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Sweet Paul is one of a growing number of digital magazines Issu

Many digital publishers are struggling to scrape by in an era when banner ads trade for pennies and social networks control distribution.

Maybe it's time for magazines to make a comeback? 

That's been the bet at Issuu, a company that has been helping entreprenuers publish digital magazines for over a decade. Now Issuu is rolling out a new product via which these publishers can charge readers for digital subscriptions.

According to Issuu CEO Joe Hyrkin, there are now  35 million indy publications using Issuu's free tools, which let creators put togther slick magazines on niche topics ranging from craft brewing to knitting to cycling. 

In aggregate, these 'digi-zines' reach  100 million unique readers each a month globally who consume close to a billion pages of content, Hyrkin said. Issuu pulls in revenue from selling some publishers premium tools and services.

To date, Issuu publications could make money from selling ads or weaving e-commerce into their magazines. But now, they can sell individual issues or monthly subscriptions at the price of their chosing. 

You might ask, why the magazine format? Wasn't the rise of the blogosphere supposed to enable these kind of narrow publishers?

"I think its an indictment of that system, meaning d igital ads, p rogrammatic," said Hyrkin. " Blogs are often one page, and are r andom in terms of cadence.  Consumers don ’t know when or where content is coming from."

Meanwhile, he argues that in a news feed, sea-of-headlines digital media era, magazine-style packaging still has an appeal.

"A collection, a curated body of work is much more interesting," said Hyrkin. "And five  years ago, i f you wanted to do a publication like this, you had to get g et blessed by [legendary Vogue editor] Anna Wintour.  Now, if you are a fashion publisher today, y ou have access to a set of digital tools to put together a  world class digital publication."

For example, one breakout Issuu publication is Sweet Paul, a Brooklyn-based food and crafting magazine that was born out of a blog founded in 2007  by Paul Lowe, a traditional publishing veteran, and his partner  Paul Vitale.

Started as a side project, it evolved into a full time job for both Pauls , and eventually led to a deal to print and distribute copies of the digital magazine with the retailer Anthropologie.

"We've been building an audience that is young and tech savvy," said Vitale. And the Issuu platform provides " the ability to have so much control."

"We’ve lost a lot of big magazines over the past couple of years," he added. "I think t here’s a lot of room f or magazines like ours.  You can have a really small team. And you d on’t have to lay people off because we lost an ad."

Original author: Mike Shields

Original author: David Choi

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Getty/John Lamparski

Amazon is sharpening its assault on the ad business, and big-name advertisers are starting to take notice.

With product and search ads on Amazon.com, and its data on shoppers being used to run display ads all over the web, the Seattle-based e-commerce giant is increasingly becoming top of mind for advertisers. In fact, its ad business is already worth over $2 billion. 

"I think that they are a force to be reckoned with, they are excellent with everything they do," said Kristin Lemkau, chief marketing officer at JPMorgan Chase. "You have to do business with Amazon."

Lemkau, speaking at the Association of National Advertisers' Masters of Marketing Conference on Thursday, said she sees Amazon as a potential challenger to the Facebook-Google duopoly in the digital advertising space.

"They take customer obsession seriously," she said. "And I think they feel like the first big, emerging advertiser that can be grouped with Facebook and Google."

"They have a search engine, a programmatic stack, premium content and one of the top five apps," she told Business Insider in an interview later. "And they are the biggest consumer company in the world today."

Lemkau also addressed the issue of brand safety, which has been foremost on the minds of marketers over the past year. JPMorgan Chase, in particular, has been vocal about the issue of branded content appearing next to inappropriate or violent content online.

It stopped working with YouTube earlier this year, for example, when the platform was in the thick of its brand safety controversy, and also pulled its ads from NBC in June, ahead of an interview Megyn Kelly did with controversial guest, Alex Jones. 

"Performance is important, but at the time, we didn't care about the performance," she told ANA chief Bob Liodice. "We were putting a stake in the ground that we were not going to support fake news."

She also mentioned how before the company decided to crack down on fake news, its ads were running on 400,000 plus websites, but getting clicks from merely 12,000. JPMorgan Chase then restricted those sites to just 5,000, and is currently on its way to limiting its display ads to about 10,000 approved sites.

"We cull it all the time, but this is something incumbent on brands themselves to figure out."

Original author: Tanya Dua

Did you come across a 7-foot-tall Chewbacca at Comic Con in New York? There was a familiar face inside. Adam Savage of "Mythbusters" and Tested fame went incognito on the convention floor as the furry fan favorite "Star Wars" character Chewbacca. We watched him get ready and followed him around to see how fans reacted. Following is a transcript of the video.

Adam Savage: Hey I'm Adam Savage from Tested.com, formerly of "Mythbusters."

I'm here at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York for New York City's Comic Con.

If you didn't know this about me, I have a cosplay habit. I go to cons all year round, and I walk in costume.

Last year was my first year at New York City Comic Con, and I made a seven-foot-tall Totoro costume. Today I am doing a brand new thing. I am walking with Chewbacca as a captured prisoner of a First Order stormtrooper, who will be played by Tested.com’s own Norman Chan.

The trick to Chewie is that he's a little bit tousled. His hair is tousled. And if you tousle it right, he looks right. See? It's kind of an Empire hairdo.

There are a lot of little things to do to prep for Chewbacca. One: I have to take my glasses off and put in a single contact lens. This is how I've learned to see in cosplay. If I put in two contact lenses, I can't see my phone, and that effectively makes me useless.

I also made some Imperial cuffs out of PVC. One hour build.

I have some tall boots that I wear that make me about 7 inches taller. The shirt here and the pants are Kanekalon artificial hair latch hooked onto webbing. So it’s a very lightweight and breathable costume. And then with the top of Chewbacca’s head rising about 5 inches above mine, I am almost 7-feet tall.

Yes, I do sweat in there.

I am ready to be led around as a prisoner.

I am so energized by what it's like to walk around. Because when people see a Chewbacca in front of them, they kind of lose their minds. They never thought that they would see a Chewbacca, and many of them just come up and hug you.

Like, Chewie is such an amazing character. He’s my favorite non-human character in film. So I love bringing him around and allowing people to experience a Chewie in the wild.

"Get a picture!"

"Hurry up, he’s a prisoner!"

"Chewie!"

I wanna take pictures with everybody, and when we stop, it's just not enough time. So we take like 10 or 15, and then we have to keep moving. Otherwise we’re just going to clog up that whole portion of the con.

"Chewbacca!"

"Hey Chewie, can I get a selfie?"

I’m Adam Savage. You guys look amazing. Keep it quiet.

"Later Chewie!"

Dude!

Norman Chan: Oh my god!

Savage: How was ... hey look at you sweaty!

I'm replacing a portion of the water I just sweated out. Nathan Fillion told me that in a very hot suit, he's lost as much as 3 pounds in an hour in water weight alone. And I'm sure I have come close to the same thing.

The second best part about cosplay, aside from walking the floor, is taking the costume off.

Alright, back to the rehearsals for Mummenschanz.

Original author: Chris Snyder

Oracle loves to pick fights with Amazon Web Services in the database and cloud markets, but the enemy it should really take aim at is Microsoft, according to one analyst. 

"Microsoft is their big competitor," says Larry Carvalho, lead analyst on platform-as-a-service at IDC.  

Amazon may be a giant in the cloud world but Microsoft is a bigger threat to the types of big business customers that Oracle depends on.

"Oracle is about two to three years behind Microsoft," Carvalho tells Business Insider.  

Pick your battle

Earlier this week, when Oracle announced its newest database, the Oracle 18c, chairman Larry Ellison called it the first "fully-autonomous" and "self-driving" database on the market. But to Carvalho, that claim doesn't mean much in a market full of semi-autonomous databases, like Microsoft Azure's SQL.

Microsoft CEO Satya NadellaAP"Oracle," Carvalho said, "is just catching up."

While certain functions on the Oracle 18c may be new, such as its reported ability to autonomously patch cybersecurity flaws, the heart of Oracle's new product is machine learning. Microsoft launched Azure SQL, which self-tunes and recommends security fixes, in March 2016.

The competition, according to Carvalho, will now come down to which customers Oracle is chasing. While Amazon might steal business from Oracle when it comes to Java workloads, Microsoft has the advantage when it comes to .NET workloads. The Oracle-owned Java and Microsoft-owned .NET are the two main frameworks used for building database applications. 

Open strategy

Oracle's best hope for winning, Carvalho reckons, is to hammer home the message that it supports open source software and that its product plays nice with everyone, working with tech from different manufacturers. 

"The whole open source story that Oracle is pushing might draw new customers, but they'll have to show differentiation about why Oracle and not Microsoft," Carvalho said. "It has potential, but I haven't seen anything come out of it." 

For now, however, Oracle is presenting the market as an issue of pricing. In his keynote, Ellison mostly focused on the price of its services compared to Amazon Web Service's. Ellison promised to include a clause in its contracts that says it will cost less than half of what Amazon charges for the same service. 

Amazon fired back on Monday, describing Ellison's presentation as "no facts, wild claims, and lots of bluster." 

Get the latest Microsoft stock price here.

Original author: Becky Peterson

Matt Weinberger/Business Insider

The Google Home Mini is a small, palm-sized $49 smart speaker powered by the Google Assistant smart voice assistant. Google Home Mini is a direct competitor to Amazon Echo Dot, a very popular smart speaker that costs the same and is roughly the same size. In my first tests, I like the Google Home Mini more than the Amazon Echo Dot because the Google Assistant agent is generally smarter than Amazon Alexa.

Amazon's Echo Dot is a sensation: Affordably priced at $49.99, the sleek, puck-shaped gadget seems to be leading the pack for voice-controlled smart speakers — and taking Amazon's Alexa voice assistant into new places. 

So it came as no surprise this week when Google announced the Google Home Mini, its own take on a smaller smart speaker, at almost the exact same price of $49. It's powered by Google Assistant, the search giant's own voice assistant, and ships on October 19th.

Not only did I get to play with a Mini after the big Google hardware event this week; I got to bring one home and try it in my own house too. And I'm here to make the case that the Google Home Mini is, indeed, better than the Amazon Echo Dot. 

Functionality-wise, the two devices are very similar. You wake them up with a magic word — "Alexa" for the Echo Dot, and "OK Google" for the Home Mini — and then ask them to do things. Both of them can play music from major streaming services, set alarms and timers, give you sports scores, and control your smart lightbulbs and other "connected" appliances. 

Amazon Echo Dot AP

The two devices are also very similar sizes, not much bigger than a hockey puck, though the Home Mini is a little shorter and a touch wider. The Google Home Mini sports an, ahem, unique fabric-covered aesthetic. You can get it in black or white, and Google itself will be selling an exclusive "coral red" color.

The Home Mini has touch controls on top for volume, and a switch that mutes the microphone. In my initial tests, the Google Home Mini's speaker seems both a little louder and a touch clearer than the Dot's. 

The Home Mini also supports Bluetooth, so you can connect other gadgets to it and control them with your voice. But it lacks an auxiliary port, which the Dot has. Generally speaking, though, if you really care about sound quality and don't plan on using an external speaker, you're going to want either the larger, original model Google Home ($129) or Amazon Echo ($99). 

The four dots mean this Google Home Mini is at maximum volume. Matt Weinberger/Business Insider

Both devices also carry some corporate synergies. With an Amazon Echo Dot, you can shop on Amazon, control a Fire TV streaming box and listen to Amazon Prime Music; with a Google Home Mini, you can control Chromecast streaming devices, access Google Play Music, and shop with new Google partner Walmart. It's a matter of taste.

Okay, so if the two devices are the same in so many ways, why do I like the Google Home Mini better? Well, to answer that, I'm going to have to take a big step back and explain why I like the Google Assistant better than Amazon Alexa. 

Before equipping my house with my first Google Home, I tried the Echo Dot, but got really frustrated at its limitations. It can answer some basic questions ("When do the Yankees play next?"). But, despite Amazon's efforts  to smarten Alexa up over the years, it tends to stumble over anything more complicated ("How do I get rid of a depleted fire extinguisher?").

You can enable Alexa "skills," or apps, that extend its knowledge and functionality — skills for recipes, for games, and trivia, and relaxation. And Amazon, to its credit, has put in a lot of work in nudging you towards the right skill, depending on your question. Not every skill is great, though, and frankly, I don't always remember which skill I need when I'm just trying to figure out a question. 

Which is why I like the Google Assistant, and thus Google Home, better. Because it taps straight into Google's base of knowledge, both global and personal, Google Assistant can answer lots of questions, even the really obscure ones. "What day was the Battle of Hogwarts?" "How does Pikachu evolve into Raichu?" Even, "when is my flight on Tuesday?"

All three colors of Google Home Mini available at its October 19th launch. Matt Weinberger/Business Insider

I don't want to sound too down on Alexa. Amazon has put a lot of smarts into its assistant, and it's really convenient to be able to check on my Amazon orders or place new ones with my voice. Functionality-wise, Alexa integrates with way more third-party apps, meaning I can use it with my preferred shopping list app. And yet, Google Home is my favorite.

When we started using the Google Home in my house, we were skeptical after our experiences with the Echo Dot. However, the Google Home has won us over to a frightening degree. "Just ask Google" has become a refrain in our house. We use it for identifying actors in movies, or to figure out what the heck an "ancient grain" is in a recipe. 

And the Google Home Mini makes it cheaper to stock our home up with that kind of intelligence, plus each individual unit is more demure and easier to stash on a bookshelf or endtable. We already love Google Assistant, so the only way Google could have messed this up for us is by whiffing on the hardware. And so far, Google Home Mini is great.

Original author: Matt Weinberger

Google released two new smart speakers at its big hardware event on Wednesday, causing the already full space to get a bit more crowded. Tech heavyweights have more or less been playing catch-up with each other since Amazon first released the Echo in 2014. As we can see in this chart from Statista, the Google Home Mini directly competes with the Amazon Echo Dot on the low end of the price spectrum, and the Google Home Max against the Apple HomePod at the very top. 

Smart speakers have become increasingly popular over the past few years as technology advances and new devices enter the market. According to an analysis by Adobe Digital Insights (ADI), smart speaker sales in the US rose 39% year over year outside of the holiday season. Despite the increased adoption, the same report found that 49% of US consumers still don't use any type of voice assistant. 

 Anaele Pelisson/Business Insider

  

Get the latest Google stock price here.

Original author: Caroline Cakebread

Uber is working on a driverless car network that could eventually replace all 40,000 Uber drivers in London. In the future, the most expensive part of any transport system is likely to be the driver, according to an analysis by UBS. Autonomous driving systems will become so cheap that some networks may offer them free, paid for by advertising. Morgan Stanley believes 90% of factory jobs and 50% of office jobs will eventually be replaced by software and artificial intelligence. Driving is dying. If you want a job in the future you must learn to code now.

USPTO

LONDON — Since London's ban on Uber was proposed a few days ago, I have a had a series of arguments with friends and strangers over whether the ban is right or wrong. The debate has brought London alive — on some days it feels like the only issue anyone is talking about. Nearly 800,000 people signed a Change.org petition asking the government to save Uber. Forty-thousand jobs with Uber are at stake, and 3.5 million Londoners use Uber regularly. Twenty-thousand black cab drivers would love the ban to survive its legal challenge. Even prime minister Theresa May weighed in.

Everyone in the capital has a stake and an opinion.

Interestingly, almost all my discussions have ended up the same way, even when we vehemently disagree: "None of this will matter when they start using driverless cars anyway," one of us will say. And we both laugh politely, the way one does when you're trying not think about the fact that Uber is going to drop those 40,000 drivers in favour of an army of robots.

The most expensive part of driving is the human

A black cab driver takes part in a protest against Uber in 2016. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)

The company is already working on its driverless future. On September 28 the company published a patent application for an "autonomous vehicle communication configuration system" that will allow a central command to monitor multiple vehicles, none of which have drivers.

There is a relentless logic to it.

In a research note published by UBS on "the mass adoption of robotaxis" last week, analyst David Lesne and his team noted that in any transport system — private car, public transit, or Uber — the most expensive part is the person doing the driving.

Driving to work in a private car imposes an average daily commuting cost on the owner of €24 per day (about $24), UBS says. In a world of robotaxis, with no need to buy a car, that cost falls to €7.2 per day. "Getting rid of their private car would enable the shared mobility user to travel about 10,000km per year in a robotaxi and save €5,000 per year," UBS calculates:

"Robotaxis will likely price-compete with mass-transit systems. The shift towards electric autonomous vehicles, combined with more advanced fleet optimization and servicing platforms, next-generation traffic management and more intense competition, should reduce the fee charged to passengers of robotaxis by as much as 80% versus a ride-on-demand trip today. The technology to make robotaxis a reality is already available. In this new paradigm, owning a private car will cost almost twice as much as using robotaxis regularly."

That is an extraordinary thought: An Uber ride that costs £10 today — already roughly half the price of a back cab — might cost only £2 in a few years' time, UBS says. The cost of providing cars without drivers might be so small that companies could offer rides for free, UBS speculates, and make money on the advertising inside them.

That is a real problem if you're an Uber driver.

The smart money says that in the short-term Uber will successfully challenge the ban and reach a compromise that will allow it to operate without interruption. The real threat to Uber drivers comes from Uber itself, and its long-term plan to get rid of all drivers. (Former CEO Travis Kalanick told Business Insider this was the plan back in 2016.)

And it's not just 40,000 Uber drivers.

The scale of the jobs carnage will be vast

Any job that involves a human behind a wheel will be threatened in the next 20 years. Driverless technology is being developed by a dozen or more large tech companies, including Google (Alphabet) and possibly Apple in its Berlin lab.

Morgan Stanley's comparative estimates on the cost of domestic IT salaries, "business process outsourcing" to India, and robots. Robots are cheapest. Morgan Stanley

The scale of the carnage in the jobs market will be vast. It's not just drivers. It is any job where artificial intelligence can do it cheaper than a human. The research team at Morgan Stanley sent a note to clients last week that calculated some of those savings (i.e. job losses):

Annual salary of a regulated financial institution IT operations worker in New York: $70-80,000. Annual licence fee for a robot doing the equivalent work of up to five humans $8-11,000.

Morgan Stanley says 90% of factory jobs and 50% of office jobs are at risk of disappearing in Europe and the US:

"... not only the jobs with routine/repetitive tasks are at a high risk of automation (up to 90% we estimate) but AI also puts jobs involving cognitive skills at risk although the probability is lower at up to 40%. We estimate that 50% of the US/European white collar jobs (including office and clerical jobs) are at the risk of automation. We think it is unlikely that job losses would reach this level given that this is a long-term forecast (we assume only c.16% penetration by 2022) and new skills and jobs will be created over time. However, it is clear that some jobs will be permanently lost, which should impact staffing revenue and earnings growth."

What is to be done?

There is one growth area for jobs that pays a lot better than driving: Tech jobs. Specifically coding.

There is no unemployment in tech. Companies are desperate for qualified workers, and the world can't produce coders or engineers fast enough. Even entry-level coders can instantly enter the middle class. A random sample of the first page of London tech jobs on Indeed shows that minimum starting salaries are £45,000 ($60,000). Salaries escalate quickly from there. Highly qualified individuals with a few years expertise can name their price.

All these driverless cars, these fleets of autonomous vehicles — and anything else that uses tech, i.e. everything— will need people to write and manage software, in just the same way that every office that once had a typing pool now only employs people who know how to use email. In the future, being able to code will be as important as being able to read. (It might be more important, given that Siri and Alexa will be able to just read stuff to you without you looking at it.)

If the Uber ban — intended to begin this weekend — teaches us anything, it is that parents and schools need to teach their kids how to code software. In fact, I wouldn't wait for your kids' school to get its act together. If I were you, I would sit them in front of an online course as soon as you can.

Parents, teach your kids to code. Now.

Original author: Jim Edwards

It has been well documented that Goldman Sachs is on a mission to become the Google of Wall Street.

And a pie chart in a new report by CB Insights shows the degree to which the bank is trying to become more like a tech company. 

The report, which dissects the investment bank's strategy, said 46% of Goldman's recent job listings were in tech. 

"The highest percentage of technology jobs were for platform roles, followed by operations engineering and equities technology positions," the report said. 

Business Insider reported in July that the bank was building an iOS app for its growing crop of digital retail banking services. That's one of the main areas in which the bank is actively seeking talent, according to the report. 

The bank is also hiring folks to fill the ranks of its fast-growing Marquee platform. Business Insider first reported that Goldman was looking to build up Marquee, which provides clients access to the bank's analytics, data, content and trading capabilities via a browser of API. 

The bank posted eight job ads for roles relating to Marquee in New York in July, and has also advertised a further 12 roles in Bengalaru and four in Warsaw. 

But the pie chart really says it all:

CB Insights

Original author: Business Insider

People are lining up for miles to get gas in Puerto Rico.Reuters/Alvin Baez

Puerto Rico is still suffering from the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria that left 3.5 million people without power.

Hurricane Irma, which hit Puerto Rico earlier this month, left one million Puerto Ricans without power. The island was still recovering from the storm's aftermath when Hurricane Maria hit, crippling the entire island's electrical infrastructure.

Here's what you need to know:

Original author: Danielle Muoio

Original author: Jason Guerrasio

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Original author: Business Insider

Verizon's Oath message has changed from data-driven targeting toward showcasing a stable of content brands.CEO Tim Armstrong is talking less about challenging Facebook and Google and ad targeting overall.During an Advertising Week keynote, however, he did say YouTube's recent issues with brand safety helped Oath bring in more ad revenue.

Oath CEO Tim Armstrong has seemingly changed his story on Verizon's ad ambitions.

When Verizon purchased AOL for $4.4 billion, the emphasis was on the powerful potential of combining AOL's advertising-technology assets with Verizon's vast pools of consumer data. The $4.48 billion acquisition of Yahoo, which gave the wireless giant access to millions more web consumers along with another set of ad-tech systems and consumer data, was only going to help take that to another level.

Not long ago, Armstrong was telling ad buyers that Verizon's data and AOL and Yahoo's scale were going to help the company challenge Facebook and Google. If Facebook's ad-targeting strength is drawn from its users' self-reported personal data, and Google's power came from billions of people typing into search boxes what they are interested in, Verizon has unique data on over 145 million subscribers, such as where they live and what kind of apps they use. That could be hugely powerful for ad targeting.

But Armstrong has noticeably backed off that claim recently while seriously downplaying the data-driven ad-targeting rationale behind the Verizon deals. Instead, the emphasis on Oath — the new name for the Verizon/AOL/Yahoo mash-up — is about being a "house of brands."

That message is apparent in the company's new marketing campaign, which includes a video featuring former Public Enemy front man Chuck D talking about people's love of coffee and sneakers and other brands.

In fact, during an Advertising Week keynote on Tuesday, Armstrong was asked repeatedly by CNBC anchor Julia Boorstin whether Oath could seriously take on Google and Facebook — and he largely demurred.

"Having a strategy of being in business because people don't like Google and Facebook is a bad strategy," he said.

Boorstin also pressed Armstrong several times to articulate the big-picture motivation behind Verizon assembling all these digital assets, and he scarcely mentioned data and ad targeting.

Instead, Armstrong described what he saw as two big moves Verizon was newly able to make. The company is planning to push Oath brands like HuffPost and TechCrunch onto more people's Android phones via a product called AppFlash. In addition, Oath wants to explore ways down the road to subsidize content and services for consumers, presumably to keep them more loyal to the wireless carrier.

When it comes to battling the duopoly, he said as Google and Facebook were in a war, Oath could serve as an "arms dealer."

But did Verizon really spend over $8 billion for AOL and Yahoo to get Tumblr and Yahoo Sports on more people's phones? It's not clear how this will happen for millions of iPhone users who interact with Verizon only when they pay their bill.

Could Armstrong be downplaying Verizon's data-driven plans to avoid the attention of regulators? The threat of consumer-privacy legislation? Or just to lower expectations?

Armstrong was vague regarding Verizon's long-term digital-media game plan, saying, "We're still in the second inning."

He alluded to the privacy dance Verizon has to navigate, arguing that its consumer data offered an "opportunity and a challenge." He said wireless providers were under more scrutiny than Silicon Valley companies.

It's a far cry from recent talk of taking on digital ad titans and aspiring to build the "number one media and tech company in the world," as he told Recode in 2016.

Still, Armstrong did hint that competition with Facebook and Google was still a goal. He told Boorstin that when YouTube saw a slew of advertisers pull back on spending after some ads were spotted next to dicey videos, "our revenue went up."

Original author: Business Insider

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Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Thomson Reuters

There's a new battle brewing in the ongoing war for control at Uber as the company prepares to reset itself after appointing a new CEO.

On Friday night, former CEO Travis Kalanick surprised the company by appointing two new members to the board, apparently without notifying the company and other board members. An Uber spokesperson told Business Insider the move was "a complete surprise."

Kalanick's appointments came ahead of the board's meetings to consider new rules of governance for the company that would change shareholder voting rights and potentially the structure of the board.

In a statement to Business Insider Friday night, Kalanick basically admitted his surprise appointments were designed to get in front of the proposed changes to the board structure. Kalanick had power over those two empty seats, and he appointed Xerox chairwoman Ursula Burns and former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain.

"I am appointing these seats now in light of a recent Board proposal to dramatically restructure the Board and significantly alter the company’s voting rights," Kalanick said in his statement. "It is therefore essential that the full Board be in place for proper deliberation to occur, especially with such experienced board members as Ursula and John."

Recode's Kara Swisher and Theodore Schleifer reported more details on the proposals that the board is considering next week. Some of the changes could reduce the voting power Kalanick and other shareholders have. According to Recode, some of the options on the table include:

Removing special voting power of some shareholders like Kalanick and the VC firm and early Uber investor Benchmark. Kalanick would lose one of the three board seats he controls, and a representative from SoftBank, which is considering a major investment in Uber, would get the seat instead. Kalanick would be able to appoint someone to the third board seat he controls, but with restrictions attached, like approval from Uber's new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. The seat must also be filled by a c-suite executive from a Fortune 100 company.

Obviously, most of these new proposals would limit Kalanick's power on the board, which could explain why he decided to appoint members to the empty board seats he controls without any warning. Recode's report says some of these proposals will be considered by the Uber board on Tuesday. 

Original author: Steve Kovach

Dragan Radovanovic / Business Insider

The Trade Desk, an advertising-technology company, took a dive into the cookie pools of readers of two "fake news" stories, one targeting readers on the left and the other on the right. It calculated "relevance scores" for a variety of characteristics for each of the two articles, getting an idea of how the audiences for the posts differed from the population at large. It found that fake-news readers interested in a pro-Trump story were more likely to be older, white, and in the military or work for the federal government. Those lured by a fake story about the Standing Rock protest by Native Americans were more likely to be affluent, college-educated, and working in the financial-services industry.

Who reads fake news anyway? We all have that uncle or colleague who shares dubiously sourced articles from websites that sound like they belong to national news organizations but don't.

While the focus these days is on fake news that targeted conservative voters — thanks to the specific allegation that the Russian government propagated this kind if misinformation on Facebook to sway last year's presidential election — it's important to note that liberal readers were also lured into fake stories that fit their political mind-set.

Ad-tech company The Trade Desk took a closer look at the readers of fake-news stories of both kinds to build a profile of who took the bait — both from the right and the left — using the same tools a business might deploy to target their advertising.

One story was from a site called American News titled "BREAKING: Congressional Plot To Bring Down Donald Trump Escalates ... They Have Momentum Now," while the other was a story titled "Police Raid Standing Rock Camp, Dismantle Tipis And Are Burning What Remains" from the Alternative Media Syndicate.

The fact-checking site Snopes.com lists a number "false" stories from American News, including this one about a plan to add President Barack Obama to Mount Rushmore. The Standing Rock story was specifically outed by Snopes as one that was dubbed "fake" by one of the protest organizers.

The Trade Desk used the "cookie pool" — or the list of other websites viewed within an hour of reading one of the fake stories — of users clicking each story to try to home in on profiles of who these readers are. It created a "relevance score" that shows the ratio of the likelihood that a reader of an article has a certain trait, like an age bracket or a gender, compared to the prevalence of that trait in the overall US population.

We're describing this as a "glimpse" into fake-news readers because there's an obvious limitation to the study. The analysis looked at only two stories, and we don't know what readers did next (like share the story on Facebook). That said, The Trade Desk is doing these analyses as the industry tries to work out how to keep advertisers away from this kind of content. Plus, it's an important reminder that liberal readers (and voters) are also susceptible to the lure of a too-good-to-be-true headline.

"The most surprising finding of our study is that fake news affects both the right and the left, the educated and uneducated," The Trade Desk's CEO, Jeff Green, told Business Insider. "There was also a strong correlation between what people read and how they voted. Of course, we expected people’s voting to be influenced by what they read; however, the truth was secondary to the content and volume of what they read."

Here are some of the characteristics of the readers of the right-wing American News article, according to The Trade Desk's estimates. The numbers below show how much more likely these readers are to match a certain trait than the general population:

Business Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from The Trade Desk

According to The Trade Desk, fake-news readers on the right were more likely to be older, white, and in the military or work for the federal government.

They were about 56 times as likely to be Gen-Xers, 22 times as likely to be white, and 21 times as likely to be male than Americans as a whole. They were also 39 times as likely to be in the property industry than the US population at large, and 27 times as likely to be over 65.

On the other hand, here are some of the characteristics of readers of the left-wing article from Alternative Media Syndicate:

Business Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from The Trade Desk

Fake-news readers on the left were more likely to be affluent and college-educated, wealthy, and in financial services.

Specifically, they were 54 times as likely to be politically influential, 34 times as likely to be college graduates, and 31 times as likely to be "positive idealists" than the overall US population.

The Trade Desk also looked at relevancy scores based on geography. States that are more conservative unsurprisingly tended to attract more readers to the right-wing American News article:

Business Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from The Trade Desk

The map bears some resemblance to the 2016 Electoral College map. States that had higher relevancy scores for the right-wing American News article were more likely to vote for Trump last November:

Andy Kiersz/Skye Gould/Business Insider

Ultimately, the goal of the study was to help protect advertisers from being caught up in the world of fake news, said Green. Once advertisers become aware of such publishers, they may be discouraged from running fake stories, he said.

"Understanding fake news helps us protect advertisers from being there. We want to defund fake news," he said. "It’s good for all reputable players. We think changing the economics or moneymaking prospects of fake journalism is the fastest way to end it."

Original author: Business Insider

Shutterstock/Pabkov

Wayfair, the e-commerce company that generates $3.4 billion in annual sales of home goods and furnishings, loses roughly $10 for every new customer it acquires, according to a new analysis by two business school professors. 

That unseemly statistic doesn't bode well for the company's future prospects, and it implies that Wayfair — which opened trading Wednesday at about $69 a share, giving it a market value of about $6 billion — could be overvalued by more than 80%. 

In a lengthy paper released late last week, Daniel McCarthy, an assistant professor of marketing at Emory University, and Peter Fader, a marketing professor at Wharton, present a new method of valuing publicly-traded retailers that focuses on customer retention. Wayfair is an unfortunate guinea pig example. 

The thrust of their analysis, which sprawls over 50 pages, is this: If you can suss out how much a company spends to attract each new customer and how much customers spends over their lifetime before ditching the company, you can deduce a company's future revenues and overall value. 

In Wayfair's case, McCarthy and Fader estimate that Wayfair is spending about $69 to acquire new customers, but it's only earning $59 back from the customer over the long haul.

"So they're losing money every time they acquire a new customer," McCarthy told Business Insider.

The paper calculates the company's value at $10.24 a share — about 85% below where the stock opened Wednesday.

A Wayfair spokesman declined to comment and referred Business Insider to research published by a Wall Street analyst who took issue with the assumptions in McCarthy's research. 

But the company has addressed the issue of customer acquisition costs and profits previously in presentations to investors. The company is currently unprofitable — having lost nearly $200 million in 2016 — but Wayfair and its investors, of course, believe it'll outgrow this problem over time and start turning a profit. 

McCarthy and Fader say the customer-retention data doesn't back that up.

Another Blue Apron?

The academic duo used similar analysis on retailers with subscription models, like Blue Apron. Prior to the meal-kit company's initial public offering, McCarthy calculated that the company's $10 a share opening price was significantly overvalued given its ugly customer-retention figures, calling for a best-case price of $8.40 a share. 

Blue Apron cratered after its IPO, and today stands at roughly $5.50 a share. 

Markets InsiderApplying this analysis to retailers with non-subscription business models — companies like Wayfair, Amazon, or Walmart — is much thornier, as customer purchasing patterns are far less predictable and customer churn isn't observable.

But with the right customer data metrics, you can glean a far better picture of a company's health, according to McCarthy and Fader.

"Wayfair has disclosed data along all of these dimensions for many years now – quarterly customers acquired, total orders, active customers, and revenues – which allows us to use some statistical modeling to 'back out' what the implied customer retention and spend are for customers," McCarthy told Business Insider.

The paper compares Wayfair with Overstock.com, another online retailer, albeit a more mature company with more general product offerings. Overstock releases similarly useful customer-focused data, though its prospects look a lot brighter: Because the company spends a lot less to acquire customers — $38 compared to Wayfair's $69 — it actually turns a $9 profit on each new customer. 

Courtesy Daniel McCarthy

If Wayfair reduced its customer acquisition costs to the same level as Overstock, its expected valuation would double, provided all else was equal, according to the paper. 

Of course, as with any valuation, assumptions are baked into the formulas and uncertainty exists. In the most optimistic scenario — in which Wayfair quarterly revenues eventually beat the baseline expectation in 2022 by a multiple of five — McCarthy and Fader estimate the company's value at $57 a share, or 19% below what Wayfair is trading at today. 

$1.2 billion in value erased

Google FinanceSince the paper was published late last week, Wayfair shares have already fallen from $83.77 to around $69 a share at Wednesday's market open — a more than 17% drop. Its market value has fallen by more than $1.2 billion. 

This is, it should be noted, a small dent given that the shares had more than doubled in the year through last week. Wayfair was already a popular target for short sellers this year — who profit from a falling stock price — though so far they've taken a bath on that bet. 

They were quick to jump on the research. Citron Research, the firm run by noted short-seller Andrew Left, has long been critical of Wayfair and was quick to tout the analysis. 

Smartest piece EVER written on $W. Not by a short or long. By a team of Ivy League scientists who specialize in predictive models. $10 tgt

Cannot argue with this analysis- target $10 Smarter work than ANYONE on Wall Street has ever done on Wayfair. https://t.co/JpDPS8NA7A

An equity analyst that covers Wayfair initially jumped to the company's defense. Aaron Kessler, of Raymond James, issued a note on Friday claiming McCarthy's analysis had "many questionable assumptions" and saying investors had overreacted.

Kessler followed up with an additional note Monday saying he had incorrectly interpreted portions of the paper but still disagreed with other aspects, notably customer retention and overall valuation.

Here's Kessler:

But McCarthy says Wayfair has a long enough track record of data to account for any potential issues regarding customers purchasing in waves. Annual data for Wayfair exists going back to 2003 and more granular quarterly data is available starting in the first quarter of 2013. 

And, he says, he and Fader have a business that models and analyzes customer-retention costs for dozens of large companies as well as asset managers performing due diligence — which gives him confidence in his analysis.

Analyzing a company with their cooperation and internal data isn't identical to analyzing a public company from afar for an academic paper, but the model and methodology remains the same, according to Fader, who has been at Wharton for 31 years and researching these specific models for the past 15.

"The basic models used here are quite standard and well-accepted in the quant marketing area — many of my colleagues and students (and countless practitioners) have been using them for years on internal transaction data," Fader told Business Insider. 

Joe Ciolli contributed to this report. 

Original author: Business Insider

Portland, Oregon. Josemaria Toscano/Shutterstock

A safe haven sounds like a good idea right about now.

Somewhere that's warm but not too warm, free from hurricanes and flood-causing downpours, and close to a body of water yet far enough to avoid the threat of sea-level rise.

Which places does that leave? According to climate scientists and urban planners, not a lot.

"The bottom line is it's going to be bad everywhere," Bruce Riordan, the director of the Climate Readiness Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, told Business Insider. "It's a matter of who gets organized around this."

Still, some areas have a better chance of surviving the onslaught of a warmer planet than others, Vivek Shandas, an urban-planning professor at Portland State University, told Business Insider.

"There are places that might at least temper the effects of climate change," he said.

All of them are cities, which tend to be less isolated than rural areas, and most are in the Pacific Northwest.

"Much of the Pacific Northwest is really well-positioned for being one of the better places for climate change," Shandas said.

Andrey Bayda/Shutterstock

Urban parts of that region tend to be newer, meaning that their infrastructure — which includes water systems, the power grid, and public transportation — is more modern and "more resilient to major shocks," Shandas said. That's key when it comes to coping with heat and rising water. It also gives the Pacific Northwest an advantage over cities whose infrastructure is badly in need of updates. 

"Generally speaking, the US gets about a D+ for things like this," Shandas said. "Much of our infrastructure was built in the late 1800s, and it's beginning to fall apart."

Riordan agreed. "A lot of places are running into real maintenance issues which lead to delays and overcrowding and operational issues because of aging systems," he said.

Geographically speaking, cities in the Pacific Northwest are also conveniently situated near natural resources like water — an integral buffer against drought — and hills, which provide access to higher elevations with cooler temperatures. The region's temperature is naturally fairly mild, making it a good candidate for those hoping to avoid the heat waves that are already becoming more common. 

"What we’re seeing is longer durations of heat waves every year since 2012," Shandas said. "So one of the key questions is 'How is this area going to cope for the next one?'"

Episodes of intense heat can be exacerbated by a phenomenon called the urban heat island effect, wherein cities essentially act as furnaces, generating so much heat that they become significantly warmer than the areas surrounding them.

One of the largest studies on the effects of heat waves took place in Chicago in the 1990s. That study revealed another important measure of a city's ability to cope with climate change: how involved, enfranchised, and well-organized its populations are. The Chicago residents who fared worst during the heat wave were those who were isolated — typically, people with lower incomes and less access to resources. Those who did better, on the other hand, had historically benefited more from social policies that had incorporated them into society.

"Neighborhoods that are connected do better when these things happen," Riordan said.

That's why Shandas and his team assess social inequity when evaluating how prepared a city is for the future.

Seattle, Washington. Wonderlane/Flickr

"What climate change does is it amplifies these inequities," Shandas said. "It's usually people with resources that have things like air-conditioning units, or cars to escape a hurricane. If a city has a lot of inequity, we can begin to speculate that any event — be it a flood, a heat wave, whatever — will really have a lot of impact and make things worse."

Cities like Seattle and Portland score well on measures of social equality or have plans in place to help distribute resources more fairly. Portland, for example, is one of the only cities with a working group tasked with reducing racial and economic inequality as it relates to potential climate-action policies.

San Francisco also scores well on these measures (though it's not in the Pacific Northwest), since 98% of its population lives within a half-mile of regularly operating transportation. That makes wealth or income  less of a factor when it comes to accessing transit during an emergency.

However, it's important to remember that climate change is not going to act selectively, and a stark impact felt in one part of the planet will have far-reaching implications elsewhere.

"We’re headed into a world that's going to look very different for everybody," Riordan said. "That’s not at the end of the century. That's pretty damn soon."

Original author: Erin Brodwin

Original author: Áine Cain

A pool table is decked out in Jet's signature purple.Sarah Jacobs/Business InsiderIt may be part of the world's biggest retailer now, but Jet still has its own personality.

Inside Jet's headquarters in Hoboken, New Jersey, a year after Walmart acquired it for $3.3 billion, the company still feels very much like a startup.

A pool table, with felt in the company's signature purple, is next to the chairs in the visitors' waiting area. Employees mill about with laptops, collaborating and chatting.

"One of the things that's been really important to Walmart since day one ... was making sure we created a path forward that let Jet be Jet," Jet.com President Liza Landsman told Business Insider.

Take a look around Jet's headquarters. 

Original author: Dennis Green and Sarah Jacobs

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Get the latest Tesla stock price here.

Original author: Danielle Muoio