Gatwick Airport is Britain's second busiest by passenger volume, and Europe's eighth. And yet it was brought to a standstill for two days by two people and a single drone.

Its vulnerability reminded me of a conversation I had two years ago, at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon with cybersecurity investor Sergey Gribov of Flint Capital. He was talking up one of his investments, an industrial cybersecurity firm based in Israel called CyberX. Half-bored, I girded myself for his pitch. They usually go like this: "The internet is full of hackers! They want to steal your data and your money! If only companies used my company's awesome product, we would all be safe!"

I have heard hundreds of pitches like this.

But my conversation with Gribov was different. It was ... extreme. The criminals who break into the web sites of banks or chainstores and steal personal data or money are not the scariest people out there, he told me. The hackers we really ought to be worrying about are the ones trying take entire countries offline. People who are trying to take down the internet, switch the lights off, cut the water supply, disable railways, or blow up factories.

The West's weakness is in the older electronics and sensors that control processes in infrastructure and industry. Often these electronics were installed decades ago. The security systems controlling them are ancient or non-existent. If a hacker can gain control of a temperature sensor in a factory, he — they're usually men — can blow the place up, or set it on fire. "The problem people don't realise is it becomes a weapon of mass destruction. You can take down a whole country. It can be done," he said.

And then, how do you respond? Does the country that was attacked — the one struggling to get its power grid back online — launch nukes? Probably not, he said, because "you have no idea who did it."

"You can have a team of five people sitting in a basement and be just as devastating as WMDs," he said. "It's really scary. In some sense it's a matter of time because it's really easy."

At the time, I discounted my conversation with Gribov. His VC fund was invested in CyberX, so he had an obvious interest in propagating the idea that the world is full of bad guys.

But in the years since we talked, two unnerving things happened.

"Someone is learning how to take down the Internet," Bruce Schneier, the CTO of IBM Resilient believes

The scope of the 2016 internet outage after the attack on Dyn.Wikimedia, CCBoth attacks were conducted by relatively unsophisticated actors. The Dyn attack was done by three young men who had created some software that they merely hoped would disable a competitor's company, until it got out of control. The Mauritania attack was probably done by the government of neighbouring Sierra Leone, which was trying to manipulate local election results by crippling the media.

Apparently, it is possible to take the world offline.

It's not merely that "someone" out there is trying to figure out how to take down the internet. There are multiple someones out there who want that power. In June 2018, Atlanta's city government was hobbled by an attack that wiped out a third of its software programs. The FBI told Business Insider earlier this year that it believed terrorists would eventually attempt to take America's 911 emergency system offline.

"Someone is learning how to take down the Internet," Bruce Schneier, the CTO of IBM Resilient believes.

Three major power suppliers simultaneously taken over by hackers

Next, I talked to Nir Giller, cofounder and CTO of CyberX. He pointed me to the December 2015 blackout in Ukraine, in which three major power suppliers were simultaneously taken over by hackers. The hackers gained remote control of the stations' dashboards, and manually switched off about 60 substations, leaving 230,000 Ukrainians in the cold and dark for six straight hours.

The hack was almost certainly done by Russia, whose military had invaded Crimea in the south of the country in 2014.

"It's a new weapon," Giller says. "It wasn't an accident. It was a sophisticated, well-coordinated attack."

The fact that the hackers targeted a power station was telling. The biggest vulnerabilities in Western infrastructure are older facilities, Giller believes. Factories, energy plants, and water companies all operate using machinery that is often very old. New devices and software are installed alongside the older machinery, often to control or monitor it. This is what the industrial "internet of things" looks like. Hackers don't need to control an entire plant, the way they did in Ukraine. They only need to control an individual censor on a single machine. "In the best-case scenario you have to get rid of a batch" of product, Giller says. "In the worst case, it's medicine that is not supervised or produced correctly."

CyberX has done work for the Carlsbad Desalination Plant in California. It claims to be the largest seawater desalination plant in the US. And it serves an area prone to annual droughts. Giller declined to say exactly how CyberX protects the plant but the implication of the company's work is clear — before CyberX showed up, it was pretty easy to shut down the water supply to about 400,000 people in San Diego.

2010 was the year that cybersecurity experts really woke up to the idea that you could take down infrastructure, not just individual companies or web sites. That was the year the Stuxnet virus was deployed to take down the Iranian nuclear program.

"Stuxnet in 2010 was groundbreaking"

The principle behind Stuxnet was simple: Like all software viruses, it copied and sent itself to as many computers running Microsoft Windows as it possibly could, invisibly infecting hundreds of thousands of operating systems worldwide. Once installed, Stuxnet looked for Siemens Step7 industrial software. If it found some, Stuxnet then asked itself a question: "Is this software operating a centrifuge that spins at the exact frequency of an Iranian nuclear power plant that is enriching uranium to create nuclear weapons?" If the answer was "yes," Stuxnet changed the data coming from the centrifuges, giving their operators false information. The centrifuges stopped working properly. And one-fifth of the Iranian nuclear program's enrichment facilities were ruined.

"Stuxnet in 2010 was groundbreaking," Giller says.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his sister Kim Yo Jong on April 27, 2018. North Korea is a major provider of malware. Korea Summit Press Pool via Reuters

Groundbreaking, but extremely sophisticated. Some experts believe that the designers of Stuxnet would need access to Microsoft's original source code — something that only a government like the US or Israel could command.

Russia is another state actor that is growing its anti-infrastructure resources. In April 2017 the US FBI and the British security services warned that Russia had seeded UK wifi routers— the little boxes that serve wireless internet in your living room — with a hack that can read all the internet traffic going through them. It's not that Vladimir Putin wants to see what you're looking at on Pornhub. Rather, "What they're doing there is building capability," says Andrew Tsonchev, the director of technology at Darktrace Industrial, a London-based cybersecurity firm that specialises in artificially intelligent, proactive security. "They're building that and investing in that so they can launch attacks from it across the world if and when they need to."

A simple extortion device disabled Britain's largest employer in an afternoon

Then, in 2017, the Wannacry virus attack happened. Like Stuxnet, Wannacry also spread itself through the Microsoft Windows ecosystem. Once activated, it locked up a user's computer and demanded a ransom in bitcoin if the user wanted their data back. It was intended as a way to extort money from people at scale. The Wannacry malware was too successful, however. It affected so many computers at once that it drew attention to itself, and was quickly disabled by a security researcher (who ironically was later accused of being the creator of yet another type of malware).

During its brief life, Wannacry became most infamous for disabling hundreds of computers used by Britain's National Health Service, and was at one point serious threat to the UK's ability to deliver healthcare in some hospitals.

The fact that a simple extortion device could disable Britain's largest employer in an afternoon did not go unnoticed. Previously, something like Stuxnet needed the sophistication of a nation-state. But Wannacry looked like something you could create in your bedroom.

A screenshot shows a WannaCry ransomware demand, provided by cyber security firm Symantec. Thomson Reuters

Tsonchev told Business Insider that Wannacry changed the culture among serious black-hat hackers.

"It managed to swoop across, and burn down huge sectors in different countries for a bit," he says. "In the course of that, the shipping industry got hit. We had people like Maersk, and other shipping terminals and operators, they went down for a day or two. What happened is the ransomware managed to get into these port terminals and the harbours that control shipping ... that intrigued attackers to realise to realise that was something they could deliberately try and do that wasn't really in their playbook at that point."

"Oh look, we can actually start to do things like take down manufacturing plants and affect the global shipping industry"

"So this year, we see follow-on attacks specifically targeting shipping terminals and ports. They hit the Port of Barcelona and the Port of San Diego and others. That seemed to follow the methodology of the lessons learned the previous year. 'Oh look, we can actually start to do things like take down manufacturing plants and affect the global shipping industry.' A couple years ago they were just thinking about stealing credit card data."

Another scary thing? The Wannacry attack was in May 2017. By December 2017, the US government confirmed that the North Korean government was responsible for the attack. The North Koreans probably just wanted money. The hermit-communist state is chronically poor.

But it may have taught North Korea something more useful: You don't need bombs to bring a nation to its knees.

Oddly, you have a role to play in making sure this doesn't happen. The reason Russia and North Korea and Israel and the US all got such devastating results in their attacks on foreign infrastructure is because ordinary people are bad at updating the security software on their personal computers. People let their security software get old and vulnerable, and then weeks later they're hosting Stuxnet or Wannacry or Russia's wifi listening posts.

National security is, somehow, about "the absurdity of the mundane," says Tsonchev. "These little annoying popups [on your computer] are actually holding the key to national security and people are just ignoring them. Individuals have a small part to play in keeping the whole country safe."

So if you're casting about for a New Year's resolution right now, consider this one: Resolve to keep your phone and laptop up to date with system security software. Your country needs you.

$7 billion workplace chat app Slack apologized on Friday for mistakenly shutting down the accounts of several users this week in its efforts to comply with US sanctions towards countries like Iran.

Slack said that it uses location information such as IP addresses to block users from countries affected by US trade embargoes and economic sanctions, and that in doing so it "inadvertently de-activated" the accounts of certain users. The company did not specify how the mistake was made, but stressed that it did not block any users based on nationality or ethnicity.

Read more: It looks like Slack, the $7 billion chat app, is banning some users because of Iran sanctions — even if they don't live or work in Iran

Earlier this week, several ethnically Iranian users tweeted their concerns that their accounts were abruptly shut down even though they didn't live in Iran or have any professional ties to the country. One PhD student in British Columbia wondered on Twitter what Slack's basis was for determining his ethnicity.

"We do not collect, use, or possess any information about the nationality or ethnicity of our users," Slack said on Friday.

Several of the affected users had said they recently travelled to Iran, which may have caused Slack to flag their IP addresses.

Slack said it's working on restoring mistakenly blocked accounts, and apologized for not handling the communication well. The company also noted that it will soon begin blocking accounts with IP addresses associated with an embargoed country and said that users traveling to a sanctioned country may temporarily not be able to access their account.

Below is Slack's full apology:

Discord, the most popular group chat program for video gamers, is now valued at $2.05 billion after raising $150 million in a new funding round, it announced on Friday. The round was led by Greenoaks Capital and also includes participation from Firstmark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures, and Technology Opportunity Partners.

Since its launch in 2015, Discord has drawn in more than 200 million users worldwide. The chat program offers a variety of impressive features for free, and lets users create and customize their own voice and text chat channels. It's become one of the premiere places for online communities to gather. The company was last valued at $1.65 billion in a funding round earlier this year.

Having established a huge userbase, Discord launched a new online store within the chat platform earlier in October. The majority of the games offered in the store come from independent developers, and Discord recently announced that creators would earn 90% of the revenue generated from each sale. Those who subscribe to Discord's "Nitro" service pay $99/year or $9.99/month to gain unlimited access to more than $1,000 worth of games from the store, and gain additional chat features.

Notably, this new store places into competition with some industry heavyweights: The Discord Store goes right up against Steam, far and away the largest PC digital games store, as well as the new Epic Games, from the creators of "Fortnite." In a bid to win developer support, Discord and Epic alike are offering developers more favorable terms than Steam, which usually takes a 30% cut of all sales.

At the same time, Discord has courted controversy. The open and relatively anonymous nature of the platform has led white supremacists and other problematic groups to gather on Discord. It was reported that the white supremacist group behind the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 used Discord to organize and plan.

Read more:A popular chat app just shut down a major online hangout for the alt-right after Charlottesville

Discord has tried to fight back against bad actors on the platform, banning known servers associated with white supremacy and hate speech, while also working to enforce terms of service that prohibit those behaviors. Still, those communities are said to still linger on the service.

Though the platform started as a niche app for gamers, Discord has secured a foothold as one of the most popular chat services in the world. As the platform continues to grow, the company will be challenged by a welcoming wider range of communities while working to stay true to its core userbase.

As for the future of Discord: It's been reported that the company has been exploring a sale, though it's unclear how raising this funding would affect its intentions in that regard.

The parent company of MoviePass may soon no longer have its shares trading on the Nasdaq market.

The Nasdaq warned Helios and Matheson on Wednesday that it plans to suspend trading in the company's shares on December 28 and will move to have them delisted, Helios and Matheson disclosed Friday in a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company plans to delay and potentially head off the delisting by appealing the exchange's decision.

But the company's chances of winning an appeal could be slim. The Nasdaq already decided that it won't give Helios and Matheson a 180-day extension to get its stock back above $1 a share, the standard which it has failed to meet since May of this year.

Helios and Matheson "received a written notice from [Nasdaq's] staff that the company has not regained compliance with [Nasdaq's listing standards] and is not eligible for a second 180-day period because the staff determined that it does not appear that it is possible for the company to cure the deficiency," the company said in its regulatory filing.

The MoviePass owner indicated in the document that it still believes it can boost its stock above $1 a share and regain compliance. It said it would appeal the decision and ask for a delay so that it can reverse split its stock a second time. It also said it would "continue considering all available options to resolve the company's noncompliance" with the listing standard.

Read this:MoviePass' parent company just bought itself more time to live, but it's still in imminent danger of being kicked off the stock exchanges

Nasdaq's rules require it to put the delisting process on hold when a company appeals the delisting decision. Appeals are typically held within 45 days of their filing, according to the document. Should Helios and Matheson not actually appeal the delisting decision or lose its appeal, its shares would likely end up on the over-the-counter markets where they would be more difficult to trade and would likely decline even further than they already have. The company's stock has lost more than 99% of its value this year as its burned through more than $300 million in cash and sold off billions of shares to stay in business.

In June, after Helios and Matheson's stock had been below $1 a share for more than a month, the Nasdaq sent the company a letter warning that it was not in compliance with the market's listing standards. Nasdaq gave Helios and Matheson 180 days to boost its share price and solve the problem.

After getting approval from shareholders, it reverse split its stock by a 250-to-1 ratio in July, temporarily boosting its stock price above $20 a share. But the shares quickly plummeted below $1 a share again as the company issued and sold massive quantities of new shares to fund its ongoing losses.

Helios and Matheson proposed reverse splitting its stock again this fall, but it ended up abandoning the effort in the face of widespread investor opposition.

The Nasdaq cited that history in explaining why it wouldn't give Helios and Matheson a second 180-day period to get back in compliance with its listing standards, according to the regulatory document.

Hector Vivas/Latin Content/Getty Images

Netflix tumbled as much as 7.3% Friday to an intraday low of $241.36 a share and was on track for its lowest close since January.

The streaming-video giant was under pressure for a third straight session Friday amid broader stock-market weakness that has seen the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index shed 6.4% since Facebook was sued on Wednesday by Washington, DC, over its Cambridge Analytica data scandal. On Tuesday evening, Facebook admitted that Netflix and Spotify were able to access Facebook's user messages.

Netflix shares have slumped more than 30% over the past two-and-a-half months despite the company posting strong third-quarter earnings and subscriber growth on October 16. Bernstein analyst Todd Juenger says the sell-off could be a result of the current environment of rising interest rates, which tends to penalize companies, such as Netflix, that are short of cash. 

Netflix management warned investors in October that its cash burn will hold steady at $3 billion for the fiscal year 2018 and that next year's negative free cash flow will be roughly unchanged.

That was "a very similar scenario to when 2018 free cash flow guide was first provided a year ago, coming in worse than consensus on higher programming expense," Juenger said. "Only last time, the market believed that higher programming spend was a 'good guy' (or not as much of a 'bad guy'), as it likely fuels future sub adds. This time, the market isn't buying into that."

On Thursday, the Federal Reserve hiked its key interest rates for the fourth time this year, making debt more expensive. Rising interest rates decrease "the present value of future cash, which is especially impactful for a company like Netflix where positive cash flow is many years into the future," Juenger said.

Netflix was up 23% this year.

Markets Insider

Uber is sending its self-driving cars back on the public road this week in Pittsburgh, with a whole new set of revamped safety procedures and a lot of public promises to further fix its safety culture after one of their autonomous cars killed a pedestrian back in March.

Last month, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi responded to Business Insider's investigation into that fatal accident by telling employees at an all-hands meeting, "We have screwed up," as Business Insider was first to report.

So, it may comfort you to know that as Uber's self-driving cars hit the streets again, employees internally are feeling good about their company's current commitment to safety and their own ability to build a safer car, according to a leaked employee culture survey seen by Business Insider.

Read more: Uber employees describe a stressful and 'ridiculous' culture at the self-driving car unit under its current leader Eric Meyhofer

In October, 91% of employees at the unit, known internally as the Advanced Technologies Group or ATG, took the survey, according an email sent to the troops by the head of the division, Eric Meyhofer seen by Business Insider.

Their biggest praise about ATG's culture was about safety. Employees were asked how much they agree or disagree with this statement: "I believe ATG values safety when it comes to the development of self driving technology" and 83% of them indicated they agreed. 14% of them were neutral, neither agreeing or disagreeing, which means only 3% disagreed. That was the highest scoring response in the survey, Meyhofer discussed in his email.

82% also agreed with the statement "I feel empowered to report safety concerns and/or suggestions without fear of retaliation" with 15% neutral, leaving 3% who disagreed.

The other very positive topic of feedback involved trust, with 82% agreeing with "I trust my team" (16% neutral). 80% also said they trusted their managers, with 16% neutral. Meyhofer said that trust was up 4% compared to the previous six-month survey.

We've heard ongoing tales of how political, backstabbing, and dysfunctional this unit is from a growing list of employees and former employees, so it's good to know that most people who work there aren't feeling that way about their own teams and supervisors.

Not that employees are delirious. The overall satisfaction score was 70%, with 26% neutral. Meyhofer also indicated that this was 1% lower than overall satisfaction at Uber's main division, the one that hosts its active commercial businesses like ridesharing and Uber Eats.

There were several red flags about ATG's culture in the survey as well. The scores on questions concerning how well people feel supported to do their jobs were abysmal. When asked, "Most Uber wide systems and processes help me get work done effectively," only 43% of people agreed.

And only about half of employees reported feeling like they had growth opportunities at the company.

Most telling of all was the question about stress. Employees who felt like they were doing a good job managing work stress were down by 6%, although Meyhofer didn't share the specific number.

Here's a rundown of the ATG employee survey results we saw, not all the numbers were shared:

It looks like Facebook will soon release the Oculus Quest headset, a virtual reality headset that can track where it is in a room using advanced built-in sensors, a feature called inside-out tracking.

A new FCC filing published on Friday is sparse on details, but it describes a VR headset with the model number "MH-B," which is similar to the Oculus Go, which is currently on sale.

FCC

FCC

Earlier this fall, Facebook announced the Oculus Quest, which had been developed under the code name "Santa Cruz." Facebook said at the time that it would go on sale in spring 2019 for $399.

There aren't a lot of details in the filing, but the limited pictures included do resemble the Oculus Quest. The VR headset has Wifi and Bluetooth radios, according to the filing.

From Facebook's announcement:

"Offering six degrees of freedom and Touch controllers for true hand presence, Oculus Quest will launch in Spring 2019 for $399 USD. In past years, we've shown you the Santa Cruz prototype, a milestone on the path to Oculus Quest today, and we're excited to help usher in a new era of VR gaming."

FCC filings like this typically surface shortly before a company releases a new device that has wireless capabilities. An Oculus spokesperson didn't immediately return an email.

Public companies head into 2019 with major blows to their market caps as the result of the end-of-year market correction. But that's not necessarily a bad thing for tech mergers and acquisitions.

While the soaring stock prices of the past few years have given CEOs the confidence to make large strategic deals, such as IBM's $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, it also meant the companies they wanted to buy were priced at intimidatingly high multiples.

With a stock market correction in full swing, tech M&A bankers and lawyers say they expect to see some buyers leap at the opportunity to acquire companies at a relative discount.

"History has shown that a stock market correction along the lines of what we're now seeing does not inevitably lead to an immediate decline in M&A activity," said Richard Climan, a partner and M&A lawyer at Hogan Lovells.

In fact, Climan said, lower prices may lead additional buyers to "jump into the fray."

"These additional buyers may have been staying on the sidelines because they thought deal valuations were just too high," he said. "So, interestingly enough, overall dealmaking activity may end up being even more robust after a stock market correction than before the correction, albeit at lower price points."

Historically, private-equity firms are more active in downturns since their business models typically prefer lower-priced assets than are widely available in a boom.

To be sure, dealmakers agree that a full-on recession and declining CEO confidence would lead to a slowdown in deals. But unless that happens, it's likely that tech bankers will remain very busy.

Software was king in 2018

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty's $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat was the largest software acquisition ever. AP Photo/Manu Fernandez

In 2018, there have been 2,236 M&A deals in the US with a total of $360 billion in deal value, according to Dealogic. While the number of deals is the smallest of any year since 2013, the value of those deals topped the past two years'.

Software deals were the stars of 2018. Just look at SAP's $8 billion acquisition of Qualtrics, Salesforce's $6.5 billion MuleSoft deal, and Microsoft's $7 .5 billion GitHub acquisition.

"The activity that you have seen this year has been all software and internet and more growth companies — more expansionary M&A as opposed to consolidating M&A," said Colin Ryan, the cohead of M&A for the Americas and global cohead of technology M&A at Goldman Sachs.

One reason for the decline in consolidation, Ryan said, is the slowdown in semiconductor M&A, which has been paralyzed by trade issues between the US and China. But strategic investors have also increased their willingness to make big bets on game-changing acquisitions.

"Customers are all going through digital transformations, and the demand for software is infinitely greater than it has been over time," Ryan said. "It's made it a very attractive business for people to own, whether that's as a strategic or a private-equity firm."

Sam Britton, the head of technology, media, and telecom M&A at Goldman Sachs, said that while many people expected a lot of acquisition activity from large tech companies such as Facebook and Google in 2018 thanks to cash repatriation, those companies were relatively quiet on the deal front. Instead, he said, many of the deals were driven by "that next tier down of software acquirers."

"We expect that to continue into the new year, with that second-tier cohort being very active and private equity being incredibly active," Britton said.

Dual tracks are all the rage

Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith sold his company to SAP for $8 billion, just days before a planned IPO in which the midrange price was $4.8 billion.SAP/YouTube

If you want to know who will get acquired in 2019, look no further than the robust lineup of IPO-ready unicorns. Word on the street is that most of the large companies prepping for a 2019 initial public offering are also entertaining offers from strategic investors.

Since valuations tend to soar once a company goes public, it only makes sense for acquirers like Google or Microsoft to make an offer in a company they are interested in before it hits the public market.

"We believe we will see a large number of dual processes, relative to historic norms, given the number of companies that aspire to go public in 2019," said Paul Haigney, the cohead of Global Technology, Telecom, and Media Group at Lazard.

"It's likely that some substantial number of them will choose a strategic outcome over an IPO outcome, both because of difficulties in achieving the IPO outcome and the certainty of a strategic investment for investors," he said.

Among those difficulties: a competitive investment landscape at a time when public markets are volatile, in which institutional investors may decide to bet on one company but not its direct competitor (think Uber versus Lyft).

Not all of these so-called dual-track processes are formal. In many cases, bankers said, it's the confidential filing that signals to strategic investors that it's time to take a look, rather than a formal process in which bankers actively seek offers.

And while insiders said the increase in dual-trackers was notable entering 2019, it is not without precedent.

Cisco famously announced its acquisition of AppDynamics for $3.7 billion in January 2017 just hours before it was supposed to go public. And just last month, SAP announced an $8 billion deal with Qualtrics, which was days away from its public offering.

But SAP's acquisition of Qualtric highlights another trend heading into 2019: big premiums over the IPO price.

Qualtrics would have been valued at $4.8 billion if its IPO had priced at the midpoint of the range it set in the first week of November, which means it got acquired at 60% premium. And while the relative value of these IPO-ready companies will most likely decline if the markets continue to fall, M&A may still prove to be a quick way to get a higher price.

Expect more buyers outside tech

General Motors' president, Dan Ammann, right, with the Cruise Automation cofounders Kyle Vogt, center, and Daniel Kan. GM Cruise

It's not just IPOs that are driving up the price of startups. Large tech companies also face growing competition from strategic acquirers outside tech.

"Non-tech buyers are becoming an increasing force in the marketplace for tech M&A deals," said Climan, citing research from Citigroup finding that non-tech buyers participated in 33% of North American tech M&A from 2016 to 2018. That's up from just 15% from 2001 to 2003.

Climan expects to see more e-commerce deals like Walmart's $16 billion acquisition of Flipkart, a deal he worked on, which the retailer announced in May, as well as deals in automotive like General Motors' 2016 acquisition of the self-driving-software startup Cruise.

Others told Business Insider they had seen growing interest by industrial companies, such as the German conglomerate Siemens — which acquired the software companies Comfy and Mendix in 2018 — as well as United Technologies and Honeywell.

"Software assets are attractive to strategics looking to remake themselves into higher-margin businesses," said Paul Crisci, the global head of technology investment banking at UBS. "We particularly see this trend in old-line industrial businesses that are able to achieve margin expansion by adding software capabilities to their business and product lines."

Something about plastics and electronics sitting at the edge of a fire may alarm you — it did me.

But, by Jove, BioLite's FirePit is a masterfully-engineered contraption built to foster, contain, and withstand the hottest little blaze you can muster, which, thanks to the fan, you can tend all night from the same seat without a single faceful of smoke. If that isn't at least a small miracle, I don't know what is.

The Bluetooth-connected, USB-charged fan, by the way, is what sets the FirePit apart. It hooks up to the side of the wire mesh cage (enabling a 360° view of your glorious flame within) and blows air through two hole-riddled tubes to create a vortex for optimal fuel burning and almost no smoke.

How the BioLite fan works Owen Burke/Business Insider

On the subject of fuel, the FirePit burns both charcoal and wood, each with astounding efficiency. The only adjustments you'll want to make when switching between the two is lowering the fuel rack for wood and raising it for charcoal (and maybe for cooking), and tossing on the grill grate when you want to cook.

Out of the box, it's recommended by BioLite that your first fire be a wood fire. This builds a layer of ash in the basin, which, they say, makes the perfect base for charcoal fires. I can confirm they're not wrong.

We started out with nothing but a bit of paper, a few precious drops of lighter fluid, some very wet wood, and not a whole lot of hope. We'd get a corner of a besotted piece of wood lit just barely before it would flicker out. After a few tries and no lasting luck, we affixed the electronic fan and got it rolling, from which point on we didn't even need to touch the thing.

Once you get your fire rolling reasonably well, all you have to do is connect your phone to the BioLite app and watch, perhaps in awe, as the size of your flame corresponds almost instantaneously to the swipe of your finger (or thumb) upon your screen.

Controlling the flame level via smartphone Owen Burke/Business Insider

The FirePit can hold about eight pieces of cordwood, which might not sound like much, but burning as optimally as it does, is plenty.

Once you're done with your fire, turn the fan off and take it inside. While it may survive rain or snow if the electronic ports are properly capped, you may want to charge it anyhow. As for the FirePit itself, make sure the fire and embers are out before attaching the cover and calling it a night or carrying on with further endeavors.

Perhaps as heartwarming as their wildly futuristic fire basin is BioLite Energy's humanitarian endeavor to bring heat and light to off-grid households around the world. To date, they've either illuminated, heated, or otherwise equipped, by their estimates, some 300,000 people around the world to date. They also have offices in Uganda, Kenya, India, in addition to their Brooklyn, New York headquarters, which is fun, but respectably modest, I ought to add.

You could do a lot worse — though hardly any better, I'm convinced — for a small outdoor fire pit or grill than the BioLite FirePit, especially in an urban or suburban setting where outdoor space is limited and large plums of smoke from traditional fire pits are cause for alarm, if not a visit from some faction of your local authorities.

Thanks in large part to how easy it was to control the flame, cooking was a breeze:

The BioLite FirePit with the fan in full force Owen Burke/Business Insider

Octopus fresh off the BioLite FirePit Owen Burke/Business Insider

Tuna belly, hot off the BioLite FirePit Owen Burke/Business Insider

Fresh fish from the BioLite FirePit Owen Burke/Business Insider

Fresh fish from the BioLite FirePit Owen Burke/Business Insider

Cooking with the BioLite FirePit was a delightful breeze. I found it a relaxing relegation of duty to sit several yards from my production, effortlessly (and somehow familiarly) swiping left or right to tamp or fan my flame.

I was able to sit back and entertain while still keeping an eye on everything. I might not be the most technologically inclined millennial on this planet, but there is a lot to be said for a remote-controlled campfire and stove (in effect). Between tossing things on and pulling them off, I never once had to come within arm's length of the FirePit, and certain dishes that I felt would be better off contained in a skillet cooked wonderfully — especially the marinated tuna belly, which I was afraid might fall apart if placed directly on the grate.

In short, the BioLite FirePit fan gets things roaring in a flash whether you're using charcoal or wood, though BioLite does advise (and I agree) that having a good base of wood-fire coals makes this little thing shine.

It's going to live in my backyard for the winter, and on my boat this summer for island hopping and fish frying, when I'll probably put it through hell and report back with more.

Buy the BioLite FirePit from BioLite for $199.95 on BioLite's website. Also find it at Amazon and REI.

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Although competition in the US wireless carrier market remains fierce, the price war among the Big Four US carriers — Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint — began to cool over the past year.

In an attempt to avoid further competition on price, carriers began shifting their focus to adding value to their mobile plans with new offerings to differentiate from the competition. This helped average revenue per user (ARPU) start to stabilize across all carriers in Q1 2018, after declining over the last two years.

The Big Four have now begun reshuffling their unlimited plans to lure subscribers by providing more options. This strategy has been unrolling in two flavors: introducing new, expensive unlimited plan tiers loaded with an array of features and choices, while also catering to price-sensitive customers with more affordable plans that strip away extra perks like free digital content and international coverage. As a result, a new battleground is emerging, with differentiation now coming down to the value loaded in their mobile plans.

Looking forward, the US carrier market will see competitive pressure pick up due to a number of trends:

Celebrity jeweler Ben Baller made a diamond ring with Tesla's name and logo as a gift to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Baller said in an Instagram post.

"Dear Elon Musk Please accept this 1 of 1 custom Diamond and Ruby #Tesla ring for being an inspiration to me and my best friend Paul aka @va_p100d FYI both of us own @teslamotors Model X P100D's and both of us appreciate what you've done for Americans and the [the world]," Baller said.

Read more: Elon Musk has reportedly donated $423,600 to Flint public schools to buy laptops for all of its seventh and eighth-grade students

The Tesla ring is the first piece of custom jewelry Baller has given as a gift, he said.

"Why are we giving you this ring? Because you have motivated me and Paul to level up and push limits," Baller said. "We salute you for giving almost 50,000 jobs to Americans and putting USA back on the map as a serious contender in the auto industry."

The ring is worth $37,000, Baller told Business Insider.

Wall Street investment banks are still shopping this December, and tech bankers — the most coveted and expensive specialists in the dealmaking universe — continue to fly off the shelves.

Earlier this week, Deutsche Bank hired software banker Greg Thorne from Stifel — the bank's second software hire in as many months. Last week it was Evercore, which opened up its checkbook to sign Citigroup internet and digital media head Zaheed Kajani, a senior MD who reportedly has over 100 transactions under his belt.

Such hiring activity this late in the year is atypical, since the hiring firm will usually have to cover the bonus the banker would've earned at their previous shop — a pricey proposition that amounts to paying an employee for a year of work they did for a rival.

But this hasn't been a typical year on many fronts.

2018 has been the most active year since the financial crisis for hires and departures among senior investment bankers, with firms of all sizes poaching talent from rivals to capture a bigger slice of the year's massive dealmaking frenzy. This year has seen $27 billion in M&A fees — the most since 2007, according to Dealogic.

Hundreds of managing directors have shuffled seats, but tech bankers have been the hottest commodity, with nearly 50 MD-level hires in the US, up 41% from 2017, according to data from executive recruiting firm Egon Zehnder.

"And the pace seems to be accelerating. Especially in software, but really across the board," Albert Laverge, head of the corporate and investment banking practice for Egon Zehnder, told Business Insider.

Read more:Investment banks are waging a war for star talent in 2018. Here are the banks that won — and the banks that lost.

Other top tech bankers who switched firms this year include Kurt Simon, who left JPMorgan Chase for Goldman Sachs; Tammy Kiely, who agreed to join Morgan Stanley only to rejoin Goldman; Sam Powers, who left UBS to run US TMT banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch; Mathieu Salas, who left Citi to run fintech banking at Credit Suisse; and Adam Nordin, an education-technology specialist who left Barclays for Goldman.

It's no surprise the market for tech bankers is booming, given the bounty of fees the sector is producing. With two weeks left in the year, tech was the most active M&A sector, producing $670 billion worth of deals, according to Dealogic. Among the largest were IBM's $34 buyout of Red Hat, Broadcom's $18.9 billion acquisition of chip-maker CA Technologies, and Microsoft's $7.5 billion deal for GitHub.

The next closest sector is healthcare at just over $500 billion, which happens to be the second-hottest hiring sector for MDs, especially in biotech. There's also been a barrage of biotech initial public offerings this year — 58 deals that have raise a collective $6.3 billion.

"Everyone's trying to recruit someone who is supernaturally successful," Julian Bell, head of investment bank recruiting at Sheffield Haworth in New York, told Business Insider. "If you do successfully do that, you can add a lot of revenue on top."

But great tech talent is scarce, and these bankers don't come cheap.

According to industry sources, it's common for senior tech bankers to make 1.5 times as much as similarly situated bankers with a different industry expertise, such as consumer goods, business services, or real estate, for instance.

"You have to be consistently good to get into the $2 million range in most sectors. As in very good," Bell said.

By comparison, sources said, compensation for experienced tech bankers in the $3 million to $5 million range is commonplace.

In part, tech and biotech bankers command a higher premium because of the revenue they bring in working in the hottest sector for deals.

But they're also more scarce because their talents are coveted beyond the confines of Wall Street, Bell points out.

Big tech giants, as well as maturing unicorns, desire seasoned bankers for CFO and corporate development roles, and the payouts, often laden with company stock and options, are potentially far greater than anything a top tech bank like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, or JPMorgan can offer.

"If they get it right, they've just earned $30 million," Bell said.

And maybe much more.

Anthony Noto, a long-time Goldman Sachs banker, joined Twitter in 2014 as its CFO, and later as its COO, before leaving earlier this year to take the top job at SoFi. He was compensated primarily in stock and options at Twitter, which are currently worth about $67 million, not including any of the shares he's already sold, according to regulatory filings and current market prices.

Imran Khan, who left Credit Suisse to become Snapchat's chief strategy officer in 2014, had accumulated a $150 million fortune by the time went public in 2017 — mostly in stock that has diminished in value since. Khan left in September to start his own company.

Ajay Shah, who was appointed head of technology investment banking at Deutsche Bank this fall and was involved in the bank's recent MD hires, said this dynamic has made finding the right talent more difficult.

"The talent there is a little sparse in terms of people who want to move, and people we really like," Shah said. "The hiring pool had gotten a little skinny because of all those bankers moving to different parts of the ecosystem."

But, with the deal market roaring and expected to continue well into 2018, banks want to have a team in place to capitalize on it as much as possible before the music stops.

Given the customary garden leave, waiting till the new year to hire talent means a bounty of potential deal fees left on the table.

That helps explain why Deutsche Bank, and others, are still poaching tech MDs well into the fourth quarter.

"Overall, the tech space is going to be extremely active, and we want to hire ahead of that and have the right team focused on clients," Shah recently told Business Insider.

I have the privilege of meeting with amazing founders who inspire me with their vision to build companies that truly transform their markets and make people's lives better. Many of these founders require capital to grow and achieve their potential. Thus, I'm often asked about how to raise capital and how to get the best outcome when raising money.

The world of fundraising can feel opaque, but it shouldn't have to.

In the spirit of transparency, I want to share some of the things I've learned in past fundraising processes.

Before wading into this topic, I want to acknowledge that I've been really lucky. I've cofounded two companies: Harry's and Warby Parker. Together, these companies have raised more than $700 million from major institutional investors.

Before I founded these companies, I worked in private-equity investing, so I started with a solid understanding of the investment process and had relationships with people in the investment world. My cofounders and I also had great guidance — from amazing cofounders, teammates, board members, and lawyers — and lots of luck along the way, so I try not to take any of that for granted.

With that said, and with the caveats that this reflects my own experience and that others may have different but equally valid perspectives, I hope some of this advice can be helpful to anyone looking to raise capital.

So let's dive in.

There's a question I don't think entrepreneurs ask themselves enough: 'Should I raise money?'

People have often congratulated me and my cofounders after a big round of funding. But raising money isn't a badge of honor. While it's validating to have someone in our vision enough to invest in the company, outside capital is just fuel for a business to grow until it can exist in a self-sustaining way.

It's a means to an end, not an end unto itself.

My cofounders and I have taken big swings at Harry's and Warby Parker. We've opened more than 75 Warby Parker retail stores and have grown to over 1,000 people in only a few years. At Harry's, we bought a 90-plus-year-old, 420-person German razor-blade factory, even though we're just a 30-person startup in New York. And we've done all of this in highly competitive markets. As a result, we've felt it prudent to raise outside capital to enable us to grow quickly.

But raising lots of money isn't necessarily right for every company. You may not feel pressure to grow as quickly or compete in the same ways we did (and that could be a good thing), and you may not need to raise outside capital.

Additionally, raising money doesn't come without cost.

The math speaks for itself: If you own 10% of a $100 million company, it's the same as owning 100% of a $10 million company, and sometimes the latter can be much easier to achieve.

Raising money also comes with high expectations from your investors about your business performance.

At Harry's, we raised money at a $750 million valuation as a three-year-old company. That valuation was predicated on our ability to continue to grow quickly; it came with substantial expectations from investors that we would hit aggressive growth targets. Such expectations can be good — they drive our team to achieve at the highest levels — but they also add pressure to the already pressure-packed situation of building a company.

Investors also expect that we'll pay them back — meaning that at some point, we need to sell our companies, take them public, or find another large investor to get our initial investors' liquidity.

So for all of those reasons, the first question I encourage founders to ask when thinking about raising capital is a basic one: "Should I raise outside capital?"

Strelka Institute / Flickr

How do you get money?

How you approach the process can have a meaningful impact on the future of your business and your role in it. The choices you make will dictate who surrounds you, your control as a founder, and financial outcomes in both positive and negative scenarios.

Take the time to prepare

Before even thinking about valuation or terms, or reaching out to potential investors, spend time refining an airtight narrative and business plan.

A good business plan answers four key questions:

For me, the most important part of a business plan is the first section that defines your reason for being. Everything flows from there. At Warby Parker, we expressed our reason for being in one line: "Glasses shouldn't cost as much as an iPhone."

As you're laying out your plan, be pithy! Our business plans have been 25 to 30 slides at most. There's always time to share more after.

Sebastian ter Burg/Flickr

Determine how much money you need and how you want to raise it

Your financial model should help you determine how much outside capital you need. From there, imagine scenarios where things don't go exactly as planned (because they never do) and what those scenarios mean for how much money you'll actually need.

For example, ask yourself questions like: What happens if Gillette threatens to sue Harry's? (Which it did) Or what if our business grows twice as quickly as we had forecasted? (Which also happened). Given the unpredictability at Harry's (and at many early-stage companies), we needed to be prepared for any scenario related to cash burn.

This estimation is both an art and a science. I've never been able to determine, with surgical precision, the exact amount of money it takes to run a business in a variety of different upside and downside scenarios. And as a result, I've always thought it prudent to raise a little extra capital (and take a little more dilution) in order to ensure we have some cushion against our projections.

Once you've determined how much capital you need, there are three common approaches I've seen entrepreneurs take in the seed stage:

1. Friends and family

Go to your friends and family who love you and believe in you, and ask them to invest in your company to the extent they're financially able.

We started this way at Warby Parker. We were lucky to have four founders and a broader group of people around us who were able to invest in our idea.

This approach works nicely because it gives the people closest to you the chance to benefit from your success in the company. The conversations are usually easier because these people already know you well and they believe in you. With that said, unless you have very wealthy friends and family, this approach has limits in terms of how much capital you can raise.

2. Professional investors

These can be angels or venture funds — either way, they are people who invest professionally and are likely invested in lots of companies like yours.

The benefit to speaking with these folks is they know the investing process well and can commit material amounts of capital to your business. They also work with lots of companies and have perspectives and experiences that can be helpful.

That said, it can be harder to approach these investors cold, and you have to really convince them of the return on investment your business will provide.

3. A mix of the two

Many people raise a round with both professional investors and friends and family.

What's best for you depends on how much capital you think you need. If you just need a little capital to get started, friends and family can be a good way to go. If you want more capital or lots of advice and engagement, then it may make sense to pursue professional investors.

SFROLOV/Shutterstock

What form of capital should you raise? Note vs. priced round

Convertible note

A convertible note is an instrument that typically converts to equity in the next funding round. These notes usually pay interest during the time that they are outstanding, and some have a "cap," which means that there is a max valuation at which they convert to equity.

For example, a company may issue a convertible note at a 15% discount to their next round of funding with a $10 million cap. In this case, if the company raises money at a $10 million valuation in the next round, the note would convert to equity at an $8.5 million valuation (15% discount). Yet if the company raised money at a $15 million valuation, the "cap" would kick in, and the note would convert to equity at a $10 million valuation.

Convertible notes are commonly used in the early stages of companies when people aren't ready to put a hard valuation on the company, and they tend to be more popular with smaller friends-and-family raises. They can often be quicker and easier to complete because valuation is off the table.

They provide companies the limited capital they need to hit early milestones, at which point they then can go out and raise money at a valuation that's exciting to them.

Priced round

The other option companies commonly choose is to raise a "priced round." That means raising money in equity at a specific valuation.

In this instance, the founders believe their vision and track record can command an attractive valuation. They also are more likely to want to raise substantial amounts of capital at a valuation they are comfortable with and have the capital last for a while.

There's no right or wrong answer as to the type of funding you should choose. We initially bootstrapped Warby Parker and invested only our own capital (meaning our life savings). Then, after we launched the business and sold out of glasses, we realized we needed more (but had no more life savings), so we turned to our friends and family and raised money from them through a convertible note.

At Harry's, we had to buy 1 million razor blades to lock a contract with our German factory. We signed the contract but didn't have the money to buy the blades — and this part is not recommended — so we came back to New York and raised a priced round in order to have capital to get started.

Thus, the type of capital you raise depends on the state of the company, what milestones you want to hit before raising more capital, how much money you need, and what valuation you think you can command.

Flickr/Strelka Institute/Attribution License

How do you navigate the investment process?

Find a lead investor

The fundraising process can quickly spin out of control and become complicated to manage.

In order to streamline and make the job as simple as possible, we've always found it helpful to find a single investor to lead each of the rounds — though this is still not easy. A lead investor is a person or firm who will commit a substantial amount of the capital in a round and with whom you can negotiate a core set of terms.

The benefit of this approach is that you have to negotiate only once. After you have a lead investor and a core set of terms negotiated, you and the investor sign a "term sheet" codifying those terms. Chris Dixon, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, wrote a post that thoughtfully lays out the common terms included in a term sheet.

Then you can take that term sheet to other investors and get them to join the round on the same terms as the lead investor. Your lead investor can help you there, too, by introducing you to their network and serving as a partner throughout the fundraising process.

For example, at Harry's, Thrive Capital led our seed round. After the Thrive team committed to investing, we sat down, talked about the early needs of the company, and put together a list of potential investors who could be helpful, instead of spending a lot of time and effort fostering our own independent relationships with potential new investors. Thrive then helped to introduce us to those investors and supported us by explaining to them why Thrive was excited about Harry's.

Find the right investors

It's important to try to figure out who the "right" investors are for you.

Investors can add a tremendous amount of strategic value beyond just the capital they provide — and different investors add value in different ways. Some have material domain expertise, some are exceptionally well-connected and can make helpful introductions to partners and prospective employees, and others have relevant experience in building businesses at your stage.

When thinking about who might be a good investor, I often try to identify who has invested in analogous companies. Then, if possible, I ask other founders about their experiences with those investors.

Once you've figured out who you want to invest, you have to actually get to those people

This step can be hard. Most people with great business ideas don't have a Rolodex of potential investors at their fingertips (and we certainly didn't either at Warby Parker).

This is where entrepreneurial hustle comes in.

I've found that the people who make the best introductions for me are people who know me well. It's always easier to make connections through someone who already knows you. For example, when I was preparing to raise money for Harry's, I first went to my Warby Parker cofounders. They knew great investors — and more importantly, they knew me well. Because of this, the investors they introduced me to were receptive and took their recommendation seriously.

Think broadly about who you know personally — professors, colleagues, bosses, friends — as they could have a connection to investors or firms that might be useful. But if you're drawing a blank, think about who you can get to know — other founders, VCs, people in the tech community, corporate venture funds — who might be able to help connect you. In some cases, pitch competitions, incubators, or grant programs that can open doors and give you initial exposure.

Strelka Institute/Flickr

If you're having an introductory conversation with a person you don't yet know, approach it with a lot of curiosity and self-awareness. In my experience, the first discussion is probably not the right moment to go in guns blazing with a hard pitch.

Investors are also out there looking for you too. So expand your network, get people to know and like you, meet with and learn from interesting folks, do people favors, and try to network yourself into the right investors in an organic and authentic way.

No one said this part was easy — it's really hard.

How do you best negotiate?

Once you have identified a potential lead investor who is excited about your business (congrats — in a lot of ways, that was the hard part), you can think about the terms of a deal.

There are three things you should keep in mind:

Though it's counter to the way people often talk about fundraising in the news, I've always been focused more on optimizing structure and control than on valuation.

You might know the valuation of a company, or how much it's "worth." But do you know whether it's capitalized through common or preferred stock, and what special terms preferred investors have? Do you know the composition of the board and the voting rights of the founders? These things also matter.

I believe that you don't always want to take the highest price valuation. Sure, big sticker prices are good for the ego, can attract top talent, and are often good for company morale. But if you're optimizing solely for valuation and trying to push for the highest possible number, you may sacrifice other terms, or you may not get the right investor, or you could increase pressure on future rounds to raise capital at even higher valuations.

Clearly, this is all conceptual, and when it comes to specifics I'd suggest hiring a great lawyer who's been through lots and lots of transactions like this and can give you good advice.

In summary...

Raising money is always hard, emotionally draining, and time-consuming, but it doesn't have to be a mystery. I hope this helps other entrepreneurs to have a more informed perspective on the fundraising process, to make good decisions for themselves and their companies, and to get the capital they need and grow their businesses and achieve their entrepreneurial vision.

Good luck.

As a cofounder of both Harry's and Warby Parker, Jeff Raider aims to build companies and brands that positively impact people's everyday lives and the world more broadly. Harry's ambition is to create exceptional shaving and personal-care products that better meet the needs of modern men. Prior to Harry's, Jeff cofounded Warby Parker, the transformative lifestyle brand that offers designer eyewear at a revolutionary price while leading the way for socially conscious businesses. Today, Jeff serves as the CEO of Harry's Labs. He is also on the board of directors at Warby Parker.

Oracle has grown only about 5% over the last five years, so there was little surprise when it reported a flat quarter earlier this week. Still, CTO and co-founder Larry Ellison made another shot at the market-leading Amazon Web services cloud, saying there's "no way" anyone would ever move from an Oracle database to Amazon.

Now, at least one Wall Street analyst says that Oracle's best shot at speeding up growth would be if it takes some cues from its cloud rivals at Amazon and Microsoft — specifically, that it should open up and be more flexible about supporting technologies from other companies.

"When we talk to customers and ask them why are you using Amazon Web Services instead of the Oracle cloud, they say it's because Amazon Web Services supports tools we use and they're not supported in the Oracle cloud, or the partners we work with are in the Amazon ecosystem and not in the Oracle cloud," Pat Walravens, director of technology research and senior analyst at JMP Securities, told Business Insider.

Right now, analysts say, the issue is that Oracle wants its customers to use Oracle as a solution to everything, whether it's Oracle's cloud, databases or applications. The problem is, customers don't want to just commit to one company. On the other hand, it's difficult for customers to run an Oracle database on other companies' clouds, Walravens says. Meanwhile, Amazon and Microsoft both make it easy — or at least, easier — to run software from other vendors.

"I think it's going to be tough for them to grow because they haven't quite figured out how to succeed in a cloud world," Walravens told Business Insider. "They have a pretty strong desire to get customers to use Oracle solutions for everything and the world has really moved to more of a heterogeneous approach."

Read more:Larry Ellison says there's 'no way' anyone would move from Oracle to an Amazon database

Oracle is also in the midst of bidding for a winner-take-all $10 billion cloud contract with the Department of Defense, which analysts say will likely go to Amazon Web Services. Oracle filed a protest in federal court on Dec. 6 saying that the contract should go to multiple companies, not just one. Walravens sees this as Oracle defending its federal business, as the CIA was actually Oracle's first-ever database customer.

"The federal government is a big and very important client of Oracle," Walravens said. "They don't like the Department of Defense awarding it to a rival cloud provider at all. To me this is a defensive move."

Not all hope is lost for Oracle though, and analysts say it's possible for the company to return to growth. For one, its enterprise resource planning businesses, Fusion ERP and NetSuite ERP, delivered 32% revenue growth rate from the same period last year. Still, ERP only represents a quarter of Oracle's overall cloud software business.

"In theory over time, that [32% statistic] will be a higher proportion and that should help on the growth but it will be slow progress," Raimo Lenschow, managing director at Barclays, told Business Insider. "Over time it should work. Over time it will improve, but it will be slow improvement."

As for Oracle's autonomous database, something that co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison has hyped up a lot over the last several months, it remains to be seen on whether it will drive growth. Oracle also announced its Generation 2 Cloud offering, which Lenschow says is much-hyped, but needs to prove itself out in the market.

"You don't want to bet against Larry Ellison," Walravens said. "It will be interesting to see what Oracle does with its strategy over the next few years. In particular, how their next generation cloud infrastructure does and whether they make a decision to open that up and to create more of an open ecosystem like you have at Amazon and Azure. That's the thing to watch."

Others are bullish, too. In a note to clients, Scott Kessler, director of equity research at CFRA Research, writes that "[Oracle] is still trying to catch up to cloud competitors, but we see opportunity and a compelling valuation."

By Bob Lord, Chief Digital Officer, IBM

With all of the wildfires that have raged through California, including the largest and deadliest in the state's recorded history, it would be easy to lose faith in our ability to limit the damage caused by natural disasters. I reflected on this as teams gathered in Puerto Rico in August, almost one year since Hurricane Maria tore through the islands and as the inhabitants braced themselves for the 2018 hurricane season. Led by IBM's Dr. Angel Diaz, a native of the region, there was a palpable sense of optimism and excitement in the room, given stark relief by the devastation still visible outside. For two days, NGOs, relief organizations, and members of the local startup and developer communities came together to explore ways in which technology could help better prepare and protect their communities for the future.

A compelling idea named DroneAid, from local developer Pedro Cruz, used drone and visual recognition technologies to help first responders identify the areas and families in greatest need. You can catch a glimpse of DroneAid and hear from its creator in this video:

National news outlets also took notice and shed some light on this incredible event:

This was one of more than 325 events held in over 50 cities around the world — part of the inaugural Call for Code, a new global initiative — created by David Clark Cause and Founding Partner IBM. The initiative supports Charitable Partners United Nations Human Rights and the American Red Cross, and The Linux Foundation is also helping power the cause. Call for Code is designed to rally the technology industry, academia, and NGOs in an effort to help reduce the impact of natural disasters, such as fires, floods, volcanoes, hurricanes, and tsunamis on society. As Founding Partner, IBM is investing $30 million over the next five years, as well as technology and resources with the goal of developing technology solutions that significantly improve disaster preparedness, provide relief from devastation caused by natural disasters, and benefit Call for Code's Charitable Partners.

Even as we made the announcement at VivaTech in Paris in May, Hawaii's Kilauea volcano was destroying hundreds of homes and soon afterward Guatemala's 'Volcano of Fire' left hundreds dead and missing. Against this backdrop, we placed our belief in the promise of technology and the willingness of developers around the world to invest their skills and drive positive and long-lasting change in society.

We were not disappointed.

In 2018, over 100,000 developers from 156 nations around the world participated, creating more than 2,500 applications. More than 70 organizations are now signed up as program sponsors, supporters, or affiliates, and many IBM clients have engaged their in-house developer teams to build solutions designed to help improve the current state of disaster preparedness. We've benefitted from the support of 40 generous celebrity supporters in addition to content partners and a panel of eminent judges — former President Bill Clinton; Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, The Linux Foundation; Kate Gilmore, United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights; Dr. Irwin Redlener, Director of National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Earth Institute of Columbia University; Deborah Dugan, Chief Executive Officer, (RED); and Grace Kim, Design and Research Lead at Twitter — who volunteered to help select the winning technologies.

On October 29, the 2018 Call for Code winners were announced during a Global Prize Celebration at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco, California. The winner of the USD $200,000 grand prize, Project OWL, is an IoT and software solution that keeps first responders and victims connected in a natural disaster. Project OWL, which stands for Organization, Whereabouts, and Logistics, is a two-part hardware/software solution that provides an offline communication infrastructure that gives first responders a simple interface for managing all aspects of a disaster.

The physical "clusterduck" network is made of many individual IoT "ducks," which can float in flooded areas if needed. Only five are needed to cover a square mile, and they create a mesh network where users can report information such as their well-being and needs like food and water.

The conversational piece becomes useful on the OWL web application that is used by first responders (think of the OWL web app like the main software brain in the cloud). First responders can talk to this web app to easily see and explore all the data added to OWL, regardless of whether that data comes from APIs, is loaded by first responders, or uploaded by a civilian through the clusterduck network.

This application, the OWL software incident management system, uses predictive analytics and multiple data sources to build a dashboard for first responders.

"Once this network of ducks is deployed and then clustered, civilians are able to basically get on the devices through a really intuitive interface and contact first responders with a list of things that are really essential to them," team member Magus Pereira said.

With this information, Project OWL allows first responders to manage a disaster, coordinate resources, learn about weather patterns, and get information data analytics through the cloud. The solution bakes in the latest IBM Watson Studio, Watson Cloud APIs, and Weather Company APIs — all built on the IBM Cloud.

In addition to the cash prize, Project OWL will be deployed by IBM Corporate Service Corps in 2019. The team members, who come from New York, North Carolina, and Texas, will have the opportunity to pitch OWL to venture capitalist firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA) for potential funding.

The second place winner, Post-Disaster Rapid Response Retrofit (PD3R) from Kathmandu, Nepal, and Bogotá, Colombia created a solution to provide displaced families with immediate access to engineering advice following a natural disaster, seeing the damage caused by the 2015 Nepal earthquake. Their solution is based on AI taught by 3D model images.

San Francisco Bay Area team Lali Wildfire Detection, now based in the Netherlands, France, and Ecuador, created a solution to predict the spread of wildfires in real-time with the use of sensor networks. Inspired by a teammate's first-hand experience growing up surrounded by fires in Ecuador, Project Lali took third place.

PD3R and Project Lali were each awarded USD $25,000. All three winning solutions will also receive long-term open source support from The Linux Foundation.

As heartened as we are by the response, there is always room for more people to get involved. We need champions, advocates, and most of all, we need developers to help renew faith in our ability to overcome one of the greatest challenges facing society today.

We can't prevent natural disasters, but the development community can come together to create solutions to improve the current state of disaster preparedness and recover efforts.

What will you do to help answer the call in 2019?

To discover more about this work, join us at Think 2019 February 12-15 in San Francisco, California. Visit the conference website here to register.

This article originally ran on August 23, 2018 and was updated on December 21, 2018.

This post is sponsor content from IBM and was created by IBM and Insider Studios.