Fitbit is making a move to become more than just a fitness device at a time when wearable competition is fierce.

The company on Wednesday announced the launch of Fitbit Care, a health platform that combines coaching, virtual care, wearable devices, and self-tracking.

Best known for its simple fitness band aimed at getting people moving, Fitbit is developing new products as its stock price has taken a tumble amid competition from companies like Apple.

After Apple debuted its new watch, which includes features like new heart-rate tracking and fall detection, shares of Fitbit fell earlier in September as much as 6%.

Here's how Fitbit Care works: The platform encompasses Fitbit's wearable band, which tracks sleep habits, activity, heart rate, and female health. Then, through a new Fitbit Plus app used on a smartphone users can get health coaching sessions and virtual care to help them reach a particular health goal, such as lowering blood pressure.

For now, the program is just for people whose employers, health plans, or health systems opt into it and pay Fitbit on a per member per month basis. That means individual people can't sign up to use the program on their own, at least for now.

"With healthcare costs and rates of chronic disease increasing, there is a clear need for innovative tools and services to help people make the lifestyle and behavior changes necessary to reverse this trend," Adam Pellegrini, the general manager of Fitbit Health Solutions, said in a news release.

For many Americans, their employers are the ones picking up the tab for their healthcare. More than half of the non-elderly population is covered by an employer-sponsored healthcare plan, and almost 80% of large companies are self-insured.

As healthcare costs go up, employers are the ones feeling the pressure. Some are starting to get fed up and looking for new ideas. Platforms like Fitbit Cares are one of those ideas. In addition to employers, Fitbit said that about 5 million Humana members — those in its employer group segment — will have access to Fitbit Cares coaching.

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Johnson & Johnson Innovation's Manhattan outpost of its startup incubator, JLabs, is the new kid on the NYC-health-tech block.

First opened in June, JLabs host startups looking for a space to grow their businesses — whether that be developing drugs, coming up with new medical devices, or applying new technology to the world of healthcare. In addition to NYC, there are JLabs in San Diego, San Francisco, Toronto, Houston, Boston and Belgium as well as another planned in Shanghai.

The incubators provide J&J, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, with a front-row view of what's happening at the startup level. Though J&J doesn't take an immediate stake in the companies, it does end up investing in some in the long-run. The relationship works like this: J&J will provide all the infrastructure, operation management, network, and programming, and the startups just have to bring new and innovative ideas.

It's part of J&J's plan of looking to the future and adapting to become more nimble as it evolves for the new generation of consumers.

"We're the leading healthcare company," Kate Merton, head of the NYC and Boston JLabs, told Business Insider. "In the future we want to be the leading digital healthcare company."

Take a look inside JLabs' NYC digs, which with its coffee-shop vibes looked unlike any startup space we've ever seen.

LONDON (Reuters) - Comcast beat Rupert Murdoch's Twenty-First Century Fox in the battle for Sky after offering around 30 billion pounds ($39 billion) for the British broadcaster in a rare auction to decide the fate of the pay-television group.

U.S. cable giant Comcast bid 17.28 pounds a share for control of London-listed Sky, versus an offer of 15.67 pounds a share offer by Fox, the Takeover Panel said in a statement shortly after final bids were made on Saturday.

The two media titans faced off in a rare one-day auction that took three separate sealed rounds of bids to produce a victor. Comcast's winning offer brings to a close a months-long battle to win the Sky, and the 23 million pay-tv subscribers in seven countries that make up its business.

Comcast's final offer was significantly higher than its bid going into the auction of 14.75 pounds, and compares with Sky's closing share price of 15.85 pounds on Friday.

It is a blow to 87-year-old media mogul Murdoch and the U.S. media and entertainment group that he controls, which already holds 39 percent of Sky and had been trying to take full ownership of the business since December 2016.

It is also a setback for U.S. entertainment giant Walt Disney, which agreed a separate $71 billion deal to buy the bulk of Fox's film and TV assets, including the Sky stake, in June and would have taken ownership of the British broadcaster following a successful Fox takeover.

If Comcast's winning offer is approved, it will own the 61% of Sky. Disney will need to decide whether it will sell it's 39% stake to Comcast, or if it will remain a minority partner.

Sky is an attractive asset to both Comcast and Disney as they work to expand their international footprints. The British pay-TV business serves 23 million customers, mostly direct-broadcast-satellite subscribers, in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland.

It has a strong content portfolio, with exclusive rights through 2020 to run HBO shows like "Game of Thrones" and "Westworld" across Europe and with the majority of Premier League TV rights and exclusive rights to the German Bundesliga.

($1 = 0.7648 pounds)

On a Monday night at a brewery in San Francisco's hipster Mission District, the co-founders of a startup called New Age Meats helped cook up samples of pork sausage made entirely out of cells grown from a live pig named Jessie.

As scientists-turned-entrepreneurs Brian Spears and Andra Necula watched, the sausage they'd spent the past two months making at a nearby lab began to sizzle. Slowly, its sides turned brown and, as the aroma of breakfast meat filled the room, samples were doled out to taste.

New Age Meats aims to make meat from animal cells without killing any actual animals. They are one of roughly half a dozen nascent companies aiming to create an alternative to factory farming. In so doing, they hope to reduce waste, improve health, and eliminate animal suffering.

New Age Meats' sausage was the first in history to be made with fat and muscle cells — an important combination that could prove key for nailing the taste of "cell-based" or "cultured" (meaning simply: not from slaughter) meat. Here's what it was like.

Last week, amid the hoopla surrounding the new iPhones, Apple quietly killed off one of the best smartphones it's ever made: the iPhone SE.

At $350, the iPhone SE was one of the best "budget" smartphones you can buy. Though it didn't have the big and flashy high-definition screens of modern smartphones like Samsung's Galaxy phones, the iPhone SE offered great performance in an adorable package.

But the iPhone SE wasn't just a "small phone" — it provided an alternative for people who didn't want to buy a large -screened iPhone.

The sweet spot

For the first six years of iPhones, the screen never got bigger than four inches.

The original iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and iPhone 4S all had screens that measured 3.5 inches.

In 2012, with the arrival of the iPhone 5, Apple bumped the screen size up to 4 inches. Even that was a huge shift, especially since developers had to re-size all their apps, and the iPhone 5S and 5C the following year kept that same 4-inch screen.

The 4-inch iPhone 5 (left) next to a 3.5-inch iPhone 4 Reuters/Yves Herman Then, suddenly, in 2014, Apple introduced the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, its largest iPhones ever, with 4.7- and 5.5-inch screens. They were huge!

Lots of people loved the larger screens of the iPhone 6-era phones, but plenty of customers who preferred the smaller designs worried about the eventual retirement of the iPhone 5S, the last remaining iPhone with a 4-inch screen.

The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus Business Insider To the surprise of many, Apple in late 2016 announced the iPhone 5S would get a true successor, called the iPhone SE. It would feature the same internals as the year-ago iPhone model, the iPhone 6S, but in the package of the 4-inch iPhone 5S.

Since 2016, the iPhone SE has remained in Apple's lineup as not only the last "small" iPhone, but also its most affordable, at just $350.

Business Insider/Steve Kovach

This, in turn, gave Apple an incredibly diverse iPhone lineup: As of last year, Apple's iPhone lineup featured models priced from $350 all the way to $1,149, giving customers a wide range of options to choose from.

Having so many different iPhone models gave Apple a big advantage: While most smartphone makers could only afford to focus on one phone launch at a time, Apple was selling phones for just about everyone, whether you wanted something affordable or high-end, big or small.

Apple missed the opportunity to make an iPhone XSE (pronounced "Tennessee")

As of now, you can no longer buy an iPhone SE directly from Apple.

This means the most affordable — and smallest! — iPhone is now the iPhone 7, which, at $449, is actually an absolute steal. The iPhone 7 is not very old at all, even if 2016 feels like a long time ago, and it's an incredible design and overall experience.

To be fair, as much as I lament the discontinuation of the iPhone SE and that particular design, Apple almost certainly has more data to support the fact it made the right decision. Who knows, maybe Apple will sell more iPhones this holiday season than ever before with the adjusted lineup. But the iPhone SE was still clearly serving a significant number of people: Back in 2016, Apple announced it had sold 30 million 4-inch iPhones in 2015, despite the availability of the newer and larger iPhone 6 and 6S models.

So, as much as I love the current iPhone X-style designs, I do believe Apple got it right with the iPhone SE, and hope to see 4-inch iPhones eventually make a return. Maybe we'll see an iPhone X-style redesign at some point (I think it would have to be called iPhone XSE — a.k.a. "iPhone Tennessee" — as it most certainly could not be called iPhone SEX). But even if a redesigned iPhone SE costs more than $350, having a new 4-inch iPhone would satisfy customers who want a smaller smartphone that runs iOS, and customers in general would benefit by having more options to choose from.

This Apple ad from 2012 had it right when it called the 4-inch iPhone design "common sense":

Amazon uses fake packages to catch delivery drivers who are stealing, according to sources with knowledge of the practice.

The company plants the packages — internally referred to as "dummy" packages — in the trucks of drivers at random. The dummy packages have fake labels and are often empty.

"We might pull something out of our pocket and put it in there" to give it some weight, a former Amazon logistics manager told Business Insider. This person, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, said instructions for the practice came from Amazon's corporate offices in Seattle.

"It's meant to be a trap ... to check the integrity of the driver," he said.

In response to this story, Amazon said, "Checks and audits are part of overall quality programs and are administered at random."

Here's how the practice works, according to the sources:

During deliveries, drivers scan the labels of every package they deliver. When they scan a fake label on a dummy package, an error message will pop up.

When this happens, drivers might call their supervisors to address the problem, or keep the package in their truck and return it to an Amazon warehouse at the end of their shift.

Drivers, in theory, could also choose to steal the package. The error message means the package isn't detected in Amazon's system. As a result, it could go unnoticed if the package were to go missing.

"If you bring the package back, you are innocent. If you don't, you're a thug," said Sid Shah, a former manager for DeliverOL, a courier company that delivers packages for Amazon.

Dummy packages are just one way that Amazon is trying to control theft, which is a giant problem for the company — and all retailers, for that matter.

Shrinkage — the industry's term for losses attributable to theft, error, or fraud — cost retailers nearly $47 billion last year, according to the National Retail Federation.

Amazon recently started delivering packages in customers' cars and homes. Both programs are designed to give customers more options for delivery, as well as reduce theft rates.

The company has also been known to deter potential thieves by showing its warehouse workers videos of colleagues being caught stealing, according to a 2016 Bloomberg report.

Amazon doesn't say how many packages it loses to theft each year. The company delivered more than 5 billion packages to Prime customers worldwide last year.

In a 2017 survey conducted by the packaging company Shorr, 31% of respondents said they had experienced package theft.

According to the former Amazon logistics manager, the "dummy" traps could be effective at catching thieves.

"We caught people not being honest," he said.

Amazon is known as the leading online store for consumers, but it's quickly becoming a destination spot for businesses, too.

The amount of goods sold through Amazon Business, the company's business-to-business marketplace, has hit $10 billion on an annualized basis, Amazon said in a blog post Tuesday. But by 2021, that amount, using "conservative" assumptions, should exceed $25 billion, according to a research note from Colin Sebastian, a financial analyst at Baird Equity Research.

"We believe Amazon [Business] over the very long-term has the potential to surpass the size of the core [consumer] segment, and remains an underappreciated opportunity by many investors," Sebastian said in his report.

Investors and analysts that are bullish on Amazon have largely concentrated on Amazon Web Services, which is its fast-growing cloud-computing segment, and its booming advertising business. Few, by contrast, have focused on Amazon Business.

But it, too, is showing impressive growth — and lots of potential.

More than $11 billion in goods will likely be sold through the business marketplace this year, up from $1 billion in annualized sales just two years ago, Sebastian said. By contrast, Amazon's consumer business took seven years to grow that same amount, he said.

In interview with Business Insider, Bill Burkland, who heads the UK operations of Amazon Business, noted that the company didn't even launch its business marketplace until April 2015. Although the marketplace offers a wide range of goods, its most popular products are those with widespread appeal across many different kinds of businesses, such as PCs and janitorial supplies, he said.

To hit an annual run rate of $10 billion in sales through the marketplace in fewer than four years "is certainly a reflection that this is a big and fast-growing business," Burkland said.

The products sold through Amazon Business are sold by both Amazon itself and by third-party vendors. Those vendors now account for more than half of the total value of goods sold through the marketplace, according to Amazon's blog post. Amazon gets subscription fees from the third-party vendors and takes a commission on their sales.

Amazon offers its business marketplace in eight countries, including the United States, Germany, and Japan. Earlier this year, the company opened it to customers in France, Spain, and Italy.

Although little attention is devoted to outside of industry publications, the business-to-business e-commerce market worldwide is huge, with some $7 trillion in sales last year, according to Sebastian, citing figures from Shopify. That's more than three times as big as the consumer e-commerce market, which tallied about $2.3 trillion in 2017 sales.

With its big investments in recent years in warehouses and delivery services, Amazon is poised to become a major player in business-to-business sales, Sebastian said. Already, Amazon Business is used by 55 of Fortune's top 100 US businesses, and 40% of the local governments in the 100 most populous US cities use the service, Amazon said. It's also used by 80% of the top 100 US educational institutions in terms of enrollment, hosts some 150,000 sellers in the US, and serves "millions" of business customers worldwide, according to the company.

"Amazon has indicated in the past that over the very long-term, [Amazon Business] should be larger than its consumer business," Sebastian said.

In his note, Sebastian reiterated his "outperform" rating on Amazon's stock and his $2,100 price target. Amazon's shares closed regular trading Tuesday up $48.14, or 2.5%, to $1,987.15.

Apple released iOS 12, the latest version of the software that runs on iPhones and iPads, on Monday.

There are a lot of changes, including performance improvements, a new feature for tracking how much you use the phone, and more. You can check out some of the changes here and a full official changelog here.

But Apple didn't spend any time during its iPhone XS event last week covering my personal favorite "hidden gem" in the new software.

If you've ever needed to fix a typo or edit a paragraph on your iPhone, you're going to love this.

Simply long-press on the iPhone's space bar. Then you'll get a cursor you can move anywhere by dragging your finger.

You kind of have to see it to believe it.

This feature was actually first made available for the iPhone 6S, since that was the first phone with "Force Touch" (now "3D Touch"), but iOS 12 makes this functionality available on devices that lack 3D Touch, including older iPhones like the iPhone 5S, and the new iPhone XR coming in October. It also works on the iPad for the first time too.

Check it out:

History of the Marketplace Lending Industry, CB Insights

The market opportunity for marketplace Lenders, LendingClub Investor Day 2017

Upgrade’s borrower value proposition, LendIt 2018 Conference

Upgrade’s Personal Credit Line, a hybrid of a personal loan and a credit card, Upgrade

Renaud Laplanche rings the bell with his team at LendingClub (DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images)