"Borat" actor Sacha Baron Cohen criticized Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin for stepping down from their roles at the company.Baron Cohen pointed out that Page and Brin still have voting control of the company, and accused Google and YouTube of facilitating the spread of white supremacy and conspiracy theories.Google employees have also expressed their anger at Page and Brin for leaving rather than stay to fix the problems within the company.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen laid into Google's billionaire cofounders for leaving the company.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced they were stepping down as CEO and President of Google's parent company Alphabet on Tuesday. Page and Brin confirmed in their goodbye letter that they will remain as board members and shareholders, and the pair still have voting control of the company.

Baron Cohen tweeted about the news on Wednesday. "First you drop your 'Don't Be Evil' mantra, now you 'drop out'? You still control 51% of voting shares, so stop @Google and @YouTube from spreading white supremacy & conspiracies."

"So long as you profit from hate, you are the #SiliconSix," Baron Cohen added.

Google founders Larry Page (right) and Sergey Brin. REUTERS/Chip East

The "Silicon Six" is a term Baron Cohen used in a speech he gave to the Anti-Defamation League about online hate speech last month, and the Silicon Valley executives he sees as responsible for its proliferation. The term refers to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg,  Larry Page and Sergey Brin, their successor Sundar Pichai, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

Baron Cohen isn't the first to criticise Page and Brin for stepping away from their roles. Numerous Google employees have also voiced their dismay at the cofounders bailing out rather than staying and fixing the problems inside the company.

"Some had seriously hoped Sergey and Larry would step in and fix Google. Instead of righting the sinking ship, they jumped ship," tweeted employee activist group Google Walkout For Real Change.

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Original author: Isobel Asher Hamilton

Peloton's latest ad featured a woman who was gifted a bike for Christmas. It was widely mocked. Peloton

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

Instagram says it will require  all new users to provide their birthdates, starting Wednesday. In a blog post, the company said it wants to "help keep young people safer and enable more age-appropriate experiences." It won't require users to verify the birthdates they provide, however. Amazon cloud CEO Andy Jassy said the company feels strongly that Microsoft's $10 billion JEDI cloud win 'was not adjudicated fairly' because of political interference. Jassy said that there was "significant political interference," as President Donald Trump has a feud with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.Current and former Googlers are furious that Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped back instead of fixing the culture. Several prominent Googlers have used Twitter to vent their frustration at Brin and Page's decision.Elon Musk opened up about his wealth during second day of testimony in 'pedo guy' defamation trial. The Tesla CEO said he was worth around $20 billion but most of that isn't cash.Elizabeth Warren tweeted at Larry Page that Congress will still hold him accountable for Google, regardless of his job title. The presidential candidate, who has made regulating big tech a key part of her campaign, said Page was still responsible for Google's practices.Microsoft is reportedly working on two new Xbox consoles for 2020, and one of them won't have a disc drive. The company has already confirmed that the next Xbox, codenamed Project Scarlett, will launch during the 2020 holiday season.Leaked internal Peloton documents revealed how the fitness startup is trying to shed its 'cultish' image as it plots its post-IPO expansion. Documents issued to ad agencies pitching for Peloton's business earlier this year show how it hopes to grow its customer base.Slack's CEO has dissed the hyper growth of Microsoft Teams, saying users of dead Microsoft products are being 'force migrated'. Stewart Butterfield addressed the competition with Microsoft Teams in the company's latest earnings call.Tesla refused to help the police with an investigation into stolen copper wire after Elon Musk learned about the incident because the company was scared of bad press. The electric vehicle maker declined to assist authorities on other occasions amid reports of "rampant crime" in 2018, according to the Reno Gazette Journal.YouTube hinted that its 'Rewind 2019' video will include PewDiePie and other stars the platform left out of last year's much-hated video. Last year's Rewind video was criticized for failing to include some of YouTube's most controversial stars, like PewDiePie and the Paul brothers.

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Original author: Charlie Wood

LOS ANGELES — Tesla CEO Elon Musk was in court Wednesday for another round of questioning in his defamation trial.

Musk said an insult he lobbed at a British diver on social media in 2018 "was very much an off-the-cuff response" to what he perceived to be a slight against him.

That diver is Vernon Unsworth, who is suing Musk for calling him a "pedo guy" on Twitter after Unsworth took part in the 2018 rescue operation that freed 12 boys and a soccer coach who were trapped inside a cave in Thailand.

"It's an insult, like saying mother-effer doesn't actually mean someone having sex with their mother," Musk told jurors, at one point recounting some parental advice: "As my mom said, 'If somebody insults you, just let it go.'"

Musk had delivered his insult to Unsworth when the diver criticized him days after the successful rescue operation ended. Unsworth called Musk's "minisub" that he had sent to the rescue operation a "PR stunt" and said Musk "can stick his submarine where it hurts."

On the witness stand a day earlier, Musk argued he "didn't literally mean he was a pedophile." But at the height of his feud with Unsworth, Musk pushed the assertion in follow-up postings, paid a private investigator $52,000 to find evidence of sexual misconduct involving Unsworth, and months later wondered aloud on the social-media platform why Unsworth had not sued him yet.

Unsworth said the sting of the ordeal remained with him.

"Feels very raw," he said in his first day of testimony. "Feel humiliated, ashamed, dirtied."

"I feel very vulnerable," he added. "It hurts to talk about it."

The case puts front and center the potential consequences of public musings from an outsize figure like Musk and the effects those statements can have on a private citizen who happened to cross him. Unsworth's lawyers have argued that their client did not seek to capitalize on his quarrel with the Tesla CEO.

Musk offered other insights about his life, including his personal wealth, which he said totaled about $20 billion, a large portion of it locked up in nonliquid assets. "People think I have a lot of cash. I actually don't," Musk said, adding: "I have stock in SpaceX and Tesla, and debt against that."

The subject of his wealth will be pertinent when jurors begin deliberations.

Unsworth notched a victory in earlier proceedings when a judge ruled he was not a public figure, which lowered the threshold for proving defamation. The diver's lawyers must now successfully prove that Musk's actions demonstrated negligence to the extent that they harmed Unsworth.

Original author: Bryan Logan

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield has addressed competition with Microsoft Teams, arguing in the company's latest earnings call with investors that the two products have different goals while highlighting the number of Slack's enterprise customers also using Office 365.On the call, Butterfield said Microsoft's 20 million daily active users weren't a result of organic growth, as it was getting customers who previously used Skype for Business, which it rebranded into Teams.In touting Slack's growing base of enterprise customers also using Office 365, Butterfield tried to suggest that those customers were choosing Slack over Teams.But analysts are still skeptical and say that the numbers Slack highlighted were inconsequential in the long run and that the company's weak guidance for the fourth quarter didn't forecast good growth prospects.Daniel Ives at Wedbush Securities told Business Insider the underlying guidance was disappointing and combined with the Microsoft numbers would prove to be a "tough hurdle" going forward. "Right now that's the dark shadow over the company — Microsoft," he said.Daniel Newman, the founding partner and principal analyst at Futurum Research, said Microsoft was just starting to "turn the screws" and was just in the early days of deploying Teams.Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield has dismissed Microsoft's claims of growing momentum within its rival Teams product, suggesting that Microsoft's expanding number of users is not as impressive as it might seem.

"Although Microsoft markets Teams as a Slack competitor — and there's no doubt this causes confusion in the marketplace — in practice, these are different tools used for different purposes and our customers achieve markedly different results," Butterfield said Wednesday during Slack's third-quarter earnings call.

"Just look at the weak engagement numbers that Microsoft themselves report about Teams and the much deeper level of engagement you see among Slack users," he said.

Butterfield went after Microsoft several times during the conference call, underscoring a fierce competition between the two companies that has put pressure on Slack's stock price. Microsoft recently announced that Teams, its workplace chat app, had 20 million users — a significant lead over Slack, which said in October that its workplace chat app has 12 million daily users.

Slack did not provide an update to its daily users on Wednesday but instead painted Microsoft's numbers as the result of Microsoft killing older products and "force migrating" users to Teams.

"When they first announced the shutdown of Skype for Business, we expected this," Butterfield said.

"Now that Skype for Business users are being force-migrated to Teams, it's reasonable to expect more of the same. Unless they hit a snag, we'd expect them to announce 50 million in the next six months and then 100 million within the next year."

The comments seemed to do the trick, sending Slack's stock up about 2% in after-hours trading.

"It's encouraging that Stewart Butterfield addressed the Microsoft question heads-on, since I know that weighs on investors," Rishi Jaluria, an analyst at DA Davidson, said. "I thought it was smart for him to say he expects Microsoft to ultimately report 100MM DAUs on Teams and get ahead of the narrative."

Still, Jaluria noted that "it may take some time for Slack to shake off the 'Microsoft overhang.'"

Indeed, while Wall Street was encouraged by Butterfield's comments, some analysts said Slack's actual metrics and guidance didn't show a rosy path ahead.

Daniel Ives at Wedbush Securities told Business Insider that the underlying guidance was disappointing and that combined with the Microsoft numbers would prove to be a "tough hurdle" going forward. "Right now that's the dark shadow over the company — Microsoft," he added.

In particular, he thinks Wall Street wanted to see better billings guidance for the next quarter, as that is an indicator of future growth.

Butterfield with the Slack cofounder Cal Henderson outside the New York Stock Exchange on June 20 before their company's initial public offering. Associated Press

Microsoft bundles Teams in with its Office 365 productivity suite for business. Analysts have said this gives Microsoft a major advantage that could make it more difficult for Slack to compete.

Butterfield on Wednesday said many of Slack's customers also used Office 365, suggesting that those Microsoft customers were choosing Slack over Teams. Slack said that it had 50 paid customers spending over $1 million annually and that 70% of those customers were also Office 365 users.

"We've continued to add Office 365 using enterprise customers at the $100,000-plus level and at the $1-million-plus level," Butterfield said. "Just as you can expect more Skype for Business users forced over to Teams, you could expect more of these customer wins from us as well."

Slack needed the "injection of confidence" from Wednesday's earnings, said Daniel Newman, the founding partner and principal analyst at Futurum Research.

But the company needs to add a lot more customers than it did in the past quarter if it wants to keep up. He added that Microsoft was just starting to "turn the screws" and was just in the early days of deploying Teams.

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Original author: Paayal Zaveri

Following Amazon's legal challenge of the government's handling of a $10 billion cloud contract, Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy tried to make his case in the court of public opinion on Wednesday.

In a meeting with reporters, Jassy argued that the Pentagon's decision to award that contract to Microsoft was not fairly made and was tainted by "significant political interference."

"What I would say is that I think it's fairly obvious that we feel pretty strongly that it was not adjudicated fairly," Jassy told reporters at a press event at AWS re:Invent, Amazon's cloud mega-conference in Las Vegas. "If you do a truly objective detailed apples-to-apples comparison of the platforms, you don't end up in a spot where that decision was made."

In October, Amazon was on the losing end of a major upset when it lost a crucial $10 billion Pentagon contract to Microsoft. Amazon Web Services was considered the frontrunner of the bid for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract.

After the Department of Defense announced that Microsoft had won, AWS filed an official challenge in November over claims of "unmistakable bias." During the bid for JEDI, President Donald Trump, who has an open feud with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post, which Bezos owns, reportedly said that he would look into the bidding process for the contract.

"We have a sitting president who is willing to share openly his disdain for a company and the leader of that company," Jassy said. "It makes it really difficult for government agencies including the DoD to make an objective decision without a fear of reprisal."

The line is almost identical to what Jassy said in an all-hands meeting with Amazon employees last month, according to a recording obtained by Business Insider. 

In his comments on Wednesday, Jassy added an appeal to patriotism and national security.

"We're talking about the national security of our country and modernizing their technology platforms and the foundation on which all those applications are going to be used to protect our country," Jassy said. "You have to make sure these decisions are made truly objectively."

Previously, Jassy reportedly told employees that AWS is two years ahead of Microsoft, and he made these claims again on Wednesday.

"Most of our customers tell us that we're a couple years ahead mostly in regards to functionality and maturity," Jassy said.

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Original author: Rosalie Chan

NASA has released its first results from the Parker Solar Probe's close approaches to the sun.For the first time, the probe found evidence of a zone with no cosmic dust, as well as a source of the solar wind of charged particles that streams from the sun.It also discovered previously unseen bursts of rapid solar wind that bend the sun's magnetic field backwards.The spacecraft will zip around the sun 21 more times in the next six years.Its findings could help scientists devise new protections for astronauts and Earth's electric grid.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

NASA's record-breaking solar probe has discovered new, mysterious phenomena at the edge of the sun.

Since it launched in August 2018, the Parker Solar Probe has rocketed around the sun three times, getting closer than any spacecraft before it and traveling faster than any other human-made object in history.

On Wednesday, NASA scientists announced the probe's biggest discoveries so far, in four papers published in the journal Nature. 

The research revealed never-before-seen activity in the plasma and energy at the edges of the sun's atmosphere, including reversals of the sun's magnetic field and "bursts" in its stream of electrically charged particles, called solar wind.

This wind surges into space and washes over Earth, so studying its source could help scientists figure out how to protect astronauts and Earth's electric grid from unpredictable, violent solar explosions.

By sending the Parker probe to the sun, NASA is studying this dangerous wind in more detail than scientists could from Earth.

"Imagine that we live halfway down a waterfall, and the water is always flowing past us. It's very turbulent, chaotic, unstructured, and we want to know what is the source of the waterfall up at the top," Stuart Bale, a physicist who leads the team that investigates the probe's solar wind data, said in a press call. "It's very hard to tell from halfway down."

'Bursty' solar wind bends the sun's magnetic field

A sunrise is photographed from the International Space Station, December 25, 2017. NASA

NASA scientists are seeking answers two major questions about the sun: What causes solar wind to accelerate as it shoots out into space? And why is the sun's outer layer, called the corona, up to 500 times hotter than its inner layers? 

The new data offers some initial clues. For the first time, Parker identified a clear source of a stream of slow, steady wind flowing out from the sun. It came from a hole in the corona — a spot where the gas is cooler and less dense.

Scientists had previously known that wind coming from the sun's poles moves faster, but this was the first time they detected an origin point for the slow wind coming from its equator.

The Parker Solar Probe observed a slow solar wind flowing out from the small coronal hole — the long, thin black spot seen on the left side of the sun in this image captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory — on October 27, 2018. NASA/SDO

The Parker probe also detected rogue waves of magnetic energy rushing through the solar wind. As those magnetic waves washed over the spacecraft, the Parker probe detected huge spikes in the speed of the solar wind — sometimes it jumped over 300,000 mph in just seconds. Then just as quickly, the rapid winds were gone. 

"We see that the solar wind is very bursty," Bale said. "It's bubbly, it's unstable. And this is not how it is near Earth."

The bursts could explain why the corona is so hot.

"We think it tells us, possibly, a path towards understanding how energy is getting from the sun into the atmosphere and heating it," Justin Kasper, another physicist who studied Parker's observations of solar wind, said in the call.

Scientists had never observed these bursts and bubbles before, but they seem to be common. The Parker spacecraft observed about 1,000 of them in just 11 days.

The rogue spikes of energy also delivered an additional surprise: The bursts are so strong that they flip the sun's magnetic field.

During a switchback, a wave of the magnetic field bends back on itself to point almost directly at the sun. NASA/Goddard/CIL

The scientists call these events "switchbacks" because in the affected area, the sun's magnetic field whips backwards so that it's almost pointing directly at the sun.

The switchbacks only seem to occur close to the sun (within Mercury's orbit), so scientists could never have observed them without the Parker probe.

"These are great clues, and now we can go look at the surface of the sun and figure out what's causing those [bursts] and launching them up into space," Kasper said.

Parker confirmed that there's a dust-free zone around the sun

Scientists have long suspected that the sun is surrounded by an area without nay cosmic dust — the tiny crumbs of planets and asteroids that float through space and fall into stars' orbits. That's because the sun's heat should vaporize any solid dust that gets too close.

For the first time, Parker flew close enough to the sun to provide evidence that such a dust-free zone exists. It observed that the dust does indeed get thinner closer to the sun.

Still, this zone wasn't quite what scientists expected.

On clear nights, observers from Earth can see the ring of dust surrounding the sun — known as Zodiacal dust or "false dawn" — as an illuminated cloud above the horizon. ESO/Y.Beletsky

"What was a bit of a surprise is that the dust decrease is very smooth," Russell Howard, another astrophysicist working with the probe, said in the call. "We don't see any sudden decreases indicating that some material has evaporated."

That will be another mystery to prod as the spacecraft gets closer to the sun.

6 more years and 21 more flybys

An illustration of NASA's Parker Solar Probe as it flies toward the sun. NASA/JHU/APL

More knowledge about solar wind and the sun's magnetic field could help scientists better protect astronauts and spacecraft from two types of violent space weather: energetic particle storms and coronal mass ejections. 

In energetic particle storms, events on the sun send out floods of the ions and electrons that make up solar wind. These particles travel at almost the speed of light, which makes them nearly impossible to foresee. They can reach Earth in under half an hour and damage spacecraft electronics. This can be especially dangerous to astronauts traveling far from Earth.

In a coronal mass ejection, the sun sends billions of tons of coronal material hurtling into space. Such an explosion could cause mass damage to Earth's power grids and pipelines.

The sun blows out a coronal mass ejection, February 24, 2015. NASA/GSFC

Over the next six years, Parker will make close approaches to the sun 21 more times, getting closer and closer. In its final pass, it will fly within 4 million miles of the sun's surface.

During each fly-by, the probe will gather more data that could answer physicists' questions about the sun's corona and solar wind.

"As we get closer, we'll be right in the sources of the heat, the sources of the acceleration of particles, and of course those amazing eruptions," Nicola Fox, NASA's director of heliophysics, said in the call. "Even with what we have now, we already know that we will need to adjust the model used to understand the sun."

Original author: Morgan McFall-Johnsen

Former Salesforce executive and customer relationship management software veteran Brad Birnbaum wants to modernize customer relationship management software with his latest startup Kustomer, founded in 2015. Birnbaum previously founded Assistly, a company that offered an instant customer-service help desk hosted in the cloud and was focused on small businesses and startups. It was acquired by Salesforce for $50 million in 2011.Now with Kustomer, Birnbaum wants to modernize the tools customer service agents use to help them. And it's looking to grow rapidly— the startup just raised $60 million in Series E funding, it's fourth time raising funding in the last 18 months.Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Former Salesforce executive Brad Birnbaum thinks it's time to modernize customer relationship management software and that's exactly what he is looking to do with his latest company Kustomer. 

"We've modeled ourselves to become a modern Salesforce," Birnbaum told Business Insider. 

Birnbaum is a veteran of the customer relationship management software space. In 1995 he founded his first service company called eShare. At the time, the company was providing enterprise internet-based customer support, when not many were working in that space. Eshare provided services to companies like Microsoft, Dell, AOL and Sprint. 

Fast forward to 2009, he co-founded a customer service company called Assistly, and served as its CTO. The company offered an instant customer-service help desk hosted in the cloud and was focused on small businesses and startups. Two years later, in 2011, it was acquired by Salesforce for $50 million.

Salesforce eventually renamed Assistly as Desk.com and it came its product offering for small businesses inside of Salesforce's larger platform. Birnbaum worked at Salesforce for three years after as a VP of engineering. 

And now Birnbaum's looking to disrupt the market again. 

"I've spent my whole career in the customer service space, I've seen it evolve and I've seen that the world is looking for a modern solution. They are looking for something that knows everything about the customers," Birnbaum said.

When Birnbaum started Kustomer in 2015, he said he saw an opportunity to do it better than legacy companies like Salesforce, Zendesk and Oracle. It's a cloud based customer service platform, not dissimilar to Salesforce. 

"We actually don't see it as a crowded space, we see it as a space with a lot of traditional products and it's really hard for them to modernize because they were built in a different generation ... so the opportunity is quite large." He adds that the market for customer service itself is growing rapidly so there is space for new players like Kustomer. 

He thinks customer service platforms now have to treat people like people and not tickets, and they have to leverage artificial intelligence and automation to automate some tasks customer service agents have to do, in order to more quickly solve customer's issues. 

Kustomer is hoping to be that modern offering. And the company is investing in that goal. It just raised $60 million in Series E funding, led by Coatue with current investors Tiger Global Management and Battery Ventures. It's the fourth time the company has raised funding in the last 18 months, taking in a total of $161 million from those four rounds and bringing the company's total funding to $173.5 million.

Scott Morgan/Reuters

Kustomer offers customer service support across all types of platforms customers might be using to communicate and interact with brands. This includes phone, email, social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. 

He said what makes Kustomer different is that in their platform, the conversation a customer is having with a business can span multiple channel types at once. For example, a customer can be using calling, texting and email to address a single issue in a continuous conversation, which Birnbaum said "no one else does" that way. 

Salesforce recently announced updates to its platform that focused on helping businesses get a "360-degree" view of their customers - ie. This means tracking customer's actions, preferences and habits across devices.

Birnbaum said he is looking to keep building and innovating on the platform Kustomer has built thus far. "As we progress we will build more apps on top of the platform and you might see us doing things like marketing and engagement over time as we continue to expand," Birnbaum said. "But right now we're very focused on customer service because it's such a huge opportunity and the current solutions are pretty ancient." 

The new funding will be used to work towards that growth by hiring more employees and expanding internationally. Birnbaum said some of Kustomer's customers are brands like Glossier, Ring, Sweetgreen, and Third Love. 

"We've modeled ourselves to become a modern Salesforce. As our platform continues to evolve and as our service application continues to broaden and as we start to launch additional applications on top of that platform you'll see that transformation occur," he said.

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Original author: Paayal Zaveri

Salesforce announced at its investor day last month that it plans to double the company in the next five years, but industry watchers say that growth may be more difficult to reach than expected and is heavily dependent on more large acquisitions like Tableau and MuleSoft.Growth in Salesforce's flagship Sales Cloud business has been slowing as the company continues to expand in size."While the company has a strong track record of buying and integrating good businesses, for an acquisition to have a material impact on the business at the current run rate, it would have to be large. This opens the door to riskier deals that present greater integration risk," Rob Oliver, senior research analyst at Baird Equity Research writes.One big problem with relying on M&A to grow revenue is that it will weigh on margins, analysts say.  And Salesforce needs to be careful about over-spending on deals.Click here for more BI Prime stories.

One of Salesforce's most reliable playbooks— mergers and acquisitions — will be put to the test like never before as the company strives to meet its CEO's ambitious growth targets, according to analysts.

Marc Benioff, the cloud software giant's voluble founder, recently declared that Salesforce will generate $35 billion in revenue by its fiscal year 2024, roughly double the current level. 

The feat would make "us the fastest enterprise software company to reach that milestone," Benioff said on an earnings call with investors Tuesday, re-iterating the target he had set a few weeks earlier at the company's annual Dreamforce conference. 

Analysts say the only realistic way for Salesforce to get there is to buy growth by acquiring other companies. And while that strategy has served Salesforce well for years, the risks will become bigger than ever as the stakes grow higher. 

"While the company has a strong track record of buying and integrating good businesses, for an acquisition to have a material impact on the business at the current run rate, it would have to be large. This opens the door to riskier deals that present greater integration risk," wrote Baird Equity Research analyst Rob Oliver in a note to investors following the company's earnings results. 

With a relatively modest $6.5 billion of cash on its balance sheet, Salesforce needs to be careful how its spends its money. 

"If Salesforce does not exhibit spending discipline, over-payment for strategic acquisitions could be dilutive to earnings," warned Wedbush analyst Steve Koenig in a note to investors.

A slowdown in the flagship business and a potential hit to margins

Growth in Salesforce's flagship Sales Cloud business has been slowing as the company continues to expand in size. While other core products like Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud are continuing to grow, acquisitions are providing the biggest boost to the company's top line. 

This past quarter, Salesforce completed its acquisition of data analytics and visualization company Tableau— the largest acquisition in the company's history at $15.3 billion dollars. This was just a year after it acquired MuleSoft for $6.5 billion. Both acquisitions are already bolstering Salesforce's revenues, although the company's plan for integrating Tableau is still a bit murky. 

Salesforce

Salesforce brought in $4.5 billion in revenue for the quarter. Tableau contributed $308 million of that, above the $300 million Wall Street expected. This led Platform and Other revenue to grow 74 percent in the quarter. MuleSoft also had a strong quarter, and re-accelerated to 77 percent subscription growth, up from 61 percent growth last quarter.

The biggest risk with relying on acquisitions to grow revenue is that it will weigh on margins, Matt Lemenage, senior associate at Baird, told Business Insider. 

"Investors biggest pushback with CRM over the past 12-ish months have been that margins haven't expanded in nearly 3 years," Lemenage said, referring to Salesforce by its stock ticker. "The 'problem' is that acquiring these large companies comes with incremental expenses and therefore margins have stayed flat to do rather than expanding"

He adds that Salesforce has promised investors between 1.25% and 1.5% adjusted profit margin expansion every year. But for the past few years it hasn't come. "Hence the investor frustration," Lemenage said. 

"We expect more acquisitions to supplement organic product development"

Analysts at RBC Capital Markets warn against investing in order to drive growth. "To us, a more dangerous path would be to invest in an attempt to drive growth. If unsuccessful, the resulting growth deceleration coupled with deteriorating margin and cash flows could be very negative for the stock," writes Alex Zukin, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets.

Products like Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Platform are becoming more important to the company's growth going forward. And given Salesforce's history of successful acquisitions, analysts are still optimistic in the long run. 

Marketing Cloud in particular has seen success in continuing to grow and build out functionality by using acquisitions, said Rob Oliver at Baird. These include deals like Radian6, BuddyMedia, and DemandWare. "We expect more acquisitions to supplement organic product development," Oliver writes.

Arjun Bhatia, an analyst at William Blair, sees less risk. He points to Salesforce's success with MuleSoft and the Tableau's prospects as a good sign for reaching its goal of doubling the company by 2024. 

"Salesforce has a strong record of integrating acquisitions and generating inorganic growth (as we saw with MuleSoft), which leads us to believe there is upside to Tableau numbers in the fourth quarter," Bhatia writes. "We have a positive outlook on the company's ability to reach its fiscal 2024 target of $35 billion in revenue, essentially doubling the company from current levels."

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Original author: Paayal Zaveri

With the exception of a few one-off promotional cars, the auto industry has never used stainless steel to manufacture vehicles.

With two notable exceptions: the DMC DeLorean, made from 1981-1983; and the newly unveiled Tesla Cybertruck, which could go into production in 2022. 

A stainless gulf of numerous decades separates these vehicles, raising the question of why undeniably durable stainless hasn't displaced good-old-fashioned regular steel.

For DeLorean, the stainless proposition was that scratches could be easily buffed out, but of course the car's shimmering skin was marketing.

For Tesla, marketing is also a factor, although the company's sibling, SpaceX, has been developing new stainless applications for its spacecraft.

As a practical matter, no automakers use stainless to build cars these days, so there's no supply chain on any magnitude.

While the CyberTruck and the DeLorean have one big thing in common, they also have some little things. But in other ways, they're utterly different.

Here's a rundown:

Original author: Matthew DeBord

Occupy Wall Street grew from the wake of the Great Recession, and while its participants were largely on the fringe, it had a lasting impact on bringing the talk about inequality into the American mainstream.The 2010s in the US saw the rise of movements on both sides of the aisle for fighting inequality, working toward sustainability, redefining the role of a corporation, and limiting the concentration of corporate power.This analysis piece is part of Business Insider's project "The 2010s: Toward a Better Capitalism."The Better Capitalism series tracks the ways companies and individuals are rethinking the economy and role of business in society.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Inequality. Taxing the 1%. Medicare for All. Sustainability.

These buzzwords are everywhere these days, whether we're listening to popular politicians or influential executives. It can be easy to forget that just 10 years ago, you'd be hard-pressed to find them in mainstream conversation.

Rewind to 2010: In the wake of a brutal recession following the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, Americans in red and blue states alike grew alienated with the powers that be. The institutions that helped cause the chaos in the first place were deemed "too big to fail" and given a $500 billion bailout. Despite their frustration, most Americans brushed off a group calling itself Occupy Wall Street (with its rallying cry of "We are the 99%") as naive hippies camping out in a Manhattan park.

How, then, did so much of the rhetoric the protesters used to challenge capitalism and demand a more equal society end up part of our everyday conversation?

Business Insider has been tracking that progression for the past few years with our Better Capitalism series. And it's not just left-wing presidential candidates who are throwing around these terms as they reconsider how we run our economy. In August, a collection of nearly 200 CEOs of America's largest companies calling itself the Business Roundtable issued a statement advocating an end to the era of shareholder primacy. The group was led by Jamie Dimon, who as the head of JPMorgan Chase is one of the most powerful people on Wall Street.

Occupy's targets had joined the conversation.

With the 2020s fast approaching, Business Insider's "The 2010s: Toward a Better Capitalism" will spend the next month examining how our most popular ideas about business and the economy went from the fringe to the mainstream in just 10 years. The following is a preview of what to expect.

Original author: Richard Feloni

Amazon held its biannual all-hands staff meeting last month.Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his top executive team answered tough questions from employees during the event, according to a recording of the event obtained by Business Insider.To provide more context, Business Insider is publishing the full transcript of their answers to some of the key questions asked.Click here to read more BI Prime stories

As previously reported, Business Insider gained access to Amazon's biannual all-hands staff meeting that took place last month.

The meeting, held only twice a year, is a valuable window into Amazon's thinking, as CEO Jeff Bezos and his top executive team, known as the S-team, rarely speak in public.

During the meeting, Bezos and the S-team answered tough questions from employees about the challenges facing the company. The questions covered everything from malicious sellers on Amazon's marketplace to the increasingly hostile political environment and the JEDI cloud contract Amazon lost to Microsoft.

Amazon's representative declined to comment.

To provide more context around the meeting, we've decided to publish the full transcript of some of the most important questions discussed during the event (certain parts bolded by BI for emphasis):

On bad actors on Amazon's marketplace

Q: Are you concerned that Amazon's reputation is at risk due to bad actors selling goods on the marketplace? 

Doug Herrington, SVP of North America Consumer: First, I would say that our reputation is built on customer trust and we have to earn that every single day. And anytime we have a bad experience or a customer or seller, like a late delivery or a fake review or a counterfeit product, it has the potential to damage our customers, damage our sellers and damage our reputation. That's why we spend a lot of resources to combat this. In 2018 alone, we spent over $400 million and we dedicated more than 5,000 team members to prevent fraud and abuse in our store. And to give you a sense of the scale of how successful they've been — in 2018, we stopped more than a million potential bad actors from successfully opening Amazon selling accounts. And we blocked more than 3 billion potential bad listings from getting published to our store. And we also ensured that 99.9% of all pages viewed by our customers were to products that had never received a counterfeit notice of infringement.

We've got a bunch of programs in place that's yielding these great results. A big exciting one that we launched last year was called Project Zero. That allows our brands to work with us to reduce counterfeits to zero. We take our automated technologies and we take their know-how of their own intellectual property and how to identify counterfeits. One of the coolest aspects of this is a self-service counterfeit removal tool that we give to those brands so that when they identify one on the site, they don't have to talk to us, they can take it down themselves. It allows us to react very quickly and even more importantly, that information feeds our machine learning models and then we proactively can block anything that looks like that going forward into the future. We've got another great program called Transparency that we've been rolling out globally and this is a service that allows brands to put unique serial codes on their products and we scan every one of their products in inbound and outbound and ensure that only authentic products get in to customers.

We've got over 6,000 brands signed up for this. We stopped 300,000 counterfeit items from getting to our customer last year using this program. And what's super exciting to me is that we haven't received a single counterfeit notice of infringement from the brands on any of the products that are using the Transparency service. These are some of the things we are doing. Of course these bad actors are going to continue to try to do what they do to disrupt our shopping experience and our selling experience. And so our job is going to be the same — we've got to stay ahead of them and we've got to prevent fraud and abuse before it happens on our store. And we're going to invest whatever it takes to protect our store and protect our reputation. 

On brands ditching Amazon to sell directly to consumers

Q: Some of Amazon's largest retail vendors are thinking about or testing their own direct-to-consumer strategies. Should Amazon be worried about what this looks like in 10 years? Specifically, is there a risk that retail vendors might pull selection off Amazon that isn't profitable and fulfill orders themselves as their direct-to-consumer capabilities improve?

Herrington: I would say direct to consumer is not a new trend. It's been around for a while and in fact, all of our biggest brands and biggest vendors are used to selling their products in many different stores online and offline, including their own stores and their direct to consumer stores. And the reason that they do this is because they're trying to reach as many customers as possible. And so for almost all of them, the direct to consumer businesses that they set up are not about replacing their traditional retail partners as much as augmenting them. That said, we've got to still deliver a lot of value to brands and we do that like we always have by focusing on our customers and we obsess over our customers to build a fantastic shopping experience with low prices and fast free shipping so that our customers make Amazon their preferred shopping destination. And as long as our customers choose to shop with us, those brands will continue to want to sell with us.

Bezos: Yeah, and I would say, just to add to that, the brands that could go direct, will continue to use us as long as we're actually adding value to the whole process. So as long as we are doing a great job of customer services, as long as we're aggregating orders, it's obviously way more efficient if you can get a few items in a box and transport that than it is if you have a single item in a box. So there are a bunch of reasons why aggregation is very helpful, not only to consumers but also to the brands that manufacture the products that they want in the hands of consumers. So that's going to continue to be true. And there will be cases where brands for whatever reason, have a strategy of going direct to their consumers, and that's going to be okay too — we're part of the mix. 

On user privacy and the spread of misinformation on Amazon Advertising

Q: As Amazon Advertising mushrooms in size and scale, and given the backlash against Google and Facebook in regards to data privacy and the spread of misinformation, what are our plans to combat similar circumstances within Amazon Advertising?

Paul Kotas, SVP of Amazon Advertising: A lot of the backlash is around political ads. Amazon Advertising does not accept political ads and never has. We're in a completely different position and we've been very conservative in this area. Protecting customer privacy is always a top priority and has been built into our systems for years. We do not sell our customer information. The information that we use for interest based advertising is pseudonymized, maintained, and used in dedicated and distinct systems, and we only share personal information as dictated in our privacy policy. We also make it easy for customers to opt out of interest based advertising from Amazon via the advertising preferences page on our website. That's it.

On losing the $10 billion JEDI contract to Microsoft

Q: Microsoft apparently won the joint enterprise defense infrastructure contract, JEDI, for cloud services. How does this affect AWS, our growth prospects and plans?

Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS: The JEDI award won't impact AWS's long-term growth prospects or plans. I think it's important just to remember for perspective that AWS has a $36 billion revenue run rate business and JEDI, if and when it actually reaches its maximum, is about a billion dollars a year. 

We feel pretty strongly that it was not adjudicated fairly. I think that if you do any thorough apples-to-apples, objective comparison of AWS versus Microsoft, you don't come out deciding that they're comparable platforms. Most of our customers will tell us that we're about 24 months ahead of Microsoft in functionality and maturity. And I also think there was very significant political interference in the process. I think when you have a sitting president who's willing to publicly show his disdain for a company and the leader of the company, it's very difficult for government agencies, including the DOD to make an objective decision without fear of reprisal. So we're going to protest the decision and push the government to shine a light on what really happened. All that said, I would say we have a pretty significant business with the DOD today and the DOD spends many tens of billions of dollars on, on technology and no matter who wins JEDI, they're going to use multiple cloud providers and we expect that we'll be one of them and we'll have a significant business moving forward. 

On the future of Amazon's logistics

Q: What is the next generation tech you'd like to see enrolled in worldwide ops and fulfillment centers in the next three to five years? 

Dave Clark, SVP of North America Operations: There's a lot of stuff going on in ops right now. We've talked over the years about what's happening in our fulfillment centers with all the robotics and innovation that's being deployed there and the Kiva fields and the other automation taking place. But I really think the next three to five years is all about what's going to happen in our transportation businesses. And we're starting to see our first implementations of robotic sort centers, package sortation centers, air hubs, delivery stations starting to deploy this year. And it will begin to scale in 2020 and 2021. And so I think by the time you look out three to five years, the way our transportation infrastructure operates is going to be pretty radically different than the way traditional transportation infrastructure works, and largely driven by both software and mechanical hardware, and automation introduction. 

And we're also doing a ton of work in our freight businesses with just technology programs for freight providers and freight businesses. In fact, the team just yesterday won an award that's given out by carriers, transportation providers in the US for the best technology teams. And our group won that second year in a row. And now we're really starting to take more of a leadership position in the technology provided for transportation in the US and around the world. And I think it's a fun space to be in for the next few years. 

On not responding to public criticism from politicians

Q: Why is Amazon not publicly correcting or countering presidential candidates' incorrect or misleading public statements about Amazon?

Jay Carney, SVP of Global Corporate Affairs: The fact is we do, and you may have noticed that. We don't always correct statements from politicians, candidates, or incumbents. And there are several reasons for that. It could be that the statement is so blatantly obviously untrue that journalists and other outside validators do their job, and we don't have to enter the fray. 

We also are careful not to take the bait when it's clear that a candidate just wants us to respond so that he or she can get more attention. Obviously in this political environment, you know, a fight gets covered and that can run down to the benefit of a candidate and not necessarily to us. I would note that we judge these case by case. Earlier this year, somebody I admire greatly and I used to work for, Vice President Biden took a shot at us over our tax liability and I felt it was very important that we put out a statement making clear that his challenge or issue is not with us because we follow the law. It's with Congress who writes the law and if he wants a tax liability to be different for companies like us, then he's got to get Congress to write a new tax code because we just go by the law. 

On how AWS is subsidizing its less profitable retail business

Q: Why should AWS profits be shared with other business lines of Amazon rather than sharing internally? We should invest all that money into further growth of AWS.

Brian Olsavsky, CFO: I think a lot of times some of our retail competitors say, you know, we're using AWS to fund retail. But I think if you look at our actual financials, you'll see that so far this year AWS has earned $7 billion of operating income. North America's, which is most of the consumer business and devices and video and everything else, earn $5 billion, and international lost a billion. So, you know, at any point in time, we're investing in a lot of areas. So to say one area where we have profits is funding directly another is kind of an abstract concept for us here. We're essentially — we have one checkbook or one Amazon and we've consistently over our history used the profits from profitable businesses to fund things that are going to be the big businesses in the future. So, rest assured we're not under-investing in AWS. I think like half of our headcount growth last year, nearly half, was in the AWS area. So we see great opportunity there and we're continuing to invest very heavily, not only in people, but infrastructure and geographic expansion. So it's a good question, but don't let others outside the company kind of trick you into that line of thought.

Bezos: And just to be super clear, there's no sense in which AWS is subsidizing retail because retail is profitable in its own right and perfectly capable of funding its own growth initiatives. And it's funding tremendous growth initiatives inside retail, just as AWS is funding inside AWS.

On Amazon's PAC donating to officials with conflicting views

Q: Amazon recently released our positions that are an attempt to clarify our views on certain issues. The Amazon political action committee consistently donates to politicians who actively oppose every single Amazon views you listed. How do you reconcile this behavior discrepancy? Should we believe the words or the money? 

Carney: So I think it's important that people understand if they choose to contribute to our PAC, that the PAC is bipartisan, that we donate to candidates, or rather candidates, or elected officials based on the positions they take that are good for our customers, are good for our employees, good for our businesses. It doesn't mean we agree individually or as a company with every position of each politician who receives a donation. We think it's important to have this PAC because it helps us engage with elected officials. But there are certainly other opportunities for all of you as citizens to put your money where you think it's best placed on behalf of a candidate. So you're welcome to do that. But don't stop giving to the PAC.

Bezos: I would just add to what Jay said that, when you look at, when you're working with people in general and you know, we have 600,000 people in this company, there's no two people in this company who are going to share the same identical set of views on every issue. You have to be able to work with people who don't agree with you on everything. And at the same time I would say when you look at candidates, and who you're funding, there are certain issues that are extreme enough that they would be disqualifying and you would say, 'No, I'm not going to support somebody who has that issue because that's so, in my view, so disqualifying that even though they agree with me on this issue, I'm still not going to support them.' 

But outside of those extreme cases, you have to be able to work with people who don't agree with you on everything. And that is one of the, I think in our current political climate, the people, that's getting more difficult to do because people take, you know, they kind of have these litmus tests for everything. But it's not right. The right thing to do within reason, again, outside of those disqualifying issues is to acknowledge that in the way it works in the world and life and in democracies is that we don't agree with everybody on everything and that's okay. It has to be. 

Personal questions

Towards the end of the event, Bezos lightened up the mood by answering more personal questions. And with that, the 30 minute Q&A session came to an end.

Q: If you had a time machine and could go back to the actual first day at Amazon, what would you do differently? What was that first day like? 

Bezos: I wouldn't do anything differently. It worked out so well (laughs), I would be afraid to change anything I did. I'd eat the same burrito for lunch. I'm telling you.

Q: Do you think that your original inspiration for starting Amazon is still the inspiration that Amazon embodies today? 

Bezos: 100%. The kind of founding idea behind Amazon is Earth's most customer centric company. Customer obsession hasn't changed. It is still our most deeply held principle. Long-term thinking hasn't changed. Willingness to invent, eagerness to invent, willingness to fail, operational excellence, those kinds of things, they have not changed. And they are what, if we stick to those principles and ideals and values, we will continue to do amazing things. Start with the customer, work backwards. Nothing's really changed there. 

Q: What's your number one best piece of advice for new hires? 

Bezos: Be customer obsessed. It's not a difficult question to answer.

Q: Does Jeff wash his head with shampoo or soap?

Bezos: I'm not sure what this question asker is trying to say, but the answer is soap. (laughs)

Original author: Eugene Kim

You can change the cursor size on your Mac computer in just a few steps to make it easier to navigate around your screen.  It's easy to change your cursor size by navigating to the Accessibility settings on your Mac under System Preferences. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Without a cursor, your Mac would be pretty hard to use. In fact, it would be all but impossible to use, save for a few keyboard shortcuts. 

The cursor is what makes it so easy to navigate around your Mac computer, as it lets you easily click on any website or choose where to type on a page. 

But if that cursor is too small for your eyes to see, then it won't do you much good. Fortunately, your Mac makes it easy to make that cursor much larger. Here's how.

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

MacBook Pro (From $1,299.99 at Best Buy)

How to change the cursor size on your Mac computer

1. Click the Apple logo at the top left of your screen and select "System Preferences."

2. Click the "Accessibility" icon, then select "Display" from the left menu.

Original author: Steven John

YouTube has released an annual year-in-review video called "YouTube Rewind" since 2010 as a way to highlight the platform's biggest stars, trends, and moments of the year.However, last year's video was met with widespread criticism and backlash for failing to include some of YouTube's most controversial (and popular) stars, like PewDiePie and Logan and Jake Paul.Ahead of the Rewind 2019 release, YouTube tweeted and shared photos on Instagram hinting that some of those absent YouTubers would be appearing in this year's video.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

It seems that YouTube is trying to rebuild the hype for its annual year-in-review "Rewind" video by teasing that some of the platform's most controversial personalities will make appearances this year.

Although the "Rewind" video for 2019 has not yet been released, YouTube has taken to Instagram to build up anticipation, while also offering teasing hints at what creators could be appearing in the video. The photos include references to popular names like Emma Chamberlain and the wildly popular band BTS, as well as hints at YouTubers who were controversially left out of 2018's Rewind video: PewDiePie, Shane Dawson, and MrBeast.

YouTube was subject to the full wrath of fandom's power after it released its "Rewind 2018" last December to celebrate the platform's biggest creators, trends, and memories. It took less than a week for the video to become the most disliked video in YouTube's history, beating out Justin Bieber's early hit "Baby" for the infamous title.

The reason for fans' severe backlash was simple: YouTube's 2018 video didn't feature some of the platform's most popular personalities. Although more than 130 YouTubers and celebrities made cameos in the video, fans were quick to note that popular creators who were surrounded by drama or controversy were not included.

 

Logan Paul, who early last year posted a video filmed in a Japanese "suicide forest," was left out. So was YouTuber KSI, his rival in now two boxing matches. Logan Paul's younger brother, Jake, who leads the rowdy incubator of YouTubers called Team 10, was also absent from the video. One of YouTube's longest-running stars, Shane Dawson, also failed to make an appearance. That's not to mention that the video also left out PewDiePie, who has yet to escape the shadow of his history of racist and anti-Semitic remarks.

The result, as The Verge's Julia Alexander said, was a video that felt "disingenuous, like YouTube is hiding its uglier side under a carpet while showing guests around."

In response to the backlash, YouTube argued that it was difficult "to capture the magic of YouTube in one single video." While the absences of the other YouTubers in "Rewind 2018" may have been able to be explained away, that explanation doesn't hold as much weight when you consider that PewDiePie is the most-subscribed-to solo creator on the platform. 

If these teasers are an indication, YouTube may be doing what it can to avoid a repeat of last year's debacle.

Original author: Paige Leskin

Generally speaking, the internet is a better place without pop-ups. 

Pop-up windows can often appear on your screen unexpectedly — posing risks for viruses or just providing annoyance — and rarely contribute something meaningful to your browsing experience. 

If you have Google Chrome on your Mac computer, pop-ups will be blocked in the default settings. If, for any reason, you want Chrome to allow pop-ups on your Mac, you can easily change the settings. And you can promptly change them back, too.

Here's how to do it. 

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

MacBook Pro (From $1,299.99 at Best Buy)

How to allow pop-ups on a Mac computer in Google Chrome

1. Open a Google Chrome browser window and click the three dots at the top right corner of the screen, then select Settings.

Original author: Steven John

A Wall Street analyst downgraded Oracle to sell from hold, saying the tech giant will likely take a hit from the ongoing shift to the cloud until 2023.CFRA analyst John Freeman also pulled his Oracle price target to $50 from $56."Even in optimistic scenarios for Oracle, the ongoing shift to cloud computing is increasingly deflationary for revenue and margins until at least fiscal 2023," Freeman said.Click here for more BI Prime stories.

The cloud will be bad news for Oracle over the next three years, a Wall Street analyst said Wednesday.

A CFRA analyst downgraded Oracle to sell from hold on Wednesday, saying the tech giant will likely take a hit from the ongoing shift to cloud computing at least until 2023.

Analyst John Freeman of CFRA also pulled his price target to $50 from $56, telling clients that the ongoing cloud migration, which is seen picking up in the coming years, is bound to hurt Oracle's revenue and profit margins.

"Even in optimistic scenarios for Oracle, the ongoing shift to cloud computing is increasingly deflationary for revenue and margins until at least fiscal 2023," Freeman told clients in a note.

The cloud lets businesses to set up their networks on web-based platforms such as those run by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, allowing them to scale back or even abandon private data centers. 

This has been bad news for traditional enterprise tech companies, such as Oracle and IBM, which sell software and hardware used to run in-house data centers.

These tech giants are scrambling to catch up to the dominant players in the cloud. Oracle is expanding its own cloud infrastructure to challenge Amazon, but a recent Forester report argued that Oracle and IBM have simply fallen so far behind the leaders.

Got a tip about Oracle 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) 731-8429. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Original author: Benjamin Pimentel

Slack's reported Q3 revenue of $168.7 million, an increase of 66 percent from a year prior on Wednesday.But Slack did not provide an update on its active users, a closely watched metric.The company also announced that Chamath Palihapitiya will be stepping down from its board of directors and will be replaced by Michael McNamara. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Slack beat Wall Street financial targets in its third quarter but did not provide an update on its number of daily users — a closely watched gauge of its competition with Microsoft — sending the company's stock see-sawing in after hours trading as investors tried to assess its progress.

Shares of Slack fell as much as 6% in after hours trading, then rebounded and traded up nearly 4%. 

The workplace collaboration company reported quarterly revenue of $168.7 million, an increase of 66 percent from a year prior, and above analyst estimates.

In its second earnings report since entering the public markets through a direct listing in June, Slack said Wednesday that it lost 2 cents per share, excluding certain items, in its fiscal third quarter — better than the 8 cents per share loss that analysts were expecting on an adjusted basis.

The company also announced that Chamath Palihapitiya will be stepping down from its board of directors and will be replaced by Michael McNamara. 

But Slack did not provide updated daily active user numbers, something that has been a point of focus in its ongoing rivalry with Microsoft Teams.

Last month, Microsoft said it had 20 million daily active users putting it ahead of Slack. Microsoft bundles Teams in with its Office 365 productivity suite for business. Analysts have said this gives Microsoft a major advantage that could make it more difficult for Slack to compete.

Slack in October said it has 12 million daily active users. It highlighted user engagement metrics and hours spent on the platform to show how much users like the product. Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield has also previously said Microsoft's behavior is "surprisingly unsportsmanlike" as a business rival, and that the company uses the popularity of Office 365 to push its Teams product on customers.

"As we've said before, you can't transform a workplace if people aren't actually using your product," a Slack spokesperson previously said in a statement.

Slack did provide updated paid user numbers on Wednesday, telling investors it now was 105,000 paid customers, an increase of 30 percent from a year prior. It also said it now has 821 paid customers with greater than $100,000 in annual recurring revenue, up 67 percent from a year prior. 

Slack forecasted revenue of $172 million to $174 million and an adjusted net loss per share of $0.07 to $0.06 for the fourth quarter, in line with analysts previous estimates. For the fiscal 2020 year, Slack is forecasting revenue of $621 million to $623 million and adjusted net loss per share of $0.32 to $0.31.

Here's what Slack reported:

Revenue: $168.7 million. Analysts were expecting $156.23 million.Net loss per share (adjusted): $0.02. Wall Street was looking for a loss of $0.08 loss per share.Revenue (fourth quarter): Between $172 million and $174 million estimated. Analysts had predicted $173.23 million.Net loss per share (adjusted, fourth quarter): $0.07 to $0.06 estimated. Wall Street was forecasting $0.07 loss per share.Paid customers: 105,000 paid customers

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or Signal at 925-364-4258. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Original author: Paayal Zaveri

A few weeks ago, my Toyota RAV4 hybrid endured an indignity. A very low-speed collision put a dent and a scrape in its rear bumper.

Nothing to panic about. Minor impacts are pretty common, and the damage was minimal. 

But it was still noticeable, and the bumper panel was slightly detached from the rest of the body, as well as being scraped. With winter coming, I decided that although I didn't really want to fully repair the damage — a new bumper would be required, and with paint and body work I was looking at a few hundred bucks minimum — I wanted to tidy up the impact.

Minor repairs such as these are easy and worthwhile, as I've already demonstrated by fixing a few scratches on my beloved Toyota Prius.

Here's how I used a $6 roll of tape to solve my problem:

Original author: Matthew DeBord

ByteDance founder & CEO Yiming Zhang is founder and CEO of ByteDance, the firm behind TikTok. Inspirasiku TV/YouTube

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

In a leaked all-hands recording, Jeff Bezos has addressed Amazon's rising political spending. In the meeting last month, Bezos said that except for certain 'extreme' issues, 'you have to be able to work with people who don't agree with you on everything.'TikTok admitted that it hid disabled users' videos appearing on the app's main feed, claiming the 'blunt' policy was used to prevent bullying. The video sharing site admitted that it previously had a policy in place which limited the reach of videos posted by disabled users. The cryptocurrency community is up in arms after programmer Virgil Griffith gave a talk on blockchain in North Korea and was then arrested. Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin defended Griffith, and said he hoped the US "shows strength rather than weakness and focuses on genuine and harmful corruption."Mark Zuckerberg had a secret dinner with Trump in October, and he really doesn't want to share what they talked about. Zuckerberg answered questions about his private October dinner with President Donald Trump for the first time, but he didn't share much.Tinder has said 'there are definitely registered sex offenders on our free products'. While Match Group screens sex offenders on its paid service, Match.com, it doesn't take that step on its free apps, including Tinder.YouTube said it deleted more than 300 Trump reelection campaign ads, without saying exactly why. The site said it removed more than 300 Trump campaign ads, CBS' "60 Minutes" reported. The president has long accused Silicon Valley of being anti-GOP.Amazon is getting into the quantum computing game, which Microsoft, IBM, and Google are already racing in. The tech giant has partnered with the startups D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti to announce a new service that allows people to try quantum computing with the cloud.The FBI says the photo-editing app that went viral this summer is a 'significant counterintelligence threat' because of its ties to Russia. It said FaceApp's Russia ties, which exposed its data to Russia's 'robust cyber exploitation abilities,' made the app a threat.Retailers like Nordstrom and Amazon are selling items like a $60 AirPod 'carrying strap' to capitalize on people's anxiety around losing a wireless earbud. A meme circulating on Monday pokes fun at retailers like Nordstrom and Amazon that have started selling accessories to prevent AirPod loss.Armed robbers raided an Amazon truck just before Black Friday as package theft runs rampant across the country. The robbers made off with 60 packages before fleeing the scene. Police released tips on how to keep your holiday packages from being stolen. 

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: Charlie Wood

Europe has minted a new generation of tech millions after some notable IPOs and acquisitions. These wealthy founders are now re-investing their earnings back into the continent's tech ecosystem.Private wealth has doubled from $33 trillion in 2008 to $70 trillion in 2018 with some 92% of respondents saying they now invest in venture capital, according to a survey by London-based fund Talis Capital. Money committed to VC now outstrips real estate among ultra-high net worth individuals as they hunt for yield outside of traditional assets. Click here for more BI Prime stories.

The young and ultra-wealthy want to pile their billions into tech startups.

Research conducted by Dealroom.co for London-based fund Talis Capital has found that increasing numbers of family offices and ultra-high net worth individuals are committing larger proportions of their finances towards European tech, via venture capital funds.

It's a sign that the continent's ecosystem is becoming more like Silicon Valley where millionaires and tech entrepreneurs are major investors in new startup ventures.

Where previously Amazon founder Jeff Bezos invested in Uber and Twitter, now European tech and other business founders may be well-placed to fuel the next big thing. 

In the past decade, private wealth has doubled from $33 trillion in 2008 to $70 trillion in 2018 with some 92% of respondents saying they now invest in venture capital, according to a survey by Talis Capital.

Talis Capital is a London-based venture capital fund which invests on behalf of wealthy private individuals

Taavet Hinrikus (left) and Kristo Käärmann, founders of European finance firm TransferWise. TransferWise

This is down to a few reasons. One is that some traditional types of investment don't offer the same attractive returns that they used to, such as property. Investors seeking higher returns need to look at riskier models, such as venture capital.

"It's a product of a hunt for yield in private markets and investors turning away from traditional assets," Vasile Foca, cofounder and managing partner at Talis Capital, said in an interview with Business Insider. 

Another reason is that successful exits by European entrepreneurs have created new millionaires who want to put money back into the ecosystem. A notable example in Europe is Skype cofounder Niklas Zennstrom, who set up venture capital firm Atomico.

iZettle, and Adyen are just some of the major European exits in recent years while individual entrepreneurs such as TransferWise cofounder Taavet Hinrikus have been notable investors across a number of sectors. 

These newly wealthy entrepreneurs don't account for all ultra-high net worth individuals investing in venture capital, but Talis believes they account for some of the shift.

Over the past five years, the number of individuals and families using private wealth to directly participate in VC rounds in Europe has grown five-fold to a record-breaking $5 billion. According to the research, 2019 could yet beat that record.

In fact, Dealroom calculates that 20% of new venture capital funds raised in Europe came from private limited partners and that 18% of the $28 billion investment in European startups in 2018 came directly from private wealth.

A survey of investors in the US with more than $25 million to hand earlier this year found that the average age of wealthy investors had dropped to 47, down from a previous 58. While youthfulness doesn't always scream tech savvy, it may well be behind an adoption of hitherto tricky bets.

Research from BNP Paribas found millennials are more than twice as likely to invest in VC funds and startups than other age groups. 

So-called digital natives are more interested in technology but still need help with understanding venture capital as an asset class, according to Matus Maar, cofounder and managing partner at Talis Capital.

"Having more capital means European investors can make bold bets like they can in the US or China," Maar said. "The key is educating investors as to how VC works as it has previously been quite opaque and they need to understand the returns cycle is longer than other assets." 

Similarly, a lack of tech expertise makes it harder for first time venture investors to do the necessary due diligence alone but are still keen to be part of a an exciting part of the market. Since 2013, tech exits in Europe have totalled $354 billion with $115.5 billion worth of exits last year alone with Spotify's $30 billion deal standing out. 

"Everyone knows you need to invest in tech and investors can see that it's not just the US that can create large companies in tech," Foca added.  

Original author: Callum Burroughs

Viral video app TikTok admitted it previously had a policy in place which limited the reach of videos posted by disabled users on the site. German tech blog Netzpolitik first reported on the moderation policy on Monday, saying the company on some occasions hid videos from users who are "susceptible to harassment or cyberbullying based on their physical or mental condition" from its main feed. TikTok in a statement said the "blunt and temporary policy" was "never designed to be a long-term solution" and is no longer in place. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Viral video app TikTok admitted it previously had a policy in place which limited the reach of videos posted by disabled users on the site, claiming that the "blunt and temporary policy" was aimed at curbing bullying. 

German tech blog Netzpolitik first reported on the policy on Monday, citing leaked documents that it obtained from TikTok which outlined its former moderation guidelines, as well as interviews with a source at TikTok with knowledge of the policies. 

According to the Netzpolitik, TikTik's moderation guidelines laid out rules for "Imagery depicting a subject highly vulnerable to cyberbullying." It went on to describe users covered under the policy as people who are "susceptible to harassment or cyberbullying based on their physical or mental condition."

It listed examples which included facial disfigurements, autism, and Down Syndrome, as revealed by screenshots of the policy. 

According to Netzpolitik, TikTok's moderation guidelines limited the visibility of content produced by those users, and people on the app who had disabilities were categorized as "Risk 4," meaning their videos were only visible in the country where it was uploaded. Some users who were deemed by moderators to be particularly vulnerable had their videos hidden from the app's main "For You" feed if they exceeded a certain number of views, which further limited the video's reach. 

The policy was in place until at least September 2019, according to the report. 

TikTok admitted to using the policy but said it was "never designed to be a long-term solution." 

"Early on, in response to an increase in bullying on the app, we implemented a blunt and temporary policy," a spokesperson for TikTok said in a statement.

"This was never designed to be a long-term solution, but rather a way to help manage a troubling trend. While the intention was good, the approach was wrong and we have since changed the earlier policy in favour of more nuanced anti-bullying policies and in-app protections. We continue to grow our teams and capacity and refine and improve our policies, in our ongoing commitment to providing a safe and positive environment for our users."

TikTok has come under fire in recent weeks for its moderation policies after it suspended the account of US teenager Feroza Aziz, who posted a viral video on the app disguised as a makeup tutorial. The video criticized the Chinese government's treatment of Uighur Muslims in China's western autonomous region of Xinjiang.

The company claimed that the suspension of Aziz's account was due to "human error", then issued a lengthy public apology before reinstating her account. In a statement to Business Insider in response to the controversy, TikTok said it "took a blunt approach to minimizing conflict" in its early moderation policies. 

"A previous version of our moderation guidelines allowed penalties to be given for things like content that promotes conflict between religious sects or ethnic groups, spanning a number of regions around the world. The old guidelines in question are outdated and no longer in use."

A report compiled by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute last month also alleged that ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, is working closely with China's government to facilitate human rights abuses against Uighurs through its Chinese apps, an allegation the company denies. 

Original author: Rosie Perper