Mahjoubi joined Emmanuel Macron’s team as the person in charge of all things digital while Macron was campaigning to become France’s President. He joined the French government immediately after the 2017 election and has been in charge of Digital Affairs. In addition to being the go-to policymaker for the tech industry in general, he’s also working on digital initiatives… Read More
French startup Spendesk just raised $9.9 million (€8 million) from Index Ventures with Michael Benabou, Laurent Asscher and Showpad cofounders Louis Jonckheere and Pieterjan Bouten also participating. Spendesk is a service that combines prepaid cards with an expense report solution. After signing up, each employee receives a personal card. Companies can top up their global Spendesk account… Read More
The current market is full of really interesting SaaS companies that have built up at least $100M in annual revenue run rate (ARR). Some have gone public. Some are waiting in the wings. There are...
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In the latest chapter of GAFAM’s continuing bid to conquer online gaming, Microsoft has acquired PlayFab, which helps game developers launch their titles online more quickly with simplified back-end services. The startup will be integrated into Microsoft’s Azure gaming group. Read More
The address book is the last, worst default app you rely on. It’s time it got as smart as the rest of our phones. That’s the idea behind SuperPhone. Email isn’t how you build relationships anymore. Yet most business software sanctifies the spammy inbox when it’s the immediacy of text messaging that keeps people in touch today. Read More
Boeing’s HorizonX is the aerospace company’s vehicle for making investments in promising next-generation startups and technology, and it just placed its latest bet: funding in Cuberg, a Berkeley-based battery tech startup that has a founding team including Stanford University researchers. Battery tech is still one of the most frustrating roadblocks any company encounters when trying… Read More
January 29, 2018
Long Haul Films is the video production company that does our videos like Bored Meetings, Worst of Times, and Iâm a VC. We are huge fans of Melissa and Tom.
They have a new documentary coming out called Adele and Everything After. It is an award-winning documentary about Marty, a woman with an untreatable heart condition that made her pass out every day, and Adele, one of the worldâs first cardiac alert service dogs.
Pre-order it today or visit Adelemovie.com to find out where else you can catch this inspiring film when itâs released on January 30th.
Also published on Medium.
Manhattan-based startup LittleBits has worked hard to shake the “tech toy” label. While the company’s done a good job getting its kid-friendly engineering kits into the hands of schools, a new partnership with Pearson will certainly add an extra bit of legitimacy to the company’s methods. The education publishing giant announced this week that it’s… Read More
As data privacy becomes an increasingly important notion, especially with the EU’s GDPR privacy laws coming online in May, companies need to find ways to understand their customer’s private data. BigID thinks it has a solution and it landed a $14 million Series A investment today to help grow the idea.Comcast Ventures, SAP (via SAP.io), ClearSky Security Fund and one of the… Read More
ContentSquare, which offers cloud-based software that helps businesses understand how and why users are interacting with their app, mobile and web sites, has picked up $42 million in Series B funding. Read More
An interactive heatmap from Strava appears to have exposed sensitive sites. Hackers or state actors could use the information to find bases. Chinese, Taiwanese, and other nations' bases were exposed too, but as the US has the biggest global presence, it stands the most to lose.
Over the weekend a company called Strava, a social network for athletes, updated an online heatmap which mapped out the routes of 1 billion workouts in 2017.
But in doing so, it seems to have expose secret US military in Turkey, Syria, and Yemen.
Strava drew on data from fitness trackers, like fitbits or smartphones, to track their workouts. But fitness tracker users skew western, young, and active. In countries like Niger, the heatmap highlights the activity of US soldiers on military bases keeping fit.
The result is potentially damning for the US military's operational security.
Previously covert bases may have been exposed. More importantly, the useful parts of the base have been highlighted. The heatmap shows that military personnel commonly jog around the perimeter of bases, thereby printing an outline on the heatmap.
Additionally, some may have left the trackers on while going about normal business. Important supply routes and key daily routines have likely been picked up by the heatmap.
"In Syria, known coalition (ie US) bases light up the night,"Â wrote military writer and analyst Tobias Schneider .
"Some light markers over known Russian positions, no notable colouring for Iranian bases ⦠A lot of people are going to have to sit through lectures come Monday morning."
But the most dangerous element of the heatmap isn't the aggregated lines, it's the potential to determine which individual drew which line. Anyone who gains access to Strava's data, legally or otherwise, can then track that soldier's movement, Jeffrey Lewis points out at the Daily Beast.Â
A user who visits one secret military base, say a missile base, and then visits another location, may indicate that there's another, previously secure, site of interest.
This data could inform both state and non-state actors as to where to attack in the case of war.
The US is not alone in being exposed â Chinese joggers in the South China Sea contributed data to the Strava map, as did workers on Taiwan's secret missile bases. But the US's larger presence around the globe means it had more to lose.
After the map came out, internet users in short order identified some of the most sensitive US military sites around the world.
Here Lewis believes a "highly secure office," possibly the director of national intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center have been exposed.
Here he seems to think US troops are running around the US's nuclear weapons in Turkey.
Here a Twitter user cross-referencing other open-source analysis seems to think he's spotted a CIA "black site," or somewhere that unacknowledged covert work is taking place, in Djibouti.
But interestingly enough, the actual Pentagon, the headquarters of the Department of Defense, the biggest office building in the world, and the most well-known US military command center in the world, is dark.
Investors in bitcoin face a "realistic risk of total loss" and everyone but the most speculative should steer clear of cryptocurrencies, a senior staff member at the asset management arm of Deutsche Bank has warned.
"We do not recommend that. Itâs only for investors who invest speculatively," Markus Mueller, Global Head of the Chief Investment Office at Deutsche Asset Management said in an interview with Bloomberg.
"There is a realistic risk of total loss."Â
Mueller went on to say that for bitcoin to considered a real, tradeable asset that Deutsche AM may include in its portfolio, huge strides are needed on "regulation, security and transparency," in the crypto world.
"Important issues such as liability and documentation are unclear," he said. "We are still at the very beginning."
"When security and trust are created, crypto-currencies can be assessed like established asset classes. It is possible that the governance required will exist in five to ten years from now," Mueller added.
Mainstream investors and institutions remain split on cryptocurrencies. Most see at least some scope for the blockchain technology underlying bitcoin to have real world applications, but many institutions see bitcoin itself (as well as other cryptocurrencies) as worthless exercises in speculation, not worth the distributed ledger they're printed on.
Late in 2017, for example, Paul Donovan,  the global chief economist at UBS's wealth management arm, tore into the argument that cryptocurrencies could eventually replace fiat currencies like the pound and the dollar.
"The problem that cryptocurrencies face is that they fail the two key metrics of what makes a currency a currency," Donovan said. "A currency has to be a widely used medium of exchange. Cryptocurrencies are never going to achieve that. Period."
Mueller's assertion that Deutsche AM will steer of the crypto space for the foreseeable future comes after analysts at boutique research house Bernstein said similar.
"Cryptocurrencies and underlying blockchains seem set to grow and become a disruptive force. Thus they will have significant implications for investors. But, for now at least, they do not have a direct role in asset allocation," a note from a Bernstein team led by Inigo Fraser-Jenkins circulated last week said.
Tether, hit by $31 million hack in November, has built a cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar. Critics are suspicious of whether it has dollar reserves it claims, but Tether calls scepticism "uninformed and baseless." The company has now parted ways with its auditor, which was reviewing its holdings, blaming auditor's "the excruciatingly detailed procedures."
LONDON â Under-fire cryptocurrency company Tether has parted company with its auditors, according to CoinDesk.
CoinDesk reports that Tether said in a statement on Saturday night that its relationship with Friedman LLP "is dissolved."
"Given the excruciatingly detailed procedures Friedman was undertaking for the relatively simple balance sheet of Tether, it became clear that an audit would be unattainable in a reasonable time frame," Tether said in the statement.
The ending of the audit is likely to fuel critics of the cryptocurrency, who are suspicious of its backing.
Tether created a cryptocurrency called USDT that is pegged to â and supposedly backed by â the dollar. It is meant to function as a "stablecoin" â a cryptocurrency that allows you to avoid the volatility of bitcoin but still have the operability of a cryptocurrency (i.e. being able to send to digital wallets and exchanges.)
The cryptocurrency was hit by a $31 million heist in November. The attack led to online rumours that Tether, which is closely linked to cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex, is facing deeper issues around its solvency. The press has also raised questions about Tether's handling of its cryptocurrency.
The New York Times wrote shortly after the hack: "One persistent online critic, going by the screen name Bitfinexâed, has written several very detailed essays on Medium arguing that Bitfinex appears to be creating Tether coins out of thin air and then using them to buy Bitcoin and push the price up."
Bloomberg wrote earlier this month: "Among the many mysteries at the heart of the cryptocurrency market are these: Does $814 million of a digital token known as tether really exist?" The article highlighted suspicions that the company may not hold the dollar reserves to back Tether that it claims to.
Tether has called this criticism "uninformed and baseless" and promised in a statement in December that Friedman's audit of its books would vindicate the company.
"We understand that the public is anxiously awaiting the completion of this process, but it cannot be rushed and we are not Friedmanâs only customer," the company said in December. "Moreover, the amount of due diligence that is being performed by Friedman is substantial."
Tether said in its Saturday statement to CoinDesk: "As Tether is the first company in the space to undergo this process and pursue this level of transparency, there is no precedent set to guide the process nor any benchmark against which to measure its success."
Business Insider contacted Tether for clarification of when it parted ways with Friedman LLP and whether it has hired a new auditor. The company did not immediately respond to our request for comment.
Good morning! Here is the tech news you need to start your week.
1. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Intel warned Chinese companies like Lenovo and Alibaba before the US government about Spectre and Meltdown. This raised concerns as the Chinese government might have come across the information before the US.
2. Twitter announced that Russian bots retweeted Donald Trump's account 469,537 times in the period leading up to the US election in 2016. Hillary Clinton's tweets, by comparison, got 47,846 retweets.
3. Google Clips, the company's screen-less camera that started selling online last Friday, sold out in about 24 hours. Google didn't say when or if it will replenish the stock, and customers of the first batch will also have to wait until March for Clips cameras to ship.
4. A new Copyright Royalty Board ruling in the US will require streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music to give 15.1% of revenue to songwriters and music publishers over next five years. The number was previously 10.5%.
5. YouTube reportedly served ads containing Coinhive's cryptocurrency-mining and CPU-draining JavaScript, likely using Google's DoubleClick. Google has said that the ads have now been blocked.
6. Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck says it will repay all 260,000 users who lost money in a theft on Friday. The company said that about $400 million (£283 million) worth of NEM coins were stolen.
7. Billionaire Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has been released after having been arrested last November amid a corruption crackdown. He is an investor in companies like Twitter and Lyft.
8. Russian Mail.ru has acquired ESforce, a Russian e-sports firm, for a reported $100 million (£71 million). ESforce has 116 million active users.
9. Fitness-tracking app Strava has published a heat map that was analysed to track military bases and soldier jogging routes around the world. The map was first shared by the company in November 2017.
10. Google explained that it used a user experience-driven approach to build the machine learning algorithms of its Clips camera. The company hired professional photographers, and "taught" the algorithms to understand which moments would most likely be worth capturing.
Fintech community has warned: "Brexit has the potential to slow down the growth of UK fintech." Tory MP Adam Afriyie heads the All Party Parliamentary Group on Fintech. Afriyie told BI: "Brexit, I think, is actually more of an opportunity than a threat." He says funding is still going strong and talent will be protected.
LONDON â The head of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Fintech says Brexit will present "opportunities" for the sector, despite reservations in the industry.
Leading British fintech businesses last year set up the Fintech Delivery Panel (FDP) to "produce an ambitious post-Brexit vision for the UK's fintech sector." Deputy chair Eamon Jubbawy said at the time: "There is a wide-ranging consensus in the tech sector that Brexit has the potential to slow down the growth of UK fintech."
But Conservative MP Adam Afriyie told Business Insider: "I think weâre poised to continue to take the world by storm on fintech... Brexit, I think, is actually more of an opportunity than a threat."
Afriyie, who supported Brexit, chairs Parliament's cross-party fintech group and regularly meets with fintech businesses doing everything from peer-to-peer lending to back-office banking processes. Afriyie set up his own IT business prior to going into politics.
He told BI: "Where thereâs change, where thereâs complexity, that is where businesses more than any others, theyâll find the gaps where thereâs money to be made.
"Do I have some question marks about the politicians' ability to resolve uncertainty in a sensible way? Yes I do. Do I have any doubt that our businesses and entrepreneurs will be able to take advantage, find the opportunities, in any changes that are upcoming? I think theyâll find those opportunities quicker than anybody else in society because itâs in their interest to do so."
He added: "People do worry about Brexit but the data shouldnât worry people at all. Iâm absolutely stunned by the rise in foreign direct investment into fintech in the UK and also by the rise in investment into tech generally in the UK over the last year."
More than $1 billion was invested into UK fintech during the first three quarters of 2017 despite the vote to leave the European Union in June 2016.
Afriyie told Business Insider: "Even myself as a Brexiter, I thought, oh well weâre going to have a bit of a fall-off in investment. Actually, the opposite has happened. Thatâs a sign that our fintech industry is very strong but also that our fundamentals are pretty strong too."
Many in the fintech industry also fear that it will be difficult to attract top international talent to the UK post-Brexit.
Afriyie countered: "People didnât particularly notice but last November we actually doubled the number of whatâs called exceptional talent visas."
The government announced last November that the number of "Tier 1" visas for skilled immigrants would be increased from 1,000 to 2,000 per year.
"I can quite safely predict that that will increase enormously at the point at which we leave the EU, because we recognise â the government recognises, we recognise as a nation â that fintech and those very highly talented people, the international people in the fintech sector, need to feel welcomed â and they will be," Afriyie told BI.
"Obviously, there are challenges, as we work out what the nature of the deal is. But quite frankly thereâs a big willingness around the world to back Britain, to back British fintech and to continue to invest here, to continue to develop here, and to continue to assimilate the standards and regulatory environments that we are developing here."
Despite his optimism, Afriyie stressed in the same interview with Business Insider that the government and financial regulators must continue to take the same "light touch" approach to fintech in order for continued success.
BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti admits the company "invested more than we should have earlier than we should have" in the UK. The NBCUniversal-backed firm made 39 British staff redundant in January, 23 of whom worked in the newsroom. A further 60 lost their jobs in the US. The job cuts were quick and clean, as staff left with what a source described as "extremely generous" redundancy packages. The upheaval is not over, however, and Business Insider understands that the company is looking to vacate its swanky London offices because they are too expensive. Despite the difficulties, BuzzFeed's reporting has still set the agenda in January.
Late last week, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti admitted that his company overreached in its mission to figure out the future of journalism in the UK. To an extent, he was acknowledging the obvious.
BuzzFeed UK had just laid off 39 of its 140 employees when he told the Columbia Journalism Review that "we invested more than we should have earlier than we should have" during a "tough business climate" in Britain.
Sources in the company speaking to Business Insider fleshed out the situation, describing a bleak process which saw almost a third of the company shown the door in a few weeks.
Peretti's admission comes against a backdrop of missed revenue targets last year â BuzzFeed fell 15-20% short of its $350 million (£247 million) goal â and declining traffic.
ComScore figures show BuzzFeed UK hovering at just over 10 million unique users towards the end of 2017, down 20% since January 2015 (see chart below). BuzzFeed does, however, consider itself a multiplatform publisher and its website traffic is not its only measure of success.
Comscore
Business Insider has spoken to a number of BuzzFeed UK insiders coming to terms with the unexpected severity of the cuts after Editor-in-Chief Janine Gibson once said there's a "genuine sense that we might just be ï¬guring out the future of journalism over here."
The redundancies were part of a global cull of 100 jobs, and the full scale of the impact on the UK was made clear in early December. US Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith originally said around 20 people would be affected in Britain, but this figure was revised up to 40 when the London newsroom was brought up to speed a week later. The Christmas party was also swiftly cancelled. Insiders were floored by the news.
Thirty-nine of 140 UK staff left, 23 of whom worked in the newsroom. Business Insider compiled this list of those willing to go public with their departure. By the middle of January, there was a flurry of "last day at BuzzFeed" tweets, as journalists publicly said their farewells.
In most cases, it was quick and clean (although not as brusque as in the US where staff were shown the door on the same day as the cuts were announced). BuzzFeed dished out "extremely generous" redundancy packages, according to one source, in exchange for silence from those involved with non-disclosure agreements. This kind of arrangement is not unusual in Britain if golden goodbyes exceed statutory requirements.
BuzzFeed targeted some obvious areas. Gone are its full-time staff in Scotland, while the websiteâs British science desk has been shut down. A layer of what an insider called "ceremonial" management was also stripped out, with founding editor-in-chief and Head of European Growth, Luke Lewis, the highest-profile departure.
The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) was on hand to assist members (there were around 44 at the company prior to the cuts) with legal advice, but said the redundancy programme was "brutal," and carried out without "any meaningful consultation."
Staff are still fighting for union recognition at BuzzFeed UK and the case is currently with the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC), which will help define the terms of a group bargaining unit.
Two of the most prominent voices in the campaign for union recognition, Science Editor Kelly Oakes and news journalist Francis Whittaker, were made redundant this month.
They publicly disagreed with BuzzFeed's vision for union recognition, openly questioning management's characterisation of the way staff are organised and rewarded. You can read a summary their testimony here. Oakes and Whittaker declined to comment.
A BuzzFeed UK spokeswoman made clear that the redundancy programme was not linked to the ongoing wrangle over unionisation. She said: "BuzzFeed UK's restructure was driven by internal business needs. The timing of the restructure was unrelated to the CAC proceedings, which have been going on for more than a year. The restructure was part of a global company change."
One insider reflected that it was "weird and ridiculous" to wave goodbye to so many colleagues. "I am just gutted. So many talented people â couldnât be prouder of the work we do," they said. It was a sentiment shared by others. Head of Celebrity and Entertainment Kimberley Dadds tweeted:
A lot of my very good friends and extremely talented colleagues are leaving BuzzFeed this week ¢ Which means you could be lucky enough to snap them up! Please do, you won't regret it.
And the upheaval is not yet over. BuzzFeed UK will likely have to move out of its swanky central London offices, located practically next door to Oxford Circus station. Some insiders said the lease has become too expensive, but others pointed out that the space simply doesn't make sense with a smaller team.
There is also speculation over more job cuts in the future. "That should be the end of that, at least until some sort of round two," said one source.Â
Some remaining staff were keen to move on from the narrative of cuts. It is noticeable that the majority of its highest-profile journalists remain in place. The London investigations team, for example, was kept intact under former Sunday Times journalist Heidi Blake. Politics was also left largely untouched.
The impact of its reporting has remained high in January too. Notably, BuzzFeed first reported TV news presenter Carrie Gracie's bombshell letter about the BBC's "secretive and illegal pay culture," which has reinvigorated the controversy around the gender pay gap at the British broadcaster.
And if evidence were needed that BuzzFeed is now a firm part of the British media illuminati, then it came only this week. Senior Political Correspondent Emily Ashton was elected chair of the parliamentary lobby, a prestigious position, which means she poses and fields daily press questions to Prime Minister Theresa May's spokesman.
As Political Editor Jim Waterson noted, only four years ago, BuzzFeed was refused a lobby pass "because the parliamentary authorities didn't think it was worth having us in there."
And as Peretti pointed out to the Columbia Journalism Review, BuzzFeed is still a growth story. "We had another year of growth in 2017, but weâre always trying to grow more and faster. I would say we had a good year but not a great year," he said.
Bodle Technologies is a startup spun out of Oxford University, that is developing a new type of ‘reflective’ display technology that promises to use a lot less power. In fact, in some states the screen tech may require almost no power at all. Read More
Stephen Lam/Reuters
Facebook and Google face bigger regulatory risks than Amazon, according to David Eiswert, the portfolio manager of T. Rowe Price's Global Stock Fund. Top lawyers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google appeared in Congress in November to answer questions about Russia's meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. Facebook's advertising platform is "like a wide-open Wild West," Eiswert said.
The largest online platforms have come under intense scrutiny about how their sites were used and abused before the 2016 US presidential election.
But even though investors have coined a convenient acronym for Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google â FAANG â they're by no means lumping their risks together.
"The giants that I am more concerned about than Amazon are Facebook and Google," said David Eiswert, the portfolio manager of the $950 million Global Stock Fund at T. Rowe Price, which manages $991 billion.
"Apple and Amazon don't monetize through selling private data," he said. "Apple sells iPhones; Amazon delivers customer service."
In November, top lawyers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google appeared before the congressional intelligence committees to answer questions about Russia's meddling in the 2016 US election. Facebook, for example, had found evidence that fake accounts, most likely run from Russia, bought thousands of ads during the presidential campaign.
So it's no surprise that these are the companies directly in the crosshairs of regulators.
"You've created these platforms, and now they are being misused," Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California said at the November hearing. "And you have to be the ones to do something about it, or we will."
In October, senators introduced a bill to require online platforms with at least 50 million monthly viewers to keep a public log of ads bought by individuals or groups that spend more than $500 over one year.
"I think Facebook's EBIT" â earnings before interest and taxes â "margins are too high, and those returns represent a company that is just like a wide-open Wild West: Anybody can come on there and through an automated platform, buy ads, and target whatever they want and spew whatever evil stuff they want to do," Eiswert said.
Critics are asking why free services like Facebook and Google can't be regulated like radio or broadcast TV, Eiswert said.
Amazon, which Eiswert describes as a stock every long-term investor should own, is not completely off the hook. Its most prominent critic is none other than President Donald Trump, who has said the company is "doing great damage" to other retailers and making the US Postal Service "dumber and poorer."
But Eiswert sees Trump's regulatory influence over Amazon as limited.
Another trait that distinguishes Amazon from the other tech giants, Eiswert said, is that it is constantly investing to grow its business.
"We think there's potential over the long term to have much higher returns because their dominance increases as they grow," he said.
Get the latest Google stock price here.
One of the great entrepreneurs of the 20th century, Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, passed away today. As Reuters pointed out in its short biography, Kamprad created a store — as a teenager mind you — that today has more than 400 locations, revenues of $62 billion, and a cultural ubiquity that very few consumer products could ever hope to attain. Having read the IKEA story… Read More
Shutterstock / Jacob Lund
You landed the job. Congrats!
Now, it's time to make your boss love you by becoming a star employee. Start with these 11 things successful people do in order to make the most of the first three months in your new position.