applications giant during his decades there, and then lead Oracle's cloud efforts. Oracle's cloud is growing quickly by internal metrics as it moves its customers from buying its software to renting its software on its cloud. But Oracle's cloud is not exactly taking the tech industry's breath away, so his performance at Google Cloud will be a test for him and the company.

There's been a lot of speculation about whether Kurian will embark on an acquisition spree to help Google's Cloud catch up with the competition. Google CEO Sundar Pichai kept mum on Monday when asked about any potential big deals or changes in strategy under Kurian. Pichai spoke of "continuity" and focusing on the parts of the business where the company is seeing good returns.

Even with all the shrouding of investment and financial results, the cloud industry is often considered a three-player race, with Amazon in the lead, Microsoft on its heels, Google in third and a variety of players, from Alibaba to IBM to Oracle, in the chase pack.

Just six months ago, analysts believed Amazon was the hands-down frontrunner in a race for a $10 billion cloud contract with the Pentagon. But now, says an analyst, Microsoft actually has a fighting chance.

Right now, these cloud giants, along with IBM and Oracle, are competing for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, a winner-take-all contract to move sensitive military data to the cloud.

Just about a year ago, Amazon Web Services had an 80% chance of winning, while Microsoft had a 20% chance, wrote Daniel Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, in a note to clients on Monday. The gap has narrowed to AWS having a 60% chance and Microsoft having a 40% chance.

Ives calls this bid the "cloud Super Bowl," and says the announcement of the winner will be a defining moment in the cloud wars between the two tech titans. And while it's far from a sure thing, Microsoft stands a better chance than ever before.

"I think Microsoft still has some wood to chop to even the odds over the next six to eight weeks and that's why it's going to be a fierce battle between these two Seattle brethren to win JEDI," Ives told Business Insider. "In my opinion it's the most important cloud deal ever."

Read more: As bidding closes, Amazon's cloud is the favorite to win a $10 billion defense deal. Here's why everybody else is so mad about it

Microsoft is making some headway

JEDI isn't necessarily the endgame, and there will be other government cloud deals to come, says Ives.

But the announcement of the JEDI winner will have a ripple effect for years, he says. Whoever wins JEDI may be more likely to win future government cloud contracts, which Ives estimates will be worth $20 billion over the next five years. That's why investors in both companies are carefully watching JEDI, as a sign of things to come.

In the past few months, Microsoft has made steady progress with its Azure Government cloud, which is certified to handle classified information. It's planning to earn the highest government security authorization, which of all the cloud giants, only AWS holds. Microsoft is also investing in its artificial intelligence product line.

What's more, Microsoft been aggressively deepening its relationship with the Department of Defense. In January, Microsoft just won a separate $1.76 billion contract with the department for software development services.

Amazon had become a go-to cloud vendor for the government, as it had previously won a $600 million cloud contract with the CIA. However, Microsoft's relationship with the Department of Defense spans over 40 years, to the earliest days of the company. And Microsoft has lots of relationships with IT consultants and systems administrators who specialize in helping big government agencies like the DoD adopt new technology.

"While Microsoft might be at a slight disadvantage to Amazon and AWS from a cloud perspective, Microsoft is actually in a position of strength especially when it comes to its partner network, especially in the Beltway," Ives said. "That has enabled the company to get a leg up in the past two months."

The victory circle

The race, Ives says, is going to come down to which vendor with which the Pentagon feels most comfortable. Ives says that in his conversations with Washington insiders, Microsoft's hustle to get the deal has not gone unnoticed.

AWS knows that Microsoft is catching up, and it's no coincidence that Amazon announced a new headquarters near Washington, D.C., even as it expanded its partnership with enterprise stronghold VMware, Ives says.

"Microsoft has really stepped up in its partner ecosystem to potentially leverage itself into the victory circle for JEDI," Ives said. "The Azure Government cloud has been significant. Them getting that deal in early January was a major feather in their hat."

Both clouds are on something of a tear: When both companies announced earnings last week, AWS saw 45% year-over-year growth, while Microsoft Azure saw 76% year-over-year growth. Google previously dropped out of the JEDI race.

A virtual performance hosted inside of the world's most popular video game may have been an early glimpse at a future cultural phenomenon. More than 10 million "Fortnite" players logged in to the game on Saturday to watch a 10-minute virtual concert performed by the electronic dance music (EDM) star Marshmello, a massive success for the game's first live performance and evidence that players are interested in more than just shooting each other.

"Fortnite" has more than 200 million registered players worldwide, including Marshmello. The basic game mode pits 100 players against one another in a fight for survival, but, as the concert demonstrated, there are many ways to enjoy the game. Each week brings new social and competitive events for players to explore, and the game's new creative mode is encouraging them to craft their own experience.

For many gamers, "Fortnite" has become the place where they gather and socialize with friends, if only because of the sheer number of people playing the game.

Read more: Netflix says it's more worried about competition from video games like 'Fortnite' than other streaming services

For Saturday's concert, players gathered at Pleasant Park, a static location in the shooting game, to watch the performance and dance along with the music. Players visiting Pleasant Park in the days leading up to the concert could see the stage slowly being built — the sort of small detail that has helped the world of "Fortnite" feel like a living place that changes with time.

On the day of the concert, Fortnite released a special mode that prevented players from shooting each other while they were in the concert area.

After the show, several "Fortnite" players told Marshmello that his performance was their first concert. Dozens of "Fortnite" players and parents shared videos of themselves dancing and having fun during the short set, and Marshmello returned for an encore run of the performance later in the day. An extended version of the mix was uploaded to Apple Music, with a 29-minute running time.

The first concert in "Fortnite" was a massive success and a perfect example of how the game has captured the attention of millions.

Amazon has leaned on technology to become a 21st century titan, but it might turn next to an old-school tactic to jumpstart its slowing e-commerce business.

The Seattle company has started to generate huge amounts of cash — it garnered $30 billion from its operations last year alone, thanks largely to its hugely profitable and fast-growing Amazon Web Services (AWS) business. Scott Mushkin, a financial analyst who covers the company for Wolfe Research, thinks Amazon will take a page from Walmart and invest some of that cash in cutting prices to boost its retail business and grab market share from competitors.

"We envision a day when Amazon not only provides unmatched convenience but also unmatched pricing," Mushkin said in a research note issued Sunday. "This, in our opinion, would be absolutely devastating to other retailers and likely result in a reacceleration of Amazon's growth rate."

Amazon spooked investors last week when it warned that it expected its first-quarter sales to grow more slowly than analysts had forecast. It also reported weak results from its retail business in the holiday quarter. Its direct online sales to consumers grew by just 13% from the fourth quarter last year, and sales through its Whole Foods chain and other physical stores actually fell 3% year over year.

Read this: Amazon tops Wall Street's holiday expectations, but offers weak sales guidance

Although the company's overall holiday results beat Wall Street's expectations, Amazon's stock fell more than 5% on Friday on investors' worries about upcoming quarters.

Mushkin lowered his earnings estimates and price target — from $2,350 a share to $2,200 — following the report. But he remains a bull on Amazon and thinks the markets fears about the company are overblown. A big part of his optimism about the tech giant has to do with how much cash it now generates.

From Amazon's earliest days until only a few years ago, many investors and analysts worried about whether it could ever become a significantly and sustainably profitable company. But in recent years, it's begun to erase those doubts as its cloud-computing arm has turned into a cash cow. Last year, AWS brought in $7.3 billion in operating income — well more than half of Amazon's total operating profit — up from $4.3 billion in 2017.

Those profits have translated into surging cash flow for Amazon. Even after subtracting the capital investments it made in property and equipment and the payments it made on capital leases, Amazon still generated $11.6 billion in cash last year, which was up from $3.3 billion in 2017 and $6.5 billion in 2016.

On a conference call with investors last week, Brian Olsavsky, Amazon's chief financial officer, cautioned investors and analysts that Amazon expects to step up spending and investments this year. It plans to increase its employee base faster than it did last year and ramp up investments in fulfillment and data centers, he said.

But Mushkin thinks the company will also invest some of its surplus in cutting prices. While Amazon has long offered competitive prices, it's tended to be a "price follower," essentially reacting to other companies' price cuts. Going forward, Amazon will likely make other companies react to its prices instead.

"With the massive growth in ... free cash flow, we think Amazon is positioned to take from Walmart's playbook, transitioning to a price leader in the marketplace," he said.

Amazon's stock closed regular trading Monday up $7.08, or less than 1%, to $1,633.31.

On Monday, Slack confirmed what had been rumored for weeks: it's planning on holding an IPO soon. The company took the unusual step of announcing, via press release, that it had filed confidential S-1 paperwork with the SEC.

Normally, a company keeps its confidential S-1 filing under wraps until 15 days before its roadshow, when companies are required to make it public. The confidential S-1, which includes a rundown of its financial performance and its plans for growth, allows a company to work with the SEC without public scrutiny.

In Slack's case, this press release is the strongest indication that the other rumors are also true: that Slack is going to go public via a direct listing and skip the traditional banker-led IPO.

Read: Amazon Web Services is experimenting with a new way to charge customers

About two weeks ago, when IPOs were stalled during the partial government shutdown, Bloomberg's Matt Levine first reported on Slack's plans to do a direct listing.

And the direct listing is likely still the plan, a source familiar with Slack's thinking told Business Insider, even though Slack is working with a cadre of bankers on the IPO, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Allen & Co., as Bloomberg's Olivia Zaleski reports.

A direct listing doesn't have bankers as intermediaries buying and selling an initial batch of shares, so the company doesn't pay the banks big commission fees for that service.

Slack can instead sell directly to public investors right away. It may not even need to impose a lock-up period — meaning the company's current investors and owners can sell their shares right away, too.

Slack has a ton of investors, ranging from classic Silicon Valley VCs like Andreessen Horowitz, to mega-investor SoftBank Vision Fund. It's raised $1.22 billion as a private company, and along the way took on institutional investors as investors, too, such as T. Rowe Price. That means that Slack doesn't need a banker to provide introductions for its road show presentation — the world of finance is already very familiar with it.

With its last round of private financing, it earned a $7 billion valuation by selling shares at just under $12. That's won't be a hard share price to best on its first day of public trading, either, even with a direct listing, where share prices can be more volatile.

Should Slack use the direct listing method, other Silicon Valley unicorns with big name recognition and healthy balance sheets will almost certainly take notice, too. Spotify pioneered the idea of a large, tech direct listing IPO last year. Should Slack have success, no doubt others will follow.

When Satya Nadella first took the reins as Microsoft CEO on February 4th, 2014, the company was losing steam fast.

Microsoft Windows 8 had been a disaster. Microsoft employees were constantly battling behind the scenes for supremacy. And all the while, consumers and developers alike were losing the faith.

Times change.

Back in December, Microsoft's market cap had exceeded that of Apple's — something that hasn't happened since President Obama was in office and the Zune was still a thing. It's an exclamation point on Nadella's five-year reign, in which he refocused the company and led it to new heights.

Here's how Satya Nadella came to Microsoft and executed a startling turnaround that led it to be worth more than Apple, with details taken from his book "Hit Refresh" and elsewhere:

This article has been updated since its original publish date in 2016.

Microsoft has revealed plans to bring its Xbox Live video gaming platform to the Nintendo Switch, Apple's iOS, and Android devices, an effort that will connect players across different devices and bring Xbox games to a new audience.

The tech giant's plans were revealed ahead of the 2019 Game Developers Conference (GDC), an annual gathering of video game professionals happening in San Francisco next month. Microsoft is hosting a GDC panel titled "Xbox Live: Growing & Engaging Your Gaming Community Across Platforms," and the panel description on the GDC website teased specific details about Microsoft's Xbox Live gaming service expanding to new platforms.

The description has since been scrubbed from the website, but Windows Central has published the full text of the panel description.

"Xbox Live is about to get MUCH bigger. Xbox Live is expanding from 400M gaming devices and a reach to over 68M active players to over 2B devices with the release of our new cross-platform XDK," the description for the GDC panel read. "Get a first look at the SDK to enable game developers to connect players between iOS, Android, and Switch in addition to Xbox and any game in the Microsoft Store on Windows PCs."

Expanding Xbox Live services could be the spark of a shift in the gaming industry. Here's why it's meaningful:

Amazon is reportedly taking over the site of a once-thriving mall in Akron, Ohio, that was shut down and abandoned after a decade-long decline.

Amazon is planning to build a 695,383-square-foot facility at the site of the former Rolling Acres Mall, according to blueprints of the project obtained by the Akron Beacon Journal/Ohio.com.

Poignant images of the mall's decay over the years have come to symbolize the era of retail disruption known as the retail apocalypse. The mall was largely demolished by the city of Akron in 2016.

Here are some of images of the mall that were taken before its destruction. The photos were taken by photographers Seph Lawless and Nicholas Eckhart.

TechCrunch Conversations: Direct listings

How aerial lidar illuminated a Mayan megalopolis

A top Microsoft executive has said that stopping government agencies from using facial recognition software would be "cruel in its humanitarian effect."

More than 85 human rights groups wrote to Microsoft, Amazon, and Google last month demanding they stop selling facial recognition software to the public sector, fearing it will lead to government surveillance.

Business Insider asked Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and chief legal officer, about the letter at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

He strongly rejected the idea that government agencies, including law enforcement, should step back from the technology.

"I do not understand an argument that companies should avoid all licensing to any government agency for any purpose whatsoever," he told Business Insider. "A sweeping ban on all government use clearly goes too far and risks being cruel in its humanitarian effect."

Read more: Amazon investors are cranking up the pressure on Jeff Bezos to stop selling facial recognition tech to government agencies

Smith referenced the fact that the National Human Genome Research Institute is using facial recognition to improve the diagnosis of DiGeorge syndrome, a rare, genetic disease, in Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans. Healthcare providers have conventionally struggled to pinpoint the disease in diverse populations.

"These are disorders that result in heart failure or kidney problems. Why should we stop a government from helping identify patients who need medical care?" Smith asked.

He also pointed to reports last year that police in New Delhi, India, was using facial recognition software to try and track down 5,000 missing children. The success of that project was questioned this week, however, by the Delhi High Court, which said it was "unacceptable" that the software "has not borne any results," according to local reports.

Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and chief legal officer. Pedro Fiúza/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Smith has been among those calling for better regulation of facial recognition technology. He urged regulation of government use covering three areas: Bias and discrimination, people's privacy, and democratic freedoms and human rights.

"There are certain uses of facial recognition that should cause concern and should cause everyone to proceed slowly and with caution. That's certainly what we're doing and we're very worried about situations where facial recognition technology could be used in a manner that would cause bias or discrimination," Smith explained.

"We're worried about certain scenarios by law enforcement or by governments in certain countries that you don't fully respect human rights. So we put in place principles and we put in place steps so that we don't license this technology in ways that we or the world would come to regret."

In a blog post last year, Smith laid out Microsoft's principles for how it would self-govern its facial recognition work. Smith said Microsoft will document the capabilities of the technology, and prohibit its use to engage in unlawful discrimination.

"Tech companies need to act proactively because we can't expect the whole world to respond to this call to action. So we need to put in place principles ourselves," he told BI.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 9 is the latest smartphone from Samsung. It has a gorgeous 6.4-inch OLED display, a massive battery, a great camera, tons of storage (128 GB to start!), a fingerprint scanner and facial recognition, and the S Pen, which lets you take notes or control the Note 9's camera remotely, among other things.

The Galaxy Note 9 also has some high-end features, like wireless charging, water resistance, and even a headphone jack (whoa!). Samsung also includes a fast-charger with the phone, which is a nice touch.

These premium features are costly, though: The Galaxy Note 9 starts at $1,000, the same as an iPhone XS. Still, you're getting a whole lot of phone for that price.

Learn more about the Galaxy Note 9.

The Antarctica of 250 million years ago was a far cry from today's icy landscape.

At the time, the continent boasted a warm environment, forests, rivers, and plenty of fauna. One of those ancient creatures, scientists just learned, was a carnivorous reptile now known as the "Antarctic king."

Roughly the size of an iguana, Antarctanax shackletoni— Antarctanax being Greek for "Antarctic king" — was an archosaur, an early relative of crocodiles and the dinosaurs.

Finding a new dinosaur relative is exciting on its own, but the discovery of the "Antarctic king" is also significant because it helps scientists understand how archosaurs and their crocodile descendants repopulated the world after a mass die-off.

"The rocks that are preserved in Antarctica are showing us a window of time just after the Earth's largest mass extinction," Brandon Peecock, a researcher at the Field Museum in Chicago who's part of the team that discovered Antarctanax, told Business Insider.

He's referring to what's known as the end-Permian mass extinction event, or the "Great Dying," which took place 252 million years ago. Roughly 90% of the Earth's species were wiped out in that extinction; it far eclipsed the cataclysm that killed the last of the dinosaurs some 187 million years later. Less than 5% of marine species survived, and only one-third of land animal species lived, according to National Geographic.

Researchers initially thought that it took tens of millions of years for diverse species to repopulate the planet in the wake of the "Great Dying." But the "Antarctic king," which lived a mere 2 million years after the die-off, bucks that idea.

A 4-foot-long insectivore

An illustration shows Antarctanax shackletoni sneaking up on an early insect, while two dicynodonts drink from the river. Adrienne Stroup/Field Museum

The skeleton that Peecock and his colleagues found was only a partial one, but the vertebrae and foot bones had enough distinctive characteristics for scientists to conclude they'd discovered a new archosaur species.

At the time Antarctanax lived, temperatures in Antarctica rarely dipped below freezing. (The continent froze over much later, around 30 million years ago.)

The reptile was about 4 to 5 feet long, and ate bugs, early mammals, and amphibians.

"We think it's an insectivore because of its body size," Peecock said. "We didn't find any teeth, but all of Antarctanax's relatives were carnivorous at the time, so we're pretty confident."

Digging for fossils at the bottom of the world

Antarctanax shackletoni's name is in part an homage to British polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, who led multiple Antarctic expeditions in the early 1900s.

But Antarctica isn't a locale typically associated with digging for fossils.

"To find fossils, you need rocks," Peecock said. "The only two places with rocks in Antarctica are islands on the coast, and way in the middle where they're poking out of the glacier."

Peecock and the rest of the team helicoptered to the Fremouw Formation of the Transantarctic Mountains, which bisect the continent, to search for ancient creatures.

"We knew where to look because scientists and geologists have have found bits of bone and other Triassic-aged fossils there since the late 1960s," he said.

There, close to the South Pole, they used diamond-bladed rock saws to cleave through the hard rock, and uncovered Antarctanax's skeleton.

The team had to use a diamond-bladed rock saw to cut out fossils from the very hard rock. Roger Smith

Window into a mass extinction

The "Antarctic king" fossil can tell paleontologists a lot about what the Earth was like at the beginning of the Triassic — the geologic period from 251 to 199 million years ago that included the rise of the dinosaurs. Tyrannosaurus rex didn't arrive on the scene for another 185 million years, but the Triassic set the stage for Earth's repopulation after the "Great Dying."

"What paleontologists have come to learn over the past 20 years is how rapidly crocodiles and their cousins radiated out after that extinction," Peecock said.

The Antarctanax finding supports the idea that Antarctica was a hot bed of evolution and species diversification after that major die-off.

"Before the mass extinction, archosaurs were only found around the equator, but after it, they were everywhere," Peecock said in a release.

Peecock thinks fossils like Antarctanax, and what they tell us about life after a mass extinction, should be of interest today, given that many scientists think the world is currently in the middle of a 6th mass extinction.

A 2017 study noted that animal populations planetwide are currently declining so rapidly that a process of "biological annihilation" is occurring. The authors estimated that "as much as 50% of the number of animal individuals that once shared Earth with us are already gone."

This trend of accelerated, widespread population extinctions, author Elizabeth Kolbert wrote, is comparable to mass extinction events like the "Great Dying."

"The extinction at end of the Permian came with conditions that are similar to what were doing to the atmosphere and oceans today," Peecock said.

Brandon Peecook prospecting for Triassic vertebrate fossils at Coalsack Bluff, a famous site in Antarctic paleontology. Adam Huttenlocker

But threats of scary mass extinctions aside, Peecock said, "the other thing that makes this whole thing awesome is that it's from Antarctica."

He added, "Antarctica is one of those places on Earth, like the bottom of the sea, where we're still in the very early stages of exploration. Antarctanax is our little part of discovering the history of Antarctica."

On Saturday morning, Punxsutawney Phil popped out in Pennsylvania and delivered his annual prediction for when winter will end. After nosing around, shaking his fur and ignoring his shadow, he proclaimed spring will come early this year. Phil's handlers, dressed in black top hats and overcoats read the groundhog's "prediction scroll."

"Here is my forecast: faithful followers, there is no shadow of me, a beautiful spring it shall be!" Phil pronounced.

In New York City, Staten Island Chuck likewise declared an early spring is on the way.

Groundhogs, it turns out, aren't great forecasters. Records show that Punxsutawney Phil actually performs worse than a coin toss when it comes to predicting the end of winter chill. The rodent's guesses are only accurate about 30% of the time. (It's probably not a shock that his shadow-checking technique doesn't actually work.)

The bizarre tradition of asking groundhogs what they think about the arrival of spring weather is an imported idea from Germany, where they originally used European badgers for the task. In the US, groundhogs were subbed in.

The logic is not completely crazy. Skies are generally clearer when the air is dry and cold, so it could be that if a little woodchuck sees his shadow on the day halfway between winter solstice (the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere) and the spring equinox (when day and night are evenly split), that might mean the weather will continue to be cold.

But relying on a single moment's conditions to predict an entire season is obviously silly.

Punxsutawney Phil, the weather prognosticating groundhog, has forecast an early spring. AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar

Asking the real experts

Thankfully, the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center has a much better forecasting record.

"I don't know how the groundhog is monitoring his accuracy, but the way we're doing it, we would ballpark we're probably about 70% right," NWS meteorologist Stephen Baxter previously told Business Insider.

Predicting seasonal climate, like Baxter does, has gotten easier over the past several years as the globe has recorded a string of record-hot temperatures. Because the Earth is consistently heating up as time goes on, it's less difficult to guess what the temperature might be like in the future. Long-range forecasters base their predictions on a climactic reference period from 1981-2010, and recent temperature trends have been higher than that baseline every single year.

"For example, the North Slope of Alaska, every fall season there's been warm for the past 15 years or something, relative to normal," Baxter said. Based on that trend, things are probably going to continue warming up.

An increasing number of extreme weather events like wildfires, hurricanes, and droughts add to the complexity of the weather models. But Baxter said "climate modeling is getting better, but rather gradually" as greenhouse gases trap more of the sun's heat.

A warm spring is likely in store

Flickr/jfdervin

According to the National Weather Service, the next couple months will be no exception to the years-long warming trend in the Northern Hemisphere.

Spring in the Northern Hemisphere officially kicks off on March 20, and the NWS predicts February, March, and April will all be warmer-than-average across much of the US, especially in the western half of the lower 48 states, southern Florida, and Alaska.

But not everyone is in for a balmy spring. Winter might last longer in the Ohio and Tennessee valleys, and the surrounding areas, and some effects of an El Niño weather pattern, stoked by warmer sea surface temperatures, could contribute to that cold.

That's still just a prediction, but it's definitely more trustworthy than anything Phil might tell us.

Roughly 10 years ago, a bizarre parade of animals, people, and vehicles lined up in the middle of the Sonoran Desert to trot, walk, and drive over a 100-foot cable stretched out across the dirt by a team of scientists.

By the University of Arizona researchers' accounts, the experiment was a resounding success, heralding a new frontier in border-security technology.

A fiber-optic cable installed in the loose, sandy soil could tell precisely what was moving above it — be it a 200-pound man, a group of people concealed in a cloud of dust from a passing car, a wandering dog, or a pair of cantering horses.

"At the time, there was a lot of interest from the federal government," Moe Momayez, an associate professor of mining and geological engineering, told INSIDER. "But like anything else, it just dies off."

These days, nearly a full decade after Momayez's experiment, the federal government remains fixated on building a border wall that critics have derided as a "medieval" solution to border security.

Barely one week after a record 35-day government shutdown over the wall's funding, President Donald Trump now appears likely to declare a national emergency to secure his requested $5.7 billion to build the wall.

President Donald Trump talks with a US Customs and Border Protection Border Patrol Agent while participating in a tour of US-Mexico border wall prototypes.Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Read more: The Republican who represents more of the border than anyone in Congress has an idea to secure the border, and it's not a wall

Fiber-optic cables could secure the border instead

Amid the cacophony, one lawmaker has tried fruitlessly to divert attention away from the wall, and toward fiber-optic technology that could pinpoint with precision where border intrusions occur, determine what exactly is coming across, and relay the information to Border Patrol agents in realtime.

"I would love to lay a fiber-optic cable from sea to shining sea," Rep. Will Hurd, A Texas Republican who represents more of the US-Mexico border than anyone in Congress, told The New York Times' "The Daily" podcast in January.

"You need something that can detect a threat and track that threat until you're able to deploy your most important resource — the men and women of Border Patrol — to do that interdiction," he added.

Contrary to popular belief, satellites carry less than 1% of human communications. Fiber-optic cables, stretching across the sea floor, buried under cities, and connected to people's homes, carry the rest. While they're mostly used to transmit telecommunications, they can also detect motion.

Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 18, 2018. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Lawmakers like Hurd have been trying for years to push for this enhanced technology at the border rather than physical barriers, but they've had limited success.

Hurd even teamed up with a bipartisan group of lawmakers in July 2017 to introduce the Secure Miles with All Resources and Technology (SMART) Act, which would have tasked the Department of Homeland Security with deploying high-tech systems like radar, LIDAR, fiber optics, drones, and cameras along the border.

The bill stalled in committee and never moved forward.

Hurd's office and the White House did not respond to INSIDER's requests for comment.

Using light and sound to detect border activity

Fiber-optic cables under production. Getty Images/Stanislav Krasilnikov

Experts and industry leaders told INSIDER that fiber-optic technology is already advanced enough to work across most of the US-Mexico border, nearly 10 times less expensive than a wall, and is ready to be deployed immediately.

All it needs is the government to ask for it.

The long delays in implementing the technology have frustrated industry leaders, who say they've been waiting for years to bid on government contracts.

The technology itself is simple enough, Momayez said. All his experiment in the Sonoran Desert required was a simple fiber like the ones that have become commonplace for providing internet in American homes.

"That's the beauty of the technology that we tested. You don't need to put any sensors on the fiber, the fiber itself can be turned into a sensor," he said. "Because we can detect movement, we can detect events anywhere along the length of the cable."

Companies like the Montana-based Adelos have been developing their own versions of the technology, and say the same fiber that could secure the border can also be used for telecommunications — and even provide broadband internet access to communities that live nearby.

A slide from Adelos on its fiber-optic cable that could detect border intrusions in the air, on the ground, and below the surface. Adelos, Inc. 2019.

"What we're doing is we're taking sound that is caused by things in the sky, on the ground, or subsurface — we're converting those sound waves, that pressure, and we're measuring how it impacts light in the cable itself, the fiber optic glass, and then we can convert that into acoustic information," Adelos founder and chief technology officer Alex Philp told INSIDER. "You can hear all this stuff happening."

But the budding industry recognizes that the technology on its own won't entirely do away with activity like illegal border-crossing and drug smuggling. At the very least, the technology would need to be combined with Border Patrol agents on the ground who are ready to respond to intrusions.

"Our approach has always been that when fiber-optic sensing is used, it's usually one of many other solutions," Mark Uncapher, the director of the Fiber Optic Sensing Association, told INSIDER. "It would do no good to know that an intrusion is going on if you don't have the capacity to do a timely response.

"So this is a tool that's used in conjunction with other tools," he continued. "But clearly being able to know that in realtime [that] something unexpected is happening within five meters of a particular location is very helpful to be able to have some kind of response."

'We're way cheaper than the crap they're talking about'

As seen from the air, U.S. Border Patrol agents follow the tire tracks of drug smugglers through the vast Sonoran Desert on December 9, 2010 in the Tohono O'odham Reservation, Arizona, near the U.S.-Mexico border. Getty Images/John Moore

The federal government isn't ignorant of the technology, but it has been painfully slow to adopt it, Philp said.

Only in recent years has the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency begun testing and evaluating fiber optic sensory equipment — known as a linear ground detection system — in the Arizona desert.

The government even set aside $16 million out of the budget for fiscal year 2018 explicitly to test the system.

"We have a tactical advantage of being able to classify a report, a sensor hit, whatever indication we have of possible illegal activity along the border," Stephen Spencer, an assistant chief patrol agent in Tucson, told the agency in a press release posted Thursday.

He continued: "It might take 45 minutes to an hour and a half to get to point of that indication. The benefits [of the new technologies] are a rapid response to make the judgment call whether that is something we need to assign assets to look at. If I spend an hour and a half walking to discover a goat tripped a device, I've just wasted three hours of my patrol time."

In October 2017, the federal government released a public request for information, soliciting information from companies about linear ground detection systems like fiber optics, that can "detect all entering threats without being affected by blind spots created by man-made and natural occurring obstacles."

The Customs and Border Protection agency and Border Patrol didn't immediately respond to questions from INSIDER about the technology.

Border Patrol agents deplane a helicopter after searching for drug smugglers spotted in a remote area of the Sonoran Desert on December 9, 2010 in the Tohono O'odham Reservation, Arizona. Getty Images/John Moore

But businesses like Adelos have been waiting on tenterhooks for the government to release what's called a "request for proposal" (RFP) detailing exactly what specifications the government needs. When and if that drops, companies like Adelos can submit their proposals on what the technology will do, and how it'll be implemented.

Philp said there's likely a lot of reasons why systems like his aren't already in place along the US-Mexico border, and why the government is still hung up on a wall — chief among them being that the government is known for being slow-moving, especially when it comes to technology.

"Sometimes it takes technology awhile to get into the public consciousness. Remember when it was weird to talk about fiber to the home? Well it's weird to talk about fiber as a sensor," Philp said. "I would argue that we are now at a tipping point in terms of understanding and adoption. The fact is that I can put basically 32 kilometers of this stuff in the ground, I can light it up with our laser, and I have literally thousands of microphones listening to everything."

He added: "We're way cheaper than the crap they're talking about in terms of physical barriers."