Promising never to make killer robots is a good thing.

That's what tech leaders, including Elon Musk and the cofounders of Google's AI company Deepmind, did last week by signing a pledge at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI).

They stated that they would never develop "lethal autonomous weapons," citing two big reasons. Firstly, that it would be morally wrong to delegate the decision to kill a human being to a machine.

Secondly, they believe that the presence of an autonomous AI weapon could be "dangerously destabilizing for every country and individual."

Swearing off killer robots is missing the point

Business Insider spoke to Dr Mariarosaria Taddeo of the Oxford Internet Institute, who expressed some concerns about the pledge.

"It's commendable, it's a good initiative," she said. "But I think they go in with too simplistic an approach."

"It does not mention more imminent and impactful uses of AI in the context of international conflicts," Taddeo added.

"My worry is that by focussing just on the extreme case, the killer robots who are taking over the world and this sort of thing, they distract us. They distract the attention and distract the debate from more nuanced but yet fundamental aspects that need to be addressed."

Is AI on the battlefield less scary than in computers?

The US military makes a distinction between AI in motion (i.e. AI that is applied to a robot) and AI at rest (which is found in software).

Killer robots would fall into the category of AI in motion, and there are already states which deploy this hardware application of AI. The US navy received a self-piloting warship, and Israel has drones capable of identifying and attacking targets autonomously, although at the moment they require a human middle-man to give the go-ahead.

The Sea Hunter is an autonomous drone warship, capable of detecting enemy submarines and spending months at sea without a crew onboard.US Navy/John F. Williams

But AI at rest is what Dr Taddeo thinks needs more scrutiny — namely the use of AI for national cyber defense.

"Cyber conflicts are escalating in frequency, impact, and sophistication. States increasingly rely on them, and AI is a new capability that states are starting to use in this context," she said.

The "WannaCry" virus which attacked the UK's health service (the NHS) in 2017 has been linked to North Korea, and the UK and US governments collectively blamed Russia for the "NotPetya" ransomware attack, which took more than $1.2 billion.

Dr Taddeo said throwing AI defense systems into the mix could seriously escalate the nature of cyberwar.

"AI at rest is basically able to defend the systems in which it is deployed, but also to autonomously target and respond to an attack that comes from another machine. If you take this in the context of interstate conflict this can cause a lot of damage. Hopefully, it will not lead to the killings of human beings, but it might easily cause conflict escalations, serious damage to national critical infrastructure," she said.

There is no mention of this kind of AI in the IJCAI pledge, which Taddeo considers a glaring omission. She thinks that AI at rest garnering less media attention, meaning it has slipped under the radar with little discussion.

"AI is not just about about robotics, AI is also about the cyber, the non-physical. And this does not make it less problematic," Taddeo said.

AI systems at war with each other could pose a big problem

At the moment AI systems attacking each other don't cause physical damage, but Dr Taddeo warns that this could change.

"The more our societies rely on AI, the more it's likely that attacks that occur between AI systems will have physical damage," she said. "In March of this year the US announced that Russia had been attacking national critical infrastructure for months. So suppose one can cause a national blackout, or tamper with an air control system."

"If we start having AI systems which can attack autonomously and defend autonomously, it's easy that we find ourselves in an escalating dynamic for which we don't have control," she added. In an article for Nature, Dr Taddeo warned of the risk of a "cyber arms race."

The question of Russian cyberattacks on the 2016 American election caused a major rift in US politics. Chris McGrath/Getty Images

"While states are already deploying this aggressive AI, there is no regulation. There are no norms about state behaviour in cyberspace. And we don't know where to begin."

In 2004, the United Nations assembled a group of experts to understand and define the principles of how states should behave in cyberspace, but in 2017 they failed to reach any kind of consensus.

She still thinks the agreement not to make killer robots is a good thing. "Do not get me wrong, it's a nice gesture [but] it's a gesture I don't think it will have massive impact in terms of policy making and regulations. And they are addressing a risk and there's nothing wrong with that," she said. "But the problem is bigger."

At one point, Alex Binello was working part-time at GameStop to pay the bills while he pursued a career as an independent game developer. Now, he finds himself at the head of one of the largest video game phenomenons you've never heard about.

Under the handle Alexnewtron, Binello is the co-creator and public face of "MeepCity," a free-to-play game with 15 million monthly active players, — 100,000 or more of whom are playing at any given time. Those numbers put "MeepCity" in a league with "Pokémon Go," "Candy Crush Saga," and other popular free-to-play games.

"The game has blown out what I ever imagined it could do," Binello told Business Insider via the phone on Thursday. "I feel like it's a real company now."

If you've never heard of "MeepCity," there's a pretty good chance that you're over 18. It's a role-playing game where players drive cars around, decorate their in-game homes, collect the titular Meep mascots, and even attend high school classes. It's pretty chill, and it's very popular with kids.

Notably, "MeepCity" is one of the biggest things going on in Roblox, a video game platform with 64 million users that's giving its mostly-younger fanbase a path into entrepreneurial opportunity, even turning a select few teens into millionaires. If you want to play "MeepCity," it's only on Roblox.

The Playground, the hub area of "MeepCity." Roblox

Unlike "Minecraft," "Fortnite," or other gaming phenoms, Roblox is entirely generated by its users. It boasts 4 million developers, who have collectively created 40 million games on the platform, including "MeepCity." On Friday, Roblox announced that it's on track to pay out $70 million total to those developers this year, up from $30 million in 2017.

The heart of the Robloxian economy are Robux, a premium currency that the company sells to users for real money. If a player chooses to spend their Robux in a game, the game's developer takes a cut. "MeepCity," for instance, charges Robux for premium features like an in-game boom box, or bonus decorations for your virtual home.

Binello declines to go into too much detail about how much he's made from "MeepCity." He does, however, say that he's making enough that he was recently able to relocate his mother and brother from Las Vegas to be closer to him in the San Francisco Bay Area, and to support all three of them fully.

More importantly for the future of "MeepCity," Binello has also hired two of his Roblox friends and collaborators as full-time employees, with a base salary and bonuses tied to the performance of the game. That's in addition to a few contract programmers and artists. Now, it's his ambition to turn "MeepCity" from a smash-hit Roblox game into a genuine media empire.

"I have a long-term vision," says Binello.

Self-taught

Notably, Binello is "definitely self-taught," he says — he joined Roblox in 2007, when he was about 12 years old, and the game was only available for PC.

He started fiddling around with Roblox Studio, the included tools for building virtual objects in the game world, and eventually came up with a simple multiplayer game in the style of Pictionary. It was a reasonably big hit in the early days of the platform, and his Alexnewtron alter ego became a fixture of the Roblox community. Late last year, "MeepCity Racing" launched, bringing a full-fledged go-kart racing title into the core "MeepCity" game. Screenshot/Matt Weinberger

When he graduated high school, he decided that college just wasn't for him. Instead of getting a formal education in programming or computer science, he would continue to try to hone his skills as an independent developer.

"I'm not really a school person," says Binello.

Since then, he says, he's learned a lot, from the basics of game design to building his own servers and matchmaking system to supplement those provided by Roblox.

The "MeepCity" story

At the time, circa 2012 or so, Roblox didn't yet offer the Robux revenue split. In search of a way to make a living from his Roblox skills, Binello decided to try his hand at smartphone games. "Pears to Pairs," a take on the classic family game "Apples to Apples," racked up 50,000 downloads, he says, but failed to develop into a real business.

Luckily for Binello, Roblox came through in 2013 with its new revenue-split model. Binello was drawn back to Roblox, with the idea that his familiarity with the platform would give him a leg up.

"I knew I needed to succeed with the platform," says Binello.

Eventually, he won the attention of Roblox headquarters in Silicon Valley, which invited him to intern at its Silicon Valley campus in the summer of 2015 — providing enough income that he could quit his job at GameStop.

During that internship, Roblox encouraged him to develop new game ideas, and the germ of the idea for "MeepCity" was born, which came to fruition in 2016. It was an instant smash hit — at first Binello had to institute a queuing system to deal with a larger-than-expected crush of players, who found the title without any marketing or ads.

"That showed me the potential of what I was making," says Binello. It's only grown since, going from 10 million monthly active players around the start of 2018 to 15 million today.

The MeepCity Fisherman action figure — pictured in the foreground — confers in-game advantages to anyone who buys it. Roblox

Binello praises the "modularity" of "MeepCity" as what kept bringing players in: The game has gotten loads of new content over time, and last year even extended into a new genre with the launch of "MeepCity Racing," a full-fledged go kart racing game within the existing game world, designed to bring in older players.

Indeed, that's how he views the future of "MeepCity."

Now that he's officially gone into the "MeepCity" business by hiring on employees, Binello envisions it expanding into a veritable video game empire. Just like with "MeepCity Racing," he sees his team as bringing the existing game to new audiences by adding new modes and features. Another internship with Roblox, in the summer of 2017, gave him even more ideas for where to take the game, he says, and inspired him to move to the San Francisco area to be closer to HQ.

"MeepCity" can go beyond video games, too, Binello says. Last year, Roblox got into the action figure business by licensing characters from top games on the platform, including "MeepCity." Anyone who bought the MeepCity Fisherman action figure got a unique in-game hat, plus 10,000 coins in "MeepCity" itself.

The promotion was successful, and Binello believes it could be a sign of things to come as he looks to future opportunities, in merchandising and beyond.

"'MeepCity' feels like a brand unto itself," says Binello.

Huge swaths of Earth are in for a special astronomical treat in late July: the longest total lunar eclipse in roughly 100 years.

During the evening of July 27 and into the early morning of July 28, Earth will pass between the sun and the moon to cast a shadow on our 4.5-billion-year-old satellite.

Earth's shadow isn't a dull gray, though.

It ranges from orange to an eerie blood-red hue if you're right in the middle, which is precisely where the moon will be this time around.

Here's that works.

How a total lunar eclipse colors the moon red

A total lunar eclipse and a total solar eclipse are similar, if not the reverse of one another, but their appearances are significantly different.

During a solar eclipse, the moon passes between Earth and the sun to cast its shadow on our planet. The shadow is colorless because the moon has no atmosphere to scatter or refract any sunlight.

Earth, of course, is a different story.

What a total lunar eclipse would look like from the moon.NASA

Our planet's nitrogen-rich atmosphere takes white sunlight, a mix of all colors of the spectrum, and scatters around the blue colors. This makes the sky appear blue during the day and the sun yellow.

Around sunset and sunrise, the light reaching our eyes has been more throughly scattered, so much that blues are nearly absent. This makes the sun and its light appear more orange or even red.

Roughly 240,000 miles away at the moon, the Earth would look quite stunning as the same air, like a big lens, refracts that tinged light toward the full moon.

"If you were standing on the moon's surface during a lunar eclipse, you would see the sun setting and rising behind the Earth," David Diner, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, wrote in a blog post. "You'd observe the refracted and scattered solar rays as they pass through the atmosphere surrounding our planet."

A diagram of the Earth, moon, and sun during a total lunar eclipse or "blood moon." Shayanne Gal/Business Insider

This is why lunar eclipses are orange-red: All of that colored light is focused on the moon in a cone-shaped shadow called the umbra.

The moon is also covered in ultra-fine, glass-like rock dust called regolith, which has a special property called "backscatter." This bounces a lot of light back the same way it came from, in this case toward Earth (Backscattering also explains why full moons are far brighter than during other lunar phase.)

So, when we're looking at the moon during a total lunar eclipse, we're seeing Earth's refracted sunset-sunrise light being bounced right back at us.

A total lunar eclipse on September 28, 2015. Matt Cardy/Getty Images

The red color is never quite the same from one lunar eclipse to the next due to natural and human activities that affect Earth's atmosphere.

"Pollution and dust in the lower atmosphere tends to subdue the color of the rising or setting sun, whereas fine smoke particles or tiny aerosols lofted to high altitudes during a major volcanic eruption can deepen the color to an intense shade of red," Diner said.

This total lunar eclipse will also happen during what's called a "micro" moon, or the opposite of a super moon. This happens because the moon's orbit isn't perfectly circular, so it appears larger at times and smaller at others during its roughly 29-day-long orbit around Earth. (In this case it will look a bit smaller.)

Where and when to see the total lunar eclipse

North America will be out of luck this year, since the moon will be below the horizon. You can still watch on a live webcast, though, if you're located there.

But if the weather cooperates, most of eastern Africa, the Middle East, and central Asia should see the full and total lunar eclipse. Scientists in Antarctica should also have a great view.

Europe, eastern Asia, Australia, Indonesia, and other regions will enjoy a partial lunar eclipse, where the moon passes partly through Earth's shadow.

A map of locations where the total lunar eclipse of July 27 and 28, 2018, will be visible.Fred Espenak/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

The partial eclipse begins when the moon first touches the penumbra or outer shadow of Earth. According to NASA, that should happen at 17:14 Universal Time on July 27.

The total eclipse — when the moon is fully inside the red-hued umbra of Earth — starts at 19:30 UT and ends at 21:13 UT. That's a full 1 hour 43 minutes, which is just four minutes shy of the longest total lunar eclipse possible, according to EarthSky.

The partial eclipse will resume immediately afterward, as the moon passes out of Earth's shadow, and the whole event will be over at 23:28 UT (early on July 28, depending on where you live).

Business Insider was given the chance to control lights using nothing but the activity of our brains.

We wore a headset that uses a method of recording electrical activity in the brain called Electroencephalography (EEG).

The headset sent the signals to a light rig hanging above our head. Certain actions triggered different brain frequencies, by opening our eyes we were able to make the lights blue, which represents increased activity in the brain. This is because we are taking in more visual information for our brains to process.

By closing our eyes the lights change to red, this now represents a less active brain due to the lack of visual stimuli.

The University of Nottingham created the demonstration to show how our brains work, but the team are working on a new, more accurate method of scanning the brain.

They have designed a new Magnetoencephalography (MEG) scanner that is an alternative to traditional MRI scans. Traditional MRI scans require patients to sit still, which can be difficult for children and those with mobility issues. The new scanner they are developing is worn on the head like a helmet and allows patients to move freely.

It is still in an early stage of development and only two scanners exist in the UK, but the team aim to have it widely available within the next 10 years.

Produced and filmed by David Ibekwe. Original Reporting by Isobel Hamilton. Special Thanks to the University of Nottingham.

Men and women across the United States are joining the Poshmark craze and selling their clothing online. Some are even turning it into a full-time job and launching their own boutiques.

This online-only marketplace functions in a similar way to eBay in that it allows people to buy and sell clothing and accessories with ease.

Since launching in 2011, it's transformed into a community of four million sellers, who so far have been paid out $1 billion, according to Poshmark. The company was founded by Manish Chandra, who is currently its CEO. His idea for Poshmark came about as iPhones started to explode in popularity and Chandra realized just how easy he could make the process of selling clothing online.

"It marries technology, fashion, and commerce together," Chandra told Business Insider.

Earlier this year, Business Insider interviewed top seller Suzanne Canon, who has personally pulled in $1 million in sales since she started selling in 2012. Selling on Poshmark is now her full-time job.

"I don't understand how it happened. I went on the app to make a little money on extra clothes," she told Business Insider.

Sellers only need to upload photos of their items from their phone to the app in order to list them for sale. Poshmark takes a $2.95 commission on all sales under $15. It takes a 20% commission on any sales above $15.

We spoke to five of the app's top sellers, who have pulled in amounts ranging from $10,000 to more than $100,000 since beginning to sell on Poshmark over the past few years.

See their top tips for turning a sale on Poshmark, below:

Veronica and her boyfriend were on the fence about buying the Tesla Model 3.

At a base price of $35,000, the electric car is the most affordable on the Tesla dealership lot, but it's not cheap.

The couple lives in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the US, where they mostly zip around in Ubers and on trains.

"We wouldn't be driving it all the time, but we could put it on Turo while it's not being driven," Veronica said. "That's what helped us pull the trigger on the Tesla."

She rents the car to strangers six days a week through the Turo app, a person-to-person car-sharing service most easily described as "Airbnb for cars."

"It's like, being able to rent the Tesla on Turo pays for the garage, pays for the loan we took out to purchase the car, and insurance," Veronica said. "It covers all the cost."

Turo is changing the economics of owning a car in cities like San Francisco. Car owners list their vehicles on the platform and lease them by the day. They can charge $29 to $200 a day, depending on the make and model of their ride.

The company says the average host in San Francisco makes $672 a month on Turo, more than enough to cover the national average monthly car payment on a new vehicle. One local "power host" said he earned $40,000 last year by renting his 2016 Tesla Model X to strangers.

The San Francisco Bay Area is one the largest markets for Turo, which has vehicles in more than 56 countries and 5,500 cities. Given the high cost of living, it's unsurprising that residents would go to such lengths to offset the cost of car ownership.

In a survey of Turo users, the company asked hosts what they do with the money they earn by renting their cars on Turo. More than half of the respondents said they pay down their car loan or lease, while about a third said they added to their savings.

Michael Quinn, the lead content strategist for the hospitality startup Lyric, leased a 2017 Subaru Forester for commuting to Palo Alto but found he was using it much less than he expected. Instead of letting it idle, he decided to start renting it out on Turo.

He averages one or two bookings a week, he said, and it covers all the costs of the SUV.

"It's like having a free car in the city," Quinn said.

Veronica belongs to the group of Turo users — 23% of survey respondents — who said they use their Turo earnings to buy an additional car to list on the service.

The Tesla Model S is the most popular car make and model in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to Turo, followed by the Tesla Model X and the BMW 3 Series. Since its limited-production launch last year, the Tesla Model 3 has also become a local favorite.

"I literally have renters who will take it out for an hour because they want to test drive it," Veronica said of her Model 3, adding that those are her favorite renters because they spend so little time in her car — the chance of an accident is that much smaller.

One Turo host in San Francisco (not pictured) said he earned $40,000 last year by renting his 2016 Tesla Model X to strangers via the app. Shutterstock

Like many power hosts, Veronica gives renters the option of paying extra for door-to-door delivery. (She charges $100.) She works as a freelancer, so her schedule allows her to leave in the middle of the day to drop off or pick up the Tesla. Turo doesn't require hosts to offer delivery, though it says it does improve their chance of booking a reservation.

Veronica doesn't offer delivery for her first car, a Toyota Corolla, which she also lists on Turo, because she said its make and model don't justify a big delivery fee.

The biggest inconvenience of using Turo, according to Veronica, is drop-off. Sometimes a person books one of her cars within a few hours of the reservation, and she has to stop what she's doing to meet them. She's excited that Turo just announced a feature designed to let hosts remotely unlock their vehicles instantly through the Turo app.

If a renter makes a mess of her car — like during one ski trip to Tahoe in her Corolla — Veronica has the option of charging them for cleaning. She has to provide Turo with before-and-after photos of the vehicle's interior to make the Veronicasaction.

Quinn said he couldn't think of a bad experience on Turo.

"They have really all been positive experiences," he said. "I think my favorite was renting my car to a family who needed a bigger SUV to visit their extended family in Tahoe."

He added: "They were so thankful and took such great care of the car. And it was touching to help them make that trip happen."

UPDATE: Veronica's last name has been removed to protect her privacy.

Dave Smith/Business Insider Thousands of disparate thoughts fly through our heads every single minute of the day.

"I need to do laundry this week."

"I have a big project coming up for work, I should spend some time on that."

"I should make tacos for dinner tonight."

"Oh, I forgot to call my mom yesterday."

There are plenty of apps to categorize your various to-dos, but there aren't many apps that can help categorize your whole life: including your to-dos, but also your random thoughts, ideas, projects, and areas of your life, like work, friends, and family.

Things 3, from the Germany-based software startup Cultured Code, is a 2017 Apple Design award-winning app for organizing your life that's both simple and robust. It works across Apple devices only right now (sorry Android and PC users), but if you have at least one-Apple made product it's probably worth your consideration.

Thanks to Cultured Code, which provided me with review codes to try Things 3 on my Apple devices, I can confidently say that Things 3 is remarkable organization tool. It's great for jotting down quick thoughts that come along, but it's really best for tackling more complex projects — like planning vacations, learning a new language, and especially prioritizing your various work tasks.

I've spent a few months importing my entire life into Things 3 — here's what it's like to use the app, and why you should consider buying it:

YouTube has terminated the popular FamilyOFive channel, in which couple Michael and Heather Martin posted "prank" videos featuring their children, over child abuse concerns.

Michael Martin started vlogging on the channel DaddyOFive, where he and his wife Heather orchestrated "pranks" on their five children. The Martins drew criticism as many viewed the "pranks" as child abuse.

In one video, Michael prompted one of the children to slap his sister, and another showed him pushing his young son Cody into a bookcase.

The Martins have maintained in the past that the videos are in part staged, and the children are in on the joke. Nevertheless in September, following outcry about a video where Michael and Heather squirted invisible ink on Cody's carpet and then screamed obscenities at him, the pair were sentenced to five years probation for child neglect and lost custody of their two youngest children, Emma and Cody.

Following the conviction, the couple deleted all the videos on the DaddyOFive account — save one which stated that the pranks were fakes — and moved from Maryland to West Virginia where they recommenced vlogging from an account called FamilyOFive. The new account racked up 176 million views, according to the Guardian.

On Wednesday, YouTube shut down the FamilyOFive account, as well as an affiliated gaming channel operated by Michael. A YouTube spokesman said "content that endangers children is unacceptable to us."

"We have worked extensively alongside experts in child safety to make sure we have strict policies and are aggressively enforcing them," he told Business Insider. "Given this channel owner's previous strikes for violating our guidelines prohibiting child endangerment, we're removing all of his channels under our terms of service."

The Martins told local news station WUSA9 in a written statement they have "worked very hard to reestablish and heal ourselves over the last 18 months" and intend to continue producing videos "within the strict boundaries we have set for ourselves."

After YouTube banned the Martins, their children Jake, Ryan and Alex uploaded a video to a channel called Team DO5 Fans entitled "Goodbye Youtube," in which they say that the pranks are harmless and planned.

WhatsApp is dramatically limiting the ability for people to forward messages after the Indian government blamed fake news going viral via messages for a recent spate of mob violence.

The change means it'll be much harder for people to forward messages — including fake news — to lots of contacts at once. Now users around the world will only be able to forward messages to 20 people at once.

In India, where viral fake news on WhatsApp has been blamed for increased mob lynchings, people will only be able to forward messages to five people at once. The previous forwarding limit was 250.

WhatsApp explained the changes in a blog post on Thursday. The company said: "We believe that these changes — which we'll continue to evaluate — will help keep WhatsApp the way it was designed to be: A private messaging app."

The company will also end the "quick forward" function in India, which allowed users to quickly forward on videos and photos.

The use of WhatsApp to spread fake news is an extremely serious issue in India. Recently, 30 people were arrested after a 2,000-person mob became incensed by WhatsApp rumours of a child kidnapping and lynched a man.

The Indian government threatened to take legal action against WhatsApp after this and a string of other lynchings. There have reportedly been at least 20 lynchings in the past two months caused by child abduction allegations, according to The Guardian. There have been similar issues in Sri Lanka and Myanmar.

WhatsApp's own privacy functionality, end-to-end encryption, means the company can't actually track who is spreading fake news or how. That suggests there won't be a full crackdown any time soon.

And WhatsApp's parent company, Facebook, is reluctant to police speech on any of its platforms. In a recent interview with Recode, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company wouldn't theoretically ban Holocaust deniers because they weren't "intentionally" getting it wrong and because people deserved a voice.

Facebook is, however, going to start pulling down fake news if it incites violence. The strategy was outlined this week and will involve Facebook working with outside organisations to determine if false information is potentially dangerous. It will initially be rolled out in Sri Lanka and Myanmar.

Topping out at 1,296 feet this week, 30 Hudson Yards is the second tallest skyscraper in New York City.

The tower is part of a new $25 billion neighborhood by the same name. Hudson Yards is the most expensive real-estate development in American history. Located between 30th and 34th street on Manhattan's Far West Side, it features a mix of office space, expensive condo buildings, retail, and outdoor public space.

Big tech companies and financial firms, including Amazon, JPMorgan, and BlackRock, have moved or plan to move to Hudson Yards. These moves point to a larger corporate migration trend from Midtown to the lower end of the island. Much of the city's Fortune 500 is now relocating below 42nd Street, an area with a growing tech scene.

Hudson Yards, which will span 28 acres by 2024, is also part of a larger luxury development boom that has accelerated in Manhattan over the past several decades. The island's Far West Side was once home to warehouses, tenements, and rail yards. Today, it features bars with $14 cocktails, multi-million-dollar apartments that overlook an lush elevated park, boutiques, and restaurants founded by celebrity chefs like David Chang, José Andrés, and Thomas Keller.

The High Line near Manhattan's Hudson Yards. Shutterstock/Marco Rubino

Over the next three years, Amazon is hiring 2,000 more employees for its new 360,000-square-foot office at 5 Manhattan West in Hudson Yards. To attract the online retail giant, New York state provided $20 million in performance-based taxed credits through Empire State Development's Excelsior Jobs Program. New York City is also a finalist for Amazon's $5 billion second headquarters, dubbed HQ2, with Hudson Yards listed as one of four potential sites across three boroughs.

In December, BlackRock, a financial company that manages $5 trillion in assets, struck a deal with Hudson Yards developer Related Companies to headquarter there for at least 20 years, too. As The New York Times reported, BlackRock will move to 15 floors at 50 Hudson Yards in 2022, pledging to keep 2,672 jobs in Manhattan and create another 700. As it did with Amazon, the state has awarded the company special tax credits, which could be worth up to $25 million.

Inside BlackRock's headquarters at Hudson Yards, New York City. Hollis Johnson/Business Insider Many corporations, including JPMorgan, Google Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs, and Coach, have already made the move to Hudson Yards.

For JPMorgan, the new headquarters is ground zero for growing tech ambitions. The firm recently told Business Insider it has a $10.8 billion tech budget and 50,000 technologists on its payroll. Many employees moved to the Hudson Yards office this year.

Companies including TimeWarner, CNN, Wells Fargo, HBO, and the global investment firm KKR will settle into the neighborhood's tallest tower, 30 Hudson Yards, following its completion in 2019.

Three week ago, employees at ad tech firm LiveRamp officially learned that they would be parting ways with more than 2,000 colleagues they worked alongside under the umbrella of parent company Acxiom.

Acxiom had announced the sale of its marketing solutions business to Interpublic Group for $2.3 billion, and LiveRamp was not part of the deal.

That's left a cloud of uncertainty hanging over LiveRamp, which makes technology to help brands reach consumers with targetted online ads.

Inside LiveRamp's San Francisco offices, a source tells Business Insider, employees are anxious but optimistic as they await direction from management on what the next months and years hold. Overall, there is a sense that whatever change happens, it will be for the best at the company, which has maintained its startup ethos despite being owned by the Little Rock, Arkansas Acxiom corporation since 2014.

Outside the company, speculation is rife about the fate of the LiveRamp business, which could be worth billions if a larger tech company decides to buy it from Acxiom.

While Acxiom maintains a market cap around $3 billion on the public markets, bankers and insiders alike believe that LiveRamp could be valued even higher once it's looked at as a standalone company. One insider floated $4 billion as a reasonable purchase price for LiveRamp, and sources told AdAge that they see the business going for $2.5 billion to $3 billion.

But the sale of LiveRamp is no sure thing. Management could try to run LiveRamp as an independent public company and capitalize on its growing valuation to make big impact investments, including some acquisitions and strategic partnerships of its own.

Here's what industry insiders think could happen to the company.

Salesforce, Oracle and Adobe could all take a look

LiveRamp is a data onboarding platform, or middleware company, which moves data from across multiple websites and sources. It's used by marketers to connect vasts amounts of customer data to individual customer profiles.

It's a tool for marketers to understand their customers better, but LiveRamp itself doesn't actually own any of the data. Instead, it runs the pipes that move marketing data around the internet.

Some think Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen could go after LiveRamp. Rick Wilking/Reuters The company hasn't stated publicly whether it's selling itself. But sources told Business Insider's Mike Shields in May that it's shopping LiveRamp around.

Though LiveRamp is marketing tech, insiders believe that its new home will likely be an enterprise tech company, if not a private equity firm.

Insiders said it could attract the offers from companies like Oracle, Salesforce, Adobe or SAP, which have competing marketing platforms, or one looking to grow in that space like IBM.

"Most companies don't have any idea how good the LiveRamp business is because Acxiom doesn't really describe it in anyway that is comprehensible," said one source, who believed that Acxiom chose to sell its marketing solutions business separate from the whole as a way to maximize LiveRamp's value in a future sale.

Adding to LiveRamp's fire is that fact that it's a busy year for M&A both inside and outside of marketing tech.

Salesforce, for instance, acquired another middleware company MuleSoft for $6.5 billion in March — a 36% premium on the company's stock price at the time. And AT&T reportedly paid $1.6 billion for the ad tech company AppNexus in June.

"I wouldn't be surprised to see an M&A food fight erupting in this space," said Paul Inouye, a partner at Union Square Advisors. "I think the back half of this year in the space is going to be active."

LiveRamp could thrive on its own

Acxiom, which has a market cap around $3 billion, got just 23% of its revenues from LiveRamp in 2018. But some think that LiveRamp's own market value could grow once investors start seeing it as a Software-as-a-Service company along the lines of Salesforce or Workday.

"I've seen this before in other businesses where you just get two very different types of businesses," added Inouye, who said that Acxiom reminds him of previous iterations of Hewlett-Packard, as well as eBay and PayPal when they were under the same roof.

Acxiom CEO Scott Howe could continue to run LiveRamp as an independent company. John Lamparski/Stringer

"I think what happens if you have that as your financial profile, your stock holder constituency is bifurcated. It makes it hard to operate because you have two different investor bases."

This is because SaaS companies typically trade based on a high revenue multiple, where as non-SaaS companies often trade based on EBITDA — earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.

The EBITDA model favors companies with low growth but high margins. IPG bought Acxiom's marketing assets for $2.3 billion, which William Blair analyst Adam Klauber pointed out suggests an EBITDA multiple of around 13x.

On the other hand, the median public SaaS company was valued 9.2 times its 2018 revenue, according to the Bessember Venture Partners Cloud Index. As Menlo Venture principal Steve Sloane noted in January, this tends to value smaller companies higher based off of their growth potential.

LiveRamp's business brought in $211 million in revenue in fiscal 2018, which was up 43% from the year before. So if it fell in line with the median valuation, LiveRamp would be worth $1.94 billion — more than half of the Acxiom's overall market cap. But since LiveRamp now has $2.3 billion in cash from the sale of Acxiom's assets, the company, Klauber said, should trade in the $40 to $45 per share range — which gives LiveRamp a maximum valuation of $3.7 billion.

Once LiveRamp is officially on its own, it could see its stock move quickly. Across the board, public SaaS companies have performed better than the rest of the market. The BVP Cloud Index is up 41.2% since the start of 2018, where as the tech-heavy Nasdaq is up just 11.4% and the more generalist S&P 500 is up just 3.8%.

"Assuming this deal is completed, Live Ramp should be a stand-alone entity. Its characteristics should make a very attractive stock," Klauber wrote on July 2. "The unique nature of the asset suggests that this will be a compelling stock over the longer term."

Are you an insider with information on what's coming next for LiveRamp? We want to hear more. Contact Becky Peterson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

25 men were arrested in India on Sunday, after a 2,000-person mob killed a 27-year-old man over baseless rumors that he was a child kidnapper.

The deadly incident was the latest in a flood of deadly lynchings across the country sparked by hoaxes on social media — and now the Indian government is threatening WhatsApp with legal action over them.

AFP reports that the Indian government has now publicly warned that it may take action against WhatsApp over the issue, with the information technology ministry issuing a harshly-worded statement on Thursday.

"Rampant circulation of irresponsible messages in large volumes on their platform have not been addressed adequately by WhatsApp," says the statement. "When rumours and fake news get propagated by mischief-mongers, the medium used for such propagation cannot evade responsibility and accountability."

"If (WhatsApp) remain mute spectators they are liable to be treated as abettors and thereafter face consequent legal action."

The Facebook-owned messaging app has come under intense scrutiny in recent months over hoaxes and disinformation circulating on its platform, leading to sometimes deadly mob violence. There have reportedly been at least 20 lynchings in the last two months caused by child abduction allegations, according to The Guardian.

WhatsApp's messages are end-to-end encrypted for security, meaning the company cannot monitor users' messages for misinformation or deliberate hoaxes the way Facebook can on its Messenger app. The company is taking some steps to try and tackle the issue, including flagging messages that have been forwarded, to make it clear that the sender isn't the original author of the post. It has also taken out full-page newspaper ads to warn about these hoaxes.

"Fortnite: Battle Royale," the free video game mode that took the world by storm last Fall, is a billion dollar business. That's according to a new report by SuperData, which estimates that the game has generated more than $1 billion in revenue across all platforms.

For some perspective, this means that Fortnite has now made more money than several of last year's highest worldwide-grossing blockbuster films, including "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle," Marvel Studios' "Spider-Man: Homecoming," and "Wonder Woman;" and more than double the gross worldwide earnings of the latest Star Wars flick, "Solo."

The report points out that the revenue comes entirely from in-game purchases, which — in Fortnite's case — offer no competitive advantage to the game. In the game, an entirely optional $10 Battle Pass allows players to earn and collect in-game currency called V-bucks, which they can spend on costumes, accessories and dance moves for their playable character. But if you don't want to play the game enough to unlock these perks, you can also purchase more V-bucks with real bucks, at a rate of 1,000 V-bucks for $9.99.

The most expensive character outfits — called "skins" in the gaming world — go for 2,000 V-bucks, or $20.

Fortnite was not the first game to bring the battle royale genre the to the masses. Games like DayZ, H1Z1, and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds popularized the "Hunger Games"-style formula, in which a hundred players are dropped onto a shrinking play area, and must scavenge for weapons and supplies in an effort to be the last man standing.

At launch, the game was available for PC and PlayStation 4. Today, it can be played for free on PCs, any gaming console, and on mobile iOS devices.

Fortnite: Battle Royale was first introduced as a free-to-play, early access mode of the original "Fortnite" title, a $60 zombie survival game that creators at Epic Games had been developing for more than five years.

The "Battle Royale" mode has now become vastly more popular than the original game — so much so that it is widely referred to with the full game's shorter title — thanks in large part to attention from celebrities and a large group of prominent video game streamers, like Tyler "Ninja" Blevins, who play the game on live streaming platforms like Twitch or YouTube Gaming for millions of fans to watch.

Fortnite has, in turn, helped Blevins, a former professional esports athlete, become a celebrity in his own right, complete with multi-million-dollar sponsorships, official merchandise, and an invitation to the 2018 ESPY Awards.

Since Fortnite has skyrocketed the battle royale genre to worldwide popularity, several other video game series have sought to emulate their success, and they're right to do so. SuperData predicts that games which feature a battle royale mode will earn 12 percent of all gaming revenue in 2018. Most notably, the upcoming installment of "Call of Duty: Black Ops" will feature the franchise's first take on battle royale.

The data shows that Fortnite saw its largest spike in players early this year, and at the time, many speculated that the free game was simply experiencing a fleeting moment of hype that would quickly dissipate.

Today, ten months after its launch in 2017, Fortnite is still the most-streamed and most-watched game on Twitch, an this impressive benchmark has placed the game among the most popular video games of all time, and signals that Fortnite is going to continue to be very profitable for a very long time.

Wall Street analyst Mark Mahaney, managing director at RBC Capital Markets, is widely known as one of the most accurate stock pickers on the Street.

He recently spoke at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado, on the surprising methods he's developed over his 20-year career for spotting winners and losers on the stock market.

He's the first to admit that he hasn't gotten every single call right. His misses, although rare, clearly burn in his memory.

His most major misfires, in his own words: "I put a sell on Amazon in 2003 right before it began one of its major inflection points. I've had a buy selectively on Snapchat since its IPO, and I did put a buy on Blue Apron at its IPO," he admitted on stage during his talk, to an appreciative audience.

He said that one key tenet of getting rich on tech stocks is that it's not for short term thinkers looking to make a few quick bucks.

He also warned that, no matter how solid tech companies look at the time they go public, "there will be blood." They may flourish as startups, and land big checks from a savvy private equity investors, but they "can still blow up" after they go public, he said. "It comes with the territory."

So Mahaney's top advice was to "focus on fundamentals" while thinking long term. Does the company have a real shot at growing its customer base for many more years to come? If it operates in a huge market, like global advertising (Google), global retail (Amazon) or entertainment (Netflix), the answer is yes. As big as those companies are, they have still only scratched the surface of the global spending in their industries.

He also offered one surprising tips on a good time to pounce on a tech stock: "look for the lucky lexicons." That means to listen for how people talk about companies.

"When companies become verbs, nouns, when they become part of the popular vernacular, that's usually a pretty good time to invest in the stock," he said.

For instance, it was a good time to invest in Google when people started saying they were going to "Google"for something instead of search for it, "tweet" something instead of share on social media, it or "Netflix and chill" instead of — well, whatever their evening plans entailed.

When that happens to a company, "their need to advertise has dramatically shrunk because they are already part of the vernacular" and those companies are "usually a safer investment."

As for spotting losers, he said the telltale sign is a sharp decline in growth. This means "there's something going wrong," he said, like maybe the company has maxed out its market and can't think of new ways to expand. Tons of turnover in the CEO spot is also a "disaster" for investors.

The whole talk is excellent and punctuated with humor. Take a look.

Microsoft posted $110 billion in revenue in its 2018 fiscal year, the company announced on Wednesday. That's the first time Microsoft has passed $100 billion in annual revenue, ever.

Buried in the earnings report is another first: Microsoft's gaming business generated just over $10 billion in annual revenue. The company says this is the first time that its gaming business has ever crossed that threshold.

In the final quarter of its fiscal year, Microsoft's overall gaming business grew 39% from the same period in 2017 "driven by higher revenue from Xbox software and services," the company said in a press release.

To that point, Xbox software and services alone are up 36% over the same period, "mainly from a third-party title," said Microsoft CFO Amy Hood on a conference call to discuss its earnings report. While Hood didn't specify which particular game drove such material growth, the most likely suspect is "Fortnite," the international phenomenon.

That doesn't tell the full story, though. Over the last year, Microsoft has renewed its push to take its gaming business beyond selling hardware and software, and moving into services. At the same time, it promoted Xbox boss Phil Spencer to the newly-created role of Executive VP of Gaming, to give him more room for this push.

The clearest example of this is Xbox Game Pass, a $10/month service that gives unlimited access to hundreds of Xbox One games. Game Pass launched in June 2017, and Microsoft has continued to push it — even committing to bringing first-party blockbusters like the upcoming "Forza Horizon 4" to the service on the day they hit store shelves.

Another relative newcomer is Mixer, Microsoft's answer to the massive success of Amazon's Twitch. While Mixer isn't nearly as popular among video game streamers as its rivals, it's won a loyal community. Microsoft has indicated that Mixer is a major push, as it works to reach gamers on iPhone and Android.

To that end, Microsoft continues its investment on Xbox Live, its online gaming service. It had 57 million active users during the quarter, Microsoft reported. That's up from the 53 million it had in the same period of 2017, but a little bit down from the 59 million it reported in the previous quarter. It's free to join Xbox Live, but there's a $60/year Xbox Live Gold plan with premium features — notably, the ability to play online multiplayer games.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella highlighted the combination of Game Pass, Mixer, and Xbox Live as "driving record levels of growth and engagement." In other words, as much as the Xbox business is still going strong, it's these less-traditional focus areas where Microsoft is pinning its hopes. And with a $10 billion year for the first time ever, you can only expect Microsoft to dig in.

Finally, to put this in context: Microsoft no longer releases Xbox One sales figures, but it's generally accepted to be second place to the Sony PlayStation 4 by a country mile. While Microsoft just launched a new Xbox One X console last year, and says that it's already working on new hardware, it's clear that the company is hedging its bets.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong Anthony Harvey / Stringer

Coinbase is best known for being one of the largest venues for mom-and-pop investors in the US to buy cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum.

But the San Francisco-based firm also has a band of ex-Wall Street executives working on addressing the biggest pain point in the crypto market: the lack of a full scale prime-broker.

On Wall Street, middlemen called brokers sit between institutional investors, like a hedge fund or money manager, and exchanges and other trading venues. Such operations are hard to come by in the crypto world because the barriers to entry are high.

Coinbase, however, is looking to overcome these barriers. It launched earlier this year a prime broker business, Coinbase Prime, joining a family of businesses spanning asset management, venture capital investing, and retail trading. 

As part of the business, Coinbase is offering some of the services of a traditional prime broker, including the onboarding of large institutional clients and custody, which had previously been announced by the firm. What's new, however, is that Coinbase is preparing to offer margin finance as early as the end of the year, people familiar with the matter said. 

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong Anthony Harvey / Stringer

That would allow institutional investors to borrow to trade, which can help magnify returns, or leverage a short position, according to the people.

In the future, it is possible that Coinbase's broker business could help clients find the best venue to make a trade, even if that means sending it to a rival trading outfit, a service known as best execution. 

"Coinbase is pursuing a lot of different initiatives that make sense and take it closer to or are more similar to traditional finance: custody, financing, lending, security tokens, and the institutional portal," said Greenwich Associates' consultant Richard Johnson. "They have the resources to fund them and will surely have some successes."

Already, the firm has onboarded a $20 billion hedge fund through its prime business, the people said, declining to specify which fund. The team is working on getting other large hedge funds onto its trading platform. 

At the same time, the firm is actively building out its teams in New York, Chicago, and London. Notably, it hired Christine Sandler from the New York Stock Exchange as cohead of institutional sales, as well as Hunter Merghart from Barclays as a sales trader. 

Prime brokers arose in the equities markets in the early 1990s, about the same time the hedge fund industry started to take off. According to the banking research firm Coalition, the 12 largest banks collectively brought in $4.9 billion from their prime-broker units in the first quarter of 2018, the highest level in three years.

Colleen Sullivan, the head of the crypto venture firm CMT Digital, said the lack of a end-to-end prime broker was among the bigger issues holding back large Wall Street firms from entering the crypto space.

Having to self-finance at each exchange opens the firm to above-average risk on Wall Street. She described the lack of prime services in crypto as CMT Digital's "biggest pain point."

"Without a prime broker, trading firms are directly subject to events that an exchange may suffer like hacks, regulatory issues, operational issues, technology issues (and many more) — all of which may lead to loss of the trading firm's cash and coin," she said.

Coinbase's decision to enter into the broker business is a bit ironic. Bitcoin, the largest digital currency on the market, was founded in the aftermath of the financial crisis as an alternative peer-to-peer financial system to Wall Street that would render middlemen useless. Coinbase's entrance into the institutional broker business also raises red-flags to some market observers. 

"There are many potential conflicts of interest in such a vertically integrated model," David Weisberger, a market structure specialist and CEO of CoinRoutes, said. 

The SEC, according to Weisberger, has been keen on keeping strict barriers between different Wall Street businesses because of the various conflicts that could arise. Specifically, Weisberger said he was concerned about confidential exchange info — who is trading and what funds are sitting on their accounts — leaking over to the broker side, which could be used to provide color to trading partners.

Institutional exchanges have historically taken steps to address potential conflict of interest. 

NYSE Group sold Wave Securities, a brokerage unit, which it acquired when it bought Arca in 2005, after the SEC expressed concerns about conflicts. 

There are parallels between the two situations, insiders say, although it may take some time to play out since the crypto market is so nascent. 

"But right now, there's so many mature players, it is probably a good thing for Coinbase to do this because it is filling a much bigger gap," said Kyle Tuskey, a former Wave technologist, and current COO of Deep Systems, a financial technology firm. 

Since Coinbase is not a registered securities exchange, it isn't clear whether the SEC would have the authority to step in and create firewalls or flat out prohibit Coinbase from operating such a business. 

A representative for the SEC could not be reached for comment about Coinbase's ambitions. A spokesman for Coinbase also could not be reached for comment. 

Still, Robert Hockett, a professor of law at Cornell University, said "it seems likely the SEC will take interest in Coinbase's intention to offer prime brokerage services."

"This raises conflict concerns, given Coinbase's also running a coin exchange, reminiscent of those that the Commission has found when securities firms have attempted to combine these two roles."