Israel produces an impressive number of highly successful tech companies for a country with just 9 million people, from social navigation app Waze, which sold to Google in 2013 for $1.15 billion, to autonomous driving company Mobileye, which sold to Intel last year for a whopping $15.3 billion.

Israelis have long lovingly referred to the Middle Eastern country as the "Startup Nation," thanks to the sheer number of entrepreneurs building businesses there, particularly in cities like Tel Aviv.

But some, like Itzik Frid, a longtime Israeli tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist, think the country will lose its edge if it can't better integrate its minorities into the tech scene. Frid is the CEO of Takwin Labs, a venture capital firm and startup incubator focusing on Arab-led startups.

"Honestly I love Israel ... but I'm so fed up with us being so self-content with us as 'the Startup Nation,'" Frid told Business Insider in a recent interview. "As much as we like to think ourselves as a 'startup nation,' everything in the startup scene is happening in the center of Israel."

Frid isn't the only one who thinks so. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said in its 2018 report that Israel needs to better integrate its Arab-Israelis or risk economic stagnation and declining living standards for all of Israel.

While Arabs make up 21% of Israel's population, they currently make up only 3% of the workforce in the tech industry. And there is a huge wage gap between Jews and Arabs in Israel, with the average Arab making 58.6% of the average Jew in 2015.

Frid is the CEO of Takwin Labs, a venture capital firm and startup incubator focusing on Arab-led startups.Harrison Jacobs/Business Insider

Much could be done to close that gap and improve the Israeli economy, Frid said, by getting tech companies to hire and cultivate Arab talent.

"Put aside the fact that they are a minority and we need to encourage them, Israel's economy would benefit by around $60 billion a year. If we need an incentive to do this, that's one," he said.

The government has taken steps to remedy the issue. As part of a law called Resolution 922, a $4.3 billion five-year plan for the Arab sector passed in 2015, funding was increased for Arab business centers and accelerators and the government plans to invest $25.6 million in small and medium-sized Arab businesses.

The government has also pledged to fund 30 months of salaries for Arab employees if a company hires five or more people from that population. The Innovation Authority, the office charged with developing the science and tech industries, said it was expanding grant and support programs for Arab entrepreneurs.

Nearly all of the tech companies in Takwin's portfolio have received grants or seed funds from the Innovation Authority. The larger problem, as it is for most startups, according to Frid, is the funding companies need a year or two down the line.

Fixing that issue, and the larger issue of bringing more Arabs into the tech workforce in general, will likely come down to the industry as a whole doing more to hire and cultivate Arab talent and to provide more funding to Arab-led startups.

Everything about the new iPhone XS and XS Max exudes luxury.

An edge-to-edge OLED display, stainless-steel construction, a camera that reviewers rave about, excellent speakers, and the iOS 12 operating system — it all combines for a decidedly premium experience.

But then you get to the charger that comes with the new iPhones — the same old bog-standard charger that charges iPhones at a glacial pace.

The new iPhone XS raises the question of why Apple doesn't include a fast-charging brick with its $1,000 smartphone.

In his iPhone XS unboxing video, the YouTube reviewer MKBHD put it well: "I was kind of hoping by 2018 we could get either a fast charger in the box, or a USB-C-to-Lightning [cable], or both. But we get neither of those things. I personally think it's getting kind of lame and kind of outdated that Apple of all companies doesn't ship a fast charger in the box of such an expensive, premium phone. Just sayin'."

Andrew Greenland/Flickr

Fast charging is a speed upgrade over the regular charging you get with the iPhone. It lets you get hours of battery life from just 30 minutes of charging.

And regarding a USB-C-to-Lightning cable, this tweet from the @JonyIveParody Twitter account portrays the problem beautifully:

Fast charging is available on the iPhone 8 and onward. But to fast-charge your iPhone, you have to buy separate accessories, like the $50 30W USB-C charger and the $20 USB-C-to-Lightning cable from Apple. That's an extra $70 for fast charging.

Meanwhile, a fast charger has become a standard feature included with most — if not all — flagship Android phones these days. Even a $250 Android phone, the Moto G6, comes with a fast charger.

More importantly, apart from comparing the iPhone's aging charger with its competition, it's also a question of getting a complete experience when you get a luxury item like the new iPhone XS.

At this stage, when the best iPhone costs $1,000 or more, I'd fully expect it to come with a set of essential accessories to make the most of the device. In this case, I'd expect a fast charger to make use of the iPhone's fast-charging support, not just the minimum required spec.

Otherwise, it feels like buying an expensive sports car that comes with cheap road tires, and you have to pay extra for the good tires to make the most of the car's performance.

The iPhone XS and XS Max. Apple

With this logic, some might say wireless chargers should also be included, as the iPhone has had wireless-charging support since the iPhone 8. But unlike a fast charger, a wireless charger is not an accessory included with most — if any — smartphones, and fewer smartphones support wireless charging. It's a less essential accessory than those for wired charging.

Perhaps I'm particularly sensitive to this issue because I'm regularly exposed to premium Android flagship devices that come with fast chargers, whereas an iPhone fan who has owned only iPhones might not even be aware of the benefits of fast charging.

It's not the end of the world, as you'll still be able to charge the iPhone XS with the slow charger, much as you'd still be able to drive that fast, expensive sports car on cheap tires. It just feels as if Apple is missing an easy and relatively inexpensive opportunity to provide the "complete package" that many would expect when spending $1,000 on a new smartphone.

I'm not sure what I expected before visiting China.

Whenever I spoke to people who had visited the country before, the dominant reaction — whether the person was white, Chinese-American, or something else — was along the lines of an exasperated sigh and a face that said, "You haven't seen anything yet."

Even when I was in Hong Kong during the first week of my five-month trip, when I told people there that I was about to embark on six weeks in China, they smiled knowingly.

"Hong Kong is Diet China," one told me. "Hong Kong is China without all the extra difficulties, weirdness, and inconveniences. Get ready."

After traveling in the country for six weeks, I think I understand a lot of what they were trying to convey. From an American perspective, China does not operate in the way you expect it to.

For example, it is pretty common for companies to have job listings that include qualifiers like "men only" or "only aesthetically pleasing women."

On a smaller scale, times are more or less suggestions. Once at the bus station when I asked when the last bus to the town I was staying in would leave, I was told, "7 p.m., maybe." The bus left at 6:40 p.m., and I missed it. Another time, on top of a mountain, when I asked when the cable car closed, I was told, "Whenever the workers decide it's time to go home." A sign said 7 p.m. The cable car stayed open until 7:30 p.m.

Among other things: Personal space is nonexistent, few people speak English, and you'll often be told things are not possible, with little or no explanation. (And that's assuming you understand enough Mandarin to hear the explanation in the first place.)

But despite those difficulties, it became apparent to me that there are certain things the country does unquestionably better than the US. Here are a few.

1. High-speed rail and public transport

China has fast, seamless cross-country travel.Shutterstock

Traveling to China can often feel like visiting the future. The cities stretch for what seems like forever, while new skyscrapers, bridges, and futuristically designed landmarks spring up every year.

Nowhere is this feeling more apparent than when you encounter China's 15,500-mile high-speed railway network of "bullet trains." It's the world's largest.

The practical result of this is that you can pretty much travel in anywhere in China via high-speed rail. It's usually comparable in speed to air travel (once you factor in security lines and check-in) and far more convenient.

What's perhaps most amazing is that the entire system has been built in the past decade. China's first high-speed rail was a single 70-mile demonstration line built specifically for the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

In many major Chinese cities, the high-speed railway station is near the center of the city and directly connected to that city's metro, creating a fast, seamless public-transportation experience.

Read more about China's high-speed rail »

2. Food

Even after six weeks in China, I wasn't sick of Chinese food.Harrison Jacobs/Business Insider

Chinese food is considered one of the most complex and diverse cuisines in the world by chefs, food critics, and travelers. Americans, and the rest of the West, tend to think of China as one monolithic place, but China comprises over 1.3 billion people, 23 provinces, 56 ethnic groups, and at least as many different cuisines. Libraries' worth of books have been written about China's food.

Each cuisine has different flavor profiles, hallmark ingredients, and cooking methods. Sweet and sour is a common taste in Shanghainese cuisine, while Szechuan food is known for its extensive use of the numbing peppercorn of the same name. Steaming is extremely popular in Cantonese cuisine, while several western and northern regions boil dishes in a "hot pot." As you can probably guess, those hot pots don't taste remotely similar.

The cuisine is so diverse and specific that it is not uncommon for a particular county or town to be famous for a single dish that is not made anywhere else in the country.

Whenever I talked to friends back home about visiting China for so long, their first question often was: "But didn't you get sick of eating Chinese food all the time?" Friends, if you understood how diverse Chinese cuisine is, you'd know that's a silly question.

Read more about some of the best food in China »

3. Mobile payments

Some street musicians use QR codes and mobile payments for tips. Harrison Jacobs/Business Insider

Paying with your phone isn't a novelty in China these days — paying with cash is.

Over the past 15 years, mobile payments in China have grown into a $16 trillion market dominated by China's two biggest tech giants, Tencent and Alibaba. Mobile payments totaled $9 trillion in 2016, according to iResearch Consulting Group data cited by The Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, the US saw $112 billion in mobile payments in 2016, according to a Forrester Research estimate included in The Journal's report.

Tencent and Alibaba's competing mobile payment apps, WeChat Pay and AliPay, are used by just about everyone in China, from fancy restaurants and high-end designer boutiques to street vendors, taxi drivers, and even panhandlers. All you need is a phone-scannable QR code to give or receive money.

Ninety-two percent of people in China's biggest cities said they used WeChat Pay or AliPay as their primary payment method, according to a 2017 study by Penguin Intelligence cited by the news outlet Tech in Asia. And the amount spent per month through those services keeps going up.

The caveat is that those services don't work for most foreigners, as they require a Chinese bank account. When I encountered a café that accepted only mobile payments, I had to beg someone there to use their account to pay for me.

Read more about mobile payments in China »

4. On-demand services

In Chinese cities, there are tens of thousands of workers fulfilling city dwellers' every wish, on demand.Harrison Jacobs/Business Insider

While most people know about Chinese internet giants like Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent, the hottest concept in Chinese tech and startups over the past several years is on-demand services.

In China's major cities, you can get just about anything done with a mobile phone and the right app. Want a manicure or pedicure at your home in a few hours? Queue up Heli Jia, a startup connecting freelance nail artists and stylists with customers for in-home treatments. For in-home massages, check out Gongfu Xiong. For food delivery, get Ele.me or Meituan Dianping.

That's just the start. People living in China can hire photographers, personal chefs, and driving instructors through different apps. They can get their car washed or laundry done, or rent a bike or scooter, in a few clicks.

While the US has many of these services as well, in China they tend to be more affordable, more convenient, and speedier.

And that's without even getting into e-commerce.

5. E-commerce and logistics

JD.com prides itself on delivering packages within a few hours of an order placement. JD

I know, I know. You have Amazon Prime, and your packages magically show up two days after you order them, with free shipping (minus the $119 yearly fee and the human cost, revealed by Business Insider's Hayley Peterson).

In China, the e-commerce giants Alibaba and JD.com pride themselves on even faster shipping with no fee or membership.

According to the news website Axios, JD.com says it makes 90% of its deliveries in China within 24 hours and 57% within 12 hours of order placement.

Let's put it this way: If you realize at lunch that you forgot your toothbrush, it could be delivered to your hotel before it's time to go to bed.

And it's only going to get faster and more efficient. JD.com is already using drones to expand its high-speed delivery network to over 100 rural villages throughout China. Its CEO, Liu Qiangdong, has said he expects drone delivery to cut costs by 70% once it reaches scale.

Both Alibaba and JD.com now have fancy Whole Foods-style supermarkets that offer fresh, high-quality food delivered within 30 minutes of an order being placed. It's a marvel to see in action.

There is a human cost. In China, there are 1.2 million kuaidi, or express couriers, who have low pay and often a brutal schedule of seven-day workweeks with shifts as long as 12 hours.

Before jumping into lenses, it's important to note the different naming conventions that each company uses.

Crop sensor cameras tend to have their own lineup of lenses. These are lenses meant to be used with a crop sensor, and are generally cheaper than their full-frame counterparts. However, crop sensor cameras can also use lenses meant for full-frame cameras.

Full-frame cameras should really only be used with full-frame lenses. If you use a crop sensor lens on a full-frame camera, you'll get what's known as vignetting — a dark circle around the other frame of the image.

However, you can technically use a crop-sensor lens on a full-frame body. Many full-frame cameras have a setting that mimics a crop sensor, which will remove the vignetting. There's going to be a loss of image quality if you use this method, however.

Both Nikon crop-sensor and full-frame camera bodies can be used with lenses meant for either system — no matter which type of body you have, you can use a Nikon lens. Canon users aren't so lucky in this regard. Canon's crop sensor cameras will still accept crop-sensor or full-frame lenses, but their full-frame bodies will only accept full-frame lenses. This shouldn't be too much of a problem, but it could be an annoyance if you choose to upgrade to a full frame and find that you can no longer use the crop-sensor lenses you already own.

Nikon's lineup of crop-sensor lenses have the 'DX' label, while its full frame lenses are labeled 'FX.'

Canon's crop-sensor lenses are labeled 'EF-S,' and its full frame lenses are labeled 'EF.'

J.D. Vance says that most entrepreneurs don't need to move to Silicon Valley.

Here's why. #TCDisrupt pic.twitter.com/0mFPeTuHLe

— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) September 6, 2018

Bay Area VCs agree that Silicon Valley may be losing its gravitational pull after all

Aileen Lee (Cowboy Ventures), Megan Quinn (Spark Capital), and Sarah Tavel (Benchmark Capital) on whether or not Silicon Valley is on the wane for investors #TCDisrupt pic.twitter.com/SOpn7p0eNQ

— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) September 5, 2018

Backstage Capital to launch an accelerator in four cities to promote underrepresented founders

Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital says founders in the US and China both want to change the world, but Chinese founders are a little more desperate (and you see it in the crazy work ethic they have).#TCDisrupt pic.twitter.com/dPxsRTbJoq

— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) September 6, 2018

Disrupt SF 2018

An undisclosed number of Google workers considered ways to use the company's powerful search engine to assist in a protest against the travel ban implemented by the Trump administration in January 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday evening.

The Journal said it reviewed emails that show Google employees proposed several ways to "leverage" the company's search engine to direct users to pro-immigration organizations and contact government agencies, especially when searching for terms like "Islam" or "Muslim."

Those Google workers involved considered the existing search results for some of those terms to be "Islamophobic," according to the report. Google told the Journal that the plans were never implemented.

The report is sure to draw even more scrutiny into how Google uses it's influential platforms to sway public opinion. The Trump administration has accused the company of using those platforms to silence politically conservative voices, as well as make him look bad.

The news also comes after Google declined to send CEO Sundar Pichai or Chairman Larry Page to testify earlier this month before a congressional committee in which Facebook and Twitter both sent top decision-makers.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Read the full Wall Street Journal report here.

In 2015, virtual assistants were the Next Big Thing.

Every major tech company had one, from Apple's Siri to Amazon's Alexa and Google Now, which would later become the more fully fledged Google Assistant. Facebook entered the space in August that year with the announcement of M— a chatbot that lived inside its Messenger app, and which users could ask for just about anything, from hiking recommendations to help buying flowers.

But while the likes of Alexa and Google Assistant have exploded over the last few years, finding their way into everything from fridges to cars, M — in its original incarnation — was never widely rolled out to Facebook's users.

Instead, it morphed into M Suggestions, an AI enhancement that hovers inside users' Messenger chats with their friends and offers contextual suggestions based on their conversations — from making payments to initiating video calls. These recommendations have historically been relatively incremental — send a funny GIF! Attach a sticker! — but Facebook is now leaning hard into translations in Messenger, and using M Suggestions as the engine to do so.

It's by far the most significant application of the technology behind M Suggestions to date — one that has the potential to radically reshape how hundreds of millions of people communicate in real-time on Facebook. Business Insider spoke to some of the team at Facebook working on the project, to learn more about the tech underpinning the ambitious project and their vision for its future.

"At Facebook we have a lot of different cultures and a lot of diversity in our team ... we are all speaking different languages, and we know how frustrating it can be not to be able to communicate ... in your own languages," said Laurent Landowski, a Facebook product manager. "So being able to also really provide M Suggestions for translation to the world is something that we're super proud of."

M is an AI assistant that lives inside other conversations

Every time you send a message to a friend via Messenger — assuming it's not an encrypted "Secret Message" — it's being scanned by Facebook.

That doesn't mean an actual Facebook employee is reading it, of course. Instead, Facebook's automated systems are parsing the message, trying to understand the intent of the message. This effort is partly underpinned by the tech Facebook acquired when it bought natural language startup Wit.AI back in 2015; cofounder Landowski is now the product manager of M Suggestions at Facebook.

If one of Facebook's AI neural net models identifies the message between you and your friend as something it can add context to, M Suggestions will automatically spring into action. If you mention a song, it might prompt you to play it on Spotify; if you're discussing multiple potential activities in a group, it might suggest creating a poll.

And it learns over time what different people utilize it for, and caters its responses accordingly; the version of M that a GIF-addict sees will be very different to what appears for someone who is more restrained in their messaging.

When it comes to quick replies — suggested responses M offers users in conversations to save them time — it even uses users' conversation histories as a training data to teach the AI how they speak, making the responses ("yes" versus "yeah" or "yep" or "yah") sound authentically like their voice.

Its unique positioning — inside users' existing conversations with other people, rather than dedicated human-to-AI chat windows — means it risks being invasive or jarring. As such, Facebook has moved slowly adding suggestions to M, Landowski said. "We have been working on trying to improve and really focus on the delight and relevance as opposed to the number of suggestions we could be suggesting."

He added: "It is super easy to lose user trust."

Facebook

Translations aren't easy — but the pay-off is huge

M Suggestions has thus far offered fun enrichments to conversations, but it's hardly transformative. Where that changes is translations.

Facebook has provided language translations on its core social network for years, first via traditional phrase-based translation techniques before migrating to a more advanced AI-powered neural net translation system in August 2017.

However, users who wanted to be able to talk across language barriers in real time were out of luck until earlier this year, when Facebook launched the first Spanish-English translations in Messenger, underpinned by M Translations. The company followed it up with the announcement this week that it was adding French.

While Facebook positions Messenger at least in part as a way to stay in contact with the people users are closest to, translations opens it up to assisting people who may never have interacted before — like in Marketplace, Facebook's peer-to-peer sales platform.

"You see more and more ways where translations can be applied, not only in your personal messaging but also like in the Marketplace, buyer-and-seller-type of messaging, that can unlock a lot of further opportunities for use," said Landowski, a native French speaker from Paris.

But translation isn't easy. Languages are always changing and shifting, evolving as slang becomes common parlance, and the problem is especially acute on an informal, real-time platform like Messenger. Facebook's language team has an "active taskforce working to adapt its models to the type of data that Messenger provides, said Necip Fazil Ayan, head of Facebook's language and translation technologies team.

"This is one of the hardest problems we have to deal with while working on translations at Facebook, and it's not a solved problem, making our systems more robust to informal language including slang," he said.

"It's a dynamic language right, and people keep inventing stuff ... my best example instead of just saying 'happy birthday,' [they] start introducing lots of P's or Y's or I's all over the place."

Facebook's unprecedented digital archives of billions of users' public and private conversations means it has a vast dataset with which to train its AI — but some languages have more material available than others. "One of the biggest challenges we're dealing with, both in terms of language understanding and translation perspective, is the set of what we call 'low resource languages.' As you can imagine, all the machine learning models require a lot of data to become accurate ... and we don't have that luxury for a lot of the languages we are dealing with," Ayan said.

And then there's the issue of bias. AI systems are only as good as the data they are trained on, and when there are human biases built into the data, it can creep into the results. "Our data is biased ... we are actively working on this at Facebook ... in machine learning this is a very hot area and it's a very difficult area, and it's going to take a while cleaning up the data from that type of bias or learning where the bias is."

But for all the challenges, automated real-time translations offer Facebook a way to have a have a fairly profound effect on the way people around the world communicate. "I really don't want language to become a barrier when people are expressing their opinions or when people are trying to reach other people to get different perspectives," said Ayan, a native Turkish speaker who grew up in the country.

"So that's the dream, we are going to break down the language barriers and that's my personal mission here."

'It's hard from an AI perspective to be able to create a fully automated assistant that can do everything'

Facebook now describes the original version of M as an experiment, one that provided valuable insight into the kind of things users utilise chatbots for but was never intended as a competitor to Siri et al, and never scaled beyond 2,000-odd users in the Bay Area. (In contrast, more than 100 million people interact with M Suggestions a month as of November 2017, a spokesperson said.)

"It's hard from an AI perspective to be able to create a fully automated assistant that can do everything,"Landowski said, "We basically realized that people, especially in Messenger, they really want to focus on the communication [assistance that M offered] ... it was really about trying to be where they are, which is their actual conversations. Instead of talking to an assistant directly it was all about focusing on the communications."

But there have been rumours circulating for months about Facebook building a smart speaker in the vein of the Amazon Echo of Google Home, with a voice-controlled AI assistant built in.

It was a no-show at Facebook's annual F8 conference in May 2018, but speculation was bolstered after a reverse engineer found references hidden in Facebook's code for an "Aloha" voice feature.

"We're exploring everything," Landowski said when asked about whether Facebook was currently looking at speech recognition.

"Speech is also an interesting way to actually interact with an assistant. We cannot comment more on exactly what we do and what we test, but definitely we are working and trying to improve this."

Contact this reporter via Signal or WhatsApp at +1 (650) 636-6268 using a non-work phone, email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., WeChat at robaeprice, or Twitter DM at @robaeprice. (PR pitches by email only, please.)You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Facebook's occasional outages are a headache for its billions of users, but there's an unexpected upside for the media industry: When the social network crashes, traffic to news sites spikes.

That's according to data from Chartbeat, an analytics firm that measures web traffic and referrals for media companies' websites and other businesses. It found that when Facebook briefly stopped working on August 3, 2018, overall traffic to news sites jumped 2.3%, and users surged to apps and search.

The data demonstrates that even though Facebook contributes vast amounts of traffic and referrals to the media industry, it is at least on one level competing with media for people's time and attention — and when it's temporarily out of the picture, traditional journalism gets a boost.

"One of the fascinating things for me in the data ... was to see what extent Facebook can actually be thought of as a competitor to news. Both things are competing for people's time," Chris Breaux, the director of data science at Chartbeat, told Business Insider in an interview.

The data collected by Chartbeat shows referral traffic from Facebook falling through the floor during its outage, as you'd expect. Chartbeat

The data was originally presented at a conference by Josh Schwartz, Chartbeat's chief of product, engineering, and data science.

With Facebook down, referrals to news sites from social sources fell as one might expect, but surges elsewhere more than made up for it. There was an increase in app usage of 22%, while direct visits soared 11%. Search, too, was up 8% — resulting in an overall increase in 2.3% across all sites.

With Facebook down, traffic to news sites from other non-social sources spiked. Chartbeat

Hang Su, a data scientist at Chartbeat, cautioned that the data doesn't necessarily reflect how traffic to news sites might look in a world without Facebook, given the abnormal nature of the 45-minute event. "It's hard to tell what the trend would really be," she said. "I'm not sure this should be very indicative of ... if Facebook were to decline, so I would take this with a handful of salt."

Over the past few years, vast swathes of the media industry has become highly reliant on Facebook as a source of traffic, obsessing over its every algorithm tweak. But facing sustained outrage over fake news and disinformation, the social network has refocused on personal connections.

Since January 2017 the amount of traffic Facebook has referred to sites that use Chartbeat is down nearly 40%, even as alternative sources of traffic like Google Search and direct mobile traffic soar.

While the 45-minute outage is just a snapshot, it hints at how news outlets needn't be reliant for Facebook for their traffic — and may be able to do just fine without it. And for users, it shows just how much attention and focus Facebook takes away from other spots on the internet.

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via Signal or WhatsApp at +1 (650) 636-6268 using a non-work phone, email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., WeChat at robaeprice, or Twitter DM at @robaeprice. (PR pitches by email only, please.)You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

If this is how Amazon treats its friends, I would hate to be its enemy.

On Thursday, Amazon unleashed a veritable barrage of new gadgetry, all powered by, or integrated with, its Alexa virtual assistant. The reveals ranged from routine updates to its Echo Dot and Echo Show speakers, all the way to oddities like a $60 microwave, a $25 smart plug, and a $50 Echo speaker for mounting on car dashboards.

It was a feeding frenzy for gadget blogs.

But to me, the most striking part of all the announcements, was how willing the company now seems to be to compete with the very same partners that helped its Alexa platform become as popular as it is.

A major reason why Amazon's Alexa enjoys so much momentum is that it's become one of the premiere standards in the fast-growing market for connected home appliances. Since the original Amazon Echo launched in 2015, the retailer has successfully convinced just about every major electronics manufacturer to produce Alexa-compatible gear, from refrigerators, to thermostats, to autos.

It's something of a flywheel: The more Alexa gear a customer has, the more they want, in the interests of making sure all of their appliances work with each other. It's good for the manufacturers, who have made Alexa compatibility a selling point. This dynamic is best, though, for Amazon, as its Alexa assistant spreads everywhere.

Now, though, Amazon is signalling an increased willingness to compete with the very same manufacturers whose Alexa-powered gadgetry made it the pioneering platform it is today.

Amazon's new Echo Show was just one of the Alexa-powered devices announced on Thursday. Amazon

The $60 AmazonBasics microwave with Alexa is going head-to-head with products like GE's $130 smart microwave. Manufacturers as far-ranging as Belkin, TP-Link, Samsung and even Best Buy's house brands offer their own smart plugs, much the same as Amazon's new smart plugs. Even the Echo Auto car gadget is somewhat similar to a device made by Garmin.

Still, it's a familiar playbook for Amazon. In late 2017, Amazon released the Cloud Cam, an Alexa-compatible security camera designed in-house. Then, in early 2018, Amazon snapped up Ring, a startup making home security systems — two moves that didn't necessarily endear Amazon to other security companies.

Still, the market for smart-home stuff is small enough that there's room for many companies to succeed. There are, after all, a lot of consumers relying on other platforms like Google Assistant or Apple's Siri, and it's not like Amazon's new hardware products will cater to them.

The risk for Amazon is that its expanding collection of in-house hardware products antagonizes other electronics and appliance makers so much that it drives them into the arms of rival platform providers like Google's or Apple.

The $60 Alexa-integrated AmazonBasics microwave. Amazon

It's a balancing act that other hardware-software companies have tried with varying degrees of success.

There's a case to be made that Amazon is simply frustrated at the pace of development in smart home electronics, and is taking matters into its own hands. In fact, Amazon Senior VP Dave Limp said at the hardware launch event that the $60 Alexa-integrated microwave was really a showpiece for a new, inexpensive processor it will sell to manufacturers, helping them make even their lowest-end products Alexa-enabled.

At the same time, though, it's hard to give Amazon the benefit of the doubt, here. This is a company that's renowned for its ruthlessness in entering and dominating new markets, and there are no signs that it's stopping any time soon.

Besides, Amazon has the greatest lever of all, here: Given the increased importance of its retailing business, both online and in the real world, it's in these electronics manufacturers interest to stay cozied up to Amazon. It's a heck of a lever for helping keep your partners on board, even while you're building products that directly compete with their core business.