Google Cloud is hustling hard to sign on large enterprise customers as the company works to close the gap with the leading Amazon Web Services and the second-place Microsoft Azure.

So it's a solid feather in Google's cap that Credit Karma, a well-known personal-finance service with 80 million users that's said to be valued at $4 billion, is moving the entirety of its data-processing services to Google's Cloud in a project expected to be completed by the end of the year.

It should be noted that Credit Karma relies on Amazon Web Services for some of its corporate applications. But for data processing, Credit Karma is already using the Google BigQuery data-crunching tool, and now plans to use it even more.

Overall, Credit Karma says it does 8 billion predictions a day based on its data to recommend credit cards and other financial products to its customers.

Of the decision to bet on Google's data tech, Credit Karma CTO Ryan Graciano told Business Insider, "It really feels like Google is a step ahead."

He added: "So why don't we leverage their infrastructure?"

Credit Karma was founded in 2007, when there "wasn't as much cloud," Graciano said. Amazon Web Services was in its infancy, and Microsoft and Google hadn't yet gotten into the cloud business. As such, Credit Karma's only real option was managing and maintaining its own servers in its own data centers, something it does a lot of today.

"We have a fair amount of physical infrastructure," Graciano said.

The conventional wisdom holds that much of the move toward cloud computing comes from a desire to cut costs — it's a widely held belief that it's cheaper to host servers from the mega-efficient platforms run by Amazon and others than it is to keep your own.

Diane Greene, Google's cloud boss. Google

That's not the case with Credit Karma though, according to Graciano. The real value, he says, is that Google Cloud makes it way faster for Credit Karma engineers to build, test, and deploy new concepts and updated models.

About half of Credit Karma's workforce of more than 700 people are engineers of some type, so those productivity gains add up very quickly, he says.

"It's all about developer efficiency," Graciano said. "I can try to cut costs on servers, or I can make those people way more efficient."

Where before a new service or model might take two years to see the light of day on Credit Karma's old systems, Graciano boasts that the turnaround time now could be two days.

"That's way better than 2% savings in capex," says Graciano, referring to the capital expenditures needed to maintain a data center.

He says there was some initial pushback on the project from some of the Credit Karma engineering staff members, especially from those who had worked closest with the data centers and server infrastructure. But as the project has progressed and they've seen those productivity gains, Graciano says they've come around.

It'll be a while before Credit Karma moves everything over to the cloud, Graciano says, just because there's so much data there — the company collects 8 to 9 terabytes of data a day, all of which has to be accounted for and migrated.

Still, the goal is for Credit Karma to be 100% based in the cloud. At that point, the data centers could shut down.

"We have this vision of getting to cloud as kind of this final, major step," Graciano said.

Once Credit Karma gets all its data processing into the cloud, it plans to take advantage of other Google Cloud tech, particularly around artificial intelligence, Graciano says. Credit Karma already does a lot of predictions; Google's AI could help it do more, and faster, he says.

"I want them to keep innovating there, because I want to take advantage of those things," he said.

Graciano praises the experience of working with Google but demurs when asked whether this means Credit Karma will ditch Amazon Web Services and go all-in on Google Cloud.

"I think it's too early to call," he said. "We want to see this project through."

Signal Snowboards has created a one-of-a-kind board that lights up the slopes with LEDs on the bottom. Check out a behind-the-scenes look on how the board was constructed. Following is a transcript of the video.

LED. Snowboard.

Snowboard company Signal wanted to build a board like no other. They settled on a programmable LED board. It can display whatever you want. PAC-MAN anyone?

Mark Rosolowski: That is so sick.

Bystander: Yes! Oh my God. This is cool.

The build had its challenges. The entire base of the board had to be covered in LEDs.

Dave Lee: This is the base — the beginning of the base that Mark showed me and if you can kind of see his computer screen, that is a lot of cutting. Which means that's a lot of lights and that's a lot of soldering.

Here's how they did it.

First Attempt

Mark Rosolowski: I saw a shock.

Dave Lee: What's that mean?

Rosolowski: I saw a little spark. It shorted. Wire went into another wire somewhere.

[Bystander]: Nothing

Lee: Nothing.

[Bystander]: Nada.

Lee: Let's go back to soldering.

[Weak laughter]

Lee: It was a crazy night. We had everything going for us. We were champions. We had this thing done. And then you pull it out, everyone's still excited, you go, and you touch the points, and you got nothing. And that's how it goes. These one-offs. This crazy idea, where you try it for the first time, it's not always gonna work. But, we rally, we do it again, and we're gonna make it work.

But it was worth it in the end.

Second Attempt

Dave Lee: OK.

[Cheers]

Lee: Woo! Nice. How good do you feel right now?

[Bystander]: Like, honestly. Amazing dude.

Lee: It looks insane. What's crazy is you'll look up on it, like this, and it's really hard to see. You step back, and it's super clear. We're running a video right now. It's crazy. So, next step, we go ride it.

Are you an #Instaddict?

Instagram is working on a new feature that will show users just how much time they spend with the app, in a wider effort from tech companies to get people to look up from their phones.

The new feature was originally discovered by Jane Manchun Wong, a computer scientist with a record of reverse engineering popular apps to uncover upcoming features. Wong's find was first reported by TechCrunch, and confirmed by Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom on Twitter.

Wong dug around in Instagram's code and found a feature seemingly known internally as "time spent." This is seemingly visualised on the app as a sidebar feature called "Usage insights."

You can see her full thread and what the feature looks like here:

There's no further detail on what the "Usage insights" feature will actually show, like your overall time spent on Instagram, or whether it just shows a limited time period of a month or a day.

Systrom simply tweeted "It's true" when TechCrunch first reported the story.

The new feature follows Google introducing time management controls for Android, with a new dashboard that lets users set how much time they want to spend on each app. When they use up their allotted time, the app will gray out on their phone screen.

Apple has similarly promised better usage controls for children, but has yet to deliver.

Major infrastructure investments by tech giants like Facebook and Amazon have led to a surprise bump in 2018 data center spend, according to Morgan Stanley analyst Katy L. Huberty.

In a report Tuesday, Huberty said that Morgan Stanley expects cloud capital expenditures to grow 29% year over year in 2018, thanks to "continued workload shift to public cloud and easing component constraints." The firm had originally expected 23% growth, but raised its estimate after seeing how companies acted in the first quarter.

This puts growth in the space 13 percentage points higher in 2018 than in 2017, when the space saw just 16% growth.

"We see hyperscale data center investment inflecting above our prior expectations," Huberty wrote.

Among the big spenders are Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, who together make up 75% of the capital expenditures of the 14 companies tracked by Morgan Stanley its Cloud CapEx Tracker.

Amazon "continues to invest heavily to expand AWS capabilities and improve data center efficiency," while Facebook also has plans to invest around $15 billion in data centers, servers, network infrastructure and office facilities, according to the report.

"Similarly, both Google and Microsoft highlighted the need to invest aggressively in their data center business," Huberty wrote.

But it's not just giants making investments in cloud. An April Morgan Stanley survey of 100 chief information officers "suggests the percentage of total company workloads residing on the public cloud will increase from 20% today to 44% by 2021," according to the report. Morgan Stanley

On Tuesday, Amazon announced that Verizon was going to vastly increase its usage of Amazon's cloud. Verizon had been an under-the-radar customer of Amazon Web Services since 2015, but it is now going to move 1,000 of its applications into Amazon's cloud in a very public way.

It is also going to be a user of Amazon's database, Aurora.

All of this is significant for a number of reasons.

For one, it marks how Amazon has taken yet another would-be competitor and brought them into its own orbit. Verizon once had ambitions to be a public cloud provider that competed with Amazon. In 2011, Verizon spent $1.4 billion to buy cloud data center provider Terremark. At the time, the cloud market was young, and every big tech company was scrambling to nab their piece of it.

It didn't really work out. In 2015, Verizon started using Amazon Web Services to power some of its own software. A year later, as Amazon's dominance rose, Verizon's in-house cloud ambitions faded. Verizon quietly closed its cloud unit. Last year, it sold its data centers to Equinix for $3.6 billion, and sold the remnants of its cloud business to IBM, with terms undisclosed.

So becoming a "preferred cloud vendor" for Verizon is a definitely feather in Amazon's cap.

And the announcement that Verizon will use the Amazon Aurora database is significant because it gives Amazon another huge, marquee customer for its fast-growing Oracle competitor.

And the list of Aurora is starting to get long and significant. AWS CEO Andy Jassy says that Aurora is the fastest growing service in Amazon's history, with "tens of thousands" of customers using it and it grew at about 250% last year. Big-name Aurora customers include ADP, Autodesk and Choice Hotels. Verizon is a standout addition, nonetheless.

It isn't clear which type of databases Verizon is moving to AWS Aurora. Back in 2015, Verizon famously had issues with a MongoDB database when a hacker claimed to have stolen the customer data out of it, and was offering to sell that data for $100,000.

Other companies who couldn't beat the mighty AWS and later opted to join it, (albeit as partners, not customers), include VMware and Rackspace.

Enjoy your MoviePass subscriptions while you've got one. They may not work for much longer.

It's no secret that Helios and Matheson Analytics, MoviePass' corporate parent, is in financial peril. The company is losing more than $20 million a month and its cash stockpile is dwindling.

But recently filed regulatory documents — as well as the company's recent stock performance — indicate it may be in deeper trouble than is widely appreciated.

In the first quarter, it burned through cash at a faster rate than it previously reported. It's so low on cash that it says it's going to need to sell more equity in the company to the public this month to raise funds, which would mark the third time this year it's tapped the public markets. But because of its recent stock slump, that tap may run dry before the year is out.

"Without additional funding, the company will not have sufficient funds to meet its obligations within one year," Helios and Matheson said in its quarterly report, filed on Tuesday.

It continued: "Without raising additional capital, there is substantial doubt about the company's ability to continue as a going concern through May 15, 2019."

MoviePass is burning through cash at a faster-than-reported rate

Helios and Matheson's troubles stem from MoviePass, which has become the core of its business. As its fans know well, MoviePass offers a $10-a-month service that allows subscribers to see a movie-a-day in the theaters.

When subscribers go see a movie, the company generally pays the theater the retail price of the tickets on behalf of those subscribers. Because ticket prices in many places are more than $10 and because many subscribers see more than one movie a month, many customers are getting a great deal — and MoviePass is losing money hand over fist.

In the first quarter, for example, Helios and Matheson posted $49.4 million in sales — $47.2 million of which came from MoviePass subscriptions. But the company's direct costs associated with those sales were $136 million in the period, almost all of which was likely due to buying movie tickets for its customers. In other words, on average, MoviePass customers are getting about $28 in tickets each month for their $10 subscription.

That's translated into a massive outflow of cash. In the first quarter, the company's operations burned through $68.4 million. That's nearly $23 million a month — or about $1 million more every month than what the company had previously said it has averaged during the seven-month period since September.

Helios and Matheson have been using the stock market like an ATM

To fund these ongoing and mushrooming losses, Helios and Matheson has started to use the stock market as a kind of ATM. The company sold $105 million worth of stock in February and another $30 million worth last month.

Despite the repeated fund raising, the company said in a regulatory filing last week that it had just $15.5 million in cash on hand at the end of last month, a perilously low figure, given its cash burn rate. While the company assured investors that it had cut down its losses significantly at the beginning of this month, it warned investors that it didn't think it has sufficient funds to last it even for the rest of the month.

"We will need proceeds from sales of our common stock ... or other sources of capital, starting in May 2018," the company said.

The company has already filed the paperwork to sell another $265 million worth of stock, so the next round of sales could happen at any time.

But Helios and Matheson's stock has now fallen below Nasdaq's listing standards

Selling stock to raise money is a good game, but it can't go on forever, particularly if the cash raised is immediately burned. All else being equal, floating more shares on the market will make each share worth less. And if the company has nothing to show for the money invested except a larger and larger accumulated deficit, investors are likely to sour on putting more money in.

But there's another practical problem with Helios and Matheson's fund-raising strategy: Its stock is now at risk of being delisted by mid-December.

The Nasdaq — the market on which the company's shares trade — requires listed companies to have a stock price of at least $1 a share and a market capitalization of at least $50 million. Helios and Matheson fell below both standards last week. At the close of trading Tuesday, its stock was priced at 65.21 cents a share, and its market capitalization stood at $41.4 million.

Should the company stay below Nasdaq's price or market value standards for 30 days, it will officially be noncompliant with Nasdaq's standards and will almost certainly get a warning letter from the exchange. If it can't meet those standards for the next six months, Nasdaq will delist Helios and Matheson's shares. At that point, its game of selling stock to pay for subscribers' tickets will almost certainly be up.

That's, of course, not the picture CEO Ted Farnsworth has been painting publicly about the company lately. He's said he's "not worried at all" about the MoviePass's cash burn rate he told Variety on Monday, saying the company has "17 months worth of cash" thanks to a $300 million line of credit.

But Helios and Matheson didn't mention that line of credit in its regulatory filings, an odd omission given its apparent financial straits.

So, have your fun on MoviePass. Just don't be shocked when it all comes to an end.

The United States Supreme Court struck down a federal law prohibiting sports betting, and the British gambling giant behind Paddy Power and Betfair wants a piece of the action.

Paddy Power Betfair — valued on the public markets at £6.5 billion ($8.8 billion) — is close to buying FanDuel, a New York-based fantasy sports company, according to multiple media reports. Business Insider also spoke to a source with knowledge of the deal.

According to The Financial Times, Paddy Power Betfair is due to make an announcement on Wednesday morning, and that negotiations are "ongoing."

Legal Sports Report, meanwhile, reported that the two companies are "close" to a deal, but that it's not clear when it might be finalized.

FanDuel lets users build fantasy teams, follow games, and win cash, and it would offer Paddy Power Betfair a major doorway into the US market — as well as details on tens of millions of users that might use its other gambling products. (Paddy Power Betfair already has a horseracing TV network called TVG in the US, and some smaller operations.) As of 2016, FanDuel was said to be worth over $1 billion.

On Monday, the US Supreme Court ruled that a ban of sports betting is unconstitutional, paving the way for the individual states to legalize sports gambling.

New Jersey and Pennsylvania have already passed such legislation, and a recent study found that 14 states are likely to have sports gambling within two years, including Montana, Colorado, Michigan, and Massachusetts.

In 2017, FanDuel had planned to merge with rival DraftKings, but it was called off after the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said it would oppose the merger. Paddy Power Betfair was formed in 2016 when Paddy Power and Betfair merged.

Some mistakes are so big that you just have to fess up and move on with your life.

That's the way Warren Buffett feels about his decision not to invest in Amazon back in 1997 when he was pitched to invest in its IPO, but passed. Amazon launched on the public markets that year at $18 a share.

At the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting earlier this month, and also in an interview with CNBC, Buffett talked about turning down Amazon as one of the decisions he regrets.

"The truth is that I've watched Amazon from the start and I think what Jeff Bezos has done is something close to a miracle, and the problem is if I think something is going to be a miracle I tend not to bet on it," he said at the meeting.

A couple of days later, CNBC's Becky Quick asked him if he's going to do an about-face, like he did with Apple, and invest in Amazon.

Warren Buffet Dennis Van Tine/AP Buffett said, "It'll probably be tough. I've probably got so many psychological problems with the fact that I didn't do it that it's very hard to do it."

He reiterated praise for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos calling him "an extraordinarily clear thinker as well as being a brilliant thinker."

He also said that Amazon and Bezos have far surpassed "anything I would have dreamt could have been done. I mean, 'cause if I had dreamt it-- if I had really felt it could have been done, I should have bought it then."

Remember, back when Amazon was founded in 1994, most people thought his idea to sell books over this thing called the internet was crazy. A lot of people had never even hard of the internet. When Bezos tried to raise money from VCs, they all turned him down. In 1995, it was so difficult to scrape together seed money, he had to hustle to secure $1 million from 20 angel investors each kicking in $50,000, he said in a 2001 interview.

Four years later, in part because of Amazon's success, investors would go so crazy for internet businesses and the so-called internet bubble would arrive.

Buffett says he still gets a pang these days every time he sees a new Amazon annual report because Bezos always includes his original 1997 shareholder letter in it. In that letter, Bezos tells investors that he has a long-term view, and promises "online bookselling, and online commerce in general, should prove to be a very large market."

Buffett told CNBC, "I knew he would do the most with whatever idea he had. I had no idea that it had this potential. I blew it."

On Tuesday, HTC unveiled the HTC Exodus — a phone that it's describing as "the world's first native blockchain phone."

The HTC Exodus, will be similar to HTC's other Android smartphones. The difference is that will be designed to support for blockchain-based distributed apps, and feature what the company describes as "built-in secure hardware."

Details, including price, are currently scant. The big-picture idea, says HTC, is that this is a phone for the privacy-minded user. By using blockchain tech, HTC promises that the Exodus can give privacy-minded users control over their data, without having to rely on the major technology companies for cloud storage.

Furthermore, the phone will come with a built-in cryptocurrency wallet. Ultimately, HTC says that each Exodus will act as a node for the bitcoin and ethereum blockchains — so that every phone increases the overall size and scope of the network.

Overseeing the project is Phil Chen, best known as the founder of HTC's Vive virtual reality headset business. He left the company in 2015 to get into venture capital, but is now returning to HTC as Decentralized Chief Officer.

Chen discussed his vision for the Exodus at the blockchain conference Consensus in New York. The goal, he said, is to build a phone that supports a decentralized system. Chen said that he believes that a blockchain-powered smartphone might inspire a new wave of decentralized systems, in the same way that the availability of computers once paved the way for the makings of the internet.

The company suggests that future customers might be able to pay for the phone with cryptocurrencies, but hasn't gone into details.

"We think that the phone can be an agent in the future for decentralization," said Chen. "We want you to hold your own key [through] a secure management method in our phones."

Here's a sketch, hinting at what the Exodus will look like:

HTC

Workplaces everywhere ground to a halt on Tuesday as everybody argued whether the robot in this recording says "Yanny" or "Laurel."

To cut right to the chase, here's the recording, as shared on Twitter by influencer and designer Cloe Feldman:

Some Twitter users have said they hear "Yanny" and some say they hear "Laurel."

Apparently, both sides are correct according to some Redditors.

There are two separate voices in the recording, one saying "Laurel" at a lower frequency and the other saying "Yanny" at a higher frequency. If you play the recording at a high volume, you're probably more likely to hear "Laurel," while if the volume is at a lower level, you'll hear "Yanny."

The video apparently originated on Reddit.

This isn't the first time a conundrum like this has taken the internet by storm. People were left befuddled by the infamous dress incident of 2015 in which no one could decide if a dress in the photo was white and gold or black and blue.

And similarly, late last year bad lighting in a photo of a pair of sneakers made it difficult to settle on what color they were.

Like the viral phenomenons before it, the recording will fade into nonexistence within a matter of days.

Warning: Minor spoilers below.

The moment I realized "Solo: A Star Wars Movie" wasn't for me was toward the two-hour mark of the movie, when I realized we were nowhere near the end.

Granted, there was about only 15 minutes left in the movie, but it felt like an eternity. I've had that feeling in many movies in my life — when it just won't end. But never for a "Star Wars" movie.

"Solo" is not an awful movie, it just has a few awful parts that feel uninspired. This is particularly true in the third act of the movie.

In "Solo" (opening May 25), we follow the progression of Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) from a small-time hood on his home planet of Corellia, with dreams of being a great pilot cruising through the galaxy, to eventually becoming a space pirate.

There are thrilling action sequences, cinematographer Bradford Young ("Arrival") gives the movie a beautiful look, there are fantastic performances by Ehrenreich and Joonas Suotamo as Chewbacca, and Donald Glover completely knocks it out of the park as Lando Calrissian.

But the movie crumbles following Han and the gang's thrilling completion of the legendary Kessel Run. The conclusion of the movie is stale, filled with cliches, and tries too hard to set the foundation for future "Solo" movies by featuring one of the most random cameos you'll ever see in a movie (more on that in a sec, but don't worry, no spoilers).

That's certainly not my only issue with the movie.

It starts with some really lame opening text that sets the stage. The worst piece is the use of the words "mean streets" in describing the planet Solo grew up on. And the movie at times tries a little too hard to make Han an idealistic jokester. Personally, I think this is less the leftover effect of Chris Miller and Phil Lord's involvement in the movie as one-time directors, and more on eventual director Ron Howard's vanilla style.Donald Glover as Lando Calrissian is fantastic. Lucasfilm However, there are some great elements to the story, as well.

Young's photography goes from smoky original "Blade Runner" vibe in the beginning to wide epic shots by the end. Glover's Calrissian sounds like the actor who originally played him, Billy Dee Williams, and has a flawless style. He's also paired with a sassy robot co-pilot, L3-37 (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) that is a total scene stealer. And Ehrenreich actually pulls off playing Solo, not so much by doing his best Harrison Ford impression, but instead showing us a different side of the character. This is how Solo was before the galaxy chewed up all the youthful optimism he had about life and spit him back out.

And we see the Millennium Falcon at its one-time pristine condition, which is a thrill to take in.

The biggest issue the movie has is that the screenwriters Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan try to shoe-horn a plot twist at the end that is so unnecessary. In teasing a potential villain path for Han's love interest in the movie, Qi'ra (Emilia Clarke), they bring back a character from the "Star Wars" saga that is a fan favorite, but is a bizarre choice to be included in this story. It certainly is going to make an uproar when general audiences see the movie, primarily because it feels so blatantly force fed.

Like all "Star Wars" movies, there will be those who will absolutely love this movie, and there are certainly things to enjoy about it. The supporting cast — filled with veterans like Woody Harrelson, Paul Bettany, Thandie Newton, and one character voiced by Jon Favreau — are all great and mesh perfectly with the leads.

But my fear is "Solo" shows signs that Disney/Lucasfilm are hitting a point where the beloved "Star Wars" universe could be headed to a watered-down moment. Is there a need to have a "Star Wars" movie released every single year, especially with multiple "Star Wars" series coming to Disney's streaming service in the coming years?

To this point, all the movies released so far since Disney took over Lucasfilm have been enormous money makers, so obviously the studio won't want to slow down. But "Solo" may be the first indication that it might be time to pump the brakes and take more time to focus on the stories, and make sure everything is right (especially the creatives involved) before making a movie.

Thomson Reuters

David Tepper’s hedge fund, Appaloosa Management, exited its stake in Apple during the first quarter, documents filed Tuesday show.

At Tuesday’s prices, the sale of 4,587,852 shares would be worth more than $853 million.

The sale was made public in a form known as a 13-F, which all institutional asset managers are required to file after each quarter. Because funds are only required to disclose their current holdings, it’s not clear when or at what price the fund sold off its stake. 

Regardless, Tepper likely saw a hefty profit thanks to the appreciation of Apple even in recent months. Since November, when a smaller stake was first disclosed by Appaloosa, the stock has risen 9%. The fund's initial purchase happened some time between July and September, when Apple shares were even lower.

Tuesday’s filings come just hours after Tepper reportedly agreed to buy the Carolina Panthers from team founder Jerry Richardson for $2.2 billion. The purchase is pending a vote at the NFL owners meeting next week in Atlanta.

The fund, whose holdings of public securities fell 7.1% to $9.71 billion in the quarter, also added a new stake in Wells Fargo while upping its stake in MGM and Google-parent Alphabet

The horizon seems to stretch toward infinity on Earth's surface, where the vast majority of us will spend our entire lives.

But photos from space don't lie about the real stature of our home planet.

Earth is a puny, insignificant speck that floats in an endless black void, and a new NASA photo is all the more proof of this moving (and perhaps depressing) fact of life.

The image was taken from a distance of about 621,371 miles (1 million kilometers) away, by a tiny satellite that's currently on its way to Mars.

When NASA's InSight lander launched on May 5, it was accompanied by two identical, backpack-size satellites collectively called Mars Cube One, or MarCO. MarCO-A and MarCO-B are tiny, modular spacecraft known as "CubeSats," and today they're officially the smallest satellites ever sent past the moon.

During a series of tests on May 9, MarCO-B — which engineers call "Wall-E" — took its first-ever photo so scientists could check that its antenna deployed correctly. In the resulting image, two familiar objects appear: Earth and its moon.

A photo of Earth and the moon taken by MarCO-B about 1 million kilometers away from the planet.NASA/JPL-Caltech

It's easy to miss the celestial partners in the picture.

To help us out, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory released a labeled version that highlights Earth, the moon, and various parts of MarCO-B.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Capturing Earth and the moon in the photo was no accident.

NASA said the image is meant to honor the "pale blue dot" photo proposed by famed physicist Carl Sagan and taken by the Voyager spacecraft in 1990.

"Consider it our homage to Voyager," Andy Klesh, MarCO's chief engineer at NASA-JPL, said in a press release about the image. "CubeSats have never gone this far into space before, so it's a big milestone. Both our CubeSats are healthy and functioning properly. We're looking forward to seeing them travel even farther."

The MarCO satellites are designed to test the benefits of launching CubeSats in deep space.

If at least one MarCO satellite safely reaches the red planet, it could help scientists on Earth get better, quicker information about the InSight spacecraft's attempt to descend toward and land on the Martian surface.

San Francisco is in trouble. The streets are filthy. Housing prices are out-of-control. The city is host to 1.23% of all homeless Americans.

Some San Franciscans are fed up with the tech industry, which they blame for gentrification and the still-painful housing crisis. They want a reckoning to come for Big Tech — courtesy of the next mayor.

San Francisco elects a new mayor in less than three weeks, and the candidates are battling over the best path to regulate the tech industry and its presence in the city. The top contenders are expected to take a harder line with the tech companies that have sprouted throughout the city, thanks to generous tax breaks and other favorable policies. The era of tech-friendly civic policy in San Francisco may be coming to an end.

Seven mayoral candidates met for one final debate on Monday evening at the Commonwealth Club. During the last portion of the debate, the moderator read questions from the audience, ranging in topic from the city's homelessness epidemic to the onslaught of electric scooters.

"Why is the rent so damn high?" the moderator read from a card.

The room broke out in laughter that quickly subsided, as an audience of about 200 people waited to hear how their next mayor plans to reckon with out-of-control housing prices.

San Francisco is in the thralls of a housing emergency. The median two-bedroom rent of $3,060 is more than double the national average of $1,170, and only 12% of families can afford to buy a home in the city. Lower-income residents are leaving in droves, as tech and finance professionals migrate into the city for high-paying jobs, driving housing prices even higher.

Audience questions during the debate made it clear, if it weren't before: Some residents are fed up with what they see as the tech industry leeching off their city, and they want the next mayor to force Big Tech to pay up.

Candidate Mark Leno, a former California state senator, called on tech companies to hire more residents for jobs in administrative offices and sales. He cited the number of college-educated San Franciscans driving taxis to suggest that underemployment is something tech can solve.

"We need to make sure that [the tech industry's] success is our success," Leno said.

An Uber self-driving vehicle climbs a hill in San Francisco. Uber

Supervisor Jane Kim, who's also running for mayor, came down on the tech industry for "their role in exacerbating the income gap," which she called the fastest-growing in the country. San Francisco's middle class shrank from about half the population in the 1990s to about 33% in 2012.

She suggested that local government work together with the tech industry to address how these companies "treat their lowest-paid workers." She asked, "What benefits do they provide them?"

Kim went on, "Can they stop contracting out [...] so that our janitors, our cafeteria workers, our security guards have security to live in the Bay Area and be able to raise their families here?"

Candidate Ellen Lee Zhou, a public health worker and union representative considered to be an underdog, asked that the tech industry considered "supplying their own apartments for their own employees." As mayor, she said she would ask tech companies to donate buildings for developing affordable housing.

People from the audience asked the candidates to address the insane traffic jams that residents face downtown, where some 6,500 Uber and Lyft cars roam the streets during peak hours.

Richie Greenberg, a small business adviser and the only Republican in the race, and San Francisco Board of Supervisors President London Breed — who served as acting mayor briefly after the sudden death of previous mayor Ed Lee — both said they would place a cap on the number of ride-hailing cars permitted on the road at any time. Breed went a step further, saying she would curb some vehicles with on-demand startups like Postmates and Caviar to reduce congestion.

San Francisco will vote on June 5 — the same day as the statewide California elections.

With Facebook under scrutiny for its privacy practices, some nurses in San Francisco want to remove the name of the company's founder from a local public hospital.

The nurses, many of whom work for the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital And Trauma Center — commonly referred to as just the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital — worry that patients will associate it with the social network and its recent scandal involving the leak of data to Cambridge Analytica. They're also concerned about being connected with Zuckerberg and Facebook in light of some of the company's ethically questionable practices in the past.

On Saturday, a small group of nurses staged a protest outside the hospital, taping over the word "Zuckerberg" on a sign.

"To give the name away to someone who has caused a great deal of harm in the world is entirely inappropriate," nurse Sasha Cuttler told Business Insider.

The New York Times previously reported on the protest.

San Francisco General Hospital was renamed in 2015 after Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan donated $75 million to the institution. The name change has aroused opposition since it was first announced.

A union that includes nursing employees from the hospital circulated a petition in 2015 urging the hospital allow city residents to have some say in the name. The petition noted that residents in 2008 had approved $887 million bond measure to support the hospital.

"Although Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan's $75 million donation is appreciated and needed, we feel strongly that it is wrong to name the whole hospital for them," the petition read.

Objections to using Zuckerberg's name have been raised for years

The objections to the name have been reignited by the recent string of scandals for Facebook, particularly the one involving Cambridge Analytica. But they also reflect longstanding concerns about the company and its practices.

Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan AP One thing the nurses pointed to was a 2015 study Facebook conducted in which its researchers manipulated users' emotions without their knowledge or consent. That study was widely criticized after it became public, with many deeming it unethical.

The nurses are also worried that Facebook might use Zuckerberg's relationship with the hospital to try to obtain data on its patients. They pointed to a CNBC report about how Facebook quietly tried to pursue data-sharing arrangements with other hospitals.

The CNBC report didn't specifically cite any contact between the company and Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. In a statement at the time, Facebook said the hospital data-sharing initiative didn't progress past the "planning stage."

"We are in charge of keeping our most vulnerable people private and protected ... Now people wonder, 'How much is my privacy protected at a hospital with that name on it?'" Heater Ali, an employee at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, told The New York Times.

One nurse thinks it should be renamed after an LGBTQ activist

But even some of the city's political elite are starting to second-guess the decision to rename the hospital.

"Had we known what we know now, perhaps we wouldn't have accepted the funds from Zuckerberg," John Avalos, a former San Francisco supervisor, told The Times.

A Facebook spokesperson did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

The protesters don't have a consensus pick for what the hospital should be named, if Zuckerberg's name is removed. Instead, they believe San Francisco residents should get to choose a name in a citywide vote, Cuttler said.

Cuttler has a personal preference — José Sarria, an LGBTQ civil rights activist and drag queen. In 1961, Sarria, who went by the drag name "the Widow Norton," became the first openly gay candidate to run for public office in the United States.

A Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital spokesperson did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

President Donald Trump said Sunday he has instructed his Commerce Department to help get a Chinese telecommunications company "back into business" after the US government cut off access to its American suppliers.

At issue is that department's move last month to block the ZTE Corp., a major supplier of telecoms networks and smartphones based in southern China, from importing American components for seven years. The US accused ZTE of misleading American regulators after it settled charges of violating sanctions against North Korea and Iran.

ZTE, which has more than 70,000 employees and has supplied networks or equipment to some of the world's biggest telecoms companies, said in early May that it had halted its main operations as a result of the department's "denial order."

President Trump takes part in a welcoming ceremony with China's President Xi Jinping in Beijing. REUTERS/Thomas Peter Trump, who has taken a hard line on trade and technology issues with Beijing, tweeted on Sunday that he and Chinese leader Xi Jinping "are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast. Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!"

Though it's unclear from Trump's tweet what his plan entails, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told Politico in a statement that Trump expects Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to "exercise his independent judgment... to resolve the regulatory action involving ZTE based on its facts."

She added: "The administration is in contact with China on this issue, among others in the bilateral relationship."

But Trump's critics appeared less than impressed with his tweet on Sunday.

"How about helping some American companies first?" Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tweeted.

ZTE has asked the department to suspend the seven-year ban on doing business with US technology exporters. By cutting off access to US suppliers of essential components such as microchips, the ban threatens ZTE's existence, the company has said.

During recent trade meetings in Beijing, Chinese officials said they raised their objections to ZTE's punishment with the American delegation, which they said agreed to report them to Trump.

The US imposed the penalty after discovering that Shenzhen-based ZTE, which had paid a $1.2 billion fine in the case, had failed to discipline employees involved and paid them bonuses instead.

Tex-Mex restaurant chain Chili's is the latest retailer to be impacted by a data breach.

On Saturday, its parent company Brinkler International announced that customer credit and debit card information had been "compromised" in certain Chili's restaurants. It confirmed that no personal data such as social security numbers or dates of birth was breached since it doesn't collect this information.

The company made the announcement one day after it said it discovered the breach.

It has not yet confirmed how many people have been impacted, but the company said in a statement that it believes the breach was limited between March and April 2018. It's advising customers to monitor bank statements for strange transactions during that period.

Chili's joins a long list of retailers— including Sears, Kmart, Whole Foods, and Under Armour — that have been impacted by a data breach in the past year. The majority of the retailers that experienced a breach have not confirmed exactly how many customers were impacted.

Breaches have huge repercussions, often resulting in customers losing trust in the brands. According to a study from KPMG, 19% percent of consumers said they would stop shopping at a breached retailer, and 33% would take a long-term break.

This is bad news for Chili's as it has suffered from weak sales since 2008. In its most recent quarterly results, Brinkler reported that same-store sales at the location it owns fell by 0.4%. At its franchise restaurants, same-store sales fell by 3.2%.