Business Insider spoke to insiders about how to master Amazon's rigorous interview process.Candidates should memorize Amazon's 14 leadership practices and prepare to answer behavioral-based questions backed with data and examples in interviews that can last six or more hours.Amazon's interview process involves its "loop" system, including a "bar-raiser," someone designated to assess whether a candidate will fit into the culture.Advertising is a big part of Amazon's hiring effort, with more than 1,000 advertising jobs open across seven teams.Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Amazon is known as one of the most difficult companies to interview with. The e-commerce giant is known for asking tough questions and quizzing candidates on 14 core leadership principles that prioritize behavioral traits over job qualifications.

But as its expected $17 billion advertising business grows, Amazon has become one of a few companies that is rivaling Facebook and Google as destination for job-seekers, said two insiders familiar with Amazon's hiring practices.

Advertising in particular is a big focus, where Amazon has more than 1,000 openings across seven teams. While hiring activity can widely vary by time of the year, that figure is well above the 130 roles that were open in June.

"They are actually working on genuinely cool problems in the space," said one source who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person is interviewing at the company. "There is a bit of prestige of having Amazon on the resume."

Business Insider spoke to current and former employees, one job applicant, and a recruiting firm for tips on getting a job at Amazon and what to expect.

How to get in the door

A referral will give candidates a leg up, and employees get a bonus for making a successful referral, but Amazon doesn't lean on referrals as much as other tech companies, according to Glassdoor. 12% of reviewers on Glassdoor said that they got an interview at Amazon this way. To compare, 15% of Netflix employees come from referrals, and 25% of Facebook employees come from referrals, according to Glassdoor.

An Amazon spokesperson said that while referrals can give candidates a boost, the company's full interview process plays a bigger role.

How to prepare for the interview 

Amazon is known for tough interview questions. Instead of asking about people's background or resume, candidates are asked behavioral-based questions. The goal is to find people who align with the company's culture, and it's normal to only be asked a few questions during an hour-long interview, sources said.

Connor Folley, CEO of Amazon-focused adtech firm Downstream and a former Amazon employee, said that he prepared for interviews by scouring Glassdoor and compiled all of the questions into a word document.

"You'll find that people with no marketing experience are hired into a marketing manager role," he said. "More important is your proclivity towards these leadership principles than having experience in the role itself."

Here are some examples of typical interview questions, according to Amazon's Glassdoor page:

Tell me about a time that you disagreed with a manager or team member.Describe a time when you went above and beyond the scope of your job.Tell me about a time that you handled a crisis.What is an example of a time you had to make a high-impact business decision with little data or time.  

Amazon's 14 leadership principles are at the core of the interview process. The principles include "customer obsession" and "learn and be curious."

Applicants are encouraged to memorize the principles and provide examples of how they embody the values.

Amazon also uses the STAR method, which stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result, in interviews. Candidates are first asked to describe a situation where they were faced with one of the leadership principles. They are asked to detail the problem and how they solved it. Data-based answers can make a candidate stand out, sources said.

The Amazon employee estimated that more than half of successfully answering interview questions comes from being able to quantify an experience and explain it well. For example, Amazon may ask an advertising job candidate about how they helped a brand with its ad-targeting strategy. A good answer would include specific controls and measures the candidate used to tweak the strategy, the employee said.

Avi Bogart, managing director of recruitment at Three Pillars Recruiting, a firm that places talent at adtech and media companies, said this focus on specificity is meant to evaluate a candidate's credibility.

"When someone isn't being specific, chances are that something is missing — that's such an important thing for how Amazon candidates respond," he said.

How the interview process works

The interview process lasts about a month, which sources described as quick for a hiring process. Hiring managers are expected to get back to candidates about next steps two days after a phone interview. Those who get an in-person interview can expect to hear back within five days, say people who are familiar with the system.

"Amazon has a rule to treat their candidates like customers," said the advertising employee. "They're not in to waste candidates' time. They want to be quick, transparent and over-communicate where they are in each step."

An hour-long phone interview is followed by in-person interviews with multiple people in what's known as Amazon's "loop" system.

It works like this: Candidates come in and interview with about six employees one at a time, with each employee asking questions about one or two of the leadership principles. Interviewers type detailed notes, which limits the amount of eye contact that they make with candidates. All in, the process can last six or more hours, according to sources.

Most of the interviewers are employees in the area the candidate is interviewing for. There's also a person called a bar-raiser from a different department. Sources said that candidates might not know which interviewer is the bar-raiser. These people are well regarded internally and undergo rigorous training to act as a neutral party whose role is to ask tough questions. 

Bar-raisers are meant to make sure that the candidate is better than half of the employees who currently have the role. Both the bar-raiser and hiring manager have to agree to make an offer to a candidate.

"Their job is to dig deeper and probe you — they'll always ask 'Why?'" said Rina Yashayeva, VP of marketplace strategy at Stella Rising, an ad agency that specializes in Amazon and a former Amazon employee who worked there for three years. "Everything should be backed by data."

While Amazon's interview process is rigorous and specific to the company, Downstream's Folley said going through the process is a good way to get jobs elsewhere. Downstream's hiring system uses the same method as Amazon's.

"We find often times in our hiring that when presented with a rigorous hiring process, the right kind of candidate appreciates it, sees it as a challenge and feels comfortable aligning their personal brand and career with that organization," he said. "It's almost like the process of becoming a Navy SEAL. You see the challenge, want to prove that you can meet it, and become part of that team."

Original author: Lauren Johnson

Kelsey Silver and her cousin dreamed of crossing the US by train.Starting in California, they took two Amtrak trains — the California Zephyr and the Lakeshore Limited  — to make their dream a reality.Along the way, Silver documented the trip with photos and TikTok videos.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Kelsey Silver and her cousin dreamed of a train trip across the US ever since they saw a blog post that described how to do the trip for only about $200.

Four years later, they finally decided to take the trip in December 2019, although they opted to spend more for a more comfortable journey.

The two flew into San Francisco to catch the California Zephyr and start a three day trip to Chicago, where they spent the night before taking the Lakeshore Limited train the rest of the way to New York City. With private rooms on both trains, Silver told Business Insider that travel costs were about $2,000 total for her and her cousin.

"If you really want to see America, this is the way to do it," Silver said.

Amtrak offers a few routes for train enthusiasts looking for a trip across the country. In November, Business Insider transportation reporter Graham Rapier spent 96 hours traveling from New York to Seattle. He said he'd "do it again in a heartbeat."

Original author: Mary Meisenzahl

A century-old dilapidated home atop a 6,450 square-foot lot in Oakland — a city just east across the bay from San Francisco — is for sale for $1 million."Fixer-uppers" selling for millions isn't new in the Bay Area, but this listing is more of a bargain since it includes city-approved plans to build five units. All the buyer has to do is purchase building permits. The property sits in West Oakland, near a train station that is merely one stop away from San Francisco.In a region with a housing shortage, and a demand for housing close to transit, the additional units would likely be welcome.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Seeing the descriptor of 'fixer-upper,' paired with a million-dollar price tag, in not exactly uncommon in the San Francisco Bay Area's real estate market.

The demand for housing is so great, and prospective buyers' pockets are so deep, that inconsequential details like fire damage and outdated plumbing don't put off some home hunters.

But a stretch of land across the bay in West Oakland with a 960-square-foot, century-old dilapidated, yet historically relevant, Victorian home is more than a mere fixer-upper. It's more of a development project, listing agent Kevin Cunningham of Red Oak Realty told Business Insider. The listing at 1818 Adeline Street comes with city-approved architectural plans to build out the lot into five housing units total, two of which would be apart of the existing Victorian structure.

The ability to add five new housing units is a minor miracle in the San Francisco Bay Area, with its limited housing stock and growing population. San Francisco may make headlines the most often for its influx of professionals and for the city's myriad reasons for not being able to keep up with housing demand, but the effects are most certainly felt in Oakland and other Bay Area cities as well. There are many that live in Oakland and commute into San Francisco for work to avoid the city's sky-high rent.

And with the listing's location being near a BART station, the Bay Area's regional train system, it will likely attract workers looking to do just that.

If the prospective buyer pays $988,000 — working out to about $200,000 per future unit before development costs — they'll have an opportunity to develop housing units to lease out that could then provide a nice revenue stream.

All of which is to say, this isn't your run-of-the-mill, multi-million-dollar San Francisco Bay Area fixer-upper. This is more of a bargain, at least for those with the resources to pay to develop it.

"It seems pretty reasonable for whoever wants to get in and get going at it," Cunningham said.

Take a look at the West Oakland listing.

Original author: Katie Canales

Microsoft's future rests on forging strong ties with corporate customers, and it relies on a special framework called "horizons" to guide its partnerships.Microsoft executive Peter Lee tells Business Insider how partnerships are categorized in "horizons," based on how ambitious projects are and how much customization they require.The framework fits in to a new focus Microsoft under Satya Nadella to dig deeper into what specific industries need from its products, versus developing something that works for everyone.Click here to read more BI Prime stories

Microsoft is all about corporate customers and, under CEO Satya Nadella, the company has made its mission to go deep into the needs of specific industries instead of trying to make one-size-fits-all technology that works for everyone.

Crucial to that new focus is forging stronger ties with other companies, and Microsoft uses a category system to get customers and partners to think not just about what the company's technology can do now, but how they might work together to create new uses for the partners' or customers' needs.

When Microsoft is deciding how to work with a potential partner, it categorizes projects into what it calls "horizons" based on how ambitious the partnerships are, Microsoft executive Peter Lee told Business Insider this week. These horizons span everything from using the company's "bread and butter" tools like Office to the most aspirational projects that are intended to "change the game."

Lee said Microsoft uses the categories when it inks a "big partnership" with another company, but a Microsoft spokesperson said horizons are used generally to "help customers think about their technology deployment and goals."

Lee is a veteran of Microsoft Research who has transitioned to running the company's health care business at the behest of Nadella. Lee is responsible for finding new uses for technologies like artificial intelligence and cloud computing for Microsoft's health care customers and partners.

What can we work on together that will change the game?

Horizon One is the "bread and butter" of Microsoft, Lee said. Think of Microsoft's exiting tools, such as Office 365, Dynamics customer relationship management, and the Azure cloud. They require little customization.

Then there's Horizon Two, which involves custom engineering. This describes Microsoft's relationship with Walmart, Lee said, intended to take the company's "retail systems to the next level."

Microsoft and Walmart announced a partnership in 2018, which the companies describe as "a broad set of cloud innovation projects that leverage machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data platform solutions for a wide range of external customer-facing services and internal business applications," though they've been quiet about specifics.

Horizon Three is used to describe the most ambitious projects. Lee describes horizon three projects as a question Microsoft asks to potential partners, "What can we work on together uniquely in partnerships that would change the game and lead to real transformation?"

Microsoft's partnership with Swiss multinational pharmaceutical company Novartis is an example. The two companies are building an artificial intelligence laboratory intended to, among other things, improve research and gets drugs on the market more quickly.

It all ties into Satya Nadella's vision of 'tech intensity'

Horizons fit in with Nadella's vision of "tech intensity," which is basically the potential for its customers to grow by adopting technology and then building their own on top of it.

Through the tech intensity pitch, Microsoft is encouraging companies in all industries to adopt Microsoft's latest technology platforms and tools  and then train their workforce to be able to create their own uses for advanced technologies like artificial intelligence.

Meanwhile, analysts expect Microsoft will ink more large partnerships this year, particularly as the company tries to grow its cloud business. 

Salesforce in November chose Microsoft Azure as the public cloud to power its cloud software for marketing professionals. The deal followed Microsoft's other recent cloud tie-ups with companies including SAP and Oracle.

The deals help Microsoft get Azure in front of more customers and help it gain market share faster than if Microsoft did it on its own.

Original author: Ashley Stewart

PagerDuty is a $1.8 billion public company that had a successful IPO in 2019.But the company was almost derailed when it was a tiny startup trying to raise its first round of funding, cofounder and original CEO Alex Solomon recently told Business Insider's US editor in chief Alyson Shontell.In those early days, with only 19 people on the payroll, Solomon had made a classic Silicon Valley mistake and hired what's known as a "brilliant jerk" engineer.After lots of rejection from VCs, PagerDuty was on the cusp of getting a Series A investor when that engineer threatened to quit and take others with him, potentially derailing the investment.The incident forever changed who and how the company hired people, Solomon said.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

One of the stars of last year's enterprise tech IPO market was PagerDuty, with an April debut on the NYSE that soared 60%.

Cofounder and original CEO Alex Solomon, who shepherded the company for its first 11 years, recently sat down with Business Insider's US editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell at the Ascent Conference to talk about those startup years. 

Today the company is valued at $1.8 billion with most analysts bullish on its future, according to Yahoo finance. Revenues have grown from $79.6 million in 2018 to $117.8 million in 2019 under hired-gun CEO Jennifer Tejada who Solomon hired to replace himself in 2016. Solomon is now CTO.

But none of that might have happened if Solomon hadn't thwarted an employee revolt when the company was only 19-people.

Solomon told Shontell how a brilliant but "overly negative" early-hire engineer taught him a valuable lesson about who not to hire.

$20,000 a month and more

PagerDuty is known for its IT incident software that alerts IT pros when they have a system failure and helps them fix it. That product was the brainchild of Solomon's experience working as an engineer at Amazon, where engineers had to carry pagers which would go off if there was a problem with the software they were responsible for, he told Shontell. 

Amazon built an in-house system for managing these alerts.

Solomon and his cofounders, Andrew Miklas and Baskar Puvanathasan, took that idea and built a product that did the same thing for other corporate IT teams, all of whom were, back in those days, on pager duty. 

At first, they bootstrapped their company, with no plan to seek funds with VCs.

"Our dream was when we get to $20,000 a month in recurring revenue, we know we've would have made it and we're going to be sitting on a beach drinking champagne and smoking cigars," Solomon told Shontell. "Obviously that time came and went and we kept on growing."

With growth, they knew they needed help and applied to the famous startup accelerator Y Combinator, which meant moving the company and their families from Toronto to San Francisco. (It took them four tries to get accepted in the program).

Even after Y Combinator, they struggled to get an investor to bite. And just when they were finally on the cusp of getting a Series A term sheet, one of their key engineers threatened to quit. Not only that, two other engineers were threatening to go with him.

"We hired one engineer that was really, really smart but also very negative," Solomon recounted. "He actually ended up influencing two other engineers on the team. They basically ended up banding together."

The three of them wanted to launch their own startup based on an internal tool they had built at PagerDuty. "So they were basically taking something that they had built on company time and wanted to kind of spin it off," he said.

The company only had 19 people at time, so losing three people would have been like "losing one-third of our engineering team" and that, the founders feared, would have scared investors off "weeks before we closed our Series A," he said.

Who not to hire

Solomon managed to convince the guy and his companions not to leave for a few months until investment money was in hand and they could hire replacements. But he never forgot that dicey time. "This led us to the 'no a--holes' rule because this person was candidly an a--hole," Solomon says. Another common name for this type of Silicon Valley engineer is the "brilliant jerk."

From then on, the founders focused as much on a job candidate's ability to work with their teammates as they did on technical skills. Someone "who complained about their previous coworkers and their previous boss a lot in the interview process, that's a big red flag that we learned along the way," he said.

Original author: Julie Bort

SpaceX is poised to launch its first astronauts into space this spring: Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley. 

Their flight on the company's Crew Dragon spaceship will mark the first time an American spacecraft has carried NASA astronauts since the Space Shuttle program ended in 2011.

Behnken and Hurley's liftoff is expected to launch a new era of US spaceflight, since it will allow NASA to stop relying on Russian launch systems to get astronauts into space. It will probably also make the two astronauts the first to ever fly a commercial spacecraft.

"Bob and I were lucky enough to be selected together," Hurley told The Atlantic in September. "As we get closer to launch, things in the last year have actually been pretty hectic. We've been spending increasing amounts of time in California, because that's where most of the work is being done for Dragon."

In preparation, they've run through emergency procedures, undergone extensive training the Crew Dragon's mechanisms, worn their new spacesuits, and met with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

"People to a degree think it's pretty glamorous to be able to go into space, but it's actually like a messy camping trip," Hurley told Reuters in June.

Here's how the astronauts were selected and how they're preparing to fly Crew Dragon to the space station.

Original author: Morgan McFall-Johnsen

Original author: Paige Leskin

Digital transformation has just begun.

Not a single industry is safe from the unstoppable wave of digitization that is sweeping through finance, retail, healthcare, and more.

In 2020, we expect to see even more transformative developments that will change our businesses, careers, and lives.

To help you stay ahead of the curve, Business Insider Intelligence has put together a list of 30 Big Tech Predictions for 2020 across Banking, Connectivity & Tech, Digital Media, Payments & Commerce, Fintech, and Digital Health.

This exclusive report can be yours for FREE today.

Original author: Business Insider Intelligence

TikTok

TikTok has also been plagued by security concerns and over reports of censorship at the request of the Chinese government. Several senators have asked for investigations into TikTok as a national security risk, and the Army and Navy have both barred TikTok from government phones. These concerns don't seem to have hurt the company: it was the second-most-downloaded app in the Apple App Store and Google Play store in 2019, surpassed only by Facebook-owned WhatsApp. TikTok has 1.65 billion downloads to date, according to SensorTower. It might also be closing in on Instagram and Snapchat in numbers of active users, though TikTok hasn't disclosed those numbers. Instagram reached 1 billion monthly active users in 2018, while Snapchat has over 300 million.

TikTok has been closing in on these company in other ways, too. In 2019, the company opened an office in Mountain View, California, just minutes away from Instagram-owner Facebook's headquarters. The office that TikTok moved into was formerly occupied by WhatsApp, another Facebook company.

CNBC reported that TikTok poached more than two dozen Facebook employees, along with workers from Snapchat, Hulu, and Google, which owns YouTube. Facebook and TikTok both appear aware of their growing competition. A November report revealed that Facebook spent six months in 2016 trying to buy Musical.ly before it was sold to ByteDance. 

In leaked audio published by The Verge in October, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the company's plans to compete with TikTok: "So yeah. I mean, TikTok is doing well ... we're trying to first see if we can get it to work in countries where TikTok is not already big before we go and compete with TikTok in countries where they are big."

TikTok isn't Instagram or YouTube, it's something different altogether. Influencers like Bernath emphasize how much faster they can grow their followings on TikTok, although it's still the "wild west" in terms of what those numbers mean to advertisers. Still, Instagram and YouTube might have to watch their backs with TikTok coming up behind them.

 

Original author: Mary Meisenzahl

The Chinese city of Wuhan is rushing to build a new hospital in just six days to treat patients of the deadly coronavirus.Excavation has started at a site in Wuhan, where the outbreak started, and where doctors describe an overwhelmed medical system.The city, and at least nine others, have had their public transport links shut off, leaving a total of 30 million people quarantined in a bid to stop the virus from spreading further.Wuhan's strategy mirrors Beijing's efforts to control the deadly SARS coronavirus outbreak in 2003, when it built a hospital in just seven days that treated one-seventh of the country's patients.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The Chinese city of Wuhan is rushing to build a brand-new hospital within six days to treat patients of the coronavirus that has killed at least 26 people across the country and is overwhelming the quarantined city's health system.

The 2019-nCoV virus, which has infected more than 870 people as of Friday morning, originated in Wuhan. China has closed down public transport links in the city and at least nine others, sealing off a total of 30 million people.

Doctors in Wuhan say that people have to queue for hours for medical attention, that screening the disease is difficult, that there is not enough protective gear, and that some doctors were told not to go to work over fears they could catch the virus.

Video footage shows people packed in small hallways as they wait for treatment.

A still from video sourced by The New York Times shows people crowding into a hospital corridor in Wuhan, China, amid the coronavirus outbreak. The New York Times

Wuhan authorities said Friday that a new, 1,000-bed hospital is being built for coronavirus patients to "address the insufficiency of existing medical resources," the Associated Press reported.

Patients with the coronavirus are currently being treated in hospitals and fever clinics across the city.

The new hospital is to be built in six days, and be put to use on February 3, state-run news site The Paper reported, citing state media outlet People's Daily.

The hospital will be made from prefabricated buildings — making it quicker and cheaper to build — on the outskirts of the city, People's Daily reported.

Video footage shows construction machinery working at the site.

The strategy is a repeat of how China dealt with the outbreak of SARS in 2003, which killed more than 770 people.

Excavators at the construction site of a new hospital in Wuhan on January 24. STR/AFP via Getty Images

In April 2003, Beijing built in just seven days the Xiaotangshan Hospital, which People's Daily said treated one-seventh of China's SARS patients at the time.

People's Daily called that hospital "a miracle in the history of medicine."

The ongoing Wuhan coronavirus can spread from human to human, and has already spread to some healthcare workers treating the infected.

It has spread to at least eight other countries: the US, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia.

This map shows where it had spread as of Thursday:

These countries have quarantined people who are infected, and are monitoring those who have been in close contact with the infected.

Other countries, including Scotland and Finland, have suspected cases.

Countries around the world are screening passengers in airports for symptoms, and have quarantine procedures in place.

Passengers who just arrived on a train from Wuhan are screened for coronavirus in Beijing. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

Original author: Sinéad Baker

Samsung is reportedly developing a rival to Apple's AirDrop file-sharing service.The service is called Quick Share, and could arrive with the upcoming Galaxy S20, expected to launch in February.Quick Share would allow Galaxy phone owners or Samsung device owners who are near each other to share photos, contacts, and other files.The new feature also appears to let you temporarily upload files to Samsung Cloud.

Samsung is reportedly developing a rival to Apple's AirDrop.

XDA Developers managed to obtain the Android Application Package (APK) for a feature called Quick Share, which would allow anyone using a supported Samsung device to quickly share files with another Samsung device owner who's close by.

XDA Developers' leak doesn't detail how exactly the feature works, but it's likely to use similar tech to Apple's file-sharing service for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, AirDrop. That uses Bluetooth to create a peer-to-peer WiFi network and lets you quickly transfer photos, messages, contacts, and other files.

XDA Developers got hold of the APK from a source who had access to an (as yet unreleased) Galaxy S20+ 5G. This suggests Quick Share will launch alongside the Galaxy S20 on February 11.

It appears the feature doesn't currently work on older Samsung devices, but according to XDA the service will allow Galaxy owners to send files to other Samsung Social users on your contacts list, or to anyone in the area with a supported Samsung device.

It also seems Quick Share will let allow users to temporarily upload files to Samsung Cloud. These files – which could be up to 1GB in size – will then be streamed to Samsung Smart Things devices and downloaded locally.

Business Insider has approached Samsung for comment.

Original author: Charlie Wood

London-based AI startup ChAI has just raised a $1.7 million seed round from three of Europe's top early-stage investors. ChAI was founded 10 months ago and raised funds from Passion Capital, MMC Ventures, and Dynamo Ventures. The company uses AI and machine learning to provide "signals" to help assess potential changes to commodity prices, a market that could be worth $60 billion. Click here for more BI Prime stories.

London-based artificial intelligence startup ChAI has raised a $1.7 million seed round from three of Europe's top early-stage investors.

ChAI was founded 10 months ago and raised funds from Passion Capital, MMC Ventures, and Dynamo Ventures. 

The company uses AI and machine learning to provide "signals" to help assess potential changes to commodity prices, a market which could be worth $60 billion.

ChAI's cofounder and CEO Dr Tristan Fletcher estimates that the combined revenue of companies exposed to commodity prices could be $16 trillion, with much of the world's economy dependent on sensitive changes in the cost of raw materials. Accurate signals about the direction of these changes could help ChAI's clients anticipate costs, and save millions.

Physical commodity traders alone bring in $100 billion a year of revenue, per Natural Resource Governance. 

"When we founded the company we believed there was a real need for a market solution and it was something of a race to get something out there," Fletcher told Business Insider in an interview. "Fundraising was a long and painful process with a lot of rejection, but as soon as Passion were onboard that changed. Getting such great investors on board is a real coup." 

Fletcher's background includes a period in academia focused on machine learning and AI applications. The idea for an AI for commodity pricing came out of a trip to China as part of a business trip undertaken with the British government. 

The company combines a variety of data sources into its platform which includes satellite data, infrared technology, alongside port and freight information alongside a number of other options. 

"The democratization of alternative data has meant that financially it's easier to get hold of but companies need some way of determining which data sources to subscribe to and how to use it," Fletcher added.

That's where ChAI comes in, with its propriety "signals" allowing clients to determine the best ways of interpreting an ever-increasing ream of data about the commodities industry. 

ChAI counts a large Thai construction firm as one of its clients already but will also market to banks, commodity traders, speculators, and other parts of the raw materials supply chain. 

Eileen Burbidge, partner at Passion Capital, said: "It's rare and always a privilege to come to work with a team that has such a unique range of skills ranging from leading academia to strong commercial acumen.

"We at Passion were immediately drawn to the fact that many large companies and enterprises which rely on commodities in their supply chain are unlikely to staff their own proprietary desks to predict or anticipate price volatility, but will look for innovative and more accurate forecasts in addition to historical-based models." 

Original author: Callum Burroughs

Donald Trump says he's not scared of Mark Zuckerberg running for president. Getty/Business Insider

Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Friday.

A New York Times report shed new light on how The National Enquirer tabloid came to possess intimate photos of Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez. The report suggests that she sent them to her brother, Michael, who sold them to The National Enquirer. Bezos later said they were used to extort him.China's version of TikTok launched a feature to spread awareness and fight Wuhan coronavirus. The coronavirus outbreak that originated in Wuhan, China, has killed at least 18 people and infected more than 630.President Trump said Mark Zuckerberg running for president "wouldn't be too frightening." Trump also praised Zuckerberg's handling of political ads, which Facebook has taken a hard stand on not fact-checking.TikTok revealed its new five-story LA office, showing its commitment to battling US social media giants like Instagram and Youtube. TikTok is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, which is currently seeking a new head for US operations.UK officials are to propose allowing Huawei to build parts of the country's 5G infrastructure, sources told Reuters. The proposal defies intense pressure from US officials to ban Huawei completely from the UK's 5G networks.Tinder's parent company partnered with safety platform Noonlight to add a range of new safety features to its dating apps, TechCrunch reports. The new features include a panic button and user photo verification.Police disputed the claims from facial recognition startup Clearview AI that it had helped solve a terrorism case, BuzzFeed reports. The firm amassed billions of photos of people's faces by scraping social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.Google made a big change to search results that makes it harder to distinguish ads from regular results. Some observers questioned whether Google was trying to intentionally steer users to click on ads through a practice known as "dark-pattern" design.Hungarian-American investor George Soros said President Trump is conspiring with Facebook to get reelected. Speaking at Davos on Thursday, Soros said he thinks there's an "informal mutual assistance operation developing between Trump and Facebook."India wants to send a legless, female humanoid robot called "Vyommitra" into space. Indian prime minister Narendra Modi is looking to establish the country as a major player in the space industry.

Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings.

You can also subscribe to this newsletter here — just tick "10 Things in Tech You Need to Know.

Original author: Isobel Asher Hamilton

A New York Times report shed new light on how The National Enquirer tabloid came to possess intimate photos of Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez.The report suggests that she sent them to her brother, Michael, who sold them to The National Enquirer. Bezos later said they were used to extort him.The Times cited four unnamed sources and a written contract to support its claim.The paper said its reporting frustrates the widespread suggestion that Saudi Arabia had a role leaking the images.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Intimate photos of Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez came into the possession of The National Enquirer tabloid via her brother, according to The New York Times. 

According to the newspaper, Sanchez sent the images to her brother Michael, who received $200,000 upon signing a contract granting the Enquirer's parent company exclusive rights to them.

The deal was the prelude to the story of Bezos' relationship becoming public, which was followed by Bezos and his wife divorcing. 

The Times said it learned of how the photos were transmitted via four unnamed sources, and a written contract between Michael Sanchez and American Media Inc., which publishes the Enquirer.

Sanchez repeatedly denied sharing "penis photos" with AMI in exchanges with Business Insider last year, but evaded answering questions about whether he had leaked messages obtained by the National Enquirer.

The paper, owned by American Media Inc (AMI), has long claimed that its source was Michael Sanchez, but Bezos hired a private investigator, Gavin De Becker, to dig deeper.

The strange saga took a twist this week after a forensic analysis of Bezos' phone, first reported on by The Guardian, found that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman hacked into Bezos' phone with spyware eight months before the Enquirer piece.

It led to speculation that Saudi Arabia had a role in getting the compromising photos to the Enquirer. But the Times's reporting offered a more prosaic route — via Sanchez and her brother — and said a definitive Saudi connection to the Enquirer's reporting has yet to be proved.

In a statement to The Times, AMI called Michael Sanchez the "single source" for their reporting. 

"The single source of our reporting has been well documented," AMI said. "In September of 2018, Michael Sanchez began providing all materials and information to our reporters." 

Both the Saudi embassy in Washington DC and AMI deny Saudi involvement.

"Any suggestion that a third party was involved in or in any way influenced our reporting is false."

Original author: Rosie Perper

Two women say they were duped into protesting in favor of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou at an extradition hearing in Vancouver, Canada.They said they were offered between 100 and 150 Canadian dollars to show up and hold signs, along with around 20 others.Both said they didn't realize what they were being asked to do, and regret it.Visit Business Insider's home page for more stories.

Unsuspecting members of the public in Canada appear to have been paid by an unknown organization to pretend to be supporters of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou at her recent extradition hearing.

Two members of a crowd of about 20 say they were given money to hold signs and participate in a protest while Wanzhou tried to avoid being extradited to the US on fraud charges.

Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou leaves a court hearing in Vancouver, Canada, in January 2020. Getty Images

According to the participants who spoke out, they and others in the group were assembled at the British Columbia Superior Court in Vancouver, and told to hold up signs saying "Free Ms Meng" and "Trump Stop Bullying."

One participant, an actor called Julia Hackstaff, said she was conned into believing she was playing the role of a protester, without realizing it was a real event. She described her experience in a Facebook post the following day

 

A second, warehouse worker Ken Bonson, said she was told a vague story about "something to do with a protest" the next morning. She told her story to the Toronto Star newspaper.

Hackstaff said she was offered 100 Canadian dollars ($76), while Bonson said she and a friend were both offered 150 ($114).

Neither realized what was going on until they showed up, were given pre-written signs, and expected to act like supporters of Wanzhou. Neither knows who was ultimately footing the bill. Huawei has denied involvement.

Georgina Smyth, a reporter for the Canada's CBC News, said there was "something very strange" about the protest, since nobody wanted to discuss Meng's case and did not like answering questions.

 

On Facebook, Hackstaff said she was "victim of a filthy cheap scam that has deeply hurt me." She said she left after five minutes and didn't get paid.

Bonson says she did get paid, but felt bad about keeping the money so gave it to her partner. She said she was offered another payment to go back a different day, but declined.

She told the Star: "I'm honestly pretty ashamed and embarrassed and wish I never went... I want this to be something I can put behind me."

Meng, whose father is Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, has been detained in Canada since late 2018. She is accused of defrauding the bank HSBC by lying about the purpose of a shell company that did business with Iran, defying US sanctions.

Canadian authorities arrested her while she was trying to change flights in Vancouver, on the request of the US government. The court hearing this week is Meng's chance to convince Canada not to extradite her.

Lawyers for Meng argued that she is really wanted for breaking US sanctions, which is not a crime in Canada, and therefore means she should be let go.

Canadian government lawyers argue that the heart of her case is fraud, which is also illegal in Canada.

On Thursday the case ended without immediate resolution. According to the Associated Press, the judge in the case said she would announce a decision at an unspecified later date.

Original author: Kieran Corcoran

Last May, Spotify announced a voice-activated music-streaming gadget, called the Car Thing — but said it would only be available for select users as a test of how people listen to music and podcasts in their car.Filings with the FCC give us our best look at the mysterious device yet, and could be a hint that Spotify might plan to actually put the Car Thing up for sale at some point. Any Spotify users who might have gotten a Car Thing as part of the test don't seem to have said anything about it on social media or elsewhere — we haven't heard much about the gadget since May, from either Spotify or users.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

We finally know more about Spotify's long-discussed Car Thing — a voice-activated music-streaming gadget intended for the car (naturally), representing the music-streaming service's first foray into hardware. 

Spotify first announced the Car Thing in May, but said it was a prototype and that it had no plans to mass-produce it for consumers. The idea, Spotify said, was to give it to a select few users as a way to test how they listen to music and podcasts in the car, to give the company more data for future products and services. In other words, Spotify said, it had no plans to get into hardware.

That came as a disappointment to some Spotify users, who were excited at the prospect of buying a Car Thing for themselves: It has a built-in 4G/LTE modem to stream music without pairing to a phone, and it has a cache so that the music doesn't stop when reception cuts out. It also has voice controls so you don't have to look down to pause a track.

Since the gadget was first announced, Spotify hasn't said anything about the Car Thing or the results of its test in public. Indeed, we didn't even know for sure what it looks like, apart from a promotional image that Spotify shared when it was first announced — and any users who might have one don't appear to have shared any reviews or photos on social media.

Even Spotify's first filing with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) at the end of May didn't reveal too many details about Car Thing. However, at the end of September, Spotify updated that filing to include photos of the Car Thing itself, as well as its user manual, giving us our best look yet at the device.

Could the September filing, including the instruction manual, be a hint that things have changed and the Car Thing could go up for sale at some point? We've reached out to Spotify for comment and will update if we hear back. In the meanwhile, here's our best look yet at the device.

Here's what the now-available photos and user manual slides tell us about the Car Thing:

Original author: Bani Sapra

Intel shares rallied more than 6% on Thursday after the chipmaker topped Wall Street expectations for the fourth quarter. The tech giant got a huge lift from its data center business, which benefited from robust demand processors from the cloud service providers.CEO Bob Swan said the strong cloud market was being fueled by an "insatiable appetite" for data and the processing power needed to handle it.The company also posted an upbeat outlook for the current quarter and for the year. Intel said it expects revenue of $19 billion for the current quarter, and $73.5 billion for the current year.Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Intel's big bet on the market for data center chips appears to be paying off, but the chip giant is embracing a cautious approach to a market known for unexpected ebbs and flows.

Intel shares rallied more than 6% on Thursday after the chipmaker topped Wall Street expectations for the fourth quarter. The tech giant got a huge lift from its data center business which benefited from robust demand processors from the cloud service providers.

CEO Bob Swan said the results were based on a continuously expanding cloud market with an "insatiable appetite" for data and the processing resources needed to handle it.

Revenue for Intel's data center business rose 19% year over year to $7.2 billion. Its PC business edged up by 2% to $10 billion.

That's a good sign for Intel which has pivoted away from a shrinking PC market. The semiconductor giant has focused increasingly on the lucrative and growing market for processors used to power massive cloud infrastructures and corporate data centers.

Analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategy said Intel had a "great fourth quarter in spite of increased competition and supply challenges."

He was referring to the challenge posed by Intel archrival AMD, whose new server chips have won high praise, and is expected to take more share from Intel.  Intel also has been plagued by production issues that have led to supply constraints.

"The data-centric businesses carried the day," Moorhead told Business Insider. A key reason was the rapid growth of companies building massive cloud platforms, led by Amazon, Microsoft and Google. 

Swan said the cloud — specifically, serving mega-providers like Amazon and Microsoft with chips — is becoming a "bigger and bigger part" of its data center business revenue. But the cloud market can be unpredictable, which Intel learned the hard way last year when an unexpected build-out stalled, causing a dip in demand.

That's why Intel is proceeding with caution, Swan said. "They go into digestion mode and the buying patterns slow down," he told analysts on the earnings call. "Hopefully, we're wrong. Hopefully we're conservative."

But Intel also cheered Wall Street with an upbeat overall outlook for the quarter and the year.

For the first quarter, Intel said it expect a profit of $1.30 a share on revenue of $19 billion. Analysts were expecting a profit of $1.04 a share on revenue of $17.2 billion

For the full year, it sees a profit of $5 a share on revenue of $73.5 billion. Analysts were expecting a profit of $4.61  a share on revenue of $71 billion.

Intel reported a fourth-quarter profit of $6.9 billion, or $1.58 a share, compared with a profit of $5.2 billion, or $1.12 a share for the year-ago period. Revenue rose to $20.2 billion from $18.7 billion. Adjusted profit was $1.52 a share.

Analysts were expecting Intel to report a profit of $1.25 a share on revenue of $19.23 billion.

Got a tip about Intel or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., message him on Twitter @benpimentel or send him a secure message through Signal at (510)

Original author: Benjamin Pimentel

Billionaire George Soros — well-known for his sizable donations to liberal political causes — said Thursday that he believes that Facebook and President Donald Trump are conspiring ahead of this year's presidential election.

"Facebook will work together to re-elect Trump, and Trump will work to protect Facebook," he said, as first reported by Bloomberg.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Soros said he thinks there's an "informal mutual assistance operation or agreement developing between Trump and Facebook," though he did not offer any evidence to back up his claim.

"This is just plain wrong," a Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider.

Soros also said there's "nothing to stop" Facebook from spreading misinformation and that he's "very concerned" about the 2020 elections. Soros has often been vilified by the political right for his ties to liberal causes — indeed, at this year's event, he also described Trump as a "a conman and a narcissist," the BBC reports.

This is not the first time Soros has used the event in Davos to criticize Facebook. In 2018, he argued that the tech giant's size and "monopolistic" behavior had made it a "menace" to society, damaged democracy, and encouraged "addiction" akin to gambling companies.

The New York Times reported later that year that, following Soros' remarks, Facebook had hired a Republican-linked opposition research firm called Definers Public Affairs, to dig up dirt on Soros and push negative press about him. 

Following the report, Facebook cut ties with Definers. Elliot Schrage, Facebook's policy and communications boss, took the fall publicly in a move that may have been meant to take heat off CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, who were both criticized in the Times' story for their mismanagement of controversies involving the company.

Original author: Tyler Sonnemaker

Your phone's ringtone can say a lot about your personality. 

The default ringtone that comes with your Android phone isn't always going to feel like it's right for you. You might find it annoying, too similar to another sound, or just want something that's a better fit for who you are.

Luckily, Android phones come with a plethora of ringtones to choose from. You can even set custom ringtones, too. 

Here's how.

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

Samsung Galaxy S10 (From $899.99 at Best Buy)

How to change your ringtone on an Android

1. Open the Settings app on your Android mobile device.

2. Tap on "Sounds and vibration."

Open your phone's "Sounds and vibration" menu. Chrissy Montelli/Business Insider

3. Tap on "Ringtone."

The "Ringtone" tab will show your current ringtone selection. Chrissy Montelli/Business Insider

4. The next menu will be a list of possible preset ringtones. With the volume turned up on your device, tap to test different ringtone options until you find the one you want.

5. Once you've selected a new ringtone, tap on it so that there's a blue circle to the left of the selection.

6. If you want to add a custom ringtone, tap on the "+" icon in the upper-right corner of the screen and select an option from any of the lists available. 

There's a long list of preset ringtones. Chrissy Montelli/Business Insider

Your new ringtone will be saved as soon as you exit the Settings app.

Note that if you want a custom ringtone that isn't listed under the "+" menu, you'll have to download it directly to your Android device. 

Original author: Chrissy Montelli

SpaceX is working feverishly to develop Starship, a new rocket system that may stand 39 stories tall, be fully reusable, and revolutionize humanity's access to space.Company founder Elon Musk regularly travels to the Starship development site in Boca Chica, Texas. He has stayed there for days at a time to work long late hours on prototypes alongside SpaceX staff.Most recently, Musk has been seen at the Texas site while other top executives attend the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.Lodging is tricky, though: The nearest hotel is at least a 30-minute drive away in Brownsville, Texas, and his high public profile poses a security risk.However, SpaceX is purchasing homes in the area, and a local is convinced Musk has been staying in an historic A-frame-style home that Business Insider photographed in April.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Making it cheap to get humans and their stuff to and from space is no easy undertaking. But Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, is rushing to do just that at the southern tip of Texas.

Musk is so engrossed by the project, in fact, that his Twitter feed suggests he is skipping most of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, to which top executives typically flock. The SpaceX CEO is also crashing in a historic A-frame home to catch what rest he can between long slogs of work, according to at least one local resident.

Musk has been working late on an unprecedented rocket system called Starship. If realized, the final vehicle would be made of steel, stand 387 feet tall, and be fully reusable. Since most rockets today fall into the ocean after one use, Starship's reusability positions it to replace all other systems by slashing the cost of launching to space by more than 90%.

According to Musk, Starship would be even cheaper to operate per flight than SpaceX's own partly reusable Falcon 9 rockets. Where Falcon 9 costs the company tens of millions of dollars to fly up to 25 tons of payload, Starship might cost just $2 million to launch up to 100 tons, Musk said in November.

Such a system could deploy hundreds of SpaceX's next-generation Starlink internet satellites, heave gigantic telescopes into space for NASA, and ferry dozens of passengers into orbit at once. But Musk's big "aspirational" goals for Starship include sending the first cargo to Mars in 2022, launching the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and a crew of artists around the moon in 2023, and rocketing the first crewed mission to Mars in 2024.

"I think we could potentially see people fly next year," Musk said in September while unveiling a Starship prototype in Boca Chica, Texas, where SpaceX is building out a private launch site and basing its development program.

Musk now travels to South Texas at least monthly, according to social-media posts by Musk and others, for hands-on work toward launching the first Starship prototype, which he said might fly as soon as February or March.

During a visit in late December, Musk tweeted he was "up all night" working on the "most difficult part" of Starship's steel structure: the domed ends of 30-foot-wide propellant tanks. (Such a dome failed during a pressurization test weeks earlier, sending it flying hundreds of feet into the air and across a state highway.)

People who live in the area — and whom SpaceX is trying to buy out — find it hard to ignore Musk's presence, given his heavy security detail and onlookers who flock to their remote and formerly sleepy retiree-age beach community.

At least one resident, whose identity Business Insider has verified but who asked not to be named because of ongoing property-sale negotiations with SpaceX, said Musk almost certainly now crashes in an A-frame-style house that SpaceX recently acquired.

"It's perfect," the resident said, adding that the house is not only the nicest of about 30 homes in the area but also the only place that's "secluded and security-controlled."

Here's a look inside the home, which also has a special historic significance to the Boca Chica area.

Original author: Dave Mosher