Sramana Mitra: So what is the best and easiest way for me to do this? I would like to acquire another product that is relatively cheap to acquire and be able to put it through my channel and just go...
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Today’s 430th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, January 31, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join....
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According to a Reports Monitor report published last year, the global digital signature market is estimated to grow by more than 31% annually over the next six years. Billion Dollar Unicorn DocuSign...
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The founders of Dadi — pronounced daddy — think men are in need of a wake-up call.
“Men [have] a biological clock just like women, which is something that people don’t talk about,” Dadi co-founder and chief executive officer Tom Smith told TechCrunch. “Infertility isn’t a women’s issue; it’s both a men’s and women’s issue.”
Smith believes Dadi, the provider of a temperature-controlled at-home fertility test and sperm collection kit, will encourage men to contribute to family planning conversations and become more aware of their reproductive health. The startup is officially launching its kit and long-term sperm storage service today with nearly $2 million in venture capital funding from London-based seed fund firstminute capital and New York-based Third Kind Venture Capital.
“Our mission is to normalize the conversation around male fertility and reproductive health, and empower men with knowledge of fertility so they can have that conversation with their family,” Smith said.
Here’s how it works: Dadi customers order a kit online, masturbate and collect their sperm within the comfort of their own homes, drop it off with FedEx and wait for a full fertility report, which comes with a microscopic video of the each man’s actual sperm. To survive the trip to the startup’s laboratory — the New England Cryogenic Center — the Dadi-designed container injects preservatives, which are nested in the lid of the cup, into the sperm sample.
Headquartered in Brooklyn, Dadi’s service is FDA-licensed in all 50 states and costs a total of $198, including a test and one year of sperm storage.
Dadi’s co-founding team includes Mackey Saturday, a graphic designer who created Instagram’s logo, and Gordon von Steiner, a former creative director in the fashion industry. The team has prioritized design and messaging of the product, in addition to security, privacy and high medical standards.
“We aren’t trying to sell hair pills, we are actually interacting with customers at a very vulnerable part of their life,” Smith said. “We feel like our value set, approach and thoughtfulness really differentiate us from anyone else in the space.”
One in 6 U.S. couples struggles with fertility, with male factor infertility a cause of 30 percent of those cases, per ReproductiveFacts.org. Startups want to improve these statistics, targeting an industry that’s trapped in the 1980s.
“We are in the direct-to-consumer era,” Smith said. “We reached peak app a couple years ago and I think a lot of the innovation that’s happening in the space comes down to individualized services.”
Dadi joins a cadre of privately funded male fertility or men’s health businesses. Hims, the provider of direct-to-consumer erectile dysfunction (ED) and hair loss medication, leads the pact. The two-year-old business entered the unicorn club last week with a $100 million investment. Ro, formerly known only as Roman, sells ED medication online, too, and has raised a total of $91 million. Legacy, which freezes men’s sperm, recently won TechCrunch’s very own Startup Battlefield competition in Berlin. And Manual, an educational portal and treatment platform for men’s issues, raised a £5 million seed round earlier this month from Felix Capital, Cherry Ventures and Cassius Capital.
It’s clear that VCs have woken up to the opportunity to disrupt fertility with tech-enabled solutions to age-old issues, and now entrepreneurs passionate about helping men broach sensitive topics, from infertility to erectile dysfunction to hair loss and more, are able to gain ground.
Here’s to more funding for women’s health businesses, which are in dire need of innovation, too.
Mark Zuckerberg says that Facebook's plans to merge Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram's messaging service won't see the light of day until 2020 at the earliest.
In Facebook's fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Zuckerberg said the plans to stitch together the backend of the three messaging services were still primitive.
"There's a lot more that we need to figure out before we finalize the plans. And then, of course, this is going to be a long-term project that I think will probably be to whatever extent we end up doing it in â a 2020 thing or beyond," he said.
Facebook's plans to assimilate the three services was first reported by The New York Times this month. Nick Clegg, Facebook's global policy and communications chief, laid out some of the issues Facebook needs to overcome earlier this week. He told an audience in Brussels:
"We haven't worked out how that will work, whether it's workable, what regulators may or may not think about it before they jump to any conclusions, what you would need to do, how you make that work in the data infrastructure, how much data integration you need between them."
Zuckerberg said he was excited to roll out end-to-end encryption â which is currently a WhatsApp defining feature â across the new, unified service.
"People really like this in WhatsApp. I think it's the â it's the direction that we should be going in with more things in the future. I think there's an opportunity to use the work that we have done with WhatsApp there rather than doing it in different ways in the different messaging experiences," he said.
Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014, and its cofounders Brian Acton and Jan Koum left Facebook in 2017 and 2018 respectively. Media reports said Koum and Acton had clashed with Facebook top brass over user privacy.
Instagram's founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger also left the company in September 2018, and reports suggested that clashes arose after Facebook dialled back the autonomy it had once promised Instagram.
The amount Facebook spent in 2018 rose dramatically, partly thanks to the firm's increased efforts to keep fake news, harassment, and fake ads off its platform.
Its expenses for all of 2018 were up 51% from 2017, hitting $31 billion. That's $10 billion higher than in 2017, when its expenses were $20.4 billion.
These feel like abstract, large figures, so to put it into context: Hot workplace chat app Slack is worth around $7 billion. Facebook's costs alone this year rose by the equivalent of a Slack. The costs themselves are equivalent to an Airbnb, which is worth around $31 billion.
In a call with analysts on Wednesday, CFO Dave Wehner and CEO Mark Zuckerberg attributed these rising costs to increased spend on "safety" â essentially the costs of fixing security, privacy and misinformation problems, and putting preventative measures in place.
That's in the wake of multiple crises including the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which highlighted how Facebook failed to police third-party developers on its platform; fake political ads; and exacerbating hate speech in Myanmar.
Read more: Facebook's stock soars 12% after beating on top and bottom lines for Q4 2018 earnings
"The reality is that we've had a number of substantive issues that we needed to address, and the investments we made in safety, security, privacy and well-being both increased our costs and, in some cases, reduced our revenues," Zuckerberg said in the call.
"We've changed how we build services to focus more on preventing harm. We've invested billions of dollars in security, which has affected our profitability," he added.
The bulk of the security costs have arisen, it seems, from hiring new staff. Facebook ended the year with substantially more full-time employees, with the number rising 42% to 35,500. Mark Zuckerberg indicated in the call that 30,000 of those new hires were people working on safety and security, though it wasn't clear that all of those 30,000 are full-time staff.
Facebook is a huge business, and not all of its expenditure was about security. The company also spent money in the holiday quarter promoting its smart speaker Portal, and the Oculus Go virtual reality headset. And $10 billion of that $30 billion expenditure was on research and development.
Wehner said costs would rise in 2019 by as much as 50%. He said: "[We] do plan to continue to invest aggressively in the priority areas, including on the innovation side with AR/VR and AI and continuing to invest in the safety and security programs that we're undergoing."
Private equity firms have stepped up their game.
That segment of active acquirers â which includes heavy-weights like the Blackstone Group and the Carlyle Group â made up 34.2% of all M&A deals in North America and Europe in 2018, according to PitchBook's annual M&A report. That's up from 29.9% of deals in 2017 and 27.4% of deals in 2016.
While the over-all volume of deals has declined since 2015, the median deal price is on the rise.
The median M&A deal across both North America and Europe hit a record high of $48.2 million in 2018, according to the report, up 34.3% from the year before. In North America specifically, the median was $60 million, up 22.4% from 2017. In Europe, the median was $34.2 million, up 34.2% from 2017.
PE M&A made up 34.2% of all deals in North America and Europe in 2018. PitchBook
"Deals have been persistently larger in North America than Europe over the long term, a trend we have witnessed across VC, PE, and strategic M&A. Part of the reason for swelling deal sizes is the growth in PE as a proportion of overall M&A," PitchBook said in the report.
In part, this is because PE firms have raised larger funds in recent years, which has given them the financial leeway to participate in competitive bidding processes, and pay more for deals.
By the end of 2018, the median leveraged buyout was $140 million, which is nearly triple the median size of an M&A deal, according to the report.
Leveraged buyouts are acquisitions made with a mix of equity and debt, which is a common practice for private equity firms.
With multiple deals over $10 billion, it's no wonder the median deal price rose.
Among the biggest deals were JAB Holding's $21 billion Dr. Pepper Snapple acquisition, and Blackstone's $17 billion buyout of 55% Thomson Reuters' financial and risk business.
Slightly under the $10 billion in Europe, KKR bought out Unilever's spreads business for $6.7 billion, and Hellman & Friendman bought the payments processing firm Nets for $5.3 billion.
An Apple employee has been charged by the FBI with stealing self-driving car secrets from the company's secretive Project Titan division, according to a charge document seen by NBC's Bay Area affiliate.
Project Titan has been the centre of a lot of speculation since it launched in 2014. Initially it was believed to be working on an electric car, but executives hires in 2016 pointed towards autonomous driving. Recently, Titan has undergone some major reshuffling, as Apple laid off 200 employees tied to the project earlier this month.
Jizhong Chen, a Chinese national, was hired by Apple as a hardware developer engineer for its self-driving car project in June 2018, according to the unsealed FBI charge sheet.
He aroused suspicion when fellow employees saw him taking photos. After that, Apple asked to look at his personal devices and found "over two thousand files containing confidential and proprietary Apple material, including manuals, schematics and diagrams," backed up onto a personal hard-drive. The was in violation of Apple's policies.
Chen claimed the images were an "insurance policy" because he was making job applications after being placed on a performance improvement plan in December 2018. However, Apple found he had collected information before being put on the improvement plan, the FBI document said.
Read more: Apple's secret car project is much bigger than people think. Of course it had to cut 200 jobs.
Chen told Apple that he was applying for positions inside the company, but it then learned that he'd applied to two jobs outside the company â one of which was with a direct Chinese autonomous driving competitor. Apple suspended Chen without pay on January 11.
He was arrested one day before he was due to fly to China, allegedly to visit his sick father. Chen's attorney Daniel Olmos declined to comment when contacted by The Wall Street Journal.
Chen is the second Chinese national Apple employee to be charged with stealing trade secrets in six months.
In July, federal agents stopped ex-Apple employee Xiaolang Zhang at San Jose airport after he bought a last-minute ticket to China. The FBI indictment said he was in possession of a confidential 25-page document containing schematic drawings of a circuit board for autonomous Apple vehicles.
Xiaolang is also being represented by Olmos, who said he has pleaded not guilty to theft of trade secrets.
The arrests come against the backdrop of the ongoing trade war between the US and China. On Tuesday, America formally requested the extradition of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, after charging Huawei with breaking US trade sanctions and stealing trade secrets from T-Mobile.
Apple was not immediately available for comment when contacted by Business Insider.
Meet Sencrop, a French startup that wants to empower farmers using sensors, a data platform and a service marketplace. The company recently raised a $10 million funding round.
The Series A round was led by Bpifrance with NCI Waterstart, Nord Capital and The Yield Lab also participating. Existing investors Demeter and Breega Capital also reinvested.
If you’re a farmer and are getting started when it comes to leveraging data, Sencrop wants to be a one-stop shop for all your digital needs. The company sells connected stations that can measure temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind speed, etc.
Each station costs between $340 and $570 (between €300 and €500) and you can have as many as you want. You can install the station yourself — it’s as easy as planting a post.
After that, you pay a subscription to access the platform. It costs around $170 to $340 per year (€150 to €300). In addition to live readings of your sensors, Sencrop can help you predict the next steps.
“On the other side of the platform, there are people broadcasting services to farmers,” co-founder and CEO Michael Bruniaux told me. “For instance, we can predict a disease and the farmer knows whether they need a product or not to prevent the disease.”
You can imagine a full-fledged marketplace in the future. For instance, it could be a good way to subscribe to an insurance product, order seeds or contact companies and cooperatives and corporations willing to buy your output.
Indeed, 5,000 farmers, winemakers and arborists are already using the platform to monitor their farms. Most of them are currently based in Europe.
Sencrop is slowly building a community of farmers by combining all data points. For instance, if other people living not far from you are also using Sencrop, you’ll get better forecasts and insights on what to expect.
The company first started with potato crops, vineyards and cereals. But now, you can find all kinds of profiles on Sencrop. Some farmers have a tiny piece of land of less than 100 acres while others have gigantic farms.
With today’s funding round, Sencrop wants to scale the community and expand to new markets.
The new iPhone may come with a 3D camera. Carl Court/Getty
Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Thursday.
Apple said it revoked Facebook's enterprise certificates thanks to the social network paying people to sideload the Facebook Research app onto their iPhones. Apple says it took the dramatic step of revoking multiple enterprise certificates from Facebook, compromising not just programs like Facebook Research but also other iOS apps in development internally at Facebook. Apple caused work inside Facebook to grind to a halt by revoking its enterprise certificates. Employees were unable to communicate with colleagues, access internal information, and even use company transportation, according to an internal memo leaked to Business Insider. Facebook shrugged off its latest scandal with fourth quarter results that smashed expectations. It netted $16.91 billion in revenue in the final three months of the year, growing 30% year-on-year, while its EPS was $2.38. Apple is preparing new iPhones with a powerful 3D camera, reports Bloomberg. The largest and most expensive phone, which could replace the iPhone XS Max, will have a three-camera module on its back, according to Bloomberg, which will enable additional zoom features. Google is disabling its own research app that let users earn gift cards in exchange for their data. Like the Facebook Research app, Google's app appears to be a clear violation of Apple's Enterprise Developer Program policy. Microsoft reported results for its holiday quarter on Wednesday after the bell â and posted earnings that fell short of Wall Street expectations, though it showed stronger-than-expected cloud revenue. Microsoft came into this earnings season from a position of strength: Microsoft holds the title of most valuable company, with Amazon in a very close second. Tesla's CFO is retiring â for the second time. Deepak Ahuja had already retired once in 2015 but later returned to the company. Google will start deleting Google+ accounts and pages on April 2nd. On that date, Google+ accounts and pages will become inaccessible to users and content, including photos and videos from Album Archives, will begin to be deleted. Facebook says it's eventually going to stop disclosing the number of users of its flagship social network and focus on its 'family' of apps instead. The size of Facebook's audience across all its apps â more than 2 billion every day at the end of 2019 â "better reflect the size of our community and the fact that many people are using more than one of our services," CFO Dave Wehner said on the call. Jeff Bezos has reportedly hired private investigators to find who leaked his intimate text messages to former news anchor Lauren Sanchez. So far there is no evidence the leak was the result of a hack, but one theory is that it was politically motivated.Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings.
Amazon's Prime service may be starting to become too much of a good thing for the tech giant.
The offering has attracted some 100 million subscribers. That sizable customer base has in turn encouraged a growing number of third-party merchants to sign up as customers of Amazon's fulfilment services. That's because products offered by vendors who are part of that program are eligible for Prime's free shipping offers.
So far, so good right? Prime brings more customers to Amazon, which lures in more merchants, which helps Amazon expand its product offerings, which likely attracts more shoppers and encourages existing ones to buy more items from Amazon.
The problem for the company is that shipping costs are rising, cutting into its profits and making its free shipping offers more costly. Amazon's fulfillment costs have already been rising faster than its revenue, noted Dan Morgan, a senior portfolio manager at Synovus Trust, which owns Amazon shares.
One of the key questions for the company, he said in an email, is "How can Amazon balance its fulfillment/shipping costs with increased order volumes from Prime members?"
Morgan is a longtime bull on Amazon, but much of his optimism about the company is due to its Amazon Web Services cloud-computing business and its burgeoning advertising business. He's more skeptical of the prospects for its traditional retail business.
Amazon charges customers $119 a year for its Prime subscription. But about half of that amount is now being consumed by the cost of offering free shipping to customers, Morgan estimated.
Dan Morgan, a senior portfolio manager at Synovus Trust, worries about rising shipping costs at Amazon. Bloomberg/YouTube Those costs could continue to rise.
Amazon spent $25.2 billion on fulfillment costs in 2017, which was up 43% from the year before and amounted to 14% of the company's total revenue. That amount likely rose to $35 billion, or 15.1% of the company's sales, for all of 2018, and will probably jump to $43.3 billion, or 15.4% of sales, this year, estimates Benchmark analyst Daniel Kurnos in a recent report.
Indeed, Kurnos worried that shipping-related factors may have weighed down Amazon's results over the holidays. While Wall Street analysts as a whole are betting that the company posted $3.7 billion in operating income in the fourth quarter, Kurnos is forecasting $3.2 billion.
Amazon is slated to report its holiday period results on Thursday.
"We are somewhat cautious ... given external pressure on delivery costs and significant increases in same-day to two-day shipping," he said.
Part of the problem for Amazon going into this year is that all three of the major domestic shippers â the US Postal Service, FedEx, and United Parcel Service â just hiked their prices. Amazon recently adjusted its own charges for merchant customers who take advantage of its fulfillment services. But it's unclear if its higher charges will fully cover its increased costs. And regardless, those fees only apply to third-party merchants, not to products Amazon sells itself.
Add it all up, and Prime's free shipping offering is becoming a better deal for customers â and a worse one for Amazon.
The "rising fulfillment costs not only hurt operating margin, but it also erodes revenues from Prime members, as the $119.00 annual fee revenue evaporates as shipping costs rise," Morgan said.
There's a growing realization on Wall Street that self-driving cars are still many years away. That pessimism is weighing far more heavily on traditional automakers than technology companies.
The big picture: Investors are betting the real value of AV companies will come from the estimated 4 terabytes of data each car will generate per day. And based on the way they're valuing the major AV players, Wall Street seems to think tech companies have a better shot than Detroit at capitalizing on that data.
The bet on data helps to explain why analysts at Morgan Stanley have very different views on the two leading AV companies.
Auto analyst Adam Jonas recently reduced the value of GM's self-driving car unit, Cruise Automation, to $9 billion, from $11.5 billion, citing delayed expectations for fully self-driving cars. Meanwhile, tech analyst Brian Nowak figures Alphabet's self-driving car unit, Waymo, is worth $37 billion, and perhaps as much as $175 billion, citing future opportunities from robotaxis, logistics and licensing revenues. Those same opportunities are available to Cruise, too, but for the moment, GM investors are focused more on the roadblocks ahead. Jonas says the massive gap between Cruise and Waymo is realistic because of the advantage Waymo has from Google's superior data analytics capability.What's happening:The mood has changed about automated vehicles. Bold predictions by Tesla and others that cars would be able to drive themselves by now have evaporated in the face of technology challenges and market realities.
The business model for AVs assumes that by removing the driver, the cost per mile falls dramatically, from today's $2.50 or $3 per mile, to less than $1, unlocking a much larger market opportunity.
"If you are going to be more pessimistic on the timing, then it means not removing the safety driver and that means the economics of the whole thing don't work," Jonas says. "Instead of a $30,000 car with no human, you've got a $300,000 car with one or two humans."That math looks even more difficult when you factor in the pressures facing GM's legacy automotive business under CEO Mary Barra, who is trying to lead a rapid transformation. It's a race, says Jonas, between management's execution and a cyclical downturn ahead.
The bottom line:"The value is in the data, and what you can do with it," says Jonas.
Facebook's reputation among lawmakers has taken another hit and the company could be in for more tough questions, following reports that it paid people, including teens, to install a special app to monitor their movements online.
On Wednesday, several US senators fired off letters to the company or made public comments voicing their unease and demanding answers.
"I have concerns that users were not appropriately informed about the extent of Facebook's data-gathering and the commercial purposes of this data collection," Sen. Mark Warner wrote in a letter to Zuckerberg.
TechCrunch on Tuesday reported that Facebook had a program that paid people up to $20 a month to install a VPN app that tracked their data.
The app, called Facebook Research, is similar to Facebook's controversial virtual-private-network app Onavo and shares much of the same code, according to security expert Will Strafach, who was asked by TechCrunch to investigate the program. Apple previously banned Onavo outright from its App Store on the iPhone and the iPad over violations of its privacy policy.
Warner (D-VA) continued: "Facebook's lack of full transparency with users... has been a source of frustration for me."
Facebook has said the program existed for it to learn more about the apps that people download and how they use their phones. The company said that only five percent of the participants were teenagers.
Blumenthal (D-CT) in a statement to TechCrunch said, "Wiretapping teens is not research, and it should never be permissible. This is yet another astonishing example of Facebook's complete disregard for data privacy and eagerness to engage in anti-competitive behavior."
He then called Zuckerberg's promises "empty" and urged the Federal Trade Commission, which is currently investigating Facebook, to add the Onavo app to its probe.
Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) told Mother Jones, "It is inherently manipulative to offer teens money in exchange for their personal information when younger users don't have a clear understanding how much data they're handing over and how sensitive it is."
This latest privacy scandal is one in a long line of back-to-back-to-back controversies the company has faced in the last two years. Critics and lawmakers have said Facebook has a lot of trust to gain back from its users, who have pioneered movements like #DeleteFacebook, and have implored it to clearly define consent in terms of data collection.
Read Sen. Warner's full letter here:
The $1 billion video conferencing company Zoom is in the process of filing confidentially for an IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission but its registration is stuck due to the government shutdown, according to a source familiar with the company's plans.
While Zoom has submitted paperwork with the SEC, the compay still isn't officially filed because of a processing delay, the source added.
The startup has picked banks for a public offering that include Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse, the source said.
Representatives for Zoom and the banks declined to comment.
Reuters previously reported that Zoom was preparing for an IPO with Morgan Stanley last October.
Zoom was founded in 2011 by CEO Eric S. Yuan, who was previously VP of engineering at the video conferencing company WebEx. Yuan joined Cisco in 2007 when it bought WebEx for $3.2 billion.
Zoom, which sells subscriptions for enterprise-grade video conference services, is used by companies including Uber and Box. Morgan Stanley also uses Zoom's video conferencing technology, which played a role in the company's decision to appoint the bank as its lead underwriter, the source said.
The company is cash flow positive, the source said. It was last valued at $1 billion in a Series D led by Sequoia Capital in 2017. The company is also backed by Facebook and Qualcomm.
Zoom is just one of a handful of tech unicorns awaiting feedback or confirmation from the SEC following the federal government shutdown. The ride-hailing competitors Uber and Lyft reportedly had not gotten comments from the SEC as of January 9, despite filing confidentially in early December, ahead of the shutdown.
After a two-year apology tour, Facebook is changing strategy: It's going to go all-out building stuff again.
On Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts on a conference call after the company's Q4 2018 earnings that the Silicon Valley tech giant believes it has made significant progress tackling its myriad woes, and that throughout 2019 one of the company's key areas of focus will be launching significant new features and products for its apps.
"I'm not talking about the many day-to-day iterative improvements we make so that ranking gets a bit better or things get somewhat faster, but major improvements to people's lives that whole communities recognize and say 'wow, we're all doing something new on Facebook or WhatsApp that we weren't doing before,'" Zuckerberg said in remarks also shared to his public Facebook page.
It's a significant step for Facebook, which has been on the back foot almost constantly since the 2016 US presidential elections, as its historically rosy image was tarnished by a string of scandals over everything from misuse of users' data and hacking, to the social network's role in spreading hate speech that fueled genocide in Myanmar and Russia's sowing of propaganda on the platform.
The new focus on product updates is also a likely necessity for keeping the company's increasingly unhappy workforce on board. Employees have been bombarded by a barrage of negative headlines, while the company's faltering stock price has put a dent in their compensation packages. ("Employee morale is dead," a Facebook employee recently told Business Insider. "It's like an open secret ... everyone has to pretend like they're all happy-go-lucky, but most people aren't, which is kinda crazy.")
As such, Zuckerberg's change of tack will allow rank-and-file employees, especially newer ones, to feel invested in new initiatives â rather than constantly playing on the defense and cleaning up other people's mess.
Zuckerberg conceded this, saying: "The reality is we've put most of our energy into security over the past 18 months so that building new experiences wasn't the priority over that period."
Particular points of focus when it comes to building new experience will be around messaging, groups and communities, "commerce and shopping" on Instagram, and Facebook's video service Watch, the 34-year-old billionaire chief exec said.
The plan is one of four key priorities Facebook's leadership has set for 2019. These are (in Zuckerberg's words):
"First, continue making progress on the major social issues facing the internet and our company." "Second, build new experiences that meaningfully improve people's lives today and set the stage for even bigger improvements in the future." "Third, keep building our business by supporting the millions of businesses â mostly small businesses â that rely on our services to grow and create jobs." "And fourth, communicate more transparently about what we're doing and the role our services play in the world."Facebook's attempts to refresh its image have had false starts before. The New York Times previously reported that in early 2018, the company had an internal comms campaign that was "meant to assure employees that the company was committed to getting back on track in 2018" â but it was ditched in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
And 2019 is already shaping up to pose some challenges for Facebook.
Less than a day before Facebook announced its Q4 earnings, TechCrunch reported that Facebook was paying users on iOS to let it spy on them â and Apple responded by revoking the company's developer certificate, effectively blocking Facebook employees' from using internal apps to do their jobs and causing chaos for the company.
Do you work at Facebook? Got a tip? Contact this reporter via Signal or WhatsApp at +1 (650) 636-6268 using a non-work phone, email at
The end of Google+ is drawing nearer.
On Wednesday, Google announced its consumer version of Google+ will officially shut down on April 2.
On that date, Google+ accounts and pages will become inaccessible to users. At that point, content on Google+, including photos and videos from Album Archives, will begin to be deleted. Also, as soon as February 4, users will not be able to create new Google+ profiles, pages, communities or events.
To gear up for the April 2 closer, Google has encouraged users to download and save their content before it is deleted. Android Police has recommended a download tool called the Google+ Exporter for power users of the social network.
Read more: Here's how to quickly check if you have a Google+ account, and delete it
Google had announced last December that Google+ for consumers would be shut down in April, but it had not provided a definite date.
At the time, Google cited "challenges involved in maintaining a successful product" and the "platform's low usage" as reasons for shuttering the service. The company reiterated this messaging in its announcement on Wednesday.
Last October, The Wall Street Journal revealed that data from 500,000 Google+ users had been exposed over a three year period, but the company had decided to keep quiet on the matter.
Two months later, Google announced that more than 52 million Google+ users had been affected by another bug which exposed personal information including names, email addresses, occupations, and ages. This issue prompted the company to expedite the shut down of its consumer product, moving it from August 2019 to April 2019.
Got a tip? Contact this reporter via Signal at +1 (209) 730-3387, email
Facebook appears to have blatantly violated Apple's rules by convincing some users to install a special iPhone app that collects personal data.
The revelation, reported by TechCrunch on Tuesday, has caused an outrage among privacy advocates. And it's spurred speculation that Apple could retaliate with the nuclear option: Banishing the Facebook app from Apple's app store.
The move would be virtually unprecedented in the modern tech business, and although there's a case to be made that Apple would be within its rights, the reality is much more complex.
Both companies simply need each other too much to break their commercial ties.
"Apple has a has lot of leverage here. If they want to ban Facebook's app, they can," said Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute, a research and advocacy group that has been helping lead the charge against the market dominance of tech firms, particularly Facebook.
But, he continued, Apple surely recognizes the risk that "people won't want to buy the iPhone, because they want access to Facebook's suite of products."
Animosity between Facebook and Apple has been growing for years now. Apple CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly criticized Facebook publicly over its privacy practices. In response to those comments, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ordered his company's management team to ditch their iPhones for rival devices running Google's Android operating system.
(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
But tensions reached new heights this week after the TechCrunch report that Facebook has been paying consumers as young as 13 to install an app called Facebook Research. Facebook Research is a virtual private network (VPN) app that can be used to monitor everything users do on their smartphones.
Instead of offering Facebook Research through the App Store, Facebook distributed it through a special "sideloading" process that Apple set up to allow companies to distribute iPhone apps internally to their employees. An Apple representative told TechCrunch that Facebook's use of this channel for the Faceook Research app clearly violated the iPhone maker's rules.
In response, Apple revoked the security certificates for all the apps that Facebook distributes through this channel. That means not just the Facebook Research app, but pretty much all the internal apps Facebook employees rely on to do their jobs and to communicate everyday. Apple's move caused chaos inside Facebook, because it basically disabled all of those apps.
But some outside observers believe Apple needs to go further.
John Gruber, the Apple blogger, wrote that Apple would be justified if it pulled Facebook's consumer-facing apps from the App store.
"Sometimes a bully needs to be punched in the face, not just told to knock it off," he wrote on Wednesday.
Anil Dash, the CEO of app development startup Glitch, tweeted that it "would be a good time for Apple users to show that they want Facebook held accountable in the same way that other devs are."
"Any other publisher carrying out this level of deliberate circumvention of Apple's platform rules would have all their apps kicked out of the store," Dash continued.
Apple banned a Facebook-owned VPN app called Onavo Protect from its app store in August, after concluding that the app was monitoring user activities on their iPhones and being used by Facebook to collect info on rival apps, as TechCrunch noted in its report. And Tim Cook's predecessor Steve Jobs famously blocked Adobe from working with Apple products, for a variety of supposed transgressions.
But banning Facebook, which has more than 2 billion users, would be a move on an entirely different level. It would amount to a direct attack on one of the most powerful companies in the world. And it would likely cause deep pain to both sides. It may not be mutually assured destruction, but it will cause a lot of damage.
Apple may not like Facebook, but its users love the latter's apps. The top free app in Apple's App Store is Facebook-owned Instagram. Facebook Messenger ranks no. 6. Facebook's eponymous app and WhatsApp, which the company owns, are also in the top 20. And those apps aren't just sitting idle on customers' iPhones. Numerous studies have indicated that customers spend gobs of time each day on Facebook's apps.
If Apple were to boot Facebook from its App Store, it could give users a real incentive to trade in their iPhones for Android devices.
In fact, some industry observers have suggested that Facebook is the one with the leverage, and that it should threaten to pull its app from Apple's App Store to bring the iPhone maker to heel.
However, it's not like Facebook can really do without Apple either. Mobile ads now account for 93% of Facebook's total advertising revenue, which provides nearly all of Facebook's overall sales, as the company detailed in its fourth-quarter earnings report Wednesday. Nearly half of Facebook's total revenue comes from the US and Canada, and in the US, depending on what figure you believe, somewhere around 40% to 50% of all mobile devices in use are iPhones.
Apple CEO Tim Cook. Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
Although the iPhone's market share is less in other areas of the world, it's still a sizeable player in many important markets, including Japan.
In other words, if Facebook were to pull its apps from Apple's App Store, it would be putting at risk a huge portion of its revenue, somewhere around a fifth of its total sales just from US iPhone users alone.
In the end, those facts are likely to prove too much to overcome. As much as Facebook and Apple are at odds, the amount of money at stake will almost certainly encourage both sides to continue to deal with the other.
To paraphrase "The Godfather," their dispute may be personal, but this is still business.
Tesla CFO Deepak Ahuja will retire in the next few months.
The company made the announcement on the company's fourth quarter earnings conference call.
The new CFO will be Zach Kirkhorn, a nine-year veteran of Tesla who has been serving as Tesla's vice-president of finance.
Ahuja had actually already retired once, in 2015. He was succeeded by Jason Wheeler, who came over from Google. Ahuja later returned to the company.
This story is developing.
Despite numerous scandals around security and data, Facebook continues to soar.
During fourth-quarter earnings, the social network reported $55.8 billion in 2018 revenue, up 37% from 2017. During the fourth-quarter â when advertisers tend to spend the most of their yearly budgets around the holidays â Facebook netted $16.9 billion, beating Wall Street's expectation of $16.4 billion.
Read more: LIVE: Facebook's stock soars 8% after beating on top and bottom lines for Q4 2018 earnings
"We know we still have a lot of hard work ahead of us â we need to do better at anticipating the risks that come from connecting so many people," Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said during the earnings call. "We need to earn back peoples' trust."
Small and midsize businesses make up the bulk of Facebook's advertisers, and the number of marketers on the platform continues to grow. Facebook now has seven million active advertisers, up from 6 million in 2017.
Execs continued to stress that Facebook's news feed is maxing out on ad load and prices, making Instagram the company's big bet on future advertising growth.
"On the supply front, we benefitted from strong Instagram growth, which was aided by both growth in impressions on Instagram feed and Stories," said Facebook chief finance officer David Wehner. Similar to recent past quarters, Wehner advised investors that Facebook's ad growth rate will slow down and will be reflected in first-quarter earnings this year.
Facebook's Stories product in particular holds a lot of promise and represent Facebook's attempt to create one ad unit that can run across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
According to Facebook, 500 million people use Stories every day, and 2 million advertisers run ads on Stories.
However, advertisers haven't completely shifted to Stories and continue to see prices for news feed ads go up.
Advertisers have struggled to create vertical-oriented content that's required by the Stories format, as opposed to horizontal ads that are suited to the news feed. Sandberg noted that the company began offering technology last fall that converts news feed ads for the Stories format.
When asked by an analyst during the earnings call about the performance of Stories ads and if the pricing gap between news feed and Stories ads is narrowing, Sandberg said: "There's a benefit to being an early adopter, so the pricing is really attractive â we think the shift to Stories is a big opportunity for us, and it's going to take time to get advertisers in."
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