Workplace is like a private version of Facebook for a business's employees. Facebook

Facebook has quietly become a sizeable force in the competitive enterprise software market currently dominated by incumbents like Microsoft and newer upstarts like Slack.

The social network's communication tool for businesses, Workplace is now used by more than 30,000 organizations after one year, up from 14,000 in April. Facebook also announced on Thursday a desktop chat app for Workplace and plans to add support for group video calling "in the coming weeks."

In an interview with Business Insider, Workplace product manager Simon Cross contributed the tool's early success to the big companies that started using Workplace early. In its first year, Workplace managed to sign on a slew of household names like Starbucks, Delta, Lyft, Spotify, Heineken. The team also recently signed a deal with Walmart, the largest private employer in the world.

“Those names lend a huge amount of credibility to the product,” said Cross. “A lot of other companies begin to sit up and take notice."

Workplace is now used in 79 languages and by people on every continent. And Facebook is in the process of aggressively expanding the team's ranks with open job listings for growth managers and salespeople.

The social network has yet to disclose how many businesses pay for the service, which charges per user per month. Facebook just recently started billing companies that elect to pay for features needed for managing larger workforces, like integration with compliance partners.

It's also unclear how deeply Workplace is being used within the 30,000 organizations that have signed on so far. That number includes companies that may not have deployed Workplace to all their employees, according to a Facebook spokesperson.

Privately-held Slack, by comparison, claims more than two million paid users and 50,000 paid teams, although large companies can pay for multiple teams to keep divisions within their organizations separate from each other.

Workplace's apps have been given a fresh coat of paint. Workplace

According to Cross, Workplace's biggest advantage against chat-based competitors like Slack is that Facebook is building a full-fledged communication platform rather than a primarily chat-based experience. Workplace functions like a private version of Facebook, with familiar features like groups, live video, and more business-focused tools like integrations with Salesforce and Google's suite of apps.

“There are very few apps in this space to connect everyone from the CEO to the factory worker across a single product," said Cross.

Looking ahead, Cross said that Facebook is focused on reaching people “beyond the reach of traditional IT," like the Starbucks barista or Walmart clerk who otherwise may not have an easy way to see what is happening within their company more broadly.

Increasing the number of people who use Workplace inside a large organization is a good thing for Facebook's pay-per-user business model, but Cross stressed that making money isn't a priority right now.

“We’re primarily focused on growth and engagement versus monetization at this point," he said.

Microsoft's head of the Xbox division, Phil Spencer. Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

Good morning! Here is the tech news you need to know this Thursday.

1. Microsoft has stopped manufacturing Kinect, the depth and motion camera system it originally launched in 2010. The device sold about 35 million units over its lifespan, and the company will keep supporting developers who use it.

2. Amazon launched a new security camera system called Amazon Key. The main camera comes as part of a $250 (£190) bundle that includes a smart door lock which can recognise and open the door to couriers.

3. Nintendo has announced a new game in its popular "Animal Crossing" franchise. The new title won't be developed for Nintendo hardware, however, but for iOS and Android, and is scheduled for release in November.

4. Roku may start streaming on devices that don't run its proprietary operating system. It's not clear yet, but the service may require the use of mobile devices to work.

5. A Bloomberg report claimed that Apple had compromised on the quality of the iPhone X's Face ID to speed up its troublesome production. Apple, however, claimed that the allegations were "completely false."

6. Tech evangelist Robert Scoble apparently refused his lawyer's advise and denied many of the allegations against him. He said he couldn't have harassed a number of the women who accused him because he "wasn't their employer."

7. Google is giving developers early access to a new Android preview, still based on Oreo. The version, 8.1, can also be downloaded by anyone on the Android Beta Program, and will be released in full in December.

8. Apple is expanding its television-related operations. It hired Jay Hunt, former chief creative officer at Channel 4, who "will play a key role in its international creative development team" when she joins the company in January.

9. Tesla is reportedly firing SolarCity employees across the US. The firings are part of a spate of company-wide terminations that Tesla said were related to annual performance reviews.

10. Google has revamped its Science Journal app. The app, targeted mainly at children curious about science (and now available on iOS), has been redesigned to become similar to a "digital science notebook."

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The pigs, developed in China, had 24% less body fat than a regular hog like this one, after 6 months. Flickr/Eric Kilby

It sounds almost like an oxymoron: low-fat pork.

Researchers in Beijing have developed a new kind of pig with 24% less body fat than regular, lard-laden swine. The researchers say their technique could help pigs stay warmer, grow faster and healthier, all while reducing costs for breeders.

The successful pig experiment, announced Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a first. In addition to being low-fat, the experimental pigs are unique in one important genetic way: they've got mice proteins in their system. 

Pigs have a reputation for being fatty, but they don’t carry the gene that produces brown fat — the stuff that helps most mammals stay warm and burn energy. That’s because they lack the requisite protein, known as UCP1. A team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences say they’ve found a way to build that protein into baby pigs, creating a new brown fat-carrying pig that can keep itself warmer, without putting on as much "white" fat — or, as you may know it, lard. 

Researchers added the protein using CRISPR/Cas9, a gene-editing technology that's kind of like a cut-and-paste function for genetic code. Snip a bit of the UCP1 mice protein into a pig embryo and voila: a pig that develops less fat is born. (Though it's not quite as easy as it sounds in practice: the scientists successfully birthed just 12 male piglets from a total of 2,553 embryos.)

Melia Robinson/Business Insider

The researchers think the lack of brown fat in regular pigs could be a key reason they get so chubby in the first place — it might be part of their feeble attempt to stay warm. Many piglets die from cold stress and the ones who survive often require heat lamps to stay warm in their first weeks of life. Exposed to cold, the UCP1 pigs managed to keep their body temperature stable for hours, while regular pigs' body temperatures dipped lower.

At 6 months old, when the brown fat pigs were finally slaughtered, they had 24% reduced fat content. They didn’t weigh much less than normal pigs, but they had a higher ratio of lean meat on their bodies and thinner back fat as well. 

But these piggies are probably not coming to market. 

"I very much doubt that this particular pig will ever be imported into the USA,” R. Michael Roberts, an animal sciences professor at the University of Missouri who edited the PNAS paper, told NPR. He also said the pig technology would probably never get FDA approval. Even if it did, Americans would likely be wary of the idea of genetically-altered bacon. 

Nutritionists say "low fat" food is not really all that healthy, anyway. Increasingly, sugar is being touted as the waistline-builder in modern diets, and while the saturated fat content in pork still gets a bad rap, health experts tend to encourage healthy overall eating habits instead of fat restriction.

Chinese scientists may have just successfully proven that they can engineer a skinnier pig than nature, but meat lovers probably won’t be frying up the lean bacon anytime soon.

The CodeFights team, CEO Tigran Sloyan is in the upper left hand corner. Codefights

 

You don't need an Ivy League education, a degree from one of the top college engineering programs, or work experience at one of the big tech companies to be a great coder. 

But hiring managers still frequently use such markers to identify and evaluate job candidates. 

CodeFights is hoping to change that. The startup, whose website helps programmers to improve their skills by offering them coding challenges, has developed a new system designed to help recruiters evaluate job candidates based on the candidates' skills rather than on what they've listed on their résumés.

"What the recruiting industry is still doing is using pedigree as a proxy for skill," said Tigran Sloyan, CodeFights' CEO. But, he continued, "Engineers are no longer coming from top schools and top companies."

Fighting bias

For the past two years, CodeFights, which was founded by former Google and Oracle engineers, has been helping companies recruit new employees by screening programmers who came to its site to practice their coding. After seeing how well CodeFights' site worked for finding talented engineers, the company's partners, which include Uber, Asana, and Evernote, urged CodeFights to create tools they could use internally to screen job candidates.

The result is CodeFightsR. The system helps companies evaluate job applicants based on their programming skills. Companies can use CodeFights R to send applicants a programming test. The system assesses candidates' skill levels based on how they do on the test. Hiring managers can then look at applicants' scores to figure out which ones to bring in for an interview. 

The system is designed to evaluate candidates objectively, rather than having assessments clouded by conscious or unconscious biases. CodeFightsR can point hiring managers to candidates who actually have the skills they're looking for, regardless of their gender or race or the school they graduated from.

"Biases mainly kick in because of people's lack of real data, said Sloyan. "They go off of proxies to decide if someone can do what they want or not."

An example of a CodeFightsR report on a coding test. Codefights

Finding Candidates in Unusual Places  

But companies can also use CodeFightsR to find additional job candidates, not just screen existing ones. 

Companies can use the CodeFightsR system to design programming bots and list them on CodeFights' public website. Programmers who visit CodeFights' site can play against the bots as a way of testing their skills. If they do well against a particular company's bot, they'll get a prompt asking if they are interested in job opportunities at that company. So, the system helps companies find qualified candidates who might not otherwise have gone through a formal application process. 

"Companies see the shift," said Sloyan. "When you realize that instead of looking at someone's resume and looking for keywords you can actually know this person is a great Java engineer or Android engineer without even having ever talked to them, it’s a transformation in (the company's) eyes."

Testing skills and offering feedback

CodeFights has designed CodeFightsR to help companies out even as they get closer to hiring particular candidates. 

In later stages of the hiring process, companies typically ask programmer candidates to complete a coding test with a recruiter, usually in Google Docs. But because Google Docs is formatted for plain text, not software code, it's not ideal for demonstrating coding skills, Sloyan said.

Sloyan is hoping CodeFightsR will help companies improve their hiring processes. CodeFights

CodeFightsR includes a feature that allows candidates to do a coding test in something closer to a programming environment. The feature allows candidates to choose from any one of 38 programming languages and actually run the code they write. 

Companies can also use CodeFightsR to figure out how to improve their hiring process. The system offers automated feedback on companies' hiring processes. For example, it can alert a company if two of its interviewers gave a candidate wildly different evaluations. Or it can notify companies if the questions they're asking candidates don't seem particular relevant to the jobs for which they're applying. 

In the CodeFights office, visitors can see what the company calls its "wall of fame." It's comprised of the stories of coders who were hired after being discovered on CodeFights' website.

The wall is supposed "remind ourselves that what we do matters," said Sloyan.

CodeFights hopes the new set of recruiting tools will help it add many more stories to the wall.

Gusto's new CFO Mike Dinsdale DoorDash

HR software startup Gusto has poached Mike Dinsdale away from Doordash, less than a year after he joined the food delivery startup.

Dinsdale is best known for his six-years as CFO of DocuSign, where he was one of the first 100 employees and helped DocuSign raise over $515 million in funding. Dinsdale left DocuSign in May, 2016, as part of a big executive exodus in which the chief operating officer, chief human resources officer, chief product officer also all left.

This was during an odd period at DocuSign when its charismatic leader Keith Krach had announced that he was leaving the top spot and the company went through a very public more than year-long struggle to hire a new one 

Dinsdale joined food delivery service DoorDash in October and a year later, has leapt to Gusto, as the company's first CFO. It's current head of finance, Andy Toung, will remain at the company as well, Gusto founder and CEO Josh Reeves tells Business Insider.

The new CFO will help Gusto get ready for its eventual IPO, Reeves says. The IPO is not imminent, but he's already prepping for it, doing everything from putting financial reporting controls in place to schmoozing the big institutional investors he hopes will one day buy Gusto's public stock.

No major business decisions for 3 months

All of that is standard practice for a startup that's raised $176 million from venture capitalists as it moves towards an IPO.

Gusto cofounder CEO Josh Reeves Gusto

What is unusual is how Reeves plans to ease his new, first-ever CFO into the company.

For instance, Dinsdale won't be allowed to make any major business decisions for his first quarter at the company, Reeves tells us.

"I'm focused on making sure that Mike is equipped to be successful," says Reeves.

Reeves has grown Gusto from a startup into a 500-employee company, along with his two cofounders Tomer London, and Edward Kim.

With that many employees, he has started to hire senior leaders. He's also hired a CEO coach for himself.

One thing that he's learned: no matter how excited you are about your newly hired senior leader, never set them loose on Day 1.

"The more senior the person is, the more pitfalls there are. There's a tendency for that person to want to jump and make decisions," Reeves says. That's natural. People want to prove themselves, and sometimes companies want immediate action from the leader as well.

It's important for people to see leaders being vulnerable

But that's just asking for resentment from the people already working at the company.

Instead, Dinsdale, like all new senior hires will spend three full months completing an intense training program, Reeves said. For one thing, he will shadow teams at all departments in the company and learn everyone's job, not just the financial team that he will lead.

"I want them to understand what everyone does," he says of his new senior leaders. 

Dinsdale will also be asked to do a so-called "LifeLine exercise" that entails sharing his life story, especially his struggles, with the whole company.

"It's important for people to see leaders being vulnerable," Reeves says. This makes it safe for everyone, including leaders, to acknowledge their inevitable mistakes and learn from them, Reeves believes.

A Michelin Star is one of the greatest honors a restaurant can receive.Skye Gould/Business Insider

The San Francisco Bay Area is the new fine-dining capital of America in the eyes of Michelin.

The region, which includes San Francisco and wine country, received 55 Michelin stars in the newly-revealed 2018 guide to spots in the Bay Area. The seven three-starred restaurants (the highest accolade) puts the Bay Area ahead of New York's six three-starred establishments and Chicago's three.

The Michelin Guide is a restaurant rating system that makes or breaks fine-dining spots around the world. Three stars, in Michelin jargon, means "exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey." San Francisco has no shortage.

The honor may only be temporary. Michelin drops its 2018 guide for New York on Monday.

Until then, the Bay Area reigns supreme. Here are the restaurants that earned the illustrious three-star designation from Michelin. Click here to see the complete list.

Coi, San Francisco

Coi is the Bay Area's newest three Michelin-starred restaurant. Chef David Patterson passed the baton to chef Matthew Kirkley in 2016, who shifted the focus to classic French influences. The seafood-centric spot is one of about 100 restaurants worldwide to receive three stars.

The French Laundry, Yountville

Chef Thomas Keller's iconic restaurant is located in a stone cottage. Diners can chose between two prix-fixe menus, which change daily and don't repeat a single ingredient through the meal.

Manresa, Los Gatos

Located on the outskirts of Silicon Valley, Manresa offers extravagant farm-to-table tasting menus. Guests don't know what chef David Kinch has in store until they arrive at the table.

Quince, San Francisco

Quince leapt from one star to three in 2013. Husband-and-wife team Michael and Lindsay Tusk have been on a roll since, serving up Californian contemporary cuisine in this fine-dining spot.

The Restaurant at Meadowood, St. Helena

Chef Christopher Kostow is the third youngest chef to ever receive three Michelin stars. The Restaurant at Meadowood delights guests with local, sustainable Californian cuisine.

Saison, San Francisco

In 2015, Eater SF recognized Saison as the most expensive restaurant in California. The French-American tasting menu and beverage pairing will set you back about $700 a head.

Here's the complete list of Michelin-starred Bay Area restaurants. (An asterisk indicates a new entry.)

Two Stars

Acquerello, San Francisco

Atelier Crenn, San Francisco

Baumé, Palo Alto

*Californios, San Francisco

Commis, Oakland

Lazy Bear, San Francisco

*Single Thread, Sonoma County

 

One Star

Adega, San Jose

Al's Place, San Francisco

Aster, San Francisco

Auberge du Soleil, Rutherford

Aziza, San Francisco

Bouchon, Yountville

Campton Place, San Francisco

Chez TJ, Mountain View

Commonwealth, San Francisco

Farmhouse Inn & Restaurant, Forestville

Gary Danko, San Francisco

Hashiri, San Francisco

*In Situ, San Francisco

Ju-ni, San Francisco

Keiko à Nob Hill, San Francisco

*Kenzo, Napa

Kin Khao, San Francisco

La Toque, Napa

Lord Stanley, San Francisco

Luce, San Francisco

Madera, Menlo Park

Madrona Manor, Healdsburg

Michael Mina, San Francisco

Mister Jiu's, San Francisco

Mourad, San Francisco

Octavia, San Francisco

Omakse, San Francisco

Plumed Horse, Saratoga

The Progress, San Francisco

Rasa, Burlingame

*Rich Table, San Francisco

Sons & Daughters, San Francisco

SPQR, San Francisco

Spruce, San Francisco

State Bird Provisions, San Francisco

Sushi Yoshizumi, San Mateo

Terra, St. Helena

Terrapin Creek, Bodega Bay

The Village Pub, Woodside

Wako, San Francisco

Wakuriya, San Mateo

Anticipation is building ahead of the Phone X's November 3 launch. With its base price of $999, the iPhone X is the most expensive phone Apple has ever released, and one of the most expensive phones on the mainstream market.

Unfortunately for cash-strapped consumers, Apple is at the forefront of a trend when it comes to pricing. According to data from market research firm Gfk, smartphone makers are likely to focus more on premium (read expensive) products. As we can see in this chart from Statista, Gfk estimates that the global average sales price of smartphones will increase more year-over-year in 2017 than it has in past years.

Premium features such as water and dust protection, biometric sensors and bigger screens are all driving prices up, says Gkf analyst Arndt Polifke. Consumers may have to pay more, but they'll be getting more too. 

Mike Nudelman/Business Insider

Get the latest Google stock price here.

BI Intelligence

This is a preview of a research report from BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. To learn more about BI Intelligence, click here.

It hasn't been smooth sailing for telecoms in recent years. Native voice and messaging services, which once accounted for the vast majority of telecoms' subscriber revenue, are struggling to compete with over-the-top (OTT) apps, like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Viber — and they're losing.

A fierce and ongoing price war among the Big Four carriers is only compounding the pressure telecoms are facing. The consequent resurgence of unlimited data plans is straining carriers' networks, and revenues are suffering.

Nevertheless, telecoms are now better positioned than ever to play a bigger role in their subscribers' lives. Consumers spend more than half of their digital time on smartphones, compared with a third on PCs. This shift has effectively placed telecoms at the front door of consumers' digital experience.

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we examine where the wireless industry stands as a result of the price war and uptick in data demand from consumers. We also look at how technological advancements and the adoption of new product lines could incentivize the next wave of revenue growth for telecoms. Finally, we explore potential barriers to carriers' growth, and examine which of the Big Four carriers are poised to lead the pack.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:

In full, the report:

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Yongrim, JuJu, and Kyurim Rhee, siblings and cofounders of Libro Library. Libro Library

Around two years ago, Yongrim Rhee had a problem: Too many surfboards.

The then-Google employee's Californian home was overflowing with more than 40 boards, and he wanted to do something with them. So he and his siblings came up with a plan for a business: An app that let you lend out your spare boards to others. Surfboard sharing-as-a-service!

They didn't end up making it.

But from there, a new and broader idea emerged: A neighbourhood sharing app, where users could list their spare possessions for others in the neighbourhood to borrow.

They didn't end up making that either.

Instead, the Rhees decided to focus on a single, narrow segment: Books.

And from there, Libro Library was born.

It turns private bookshelves into public libraries

A screenshot showing a user's library. Libro Library

In a nutshell, Libro Library is an app that turns your private book collection into a public lending library. You list the books you're willing to lend out, and users can then select to borrow them — and vice versa.

It's still in the early stages, and the three siblings — JuJu, Yongrim, and Kyurim — are currently its only three employees (chief executive officer, chief product officer, and chief strategy officer respectively). It's being tested in specific regions, and book exchanges become available in an area if enough people "enroll" for it.

Right now, that's only in South America, in cities like Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile. Around 400 books are scanned into the system a day, Kyurim said, while it has thousands of active users.

(Also, it's iOS-only for now, though there are plans for an Android app further down the line.)

It's an almost anachronistic idea in an era of ebooks and digital sharing — but in an interview with Business Insider in London, Yongrim and Kyurim emphasised the importance of the physicality of books and the emotional attachment they provide.

"We have a lot of books ourselves, print books we're talking about, and we grew up pre-ebook times," Yongrim said. "We never fell out of love with print books, we share this sentiment with users, they tell us 'oh, we love the smell of the books, and these almost intangible thing that ebooks don't [have]."

The team is still working out how to make money

This nostalgic sentiment is informing certain design choices the trio are making on the app. "We want to maintain the features of libraries we really like. In the old days, you can open the book, you can see who checked out a book before," said Kyurim, as he explained Libro Library is trying to implement something similar. "So you can see who the book's passed through. This is a feature we think will be really compelling for our readers."

They've bootstrapped the business with their savings so far, but are now on the hunt for outside investment. They're not yet certain how they'll make money off the app ("this might sound naive, we don't really have a monetising strategy," Yongrim admits), but they're exploring a few different routes.

They might charge independent authors to distribute books through the platform, or put up relevant adverts on the app. Or they could provide analytics to publishers, letting them track the movement of their titles as they change hands.

They're keen, however, to keep it free at the point of use — so the actual users on the hunt for new books to read won't have to pay to see what's available in their area.

Working with siblings has 'its own set of challenges'

The app can scan books to work out what they are. Libro Library

Before Libro Library, Yongrim worked as a software engineer at Google in Mountain View, California, and now lives in London. Kyurim was a network engineer in Washington D.C., where he still lives. And JuJu, who lives in New York, has worked as an artist and coordinator.

All this adds up to an unusual dynamic — not only are they siblings, but they also lives thousands of miles from one another, across timezones. 

It makes communication far easier, they said — but it can also be far harder to switch off. Startups can already be all-encompassing, and the trio will sometimes find themselves chatting work at family get-togethers in the States. ("It's going to come up, it's like this ugly beast that's in the corner," said Kyurim.)

And in professional situations, things can sometimes get too familial: "The word 'let's be professional' comes up quite a lot," Yongrim joked.

"It comes with its own set of challenges," he said of working with his brother and sister. "When it's bad ... sometimes I feel like 'what have I done, why did I start this business with my siblings?' But then it gets really bad, I feel like with anyone else it would've been over but because it's my siblings I think ... 'let's thin this through and stay together.'"

Kyrurim added: "If something bad happens, if we have a bad fight, we have to get over that. I can't stop being your brother. I can walk away from my coworkers, yeah, I don't wanna talk to that person any more, but I can't stop being a brother to him."

But despite this optimism — there's still a danger that if things do go badly wrong, it could seriously damage some of their relationships. It's a risk that Yongrim has encountered before.

"I've done a startup before with my best friend from college, and we don't talk any more," he said. "So I am somewhat experienced in that. So they know what I've gone through, it was such a painful experience, so in that sense we were somewhat prepared ... I was like 'I'm never going to let that happen again,' because in retrospect it really wasn't worth destroying my friendship over.

"I don't think it was my fault," he added with a laugh. "He shouldn't have done that, but that's sort of what I'm talking about. Being siblings you never let it go that far."

BI IntelligenceThis is a preview of a research report from BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. To learn more about BI Intelligence, click here.

Media consumption is at a saturation point. After rising for much of the last decade, total digital time spent has been nearly static since the start of 2015. As a result, it's increasingly difficult for content producers to win over minutes of consumers' time.

One platform, though, is poised to move the needle and provide a new avenue to boost digital time spent: the connected car. Consumers will spend more time in cars that offer a range of connectivity options, giving them the chance to use the services they know and love in the car.

The key question for service providers is how to take advantage of the connected car by integrating their services into this growing platform.

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we provide a roadmap for service providers looking to offer their services in the car. We analyze media consumption and overall digital time spent trends, and then forecast the growth of the connected car market in relation to the digital time opportunity. Finally, we propose potential routes that service providers can take to get into connected cars and ride-hailing vehicles.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

In full, the report:

Interested in getting the full report? Here are two ways to access it:

Beck Diefenbach/Reuters

Bill Gates will fund a massive investment in education, pledging more than $1.7 billion into public schools, The Washington Post reported.

Gates has long been a thought leader on improving school outcomes through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where he's invested more than $3.4 billion in public education in the US, according to The Post.

But the eye-popping sum of his newest investment harks back to another tech titan's massive investment in public schools — one that was largely deemed a failure.

Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Stephen Lam/Reuters

In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to Newark, New Jersey's failing public-school system with the intention of turning around the schools in five years.

The goals Zuckerberg set out to achieve — to enact a number of reforms that would make Newark a model city for education reform — were largely panned, and multiple sources tore into Newark Public Schools for squandering his money and not delivering on any of the goals it set out to achieve.

Critics also argued Zuckerberg's strategy was top heavy, done quickly and without input from parents or local administrators, who could have provided guidance on how the changes would play out among the community.

After his so-called blunder in Newark, Zuckerberg appeared to employ a different strategy for affecting positive change in schools. In 2014, he committed $120 million to school districts around the San Francisco Bay Area, focusing on reform at the community level, rather than a heavy-handed, top-down approach, as the Newark reform plan has been described.

Gates will invest more than 10 times as much as Zuckerberg did in Newark. He appears cognizant of the need to engage school communities in the process, noting he wants schools and educators to drive the process, according to The Post.

Bill Gates. Eric Vidal/Reuters

"The actual tactics about great teaching, about how to reform the schedule, how to get students who are off track on track — those will be driven by the schools themselves,” Gates said before an audience in Cleveland, Ohio, according to The Post. " We will let people come to us with the set of approaches they think will work for them in their local context."

Gates, the richest man in the world, has been at the forefront of some of the biggest ideas in education, if sometimes equally unpopular. He invested heavily in the Common Core State Standards, the controversial set of nationwide education standards that almost all 50 states signed into law.

Following near-universal praise and adoption of the standards in 2010, there has since been equally swift backlash against the standards on both sides of the aisle.

Lara O'Reilly/Business Insider

 

BuzzFeed is investigating allegations of harassment by its employees, people familiar with the matter said.

The investigation comes after several of its staffers appeared on a list, titled "Sh---- Media Men," which was distributed among journalists across several news organizations. The existence of the list, which names men from a variety of publications, was reported by BuzzFeed last week.

The allegations on the list include verbal, physical and sexual abuse, but were added anonymously so it is unclear who wrote them. The list makes clear that these are "allegations and rumors," and that readers should "take everything with a grain of salt." 

BuzzFeed staffers, both current and past, are represented in multiple versions of the list reviewed by Business Insider. The number of BuzzFeed employees on the list sparked a conversation among current and former employees about the publication's own workplace culture, according to people familiar with the matter. 

An anonymous reporting tip line was distributed to editors this week in which employees can report harassment if they don't feel comfortable going to their managers, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

"We cannot discuss specific personnel matters, but we take allegations of inappropriate conduct extremely seriously, including anonymous ones," BuzzFeed spokesman Matt Mittenthal said.

The list was widely distributed among journalists in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal that has rocked Hollywood.  

Female journalists, in conversations with Business Insider, say that a list of this nature is necessary to warn other women and because women may otherwise hesitate to report harassment to management for fear of retribution.

Silicon Valley has been encroaching on Wall Street's turf. Margin Call screenshot

Business Insider recently compiled a list of the top talent on Wall Street age 35 and under, interviewing dozens of bankers, asset managers, and traders in the process.

We asked the crop of dealmaker candidates making waves in investment banks and private-equity shops the same question: What's your biggest concern about the industry?

While responses varied — some bemoaned market trends, like record-low volatility and sky-high valuations — a strong current ran through the vast majority of answers that underscores Wall Street's challenge in keeping up with Silicon Valley.

Most notably, bankers are concerned with Wall Street's ability to recruit and retain young talent given the competition from tech giants and startups that offer juicy perks, a more relaxed lifestyle, and an exciting, entrepreneurial environment.

There's a reason Goldman Sachs is rebranding itself as a tech company and trying to hire engineers in droves.

The industry has changed swiftly since the financial crisis, and the stable, predictable career trajectory calcified over decades on Wall Street has largely been thrown out the window.

"When I joined the industry 10 years ago, if you were smart and had an interest in business, chances are you were coming into finance and consulting," one private-equity standout told us. "We were able to get the best and brightest undergrads. With the advent of startups and tech — Google, Snapchat, or entrepreneurs — we're finding it more difficult to recruit that top tier."

A handful noted that banks, despite marked improvements in recent years, still struggled to offer a healthy work-life balance. Many of the people we spoke with in their early 30s had recently become parents, mixing that daunting responsibility into the cocktail of one of the most competitive, high-pressure career tracks out there.

Here's what a couple of others had to say:

And in the same vein, young financiers are concerned that the technologies coming out of Silicon Valley may further drain the pool of opportunities.

"There's a lot of fear about how much technology can replace day-to-day tasks," one banker told us.

Former Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit said last month that 30% of banking jobs could be gone within five years from the threat of automation and artificial intelligence, though relationship-based practices like investment banking face less risk than trading operations.

"I do think we need to be better coordinated about how Wall Street will protect itself against outsiders who are going to be encroaching on the banks' turf," another rising banker told us, highlighting Apple Pay, PayPal, and blockchain as emerging threats.

Banks may continue to struggle to lure talent back from Silicon Valley, but they're awake to technology threats.

Investments in private tech companies by banks have soared in recent years. Goldman Sachs is leading the charge, but Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley are all very much in the game as well.

Get the latest Bank of America stock price here.

It seems that Nintendo has finally cracked the code to get more of its consoles into American homes.

Nintendo's Switch console has been the top-selling games console in the US for five of the past seven months since its March release, despite the fact that the console has been hard to find for many buyers, according to new data from Nintendo charted for us by Statista. It's a stark contrast to the company's previous console, the Wii U, which didn't enjoy much success. 

That's compared to other "current-generation console hardware" sold in the same months of 2016, according to Nintendo. Of course, both Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One were released in 2013, which could account for their slower sales compared to Nintendo's Switch, but Microsoft released a smaller and sleeker Xbox One S in August and Sony is selling its 4K/HDR-capable PlayStation 4 Pro. Microsoft also plans to release an Xbox One X in November, which also supports 4K and HDR.

Nintendo has sold over 2 million Switch consoles to date in the US, and it has yet to go through the holiday season when sales are usually even greater for devices like games consoles. 

Mike Nudelman/Business Insider