Google will hire thousands of full-time customer support employees in the coming year and open a new support center in Mississippi, a move that may assuage criticism that the internet giant relies too heavily on lower-cost temp workers. 

Google announced the plans in a blog post on Thursday, signalling a big change for the company which relies on a vast workforce of temporary workers, third-party vendors, and contract workers in addition to the roughly 114,000 full-time workers on its payroll.

The customer support employees will handle product troubleshooting, customer phone calls and assist marketers setting up advertising campaigns with Google's internet products, Google said. The workers will receive "industry-leading wages and benefits," including three weeks of paid vacation, up to 22 weeks of paid parental leave and comprehensive health benefits, the company said.

The announcement comes just a few months after a group of lawmakers called on Google to reclassify its temp workers as full-time employees, accusing the company of inappropriately using the distinction to avoid paying wages and benefits typically enjoyed by full-time Googlers.

Google's temp and contract workers have complained about being treated like second-class citizens and a "shadow workforce" at Google, publishing an open letter to CEO Sundar Pichai in December 2018.

Google had initially launched a pilot program in 2018 to bring on full-time customer support workers in the Philippines. In Tuesday's announcement, the company said that it plans to expand on the program by hiring up to 3,800 full-time customer support employees by the end of 2020 in addition to the 1,000 full-time employees it has already hired.

Google said it will open a new customer support operations facility in Mississippi, which will join new and expanding locations in India and the Philippines.

"As part of Google's commitment to growing our workforce across America (earlier this year, Google announced a $13 billion investment across our U.S. offices and data centers) we wanted to expand our footprint in the Southeastern United States. Northwestern Mississippi has strong local talent, and we're excited that GOC Mississippi marks Google's first entry into the state," a Google spokesperson told Business Insider in an emailed statement.

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The race is on to launch thousands of internet satellites around Earth and envelop the planet in high-speed, low-latency, low-cost, and unbelievably pervasive broadband internet service.

But as Todd Feathers at Motherboard reported on Thursday, that race has at least one member — tech giant Amazon, founded by Jeff Bezos — that's starting years behind its competition and seeking a critical exception to the rules to catch up, and companies like SpaceX and OneWeb are crying foul.

OneWeb has launched six of its 650 planned internet satellites and aims to boot up service in 2021. Meanwhile, SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, has rocketed 120 of its Starlink satellites into orbit, plans to send up about 1,400 more in 2020 alone, and start providing web service to customers the same year. Though SpaceX has permission to launch nearly 12,000 satellites, it has asked government regulators to allow the company to send up to 42,000 total (five times as many objects as humanity has ever flown to space).

Meanwhile, Amazon has launched zero of 3,236 planned Project Kuiper network satellites.

The company only this week announced plans to open a 219,000-square-foot facility in Redmond, Washington, to develop and manufacture its spacecraft. It also missed a November 2016 deadline set by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to apply to use part of a narrow band of available signal, or spectrum, that's most suitable to beam internet data to and from low-Earth orbit. Nine companies got permission to execute their plans — OneWeb and SpaceX among them — but Amazon was not one of them.

Without an FCC license, Amazon can't legally launch satellites into orbit and use them to bathe the US with internet service, so it has requested a waiver to the regulatory process.

As Motherboard reported, SpaceX, OneWeb, Iridium, and other companies are lobbying against the FCC granting that decision with written and in-person complaints to officials.

"Amazon's overt attempt to override long-standing rules would undermine confidence in Commission processes, harm competition, and eliminate broadband options for consumers," Motherboard says SpaceX lawyers wrote in a Nov. 25 filing, adding that Project Kuiper would have a "significant detrimental impact [on] SpaceX" and that "Amazon's flawed analysis yields results that defy common sense."

There's a lot of money at stake in the fight: Starlink alone may double or even quadruple the value of SpaceX as a company, according to some estimates — perhaps enough cash for Musk to fund his company's quest to the surface of Mars.

And though there is enough space in orbit to accommodate tens of thousands of new satellites, experts say clashing use of similar broadband internet signals, and the increased risk for accidental collisions, are real concerns.

San Francisco became the first city to ban the use of facial recognition technology by the police and other city agencies back in May, blocking a tool that has been broadly criticized for misidentifying people of color. 

But then some of the iPhones that San Francisco provided its employees turned out to be illegal under the new law, highlighting the complexities of placing a blanket ban on an increasingly-common type of technology, Wired reports.

San Francisco's local Board of Supervisors voted to amend the law on Tuesday, such that the city could not be sued for violating the ban when its employees used products like recent models of the iPhone — which comes with FaceID, an optional feature to unlock your phone using facial recognition. 

Apple's FaceID cannot be deleted or otherwise removed from compatible devices, so even turning the feature off could have still left the government liable, a city aide to a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors told Wired. 

But the ban on facial recognition still broadly applies. Government agencies can obtain and distribute gadgets equipped with facial recognition technology, as long as the gadget in question is deemed necessary, its facial recognition features cannot be deleted, and without viable alternative to the product exists, according to the amendment. 

A handful of other cities have followed San Francisco's lead in blocking facial recognition, including the city's neighbor of Oakland, as well as Brookline and Somerville in Massachusetts. 

But some cities have made exceptions, to tackle the nuances of banning a now-prevalent technology. Brookline's ban, which passed last week, includes specific exemptions on personal devices used by city officials. That's to address both Apple's FaceID and photo-tagging features on Facebook. 

The amendment to San Francisco's facial recognition ban is set to be reviewed by city mayor London Breed before it can go into effect, according to the official website of the Board of Supervisors. 

Wawa announced on Thursday that it had discovered a data breach that could have impacted customers over the last nine months. 

"Our information security team discovered malware on Wawa payment processing servers on December 10, 2019, and contained it by December 12, 2019," Wawa CEO Chris Gheysens wrote in a public letter. "This malware affected customer payment card information used at potentially all Wawa locations beginning at different points in time after March 4, 2019 and until it was contained." 

According to Gheysens, in-store payment processing systems were impacted by the data breach starting in March. By late April, the malware was running on payment processing systems in most Wawa locations. 

The data breach affected credit and debit card numbers, expiration dates, and cardholder names for potentially all purchases made in Wawa locations and at fuel dispensers. No other personal information was accessed, including PIN numbers, credit card CVV2 numbers, and driver's license information. ATM cash machines located in Wawa locations were also not impacted. 

Gheysens said that the company believed the malware no longer posed a risk to Wawa customers and that the company has "initiated an investigation, notified law enforcement and payment card companies, and engaged a leading external forensics firm to support our response efforts." 

Wawa is encouraging customers to review their credit and debit card account statements. The company is also providing customers who may have been impacted a free year of identity theft protection and credit monitoring via Experian. More information on how customers can protect their information is available on the Wawa website. 

"I apologize deeply to all of you, our friends and neighbors, for this incident," Gheysens wrote in the letter on Thursday. "You are my top priority and are critically important to all of the nearly 37,000 associates at Wawa. We take this special relationship with you and the protection of your information very seriously."

SEE ALSO: Apply here to attend IGNITION: Retail, an event focused on the future of retail, in New York City on January 14.

Using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have confirmed a new class of planets that have the density of cotton candy.

Because their hydrogen-helium atmospheres balloon out, these planets are nearly as big as Jupiter, but have 100 times less mass. That's why scientists are calling the new planets "super-puffs."

Until recently, astronomers had only known about the three types of planets that we see in our own solar system: terrestrial planets like Earth, ice giants like Neptune, and gas giants like Jupiter. So scientists group the worlds they find around other stars based on these categories.

But on Thursday, NASA confirmed that three exoplanets (the term for worlds that orbit distant stars) fall into the new super-puff grouping. The planets circle a sun-like star 2,600 light-years away. Hubble data revealed their mass and size, but thick clouds prevented researchers from learning more detail about the super-puffs' chemistry.

Scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder described the findings in a new study set to appear in The Astronomical Journal.

"They're very bizarre," Jessica Libby-Roberts, the graduate student who led the research, said in a press release. "When you picture a Jupiter-sized ball of cotton candy—that's really low density."

Nobody knows why the planets' lightweight atmospheres are so bloated.

Mysteriously lightweight super-puff planets

The Kepler space telescope found this group of three super-puffs in 2012, and some of the scientists behind the recent discovery figured out just how mysteriously lightweight these planets were in a 2014 study.

The discovery was "straight-up contrary to what we teach in undergraduate classrooms," Zachory Berta-Thompson, an assistant professor of planetary sciences and co-author of the study, said in the release.

The group recently took a closer look at the planets with Hubble, NASA's most powerful space telescope. They used Hubble's infrared lens to peer at star light passing through two of the planets' atmospheres. By measuring the light's intensity, they could determine which chemicals make up the planets' atmospheres.

To their surprise, the researchers couldn't see any chemical signatures. They were totally blocked by thick clouds.

"It definitely sent us scrambling to come up with what could be going on here," Libby-Roberts said. "We expected to find water, but we couldn't observe the signatures of any molecule."

Instead of water, the researchers think the clouds might be made of salt crystals or methane, which would cause a hazy interaction with the telescope's ultraviolet light. That could mean the planets are similar to Saturn's moon Titan, which is clouded in a thick methane atmosphere.

"If you hit methane with ultraviolet light, it will form a haze," Libby-Roberts said. "It's Titan in a nutshell."

Under that methane, lighter gases like hydrogen and helium could be puffing up the planets' atmospheres. 

Our best hope of learning more about these super-puffs is NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, which could peer through the smog and find out what the Kepler-51 planets are truly made of. The new telescope's 21-foot-wide beryllium mirror and new infrared technology make it sensitive to longer wavelengths of infrared light.

The telescope is slated to launch on March 30, 2021.

Bleeding atmospheres suggest these planets are becoming more like Neptune

Both of the planets the researchers observed seemed to be rapidly losing their gases. One was spewing tens of billions of tons into space each second.

If the leakage continued at that rate, the researchers calculated that the planet would shrink to a size smaller than Neptune in 1 billion years, losing all its puffiness in the process.

Small, hot Neptune-like planets are common throughout the Milky Way, unlike these rare super-puffs. 

The cotton-candy planets' state of transition could explain why we don't have anything like them in our own solar system. The Kepler-51 star they orbit is relatively young — 500 million years old, compared to our 4.6-billion-year-old sun. So its system of planets may not have settled down yet.

"This is an extreme example of what's so cool about exoplanets in general," Berta-Thompson said. "They give us an opportunity to study worlds that are very different than ours, but they also place the planets in our own solar system into a larger context."

Instacart is back to delivering Target products — just not as an official partner. 

The on-demand delivery startup is now delivering from select Target stores, two years after its official partnership ended, Business Insider has learned. An Instacart spokesperson confirmed in an email that it's started testing deliveries from Target this month without a "formal partnership" in place between the two companies.

Instacart declined to share more details, only adding that the test service is "early on" and that it's delivering from Target stores "across the US."

Target's representative told Business Insider that the retailer does not have a "business relationship" with Instacart. Instead, it said Shipt, the startup Target bought for $550 million in 2017, is the "exclusive partner" for its same-day delivery needs.

The move shows Instacart's continued effort to expand its product selection, even from non-partners, as it faces intense competition in the on-demand delivery space. While it's become more common for same-day delivery services to list non-partner retailers and restaurants on their sites, analysts say the move could hurt customer experience and long-term business relationships.

"Companies do this because they have to have more stores and outlets on their platform — it's becoming harder to differentiate," Michael Schaefer, Euromonitor's global lead analyst for food and beverage, told Business Insider. "But overall, this leads to a less polished customer experience."

Besides Target, Instacart has also lost its partnership with Whole Foods last year, following Amazon's acquisition of the grocery chain. Other heavily-funded startups like DoorDash and Postmates are eating into Instacart's market share as well. Meanwhile, national retailers like Amazon and Walmart are heavily investing in improving their same-day delivery capabilities.

Instacart currently delivers from more than 300 national, regional and local retailers across the US and Canada, its spokesperson said.

Instacart's move could lead to a number of problems, according to Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester Research.  

For one, since Target's data is not properly synced, Instacart could have inaccurate product and out-of-date inventory information. Trademark and copyright issues could arise too. More importantly, it's unclear who would be liable for bad customer experience. 

"At its heart, this is bootlegging information," Kodali said. "It's a very imperfect workaround the issue."

At first, many retailers and restaurants paid less attention to partnering with on-demand services because it was an easy way to sell online without investing in delivery, Kodali said. For the delivery startups, it helped them save on costly sales cycles and complex data integrations. They also didn't have to agree on any type of revenue sharing model. 

But more retailers and restaurants have started to realize the risk that comes with having their products on a delivery service without their knowledge or permission. The most prominent case took place in 2015, when In-N-Out filed a lawsuit against DoorDash over trademark infringement and poor quality control. The two companies eventually reached a settlement, and DoorDash no longer delivers for In-N-Out.

Still, same-day delivery companies have become more aggressive in adding non-partner stores in recent years.

GrubHub, for example, was historically against listing non-partners on its service, but has recently changed its strategy, according to Shaefer at Euromonitor. The move, he said, is largely driven by the intensifying competition among on-delivery services.

In fact, GrubHub's leadership addressed this strategy a number of times over the past few months as investors grew concerned about its long-term impact. In its most recent earnings call, GrubHub's leadership said having non-partners helps "acquire new diners" to its platform, although it could lower the quality of its service.

"Why would a restaurant choose to partner, when they have a non-partner option, is because the diner experience sucks," GrubHub CEO Matt Maloney said during the call.

The decision to add more non-partner retailers could come back to haunt a lot of these on-demand services, said Ben Henniges, associate director of e-commerce at Spark Foundry, an agency that helps brands sell online. In Instacart's case, he said, mounting pressure from bigger players, like Amazon and Walmart, is causing the company to focus on the short-term benefits.

"Competition is driving a lot of short-term thinking solutions, but that's probably going to have a negative impact in the long-term," Henniges said.

Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: Every year, McDonald's produces more than 62 million pounds of coffee chaff. That's the unused dried skin that comes off of coffee beans during the roasting process. And that 62 million pounds used to go straight to landfills. But now, Ford is taking that chaff from McDonald's and turning it into car parts.

Almost 140 million tons of solid waste was sent to US landfills in 2017. And when that waste hits a landfill, it creates a pile of trash that is impossible to take back. And incinerating the waste creates carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions that are harmful to the environment. But some materials don't have to end up in landfills, like coffee chaff.

McDonald's partnered with Ford's research team, which was already using agave, wheat, tomatoes, and even denim byproducts to make car parts. The team discovered that chaff could also be used to make car parts, especially ones that need to withstand high temperatures, like headlights and car battery covers.

When the coffee chaff is heated to high temperatures and mixed with plastic and other additives, it turns into a material that can be formed into various shapes. Not only will less waste go to landfills, but using the chaff actually benefits Ford vehicles. Its headlights were made up of plastic and talc, a mineral that has to be mined. But now, the coffee chaff replaces some of the talc, making the car part 20% lighter. Molding the coffee chaff also uses 25% less energy than the previous material combination. The chaff component meets all durability and performance requirements, and it can withstand high temperatures much better than talc.

So, how is Ford turning coffee bean skins into headlights?

It all starts where the coffee beans are grown - South America. The beans are collected and then shipped to the roasters. When the roasters roast the beans, the skin comes off. The coffee chaff is collected and shipped to Competitive Green Technologies, a biotechnology company in Ontario, Canada. This is where the coffee chaff and plastic are mixed.

The mixed material is then shipped to a company called Varroc, which molds and assembles the headlights. The company uses a process called injection molding. Pellets made from plastic and chaff are combined in the machine. The material is heated and mixed, then shot into a mold and placed under pressure that forms the shape of the part. Each headlight takes 30 to 60 seconds to form. The final step is to ship the headlights to Ford, where they get added to the cars.

Ford began installing the headlights in its Lincoln Continental cars in December 2019. Other model cars are expected to follow. But this doesn't eliminate the environmental problem entirely. At the end of a car's life, some parts will still end up in landfills since they're still made out of plastic.

Ford and McDonald's plan to reduce that waste by substituting traditional plastic with recycled plastic. And Ford hopes to have 100% recycled and sustainable plastic on its vehicles by 2035. The sustainability efforts don't stop there. Ford is also looking into using other McDonald's waste products, like orange and potato peels. So who knows... Maybe one day, we'll be driving cars made completely from fast-food waste.

Barry Diller's IAC is spinning off its dating sites business Match, which will leave media properties as a bigger part of the remaining company.

Those include College Humor and Dotdash, a collection of 11 service-oriented sites like Verywell, The Balance, and Lifewire.

At a December 4 presentation to investors, Dotdash CEO Neil Vogel laid out the business case for his company, which has been on an acquisition spree lately, buying niche sites including Brides and Liquor.com.

Dotdash said it's one of the fastest growing publishers online, with healthy profit margins, and is giving established brands a run for their money in certain categories like health, finance, and home.

It's laid the groundwork to expand into the lucrative beauty advertising category and take on Condé Nast and Hearst, with the acquisitions of Byrdie, Brides, and MyDomaine.

The bulk of its revenue comes from advertising, but commerce is a growing part of the mix, accounting for about one fourth of revenue.

Scroll down to see how Dotdash is positioning itself to advertisers and investors:

 

Overtime, a sports media startup that's raised $33.5 million in funding, has made no secret of its ambitions to take on none less than ESPN, and it's diving into esports in its latest step in that effort.

But while more traditional media companies have added coverage of esports, Overtime is creating the teams itself and building a content strategy around them. It just announced an "NBA 2K" team after creating a "Fortnite" team.

In this way, cofounder and CEO Dan Porter aspires to mimic the success of buzzy new companies that are thriving on the popularity of gamers as personalities and entertainers, like FaZe Clan, which has 15 professional gamers and many more content creators; and 100 Thieves, which just raised $35 million.

For its "2K" team, Overtime signed five gamers to exclusive contracts, similar to any pro team, but chose them just as much, if not more, for their personalities as their gaming abilities. Together they have 2.5 million fans and include Hank da Tank, a gamer with over 800,000 subscribers on YouTube; and Cole the Man, with over 570,000 subscribers. In a recent video, Cole the Man, who is 22, took viewers along to show him buying a Lamborghini.

They're "the LeBron James of '2K'," Porter said. "We start out of the gate not with people no one has heard of. We signed superstars."

To build out its gaming arm, Overtime hired recent high school grad Chris Toussaint, who was managing the Orlando Magic's "NBA 2K" gaming team at age 18. Toussaint said he found the gamers while working down in Orlando.

"I loved the content they brought to the table," Toussaint said. "They create content that appeals to '2K' fans. It was their personalities, how entertaining they were as a group."

The plan is to create content starring the team members to be distributed on YouTube, Instagram, and the like, including a reality series set to launch in the spring at the team's Miami homebase, and use their established social followings to help spread the videos. Overtime has a small content team dedicated to gaming content, which it aims to grow to about 10.

Overtime began in 2016 as a platform for people to share high school sports clips and has branched out to more than 25 socially distributed video series. Along the way, it's raised funds from backers including the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and former NBA commissioner David Stern.

Porter said he always planned to expand to esports because it's key to the Gen Z audience Overtime is targeting, and that the time was right now that the company had built a foundation in big team sports like football and basketball.

Professional gaming is projected to be a $1.5 billion business by 2023, helped by the popularity of "Fortnite" and interest from celebrities like Michael Jordan and Drake. It's gained legitimacy from advertisers and media outlets like ESPN and Turner's Bleacher Report that are devoting budgets to it.

Bleacher Report, which also aims to be the sports destination for young fans, considers gaming a key focus. It's planning to staff up in the year ahead and work more directly with gamers by potentially doing exclusive content with them like livestreams or AMAs that's meant to increase the audience for both Bleacher Report and the gamers themselves.

"This is a category we're bullish on," said Bennett Spector, SVP of programming there.

Over time, Porter's goal is to build big audiences for the series and sell related merch and sponsorships — even sell some of the video series to a broadcaster one day.

"I'm not in this to play small ball — I'm trying to build a billion dollar business," Porter said. "If you look at the absolute biggest esports teams, they're generating tens of millions in revenue. It's sponsorships, jerseys, potential live events. There's a huge appetite for gaming content, and a lot of it is not able to be produced at a high level."

Getting a direct track to professional gamers by creating a team and hiring someone like Toussaint could be a way for Overtime to build a diversified business though commerce and advertising, said Seth Hittman, who is CEO of Transmit.Live, a video tech company that serves esports companies and invests in esports.

A question is whether Overtime can find operational synergies across its teams and balance the demands of managing a team with the rest of its business, he said.

Another concern for any company with a direct relationship with gamers is player care, with growing awareness of mental and physical health concerns associated with gaming, he added.

A sweeping federal study of facial-recognition technology found that the systems were worse at identifying women and people of color than men and white people, the National Institute of Standards and Technology announced on Thursday.

Researchers found that facial-recognition software produced higher rates of false positives for black people and Asian people than whites. The software had a higher rate of false positives for those groups by a factor of 10 to 100 times, depending on which algorithms were used.

Women were also misidentified more frequently than men across the board, the study found. The Native American demographic had the highest rate of false positives.

"While it is usually incorrect to make statements across algorithms, we found empirical evidence for the existence of demographic differentials in the majority of the face recognition algorithms we studied," the NIST researcher Patrick Grother, the report's primary author, said in a statement. "This data will be valuable to policymakers, developers and end users in thinking about the limitations and appropriate use of these algorithms."

Law-enforcement agencies across the US have begun to embrace facial-recognition technology as a tool for tracking people's movement and identifying suspects in the past year. Civil-liberties advocates have pushed back against that trend, and some cities have banned the use of facial recognition by law enforcement.

ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley said the NIST study is evidence that facial recognition is a "dystopian technology" and called on government agencies to stop using it. The ACLU has consistently opposed facial recognition, and is suing the federal government to release information about their use of facial-recognition software made by Amazon and Microsoft.

"Even government scientists are now confirming that this surveillance technology is flawed and biased," he said. "One false match can lead to missed flights, lengthy interrogations, watchlist placements, tense police encounters, false arrests, or worse."

The NIST study confirms existing research that has shown racial and gender bias of facial-recognition technology. Researchers at MIT found that Amazon's facial-recognition software, Rekognition, misidentified people of color at a higher rate than white people (Amazon criticized the study, arguing that researchers were using the software incorrectly).

Amazon was not one of the 99 facial recognition vendors tested by NIST, however — the company did not make its software available for the study, according to The Washington Post. Vendors who participated in the study included Intel, Microsoft, Panasonic, SenseTime, and Vigilant Solutions.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment. In the past, Amazon has said its software is a cloud-based service and would need to be altered in order to undergo NIST's test.

The NIST study also found that facial-recognition software made by Asian companies was less likely to misidentify Asian faces.

"These results are an encouraging sign that more diverse training data may produce more equitable outcomes, should it be possible for developers to use such data," Grother said in a statement.

Disclaimer: This article does NOT constitute investment advice. All investment and financial opinions expressed in this article is from the research and experience of the author and is strictly intended as educational material. 

 

J.J. Abrams helmed the return of the "Star Wars" saga with "The Force Awakens" in 2015 and mixed a new chapter with the nostalgia to deliver a movie that was loved by the fan base.

Boy, what a difference four years makes.

Abrams returns to close out things with "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker" (in theaters Friday) and clearly tries to pull off the magic trick twice. But this time it feels forced, unnecessary, and in some instances boring.

The first half of the movie, which brings Rey (Daisy Ridley), Poe (Oscar Issac), Finn (John Boyega), Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo), and C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) together to track down the planet that Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) has been hiding out in (since "Return of the Jedi") and finally end the Sith, just isn't interesting. It feels like filler to get to the second half of the movie.

It seems there was a strong idea of how to end the Skywalker saga, but they needed to fill in an hour before getting there.

Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) discovers the existence of Palpatine before the Resistance does, and is given an important piece of information: who Rey's parents are (turns out he only knew one part of who Rey's parents were in "Last Jedi"). So, while Rey and the gang are trying to figure out where Palpatine is, Ren gets his mask put back together and goes out to find Rey with Palpatine's Final Order army.

Yeah, it's really confusing, and worse, lame.

It's clear with just the pacing of the movie that Lucasfilm/Disney did not want another "The Last Jedi," where Rian Johnson slowed things down and let it all breathe. "The Rise of Skywalker" is as quick as the Millennium Falcon. There is no time to catch your breath or for the actors to give anything in the scenes. It's basically, how many things can we do in how many locations, without spending too much time doing them?

And the movie goes overboard with nostalgic hat tips. There are some needed to give you a fulfilling climax, but for the most part, it goes so far in the hap tips it's a shock to the senses. It will make even the most dedicated "Star Wars" fan say, "Enough!"

Because so much is packed in, there is little for the new characters — and some of the existing ones — to do. Thankfully, Leia (Carrie Fisher) gets a nice send off, but there is one highly CGI'd scene with her that will have some folks up in arms. 

If there's one thing that will stay with me it's Driver's performance as Ren. He's always the standout, but in this film he shows why he's an incredible talent. Honestly, the movie would be a complete disaster if it weren't for him.

Despite all of that, the movie is going to be a monster at the box office — at least for the opening. The question becomes what kind of legs it has. It likely won't have the staying power of "The Force Awakens," but will it earn as much as "The Last Jedi"? We'll be watching.

 

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While hardware companies like Apple stand to gain the most from last week's US-China trade agreement, Amazon could also be a key beneficiary of the reduced tariff deal.

That's because Amazon has been paying up to 25% more for the products it buys from some of its bigger suppliers in order to help them offset the tariff costs, according to people familiar with the matter.

Amazon buys products wholesale from these suppliers — commonly called first-party vendors — and resells them at a profit. So the higher price Amazon pays suppliers cuts into its gross profit margins.

In one of the messages sent to suppliers, seen by Business Insider, Amazon asked them to "submit a product cost revision for consideration" in order to get a price increase in light of the tariffs.

"We understand that tariffs can have a significant impact on the landed cost of your products and want our business relationship to be mutually beneficial," the message said.

The move shows how Amazon, the largest online retailer in the US, is dealing with the tariffs imposed on Chinese imports, which account for billions of dollars worth of products sold on its site annually. Almost half of all products sold on Amazon come from first-party vendors, and roughly 20% of them are sourced from China, according to a recent estimate by Bank of America.

Retailers in the US are taking different approaches to tariffs. Walmart, for example, launched a new price changing tool last year to allow suppliers to request price increases related to tariffs, according to Bloomberg. Target, meanwhile, told suppliers that it would not accept any new cost increases, effectively telling them to bear the cost, the Wall Street Journal reported.

In a statement to Business Insider, Amazon's spokesperson confirmed that certain suppliers have received pricing concessions related to the tariff costs.

"Companies of all sizes throughout the supply chain have been making adjustments to increased costs resulting from tariffs, and we have been working closely with vendors to make these adjustments as smooth as possible and minimize impacts on customers," the spokesperson said.

Last week, the US and China agreed to halve the tariff rate on $120 billion worth of Chinese products to 7.5%, while delaying planned tariffs on $160 billion of Chinese goods. A 25% tariff will remain on roughly $250 billion in Chinese-made goods, including furniture and machinery.

The price increase, however, is mostly offered to larger vendors, leaving smaller suppliers to foot the bill when it comes to tariffs, people familiar with the matter said. Those larger vendors typically sell more than $10 million a year to Amazon and have access to an Amazon vendor manager, who negotiates the price increase in person, these people said. 

Smaller vendors without a human representative to talk to at Amazon still have an option to submit price increases, but rarely get them accepted, these people said. Those vendors usually end up moving to the third-party marketplace, where they can set the price on their own.

But even for those large vendors, the price increase often comes only after playing hardball with Amazon. Some vendors told Business Insider that they had to stop shipping their popular products to Amazon in order to get the company's attention. Because Amazon had orders to fulfill, and to keep those popular products in-stock, it had to accept the price increase requests, these vendors said.

"We noticed that your company has stopped shipping us some [products], I assume, in reaction to this unresolved discussion," Amazon's vendor manager told one supplier in an email seen by Business Insider. 

One supplier, who wanted to remain anonymous due to confidentiality agreements, told Business Insider that Amazon denied multiple price increase requests he submitted over the past year. As a result, his cost is up 30% this year, and total sales are cut in half as he stopped shipping inventory after it made little financial sense to sell to Amazon.

"Amazon plays a particularly hard form of hardball," one of the suppliers told Business Insider.

Analysts say it's difficult to estimate the exact financial impact of the tariff agreement on Amazon. But the change is likely to reduce Amazon's wholesale costs and have a "single digit" positive impact on Amazon's profit margins, Wedbush's analyst Dan Ives told Business Insider.

"It's a clear benefit for the company — a headache removed from Amazon's story," Ives said.

D.A. Davidson's Tom Forte said Amazon's hardware business could also get affected by the tariffs, although it would have a minimal impact on the overall company. He said last week's tariffs agreement could ease some pressure on Amazon's margins, but pointed out the company was already in a good position with expectations of having another record holiday season.

"We expect Amazon's sales to be strong and gross margin, for the most part, to hold up well despite tariffs," Forte said.

If you've set up Mail and iMessage on your iPad, you may be getting frequent notifications for texts and emails. 

In addition, notifications might be coming in for Calendar alerts, Reminders, and more. And if you don't like hearing those classic notification sounds, it's a good idea to change them — or customize each notification sound so you know what the alert is when it rings. 

Luckily, it's quite easy to change the notification sounds on your iPad. Here's how to do it. 

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

iPad (From $329.99 at Best Buy)

How to change the notification sound on an iPad

1. Open Settings.

2. Scroll down and tap Sounds.

3. Tap Text Tone to change your text message notification sound — simply scroll through alert tones and choose your sound. 

4. Go back to Sounds and tap on New Mail. This will change the notification sound for any incoming email. 

5. You can go back to Sounds and choose every other notification alert for which you want to change the sound — these include Sent Mail, Calendar Alerts, Reminder Alerts, and AirDrop.

If you really want to customize your notifications sounds, you can tap on the Tone Store and purchase new tones, from songs to clips and quotations.

 

Hello! It's been a busy week on the advertising front here. The weekly Advertising & Media Insider newsletter will take a break until January 8. Before we pause for the holidays, here's a rundown of what's occupied us this past week.

New to this newsletter? Sign up for your own here.

We're fascinated by Juul Labs, the $15 billion vaping startup that formed on the premise of helping adults kick the cigarette habit and is now facing federal investigations and lawsuits accusing it of trying to get kids hooked on nicotine. Juul is regrouping with a new CEO and executive bench as it plots its next steps.

Tanya Dua, who has been tracking the company's moves, has rounded up a list of who's running Juul now, and it's a who's who of former regulators, tobacco and alcohol executives, and crisis communications experts — just the kind of people a company like Juul needs to fix its tarnished image.

These are the 23 key people at Juul Labs who are charged with navigating the company through regulatory scrutiny and federal investigations

Here's Tanya's earlier coverage of Juul's layoffs:

Juul just laid off 650 workers after federal investigations rocked the company. Workers who were affected describe how it was handled and what they saw leading up to it.

Next, Lauren Johnson brought us the definitive read on IgnitionOne, a pioneering digital ad firm that ended up selling in a fire sale. Here are the main takeaways from her reporting:

The cautionary tale of IgnitionOne, a onetime digital marketing pioneer that ended up selling in a fire sale

Netflix routinely ranks in surveys as one of most attractive places to work in tech. My colleague Ashley Rodriguez asked former employees for tips for getting referrals and using them to land an interview with Netflix. Here's what they told her:

How to get a job interview at Netflix with the help of employee referrals — and what to avoid doing, according to company insiders

It's year-end prediction time. We've been talking to investors about what they're most excited about and where they're placing their bets.

And a fun thing: Patrick Coffee profiled Mekanism, the San Francisco ad agency that had not one but two controversial ads this month, from Peloton and Zola.

Meet the agency behind two of this year's controversial ads for Peloton and Zola

Here are other great stories from media, marketing, and advertising. (You can read most of the articles here by subscribing to BI Prime; use promo code AD2PRIME2018 for a free month.)

NBCU and Comcast's new streaming service Peacock just isn't bold enough and they may lose the streaming wars. Here's what they should do instead.

A London startup uses artificial intelligence to insert ads into videos, and it just signed an exclusive deal with publisher Condé Nast

The founders of buzzy media company theSkimm explain why they're betting on personal finance as they look for its next growth engine

Facebook built an entire 'Game of Thrones'-themed kingdom for its employee holiday party, complete with White Walkers, swords and archery

A YouTube influencer explains how he made $97,000 from a single video

The CEO of Imax breaks down the theatrical release of Kanye West's 'Jesus Is King' short movie: 'It kind of worked'

That's it from me until Jan. 8! Enjoy the holidays and have a happy New Year, and keep the ideas and tips coming to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Russian President Vladimir Putin should update the operating system on his computer. Photos released by the Kremlin Press Service inadvertently revealed that his computer runs an outdated version of Windows, The Guardian reported.

The photos showed Putin's computer was running Windows XP, an operating system that Microsoft stopped updating in 2014, making it more vulnerable to hacking. The risk isn't just theoretical, either. In 2017, ransomware attacked over 20,000 victims, including the UK's National Health Service, which was using outdated Windows XP software. Hospitals had to close, and operations were even cancelled.

Despite the track record of vulnerabilities, Windows XP was still the third most popular operating system in the world, and apparently Putin counts himself among its users. According to The Guardian, the photos show that Putin uses Windows XP in his Kremlin office and Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside of Moscow. Russian news website Open Media reported that the Russia's Internet Protection Society head confirmed that the photos showed Windows XP running on both computers.

Putin is famously distrustful of the internet, and this attitude is making its way into Russian law. In May, he signed a bill allowing the government to create a Russia-only internet with a new domain name system to guard against hacks — a much more drastic step than upgrading old software. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Russia was setting up its own online encyclopedia in place of Wikipedia. A law that will go into effect in July will require all smartphones, smart TVs, and computers to come with Russian software pre-installed.

The Kremlin did not respond to a request for comment.

If you have more than one Roku device in your home, you've probably discovered that they are unhelpfully given names like "Roku 2" and "Roku 3." If you want to control them using Alexa, or switch among them in your mobile app, it can become hard to tell them apart.

The remedy, of course, is to rename them to something friendlier and more recognizable, which is something that Roku lets you do easily. 

You can't rename your Roku from the Roku itself, nor in the mobile app — your only option is to do it from the Roku website. Here's how.

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

Roku Express (From $29.99 at Best Buy)

How to change the name of a Roku

1. You'll need to know how to tell your Roku devices apart, so start by turning on one of your Roku devices.

2. Using the Roku remote, select "Settings."

3. Select "System," and then select "About."

4. On the System info page, note the serial number of your Roku. Every Roku device has a unique serial number, so this is the easiest way to tell Roku devices apart when we get to the website.