Alphabet Inc, Google's parent company, must become more transparent about the company's financial performance if investors are to have any chance at accurately valuing the company, according to one Wall Street analyst.

Against a backdrop of mostly positive expectations for Google heading into Monday's quarterly earnings report, Ben Schachter senior analyst at Macquarie Research, stood out for taking a much more cautious approach to the company's shares.

"We are increasingly frustrated with the lack of visibility into GOOG's core revenue drivers, and valuation is starting to become an issue," Schachter wrote in his report. "However, with revenues growing (at 20 percent year from last year) , we don't think Google is wildly expensive, but see upside as limited."

Schachter has a neutral rating on Alphabet's shares.

Getty / Chip Somodevilla

A lack of transparency about Google's financial performance has long been a complaint on Wall Street, and Schachter argues reporting is less clear than ever.

He wrote: "We are approaching a point where we, and we believe The Street collectively, are not understanding the size of search vs YouTube vs programmatic (advertising), which may lead to increasing volatility."

And that wasn't his only problem. In his report, the analyst called attention to the excitement on Wall Street over the potential growth of some of Google's side businesses. This presumably includes Waymo, Alphabet's autonomous car operation, which has taken an early lead in the nascent self-driving car market.

Google has invested heavily in businesses that managers hope will one day be on par with search advertising, the company's bread-and-butter business. Wall Street too is eager for Google to diversify, a means to ensure the company can better weather any downturns in advertising as well as remain a growth story among investors. But Schachter pointed out that in terms of revenue, most of these bets have yet to pay off.

"Advertising today still represents 86% of revenues," the analyst wrote. "In our view, while there have been innumerable notes, articles, and discussions posted about all the fascinating technologies that Google is pursuing the single most important driver of the stock over the past five years is related to the number of ads it shows in its mobile search results."

Most financial analysts say they believe that Wednesday's big news, the $5 billion fine imposed on Google by the European Union, represents little to no threat to the overall health of Google's business in the short- and medium- term.

Beyond that timeframe, there are some concerns that some of the restrictions imposed on Google by the EU could benefit some of Google's competitors. The EU's competition watchdog demands that Google end or alter several trade practices.

European regulators claim Google forced manufacturers to pre-install its browser and search apps on their mobile devices, and also paid manufacturers to exclusively preinstall Google search. According to the EU, this stifled competition. Google also allegedly broke the law by preventing device makers from running alternative versions of Android — known as forks — that would enable owners to run derivative software, such as Amazon's Fire OS.

Many on Wall Street were unimpressed with the allegations or the fine.

"We view the European Commission's ruling against Google as a bit misguided, but likely a relatively minor inconvenience in the short and medium terms," wrote Colin Sebastian, senior research analyst for Baird Equity Research. "Longer term, we see modest (but not unexpected) added risk from requirements to support forked versions of Android, and secondly, from the direct and/or indirect benefits of this ruling for Apple and Amazon."

As for the other growth areas in Google's business, such as advertising, cloud enterprise and retail, they appear to be running smoothly, according to analysts.

John Blackledge at Cowen Equity Research wrote Wednesday that his firm spoke to a digital advertising agency that spends $1 billion in US digital advertising "across paid search and paid social channels."

That ad agency told Cowen that spending on Google search was up between 15% to 20% due in part to strong demand for mobile, and the growing number of ad impressions.

Blackledge wrote that according to its ad agency source, "mobile continues to drive Google Search spend."

Amazon's servers couldn't handle the flood of traffic from shoppers during Prime Day — and the company cut off all international traffic and launched a backup landing page in an effort to fix the problem, according to internal documents obtained by CNBC.

Amazon declined to comment to CNBC and did not immediately respond to request for comment from Business Insider.

At exactly at 12 p.m. PDT on Monday, right Amazon's annual doorbuster sales event began, the company's website was riddled with glitches and outages. A source told CNBC that the scene inside Amazon was "chaotic" and about 300 people got on an emergency conference call to try and deal with the issues.

According to outside experts who reviewed the documents for CNBC, Amazon's auto-scaling technology may have broken down under the burden, which would have limited the number of servers available to respond to the boom in traffic. Auto-scaling automatically increases or decreases cloud server capacity based on changes in traffic.

During the first minutes the site was experiencing glitches, Amazon created a "scaled-back" front page to relieve pressure on servers, CNBC reported. At the time, users who clicked on buttons on Amazon's main landing page weren't taken anywhere. The company also cut off all international traffic in an effort to reduce server load.

The reduced server capacity allegedly started to effect another tool called Sable, which coordinates several other internal infrastructure services at Amazon. At about 1pm PDT, says the report, Sable sounded a "red" emergency alert, which could have been related to problems at other parts of the site, including the Alexa voice service and Prime Video.

At the time, the company acknowledged the technical hiccups in a short statement, which said "some customers are having difficulty shopping, and we're working to resolve this issue quickly."

But despite the embarrassing glitches, Amazon reported that Prime Day saw a record number of sales, becoming the biggest shopping day in the company's history.

Read the full CNBC report here>>

CHICAGO — McDonald's only began delivering fast food in the United States less than two years ago. But, those two years have been explosive.

On Thursday, McDonald's celebrated "Global McDelivery Day," a holiday of sorts that the chain created last year, the first July that the fast-food giant was offering delivery in any major capacity. McDonald's now offers delivery through a partnership with UberEats at 12,000 locations in 60 markets, including 5,000 restaurants in the US.

"I think we're just getting started," Lucy Brady, the McDonald's senior vice president who has overseen delivery at the chain, told Business Insider.

"Everybody who tries it loves it," Brady said. "There's always a little bit of, 'Well will the fries taste good? Will they show up hot?' ... If [they] have a great experience, we're finding, customers repeat over and over."

McDonald's fries are a delivery best seller — but also a challenge. Hollis Johnson

McDonald's launched delivery in the US as a test at just 200 restaurants in Florida in early 2017. To go from 200 locations to 5,000 in under two years is an impressive feat in its own right. More than that, it represents a new strategy for McDonald's — one that prioritizes "progress over perfection," Brady says.

Over the past three years, under the leadership of CEO Steve Easterbrook, McDonald's has realigned its strategies to roll out more tests and adopt new tech in an effort to modernize the chain. The results have included self-order kiosks rolling out across the US, new menu items such as fresh-beef burgers, and a delivery deal with UberEats.

"Uber prides ourselves on moving quickly, but in so many different circumstances I feel like McDonald's moves faster," Liz Meyerdirk, the head of business development at UberEats, said.

"The pace of change is accelerating," Brady said. "The ability to anticipate and react quickly is really important."

Making things happen quickly can sometimes mean McDonald's hits bumps in the process and floors the metaphorical gas, fixing the problem while continuing to speed ahead. Making sure fries stay warm has been a top customer concern and a problem that has plagued McDonald's since it began testing delivery.

While cold, floppy fries can convince customers to never order McDonald's via UberEats again, the chain has pressed onward, trying to boost reliability as delivery simultaneously expands.

"It's never 100% solved," Brady said. "But, it's our best-selling item. Satisfaction is very high."

Hollis Johnson

If McDonald's can boost delivery orders, the chain can see some concrete benefits.

Delivery allows for more late-night orders, with roughly 60% of orders currently coming after 4 p.m. The average delivery check is 1.5 to two times as large as a typical customer's order. And, it helps make McDonald's seem more modern and relevant more generally.

"We're not just growing the delivery business," Brady said. "The rising tide is actually going to lift both the delivery business and the restaurant business. And, that creates a really vibrant brand and energy."

The biggest challenge right now, according to Brady, is simple awareness. Even in cities that offer McDonald's delivery, many customers simply aren't aware that it is available, something McDonald's is trying to combat with initatives like the McDelivery Day giveaways. And, there's still the question of how to speed ahead and expand delivery while ensuring reliability.

"How do you make sure you're moving fast enough and scaling fast enough, as a global business, but still taking into account all the various local nuances to really represent what the people want?" Meyerdirk said.

For these two global brands, part of the solution is tweaking delivery based on local needs as the service expands. In skyscraper-filled Hong Kong, for example, some UberEats delivery people have ditched their cars to make deliveries on foot.

As McDonald's hustles to stay ahead of the growing pack of chains trying to boost sales with delivery, not everything will be be perfect immediately. But, for the fast-food chain, forging ahead — both in delivery and in modernizing the company overall — is worth risking a cold fry or two along the way.

For two years, a team of 100 engineers at Google have secretly been working on the successor to Android, the operating system that powers three quarters of the world's smartphones, according to a Bloomberg report published Thursday.

Sources close to the project, which is called Fuchsia, told Bloomberg that engineers working on the software want to begin incorporating it into voice-controlled speakers and other "connected home devices" in the next three years, and on larger devices like laptops in the next five years.

The report also asserts that members of the team say that Fuchsia could someday power all of Google's devices, including Pixel smartphones and Google Home speakers, as well as third-party devices that currently rely on Android and or Chrome OS.

The existence of Google's Fuchsia software has been public for some time now, with details about the open-source software available online, but this is the first time we're hearing about its potential scope and future applications. Google acknowledged the existence of Fuchsia in 2017, when Android VP of engineering Dave Burke called it an "early-stage experimental project." You can see additional screenshots of a previous version of the open-source software here.

When asked to confirm these plans for the operating system Thursday, a Google spokesperson provided the following statement to Business Insider:

"Fuchsia is one of many experimental open source projects at Google. We're not providing additional details about the project at this time."

Google has been quietly posting code related to Fuchsia online since 2016, and according to Bloomberg's findings, the software will likely be designed to address the shortcomings of Android, focussing particularly on voice commands and frequent security updates.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai and founding member of the Android team, Hiroshi Lockheimer, have been reluctant to commit to future plans for Fuchsia, according to the report, given that a re-vamp of the most popular operating system in the world could have massive ramifications for Google's core business as an advertising platform and its hardware partners.

Read more about the project over at Bloomberg.

Mark Zuckerberg called Donald Trump soon after the 2016 US presidential election to congratulate him on his shock victory, according to a new report from BuzzFeed News— and also reportedly congratulated him on his "successful [advertising] campaign on Facebook.

The new report comes after Business Insider reported in May 2017 that Trump and Zuckerberg had spoken multiple times over the phone since the election, and sheds light on the subjects that the tech titan and then-president-elect discussed.

Mark Zuckerberg has made veiled criticisms of Trump, and has long championed political causes at odds with Trump's platform, like immigration reform. But the Trump campaign was also a major customer for Facebook's advertising business, spending $44 million in the run-up to the 2016 election.

According to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News, Facebook internally views the Trump campaign as an "innovator," and has gone on to use the campaign's techniques to refine its own advertising efforts.

While Zuckerberg and Trump have chatted behind the scenes, it's not clear if the pair have ever met face-to-face. In December 2016, Trump convened a meeting of high-profile tech executives including Apple's Tim Cook and Microsoft's Satya Nadella, but Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg went instead of Zuckerberg.

Reached for comment, a Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider: "We declined to comment on the speculation to Buzzfeed and have nothing else to add."

Conservative politicians have claimed, without proof, that Facebook has an anti-conservative bias — but this hasn't dulled Trump operatives' taste for Facebook advertising. According to a recent study publicized in The New York Times, Trump and his Political Action Committee are currently the single biggest political advertiser on Facebook, spending $274,000 on adverts since May.

Warner Bros. finally revealed how much its upcoming streaming service, DC Universe, will cost.

During San Diego Comic-Con on Thursday, the studio announced that the service will cost $74.99 annually for those who pre-order the service. For those who wait, they'll be able to sign up for a monthly plan that costs $7.99 a month, but they'll miss out on the first three months free that come with the pre-order.

You can pre-order the service now before the full service launches later this fall. To sign up, visit DCUniverse.com.

Numerous original programs based on DC Comics characters are currently in development for the service. The first will be the live-action "Titans" series, featuring the likes of Robin, Starfire, and Beast Boy. It debuts later this year, and the first, violent trailer was released on Thursday.

In 2019, live-action shows "Swamp Thing" and "Doom Patrol" will premiere, along with animated programs like adult comedy "Harley Quinn" and the third season of "Young Justice," rebranded as "Young Justice: Outsiders." "Young Justice" originally aired on Cartoon Network but was canceled in 2013.

In addition to original programs, the service will also offer other DC movies and shows, including the first two seasons of "Batman: The Animated Series," the entire 1970s "Wonder Woman" TV show starring Lynda Carter, "The Dark Knight," and all four of the original "Superman" movies starring Christopher Reeve.

But it wouldn't be a DC service without comics. The service will feature a library of thousands of digital DC comic books from a selection that spans decades — even the first appearances of Superman and Batman in the 1930s. Comics can be read on smartphones, tablets, or TV screens, and will be available to download for offline reading.

DC Universe will be available at launch on iOS, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, and the website.

Check out images from DC Universe shows below, as well as screenshots of the service:

Brenton Thwaites as Robin in "Titans" DC Universe/Warner Bros.

"Harley Quinn" DC Universe/Warner Bros.

"Young Justice: Outsiders" DC Universe/Warner Bros.

DC Universe/Warner Bros.

DC Universe/Warner Bros.

DC Universe/Warner Bros.

Marvel

Disney's Hollywood dominance will soon expand, and with it, Marvel's reign over the superhero genre.

Comcast announced that it was backing out of its bid for Fox assets on Thursday, leaving the door wide open for Disney to finally acquire the Fox film studio and other assets for $71.3 billion.

There are a lot of questions that arise from this merger, notably how it will affect the Hollywood and box-office landscapes. But it also means big things for the Disney-owned Marvel Cinematic Universe, which now has a chance to incorporate Fox-owned properties into the franchise.

Characters like the X-Men, Wolverine, Deadpool, and Fantastic Four will be at Marvel's disposal once the deal is finalized. Disney CEO Bob Iger has said that the MCU may try a "new franchise beyond 'Avengers'" in the future, and Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige called next year's "Avengers 4" a "conclusion."

On top of that, veteran actors of the franchise like Chris Evans, who plays Captain America, have teased that they are ready to retire after "Avengers 4." "Avengers: Infinity War" set up a reunion between the original Avengers in the sequel, and I've written about why that could mean some of those characters' last hurrah.

With all of that in mind, Disney's merger comes at a perfect time if the MCU is planning to head in a new direction after "Avengers 4," but it could also have huge ramifications for all of the characters involved.

Below are 11 heroes, villains, and events that could be introduced to the MCU after the Disney/Fox merger, and what it could mean for the franchise:

Microsoft reported earnings after the bell on Thursday. After initially moving not much at all, Microsoft stock jumped over 4% in after-hours trading. The jump occurred after Microsoft gave guidance for the next quarter on a conference call with investors. 

Here's what Microsoft reported:

Notably, this marks the end of Microsoft's 2018 fiscal year. The company reported $110.4 billion in revenue over the past 12 months, marking the first time it has passed the $100 billion mark.

For the quarter, Microsoft showed strong growth in all three of its major reporting areas — especially in cloud computing, where Wall Street most wants to see growth.

Productivity and Business Processes, the unit that includes Microsoft Office, was up 13% from the year-ago period, to $9.7 billion. Intelligent Cloud, which encompasses the Microsoft Azure cloud-computing platform and related technologies, was up 23%, to $9.6 billion. And More Personal Computing, which includes Windows, the Xbox, and the Surface hardware business, was up 17%, to $10.8 billion.

Notably, Azure — considered the leading rival to the dominant Amazon Web Services — saw revenue growth of 89% from the same period in 2017, though Microsoft doesn't disclose specific financials for the service.

Overall, Microsoft says its commercial cloud revenue, which includes cloud business software and services like Azure and Office 365, is up 53% year over year, to $6.9 billion.

The Windows business was up 7% from the year-ago period, drawn by a stronger demand for PCs preinstalled with the professional version of Windows 10.

Other standouts include revenue from LinkedIn, up 37% from the same time last year, and gaming revenue, up 39%, with Xbox software and services up 36%. The Surface business is up 25% from this time last year, something Microsoft credits to both a strong hardware lineup this year and a 2017 performance that set the bar lower.

Also of note is that Microsoft says its GAAP results reflect a net benefit of $104 million related to the new tax law, as well as a $306 million charge related to restructuring.

Get the latest Microsoft stock price here.

The training Facebook moderators are put through has been revealed in hidden camera footage.

A journalist for British broadcaster Channel 4 went undercover as a Facebook moderator and was shown how to deal with extreme content, including child abuse, self-harm, and racism.

During the secretly filmed training, new moderators are walked through various kinds of content and told to delete, ignore, or mark it as disturbing. The latter means it remains on Facebook, but places a restriction on who is able to view the content.

The reporter was employed by CPL Resources, a Dublin-based company to which Facebook outsources content for moderation. Below are some examples CPL gave during the training, which featured in the Channel 4 documentary "Inside Facebook: Secrets of the Social Network."

Facebook published a blog about the film, in which it said the training fell short of its standards. Monika Bickert, vice president of global policy management, said some of what was shown in Channel 4's documentary "does not reflect Facebook's policies or values, and falls short of the high standards we expect."

Facebook has reviewed training materials at contractors like CPL and provided refresher courses for moderators at the contractor. CPL staff who do not reflect Facebook's standards, no longer moderate content on the site.

CPL told Channel 4: "Ensuring our trainers and employees are always fully trained and up-to-date on Facebook policy changes is critically important to us, so we're investigating this matter as a priority, and taking immediate steps with Facebook."

Footage obtained by Channel 4 showed moderator trainers running through a number of specific examples of how to handle content. In some cases, the decision was clear: The content should be removed. Others were less obvious.

Pictures of topless women — delete

Early in the documentary, trainee moderators were shown pictures of topless women, and instructed to "delete images that depict real adult females with uncovered nipples."

Violent death — mark as disturbing

Moderators were shown images of graphic violence and told that they "are not the nicest to look at" and instructed to duck out of the room and "grab a cup of water" if any of the images made them feel ill.

They were told that footage of someone dying is "not necessarily going to be a delete."

The reporter asked why images of people dying aren't removed, and was told that sometimes they fit within Facebook's terms — especially if they "raise awareness." The trainer did not elaborate on this point on the Channel 4 documentary.

Footage of a little boy being beaten by his step-father — leave it up

The trainee moderators were shown footage of a small boy being viciously attacked by what transpired to be his step-father. This was used as an example of what could be left up and "marked as disturbing."

The trainer says: "We always mark as disturbing child abuse, we never delete it and we never ignore it."

Footage of a grown man beating a small child was shown in training. via Facebook

In Channel 4's undercover footage, a trainee asks what must be done to escalate the child abuse footage. They are told by a trainer that "there's nothing we can do really," unless it's a live video.

In Channel 4's documentary Richard Allan, Facebook's vice president of public policy, said that the video "should have been taken down." You can watch the full interview with Allan below:

Footage of a man eating live baby rats — ignore

While on the job as a moderator, the undercover reporter reviewed footage of somebody eating live baby rats. He was told to ignore the video because it was for "feeding purposes" and therefore didn't violate Facebook's animal cruelty policy.

Footage of two girls fighting — mark as disturbing

Working as a moderator, the undercover reporter came across footage of two teenage girls in a physical fight, which had been shared over 1,000 times. His assessment was that one girl is "definitely more dominant than the other" and results in the other girl getting "battered." He asked for clarification about whether to delete the video.

Channel 4's undercover reporter at work as a moderator. Channel 4/Firecrest Films

A moderator tells him that this video falls under a new policy, and that because the caption on the video is a condemnation of the bullying, it should be marked as disturbing. Otherwise, any physical bullying of minors is a delete.

Images of self-harm — delete "promotion," leave up "admission"

Trainees were shown images and memes of "suicide and self-harm promotion." This included an image of healed cuts on someone's arm accompanied by the text "miss the way it feels." They were told that this kind of content needs to be deleted.

However, content showing self-harm with no "promotional" context is called "self-harm admission," and is left up on the site. The trainer said "anything to do with admission we are going to send a checkpoint." A checkpoint is a message sent to the user, which contains information about mental health support services.

Richard Allan argued that there is a legitimate reason for Facebook to leave images on the platform. "There's actually a very strong valid interest from that person, if they're expressing distress, to be able to express their distress to their family and friends through Facebook and then get help," he said.

Clearly underage users — ignore and don't send help

The trainees were shown an image of a clearly underage user posting a picture about having an eating disorder, in which case they were told not to send a checkpoint. They are told that Facebook does not action underage accounts unless they specifically admit to being under 13 years old.

"We need to have an admission that the person is underage. If not, we just like pretend that we are blind," the trainer said.

Facebook said this is not the case. In her blog, policy chief Bickert said: "If someone is reported to us as being under 13, the reviewer will look at the content on their profile (text and photos) to try to ascertain their age.

"If they believe the person is under 13, the account will be put on a hold and the person will not be able to use Facebook until they provide proof of their age."

Racist hate speech — it depends

The trainees were shown various racist and Islamophobic memes, and told as an example that images calling for "exclusion, death or harm of Muslims" should be removed as "visual hate."

However, as an example of what to ignore, they were given a meme of a girl having her head held underwater with the caption "when your daughter's first crush is a little negro boy." This was because the image, "implies a lot, but to reach actual the violation you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get there."

This meme was used as an example of an "ignore." Firecrest/C4

Facebook told Channel 4 that the image does, in fact, violate its hate speech policy.

Hate speech aimed at immigrants — ignore

The undercover reporter asked for advice on whether to delete a comment which said "f**k off back to your own countries" under a video with a caption referring to Muslim immigrants.

The trainer told the reporter: "If it just said Muslims then yeah, you'd take this action. But it doesn't, so it's actually an ignore." Immigrants specifically have fewer protections than ethnic groups on the platform, according to a secretly filmed CPL staff member.

Pages with large followings — proceed with caution

A trainer told Channel 4's undercover reporter that Britain First's Facebook page, which was taken down in March, had eight or nine violations when five is the theoretical limit, "but obviously they have a lot of followers so they're generating a lot of revenue for Facebook."

Pages with a large following are "shielded content," and can't be deleted by moderators at CPL. Full-time Facebook employees make the final call after the pages are put into the "shielded review queue." One such shielded page is that of far-right activist Tommy Robinson, according to Channel 4, which is followed by just over 904,000 people.

Facebook strongly denied profiting from extreme content. Allan told Channel 4: "Shocking content does not make us more money — that's just a misunderstanding of how the system works."

Elon Musk has apologized for calling a diver involved in rescuing 12 boys and their coach from a flooded Thai cave a 'pedo.'

The incident began when British diver Vernon Unsworth criticized the "kid-size" submarine Musk had made to help with the cave rescue mission and said the Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company "can stick his submarine where it hurts." In response to the criticism, Musk called Unsworth a "pedo guy" and the British diver said he would consider legal action over the slur.

Musk had deleted his tweet earlier but apologized for his comment on Twitter on Tuesday night.

"His actions against me do not justify my actions against him, and for that I apologize to Mr. Unsworth and to the companies I represent as leader. The fault is mine and mine alone," Musk said.

The apology was a follow-up to a tweet sent three minutes earlier in which Musk said his "words were spoken in anger after Mr. Unsworth said several untruths & suggested I engage in a sexual act with the mini-sub."

Musk also pointed out that the sub had been made "according to specifications from the dive team leader."

The outburst seemed to affect Tesla shares with stocks sliding about 3.5% on Monday as investors urged Musk to abandon his tirades and focus on his companies.

Diamond and Silk. Reuters

Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Wednesday.

1. Walmart and Microsoft, Amazon's two most powerful rivals, decided to team up on cloud technology. Microsoft will provide cloud services to make online shopping faster and easier for Walmart customers.

2. Google has removed the CEO of its Nest unit, which makes internet-connected thermostats and other devices, and will fold the business into another team within the company. According to CNET, which first reported the news, the change came after Google received complaints about Marwan Fawaz's leadership

3. Walmart is considering launching its own streaming service. According to The Information, the service would only cost $8 per month, which is cheaper than Netflix and Amazon.

4. A top voting machine vendor admitted to selling election equipment that included a serious vulnerability between 2000 and 2006. The vulnerability could have allowed malicious actors to remotely access and manipulate the systems that tabulate votes and program some voting machines.

5. A Facebook executive testified in front of the House Judiciary committee on Tuesday, fielding questions about how the platform polices content. During the hearing, the executive apologized to Diamond and Silk, pro-Trump vloggers who claim that Facebook is biased against conservatives.

6. Disgraced political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica tried to sell itself to 18,000 buyers, but received just four paltry offers for its business, some for as little as £1. Cambridge Analytica went into administration in May and is now facing liquidation.

7. Google's CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly had a call with the EU's competition commission ahead of a big antitrust fine for the company. According to Bloomberg, the eleventh-hour call was intended to determine the state of play.

8. Twitter has paused its work on fixing its 'blue tick' verification process, because it's focused on combating misinformation. The company's new head of product, Kayvon Beykpour, said fixing the system "isn't a top priority for us right now."

9. Slack has acquired Missions, an enterprise software startup. Missions lets non-IT employees create new features inside Slack.

10. Google is running a private cable underneath the Atlantic Ocean to speed up its infrastructure. The cable will boost the span and reach of Google Cloud and should be up and running by 2020.

Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings.

One last thing: Business Insider wants your nominations for the coolest people in the British tech industry. Please get in touch if you know someone who should be included in our UK Tech 100.

Dialpad CEO Craig Walker wants to replace desk phones once and for all.

"We're the only competitor built after the iPhone launched," Walker told Business Insider. "It was built for a different world; It was built for a world of mobility and world where the modern worker isn't sitting at a desk or picking up a desk phone."

Dialpad wants to replace landlines with desktop and mobile app calls. Dialpad Dialpad is a digital business communication platform designed to handle two-way phone calls, conference calls, and call-center work via a desktop browser or mobile app.

On Tuesday, Dialpad announced its $50 million series D funding round, led by ICONIQ Capital with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz. Dialpad didn't disclose its new valuation, but the company was last valued at $250 million in 2017, according to PitchBook.

That funding will be used to build out new artificial intelligence tools, and to grow its existing 275 person team by at least 100 more, with new offices arriving across Asia and Europe.

Though Dialpad functions as a work phone, the platform has access to vast troves of data — a necessary component of effective AI. Its platform integrates with other workplace productivity tools like Slack, Zendesk, Salesforce and G Suite, and soon its AI tools will give users live transcriptions, sentiment analysis and coaching that tells employees what to do next on a call.

Those new features, which are expected to roll out over the next couple of months, are the direct result of Dialpad's reported $50 million acquisition of a competing startup called TalkIQ, which the companies announced in May.

"It's a really unique offering to a really large market that's been dominated by antiquated legacy vendors like Cisco and Avaya," Walker said.

Dialpad, in its current incarnation, was founded in 2011 by a cohort of Google Voice people who wanted to refocus their expertise on a paid product aimed at enterprises, instead of the free consumer phone tool offered by Google.

Around half of Dialpad's first 30 hires came from Google, according to Walker, which has been good news for the business since product people at Google know a thing or two about building to scale.

Google co-founders Larry Page (left) and Sergey Brin saw the potential for digital calls early on. RANDI LYNN BEACH / AP Images "If you launch a product at Google, particularly a consumer product, it has to theoretically scale to be able support 100 million users on Day One. And that made us build the Google Voice platform in a way that scaled like no other phone system before it or since could," Walker said.

"So when we left to build this, we built it in the same way. That allows us to take on a company like Uber that could add 1,000 people during a lunch break and we wouldn't even notice," he said. (As of 2017, Uber had 16,000 employees around the world.)

But the team's journey started long before Google Voice.

Walker and chief product officer Vincent Paquet co-founded the first version of Dialpad, under the same name, back in 2001, before being acquired by Yahoo in 2005. The pair stayed at the corporation for about 6 months before leaving to start another telecommunication startup called GrandCentral.

It was GrandCentral that was ultimately acquired by Google for a reported $50 million in 2007. It became Google Voice, the company's consumer-oriented phone service, which gives users a free phone number that they can use to make and receive calls from within a web browser.

Though the team stayed on for a few years, the magic faded once "Google got very concerned with Facebook," Walker said. Everyone's attention shifted toward launching the company's social media network Google+, "and that's when we decided to leave and go work on solving this for enterprises," he continued.

Once things fizzled with Google, Walker had one more challenge: buying the original name back from Yahoo, which he got, thus preventing him from facing an even bigger stressor.

"One of the hardest parts of starting a company as an entrepreneur," Walker said, "is getting a URL that makes sense and is memorable, and ends in dot-com."

Computers used to tabulate votes and program voting machines in the United States contained a key security vulnerability that could have been used to affect election results.

Some of the election management systems sold by Elections Systems & Software, the top voting machine manufacturer in the country, contained remote-access software, the company admitted in a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, that came to light Tuesday. Those systems that had the software, which were sold between 2000 and 2006, also had modems that allowed them to connect to the internet.

As its name implies, remote-access software allows people to log in and use computers from afar via the internet. It's inherently vulnerable, because it serves as a kind of direct tunnel to particular computers on the network. Worse, the particular remote-access software ES&S installed — Symantec's pcAnywhere — was later shown to have significant security flaws that could allow malicious actors to compromise computers running it.

"Installing remote-access software and modems on election equipment is the worst decision for security short of leaving ballot boxes on a Moscow street corner," Wyden said in a statement.

Motherboard broke the news about the letter, which ES&S sent to Wyden in April, on Tuesday. Business Insider also obtained a copy of the correspondence.

It's unclear whether anyone ever exploited the vulnerability on the election systems.

In the letter, ES&S said it installed pcAnywhere on the election systems of "a small number of customers" during the six-year time period. It provided the software to allow its technicians to help election administrators troubleshoot problems with the systems, according to Motherboard's report.

pcAnywhere was later found to have serious flaws

But pcAnywhere was later discovered to be seriously flawed. The source code for the program was stolen by hackers in 2006 and was posted online in 2012, a move that could have allowed malicious actors to find and exploit vulnerabilities.

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden criticized Elections Systems & Software for shipping election systems with remote-access software installed. Thomson Reuters About the same time that the source code was posted online, white-hat security researchers announced they'd discovered a critical vulnerability in pcAnywhere. The vulnerability would have allowed a hacker to take control of a computer running the software without having to enter a password. The flaw was so severe that Symantec initially advised customers to disable or delete the software until it could patch it.

Symantec, which created pcAnywhere, did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Installing remote-access software was "considered an accepted practice" at the time ES&S sold the election systems, the company said in a statement to Business Insider. The company configured pcAnywhere so that it could only be used to make outbound connections to ES&S and wouldn't allow inbound connections, ES&S said in its letter to Wyden.

However, the company declined to answer a question from Wyden's office about the settings it used to secure communications to the election systems over pcAnywhere, Motherboard reported.

It's unclear when ES&S's customers completely stopped using pcAnywhere

ES&S stopped selling systems with pcAnywhere in 2007 after the Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency tasked with creating standards for voting systems, released a set of guidelines that prohibited the practice, the company said. It did not install pcAnywhere on any of its actual voting machines, and the software "did not come in" contact with those devices, ES&S said in its statement to Business Insider.

"ES&S discontinued providing pcAnywhere over a decade ago, and no ES&S customer is using it today," the company said in the statement.

But it's unclear when the software was removed from all the systems that had it installed. As late as 2011, pcAnywhere was still being used on an ES&S election-management system in Venango County, Pennsylvania, Motherboard reported.

ES&S did not respond to questions from Business Insider about the use of pcAnywhere on that system or about when pcAnywhere was uninstalled from all its customers' systems.

At least 60 percent of ballots cast in the US in 2006 were tabulated on ES&S election-management systems, Motherboard reported.

Google is going under the sea so its cloud infrastructure can better take on rivals Amazon and Microsoft.

The search engine giant announced on Tuesday that it is building its own private underwater cable between the U.S. and France. The cable will be named Dunant, after Henry Dunant, the founder of the Nobel Peace Prize, who was the first recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Google expects Dunant will be functional in 2020.

"Dunant adds network capacity across the Atlantic, supplementing one of the busiest routes on the internet, and supporting the growth of Google Cloud," Jayne Stowell, strategic negotiator of global infrastructure at Google, wrote in a blog post.

Underwater cables are typically built and maintained by consortiums of companies. For example, Google and Facebook teamed up in 2016 for an 8,000 mile long cable project bridging Los Angeles and Hong Kong.

This time, though, this cable belongs to Google, and Google alone. Indeed, Dunant will be the first trans-Atlantic cable solely owned by a non-telecom company.

This means that Google has more control over capacity and the route of the cable, giving it an infrastructural edge over competitors like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services who rely on consortium cables to help their data bridge the Atlantic Ocean.

While Dunant is Google's first cable spanning that particular ocean, it's the search giant's second privately-owned cable overall. The first, named Curie, will be up and running in 2019, connecting Los Angeles and Chile.

Google

The execs at so-called "gig economy" companies — those companies making apps that let one person hire another to, say, drive you around, or put you up for the night — sometimes go undercover as workers on their own platforms. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi briefly drove an Uber; Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky used to be a host himself.

And Stacy Brown-Philpot, CEO of TaskRabbit, says she was once hired as a "tasker" too. She took a job to clean someone's apartment and found it to be "stressful," she said on stage at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado on Tuesday.

Not only did she have to clean the apartment in two hours — including a surprisingly dirty oven that she didn't know about until she opened it — but the task was for someone who was moving out "and had to get their deposit back."

So she felt pressure because the customer had "money on the line."

She never told the customer that she was the undercover CEO. But she did rise to the challenge.

"He got his deposit back," she proudly said.

Venture capitalist Connie Chan is known in Silicon Valley for her expertise on the Chinese tech market. But it turns out she also knows a thing or two about the international rap scene.

That factoid was revealed Tuesday by her boss, Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Ben Horowitz, in a blog post announcing her promotion to general partner of the firm. Chan, who focuses on consumer startups, joined the firm in 2011 as an analyst before getting an unprecedented promotion to a top spot this week.

"Through the course of her work, everyone whom we ever connected with Connie — from Ben Keighran, founder/CEO of Caffeine, to Chance the Rapper — came back with the same feedback: 'Connie is the best.' Yes, we know," Horowitz wrote.

Chance the Rapper isn't a tech founder. But Chan did give him some critical business advice as a favor, Horowitz explained to Business Insider:

"I am friends with Chance's father Ken [Williams-Bennett]. They had a plan for Chance to enter the Chinese market, but it wasn't great," Horowitz said in an email, explaining that since Chance is an independent artist, he didn't have a label to support the effort.

"I asked Connie to help out and she made the whole thing a giant success. She has some great photos," he continued.

Chance isn't the only rapper with close ties to the VC firm. The rapper Divine even dedicated a song to its firm's cofounder, aptly entitled "Venture Capitalist (Like Ben Horowitz)."

Google has removed the CEO of its Nest unit, which makes internet-connected thermostats and other devices, and will fold the business into another team within the company.

The shakeup is the latest strategic overhaul at Nest, which Google acquired for $3.2 billion in 2014 and was once considered one of the flagship standalone companies under the Alphabet umbrella organization.

Nest's founding CEO Tony Fadell was pushed out two years after the acquisition amid stinging criticism about his management style and the company's poor track record shipping products. Fadell was replaced by Marwan Fawaz, a cable industry veteran who was little know in Silicon Valley.

Nest Now, almost exactly two years after Fawaz was tapped, he is being sidelined.

According to CNET, which first reported the news, the change at Nest came after Google received complaints from employees about Fawaz's leadership, which anonymous sources described as more of an "operations manager" than a leader.

Google representatives and Fawaz did not immediately respond to questions from Business Insider about the story.

The Nest team will be integrated into Google's home devices division under the leadership of Rishi Chandra, vice president of product management and general manager of home products.

"This is the natural evolution," Chandra told CNET. "We thought, let's connect these things and build experiences that we really couldn't do before."

Fawaz will remain with Google as an executive adviser and there will be no layoffs according to the report. Google will also keep the Nest brand. It was only six months ago that Nest operated as a separate division within Google's parent company Alphabet. Then Nest was folded into Google and now it appears that Nest as a standalone entity has all but vanished.

The Airbus A330neo is Europe's answer to the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Instead of creating brand a new aircraft from scratch as Boeing did with the Dreamliner, Airbus decided to optimize the existing Airbus A330ceo or "current engine option" jet that has been around since the mid-1990s.

Airbus launched the updated A330neo or new engine option at the Farnborough Airshow in 2014. Since then, the A330neo has netted 224 orders from airlines around the world with Malaysian low-cost carrier AirAsia X as its largest customers with 66 on order. The A330neo's only US airline customer is Delta with 25 orders on the books.

While 224 orders in four years are nothing to scoff at, the A330neo has lagged behind the rival Dreamliner in the sales department. The Boeing jet has taken more than 400 orders in the same period and has sold nearly 1,400 units since 2004.

According to Airbus America's new CEO Jeff Knittel, the A330neo's lack of sales can be attributed to a soft widebody jet market and the replacement cycle of existing airliners.

"The widebody market, in general, has been slower over the past year or two and some of that can be attributed to the replacement cycle," Knittel told Business Insider at the 2018 Farnborough International Airshow.

The current generation Airbus A330ceo is still on sale and is one of the most popular widebody airliners in the world. As result, Knittel said, the A330 is still a "relatively young aircraft" in many operators' fleets and have not hit their replacement cycle yet.

"When you have airplanes that are older, the analysis to flip them out and put in new airplanes is much easier and in most cases fairly obvious," the former chief of executive of airplane leasing firm C2 Aviation Capital said. "But the A330ceo is a good airplane with good range and has been improved a lot over the past 10 years."

This has led many potential buyers to hang on to their current fleet of very capable planes a little longer.

"As the replacement cycles come and as the A330neo enters peoples' fleets, I think you will see sales accelerate on that airplane because they will see that (the neo) is a fundamentally improved aircraft over what was already a very good aircraft, to begin with," Knittel said.

The A330neo features updated aerodynamics, fuel-efficient Rolls-Royce Trent 7000 engines, and the big brother A350's AirSpace interior design.

San Francisco's new mayor London Breed has lived in the city by the Bay for most of her life — and in all that time, she told a local NBC affiliate that she's never seen as much human feces piled on the sidewalks as she did during a recent stroll through the city.

"I will say there is more feces on the sidewalks than I've ever seen growing up here," Breed told NBC in a recent interview. "That is a huge problem and we are not just talking about from dogs — we're talking about from humans."

Breed's findings are a part of a broader issue affecting San Francisco in which 7,499 homeless individuals live on the city's streets without access to public restrooms and other necessary resources. Due to a variety of factors, including a lack of affordable housing and shortcomings in the mental healthcare system, the homelessness crisis in the city has resulted in drug needles, human feces and garbage riddling the streets to a degree comparable to that in some of the world's dirtiest slums.

The destitution on the streets has made for a startling contrast to the tech industry wealth on display throughout the city, as companies like Google, Facebook and Salesforce have staffed up with highly-paid computer programmers and other employees.

Breed, a San Francisco native who grew up in the city's public housing, was sworn in as mayor last Wednesday and among her endeavors is to increase the construction of affordable housing and implement safe, supervised injection sites for homeless individuals to use drugs instead of the very public drug activity the city sees daily.

Just last week during Breed's tour of the city, a video captured by NBC Bay Area shows a man appearing to prepare a needle as the mayor walks past him.

But a promise that Breed gave to NBC during last week's interview was that the city will see cleaner streets within three months of her mayoral inauguration. That means that by October, perhaps San Francisco's "poop problem" will have lessened.