The increasing number of terrorist and gun violence attacks have increased the need for an able alert system. Billion Dollar Unicorn player Everbridge (Nasdaq: EVBG) has been leveraging the cloud...
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While brand safety and fraud prevention have been big topics in the online ad industry over the past couple years, Cheq CEO Guy Tytunovich argued that “first generation solutions for ad verification” aren’t good enough.
The problem, Tytunovich said, is that existing products use sampling to alert advertisers to issues “after the fact.” Compare this to credit card fraud — if the credit card company only alerted you long after the fraud had occurred, “You’re not going to be happy with that kind of answer.”
At Cheq, Tytunovich and his team have developed an approach that uses artificial intelligence to deliver what he calls “autonomous brand safety” — the idea is that when an ad is being served, Cheq can detect whether it might be a fraudulent impression that will only be seen by bots, or if it might show up next to content that a brand doesn’t want to be associated with. If there’s an issue, Tytunovich said, “We block [the ad] from being served in real time.”
Beforehand, advertisers set up their own ad placement guidelines, and afterwards, they can see the reason why individual ads didn’t get served.
Cheq is announcing that it has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Battery Ventures . Tytunovich said that 80 percent of the Cheq team consists of developers, and that most of the funding will go towards further product development.
If the Cheq approach really is so much better, why aren’t bigger, better-funded companies doing the same thing? Tytunovich pointed to his experience, and his team’s experience, in the Israel Defense Forces, where he said “they teach you to compensate for a lack of scale, of manpower, by focusing on automation and speed.”
Similarly, Tytunovich said that at Cheq, “the name of the game is speed.”
“A lot about our underlying technology lies around the speed of the data crunching,” he added. “We look at around 700 data parameters per impression … We need to be able to take all that data, analyze it and do it in real time.”
Cheq has offices in Tokyo, New York and Tel Aviv. Tytunovich said it’s currently focused on the American and Japanese markets — customers listed on the Cheq website include Coca Cola, Turner and Mercedes-Benz. Update: A spokesperson clarified that those companies are listed on the Cheq website because Cheq participated with them in The Bridge program.
Security companies Fortinet and Kromtech found seventeen tainted Docker containers that were essentially downloadable images containing programs that had been designed to mine cryptocurrencies. Further investigation found that they had been downloaded 5 million times, suggesting that hackers were able to inject commands into insecure containers to download this code into otherwise healthy web applications. The researchers found the containers on Docker Hub, a repository for user images.
“Of course, we can safely assume that these had not been deployed manually. In fact, the attack seems to be fully automated. Attackers have most probably developed a script to find misconfigured Docker and Kubernetes installations. Docker works as a client/server architecture, meaning the service can be fully managed remotely via the REST API,” wrote researcher David Maciejak.
The containers are now gone, but the hackers may have gotten away with up to $90,000 in cryptocurrency, a small but significant amount for such a hack.
“Today’s growing number of publicly accessible misconfigured orchestration platforms like Kubernetes allows hackers to create a fully automated tool that forces these platforms to mine Monero,” said a writer of a report by Kromtech. “By pushing malicious images to a Docker Hub registry and pulling it from the victim’s system, hackers were able to mine 544.74 Monero, which is equal to $90,000.”
“As with public repositories like GitHub, Docker Hub is there for the service of the community. When dealing with open public repositories and open source code, we recommend that you follow a few best practices including: know the content author, scan images before running and use curated official images in Docker Hub and certified content in Docker Store whenever possible,” wrote Docker’s head of security David Lawrence in a Threatpost report.
Interestingly, of late hackers have moved from attacking AWS Elastic Compute servers on Amazon’s platform to Docker and other container-based systems. While there are security systems available to manage Docker and Kubernetes containers, users should remain vigilant and assess their vulnerabilities before hackers get more of an upper hand.
Sramana Mitra: That is a very reasonable strategy for Indiegogo. You mentioned that Indiegogo’s equity crowdfunding platform has been successful. What are the trends? What kind of ventures are...
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PENRYN, ENGLAND - MAY 09: Engineered Arts RoboThespian robots are pictured at the company's headquarters in Penryn on May 9, 2018 in Cornwall, England. Founded in 2004, the Cornish company operating from an industrial unit near Falmouth, is a world leader in life sized commercial available humanoid robots for entertainment, information, education and research. The company has successfully sold its the fully interactive and multilingual RoboThespian robot and their smaller SociBot robot around the world to science centres, theme parks and visitor attractions, and also to academic and commercial research groups where they are used as research and development platforms. However, more recently the company has been building a range of lifelike bio-mechanical Mesmer robots. Built on the sensors and the extensive software framework already developed for RoboThespian, the Mesmer robots can offer some of the smartest animatronics on the market, giving extensive interaction but can also move very smoothly, quietly and naturally too. Developed using Engineered Arts own animation software 'Virtual Robot', Mesmer characters can be fictional, or faithful recreations of real-world people with accuracy possible to the last pore or finest of hairs. (Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images) Matt Cardy/Getty Images
Digital advertising continues to be plagued by hackers ripping off marketers. The ad-tech giant AppNexus says it has found a way to wipe this plague out.
Specifically the New York-based firm has inked a deal with the anti-fraud company White Ops. The partnership will see White Ops technology baked into AppNexus' ad buying and ad selling software.
The net result, according to AppNexus CEO Brian O'Kelley, is that AppNexus and White Ops will scan every single ad that may be bought or sold to determine if the traffic being delivered is indeed coming from a human, and not a bot.
If White Ops says the traffic isn't human, AppNexus won't let the transaction happen, O'Kelley said. This will all happen in milliseconds.
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If it works, O'Kelley believes this will significantly choke off bogus traffic from AppNexus and its customers - and he thinks this will pressure other ad exchanges (like say Google's) to follow suit.
"We think we can make this go away entirely," he told Business Insider.
That would be no small feat. Figures vary, but experts say that various forms of ad fraud cost the industry billions in wasted revenue; White Ops has estimated that the industry lost between $6 and $7 billion annually in recent years.
As programmatic advertising has exploded over the last decade, the digital ad business' embrace of automation has left it vulnerable to scam artists. And there are multiple flavors of fraud, such as scammers falsely listing their small websites on ad exchanges as well as on known sites (like say CNN.com or NYTimes.com).
Other fraudsters install malware on people's computers and even insert ads on top of existing web ads, cashing in along the way.
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One popular ad fraud scam involves creating bogus web sites, sending loads of non-human traffic to them using bots, and then selling all sorts of ads on these fake sites.
O'Kelley said that its White Ops deal won't eliminate all fraud, but he thinks it can wipe out the non-human traffic part. He says the industry needs to join forces on this quest if it wants to get any real headway.
A few years ago, AppNexus found itself with a significant fraud problem of its own. Since then, "we've been spending a ton of money every year to fight this," he said. "It's a big tax on the industry."
Different ad-tech companies work with different anti-fraud vendors, and ad buyers often chose to work with yet another partner.
AppNexus
"Not every company stands by the same standards," O'Kelley said. In the case of White Ops, "they only focus on non-human traffic, and they do it better than anybody else."
To date, White Ops has raised over $30 million to build tech designed to sniff out bot traffic. In 2016 the company claimed to have discovered a bot net that was stealing $5 million a day.
"We could use our partnership as a competitive advantage, but it's too important," O'Kelley said.
"But we've got tens of billions of dollars coming online. So we said, 'let's raise the bar so high for everybody.' This is a way to put fraud away for good."
McDonald's is ditching plastic straws in all its 1,361 UK and Ireland restaurants, in what could turn out to be a playbook it repeats in the rest of the world.
More environmentally-friendly paper straws will replace plastic ones starting September.
The BBC reports that McDonald's currently uses 1.8 million straws a day in the UK alone.
"Reflecting the broader public debate, our customers told us they wanted to see a move on straws," Paul Pomroy, chief executive of McDonald's UK and Ireland, said.
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"The government's ambitious plans, combined with strong customer opinion, has helped to accelerate the move away from plastic and I'm proud that we've been able to play our part in helping to achieve this societal change."
McDonald's say the new straws will use paper from sustainable sources.
UK Environment Secretary Michael Gove called it a "significant contribution" to helping the environment, and said it was "a fine example to other large businesses."
The Ocean Cleanup
The ban on plastic straws comes as a result of a series of successful trials in certain outlets â and they will soon start in the US, France and Norway.
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Recycling non-profit Eco-Cycle claims that the US uses 500 million plastic straws every day.
While plastic straws are technically recyclable, their small size and weight mean they are often missed by sorting machines and the sheer number of straws used every day means they make a big contribution to the millions of tons of plastic that end up in our oceans every year.
Most straws are made from plastics that take hundreds of years to decompose and instead break down into microplasticsâ which are extremely dangerous to the environment.
McDonald's isn't the first food corporation to buck the plastic trend in the UK; JD Wetherspoon, Burger King and Costa Coffee have all phased out plastic straws in the last year.
Blippar CEO Ambarish Mitra. Getty
Hyped augmented reality startup Blippar has posted losses and warned that it needs to raise more money to stay afloat.
In earnings for the year to 31 March 2017, published on Companies House, the company said it was in talks with strategic investors for new cash, but said the funding was not yet agreed.
The firm said: "The group has incurred losses from operations as it continues to prioritise investment into technology over short term profits. This investment has resulted in the need to obtain additional funding to continue with further investment... and continue as a going concern."
Here are the important numbers from Blippar's earnings for the year to the end of March last year:
A pre-tax loss of £34.5 million Revenue of £5.7 million Operating loss of £35 million£10 million left in the bankDue to a change in the way Blippar reports its finances, it's difficult to compare the company's 2017 performance with how it did in 2015/2016.
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In the 16-month period to 31 March 2016, Blippar posted revenue of £8.5 million and a loss of £24 million, according to its adjusted results. While a direct comparison is difficult, the most recent numbers suggest that Blippar has lost more money in a shorter timeframe.
Blippar also said it had raised $26.3 million (£19.9 million) after March 2017 through loans from existing undisclosed investors, and a further $500,000 (around £378,000) from selling its shares in another startup, WaveOptics.
It didn't say whether the new cash was sufficient to keep the company going for the next year. The company would not comment on Thursday when asked about raising new funding.
It was five months late in postings its financials for the year to 31 March 2017, and has not explained the delay.
The Blippar app. Blippar
Blippar was founded in 2011 by CEO Ambarish "Rish" Mitra, CTO Omar Tayeb, and directors Steven Spencer and Jessica Butcher.
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The company is best known for its augmented reality app, which can recognise everyday objects and overlay them with more information. It predominantly makes money through selling augmented reality advertising to brands and advertising agencies, and through licensing its technology to third parties.
Sources told Business Insider last year that, despite its charismatic and visionary chief executive, Blippar has always struggled to nail down a strategy and had inflated its user numbers.
It has pivoted from augmented reality to computer vision and, the sources said last year, was on the brink of running out of cash. They said Blippar had shuttered offices in Japan, Turkey, and Amsterdam, something the firm acknowledged in its 2017 earnings.
Blippar blamed its losses on its investments in computer vision and said it employed more than 116 technologists, compared to 54 sales and marketing staff.
That number is now likely to be lower, after Blippar shut another office in Mountain View in May this year. The Mountain View hub was Blippar's biggest office and houses its computer vision engineers, although the company has not confirmed any job losses.
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The filings also reveal that Blippar has lost another board member. Javier Santiso represented one of Blippar's biggest investors, the Malaysian government's sovereign wealth fund. He resigned in March. Non-executive board member Doreswamy Nandkishore also stepped down earlier this year.
eToro CEO Yoni Assia. eToro
LONDON â Social trading platform eToro is setting up a new over-the-counter (OTC) trading desk in London for cryptocurrencies amid growing interest from institutional investors.
eToro CEO Yoni Assia told Business Insider: "We are launching an OTC desk for institutions. We've seen more and more interest from corporates and institutions."
OTC desks cater to clients who want to place large orders that may otherwise move markets for certain assets. OTC brokers pool liquidity across different exchanges to fill these orders. eToro, which lets people trade stocks, crypto, and other assets, has connections to 15 cryptocurrency exchanges around the world and is planning to launch its own exchange.
Assia said: "We've actually set up our corporate team here in the UK to start setting up accounts to trade on eToro. We've announced that we're launching the exchange as well so, between the exchange and the OTC desk, we're also starting to serve more potential institutions and financial institutions."
Assia with ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin. eToro Mainstream financial institutions were largely dismissive of cryptocurrencies until last year but have grown increasingly interested after a surge in the value of bitcoin. Exchange operators CME Group and CBOE both launched bitcoin futures at the end of last year to offer more traditional investors exposure to the space.
The cryptocurrency market crashed from a peak of over $800 billion in December to around $280 billion today, but institutional interest has persisted.
Goldman Sachs-backed cryptocurrency startup Circle and Cumberland Mining, a division of Chicago high-speed trading company DRW, both offer OTC crypto services and have reported rising interest from institutions. Goldman Sachs has begun setting up a desk to trade on cryptocurrencies on behalf of clients, and the likes of JPMorgan and Fidelity are also assessing the space.
Assia said institutional interest in the space was still at an early stage. "It's the owners of hedge funds at this point," he said when asked who was contacting eToro.
"What we're seeing is a sense of interest and people who want to experiment but not yet take their core assets in. Corporates are corporates. But we're seeing more interest from the city folk who potentially could take that interest institutionally but the initial interest is in experimenting â where we were in 2010."
Financial News reported recently that eToro had held preliminary talks with bankers about a potential IPO. Assia was circumspect, telling BI the discussions were "in a standard course of business for a business that raised $100 million and significantly scaled its revenues."
"Obviously, we have the surrounding people who are interested in taking us there but it's nothing that has been set in stone."
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He added that bankers were likely keen to capitalise on the surge in interest in cryptocurrencies among investors.
"I think there is growing institutional demand and interest of public investors to understand whether they can join the party," Assia said. "That is something we definitely see out there. We see more and more public market players and big banks who are interested in this space and feel left out because they're not allowed to invest in crypto or ICOs."
eToro was founded in 2006 and claims to have over 10 million retail customers worldwide, with the majority in Europe. The online platform lets investors track, follow, and even automatically copy the trades other investors. This week the business announced that customers can now buy and hold both stocks and cryptocurrencies in the same portfolio.
Apple is close to agreeing a deal to buy the distribution rights to a movie from Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon, Bloomberg reports.
Cartoon Saloon is based in Kilkenny, Ireland and has produced three Academy Award-nominated features: "Secret of Kells," "The Breadwinner," and "Song of the Sea." It also produces the children's TV series "Puffin Rock," narrated by "Bridesmaids" star Chris O'Dowd.
Citing anonymous sources, Bloomberg said a deal is being negotiated between Apple and Cartoon Saloon for the rights to an unnamed movie, which is more than a year from release.
One of the sources said a theatrical release would be possible, and noted that other potential movies are also in the works.
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While the deal is not yet closed, it is another signal of Apple's video ambitions. The company already makes shows like "Carpool Karaoke," and has a crop of original shows planned.
Business Insider has contacted Apple and Cartoon Saloon for comment.
Musician Imogen Heap arrives at the 52nd Annual GRAMMY Awards held at Staples Center on January 31, 2010 in Los Angeles, California.Jason Merritt/Getty Images
DUBLIN, IRELAND â Grammy Award-winning Imogen Heap is using the proceeds from her score for the Harry Potter musical and a surprise ethereum windfall to fund a blockchain project to help musicians keep track of, and get paid for, their music.
Heap appeared at the MoneyConf conference in Dublin this week to talk about her project Mycelia. Heap wants to create a blockchain-based app that will allow musicians to store all the information about their work in one place. Currently, no central repository exists for information like publishing rights, recording rights, and composition rights.
"It's about how to ease flow of payments, how to ease collaboration, how to grow partnerships, how to make better collaborations on a business level and a creative level," Heap told Business Insider.
"If you're just a new musician out there and you don't know what to do, how do you know where to sign up? This is a guide as much as anything, a way to help the music maker navigate the industry."
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Heap admitted that blockchain was not the only way to solve this problem but said she is keen to piggyback on the popularity of the technology, which was first developed to underpin digital currency bitcoin.
"There are many ways to do it," she said. "But for me, it's important to be in this space because it's a growing space and the music industry has to move with the times and I just want to make sure that we're here and prepared â the music-makers are prepared."
Heap has been talking about creating Mycelia for around three years but said she is now taking the idea forward and hopes to have an app by September.
She said: "I didn't expect to be able to develop a thing â I didn't want to, to be honest, I just wanted to make music. I thought if I could just share an idea maybe someone would make something but in the end nobody was doing this thing."
Heap, perhaps best known for her song Hide & Seek, is planning to do a world tour to promote the project once the app launches. She will do 40 shows around the world connected to business conferences.
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Heap is self-funding the project and says she has benefitted from her work scoring the Harry Potter musical, playing on London's West End.
"I'm also in a position, thanks to Harry Potter to be honest, that I'm not needing to make money on the next album and the next tour. I've just lucky to be in a position where this magic play is essentially giving me a wage every week, which has never happened in my life before. Who would have thought? Harry Potter is the saviour â well, not a saviour but Harry Potter is enabling this."
She added that she has also benefitted from the surge in cryptocurrencies over the last year. Heap released the song Tiny Human on the ethereum blockchain in 2015, allowing people to download the song in exchange for the cryptocurrency ether.
"People paid $1, or 1 ETH, which was equal to $1 at the time," she said. "That was $200. I didn't think anything of it and then, of course, it went massively up and I took a bit out and put it into the project, and then it went massively down. It went up to £200,000."
Ether reached a peak of over $1,200 per coin in early January before declining in line with the wider cryptocurrency market. Ether is trading at around $480 as of June 14.
AP Photo/Richard Drew
Chinese Netflix-competitor iQiyi has more than doubled its stock price since going public in the US in March. The stock is wildly popular with millennial investors on the stock trading app Robinhood.Follow IQ's stock price in real-time here.ÂShares of iQiyi â the Baidu-owned video service widely seen as the Netflix of China â has more than doubled since its US initial public offering less than three months ago.
As its stock has skyrocketed from $18 at the IPO to $37 on Thursday, the streaming video service has become a darling for millennial investors on the stock trading app Robinhood, whose users skew markedly younger than that of traditional brokerages. The stock is now held by 31,302 Robinhood investors, the siteâs data shows, making it the 30th most held stock. It first appeared in the top 100 in late May.
Ten-year-old iQiyi began trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange in March after being spun off by the Chinese search giant Baidu. The offering raised $2.25 billion for the video service, which currently boasts 61 million subscribers. For comparison, Netflix has more than 100 million worldwide, but Chinese regulations have hindered its expansion in the country.
Its success in trading so far has led to optimism on Wall Street. Both Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse have positive ratings for the stock.
China will soon begin tracking the movements of all new cars.
Beginning next year, China will require all new registered cars to have an RFID chip installed on windshields which will help study and manage traffic, pollution, and public security, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
Under the program, both a car's license plate and its paint color will be recorded. Card readers placed along roads will detect the RFID chips and pass information back to the Ministry of Public Security.
China's congestion is almost incomparable, with 5 million cars on the road in Beijing. China is also one of the most dangerous countries in the world for drivers, with the World Health Organization putting traffic deaths at more than 260,000 in 2013.
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But the RFID plan, which will initially be voluntary from July 1 2018, will also help another focus of President Xi Jinping's: China's domestic chip industry.
Despite being the world's factory, 90% of the chips China uses are imported or produced locally by foreign-owned firms, according to International Business Strategies Inc. Tens of billions of dollars are reportedly set to be poured into a new investment fund to finance local chip R&D.
But when Chinese smartphone maker ZTE was banned from buying parts, including chips, from US companies, the company essentially shut down. After the ban, Chinese officials reportedly held a number of meetings about speeding up the local industry.
While China won't be the first country to use such computer chips in cars â California has begun testing chip-enabled license plates that would allow drivers to automatically update their vehicle registrations and let police track stolen vehicles.
Amid punishing repeat jaywalkers and honking drivers, Beijing police have already started using facial-recognition glasses that can identify passengers and car number plates within milliseconds. Powered by artificial intelligence, the eyewear compares faces and cars to a "blacklist" in real time and display a red box and warning sign when a match is made.
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With China wanting to roll out a nation-wide social credit program, it's unlikely to be long until all cars are tracked and compared to various legal and social blacklists.
If you're a black or a Latino software engineer, now might be a good time to file your resume with Google.
Not only is the search giant struggling to add workers from those groups to its ranks but it also faring poorly at keeping them around, according to Google's annual diversity report released Thursday.
Google and the rest of the technology sector are trying to shed their reputations for not being inclusive. In the case of Google, the company at minimum deserves points for transparency, as managers each year reveal how they're progressing at hiring more women and workers from minority groups.
Still, in many areas the numbers show little if any progress.
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Blacks make up 2.5% of Google's US workforce, up from 2.4% the year before. The percentage of Latinos barely moved, from 3.5% to 3.6% (Google said it chose the term to use the Latinx because it describes all people from Latin American, including Brazilians who are not Hispanic, as well as people of all genders).
Women made up 30.8% a year ago and are now at 30.9 percent.
For blacks and Latinos, things appear even worse when considering attrition rates, a data point that Google added for the first time this year.
Blacks have the highest attrition of any of the ethnic groups listed by Google, with a weighted index rating of 127 (100 is the company's overall attrition rate). Latinos were the next highest at 115.
Screen shot of Google diversity report Google
Google wrote in the report, "Black Googler attrition rates, while improving in recent years, have offset some of our hiring gains, which has led to smaller increases in representation than we would have seen otherwise."
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This was "a clear low light," said Danielle Brown, Google vice president of Diversity and Inclusion, of the attrition rates in an interview with TechCrunch. "That's an area where we're going to be laser-focused."
The attrition rates for Whites came in at 108 while Asians possessed the lowest rate with 83.
Google did make headway from last year when it came to the management ranks. Over the past few years, the number of women in leadership roles globally has risen from 20.8% to 25.5%. Though that leaves plenty of room for progress.
James DamoreYouTube/Joe Rogan ExperienceGoogle's struggle creating a diverse workforce is hardly unique in Silicon Valley, with companies such as Facebook, Apple and Microsoft all similarly underrepresented when it comes to women and minorities.
In its report, Google offers some thoughts on how to address the attrition rate:
"Based on employee surveys, we have learned that feeling included is associated with lower attrition for all employees, especially people of color. So we are accelerating efforts to ensure all Googlersâand in particular those from underrepresented groupsâexperience Google as an inclusive workplace," the report says.
But that goal might be tougher than expected given some of the recent events at Google.
Google's efforts to create a diverse workplace became a lightning rod earlier this year after an internal debate about diversity issues exploded in public, landing Google on the frontlines of the country's culture wars. Former Google employee James Damore, who famously suggested that women weren't genetically equipped to be great engineers, was fired for violating company policy.
Damore later filed suit, saying Google discriminated against white male employees as well as conservatives.
The incident highlighted a tricky tension between Google's commitment to gender and ethnic diversity and its commitment to free expression and debate. Damore is no longer at the company, but it's not clear if the issue is resolved.
Former Tesla employees told Business Insider they were caught off-guard when they learned they were being fired. Spencer Platt / Getty Images
This week, Tesla is firing around 9% of its employees in an effort to cut costs and eliminate redundancies, CEO Elon Musk said in an email to employees he shared on Twitter.
The move came as a surprise to some employees, who told Business Insider they were given no advance notice about the possibility of being fired. During Tesla's first-quarter earnings call in May, Musk said the company would restructure operations to boost profitability. At the time, he said the company would review its third-party contractors, though he didn't discuss specific plans to layoff company employees.
A former Tesla Energy salesperson who asked not to be identified by name said her team received an email at 1 a.m. on Tuesday morning asking them to clear four hours in their schedule that day for a video conference. The video conference turned into a conference call with a human-resources employee and Brent Baldwin, the company's director of energy sales.
During the call, 250 people, including the energy sales employee's entire training class, learned they would be let go, and Baldwin apologized for having to fire salespeople who had hit their quotas, the former energy salesperson said. Despite the apology, the former energy salesperson said she and her training class were made to feel as if they had failed the company.
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"font-weight: 400;">Musk said in an email on Monday that the company was laying off people now so& that it would never have to do it again.
But the former employee said she believes this round of layoffs won't be the last.
"My theory is that this is the first wave. I don't think there will be enough business for the staff levels that they have," she said. "I would be scared to lose my job if I still had one.
The former employee started at Tesla in January and said she had to work nights and weekends to hit her quota while dealing with a shifting commission structure that made it more difficult to hit her goals.
"Honestly, since I started with this company it's been nothing but a disaster," she said.
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The company broke promises more than once, she said, adding that she was not reimbursed for mileage, as promised, and never received any company apparel. Tesla also didn't mark out sales territory, so she would run into her coworkers in her region, she said.
In April, she said solar salespeople signed a new commission plan that would prevent them from receiving commissions at different stages in the sales process. Instead, they would only receive commissions at the end of the process. The former solar salesperson says she'll end up losing money she would have made under the old commission structure because she was fired before some of her clients had their installations completed.
"There's no way around it, they just got away with not having to pay people," she said.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment about her claims.
Another employee, who worked in vehicle delivery and asked not to be identified by name, said he wasn't aware of the meeting that would lead to his firing before he came to work on Monday morning. An hour after he arrived at the office, two of his supervisors and a regional human-resources manager brought one of his colleagues into a conference room, putting the vehicle delivery employee on alert.
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"It was a little odd to see three managers show up," he said
Once his colleague left the conference room, she gathered her belongings and was escorted out of the building. The former delivery employee said he thought his colleague had been fired for performance reasons, but once he was called into the conference room, he said he realized his position was being eliminated.
He was given no advance notice of the meeting before Monday. For each of the prior two weeks, he had worked 60 hours over six days, he said.
He had worked for Tesla since 2015 and said during his time at the company his team had to adjust to a sixfold increase in deliveries while being told to increase delivery speed. Despite the raised expectations, his team decreased from its original size.
"How are we understaffed and you're still letting 9% of employees go?" he said, "It boggled my mind."
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A third employee, an engineer who still works at Tesla and asked not to be identified by name, said he discovered his manager had been fired after the manager didn't show up for a meeting on Tuesday. When a colleague of his attempted to email the manager, the email bounced back. He said he thinks they fired the wrong people.
"I think it was really squirrelly how they did it," he said.
If you've worked for Tesla and have a story to share, you can contact this reporter at
The biggest game announced at E3 that's actually coming this year is probably "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate," which arrives December 7.
Most of the best-looking games we saw at E3 are launching in 2019 or later.
â "Kingdom Hearts 3" was delayed out of 2018, and will now be released on January 29, 2019.
â The "Resident Evil 2" remake arrives in January 2019.
â "Anthem," "Metro Exodus," and "Crackdown 3" all arrive in February 2019.
â "Ori and the Will of the Wisps," "Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice," "Devil May Cry 5," "Battletoads," and "Gears of War 5" will all arrive at some point in 2019.
â We have no idea when "Halo Infinite," "Doom Eternal," "The Last of Us II," "Beyond Good and Evil 2," "The Elder Scrolls VI," "Death Stranding," or "Cyberpunk 2077" will come out.
The Department of Homeland Security recently filed a proposal to remove an Obama-era rule that allows immigrant founders of companies in the US the opportunity to stay for two and a half years, with the possibility of an extension.
It was a long time coming, considering the current administration's push to enforce stricter and broader immigration laws to prevent any loopholes: Last year, the DHS delayed the effective date from July 2017 to March 2018, and announced it would ultimately remove it completely in order to protect the jobs of American workers. The announcement triggered comments from industry experts and professionals who say that rescinding the rule that protects immigrant founders will have the opposite of the intended effect.
And as this chart from Statista shows, they're right to think so. Immigrants have been a major part of the startup scene, creating jobs in the process. Combined, (co-)founders from other countries have created half of the billion-dollar startups that existed as of January 2016, each of which created an average of 760 jobs.
Shayanne Gal/Business Insider
A rendering from Facebook of the planned Huntsville, Alabama data center. Facebook
Facebook has got big plans for a new $750 million data center in Huntsville, Alabama.
On Thursday, the social networking giant announced it was building a new 970,000 square foot facility in Huntsville, a city in the northern part of the US state.
"As a growing tech hub, Huntsville seemed like a natural fit for Facebook," the company wrote on a new Facebook post dedicated to the planned data center. "It also provides reliable access to renewable energy, strong local infrastructure, a great set of community partners, and very importantly, an outstanding pool of talent."
A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that it is investing $750 million in the project.
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The Birmingham Business Journal previously reported Alabama governor Kay Ivey as saying the average salary at the completed center will be $80,000, and it will create 100 new jobs.
It should be up and running by 2020, Facebook said.
The new Huntsville facility will join Facebook's sprawling network of data centers across America and around the world, that host its reams of user data and power its apps and services.
Today, we are excited to be in Huntsville to announce our newest data center. As a growing tech hub, Huntsville seemed like a natural fit for Facebook. The site, located in Northern Huntsville, is shovel-ready and allows us to break ground this year. It also provides reliable access to renewable energy, strong local infrastructure, a great set of community partners, and very importantly, an outstanding pool of talent.
This 970,000 square foot facility will host many of the videos, photos, and news articles you see on your Facebook feed every day. And once it becomes operational in 2020, it will help us continue to provide a great experience for people here in Alabama and people around the world.
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But it's not only about the impact online, we are also committed to having a positive impact on this community. These data centers are real economic engines - and beyond just the four corners of the site. We are proud to say a recent study found that for every 1 million dollars in operating expenses at our data centers, there are 13 jobs supported in the economy. And for every 1 million dollars in capital expenditures, there are more than 14 jobs supported in the economy.
Facebook is also committed to powering our data centers with 100% clean and renewable energy. That is why we worked with the Tennessee Valley Authority to establish a renewable energy tariff that will let qualifying customers, not just Facebook, buy new renewable resources. We are also working closely with them to identify new solar projects in the area that will power 100% of our facility.
Over the coming years, we will continue to work on the foundational technologies needed to bring the world closer together - and the Huntsville Data Center will be a part of that.
If you're not already using Zelle, you may be one of the millions of users the platform is expected to add in 2018.
Zelle is a year-old service that lets you instantly transfer money to someone else, much like Venmo or Square Cash.
But Zelle differs from either service in a major way: because it was built by seven of the largest US banks, it's often able to integrate more seamlessly with your bank's mobile app. While other services make you wait a few days for the money you received from friends to show up in your bank account, Zelle can transfer the money almost instantly.
For those reasons, analysts at eMarketer expect Zelle to "leapfrog" other payments services before the end of the year.
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"One of the main hurdles new apps face is building trust and a sizable audience," eMarketer forecasting analyst Cindy Liu wrote in a report. "But Zelle has leapfrogged the early stages of adoption by having the benefit of being embedded into the already existing apps of participating banks."
Zelle is expected to grow more than 73% this year, eMarketer predicts, and will likely reach 24.7 million US users. That's more than Venmo's 22.9 million users.
Square Cash is the third most-popular payments app with 9.5 million users.
Take a look below at how Zelle's predicted user growth over the next four years:
Shayanne Gal/Business Insider
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The Chicago Tribune reports Mayor Rahm Emanuel has selected a bid from Elon Musk's Boring Company to build a high-speed link between downtown Chicago and O'Hare Airport. Autonomous vehicles are supposed to make the trip in just 12 minutes, at over 100 miles per hour.
It sounds cool, but the proposal as described makes very little sense.
The Tribune says the project "would be able to handle nearly 2,000 passengers per hour in each direction." This is not a high capacity. You can fit 2,000 passengers on a single, crowded New York City subway train â and a subway line can handle 24 of those trains per hour. Even assuming a more comfortable subway load of 1,000 passengers per train, this system would have 1/12 the capacity of a subway line.
The low capacity would stem from the small size of the vehicles, which would carry just 16 passengers each. What is the point of using such small vehicles in a system that connects just two stations?
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This all assumes Boring can deliver on its promise of much faster and cheaper tunnel construction, which will rely on technologies the company has not yet shown can work. I'm glad Musk is trying to innovate here â underground rail projects in the US are far more expensive than they should be, and the space is ripe for innovation.
But I'd like to see him show that he can actually build faster and cheaper at a demonstration site before a major city like Chicago goes into business with him.
Plus, one of the ways the Tribune says he'd save money is concerning: His tunnels would only be 14 feet in diameter, about half the size of a typical subway tunnel. A smaller tunnel means smaller vehicles and lower passenger capacity, which can mean it's a false economy â you're spending less because you get less tunnel when construction is finished.
The best argument for this project is that Musk says the Boring Company will take on the entire construction cost, which he thinks will be only about $1 billion. So long as that remains true, sure, let him have at it and see if he can actually build the thing. (I wouldn't want to be one of his investors, though.)
But private megaprojects like this have a way of turning into public ones, when costs exceed projections and private operators say they have no way to finish construction without public support. If Chicago goes down this road, they need to be prepared to say "no" if Musk comes back in a few years and asks for money.
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