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Google Assistant is six times more likely to answer a user’s question than Amazon Alexa is, according to a study by 360i.

Each AI-infused assistant was asked 3,000 questions, of which Google Assistant answered 72%, and Alexa answered only 13%.

As the rapidly burgeoning voice assistant landscape evolves, the initial results suggest that Google could be well-positioned to overtake Amazon in the voice assistant market, despite Amazon's early lead.

The ability to accurately understand and respond to users’ questions will be a key element to the usefulness and usage of a voice assistant. And the vast difference in performance by Google Assistant over Amazon could give it an edge as the voice-first ecosystem continues to expand. Here’s why:

Still, Amazon has established a solid lead over competitors in the connected voice market. The company’s Echo installed-base, large volume of Alexa skills (voice apps), and multitude of partnerships with third-party connected devices, has helped it capture mindshare and carve out a solid segment of the voice assistant market. And Alexa has a ton of room for growth; just 5% of Amazon customers own an Echo, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. For context, 51% have a subscription to Prime, 34% own a Kindle Fire, and 6% own a Fire TV. 

Jessica Smith, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on the voice assistant landscape that:

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Amazon's second-quarter report fell well short of Wall Street's expectations.

The company's earnings missed analysts' forecasts by more than a dollar a share. It also offered a disappointing outlook for the third quarter.

Investors sold the stock on the news. In recent trading after the bell, Amazon's stock was down $29 a share, or nearly 3%, to $1,017.00.

The company reported on Thursday:

The company's sales were boosted by results from its services business, most notably its AWS cloud-computing business. Compared with the year-ago period, AWS' revenue was up 42% to $4.1 billion. Amazon's overall service revenues also rose 42% to $13.2 billion. The company's total revenue grew 25%.

But rapidly rising expenses weighed heavily on Amazon's bottom line. Marketing costs jumped 44% from the second quarter last year to $2.2 billion. Amazon's spending on technology and content jumped 43% to $5.5 billion over the same period. Its fulfillment costs swelled 33% to $5.2 billion. Overall, the company's operating income was down 51% from the second quarter of 2016, to $628 million.

Amazon has been hiring software engineers and sales representatives for its AWS business, Brian Olsavsky, Amazon's chief financial officer, said on a conference call with analysts. It's also been investing in new warehouses, digital video for its streaming video service, and in developing and promoting its Echo smart speaker products, he said. 

Besides increased operating costs, taxes took a toll on the company's results too. Even though Amazon's operating income was down from the same period last year, the amount it set aside for income taxes rose by more than 50%, to $467 million. That provision would give it a tax rate of about 70% for the quarter. It was unclear from the company's report why it set aside so much for taxes.

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Rolls-Royce

The Rolls-Royce Phantom is one of the oldest names in the car business. For nearly 100 years, the Phantom has been a byword for luxury, exclusivity, and world-class engineering.

After remaining dormant for a decade, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars launched the seventh generation Phantom in 2003. It was the first new Rolls-Royce introduced after BMW assumed control of the brand from Volkswagen Group in what was one of the most bizarre business deals in recent memory.

For 13 years, the Phantom VII served Rolls-Royce with distinction as its flagship model while also becoming a catalyst for the brand's recent renaissance. With annual sales topping 4,000 cars, the past few years have been happy times for the rarefied luxury automaker.

Now, there's an all-new Phantom.

On Thursday, Rolls-Royce unveiled the Phantom VIII.

"The Phantom is the pinnacle of the Rolls-Royce brand in its truest sense," CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös told Business Insider in an interview. "It embodies all of the qualities Rolls-Royce is well known for. It starts with the magic carpet ride, the quality, the precision design, and engineering."

"It embodies what (company founder) Sir Henry Royce said, 'Take the best that exists and make it even better,' and that is exactly what the Phantom is in every single detail,"Müller-Ötvös added.

Rolls-Royce is expected to commence customer deliveries of the Phantom VIII in early 2018. The standard wheelbase Phantom starts at around $450,000. However, company data shows Phantom VIII customers are adding around $150,000 in bespoke options to their cars for an average order price of $600,000.

Here's a closer look at Rolls-Royce's new flagship.

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

1. The UK government is to force porn sites to introduce age verification, or else be banned. People will have to register their card details to prove their age, in a measure designed to protect children from seeing graphic content.

2. Investor and startup platform AngelList has suspended an employee, Lee Jacobs, as it investigates allegations of assault. According to TechCrunch, Jacob allegedly assaulted a woman at an event in 2013.

3. A security flaw in MySpace meant that someone could hack into an account knowing just the user's real name, user name, and birthdate. It isn't clear if any MySpace accounts were affected by the vulnerability.

4. Google's troubled high-speed broadband business, Google Fiber, is losing its new chief executive just five months after he joined. Gregory McCray was hired to head up Access, the Google division which includes Fiber, and it's not clear why he's left.

5. Uber's global retreat continues after it pulled out of China-controlled Macau. The company said it couldn't "secure" the right business environment, and leaves after less than two years in the market.

6. Amazon registered a trademark application for "prepared food kits", suggesting the firm's about to take on the likes of Blue Apron in meal kits. Blue Apron's stock sank 11% on the news.

7. Essential, the startup headed by Android creator Andy Rubin, is set to bring its new smartphone to the UK. Essential has conducted talks with operators to bring its smartphone, a high-end device just called "Phone", overseas.

8. Netflix crushed its growth targets, adding more than 5 million new subscribers for its second quarter. Revenue and earnings per share were in line with analyst guidance, and the results sent the firm's stock up 8%.

9. Hand-tracking firm Leap Motion has raised $50 million (£38 million) in Series C funding to expand its human-computer interaction technology. The firm will expand into different sectors and open a new office in Shanghai.

10. The entire board of Hampton Creek, a Silicon Valley startup famous for making egg-less mayonnaise, has quit except the CEO, Josh Tetrick. The outgoing board members reportedly left because of conflicts with Tetrick.

A view of the Lucid Air outside of Lucid Motors' headquarters in Menlo Park, California, February 16, 2017. Bryan Logan/Business Insider

The Silicon Valley-based electric-car startup, Lucid Motors is said to be entertaining a possible sale to Ford Motor Company, Bloomberg reported on Monday.

The publication, citing people familiar with the matter, said Lucid approached Ford about a possible sale, and that Ford rebuffed the suggestion.

Lucid is currently raising money in a Series D round.

A Lucid Motors spokesperson declined to comment on any takeover talks or the company's current Series D, but said that the fundraising effort was "going well." The company is backed by Venrock, which is the same venture capital firm that led Apple's Series A round in 1978.

Business Insider reported in February that Lucid Motors' Series D was in the works. A company spokesman said at the time that Lucid had raised several hundred million dollars as it develops its 1,000-horsepower Lucid Air electric luxury sedan.

Like Faraday Future, another investor-backed electric-car startup, Lucid Motors is also seeking funds to build its inaugural factory, which Bloomberg said could cost $700 million. But unlike Faraday Future, Lucid Motors has not started work at its own site in Casa Grande, Arizona.

Faraday Future said last week that it was temporarily abandoning its plans to build an assembly plant in North Las Vegas, Nevada, 15 months after it held a ceremonial ground-breaking at the site in April 2016, citing trouble raising money from outside investors.

Lucid Motors Chief Technology Officer Peter Rawlinson told Automotive News at the New York International Auto Show in April: "It would be irresponsible to start moving earth or start anything until we have a financial runway to execute that professionally and with absolute integrity."

During his February interview with Business Insider, Rawlinson said of building a new electric car from the ground up: "This team realizes the enormity of the task. We're car guys. This is the team that has done it before. We know how to do this."

Get the latest Ford stock price here.

ASPEN, Colorado – There's no question that superfast, fifth-generation mobile networks are coming. But when will consumers get to connect to these 5G systems?

How about in as little as two years?

"You’ll see 5G in 2019 for sure," Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf told attendees of the Fortune Brainstorm conference in Aspen, Colorado on Monday. 

5G networks are expected to send gobs of data faster than your at-home WiFi network and faster than your old-fashioned, wired plug-in network at work. They might even be as fast as the fastest networks you can get today, which run at gigabit speeds.

Although everyone wants faster networks, it's not been clear when 5G would arrive. Even a year ago, Mollenkopf himself would have predicted that 5G wouldn't be readily available until 2020, but "people are pulling us faster" toward 5G than that, he said.

There are also whole new industries that are pushing for it, like connected cars, and health care.

But the big driver? Videos. People want to watch more videos on their gorgeous-screen smartphones, and that requires lots of bandwidth.

Google Fiber, the high-speed internet service operated by Alphabet, has lost its second CEO in less than a year. 

Gregory McCray is stepping down from the CEO job of Access, the Alphabet subsidiary that houses the Fiber unit, Google confirmed to Business Insider on Monday.

The change is the latest shake-up at Access, which announced in October that it would stop rolling out its 1 gigabit per second wired broadband networks to new cities and focus on newer, wireless options, such as the Webpass wireless service it acquired last year.

The Access group also had layoffs towards the end of 2016 and shifted hundreds of other employees to different units within Google earlier this year.

Alphabet CEO Larry Page said in an emailed statement to Business Insider on Monday that the company is "committed to the success of Google Fiber" and was looking for new leader for the business.

"We are serving not only our core Fiber cities but also others through Webpass. Fiber has a great team and I'm confident we will find an amazing person to lead this important business," Page said in the statement on Monday, following the news, which was first report by Bloomberg. 

Craig Barratt, the head of Google Access, stepped down from the top job at the time. And Google hired McCray in February.  McCray was the CEO of Aero Communications before taking the job at Alphabet. His departure after only five months on the job is likely to revive questions about the future of the Access division when Alphabet holds its Q2 earnings conference call next week. 

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You may not have thought much about your Myspace page in a long time, but you might want to give it some thought now. 

It turns out, there was — until very recently — an easy way to hack into Myspace accounts. All you needed was an account holder's name, user name, and date of birth. 

British cybersecurity blogger Leigh-Anne Galloway published a post on Monday about the security flaw. Her post was picked up by the Verge, among other outlets. 

Galloway discovered the Myspace vulnerability in April while trying to regain access to her account so she could delete it. The site directed her to an account recovery page. In order to reset her password and allow her to regain control of her account, the page only asked that she provide her full name, user name, email address associated with the account and birth date.

As Galloway noted, most of that information is either public or fairly easy to find for most people, meaning that if hackers wanted to, they could fairly easily take control of any MySpace account. Galloway was concerned enough about the flaw that she notified Myspace soon after she discovered it. She said she never got a response other than an automated email telling her MySpace had gotten the message and would get back to her.

Galloway later discovered the situation was even worse than she thought. Although the recovery page indicated certain fields were required to reset an account, the page also tells visitors to just "try and fill out as many of the fields as you can." After testing it a bit, she discovered she was able to reset her password and gain access to her account without a valid email address

Interestingly, after Galloway published her post on Monday and it was picked up by various news outlets, the recovery page she used disappeared. The site now redirects visitors to a page prompting them to enter an email address to get instructions on how to reset their password.

It's unclear whether any Myspace accounts were compromised due to the vulnerability.

In an emailed statement, the company said that because of the recent concerns, it added an additional verification step for customers seeking to reactivate their accounts. Myspace plans to continue refining the process over time, the company said.

This isn't the first or even the most serious security issue Myspace has faced. In 2016, a hacker stole and then tried to sell 360 million user email addresses and passwords. 

Although it's largely an after-thought in the social networking world these days, Myspace still gets 50 million visits every month according to the Verge. In 2016 media giant Time purchased the social networking company for an undisclosed sum. Then Chairman and CEO of Time, Joe Ripp called the purchase “game changing.”

Viant, a digital advertising platform, is the parent company of Myspace, and Time was likely looking to get in on Viant’s user data for ad targeting purposes. 

Nest CTO Yoky Matsuoka Stuart Isett/FORTUNE Brainstorm Tech. Used by permission.

Yoky Matsuoka is in the middle of a spectacular career. She began as a semi-professional tennis player. She became a renowned expert on robotics because she dreamed of building a robot tennis partner (something she never accomplished). She did research stints at University of Washington and Microsoft Research.

Then she went on to become one of three co-founder of Google's moonshot R&D unit Google X (now called merely "X"). Today, she's the Chief Technology Officer at Nest.

Having been both a university researcher and a product developer, she has an interesting perspective on why it's so hard for research breakthroughs to wind up in products.

She says there's a "Valley of Death" between academia and commerce because each of them are after different things.

Research is all about proving an idea that's never been done before. Have an idea, write a grant, hire research students, get proof-of-concepts and have everyone publish papers. Those papers bring in more grant money and lead to tenure.

The gap comes at that point.  Researchers assume that that some great product person will take the research and turn it into a product to be used by millions of people.

But it's not easy to take a product "that works for 10 people and getting it working for a million or a billion people," Matsuoka says.

And the work required to bridge t hat gap "is boring for everyone," she says.

Researchers want to focus on new stuff that's never been done before. They don't want take something proven and published, and make it stable for a billion users.

And product people don't want to spin their wheels experimenting with early technologies that have only worked for 10 people. Their attitude is "We’re working on real products," she describes.

She thinks the solution is for more cooperation between the two sides, including more researchers who jump to commercial work and back and again, like she has.

And that was one idea behind the formation of X, which she says was intended to be a "paradigm shift" in research. Even though none of the companies that X has launched has yet to produce financially successful products, she says "It's been very successful, by its own metric."

For all the PR fiascos it’s faced, Uber is still king of the ride-hailing services in the West.

On the other side of the globe, however, the process of requesting a car from your phone is dominated by another giant: Didi Chuxing. As this chart from Statista shows, while Didi is a relative unknown in the West, its fundamentals are nearly on par with the world’s most valuable private company.

Didi acquired Uber’s China operations in a mega-merger last year, outlasting its fellow giant after a fierce price war. The company has the backing of titans like Apple, SoftBank, and China’s own Alibaba and Tencent, two truly massive rivals that merged their respective ride services to create Didi Chuxing and share the spoils.

It’s not hard to see why all these major players are bullish on Didi: It now owns a virtual monopoly on ride-hailing, a growing business, in China, a country with a population of 1.3 billion and a high percentage of citizens who do not own cars. Uber now has a stake in Didi’s business, so it’s not being left in the dark there. But as Uber continues to deal with Lyft at home, Didi may wind up the king of ride-hailing worldwide.

Jeff Dunn/Business Insider

Monday's Google Doodle is a nifty little cricket game in which the batsman is a ... cricket! and the fielders are snails. The bowler is also a snail.

From the preceding sentence you might assume that I know something about cricket, but I don't. I have the basics. And playing Google's cricket game is mesmerizing. I'm as much adrift as my colleague Matt Weinberger.

I was waiting for the one thing I do know about cricket, which I learned from many listens to the English progressive folk-rock musician Roy Harper's cricket ballad, "When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease," a meditation of mortality and, well, cricket (Harper, by the way, sang lead vocals on Pink Floyd's "Have a Cigar" and was immortalized in a Led Zeppelin number, "Hats Off to (Roy) Harper," from the group's third album).

Here's the first verse, from Harper's album "HQ":

When the day is done and the ball has spun in the umpires pocket away
And all remains in the groundsman's pains for the rest of time and a day
There'll be one mad dog and his master, pushing for four with the spin
On a dusty pitch with two pounds six of willow wood in the sun.

So what's with all the spun/spin stuff? Well, in cricket a spin bowler delivers the ball with rotation that's meant to make it hard to bat. And lo! In the Google Cricket game, the snail does indeed bowl with spin.

I was able to hit it anyway. Maybe it gets harder as you rack up the runs.

Out!Screenshot via Google

 

Get the latest Google stock price here.

"Okja." Netflix

Netflix wants to reinvent movies in the same way it did TV, according to its Q2 earnings letter posted Monday.

In the letter, Netflix focused on the importance of shaking up the movie business, which has seen dwindling numbers of people going to theaters.

"Just as we changed and reinvented the TV business by putting consumers first and making access to content more convenient, we believe internet TV can similarly reinvigorate the film business (as distinct from the theatrical business)," Netflix's letter read. "This year we will release 40 features that range from big budget popcorn films to grassroots independent cinema."

That parenthetical implies that while Netflix has a plan to boost the movie business, the traditional movie theater may or may not be part of it.

Netflix has sparred with old Hollywood over its release strategy, and commitment to having movies play online the same day they play in theaters. While its rival Amazon has played nice and respected the theaters by not streaming movies until the allotted 90 days after their theatrical run, Netflix has refused to do that. This has lead all the major movie chains to refuse to screen Netflix movies.

Most recently, Netflix's model got folks at the Cannes Film Festival upset as two Netflix titles, "Ojka" and Noah Baumbach's "The Meyerowitz Stories," were added to this year's esteemed competition lineup, though it was unclear if either title would play theatrically in France. The festival quickly announced that beginning in 2018, a film would only qualify for its competition lineup if it has a theatrical release in France.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings responded to the ruling on Facebook by characterizing it as "the establishment closing ranks against us."

In its Q2 letter, Netflix implies both that movies will be a big part of its future, and that it plans to disrupt the business — with or without the help of theaters.

Ann Coulter. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Airlines are usually the ones at the receiving end of complaints, rants and trolls online.

But Delta seems to have the upper hand in its ongoing Twitter war with political commentator Ann Coulter.

According to data crunched by social listening firm Brandwatch, Coulter’s online sentiment is 55.9% negative, whereas Delta’s sentiment is 52.3% positive.

The analysis is based on over 337,000 mentions of Coulter and over 410,000 mentions of Delta across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook over the past seven days.

Brandwatch

This weekend, Coulter embarked on a multiday Twitter tirade, accusing Delta of giving away her seat on a flight on Saturday. According to Coulter, Delta gave away an extended-legroom economy-class seat, for which she paid $30, to another passenger.

Ann Coulter

The dispute quickly escalated and subsequently went viral on Twitter, after Delta responded on Sunday evening.

Delta criticized her for posting "slanderous comments and photos in social media” and Coulter responded by calling the airline "fascists."

According to Brandwatch, activity around the Delta brand increased by nearly 1,400%, while activity around Coulter rose by nearly 2,700% on social media between July 14 and 16.

Coulter has 1.6 million Twitter followers, while Delta has 1.3 million. The chart below shows how closely the two conversations are entwined. (It represents only 10% of the conversation)

Brandwatch

In an age where airlines are frequently lambasted online for all things customer service-related and beyond, Coulter’s polarizing persona has actually turned the tide in Delta’s favor. Coulter didn’t help either, not just attacking Delta but also the other passenger that was given her seat. Coulter called her "dachshund-legged" and implied she's an immigrant when she tweeted, "Immigrants take American jobs (& seats on @Delta)."

Critics are not only embracing the airline’s response, but according to Brandwatch, Delta’s sentiment is actually more positive than the numbers indicate. This is because a lot of the conversations around the topic are overrun with sarcasm (which the algorithm cannot read) and are negative reactions to Coulter that mention Delta in the same breath.

Delta’s sentiment was as much as 80.3% positive on July 13, but its sentiment has taken a hit since Coulter's mentions have started to attach themselves around its conversation. Even though these mentions aren't directly guided towards Delta, its sentiment is going down as the algorithm can’t determine if people are discussing Coulter or the airline.

“Delta is somewhat of the victim in this,” said Kellan Terry, senior data analyst at Brandwatch.

Coulter's conversation, on the other hand, is quite negative regardless of the incident, because she is a polarizing regardless.

Among those that rallied behind Delta included actor Matt Doyle, who said "I was impressed with your service recently. Most pleasant flights I've had in while. Oh and @anncoulter is evil, but what else is new," in a tweet.

On the other end of the spectrum were supporters of Coulter who vowed to boycott Delta because of the incident.

"You screw a customer then scold her for not being polite about it? Never flying Delta again. Plenty of other airlines to choose from," tweeted one user.

 

Elon Musk took to Twitter on Monday to clarify comments that appeared to talk down Tesla's share price. 

I should clarify: Tesla stock is obviously high based on past & present, but low if you believe in Tesla's future. Place bets accordingly … https://t.co/4zbc6vqZSZ

The Tweet was a clarification of earlier comments made at the National Governors Association summer meeting over the weekend.

"I've gone on record several times saying our stock price is higher than we have any right to deserve," Musk said at the conference, according to video from CNBC.

Shares of Tesla sank following the comments. Tesla also had to contend with reports that a Tesla had crashed over the weekend while its Autopilot system was engaged. The driver of the Tesla involved in the crash on Monday denied that the vehicle's Autopilot system led to the incident.

Musk clarified on Twitter that Tesla's stock is priced high based on the past and the present, but not if you believe in the company's future. Musk has pitched a vision for Tesla where it owns the solar panels that charge a fleet of autonomously driving Teslas that come and pick you up at the touch of a button. 

Investors regularly price in their expectations for the future of a stock. After it was announced that Tesla expects to be producing 20,000 of its new Model 3 a month by the end of the year, shares popped. Shares also rose on news of an expanded service fleet, and huge battery installation in South Australia.

Shares of Tesla have grown 48.82% this year.

Markets Insider

 

The Away x Tile luggage tag costs $30 and attaches to any piece of luggage. Away

I'm not exactly a calm, cool, or collected traveler. 

It's not for lack of trying: I always try breezing through the airport as if I know exactly where I'm supposed to go. I download my boarding pass to my phone like a real millennial, and I kick off my shoes and jacket as quickly as humanly possible while going through security so as not to hold up the line. 

But the truth is, my first airplane ride was at 17 when I went on a school trip to Washington, D.C., and I didn't fly again until I was 21 and going to California for the first time. 

All of this to say: I am not a traveling pro by any stretch of the imagination, so I eagerly accept any little little hacks that can make traveling easier. 

So when luggage startup Away offered to let me try a new high-tech luggage tag it created in partnership with Bluetooth tracking company Tile, I decided to give it a shot. The tag looks like any other luggage tag, but it has a narrow slot in the back for a Tile Slim. For anyone with an Away suitcase, the new tag looks almost identical, but it's a bit bigger and a bit heavier duty. 

Tile Slim is about the size of two credit cards stacked on top of each other, so it really is slim. Away

I tested the new tag on a recent trip to Los Angeles. While I was lucky to snag a non-stop flight last-minute, I had a problem: Because I chose United's new Basic Economy fair, I was required to check a bag. 

This was a frightening proposition for two reasons: I never check bags because that adds to the hassle of finding it once I disembark, plus it adds time waiting around at the airport. I'm not a seasoned traveler, so I'd rather just keep my suitcase with me at all times and avoid an added layer of confusion, even if it means dealing with tiny liquids. 

My other worry was a thought everyone has when checking a bag: What if the airline loses it? 

Thanks to this new Tile tag, though, that fear quickly dissipated. All I needed to do was download the Tile app, activate my device, and pair it with my iPhone. My phone communicated with the Tile using Bluetooth: If my bag was too far away from me, I got a push alert as soon my phone couldn't find my luggage. I could also open the app and locate the last-known location of my suitcase. 

That gray circle is the last spot my bag was detected. Away

The tag works both ways, too. If I had my luggage but couldn't find my phone, all I had to do was squeeze the Tile and it would cause my phone to ring loudly. 

There's only one downside of Tile, and other Bluetooth trackers like it: Since the tracking capabilities rely on Bluetooth technology, it's dependent on you having access to the app and having Bluetooth turned on. If your phone is inside your suitcase and you lose your suitcase, you're out of luck until you can get on the app on another device. Still, having any type of tracking device is better than nothing. 

The tag could be attached to any other bag or backpack you'd like to keep tabs on, and you can also slide the Tile out of the tag and place it inside a wallet or purse. The Tile should last for about a year without needing to be charged. 

Away x Tile costs $30. You can learn more on Away's website.