Google's second-quarter earnings on Thursday revealed a historic year-on-year revenue decline for the tech giant as the coronavirus crisis pummeled the advertising industry. But while executives were "cautiously encouraged" that the ad outlook was improving, there's another major pandemic-related challenge ahead for the search giant. 

CEO Sundar Pichai told employees this week that they would be able to work from home for another year, until summer 2021. Now — as executives hinted in the Q2 earnings call — Google must sort through the reality of what extended remote work means for the company and its culture.

Google's chief financial officer Ruth Porat said that Google expects a "modest decrease" in how much it spends on office and data centers through the rest of 2020, compared to the year before.

"This is particularly due to our decision to slow the pace at which we acquire office buildings in the near term as we focus on reimagining the optimal work environment," she added.

The "optimal work environment" for Google has historically been one of free food, live company-wide "TGIF" meetings with top executives, and more perks than you can throw a Google bike at.

But with most of its workforce operating remote for up to another year, Google is faced with rethinking the way it operates and how to make an office-less Google a great place to work – especially as employees already see Google moving moving away from its culture of old. As the many perks that were touchstones of what made Google such a sought-after employer disappear, it will need to adjust its philosophies and benefits accordingly. 

On the earnings call, Porat said that while Google still expected the pace of headcount growth to decelerate "somewhat" in 2020, the company will continue to hire "aggressively" in priority areas, such as Cloud. Plus, it plans to bring on a new class of younger workers, too. 

"We still expect that headcount additions will be seasonally higher in Q3 as we bring on new graduates," Porat added.

Bringing on a fresh spate of new employees without any sense of the old Google culture to attune themselves to presents its own bucket of challenges for Google as it tries to reimagine what a more flexible future for the company looks like.

There are issues beyond the cultural aspects, too.

In an interview with The Verge back in May, Pichai said that "productivity is down in certain parts" of Google during remote work. While companies such as Twitter were announcing their employees could work from home forever, Pichai seemed hesitant to suggest a fully-remote solution would work for Google.

"Let's say you're designing next year's products, and you're in a brainstorming phase, and things are more unstructured," he said. "How does that collaboration actually work?"

As the timeline for coming back into an office keeps moving back, Google will have to figure that out.

Google Cloud's revenue growth is showing signs of slowing down, but Google is still investing aggressively in the unit by spending big on hiring and building new data centers.

On Thursday, Alphabet announced that Google Cloud generated over $3 billion in revenue this past quarter. That's a 43% increase from the $2.1 billion it posted over the same period last year. Still, that rate of growth is down from the previous quarter, when Google Cloud saw a 52% revenue increase, year-over-year.

Ultimately, Google Cloud was one of the bright spots for Alphabet on this earnings report. While its earnings report slightly beat Wall Street expectations overall, Google saw its first quarterly revenue decline since going public, as Alphabet reported overall revenue of $31.6 billion — down from $31.7 billion over the same period last year. 

Google Cloud is still putting a big focus on hiring and building new data centers. Since Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian joined early last year, the company has gone on a leadership hiring spree, winning over talent from enterprise stalwarts like Oracle and SAP. 

It also saw strength in selling its infrastructure and data and analytics offerings, the company said on Thursday. Earlier this month, Google Cloud announced a new product that allows customers to run its flagship data warehouse product BigQuery on multiple clouds, even those of rivals like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.

"GCP maintained a strong level of revenue growth it delivered in the first quarter and its revenue growth was again meaningfully above cloud overall," Google CFO Ruth Porat said on the earnings call with investors.

Porat attributed the lower Google Cloud revenue growth compared to last quarter to G Suite, its productivity software, and specifically a "lapsed" price increase that went into effect last April and that is now accounted for as part of its normal revenue. Still, she says, G Suite maintained "healthy growth," especially amid the ongoing remote work boom. 

"G Suite products and in particular Google Meet have been absolutely critical," Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said on the earnings call. "We quickly re-engineered it and made it available widely to help millions of businesses and other organizations connect and collaborate."

Read more: Google Cloud did some 'myth busting' about data privacy and winning large customers this week as it tries to win the war against Amazon and Microsoft, analysts say

Currently, Google Cloud still trails behind cloud rivals AWS and Microsoft. However, it has been working on building itself to become stronger in attracting enterprise customers by investing in data privacy and security, and it even announced some new customers this past quarter like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Verizon, Fox Sports, and the French auto company Renault.

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If you're looking to sell your tech startups to one of the big tech giants, an intimidating reputation will take you further than good technology. 

Market position, "land grabs," and winning were all top considerations for the CEOs at Amazon, Facebook and Google ahead of major acquisitions, according to emails and instant messages made public on Wednesday as part of Congressional hearing over possible anticompetitive practices in tech.

The documents give unique insight into the thought processes of these powerful (and often rash) men on the eve of big purchases, which over time have proven to completely rewrite the technology landscape. Ultimately, the messages show, none of these companies made their most high-profile acquisitions because of the quality of the technology.

Google, which acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in October 2006, considered the video streaming website a threat because it meant people were searching for things away from Google.com, the documents show.

Ultimately, its product was less important to Google than its position as a top video startup. In one email, Peter Chane, who founded and oversaw Google Video, said that YouTube's "systems wouldn't be valuable to us" and described its content quality as "worse than ours." But Google's Jeff Huber defended the talks and wrote that at the very least, opening M&A talks would raise the price tag for Google's competitor Yahoo if it wanted to acquire YouTube itself.

Plus, Huber said, YouTube was located a quick drive away from Google in Palo Alto. It might seem like an arbitrary advantage, but it sure worked out for YouTube. 

Perhaps the most insecure emailer was Amazon, which spent months trying to "undercut" Diapers.com before acquiring its parent company Quidsi for $545 million in November 2010. Emails show extensive deliberations, referred to as the "Plan to Win," which addressed Amazon's internal strategy to price match and "meet or beat" Diapers.com's order time cut off of 6 p.m. (The plan also required Amazon to fix a bug on its website: a widget that gave shoppers to option to browse "used" diapers.)  

In 2017, Amazon shuttered its Quidsi properties altogether. In other words, its plan was a success.

Bezos was absent from the Diapers.com emails, but played a more active role fretting over market dominance in documents surrounding Amazon's acquisition of doorbell camera startup Ring for $1 billion in March 2018. 

"To be clear, my view here is that we're buying market position — not technology. And that market position and momentum is highly valuable," Bezos wrote to Amazon Vice President Dave Limp on December 15, 2017, according to the documents.

Others on Bezos's team made clear that Ring didn't have much to offer that Amazon couldn't build itself.

"They don't have any interesting hardware secret sauce either in IP, manufacturing process, or people," vice president Robert Stites wrote to Limp on November 1, 2017, in an email arguing against the deal. "I'm not inclined unless our intent is to just benchmark pricing." 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a similar attitude leading up to its acquisition of Instagram for $1 billion in April 2012. Instagram, then a small but growing photo-sharing app, came into Zuckerberg's line of sight as he fretted over how long users spent on Facebook's mobile app, according to the documents. Every second spent on Instagram's app was a second not spent looking at Facebook.

"Instagram is eating our lunch. We should have owned this space but we're losing quite badly," an unnamed Facebooker wrote in a redacted IM transcript from January 2012.

"Not losing strategic position in photos is worth a lot of money," Mike Shroepfer, Facebook's technology chief, wrote to Zuckerberg on March 9, 2012, ahead of the deal.

Once the acquisition went through, Zuckerberg was more direct about his reason for buying Instagram: it was stiff competition. "One thing about startups though is you can often acquire them," Zuckerberg wrote on April 9, 2012

One email of particular interest during the hearing on Wednesday came from Facebook's chief financial officer, David Wehner, in a February 2014 thread about Facebook's $19 billion WhatsApp acquisition earlier that month. 

"A big concern expressed it that we're going to spend 5-10% of our market cap every couple of years to shore up our position," Wehner wrote in defense of the deal. "I hate the word 'land grab' but I think that is the best convincing argument and we should own that. ... We are being aggressive about seizing that opportunity as it is transforming the communications landscape."

(Apple CEO Tim Cook was also part of the hearing, though the company's M&A history was not a big concern for lawmakers.)

Consolidation is nothing new in the land of tech, and in many cases strategic acquirers get lauded for the wisdom behind deals that increase their power and eliminate risk. But not every acquisition is about dominance or eliminating obstacles. 

When the $194 billion enterprise tech giant SAP acquired Qualtrics for $8 million in 2018, SAP added a top-of-the-line market research and data analysis product to its offerings.

If SAP saw market research as its only growth opportunity, that would be one thing. But the point of the acquisition wasn't to make SAP the market leader in that sector. It was to give SAP more ground in its competition against Oracle and Microsoft to dominate in cloud software more broadly.

Then there are deals like Cisco's May acquisition of ThousandEyes, a network security startup whose technology Cisco plans to tie into its existing products. Cisco bought the company because it made more sense than developing its own tool that could do the same thing.

This is all to say: it's possible for a large tech company to acquire a startup for reasons other than fear of the underdog. But if these messages from executives at Facebook, Amazon, and Google show anything, it's that making tech's mega giants feel insecure is a great way to go from startup founder to multi-millionaire. 

Never-before-seen text messages from 2012 show just how careful Instagram cofounders felt they needed to be in dealing with the "wrath" of Mark Zuckerberg in the months before Facebook acquired the photo-sharing app for $1 billion.

A text exchange between Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom and early investor Matt Cohler, then a partner at Benchmark, show the two strategizing how much to disclose to Zuckerberg about the photo-sharing app's future plans, and the cofounders' decision whether to get acquired or continue on independently. In the text conversation, Systrom voices his concerns to Cohler about possibly sending Zuckerberg into "destroy mode" or encountering "the wrath of Mark" if the Instagram cofounders were to rebuff Facebook's interest in buying the app.

The text messages were made public Wednesday as Zuckerberg — as well as the CEOs of Apple, Google, and Amazon — appeared in front of the House Judiciary's antitrust subcommittee to answer lawmakers' questions about any potential violations of antitrust regulations. The exchange between Systrom and Cohler was just one of a trove of documents the House subcommittee made public during Wednesday's hearing to demonstrate possible anticompetitive practices by the four big US tech companies.

Although Facebook's purchases of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 weren't challenged at the time, lawmakers at Wednesday's hearing heavily scrutinized the acquisitions. Some representatives argued that Facebook's app acquisitions and clones of other platforms' features — like Snapchat's Stories and, most recently, TikTok — were evidence of monopolistic or anticompetitive behavior.

The committee also published several email threads and online chat logs showing conversations that took place among Zuckerberg and various Facebook executives and employees to demonstrate the company's mindset during Instagram's $1 billion acquisition.

By the start of 2012, Facebook was touting that its company comprised 95% of the social media market. However, Instagram was rapidly threatening that lead: In March 2012, Instagram's average daily users was growing at a rate of more than 1,700% week-over-week and 9.2 million percent month-over-month, according to documents published Wednesday.

In emails Zuckerberg sent in 2012, the CEO calls Instagram a "threat," and reasons that buying Instagram would be a way to successfully "neutralize" its success. Zuckerberg told colleagues that Instagram "can hurt us meaningfully without becoming a huge business," and that acquiring Instagram would be "buying" time for the company.

But Zuckerberg's plans to take on Instagram didn't come as a surprise to the app's cofounders, as is apparent by the text exchange between Systrom and Cohler. Systrom said he feared turning down an acquisition offer from Facebook would send Zuckerberg into "destroy mode" — a concern that Cohler affirmed.

"Mark doesn't react emotionally, he reacts based on competition," Systrom later writes to Cohler. "Bottom line I don't think we'll ever escape the wrath of [M]ark. It just depends how long we avoid it."

Just two months after this conversation took place, Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion in April 2012.

In response to questions from Rep. Jerry Nadler at Wednesday's hearing, Zuckerberg acknowledged the company viewed Instagram "as a competitor and a complement to our services" in 2012. The chair of the big tech hearing, Rep. David Cicilline, later told Axios that Zuckerberg's testimony proved Facebook displayed "classic monopoly behavior" and should be broke up.

However, Zuckerberg also reasoned that Facebook had simply "adapted features" from competitors in response to lawmakers' grilling about whether it cloned competitors' products in order to maintain its social media dominance. Zuckerberg also argued that Facebook still faces competition from platforms like YouTube and TikTok.

The Facebook CEO also disagreed with lawmakers' characterization that his conversations with Facebook executives regarding acquisition targets were viewed as a threat "in any way."

Amazon blew away expectations in the company's second-quarter earnings report on Thursday, except for its Amazon Web Services cloud business. 

The business brought in $10.81 billion in Q2, falling slightly short of Wall Street's $11.01 billion expectations. Meanwhile, revenue growth for the segment slowed to just 29% year-over-year, down from 33% last quarter. 

But, according to Amazon, the deceleration was a result of its own helpfulness. In response to a question about slowing revenue on the company's earnings call, Amazon Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said that the cloud business has been actively looking for ways to help customers scale down usage so that they can save money during the pandemic. 

"What we see are companies working really hard right now to cut expenses, especially in the more challenged businesses like hospitality and travel, but pretty much across the board," Olsavsky said. "We're actively — with our sales force — looking at ways we can help them save money."

The company believes that in the long run this will help Amazon, because it will allow its customers to continue operating, thus remaining AWS clients into the future. 

Helping customers scale back is "not going to help our usage growth in the short run, but it'll help those customers save money," Olsavsky said. "We think that's the right thing to do not only for their success — so they can come out of this in better shape — but also for the longterm health of our relationship with them."

Olsavsky's comments seem to counter earlier reports that Amazon Web Services was unwilling to work with customers to cut their cloud costs amid the pandemic.

While some customers are looking at ways to reduce cloud spending, Olsavsky said, "it's a bifurcated world," and Amazon is seeing some customers accelerate their shifts to the cloud.

AWS revenue growth slowed to 29% year over year this quarter, down from 33% last quarter, 34% in Q4 2019, 35% in Q3 2019, 37% in Q2 2019, and 42% in Q1 2019.

Meanwhile, AWS operating profit jumped to 54%, up from 36% in the previous quarter, and 18% in the quarter before that. Olsavsky explained Amazon profit was up across the company because of cuts to marketing, travel, and medical expenses amid the coronavirus crisis.

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Apple said the launch of its anticipated 5G iPhone will likely be delayed a few weeks as the company's supply chain recovers from the coronavirus pandemic. 

The company did not provide revenue guidance for its fiscal fourth quarter because of uncertainty stemming from COVID-19. But during its fiscal third-quarter earnings call, the company did provide some insight into what it's expecting across its biggest product segments for the September quarter.

When discussing the iPhone, Apple said that although it started selling new iPhones in late September last year, it expects "supply to be available a few weeks later."

"This year the supply of the new product will be a few weeks later than that," Luca Maestri, Apple's senior vice president and chief financial officer, said on the company's earnings call. 

It's far from being the first indication that Apple's next iPhone could see a delayed launch. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported back in April that at least some versions of the new iPhone could launch a few weeks later than usual, noting that they would still likely debut in the fall time frame. Analysts from J.P. Morgan previously suggested that the next iPhone could be delayed by one or two months.

It also wouldn't be the first time that Apple launched an iPhone later than its typical September window. In 2018, for example, it began selling the iPhone XR in October, while the iPhone X launched in November 2017.

Apple's next iPhone, expected to be called the iPhone 12, is rumored to be its first 5G iPhone. Other than 5G connectivity, reports suggest it will come with a fresh design in new screen sizes. It may also come with a LiDAR sensor for enabling better augmented reality performance, much like the most recent iPad Pro.

The comments came after Apple reported a blowout earnings report that saw growth across all product segments — including the iPhone, which had suffered multiple quarters of decline. Apple attributed the iPhone's growth to the new iPhone SE it launched in April, some of the reopenings that took place in May and June, and the popularity of last year's iPhone 11. 

When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos testified with three other tech leaders on July 29 on antitrust issues, many of those who make their livelihood on Amazon's retail marketplace tuned in.

There are approximately 1.7 million third-party sellers on Amazon, according to Bezos, and more than 200,000 of them generated more than $100,000 in sales last year. They comprise 60% of product sales on Amazon — collectively beating the retailer at its own game. 

Some of those merchants, along with those who oversee online seller communities or provide consulting work to sellers, told Business Insider they weren't happy with how Bezos talked about sellers during the hearing.

Bezos stressed that Amazon's retail dominance is partially thanks to these third-party sellers. He also referred in his opening remarks to everyday folks who have benefitted from Amazon's marketplace, like Sherri Yukel, a mother and aristan who now employs 80 people to run her Amazon-based business. 

He said these small business owners succeed thanks to Amazon's focus on "supporting sellers and giving them the best tools we could invent." That claim that Amazon is dedicated to supporting sellers is what rubbed some merchants the wrong way.

The animosity between Amazon and some of its sellers goes back years

Paul Rafelson — a tax law attorney and chairman of the Online Merchants Guild, a trade association — said sellers in his online communities were displeased when Bezos emphasized Amazon's support of small businesses on its marketplace throughout the hearing. "People were sick to their stomach with his fake sincerity," Rafleson said.

The animosity may seem unwarranted at first brush. But for years, merchants have pushed back on several challenges of selling on Amazon.

Some of the most contentious points include the lack of communication when Amazon suspends a seller account and Amazon re-producing what other brands and manufacturers are already selling. Both can cost a business dearly.

Scott Needham, an Amazon merchant with $50 million a year in sales and host of "The Smartest Amazon Seller" podcast, is one seller who has struggled with Amazon's account suspension system. His company BuyBoxer has been suspended twice in recent years; one suspension in May slashed his sales by about 90% in just one day.

In both instances, Amazon did not communicate with BuyBoxer on why it was suspended until several days after, costing the company tens of thousands of dollars in sales.

"There are certain things where I think, 'How does a trillion dollar company not solve certain parts of this puzzle?'" Needham said. "There are many legitimate businesses on Amazon, just mom-and-pops, tens of thousands that rely on them. They just under-invest in keeping those sellers up and running."

"There are all these stories of ways that Amazon has basically ruined seller's lives," Rafelson previously told Business Insider. "One strong suspension or misunderstanding can destroy a seller's business."

Lawmakers drilled down on how Amazon competes with its own merchants

Some merchants pay big money to ex-Amazon executives for the secret sauce in getting ahead on the massive marketplace — but sometimes Amazon itself beats the little guys out.

Sellers have stated for years that Amazon will sometimes duplicate items from their own catalog that perform well on the website. The retailer has access into the data on third-party sales, and some say they do not use that data in good faith. Jeff Peterson told The Wall Street Journal in 2012, for instance, that his $30 stuffed-animal pillows once sold gangbusters on Amazon — until Amazon started selling its own animal pillows for $12 apiece. 

State Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington state, who represents parts of Seattle, was keen on asking Bezos how his employees use third-party sales data. "The issue that we're concerned with here is very simple," Jayapal said. "You have access to data that far exceeds the sellers on your platforms with whom you compete."

Bezos did not provide a clear answer on how that data is used. "What I can tell you is we have a policy against using seller-specific data to aid our private-label business," the CEO said. "But I can't guarantee you that policy has never been violated."

Another way in which sellers must compete against Amazon is in the retailer's search function. Getting on the first place or on the first row when a consumer searches, say, "iPhone case" is the target of many sellers. But, as The Wall Street Journal's Dana Mattiloi reported last year, Amazon usually claims the first spot for its own line of products. 

"I find it very troubling when you search for something, and the second row down will be brands from Amazon," Needham said. "I know sellers who would kill for that spot."

He added, "The fact that they give it to themselves — I do not know how (Bezos) can be up there in front of Congress and say that everything is equal."

Some say there's bigger fish to fry yet

While sellers were happy to see their long-emphasized problems reach the House Judiciary subcommittee, they say it's unclear how lawmakers can do much more besides make Bezos sweat.

Amazon seller consultant James Thomson, who was previously a senior manager at the mega-retailer, said the issues raised in the hearing may cast Amazon as an unfair competitor — but not necessarily one that acted unlawfully.

After all, sellers consent to giving Amazon their sales data. It may leave a bad taste in someone's mouth, but it's not illegal. 

"This is a situation where there are a lot of people who don't like Amazon, or think Amazon is unfair, immoral, or not nice," Thomson told Business Insider. 

Thomson added, "Is it fair? I'll let someone else decide that, but fairness has nothing to do with it. Do we have laws that know how to properly address companies this big? At this point, I don't think the laws have kept up adequately."

That viewpoint is echoed by Jason Boyce, who sold on Amazon for nearly 17 years and now consults third-party merchants on how to succeed on the platform. Boyce said Amazon needs to be broken up, but the United States' current laws don't provide a path for that. 

"I'm honestly both disgusted by the behavior of these big companies, while simultaneously understanding why they do the things they do to capture more market share and squash competition," Boyce, the co-author of the forthcoming book "The Amazon Jungle," told Business Insider. "It's part of their DNA."

Anyone who said grain silos can't fly may be in for a surprise on Sunday.

SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk, is fervently working to develop a potentially revolutionary rocket system called Starship in Boca Chica, a relatively remote region in southeastern Texas that sits on the Gulf of Mexico. If Starship and its Super Heavy rocket booster end up being fully reusable, Musk has said, the system may reduce the cost of launching anything to space by about 1,000-fold.

But first, SpaceX has to see if its core designs for Starship works. To that end, the company is moving briskly to build, test, and launch prototypes. According to a tweet from Musk, the first such full-scale example may soon fly from a beachside launch site to nearly 500 feet (150 meters) in the air.

To tee up that imminent test flight, SpaceX on Thursday test-fired its latest Starship prototype, called SN5 (short for "serial number 5") — and apparently with success. "Starship SN5 just completed full duration static fire," Musk said on Twitter.

Musk added that the vehicle would "hop soon," and though he did not immediately clarify when that meant, a notice to airmen, or NOTAM, posted on Thursday suggests SN5 could fly between 9 a.m. ET and 11 p.m. ET on Sunday. (For safety reasons, SpaceX is required to file such notices with the FAA before launching rockets.)

SpaceX had hoped to attempt a flight last week, but Hurricane Hanna not only prevented SN5's testing, but also apparently damaged a component that had to be fixed, Musk said.

SN5 is the latest of several full-scale Starship prototypes that SpaceX has built in Texas. The previous versions have either crumpled during tests or, as was the case on May 29, catastrophically exploded.

Each failure has taught SpaceX valuable lessons to inform design and material changes — tweaks that Musk says are already being worked into SN6, SN7, and SN8 prototypes, which are in various stages of assembly within the company's expanding and bustling work yards in South Texas.

The steel vehicles don't have wing-like canards or nosecones attached in case something goes wrong in their earliest phases of testing, so they look more like flying fuel tanks or grain silos than rocket ships.

However, as last year's test launch of an early Starship prototype called Starhopper showed, the flights of such crude experimental vehicles (shown above) can easily impress: On August 27, Starhopper soared about 492 feet (150 meters) into the air, translated across a launch site, and landed on a nearby concrete pad.

SpaceX has an FAA launch license to send Starship prototypes on a "suborbital trajectory," meaning the experimental rocket ships could reach dozens of miles above Earth before returning and landing. However, it's uncertain if SpaceX plans to launch SN5 on such an ambitious flight path if it survives the pending 150-meter "hop" flight.

The company couldn't attempt more ambitious flights until late August at the soonest, though.

On July 23, SpaceX asked the FCC for permission to use communicate with prototypes flying as high as 12.4 miles (20 kilometers) within the next seven months. The earliest date noted on the request, which is still pending, is August 18.

Nevertheless, SpaceX is pursuing a launch license for full-scale, orbital-class Starship-Super Heavy vehicles, part of which includes a new environmental review of its Boca Chica site.

Musk hopes Starship will launch a cargo mission to Mars in 2022, send a private crew around the moon in 2023, return NASA astronauts to the lunar surface in 2024, and even begin sending people to Mars the same year.

Have a story or inside information to share about the spaceflight industry? Send Dave Mosher an email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or a Twitter direct message at @davemosher. More secure communication options are listed here.

This story has been updated with new information. It was originally published on July 21, 2020.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company's employees can continue working from home until early 2021.

Cook laid out the company's plans to extend its work-from-home policy in a Thursday interview with Bloomberg. 

"To go beyond that, it would depend on the success with a vaccine, success with therapeutics," and other factors, Cook told the outlet. The CEO also compared office reopening plans to the company's strategy in reopening its retail stores. He said the "accordion" process would allow the company to reopen and reclose offices as needed depending on updated data.

In late May, Apple reportedly began asking employees to start returning to work that month and through June, with even more expected to go back into the office in July.

Cook's comment comes days after news surfaced of Google's intention to extend its work-from-home policy until summer 2021. Neither companies has gone as far as Square and Twitter, which both announced they're allowing employees to work remotely on a permanent basis if they choose.

The short-form video app Triller is suing the company behind the social-media juggernaut TikTok, alleging that the viral app is pirating Triller's patented technology to use audio tracks to edit multiple videos together. 

Triller claims that it had patented the video format back in 2017 that has been made famous by TikTok, and that the app as it stands today continues to violate Triller's US trademark. Lawyers representing Triller are asking for damages, as well as the court to file an injunction against ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, to prevent further alleged infringement of Triller's patent.

The patent infringement complaint, first reported by The Wrap, was filed Wednesday in US District Court for the Western Division of Texas. Although ByteDance is located in China, TikTok operates globally and maintains offices in Austin, Texas.

The patent Triller is referencing was filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office back in 2015, the year Triller was founded. The patent, approved in 2017, covers "systems and methods for creating music videos synchronized with an audio track." 

In a statement provided to Business Insider, Triller CEO Mike Lu claims TikTok paid some creators to "actually not post on Triller," a move he called "neither ethical nor legal." Lu also said Triller plans to add an alleged antitrust violation to the complaint.

"If every 200B company could just pay their customers to not join a startup competitor, entrepreneurship in America would die and no new companies could ever exist," Lu said in the statement.

Representatives for TikTok did not immediately return Business Insider's request for comment. A representative for Triller said TikTok has not yet responded to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit comes as TikTok faces increased scrutiny around its ties to China, and the amount of access and influence the foreign government has over user data and content moderation. Just earlier this month, President Donald Trump publicly said he's considering banning the app in the US due to these concerns.

TikTok has been a dominant force in the short-form video-sharing space and has amassed more than 2 billion downloads globally. But TikTok's uncertain future in the US has already led creators and users to panic. In recent weeks, tech companies have taken advantage of the chaos to lure the app's loyal US following — estimated around 80 million strong — to their rival platforms.

Triller is among those competing apps that have already seen user interest and download numbers spike. Just earlier this week, Triller got a boost when a group of prominent TikTok stars with a combined following of nearly 50 million followers announced they were taking their talents to the rival Los Angeles-based app. One of the TikTok influencers, Josh Richards, told the Los Angeles Times he was migrating to Triller "given my responsibility to protect and lead my followers and other influencers" after hearing the US government voice concerns about TikTok's ties to China.

Triller was founded back in 2015 as a music video-editing tool. The app reports around 64 million active users a month. According to figures provided to the Times by app-analytics firm Sensor Tower, Triller has just 130 million downloads compared with TikTok's 2.3 billion globally.

However, TikTok's roots can be traced back to 2014, when short-form video-making app Musical.ly was founded in the US. The app hit to the No. 1 spot in the US App Store in the summer of 2015, and was purchased by ByteDance in late 2017 in a deal valued at $1 billion. ByteDance shut down Musical.ly a year later, merging it into the TikTok platform in markets outside of China.

You can view Triller's lawsuit in full below:

 

Silicon Valley's reputation as the world's leading tech hub could be in jeopardy because of the United States' restrictive immigration laws.

Tens of thousands of immigrant tech workers have flocked to Toronto in the past few years, making it the fastest growing tech hub in North America.

Many of them are deliberately avoiding the US as the Trump administration clamps down on immigration. In June, President Donald Trump temporarily suspended visas known as H-1B visas, which are awarded to thousands of skilled immigrant workers each year.

The visa suspension is prompting some immigrants, like former Silicon Valley product manager Asim Fayaz, to move north to Canada. 

"There is a whole world out there, and you are probably better off going somewhere else because you'd be treated more human," said Fayaz, a Pakistani immigrant who now runs an online restaurant business in Toronto. "You don't need to be, like, pleading for your existence all the time."

Every year, the US government reserves 85,000 H-1B visas for skilled foreign professionals — people like Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa and started companies such as Tesla and SpaceX in the US.

Fayaz came to the US to attend the University of California, and landed a job after graduating with a master's degree in 2016. As an immigrant, trying to find work in the US was tough — he needed an American employer to not just hire him, but also sponsor his H-1B work visa.

This year, immigration laws suddenly changed as Trump suspended the program, citing "an unusual threat to the employment of American workers" during the coronavirus pandemic. The move left thousands in limbo.

But while the US is closing doors, Canada has been rolling out the welcome mat. Since 2013, the number of tech jobs in Toronto has skyrocketed from about 148,000 to 228,000, an increase of 54%.

"We have over 100,000 people immigrate to the Toronto region each year, which is twice as many as San Francisco Bay Area," Jason Goldlist, cofounder of TechToronto, said. And we don't just attract the quantity. It's also quality because a fifth of these immigrants already have a STEM degree before they even arrive here.

Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify is trying to capitalize on the opportunity. Following Trump's announcement, CEO Tobias Lutke — himself an immigrant from Germany — tweeted, "If this affects your plans consider coming to Canada instead."

Sandeep Anand, the company's senior mobility lead, echoed Lutke's call for talent: "Whether they're already in Canada, whether they're globally present, we're looking to really expand our diverse workforce. And in some cases it does mean that we would need to relocate and provide immigration support, which we're happy to do," she told Business Insider Today.

According to a 2016 study, 25% of Canada's workforce are immigrants. And in the tech space, that number is even higher — 40%, or 350,000 workers.

"It's not like there's a bunch of Canadians waiting to take these jobs," Brotzky said. "The unemployment rate is really, really low. We can't find the people."

Brotzky argues it makes economic sense for US companies to open offices in Canada, as well.

"You have these people that can basically work in the same time zone, quick flight from you, really easy laws, super fast to set up, and you have the benefit of Canadian dollar salaries," he told Business Insider Today. "But more importantly, you have access to the global talent pool. So you can bring in any developer from around the world that's good."

That's why Canada is trying to attract highly skilled foreign professionals through visa programs like the Global Talent Stream, launched in 2017. Immigration experts say it is like the H-1B program, but a lot better. 

"It's a very fast processing time. It takes anywhere from roughly around two weeks to complete the first stage. And then the second stage, which is the work permit stage. It takes another two weeks. So you could be in Canada as quickly as a month," Blayne Kumar, founder of the immigration services company Bright Immigration, said.

For Fayaz, the decision to move from the US to Canada came after he was laid off from his Silicon Valley company, when he and his wife became fed up with constantly worrying about their legal status.

"It's not even like in 10 years, I will get it," he said. "It's like maybe, maybe not. Who knows, who cares. We don't need you in this country."

And the recent suspension of the H-1B visa program only confirmed his worst fears.

"You know that scene in movies where the actor is leaving the scene and the world is blowing up behind you, right? I feel like that — that I kind of managed to exit the scene somehow, magically," he said. "And I look back and the US is just blowing up."

"So many of my friends, people that I worked with, went to school with, they're all impacted. And whenever I get a phone call, I just feel so sorry for all those people."

Facebook is resisting giving over reams of internal documents to the EU's antitrust investigator.

Bloomberg reported that on July 15 Facebook's lawyer in the EU filed an official challenge to a request from the European Commission for documents relating to the company's internal practices. Facebook confirmed to Reuters on Monday it's suing the Commission for demanding unreasonable quantities of information. The Commission said it would defend its position in court, per Reuters.

Facebook's lawyer Tim Lamb said the EU's requested internal emails that mentioned a set of 2,500 terms including "big question," "shut down," and "not good for us," and could end up infringing on the privacy of individual employees.

"We are cooperating with the Commission and would expect to give them hundreds of thousands of documents," Lamb told Business Insider in a statement. "The exceptionally broad nature of the Commission's requests means we would be required to turn over predominantly irrelevant documents that have nothing to do with the Commission's investigations, including highly sensitive personal information such as employees' medical information, personal financial documents, and private information about family members of employees.

"We think such requests should be reviewed by the EU Courts."

The Commission has been investigating Facebook's data practices and its Marketplace platform since summer 2019, but has not yet launched a formal antitrust probe.

Reuters reports Facebook has already handed 315,000 documents over to the Commission.

Meanwhile, Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg is preparing to testify before Congress on Wednesday in a series of big tech US antitrust hearings.

President Donald Trump was mocked by two popular hashtags after he complained on Twitter about "very unfair" trends on the site. 

The hashtags #TrumpleThinSkin and #ThePresidentIsACrybaby both appeared on the site after the president tweeted that negative trends about him were "really ridiculous, illegal, and, of course, very unfair!"

The full tweet, posted at 6.41 p.m. local time on Monday, said: "So disgusting to watch Twitter's so-called "Trending", where sooo many trends are about me, and never a good one. They look for anything they can find, make it as bad as possible, and blow it up, trying to make it trend. Really ridiculous, illegal, and, of course, very unfair!"

Since this tweet, the hashtag #TrumpleThinSkin has been used 121,000 times and #ThePresidentIsACrybaby 40,300 times, according to Twitter's trending list around 12 hours later.

Both terms appeared in the top 10 US topics.

Many posts were direct replies to Trump's tweet, with some particularly objecting to the idea that tweeting criticism of him could be "illegal."

Using #TrumpleThinSkin, pro-Democratic campaign group Really American tweeted saying Trump was "literally going to destroy the 1st Amendment because people said mean things about him on twitter."

Hundreds tweeted political cartoons with the hashtag. Others used it along with news clips about Trump's decision not pay his respects to civil rights activist Rep. John Lewis as he lay in state in the Capitol on Monday.

There had been a tense relationship between the pair, but it is nonetheless unusual for a US president not to pay respect to deceased prominent public figures they disagree with, as Business Insider's John Haltiwanger reported. 

Many others used the hashtag in combination with the recent news that Trump had canceled throwing the opening pitch for the Yankees, despite not actually having been invited, according to reports.

Officials told The New York Times that the president had been annoyed at the attention Dr Anthony Fauci had received in being invited to do so for the 2020 Major League Baseball season. 

Business Insider has contacted the White House for comment, but did not immediately receive a reply. 

Sixteen years after Richard Branson founded Virgin Galactic, the company plans to unveil the interior design of its centerpiece suborbital rocket ship, SpaceShipTwo.

The vehicle is designed to fly to supersonic speeds and pierce the unofficial boundary of space some 62 miles above Earth.

At the pinnacle of such flights, six passengers — either a group of space tourists or science researchers — and two pilots would experience a few minutes of weightlessness before returning and landing at Spaceport America in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Virgin Galactic is now in the final stages of a test-flight program before the company attempts to start commercial operations.

As those final experimental flights take place, the company is announcing that it has finalized the interior cabin of SpaceShipTwo.

Virgin Galactic has seen repeated setbacks to its goal to carry paying passengers, which founder Richard Branson had predicted could start as long ago as 2009. A prototype ship failed over the desert in 2014, killing a test pilot and further hampering the project.

But Virgin Galactic says it is now on the final stretch. The next phase of the company's existence is planned to kick off with the inaugural flight of Branson himself, followed by a manifest of at least 600 passengers who've already paid $200,000 to $250,000 each for a ticket. An additional 400 passengers who've placed $1,000 deposits may follow.

Since the coronavirus pandemic limits in-person tours, the company plans to reveal that design on Tuesday at 1 p.m. ET in a virtual tour on YouTube, embedded below.

SpaceShipTwo's cabin has to work for passengers and pilots in a many challenging situations. Its missions involve dropping from a two-bodied mothership airplane, igniting its rocket engine, then accelerating to more than three times the speed of sound.

The ship can then give passengers a few minutes of weightlessness before descending, falling back to Earth in a spiral flight pattern to bleed off speed, and gliding to a soft runway landing.

In a press release, Virgin Galactic said the "cabin interior has been created to integrate seamlessly with every step of that journey, it is also the design centerpiece, providing safety without distraction, quietly absorbing periods of sensory intensity and offering each astronaut a level of intimacy required for personal discovery and transformation."

Ahead of the event, the company released a short teaser clip for its unveiling, below.

A spokesperson could not tell Business Insider when Virgin Galactic planned to begin commercial operations.

However, the spokesperson noted that only one or two rocket-powered test flights remain before the Federal Aviation Administration can sign off on the final five of 29 requirements to license the vehicle.

"We're now on what I think of as sort of the final stretch of those," George T. Whitesides, the CEO of Virgin Galactic, told Business Insider in May. "Many of those have to do with things related to the cabin. Stuff like humidity [levels]."

Following those one or two powered flights and an FAA license, the spokesperson said Virgin Galactic can fly additional missions to the edge of space with up to four employee passengers each to test out the company's cabin hardware and suborbital astronaut training program.

Have a story or inside information to share about the spaceflight industry? Send Dave Mosher an email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or a Twitter direct message at @davemosher. More secure communication options are listed here.

This story has been updated. It was originally published on July 2, 2020.

Google is planning to lay more than 3,000 miles of transatlantic undersea cable by 2022.

The tech giant announced its new Grace Hopper undersea cable project on Tuesday.

The Grace Hopper cable, named after the famous US computer scientist, will connect New York to Bude in the UK and Bilbao, Spain. The distance from New York to Bude in Cornwall, England is roughly 3,290 miles.

In a statement Google said Grace Hopper marks its first private investment in a private subsea cable route to the UK, and its first ever cable route to Spain.

Google says the Grace Hopper cable is expected to be completed by 2022, and the company will use a new technique to make it more reliable than existing fibre-optic cables.

"Grace Hopper will incorporate novel optical fiber switching that allows for increased reliability in global communications, enabling us to better move traffic around outages," Google said.

The cable is set to funnel 340-350 terabytes of data per second, which according to Google equates to 17.5 million people streaming 4K videos simultaneously.

Google already has three privately-owned undersea cables: Curie, Dunant and Equiano.

Curie runs down the West coast of the US from Los Angeles all the way down to Valparaiso in Chile, stopping off in Panama, and is already online. Dunant stretches from Virginia Beach in the US to France, and is expected to become accessible later this year. Equiano runs from Portugal all the way down the West coast of Africa to Cape Town, South Africa, and is expected to be completed next year.

Spanish business-to-business learning platform Odilo just raised $10 million in a Series B funding round led by Swanlaab Venture Factory.

Odilo allows schools, universities, and companies to create their own learning ecosystem using resources from more than 5,000 different content providers.

The edtech startup has previously raised €10 million ($11.8 million) in funding from investors including KIBO Ventures, JME Venture Capital, and Active Venture Partners. All existing investors as well as new investors like Endeavor Catalyst and CDTI participated in the Series B round. 

Since the beginning of the pandemic, edtech startups have seen a seen a surge in popularity as students and employees contend with the new norm of learning at a distance.

The global market for education technology is projected to be worth $285 billion by 2027, growing at an average rate of 18% a year, according to Grand View Research.

In the case of Odilo, the amount of hours spent on the platform by teachers and students who were already signed up increased by 400% during the past few months, while corporate learning increased three-fold.

Odilo already has more than 146 million users across 43 countries. It was looking to raise even before the boom in edtech seen over the past few months, according to CEO Rodrigo Rodriguez.

"We were profitable before raising funds so we were in a situation that we were growing organically," he said. "The reason for this round is basically that we wanted to grow faster than we can do with our own possibilities."

The Madrid-based startup plans to use the round to expand into new countries and verticals, focusing on the US and Asia, as well as launching into the rest of Europe. 

Odilo will benefit from the long-term adoption of online learning tools because the curated, Netflix-style experience it offers is completely different to anything else in the edtech market, according Rodriguez.

"Odilo allows them [the clients] to build their own data platform, so they can select exactly the content that they want from the 5,000 different content providers," he said. "We centralize everything in one platform. We can build learning experiences, using the content from any content provider so that it makes it a very easy experience, and offers unlimited learning options."

Take an exclusive look at the pitch deck that Odilo used to raise this latest round below:

Tandem, the language learning app letting users pair up and share tips from around the world, just raised more than $5 million in a Series A fundraising round. 

Launched in 2015, Berlin-based Tandem today boasts more than 10 million users across 180 countries, members are matched with fluent speakers of the language they want to learn, allowing them to swap ideas over text, audio and video. 

Users can choose from more than 300 different languages, including 20 forms of sign language, 20 indigenous language – and six fictional ones like Klingon or Mandalorian. 

The firm's £4.5 million ($5.7 million) funding round was led by Brighteye Ventures, a leading European technology fund, alongside Trind Ventures, Rubylight Limited, and GPS Ventures. 

"We have seen a strong growth in Tandem members since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic," said CEO and cofounder Arnd Aschentrup.

"As access to offline lessons and courses has been limited, many people are discovering a new way to learn languages and connect with new people across the globe - particularly important during times of limited face-to-face interaction.

"We are very pleased to be working with a group of investors who share our vision of a world connected by learning."

Alex Spiro, managing partner at Brighteye Ventures, said: "The product has not only proven resilient in this global crisis but has seen impressive growth during the period, and the team is now very well equipped to come out of it stronger and to continue to support loyal language learners that now number in the millions and will number many more in the coming years."

NOW WATCH:

President Donald Trump reignited his feud with Twitter on Monday, suggesting that the website's trending topics section is "illegal" because the topics and content that appear there make him look bad.

"So disgusting to watch Twitter's so-called 'Trending', where sooo many trends are about me, and never a good one. They look for anything they can find, make it as bad as possible, and blow it up, trying to make it trend. Really ridiculous, illegal, and, of course, very unfair!" Trump tweeted.

Trump didn't mention a specific trend or cite any evidence to support his claim that Twitter was intentionally biasing its trends against him, nor did he say which laws he believed the company is violating.

Twitter's website says that "trends are determined by an algorithm and, by default, are tailored for you based on who you follow, your interests, and your location." Users can also view topics that are trending by location instead of those personalized for them, according to the site.

Twitter declined to comment for this story.

Trump and other conservatives frequently accuse social media companies of bias against their political viewpoints, though so far without any systemic evidence. Trump has more than 84 million followers on the platform, the seventh-largest audience of any user and second only to former President Barack Obama among politicians, according to Brandwatch.

Multiple lawsuits brought by conservatives who said social media companies illegally discriminated against them have been rejected by courts because the First Amendment doesn't apply to private companies.

Trump's own criticisms of social media sites, Twitter in particular, have escalated in recent months as platforms face growing pressure to take action against hateful and potentially violence-inducing speech as well as misinformation.

Twitter drew Trump's ire in May when it added fact-checking links to his false tweets about voting by mail, and again the same week when it applied a "glorifying violence" label to his tweet threatening protesters following George Floyd's death with being shot.

Shortly after, Trump issued an executive order targeting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law that protects social media companies from being sued for content posted by users on their platforms, specifically calling out Twitter. Legal and tech policy experts have expressed skepticism that the order would hold up in court.