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MoviePass owner Helios & Matheson was down more than 10% Friday, hitting a fresh record low of $0.40 a share.    

The recent turbulence for Helios & Matheson began in mid-April when its internal auditor said there was "substantial doubt" the company would be able to stay in business. A few weeks later, the company said it burns about $21.7 million a month, and that its shrinking cash pile is down to $15.5 million. 

MoviePass' leadership has suggested the company will climb its way out of the hole by using its $300 million "equity line of credit."

Helios & Matheson shares are more than 98% below their October all-time high of $32.90, hit shortly after the company acquired MoviePass.

 

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Editor’s Note: DIGITAL HEALTH BRIEFING will not appear Monday, May 28, due to the Memorial Day holiday in the US.

BUOY HEALTH, CIRCULATION PARTNER TO EASE PATIENT JOURNEY: Buoy Health, an interactive web app that uses AI to suggest diagnoses and recommend the appropriate type of care to users, announced a partnership with Circulation, a platform that transports patients to care facilities using ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft, per Business Wire. The partnership will ease the patient journey, providing users with an end-to-end healthcare solution that follows them from their initial symptom assessment through transportation to an appointment, if necessary. The companies expect an integrated launch rollout by the end of 2018.

Buoy Health and Circulation aim to reduce some of the friction patients face when seeking care.

The partnership is a boon for health systems and insurers, and may help to retain patients and customers, and drive down associated healthcare costs. The US healthcare system loses $150 billion annually due to missed appointments, according to Health Management Technology. At the same time, adding an additional channel to care helps partnered health systems reach customers that might otherwise go to a different location, or not seek out care at all. Furthermore, because Buoy Health informs patients of the type of care necessary according to their symptoms, health insurers are less likely to have to payout claims for more expensive — and often unnecessary — emergency department or urgent care visits.

It's likely that similar services will become more common as healthcare organizations work to navigate the rapidly changing US healthcare market. Patients are gaining more control over the way they access care and engage with healthcare providers. This forces healthcare organizations to consider a more active approach in how they engage with new patients and retain their current customers. Services that can facilitate these transactions, such as the tie-up between Buoy Health and Circulation, will rise in popularity to accommodate the changing market.

NEW DATA BREACHES HIGHLIGHT HEALTH SYSTEMS’ OUTDATED CYBERSECURITY: Two separate cyberattacks on Indiana-based Allied Physicians and Maryland-based LifeBridge Health occurred within days of each other, according to Healthcare IT News. While Allied Physicians officials are still working to understand the scope of the breach, LifeBridge reported as many as 500,000 patient records — including social security numbers — were exposed. Moreover, while the breach was only uncovered recently, it occurred nearly two years ago.

These attacks underscore an ongoing concern for the healthcare industry: Four in five US doctors have experienced a cyberattack of some sort, according to a study by Accenture and the American Medical Association. There’s been a surge in the use of electronic health records (EHRs) — and Business Insider Intelligence forecasts that by 2025 nearly all health facilities will use EHRs — but health systems’ cybersecurity efforts haven’t kept pace, leaving US physicians feeling concerned for the future. Only 15% of organizations employ a designated C-suite leader to manage enterprise-wide data security efforts, according to a recent Black Book Research study. This failure to adapt leaves legacy data security systems vulnerable to hackers, and the results are costly — the average healthcare data breach puts a $700,000 hole in a health system’s pocket, according to Net Diligence. Providers should commit more resources to shore up their IT security. 

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APP SECURES $50 MILLION TO ADDRESS MEDICATION ADHERENCE COSTS: San Francisco-based startup CareZone — a platform that acts as a medication adherence assistant — added $50 million in funding, bringing its total to $150 million, according to MobiHealthNews. CareZone’s app prompts users to photograph their prescription drug bottles and uses the instructions to send users notifications when it’s time to medicate. The app can also automatically refill prescriptions and deliver new doses to users’ homes. Delivering prescriptions and reminding users to take their medication makes prescription management easier for CareZone’s 3 million registered users, who take an average of six medications. mHealth solutions can help clamp down on the more than $300 billion in healthcare costs from poor medication adherence due to unnecessary hospitalizations, ER visits, and extra tests. An expanding aging population and the rise of chronic disease will lead providers to explore solutions that boost adherence and mitigate ballooning healthcare costs.

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IN-HOME CARE STARTUP SECURES $20 MILLION: California-based startup Heal — a doctor-on-demand scheduling service that brings its staff of primary, preventative, and urgent caregivers to users’ homes — raised $20 million in additional funding to bring its total up to $70 million, according to MobiHealthNews. Heal’s app and web-based service allows users to book an in-home care visit from Heal’s medical staff at a convenient time for the patient. Heal claims that by automating functions like payment and scheduling, primary care visits can last twice as long as the national average. Heal hopes that by offering personalized in-home care with transparent pricing it can capture a portion of the market traditional providers might miss. In-home care services will likely see a boom as an expanding aging population comfortable with digital tools demands more convenient care. There’s been a slew of other startups expanding their efforts in this market — Honor, which pairs seniors with living assistance caregivers, announced $50 million in additional funding and insurer Clover Health launched a new in-home care program in May 2018.

IN OTHER NEWS:

Two minds may be better than one, but one mind connected to millions of others would be infinitely superior.

That's the thinking behind several companies that are currently racing to link mind and machine by way of devices called brain-computer interfaces. The first to put the functionality of a laptop in your head would pave the way for people to communicate seamlessly, instantly, and with whomever — or whatever — they want.

So far, two figures are publicly leading that race: Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Their clandestine projects, known as Neuralink and Building 8, respectively, focus on approaches that will require brain surgery, according to researchers familiar with their efforts.

But there's a less ambitious and less invasive way to tackle the brain-computer interface problem. It involves translating data from brainwaves into simple commands that can be processed in an app or device. A startup called Nuro is taking this route. It hopes its software platform can give the ability to communicate back to people who've lost it as a result of severe injury or disease.

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Outside researchers say the approach is simpler and less functional than invasive approaches, but easier to put into practice.

If Nuro's product succeeds in that initial market, the company plans to expand the technology and test it more broadly in cars and homes. As a result, the company could shape the broader future of technologies that link mind and brain.

Communicating with thoughts

Nuro / Francois Gand In April, Nuro opened up for the first time about a version of its software called Nuos, which is designed to give a voice to people who've experienced spinal cord injuries or other major illnesses and can't communicate as they once did.

Nuro CEO and founder Francois Gand envisions the system for use first in a hospital or intensive-care setting. It could allow so-called "locked in" patients to do things like ask for a glass of water or play music on an Amazon Echo smart speaker.

Gand has test-driven his tool in at least one person with a severe brainstem disorder, and recently showed me how a Nuro user could interact with the technology using a tablet. A black and teal screen is divided into tiles with icons and pre-written messages displaying basic commands like "I need water" or "I'm feeling cold." By focusing intently on a given icon or piece of text, a user can select that tile.

It's the same idea used in neurofeedback, a practice in which people use real-time displays of brain activity to do things like play basic video games in order to better regulate their brainwaves.

Nuos users could even use that technique to type custom messages using a keyboard on the screen.

An OS that runs on brainwaves

Computer interfaces powered by brainwaves aren't completely new.

lwpkommunikacio/flickr

Before Stephen Hawking settled on the Intel setup he primarily used to communicate, he tested several EEG-based caps. But because of his age and the severity of his condition, the caps couldn't get a strong enough brain signal to function properly.

Studies suggest that EEG technologies have the potential to help thousands of other disabled people, though. Every year, roughly half a million people across the globe injure their spinal cord, according to the World Health Organization. The authors of a 2018 paper published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience called the use of EEGs for people with disabilities "a novel approach of the 21st century."

"Development of a brain-computer interface technology that does not replace but complement[s] existing therapies is a...promising field," the authors wrote.

But Gand envisions Nuro's technology — which is essentially an operating system, or OS, that runs on brainwaves — extending far beyond a hospital, to people's homes and even cars. That's something automakers are interested in. In January, the Nissan revealed it was working on helping drivers avoid crashes using EEG data.

"Fundamentally, we're an OS company," Gand said.

Investors see Nuro's potential to expand, too. The company, whose team is based in Waterloo, Canada and San Francisco, California, got a $100,000 grant from Google to build a part of its system in the Google Cloud platform. Nuro also recently got $250,000 in seed funding from Silicon Valley biotech accelerator IndieBio, and $40,000 ($31,000 USD) from Canadian startup hub Waterloo Accelerator Centre. And it won two MIT competitions (Hacking Medicine and the MIT Barracuda Bowl) at the South by Southwest festival, which brought in $7,500.

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Karen Moxon, who runs a lab focused on brain-computer interfaces at the University of California, Davis, told Business Insider that she's not surprised by Gand's vision. A less invasive and more user-friendly brain-computer interface is ripe terrain for future advancements.

But Moxon expressed concern about some of the technical and financial roadblocks Gand might face, such as raising and making enough money to stay financially viable over the long term.

"This has been done well by gobs of people — but in a laboratory setting," she said. "Being able to do it isn't surprising; translating it to a company that can be financially viable is another."

The race toward a superpower: Where Neuralink and Facebook are headed

Elon Musk. Lucy Nicholson/Reuters As our smartphones grow smaller and more advanced, we grow increasingly dependent upon the services they provide. (Not convinced? Try taking your next trip without opening Google Maps.)

Devices embedded in our bodies and brains are a logical next step.

Zuckerberg said last year that Facebook is working on brain-computer interface technology that "one day will let you communicate using only your mind."

Whether the first brain-computer interface runs on EEG or something harder to access, the first company to nail that technology could rocket decades into the future.

"Just being able to communicate at the speed of a BCI without having to speak or type would have a radical effect," a former Neuralink employee who asked to remain anonymous told Business Insider. "It's not so much a race to a long-term goal as much as it is a race to a near-term goal in which somebody gains a metaphorical superpower that enables them to start accelerating faster than anyone could catch up."

Musk and Zuckerberg have both kept details about their progress toward achieving this superpower under wraps.

But there are some clues. Several former Neuralink employees told Business Insider that they were engaged in building microchips and small electronics that could eventually be tested on animals. They said employees of Neuralink have frequently interacted with people researching the subject of animal testing.

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Andy Fell, a communications director at the University of California, Davis, confirmed to Business Insider that several university employees were actively working with Neuralink on research projects using mice.

Facebook, meanwhile, does not yet seem to have plans to open an animal-testing facility in California, according to a public records request filed by Business Insider with the California Department of Health.

Given how little we know about the brain, experts say it's unlikely that we'll see an invasive, surgery-based BCI used on a person within the next few years.

That's where Nuro comes in.

"We want to be as safe as possible. We're not inclined to open up the brain. For some people who might ask, 'are we hacking the brain?' doing it non-invasively kind of solves that issue," Gand said.

From hospitals to homes: Bringing apps into the Nuro ecosystem

Shutterstock

In addition to allowing "locked-in" patients to communicate, Gand's Nuro system is set up to give doctors or physicians access to a separate interface from the one users see. That would allow for remote monitoring of people with a severe injury or those at risk of a stroke.

The software is also capable of passively collecting data on brain activity, including the various levels of brain waves linked with alertness and sleep.

The Nuro system could therefore detect aberrant patterns of brain-wave activity, like those exhibited by people at risk for neurological problems like stroke, Gand said. Health professionals monitoring the situation remotely could use those observations to inform decisions about calling for emergency assistance.

But Gand hopes that if his OS moves beyond the medical setting, people using Nuro within the home would have access to a wider range of EEG-enabled activities than someone in the hospital.

Home users could eventually see features designed to speed up the communication process, such as a faster and more dynamic keyboard that could be used in conjunction with applications like news apps and social-media platforms. In the future, Gand also envisions developers creating versions of their apps that are compatible with the Nuro ecosystem, just as they currently are with Android or iOS.

"We can also give you the ability to have your app controlled neurologically," Gand said.

"Solo: A Star Wars Story" is starting off strong by breaking the Thursday preview box-office record going into Memorial Day. But it's still up in the air if this latest release in the beloved franchise will perform like the previous titles since Disney took over the reins.

"Solo," which looks at the origin story of Han Solo, took in $14.1 million on Thursday night, according to The Wrap. That beats the previous record holder, 2007's "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End," which took in $13.2 million.

With the movie being released on 4,381 screens, Disney is setting the stage for a typical huge release for a "Star Wars" movie. But it's going to be a big test for the franchise.

"Solo" comes out just five months after "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" opened. So for the first time ever in the storied saga, fans could be suffering franchise fatigue. Also, the movie has received mixed reviews. It's sporting a 70% rating going into the holiday weekend. That is low for "Star Wars" (the lowest since "Attack of the Clones"). And Memorial Day weekend is one of the few holidays when audiences don't flock to the theaters.

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Disney is certainly rolling the dice.

Though industry projections have "Solo" breaking the Memorial Day weekend box-office record ("At World's End," $139.8 million), it still will be the lowest opening ever for a Disney-era "Star Wars" movie. In fact, it probably won't earn as much as the previous "A Star Wars Story" movie, "Rogue One," which had a $155 million opening.

Whether you chalk it up to "Star Wars" fatigue or mistakenly releasing this movie in the summer instead of in December, which has been the home for the franchise since "The Force Awakens," this weekend will be the first time Disney and Lucasfilm executives will feel a little uncomfortable.

Amazon's Alexa isn't only listening to everything you say — it's absorbing it.

While Alexa makes certain tasks easier by following voice commands, it is learning more about you than you might expect, and it's terrifying some customers.

A couple from Oregon were shocked to find out that their Alexa-powered speaker recorded a private conversation in their home and sent to a person in their contact list.

"I felt invaded," the woman, named Danielle, told KIRO-TV. "A total privacy invasion. Immediately I said, 'I'm never plugging that device in again because I can't trust it.'"

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In a statement to Business Insider, Amazon explained what happened:

The rationale behind these recordings

In order to adapt to its owner's style of speaking, Alexa listens and stores recordings of their voice.

The recording activates when a person says the "wake" word, and it stores what you say after that. It is not constantly recording.

These recordings are then stored on Amazon's servers.

"We keep the voice recordings associated with your account to improve the accuracy of the results provided to you and to improve our services. If you delete these recordings, it may degrade your experience using voice features," Amazon says on its website.

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To stop the device from listening, you can mute the microphone. However, in doing so, you'll also be unable to send it commands.

How do I listen to my recordings?

Fortunately, there is an easy way to listen to the recordings, if you're curious to know what is being stored on Amazon's servers:

Since Wednesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has criticized the media and its coverage of his company. He even said he would start a website that would rate the credibility of journalists and their editors.

But in the 2017 annual report Tesla filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Tesla credited the media as a significant catalyst for sales.

"Historically, we have been able to generate significant media coverage of our company and our vehicles, and we believe we will continue to do so," the company wrote. "To date, for vehicle sales, media coverage and word of mouth have been the primary drivers of our sales leads and have helped us achieve sales without traditional advertising and at relatively low marketing costs."

Tesla has included those sentences or a variation on them in each of its annual SEC filings dating back to its 2010 initial public offering.

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On Wednesday, Musk wrote a series of Twitter posts in which he described the media as being hypocritical, impulsive, sensitive, unreliable, and ethically compromised. Musk wrote that he would create a website, named Pravda, which would rate the credibility of journalists and their editors.

A tweet from journalist Mark Harris linked to a filing that certified Pravda Corp. as a foreign corporation in October. There has been speculation that the filing is related to a satirical publication Musk has previously proposed, and that Musk's idea for a media rating website is a joke.

On Friday, Musk said he has not liked the media even when it has highlighted his accomplishments and said Twitter allows him to communicate with the public outside of traditional media channels.

"I've been through many press cycles & know full well same person praising me today will trash me tomorrow," Musk wrote. "Journos hound me constantly for interviews, but I do almost none these days. [heart emoji] Twitter as it allows me to bypass journo bs."

Tesla has faced a number of challenges in recent months, including missed production goals, questions about the company's financial health, and concerns about working conditions at the Fremont, California, factory where the company makes its cars.

Musk has been outspoken about the criticism Tesla has received, and the media's reporting on it. During the company's first-quarter earnings call in early May, Musk expressed frustration about the media attention that Autopilot — Tesla's semiautonomous driver-assistance feature — has received after fatal accidents involving the system.

LONDON — Dutch payment business Adyen has announced plans to list its shares publicly in Amsterdam.

Adyen said on Thursday that it will IPO on the Euronext Amsterdam exchange later this year. Existing shareholders will sell around 15% of its shares in the offering.

Adyen's biggest investor is Index Ventures, the London-based venture capital firm, and it is also backed by Iconiq Capital, a Silicon Valley fund backed by an incredible lineup of billionaires including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey.

Reuters reports that the company is seeking a valuation of between €6 billion ($7 billion) and €9 billion ($10.5 billion) in the public listing.

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Adyen's core product is an integrated payment platform that lets companies process both online and offline payments through one system. Customers include Facebook, Uber, Netflix, Spotify, L'Oreal, eBay, Microsoft, and Tinder.

The company, which was founded in 2006, processed €108 billion ($126.3 billion) of payments last year and had net revenues of €218 million ($254.9 million). Adjusted earnings were €99 million ($115.7 million).

CEO Pieter van der Does said in a statement: "We feel that we are still in the early stages of a remarkable journey. Our focus remains on building new functionality and on helping our merchants grow.

"This offering provides us with the freedom to keep building the company, while offering our shareholders a path to liquidity. Adyen will remain a company that is driven by a long-term vision and strategy."

Adyen said it wants to grow revenues by 20-30% over the next few years and expects to grow revenues by 40% this year.

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JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, ABN Amro, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Citigroup are all working on the offering.

Don't worry, everything is fine.

That has been the message from MoviePass and its parent company, Helios and Matheson Analytics, in recent weeks as the company's financial health has become a topic of heated debate.

MoviePass has been burning more than $20 million a month, but its leadership has repeatedly stressed that it has access to a $300 million "equity line of credit."

The comments were intended to address concerns that MoviePass might go out of business. The lifeline meant the company could sustain itself for over a year without needing additional funds — long enough to figure out how to stem its substantial losses.

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But it has become clear after speaking with MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe, consulting financial experts, and reviewing Helios and Matheson's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the $300 million in financial firepower is less secure than at first blush and dependent on selling shares to a fickle public market. And it's not really a "line of credit" as generally defined by the financial community.

To access that money, MoviePass has to convince investors of its prospects — a big ask, given that Helios and Matheson's stock is down over 98% from its 52-week high in October. Shares were trading at an all-time low of $0.46 on Wednesday, and the entire company is now valued at under $39 million.

The state of affairs for MoviePass

Helios and Matheson disclosed in filings this month that it had been losing nearly $23 million a month in the first quarter (though the company also said it had found a way to cut losses by more than 35%).

It had only $15.5 million cash on hand at the end of April, and some industry observers, including the CEO of AMC Theatres, publicly questioned how it would keep going. Helios and Matheson's independent auditor said it had "substantial doubt" about the company's ability to survive a year.

MoviePass' leadership fired back, with Helios and Matheson's CEO, Ted Farnsworth, telling Variety he was "not worried at all" about the cash situation.

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Why? He said Helios and Matheson had a "$300 million equity line of credit," a term he used in an email (via a spokeswoman) to Business Insider. Articles on MoviePass by The New York Times, Reuters, and Variety have also mentioned it.

Business Insider

The 'equity line of credit' question

So this lifeline would supposedly save MoviePass for at least another year. But what exactly is this "equity line of credit" MoviePass keeps talking about?

Lowe told Business Insider that the term referred to the "at-the-market" (ATM) sale of the remainder of a shelf offering certified by the SEC.

By Business Insider's calculations (based on SEC filings), less than $265 million remained of the original $400 million as of April.

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Here is Lowe's explanation in full:

"So the SEC approved for Helios and Matheson the ability to sell up to $300 million of its stock in the format of what is called an ATM. An ATM essentially means you can put on the market shares on a daily, weekly basis, and feed them into the market, and as long as people want to buy them, then that money can go into the coffers of HMNY and therefore go into MoviePass to fund our growth — to fund our ticket purchasing and our acquisition of subscribers.

"It's kind of a science in that you can't put all $300 million out there. You put a little bit every day. If you look at how many shares are sold every day, I think there are some days 25 million shares, 10 million shares — I think the average is 6 million shares — so you can imagine you can put four or five hundred thousand shares out there without having much impact on the demand.

"I have no idea. It's a third party that manages it on behalf of HMNY, but essentially some days they might sell, some days they might not sell. It's all kind of based on what they believe will have the least impact on the valuation."

What Lowe is describing is an at-the-market offering, not what is usually considered to be an equity line of credit, according to several financial experts.

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A Wall Street analyst who covers Helios and Matheson told Business Insider that an equity line of credit was a "confusing" way to characterize such a stock offering. Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, said it was "not the way most people think of an equity line of credit."

MoviePass did not respond to multiple requests for further clarification.

Why is it not a line of credit?

An equity line of credit implies that an investor has already agreed to buy shares at a maximum offering price. (A guide from the law firm Morrison & Foerster explains it in more detail.) It's money in the bank if the company wants to take it, during a certain period and under certain conditions.

But in an at-the-market offering, which Lowe is describing, Helios and Matheson is at the mercy of the public market. It is authorized to sell shares, but someone has to buy them. It is not a guaranteed line of credit.

Todd Lowenstein, the director of research at Highmark Capital, explained to Business Insider that the idea behind an offering like the one Helios and Matheson is using is that you do the SEC paperwork up front, then time the selling of shares based on your need as you prove your business model.

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Farnsworth told Variety this month that Helios and Matheson had "17 months' worth of cash without further raises of capital."

But as Lowe describes it, the ATM offering is effective only "as long as people want to buy" the shares. That is not certain, given the negative investor outlook on the company evident in the stock price.

A MoviePass customer's ticket-stub collection. Tracey Trevino

What are MoviePass' chances?

"If they can sell stock, the most likely buyers are related parties, bottom-feeders, or people who think the company is on the cusp of a turnaround," Gordon said. "It is unlikely to be an easy sell."

At this stage, those who would be buying are the "true believers," Lowenstein said. And if Helios and Matheson has to sell tons of stock to cover its costs, after such a huge drop in price, it would massively dilute previous shareholders.

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MoviePass is also at risk of getting kicked off the Nasdaq by mid-December if its share price and market cap don't increase, as my colleague Troy Wolverton noted recently. Lowenstein called it the "specter of delisting" hanging over the company's head.

The big question now is whether MoviePass can keep investors happy long enough to find a way to become profitable — because the line of credit that was supposed to sustain the company could easily slip out of its grasp.

Its survival depends on it.

Additional reporting by Jason Guerrasio.

If you have any information about MoviePass, tip the author at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The company behind the simple fitness band aimed at getting people moving now has its sites set higher: playing doctor.

In recent months, wearable-device company Fitbit has made a big push toward healthcare. From an in-app feature for tracking women's menstrual cycles to a redesigned ecosystem that makes it more compatible with diabetic glucose monitors, the company is working to keep its device relevant alongside heavy competition from players like Apple.

As part of the health pivot, the company is also developing apps designed to detect two common but dangerous health conditions: sleep apnea, which affects 22 million Americans but goes undiagnosed in some 80% of them, and atrial fibrillation, a tough-to-spot heart disorder that's on the rise in the US.

It's all part of a strategic move to transform its products from casual, single-purpose fitness bands to comprehensive devices that do everything from tracking your steps to detecting and even treating illnesses, Shelten Yuen, Fitbit's vice president of research and development, told Business Insider. In the process, the company will be working closely with the Food and Drug Administration and running a series of clinical trials.

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"We're consumer-centric and health-centric at same time," Yuen said. "We're moving into a new direction where those lines will become blurred and, I think, Fitbit will play a huge role in giving individuals insight there, and healthcare providers too."

From fitness trackers to far-reaching health tools

Fitbit

One-use devices such as wristbands that exist just to help count steps have fallen by the wayside as all-in-one gadgets like smartphones and smartwatches have taken their place.

Fitbit's share price, in turn, has taken a tumble. When the company went public in 2015, it did so at a $4 billion valuation; now its market cap stands at just over $1 billion.

So Fitbit is looking at broadening out its product to have a more comprehensive role as a health tool. And the company is starting by focusing on populations other wearable-device makers may have overlooked.

In February, the company put $6 million behind a tiny San Francisco startup that's working on a needle-free way to track blood-glucose levels, a key metric that people with diabetes rely on to make decisions about what to eat and when. Around the same time, Fitbit announced a number of new partnerships with diabetes-device companies designed to help better integrate the devices into the Fitbit ecosystem.

In May, Fitbit became the first major wearables company to introduce period tracking. The feature includes an in-app dashboard that allows users to log their periods, record symptoms, and opt into getting push notifications two days before and on the day of their predicted period start date. Eventually, Fitbit wants to use the data it gathers from the initiative to help women take steps to address painful period-related symptoms such as cramps and fatigue, Yuen told Business Insider.

"To take something most women have in their pocket or purse and use that to help give key health information not only to themselves but also to medical providers, that is such a powerful, and still relatively untapped, resource," Katherine White, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Boston University who advised Fitbit on its female-health tracking initiative, said.

Diagnosing heart conditions, sleep apnea, and more

Fitbit

Next, Fitbit plans to roll out a host of more advanced medical features geared at detecting widespread but often unaddressed health conditions.

First on Fitbit's radar are sleep apnea and atrial fibrillation, or A-fib, two disorders that frequently go undetected but can have dramatic consequences without treatment.

While sleep apnea is characterized by breathing that repeatedly stops and starts during sleep, atrial fibrillation is an irregular, often quick heart rate that can cause poor circulation.

In 2017, Fitbit enrolled in a new precertification program with the FDA designed to help speed the approval process for new digital health products.

As part of that work, Fitbit is conducting clinical trials on both sleep apnea and A-fib, to see if their devices could one day replace existing tests for the conditions, which are often invasive and expensive. Right now, diagnosing sleep apnea requires physicians to collect information on everything from your heart rate and blood-oxygen level to your airflow and breathing patterns.

For some people, that can mean spending the night in a sleep lab and spending up to $5,000 a night; others may be able to do so using home sleep-apnea tests that cost between $350 and $500. By comparison, Fitbit's most expensive smartwatch costs $300.

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As with its female-health-tracking initiative, the new apps would give Fitbit access to a trove of data — in many cases where little or none existed before.

That data could be used as it is now — with researchers who are studying cancer and heart conditions drawing from it for scientific studies — or it could be sold. For instance, genetics-testing company 23andMe has sold anonymized genetic data from millions of customers to drug companies.

Fitbit's data could be more attractive than that of its competitors because it's all stored one place, no matter what device the consumer is wearing.

"We know people like to change their devices," Yuen said. "Regardless of which device you use, Fitbit is able to maintain a big database of this, and we think that's exceptionally powerful over the long term."

If the company can pull from that mass of data and capitalize on conditions that other wearable-device makers aren't addressing, that could be enough to keep customers — and researchers — coming back for more.

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"The market is very large for these kinds of tools, but right now they're all behind this regulatory fence, and so we hope there will be some exciting commercial opportunities in the near future," he added.

When it comes to the cloud-computing market, Amazon is the clear leader and Microsoft's a strong No. 2.

Their dominance of the space isn't going to change anytime soon, if new research from Cowen is any indication. Companies of all kinds — small, medium, and large — are rushing to embrace the cloud. But customers of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Azure are more likely than those of other services to ramp up their spending this year, Cowen found.

"AWS and Azure scored well across the board" in the survey, the Cowen analysts said in a report issued Wednesday. "Both companies continue to distance themselves from the rest of the pack."

Indeed, the analysts cited the survey results in raising their price targets on both companies. Cowen now has a price target of $2,000 a share for Amazon, up from $1,900 a share, and $112 a share for Microsoft, up from $105 a share.

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In recent trading on Wednesday, Amazon's stock was at $1,584.36 a share, while Microsoft was trading at $97.56.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Thomson Reuters For its survey, Cowen polled some 574 IT decision makers at a collection of small, mid-size, and enterprise companies about their current and expected use of cloud services. In general, the respondents who were customers of AWS or Azure were more enthusiastic about those services than their rivals, although on some questions, all the major service providers scored well.

On average, for example, the decision makers plan to increase their spending across all cloud providers by about 28% this year. But customers of AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and IBM Cloud each plan to up their spending with those services by at least 31% on average, according to the survey, with Amazon's service topping the list at 32%.

Perhaps more tellingly, customers of AWS and Azure were more likely than those of other services to say that the rate of growth in their cloud spending will increase this year. On average, about 28% of respondents said they planned to accelerate their cloud spending in general this year.

But 41% of AWS and Azure customers said they plan to increase the growth rate in their spending with those services this year. Another 42% of customers of both services said they plan to keep the rate of growth in their spending with them about the same.

"We currently forecast market leaders AWS and Azure to grow well above expected market growth in 2018," the Cowen analysts said in the report.

Another good sign for Amazon and Microsoft was that the decision makers in general were much more likely to be aware of AWS and Azure than other cloud services. About 67% of respondents were familiar with Azure and 65% with AWS. By contrast, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud were tied for third place with 50%.

Apple and Volkswagen are officially in the car business together.

That's according to a multiple news reports published on Wednesday night, which outline some details of Apple's plan to turn some Volkswagen passenger vans into self-driving vehicles.

Apple will equip the German automaker's T6 Transporter van with its own self-driving technology and use a fleet of them as employee shuttles.

The partnership between Apple and Volkswagen is seen by some as bittersweet for the consumer-electronics giant, which had higher hopes for its self-driving car project when it first launched in 2014. Apple has sought partnerships with BMW and Mercedes-Benz. Those endeavors never panned out.

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But the deal with Volkswagen could help breathe new life into one part of the project, which, as The New York Times reports, has been middling — mostly due to false starts and employee turnover within the program.

More broadly, Apple has encountered some formidable competition in the self-driving space, right in its own backyard. Waymo, the autonomous-car unit that Google launched in 2016, is miles ahead by most estimates.

It hasn't been all bad news for Apple's automotive ambitions, though. As of May 9, it had 55 self-driving vehicles on the road in California, according to DMV records.

Companies like Microsoft have spent the last few years championing so-called digital transformation, a catch-all term for businesses embracing cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and all the other wonders of modern technology.

The problem is that it's not always smooth sailing to get there: Lots of companies, especially older ones, are sitting on mountains of data that have accumulated over the years. That data might be sitting in different systems, on different servers, in different parts of the world. And it's not like a company can simply discard decades of data and start over.

Enter Informatica — a 25-year-old data management company that famously took itself off the public markets in 2015 following a $5.3 billion leveraged buyout deal.

This week marked the annual Informatica World conference, where the company announced a deeper partnership with Microsoft. Now, Informatica customers can easily shunt all of their data to the Microsoft Azure cloud, from which they can apply the tech titan's formidable database wizardry. Conversely, the Informatica data management platform, which lets customers mash-up data from different sources, will run natively on Microsoft Azure.

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From Informatica's perspective, this is a big step towards that ideal of digital transformation, CEO Anil Chakravarthy tells Business Insider.

Once the data is in the cloud, it becomes easier to put it to new and novel uses. Indeed, Chakravarthy hopes that partnerships like this make it easier for its customers to start using artificial intelligence in earnest, by making the data more usable. For its own part, Chakravarthy says, Informatica has bet big on integrating AI into its own products.

"We see ourselves as both a provider of AI, as well as a consumer," says Chakravarthy.

From Microsoft's perspective, partnerships like the one with Informatica are reflective of its broader approach to growing the Microsoft Azure supercomputing cloud — a huge driver of growth for Microsoft, and a platform that's second in the market only to the leading Amazon Web Services.

"One of the things that's allowed us to be so successful is to recognize that the enterprise space is a very complicated space," Scott Guthrie, the Microsoft executive VP in charge of cloud, enterprise, and AI products, tells Business Insider.

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In other words, not even Microsoft can build all the tools and services necessary to consolidate and combine data, says Guthrie. That leaves a huge opportunity for a specialist like Informatica, which is happy to play that role, and which can focus all of its energies on filling those complicated needs, he adds.

Further to that point, Microsoft has been investing heavily in artificial intelligence, positioning it as the wave of the future in both enterprise and consumer software. Indeed, Azure offers many AI services. Yet, without partners like Informatica, companies wouldn't be able to wrangle the huge amounts of data necessary to make AI really useful.

Microsoft Executive VP of Cloud and Enterprise Scott Guthrie. Microsoft

"Data is the heart of that transformation that's happening," says Guthrie. And Informatica's Chakravarthy says that there's a "big gap" between having data, and making it useful.

Notably, Informatica has integrations with Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, too. Chakravarthy says that Microsoft is a key partner, however, because of its inroads with the largest companies in the world. In other words, Microsoft gets a way to offer customers better data management, and Informatica gets access to Microsoft's customers. Indeed, the Ford Motor Company is a mutual customer of Microsoft and Informatica.

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"This [partnership] gives us a way we can talk to customers together," says Guthrie.

"The real winner is gonna be the customer," agrees Chakravarthy.

This year is seeing a resurgence in the market for initial public offerings from tech companies, but by historical standards, it still likely to end up looking disappointing.

Tech bankers are expecting some 50 to 60 tech IPOs this year. That's a significant uptick from the 38 or so that happened last year, but it's still significantly below the average over the last 35 years or so. And it's well off the pace of the dot-com era, when more than a hundred tech companies went public a year on a routine basis.

Jay Ritter, Professor of Finance at the University of Florida Jay Ritter For much of the last two decades, people have been trying to figure out why we're no longer seeing anywhere near the number of IPOs we saw during the dot-com boom — and how to boost the market back to those levels. Politicians, policymakers, and market watchers have typically blamed onerous regulations. More recently, they've been pointing at the flood of cash in the private markets from investors such as SoftBank that's allowed companies to stay in business without having to turn to the public markets for funding.

But if you ask Jay Ritter, the pundits have missed the real causes for why tech IPOs haven't returned to their historical levels. The lack of IPOs can't really be blamed on SoftBank or regulations, said Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida who has been studying the public offering market since the 1980s.

"The main reason" he said, "is that tech companies are selling out rather than going public."

Although pundits typically point to the dot-com bust as when the IPO market fundamentally changed, its transformation actually predates it. Even as the market for public offerings was hitting record levels in the 1990s, a smaller and smaller percentage of venture-capital backed tech companies were actually going public.

At the beginning of the 1990s, about 80% of VC-funded tech companies that didn't shut down went public, Ritter said. By the end of the decade, only 40% did, with the rest being acquired by other, typically larger companies, he said. Today, just 10% of venture-backed tech companies exit their startup phase with an IPO, he said.

The shift happened as larger and larger companies started to dominate particular sectors in the tech industry. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the market was fairly wide open, and entrepreneurs had a reasonable shot to build large successful firms in any number of different areas.

But the tech industry moves rapidly and tends to be dominated by network, and winner-take-all effects, Ritter said. Companies that enter and dominate a sector early tend to see increasing returns, while closing the door on competitors. That phenomenon has encompassed a growing number of areas in the tech industry, leaving fewer and fewer sectors available that have the room to allow a startup to become a huge corporation.

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In the early 1980s, it was a reasonable bet to create a computer operating system company. Few saw that as a good prospect after Microsoft came to dominate the space by the end of that decade. Likewise, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in 1998, the web search market was still wide open. That's no longer the case.

With the competitive landscape changed, founders of smaller scale startups have found it more profitable to build businesses that they could potentially sell to one of the existing tech giants rather than trying to develop them into standalone businesses, Ritter said. Many are working on technologies that might fill in product niches at larger companies, or that could help improve those companies' services.

"Small tech companies have not been going public," Ritter said. "For a lot of tech companies, getting big fast is the value maximizing strategy, and organic growth takes too long."

Ritter has been making this case for years now. In 2012, he testified before Congress as it was considering the legislation that became the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act. The law was in large part an effort to boost the IPO market by reducing the regulatory burdens companies faced. Ritter argued that legislators were misdiagnosing the cause of the problem and that the legislation likely wouldn't boost the number of companies going public.

"With the benefit of six years of experience, I wouldn't change single word of what I said six years ago," he said.

Streaming is eating TV. Ratings for live, ad-supported shows continue to plummet. Netflix is set to make 1,000 original shows and movies this year.

And the TV advertising business is set to have a killer year.

Counterintuitive it may be, but the just-kicked-off TV upfront selling period, that annual spring ritual during which TV networks sell the majority of their ad space, is expected to be robust. That's in spite of a growing number of Americans ditching scheduled-TV watching.

"Panelists were bullish on the TV Upfront," says a new report from UBS, which quizzed 40 major advertisers on their media spending plans for 2018. "Demand for high quality TV inventory has never been higher."

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Those advertisers "do not expect a sudden inflection point in TV share losses in the near/medium term," the report says. "Eventually advertisers cannot keep paying more and getting less, but for now there is no better alternative for the majority of TV budgets."

In other words, that TV-advertising tipping point you've been waiting for isn't happening this year.

In fact, while volume, or the sheer number of ads sold, is expected to be flat, TV ad prices are expected to jump over the coming year.

A unique set of short-term conditions is helping prop up the TV ad business for now

TV budgets aren't shifting that fast. UBS

It's hardly all good news for TV, which may be enjoying a short-term blip

UBS did splash some cold water on what is otherwise a strong moment for TV advertising. For example:

Digital is still expected to steal ad share from TV over time. USB

TV is still the best way to reach millions of consumers quickly. But digital media wins on targeting.

TV wins on reach, but digital nails data. UBS

Facebook wants to be a bigger part of your home.

The social network's Marketplace section is moving further into commerce with the addition of home services. Starting Wednesday, users can enlist the expertise of local professionals to do things like plumbing, cleaning, or performing home renovations. Communication happens directly on the site, via Facebook Messenger.

Facebook says it got the idea from its own users, and it's working with partners like Handy, HomeAdvisor, and Porch to verify the providers on the site.

"More people ask for recommendations related to home services on Facebook in the US than any other topic," Deb Liu, head of Facebook Marketplace, said in a blog post announcing the new service.

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Here's how it works:

The service is a lot like other online portals that allow users to enlist professional help, like Angie's List or Amazon Home Services, which connects customers to local contractors to do work like cleaning and appliance installation. Amazon recently decided to hire its own cleaners in the Seattle area, signaling it might have more ambitious plans in the space.

A number of retailers are launching initiatives to bring home-improvement professionals into customers' homes. Walmart r ecently announced a partnership with Handy to bring its home-improvement and cleaning services to 2,000 stores, and in September, Ikea acquired TaskRabbit to integrate its assembly expertise into the stores' offerings.

Elon Musk is apparently hoping to take a page out of the Soviet playbook.

It all started when, on Wednesday afternoon, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO criticized the media in a series of tweets.

"The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them," he wrote.

Several minutes later, Musk followed up by tweeting that he plans to start a site that would rate the credibility of news organizations. He wrote that he would consider calling the site "Pravda," a word that means "truth" in Russian.

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"Pravda" references the Russian newspaper of the same name, which launched in Moscow in the early 20th century and published daily. It still exists today, but has a much lower circulation and comes out three times per week. The paper is now run by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the country's modern Communist party.

From 1918 to 1991, the original Pravda served as the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. When Vladimir Lenin and (later) Joseph Stalin ruled Russia, the paper was used to spread their ideas as propaganda.

During the Soviet era, Pravda was distributed nationwide. Featuring articles on Communist theory and programs, it attempted to avoid sensational news.

There's also the Pravda Report, another publication with a similar name that English speakers may be more familiar with. Existing solely as an online site at Pravda.ru, it covers both straightforward news (often with a Russian nationalist slant) as well as conspiracy theories. A few headlines in the past decade have included "AIDS: 21st Century's Biggest Hoax" and "Aliens forced Americans out from the Moon." Unlike today's Pravda, the Pravda Report has an English-language site and is not connected to the Communist party.

This is not the first time Musk has railed against the media. Earlier this week on Twitter, he also criticized journalists from Reveal, the nonprofit investigative news organization that ran a story claiming Tesla didn't report several factory injuries. Tesla workers have also accused Musk of shutting down efforts to unionize, and BuzzFeed recently leaked emails that show Musk slamming their organized labor effort.

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On Twitter, a number of journalists and other commenters have compared Musk's latest tweets to those of President Donald Trump, who frequently criticizes the media for stories he perceives as negative.

The Verge reporter Andrew J. Hawkins, for example, called Musk a "media-baiting Trump figure" on Wednesday.

Musk replied: "Thought you'd say that. Anytime anyone criticizes the media, the media shrieks 'You're just like Trump!' Why do you think he got elected in the first place? Because no ones believes you any more. You lost your credibility a long time ago.'"

Musk might be serious about launching his own "Pravda." As freelance reporter Mark Harris pointed out on Twitter, documents from California's Secretary of State show that one of Musk's agents incorporated Pravda Corp in October 2017.

Microsoft's annual E3 press briefing on all things Xbox is Sunday, June 10 at 4 p.m. EST / 1 p.m. PDT.

The primary way to watch the broadcast is on Mixer, Microsoft's live video platform, though "other streaming services" will also carry a stream. Microsoft didn't reveal which services those will be, but it's likely to include the usual platforms (YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook).

The E3 briefing is Microsoft's annual opportunity to announce major Xbox games, show off upcoming games, and — generally speaking — address its most loyal fans directly. It's the kind of event where Microsoft might reveal a major new "Halo" game (for example only, though we're certainly due for a follow-up to "Halo 5" at this point).

It's an event full of surprise reveals intended to wow viewers, and this year is no different, but we do have a few good ideas of what to expect.

Here's what we know about Microsoft's Xbox line-up:

Soon, you'll be able rent a car from Uber.

The ride-hailing company has taken its first step into car rentals by including a new "Rent a Car" option in its app. The rental service doesn't appear to actually be live yet, but Uber users in San Francisco will notice new options within the app asking them to sign up, and suggesting an imminent rollout.

Uber Rent, which will initially be limited to San Francisco, will work in partnership with Getaround, a car sharing service that lets anyone make their car available for people to rent.

Uber announced Uber Rent in April, but this is the first time Uber has made the service available for signup within the app. In the Uber app, San Francisco users will be able to see which cars are available to rent on Getaround, reserve a car, and pay for it.

To sign up for the new Uber car rental feature, first click on the left-hand hamburger menu inside the app:

Screenshot

Uber then provides a few more details of the rental service, which is still in "beta" testing, and will invite you to sign up for early access to provide feedback:

Uber

Congratulations — "You're a trailblazer!" You can't actually rent a car right away, but it looks like Uber will give you a heads up when a vehicle is available. How much it will cost and how exactly it will work remains unclear. Stay tuned.

Uber