What is it like to have one of the most valuable companies in the world become your strategic investor?

Amazon is an active corporate investor, ploughing money into other companies directly or via its Alexa Fund. According to the firm's most recent quarterly filing from May, it now owns $2.1 billion in stock from other companies.

That number will have gone up after Amazon led a $575 million investment into British food delivery startup Deliveroo in May 2019.

Amazon hasn't really explained the rationale behind the deal but the thinking is that Deliveroo and its network of food delivery riders might be an interesting solution to the "last-mile" problem in logistics.

Deliveroo's network of riders deliver takeaway food to customers. Reuters

Superficially, it looks like good news when a cash-rich tech giant takes an interest in your startup. But Amazon's history suggests the reality can be more complicated.

In 2016, Amazon invested in a startup called Nucleus, which had created an Alexa-powered video intercom. A year later, Amazon launched an awfully similar product, the Echo Show. The CEO of Nucleus, Jonathan Frankel, was furious and told CNET that his own investor had "probably copied us."

Amazon isn't always so aggressive. The firm invested in doorbell startup Ring, again through its Alexa fund, and then acquired it for $1 billion in one of its biggest-ever deals. That worked out pretty well for the startup and its investors.

Amazon's rumoured acquisition bid and then investment into Deliveroo follows a similar pattern to a much earlier deal with another British company: LoveFilm.

Business Insider spoke to Simon Calver, a British tech investor for BGF Ventures and the former chief executive of LoveFilm.

Amazon first tried to buy LoveFilm in the early 2000s, invested in 2008, then successfully bid again to buy it for $317 million in 2011. LoveFilm became the basis of what is now Amazon Prime Video, Amazon's popular Netflix rival.

Calver was the man who negotiated with Jeff Bezos and the rest of Amazon's leadership over the deal, meaning he has fascinating insight into what it's like to sit across the table from the company when it wants to open its wallet.

"Amazon do have a long-term vision for their business, and what they want the component parts of that to look like. So they are quite deliberate in their thinking in terms of what tech, what people, what capability they need," he said.

"There are other corporate acquirers who are a lot more opportunistic and would think, 'Let's have their capabilities and see what we can do with it.' Amazon will typically have a very well thought-through and detailed plan, so they, therefore, don't enter into anything lightly even though they are sat on large cash piles."

The company that became Amazon Prime Video was originally a strategic investment

LoveFilm let you receive rental DVDs by post.Gwydion M. Williams/Flickr/licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

LoveFilm was a precursor to Netflix, and was hugely innovative at the time. The firm pioneered the concept of posting rental DVDs to people. It sounds outdated now, but was a popular idea.

LoveFilm was itself the composite of a bunch of different British companies all essentially doing the same thing. The various competitors merged under the LoveFilm brand in the mid-2000s and went on to dominate the film rental space in the UK and much of Europe. Shortly after these mergers, the new entity fended off an early acquisition offer from Amazon.

According to Calver, LoveFilm wouldn't have sold so early into its journey "unless it was a silly price." It also believed that it was changing how people watched films at home.

Calver believes that what happened next was unique in Amazon's history.

Amazon had its own DVD rental business, which was mostly second to LoveFilm across Europe but did have a strong customer base in Germany. LoveFilm decided to approach Amazon about a deal, and eventually acquired its UK and Germany DVD business.

"We approached them to combine forces in 2008," Calver said. "They became a shareholder in us, and we joined Amazon DVD and LoveFilm. We acquired the customers, but we didn't really acquire the people. I don't know of any other situation where Amazon has sold a customer set, that was unique."

The deal involved Amazon becoming LoveFilm's biggest shareholder (with more than 35% of the business) and putting in some additional cash. Amazon's then-global media boss, Greg Greeley, took a board seat. The ensuing competition investigation also cost LoveFilm almost £1 million in legal fees.

The situation is not unlike Deliveroo's. Amazon was the biggest investor in Deliveroo's latest round, has a board seat, and is likely now a major shareholder.

This can have risks. "You're in a situation where you potentially have your major strategic acquirer sat around your board table," said Calver.

As both a strategic investor and potential acquirer, such a powerful shareholder can "hold you hostage" down the line — especially if they're the only potential buyer. Calver adds that Amazon never did abuse its power. "They never played that card. It was never acrimonious. However it was a risk," he said.

Having Amazon on the board was awkward as LoveFilm considered alternative exit strategies like an IPO

Simon Calver, former CEO of LoveFilm and now founding partner of BGF Ventures. BGF Ventures

Around 2010, LoveFilm's streaming service took off and became available on third-party platforms like the Xbox. It also began considering its exit strategy. This is when startups sell to an acquirer or go public so its original investors and shareholders can get their money back.

"Our preferred exit route was through IPO," Calver said. But given LoveFilm was evolving its DVD rental business and developing streaming, it had to work out how it was going to get hold of enough cash to buy content.

Netflix has a similar problem and burns through considerable cash so it can buy original content like "Bird Box".

Calver said: "What became increasingly apparent is that if we needed to raise $100 million every two years to invest in digital content as a relatively small, sub-scale public company, that would always be difficult.

"So we began to look at strategic options, ideally a partnership with somebody who would be a content owner, where we could use the distribution of LoveFilm to distribute their content."

As Netflix would go on to do, LoveFilm began talking to Hollywood studios.

Original content like Netflix's "Birdbox" is expensive. Netflix Amazon, meanwhile, was considering its strategy around what would become Amazon Prime Video. The success of LoveFilm's app on different digital platforms like Xbox, and its strong customer set, made it a tempting acquisition proposition once again.

"It was being a successful, growing digital business that triggered the interest," Calver said.

Several complex things began happening simultaneously.

LoveFilm kicked off talks with Amazon as a possible acquirer. At the same time, it began exploring an IPO, and mulling other potential acquirers — all while Amazon was on its board. Meanwhile, some of LoveFilm's own shareholders were trying to cash out of the business by selling their shares to Amazon in a secondary trade, while unaware Amazon was also trying to buy the whole company.

"This is where having a strategic on board can be a challenge," said Calver wryly. "When you're at an early-stage startup, managing your internal shareholders can be as much a challenge as managing an external acquirer. I think that's where [LoveFilm cofounder] Saul Klein and I smile about the experiences we had together.

"We had some members of the shareholder base who were not aware we were negotiating with Amazon for a larger deal, who'd been offered less money from Amazon for their shares and we would not let them sell at a lower price, because we knew we were negotiating a deal at a higher price for them and couldn't let them know."

These shareholders took out their frustration on LoveFilm's leadership, Calver added. After some months of haggling, Amazon was successful in its bid. Ultimately, Calver said, the outcome was the right one for LoveFilm.

Bezos told LoveFilm's executives: 'It's go big or go home time'

He stayed on for a year at Amazon post-acquisition ("I took the orange") and credits Amazon for freeing up cash to build up the business. He recalled one meeting where he and other execs pitched Jeff Bezos directly for investment to buy content.

"They really committed to building content, so we could compete," Calver said. "There was one meeting with Jeff Bezos, where we put forward a content proposal plan [which needed] $100 million over two years. And he was like, 'It's go big or go home time, we acquired you to be big.' It was off you go, here's a $100 million. If we'd tried to raise that in a public market, it would have taken forever."

As for what this means for Deliveroo, Calver says that LoveFilm ultimately helped Amazon build a new product: its streaming video business.

"The question for Deliveroo is whether it becomes an Amazon product, a branded Amazon product, or be maintained as a separate product and service," he said. "I don't know their strategic decision, but the more integrated it is to their core proposition, the more likely it's going to end up being Amazon."

Autonomous vehicle technology company Velodyne Lidar has hired bankers for an IPO, according to sources familiar with the process.

Velodyne Lidar, which makes a laser technology that helps self-driving cars detect the objects around them, is working with Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Royal Bank of Canada, and William Blair for a potential public float, the people said.

The company is looking to surpass its last private valuation of $1.8 billion and go public before the end of the year, one person said.

Though autonomous vehicle technology is in its early days, Velodyne Lidar traces its origins back to 1983, the founding year of its parent company, Velodyne Acoustics.

The company started making lidar technology around 2005, and then spun off from the audio division in 2016 with $150 million in financial backing from Ford and Baidu.

Velodyne closed $25 million funding round led by Japanese multinational Nikon at the end of 2018.

Read more: Uber insiders describe infighting and questionable decisions before its self-driving car killed a pedestrianGoing public would make Velodyne the first IPO in the emerging autonomous vehicle technology space.

The company's plans come at a high-stakes moment for the autonomous vehicle sector. Self-driving cars are at the brink of commercial adoption but the space continues to face public set-backs, including a fatal accident in which one of Uber's self-driving cars struck a pedestrian in March 2018.

Yet money continues to flow into the sector as competition grows between some of the biggest players, which include Google's Waymo, Tesla, GM's Cruise, and Intel/MobileEye. GM's self-driving car unit Cruise raised $1.15 billion in May from GM, the SoftBank Vision Fund, and Honda. That round valued Cruise at $19 billion.

In June, Apple reportedly bought self-driving car startup Drive.ai, an acquihire which gives the company access to more engineers from the AV world. Drive.ai was last valued at $200 million, according to PitchBook.

Quanergy Systems, one of Velodyne's biggest competitors, previously spoke to banks about going public though by August 2018 it had put those plans on hold, Bloomberg reported.

Quanergy and Velodyne are engaged in a patent dispute over a Velodyne patent for a "high definition lidar system." The US Patent Trial and Appeals Board upheld Velodyne's patent at the end of May, though Quanergy has since said it plans to appeal that ruling.

Velodyne, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Citigroup declined to comment. Royal Bank of Canada and William Blair did not respond to a request for comment.

Two years ago, the starting price of the newest iPhone was $650.

Today, the newest iPhones start at $750 and $1,000.

Hold onto your current smartphone for as long as you can. Here's why.

Microsoft does not allow its employees to use Slack, GeekWire's Nat Levy and Todd Bishop reported, citing an internal document.

Read more: Inside Slack's direct listing: Here's what actually went down between the tech company and its Wall Street advisers

While Microsoft has a rival workplace chat app, called Microsoft Teams, the tech company reportedly cites security risks as the reason for its internal Slack ban. The company gives the following explanation in an internal list of software and online services it restricts or discourages employees from using, according to GeekWire:

Slack Free, Slack Standard and Slack Plus versions do not provide required controls to properly protect Microsoft Intellectual Property (IP). Existing users of these solutions should migrate chat history and files related to Microsoft business to Microsoft Teams, which offers the same features and integrated Office 365 apps, calling and meeting functionality. Learn more about the additional features that Teams can provide your workgroup. Slack Enterprise Grid version complies with Microsoft security requirements; however, we encourage use of Microsoft Teams rather than a competitive software.

Microsoft also reportedly prohibits employees from using the grammar-checking app Grammarly and the Kapersky security software. It discourages employees from using Amazon Web Services, Google Docs, PagerDuty, and the cloud version of GitHub, according to GeekWire.

Microsoft and Slack did not immediately respond to Business Insider's requests for comment.

Slack named Microsoft as its primary competitor in a regulatory filing sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission in April, and Microsoft listed Slack among its competitors in its most recent annual report. Microsoft launched Teams in 2016, seven years after Slack was founded.

Slack began listing its shares on public markets on Thursday. They closed 5% below their debut price on Friday.

The price of a single bitcoin exceeded $10,000 for the first time since March 2018 on Friday, according to CoinDesk.

The milestone followed Facebook's June 18 announcement that it will introduce a digital currency, Libra, and an app, Calibra, that will allow users to send and receive the currency and use it to make purchases online. Facebook's announcement came four months after JPMorgan became the first major US bank to create a digital currency.

Read more: Facebook's facing a bunch of questions about its new cryptocurrency. How it addresses them will make or break the service.

Both moves were striking due to the significant roles the companies play in the technology and finance industries and the heated debate about the long-term prospects of bitcoin and other digital currencies.

Aside from those announcements, bitcoin has experienced strong 2019 growth despite its epic fall in 2018. It's experienced over 150% growth this year. That number far exceeds the growth of the S&P 500, gold, and US oil, which have reportedly all seen less that 20% growth, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Of course, an outsized rise is also what precipitated the bitcoin crash last year.

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said in September 2017 that bitcoin was a fraud and that he would fire employees who traded it. Four months later, he said he regretted those comments. Famed investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett has compared bitcoin to rat poison, while Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has expressed enthusiasm for the digital currency.

Bitcoin's price has experienced significant volatility during the past two years. It rose to nearly $20,000 in December 2017 before falling to around $3,200 a year later.

The Chinese tech company Huawei filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Commerce on Friday alleging that it has "unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed agency action" on unspecified telecommunications equipment that it seized in 2017, Bloomberg reported.

In the lawsuit, Huawei reportedly said that it had sent the equipment to be tested in a California lab in July 2017. The tech giant said the equipment was taken by the US government as it was being returned to China due to uncertainty over whether the equipment required an export license, according to Bloomberg.

Huawei reportedly argued that the equipment didn't need an export license and that it had given the US all of the information it asked for. The company said in the lawsuit that the US has not yet come to a decision on whether the equipment can be returned to China, according to Bloomberg.

Read more: Huawei is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad few months, and it's not likely to get better anytime soon

Huawei and the Department of Commerce did not immediately respond to Business Insider's requests for comment.

The lawsuit adds another layer to the increasing tension between Huawei and the US government.

In December, Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Canada on charges of violating US trade sanctions against Iran.

The arrest came months before Commerce Department effectively banned American companies from working with Huawei, saying the company's operations posed a threat to US national security and foreign policy, though comments from President Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have suggested the ban is related to the trade war between the US and China.

The tension seems to be taking its toll on the tech giant, as Huawei has since delayed product releases and cut revenue expectations for this year.

Deepfakes, videos that have been manipulated to make it look like the subject is realistically saying or doing something they didn't, have officially entered the mainstream.

In 2019, fake videos of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and "Game of Thrones" character Jon Snow went viral and inspired responses from some of the most powerful people in the world.

The mode of manipulation, and deepfakery as a pastime, was seemingly popularized around pornography, in which denizens of certain online communities would swap celebrity faces with those found in porn. Now, following earlier warnings in 2017 around the initial deepfake movement, the nightmare scenario has become a reality as some of the most influential people in the world, and their audiences, have become targets of deepfakers.

This is how deepfakes catapulted into the mainstream consciousness, and a look at what's actually at stake when considering the rise of fake video.

Oracle has been conducting rolling layoffs worldwide since March, impacting all sorts of business units within the company, including its all-important cloud divisions. While the company has publicly acknowledged the layoffs, management hasn't discussed details like how many jobs will be cut or when the restructuring will end.

Oracle may not have an end date in mind at all. The company has engaged in ongoing layoffs since at least 2013.

Still, on Wednesday, after Oracle reported its fiscal 2019 Q4 earnings, founder, chairman and CTO Larry Ellison gave some insight into what's going on, saying that some of Oracle's businesses "are melting away and we just don't care. We are focused on our star products and our star products are now driving our top line higher."

He said shrinking businesses included some old-school, on premises software products. That seems obvious as Oracle is now pushing its customers to buy the cloud versions of many of its products.

Read: Larry Ellison is cautiously optimistic that Oracle's new cloud database will succeed, even though it doesn't have many customers yet

He also cited Oracle's ever-shrinking hardware business, the result of its $7.2 billion acquisition of Sun back in 2010. Oracle's hardware business has been declining almost since Oracle closed the deal, and some of the hardware businesses shrunk another 25% in the latest quarter, one of Oracle's co-CEOs, Mark Hurd, said on Wednesday during that same analysts call. Hardware declined 11% overall in the quarter.

Oracle has been laying off people from that unit for years. In 2017, it reportedly laid off about 2,500 employees from the old Sun business, ZDNet reported.

But Ellison also threw Oracle's Data Cloud business into the "shrinking, we-don't-care" bucket blaming the unit's problems on "all the privacy issues," he said.

Data Cloud was formed through a series of acquisitions of online advertising data companies like BlueKai, Datalogix, and Moat. Oracle spent about $3 billion on six key acquisitions for the unit, Ad Exchanger reports

By 2017, Oracle was considered one of the power players in the data broker industry, gathering data on consumers and watching their online activity to help brands target digital ads.

Then came the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Europe's GDPR privacy law. Oracle shut down one of its ad tracking products in Europe in March, Ad Exchanger reported.

Ellison explained this week that the growth from several of Oracle's successful products was starting to outpace shrinkage from the who-cares declining units. These outperformers, he said, includes Oracle's own home-grown cloud applications and NetSuite, the cloud software company Oracle bought for $9.3 billion in 2016. (Ellison owned 40% of NetSuite when Oracle bought it, upsetting some Oracle shareholders with the price paid.)

Read: Oracle revoked job offers for some people in the UK, blaming a hiring freeze. Yet it says it's both hiring and still restructuring.

So, while he admitted that Oracle's overall growth has been modest — annual revenues increased 2% — "underneath that, there's really a lot of activity, you have these very, these modern businesses like the autonomous database, Fusion, NetSuite growing very rapidly, taking share," he said.

"So yeah, there are some of our businesses that are not, if you will, hot. But the good news is, the hot businesses are now bigger than the not-so-hot businesses, and that's determining our future," he said.

Despite the layoffs, Oracle says it is hiring globally. A spokesperson tells Business Insider, "Every year Oracle hires tens of thousands of employees and we are currently hiring globally and in every line of business, including OCI Gen2. Enabling our customers' success has always been a top priority for Oracle. We are laser-focused on delivering the best cloud products that drive efficiencies, fuel innovation and impact the bottom line for our customers around the world."

Slack has completely changed the way millions of people communicate at work. Long, formal emails are out; casual, rapid-fire chats are in.

But even as Slack's messaging platform spreads to more offices and its now publicly-traded stock wins the hearts of investors, the time-tested email is unlikely to disappear. Think about an important note to a manager or a marketing outreach to a potential customer — email is still probably the best means to communicate in certain situations.

That's giving hope to companies like Google and Microsoft, who are betting their email products can not only co-exist with chat, but that email can make chat better.

"There's the classic user that likes to keep email and chat separately," Jacob Bank, Gmail's director of product management, told Business Insider in a recent interview. "But according to our research, the vast majority are just frustrated by having to constantly keep tabs on two separate places."

At this year's Cloud Next conference, Google announced it would be moving its Hangouts Chat for team collaboration (a messaging app similar to Slack) directly into its email service, Gmail. Emails would not be converted into chat messages (the two would be clearly distinctly marked as such), but Hangouts Chat would now live on a sidebar within Gmail itself.

Read more: Inside Slack's direct listing: Here's what actually went down between the tech company and its Wall Street advisers

Bank also said one of the biggest challenges for a company to adopt a new product — like a chat service— is getting everyone on board. If some people use it, but others don't, communication can break down. But because people already use Gmail daily, Bank thinks adopting Hangouts Chat into daily workflows will be a more seamless experience for users.

"When teams are adopting a new chat product, for it to really work, everyone's gotta go all in," Bank said. "The advantage of bringing team messaging to Gmail is that it's a tool everyone already uses, so you don't have this 'one person left behind' problem."

Hangouts Chat will be integrated into Gmail for all G Suite users by the end of this summer. Google

The Google product update that moves Hangouts Chat to Gmail has so far been rolled out only to a limited number of beta users, with plans for a formal launch to its more than 5 million enterprise customers later this summer.

But if Microsoft's group chat product — known as Microsoft Teams — is any indication, the future may be bright for Google. As of this March, 500,000 companies were using Microsoft Teams with 150 of those customers having more than 10,000 users. Slack does not release the number of organizations using its product, but said in January that it had over 10 million paying users.

The possible future for Hangouts Chat

Beyond the convenience factor of having a chat service within Gmail, Google thinks it has some other advantages as well. For one, Bank said his team is working on a way for users to better manage the barrage of chats and emails they receive.

Over the years, Gmail has created multiple ways for recipients to make sure they're not "dropping the ball" on incoming emails by offering features like labeling, read receipts, and automated nudges. Today, Bank says chat has "none or very little" of those features, but he wants that to change. Bank envisions a world where marking an email and a chat as "unread," for instance, will function in similar ways.

"Notifications can be handled in a unified way. Triage actions like, 'I want to star this or mark this as unread or snooze this,' can be handled in a unified way. Search can be handled in a unified way," Bank said. "The idea is that your inbox that we've built — all these tools to help you get back to things — can help you across channels."

With a research background in time management and also having started a company focused on the topic, Bank is especially interested in how communication tools can become less distracting.

In future iterations of Gmail and Hangouts Chat, Bank hopes to offer users insights into which channel — email or chat — should be used given the recipient and the time. If you're trying to send a chat message to someone across the world, for example, and it's late there, Bank thinks users should be prompted to send an email instead (since email is asynchronous and the expectation isn't that you'll respond right away, which is often the case with chat).

"This is a really important product principle for us. We want to give humans the information they need to make the right choice," Bank said. "Most of the interrupting people do is not out of malice. It's just out of a lack of information, a lack of tooling, and a lack of contextual intelligence within the tools."

Bank said his team will also bring in information from a users' Google Calendar to let people know if they're busy or not.

Too big to fail?

When Google launched its Hangout Chat product in 2017 it had the luxury of rolling it out to an existing base of 3 million businesses. By the end of 2018, G Suite had over 5 million corporate customers.

And to further spread its chat service, Google announced at Cloud Next in March that it will release a feature known as "Guest Access," which allows users in one company to chat with those in another organization on Hangouts Chat. Guest Access also allows Hangouts Chat users to talk with people using their personal Gmail accounts. Currently, there are 1.5 billion Gmail users worldwide.

Google's aggressive campaign to capture more of the chat market, and the advantages it has through integration with its existing products and customers, could present a threat to Slack's fast-growing chat business. But Google's chat ambitions are also playing out against a backdrop of political backlash towards tech giants and the potential of antitrust investigations to determine if companies like Google are too big and powerful.

So far, the antitrust conversation has revolved primarily around online advertising and e-commerce. But the battle for the emerging chat market could provide fresh ammunition to Google's critics.

When asked if he was concerned about the timing of Google's push into the enterprise chat market, Bank said: "We have a bunch of users in Gmail who are trying to communicate and collaborate with their teams and it would be crazy for us to try and not create a better experience for them. Our Gmail users tell us they want help getting their work done and we want to help them."

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, meanwhile, is even wishing Slack "continued success."

A Google engineer is using his drag persona to teach novices how to code on YouTube.

The engineer, Billy Jacobson, began performing as "Anna Lytical" almost two years ago, but only launched the YouTube channel four months ago. The name Anna Lytical is a nod to his personality. "I'll always be analytical even if I'm not Anna Lytical," Jacobson said in an interview with Megan Friedman for Google's Passion Projects series about employees.

Besides teaching beginners the " holy trinity" of web development — HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — Anna Lytical is creating an inclusive space for coders to-be, which in turn will make technology more representative of all folks who use it.

"I'm a drag queen and a software engineer, and I want you — queer person, feminine person, woman, anyone who supports this — I want you to learn how to code," Anna Lytical says in a January video titled "ATTENTION QUEENS: learn to code & take over the world w/ me."

"Technology is all around us, the websites we use, the apps we use. If we do not take part in building the technology around us then we will not be represented in it," Anna Lytical continues.

Anna Lytical goes on to outline the lack of representation we're already seeing in technology, like getting on a dating app and then finding that it doesn't fit your needs correctly, or filling out a form that only gives you two gender options. This exclusivity of technology can be ameliorated by code, and having diverse coders to program it, Anna Lytical says.

"We're going to build websites together, we're going to build apps together. For now, I'll be your representation: I'll build the kinds of apps we want to see in the world, I'll use the references we know," Anna Lytical concludes.

The genesis of Anna Lytical

Anna Lytical with a Google Chrome-inspired eye Anna Lytical

"A few years ago, I was feeling kind of lost in New York City, a city I'd grown up in and, at one point, felt so connected to," Jacobson said in an interview with Business Insider. "One way I'd felt connected to New York was through performances."

Around the same time, he began re-watching "RuPaul's Drag Race" and consequently attending drag shows in the city.

"There's something about it that really drew me in," Jacobson said. "I saw a place where I'd get to have a queer, LGBT audience, and get to do whatever I wanted."

And so Anna Lytical was conceived.

Anna Lytical appeared in around 10 performances, first doing traditional drag acts, à la lip sync, but then beginning to mix in skills Jacobson acquired through his day job as an engineer.

On Halloween at one of Anna Lytical's haunts, Pieces gay bar in Greenwich Village, Anna Lytical did a performance mashing up "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and the song "Blue" by Marina and the Diamonds. Anna Lytical made a blue dress with an explosive baking soda and vinegar mix that would inflate the outfit when she removed her belt, just like the Willy Wonka character of Violet Beauregarde, who physically swells into a giant blueberry when she eats a three-course dinner chewing gum with a blueberry pie dessert.

Anna Lytical eventually went on hiatus, as Jacobson found drag competitions to be physically taxing — before even hitting the stage, it takes two hours for Anna Lytical to do makeup, hair, and clothes — but work soon sparked an idea for Anna Lytical's next venture.

"I work in developer relations at Google, so it's our job to explain to other engineers how to use our tech, and that inspired me a little," Jacobson explained. "People on my team make videos to show how to use the Google Cloud products, so (I thought) maybe there's something here to do with my drag."

Enter Anna Lytical, the queen of code.

"I look at drag queens, and they are problem solvers."

Anna Lytical think of the YouTube channel, which currently has more than 1,400 subscribers, as a college for coding, with each video series serving as a class. The current series, "Beyond Binary: Intro to Computer Science," launched on Wednesday. In it, Anna Lytical teaches in a self-described Suze Orman-meets-Rachel Maddow look, blazer and all. The series will be all about creative problem solving with code.

Anna Lytical's videos marry drag culture and queer culture with coding concepts: "Show off your sickening MUG: Adding images to your site," "As queer people, we get to choose our family...our font-family: Intro to Google fonts," and "Programming is a construct, TEAR IS APART: Is HTML Programming?" are just some of the tutorial titles.

Inclusivity and representation are the ultimate goals of Anna Lytical's videos, with the intended audience being folks who are often at the periphery of computer science.

"The people I'm trying to target are young queer artists," Anna Lytical said. "I see these people who might be doing drag as their art — makeup, sewing, styling wigs — or LGBT people who are making fan art for their favorite diva. The skills that they need, that they (already) have to do all these things, translate so well into those skills you need to be a good engineer."

"I look at drag queens, and they are problem solvers. They have $5 and they want to make an outfit, they're going to make something gorgeous," Anna Lytical continued. "Creative problem solving is what makes a good engineer, so if I can show that to someone who is already doing that kind creative problem solving, hopefully I can get some of them into the world of tech."

SpaceX is gearing up for the third-ever launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket: the world's most powerful operational launch system.

The mission, called Space Test Program-2 (STP-2), is slated to lift off between 11:30 p.m. ET on June 24 and 2:30 a.m. ET on June 25, weather permitting.

When it does, the rocket will propel 24 satellites into orbit around Earth — as well as the ashes of 152 dead people.

The launch of cremated remains is facilitated by a company called Celestis Memorial Spaceflights, which purchases available room on spacecraft, installs a container, then packs it with small metal capsules filled with ashes. It refers to these as " participants."

But for these ashes to enter orbit as intended, SpaceX first has to pull off what Elon Musk, the rocket company's founder, has called "our most difficult launch ever."

The variety and complexity of the two dozen satellites and their payloads is to blame: The various spacecraft have to be deployed into several different orbits using multiple engine burns, according to SpaceX. One of the satellites being launched holds NASA's Deep Space Atomic Clock, which may change the way robots and astronauts navigate through space. Another has the Planetary Society's LightSail, an experiment that could change how vehicles propel themselves to a destination.

The ash capsules are stowed on the same spacecraft as NASA's clock.

An illustration of the Orbital Test Bed satellite, which contains multiple experimental payloads — and human ashes.General Atomics

SpaceX has launched cremains into orbit before, but the company doesn't work directly with families to memorialize loved ones by flying their ashes into space.

That responsibility on this mission goes to Celestis. Since its founding in 1994, the company has flown cremains on 15 different rockets: eight up-and-down suborbital flights, six into orbit around Earth, and one that crashed into the moon.

Current and future "participants" include children, space enthusiasts, scientists, engineers, astronauts, authors, and more. For example, Celestis flew some ashes of geologist and planetary scientist Eugene Shoemaker to the moon in 1998, and took the remains of "Star Trek" actor James "Scotty" Doohan into orbit in 2008. (Doohan's ashes also launched to the International Space Station in 2012, and even more await a future " Enterprise" flight into deep space.)

The location of a sleeve of Celestis capsules filled with the ashes of 152 different people on the Orbital Test Bed satellite.General Atomics

For SpaceX's STP-2 mission, Celestis bought spare room aboard the Orbital Test Bed satellite, which is also flying NASA's experimental atomic clock (among other payloads).

The Celestis payload is flat metal sleeve. Technicians glued each of the 152 capsules inside the sleeve, then bolted it to the upper deck of the satellite.

A technician inserts Celestis capsules filled with the ashes of 152 different people on the Orbital Test Bed satellite.General Atomics

Not every capsule is the same size or weight: A family can choose to fly between 1 gram and 7 grams of ashes (between a US dollar bill and a US dollar coin's worth of mass).

"The Gemini capsules house two individuals at 1 gram each. The Flight Module houses 7 grams of one individual," a spokesperson for the Smithsonian Channel, which is producing a documentary about Celestis called "Heavenly Bodies," told Business Insider. "Most people select to fly 1 gram in a single capsule."

Many capsules have tombstone-like sayings etched into them. An inscription of one capsule flying aboard the upcoming STP-2 mission flight reads "Reach for the stars!" and another says "Space Truckin' Forever." The capsule of a now-deceased couple says: "THEY LIFT OFF TOGETHER!"

Capsules filled with the ashes of 152 different people is scheduled to launch aboard one of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rockets.Surrey Satellite Technology US

Prices to send ashes into space start at just under $5,000 for orbital flights, according to Celestis' website, while deep-space and lunar flights begin at $12,500.

If that doesn't strike you as an appealing end-of-life option, there are an increasing variety of alternatives to traditional burial and cremation. More and more US states are permitting preservative-free "green" burials, while others now allow body composting and even dissolving corpses with alkaline hydrolysis.

You can even forge friends, family, and pets into eerie blue diamonds.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring in to companies that are building technology to keep Kubernetes cloud-software technology safe.

It's a market that is likely to continue to accelerate in the months ahead as organizations increasingly rely on Kubernetes for day-to-day operations, and asthe risks of potential security exploits grow.

Kubernetes is an open source cloud-software project, first developed by Google five years ago as a way to help manage its own container infrastructure. In 2019, Kubernetes has moved far beyond Google and is now developed under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), with support on Amazon's and Microsoft's public cloud platforms. Kubernetes is also widely used by organizations large and small including Tesla, Spotify, CERN, eBay, IBM, Oracle and both Uber and Lyft, among others. Even Apple is getting in on the game, announcing on June 11 that it has joined the CNCF as a platinum end user member.

Read more: Everything you need to know about Kubernetes, the Google-created open source software so popular even Microsoft and Amazon had to adopt it

Containers, as first popularized by Docker, provide a way for developers to compactly build and deliver applications. A "containerized" application is highly portable and runs on top of a container engine that an organization can choose to runs on-premises, or in the cloud. Kubernetes integrates a container engine, and provides a way for companies to run and deploy large volumes of containers in a coordinated and resilient way. As companies big and small use containers to deploy and run applications that are part of business operations, there is a need to make sure they stay secure. Simply put, a security issue in a company's container and Kubernetes stack could put the company at risk from un-intentional data disclosure or even a full scale data breach.

One of the core promises of Kubernetes, and the container technology on which it relies, is that there is a certain degree of security control. As it turns out though, the built-in security that comes with a standard Kubernetes deployment is not always enough to deal with the modern threat landscape.

The emerging market for Kubernetes security solutions has grown as Kubernetes adoption has grown.

The need and the demand for Kubernetes security solutions was on display at the recent KubeCon conference in Barcelona last month, where security vendors exhibited and there were multiple co-located security focused events as interest in the topic expands. For most organizations, it is all about minimizing the risk around their cloud presence.

"Containers address some of the traditional shortcomings of security and at the same time, they have introduced new attack vectors," Varun Badhwar, Senior Vice President of Products and Engineering, Public Cloud at Palo Alto Network, told Business Insider. "Organizations will want to ensure that they have their bases covered and will want to have a container security strategy in place."

A $410 million bet on container security

Palo Alto Networks, a $19 billion networking company, has a particular viewpoint on Kubernetes security that is backed by a big bet. At the end of May, Palo Alto Networks announced its intention to acquire privately-held container security vendor Twistlock in a deal valued at $410 million. Twistlock was founded in 2015 and had raised $63 million in venture funding.

Robert Ackerman, founder and a managing director of AllegisCyber Capital, a Silicon Valley early-stage cybersecurity venture capital firm, commented that he now sees container security as being "table stakes" for security vendors to have as a capability.

"The Twistlock valuation not only reflects the strength of the company's technology, but also Palo Alto Networks conviction around the market opportunity," Ackerman told Business Insider. "There is a tremendous amount of future growth factored into the purchase price."

Twistlock is just one of many vendors that have emerged over the past five years, seeking to fill the security gaps in container and Kubernetes deployments. Rival vendor Aqua Security was also founded in 2015 and completed its $62 million Series C round of funding in April, with total funding to date of $100 million.

Amir Jerbi, co-founder and CTO of Aqua Security, told Business Insider that in his view, it's likely that more acquisitions will occur in the container security space, though he's not currently looking at his own company to be one of them.

Container security vendor StackRox got its start in 2014 and has raised $39 million in funding to date. Kamal Shah, president and CEO of StackRox, told Business Insider that as with any strategic market, he does expect additional merger and acquisition activity in the container security space.

"It's clear from industry conversations we're having that interest in the container security space keeps increasing," Shah explained. "Organizations realize they need to address security and compliance requirements for cloud-native applications, and existing security vendors lack offerings in this area."

Sysdig is another vendor that is active in the container security space, and has raised $121 million in funding for its platforms, which have a strong focus on application visibility. Sysdig CEO Suresh Vasudevan told Business Insider that one of the best signs of an emerging market is when an incumbent places a huge bet of several hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire a startup focused on securing containers - which is to say, what Palo Alto did with Twistlock.

What's wrong with plain-old Kubernetes?

The need to provide additional security controls for Kubernetes isn't just hype from these companies, either. There have been multiple publicly reported incidents involving containers in recent years that have raised concerns.

The concerns involve both the configuration of Kubernetes, as well as the applications that run on top of it. The risk to organizations is straightforward: if Kubernetes is somehow compromised, an attacker could gain access to information and corporate resources.

One very public incident occurred in 2018, when electric car vendor Tesla was foundto be running a Kubernetes cluster with an unsecured dashboard to power its cloud services. At the time, the default Kubernetes installation didn't require the use of a username and password to set up the dashboard, which provided access to running Kubernetes resources. Attackers were reportedly able to discover the unsecured dashboard and used the resources to run an cryptocurrency mining operation, until it was discovered and shut down.

It wasn't just Tesla, either. Security firm Lacework reported that it discovered 300 entirely open Kubernetes dashboards on the public internet, that didn't have any basic username/password protection. The lack of dashboard security by default is just one of a myriad of details that companies need to consider when deploying Kubernetes.

Looking beyond just potential gaps in Kubernetes itself are concerns about applications. Kubernetes is infrastructure software that enables applications to run in a highly agile and resilient manner. It's entirely possible that an organization could end up running insecure or malicious software on top of a seemingly secure infrastructure platform.

An obvious market opportunity

Properly configuring and tuning Kubernetes to be secure is not an easy task. It's also an obvious market opportunity for security vendors that are racing to help organizations.

StackRox's Shah commented that while containers and Kubernetes do have native security capabilities, there is also a need to ensure that these technologies are properly configured during before they're formally rolled out. Additionally, Shah said that it's critical that organizations put controls in place to detect and stop bad actors who still manage to find ways to break in, even once everything is up and running.

Like other forms of modern application deployment, there is also a need for visibility into what's running to help ensure compliance with different policies. Regulatory compliance is a hot button issue for many companies, whether it's compliance with PCI-DSS for payment card security, HIPAA for sensitive health information, or data privacy with the GDPR and other emerging efforts.

M&A is coming

Though Kubernetes is only five years old, it's clear at this point that it is a technology that is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

"Containers and Kubernetes are the foundation of a generational shift in infrastructure, and every significant IT vendor will need a product strategy aimed at being relevant in the cloud-native market," Vasudevan said.

Chenxi Wang has a unique viewpoint on the emerging landscape for Kubernetes security. From 2015 to 2017, she worked as the Chief Strategy Officer at Twistlock, and in 2018 became the managing general partner of Rain Capital, which has investments in several security vendors. In her view, container and Kubernetes security is a "must have" for both end users and security vendors.

"In 2015 and 2016, when I was with Twistlock, people were asking 'is this container thing going to take off? Is this market going to be around in a few years?' and now it is hard to find a single company that does not have some kind of container workloads running in their environment," Wang said. "If you are running apps in containers but do not have sufficient capabilities to protect them, you are exposing your company to threats."

While Kubernetes is here to stay, for Steve Herrod, Managing Director at venture capitalist firm General Catalyst, it's still early days for the container security market. Herrod is no stranger to emerging categories, as prior to becoming a venture capitalist he helped to lead VMware as the company's CTO.

"I think the demand is generally following the movement of the most mission-critical applications and data into containers, which continues to ramp," Herrod told Business Insider.

Containers and Kubernetes however are not the only concern that companies have from a security perspective. Most enterprises that Herrod meets are looking for solutions that tie into non-container pieces of a workload protection approach.

"Enterprises are looking for vendors that will be good today and tomorrow, so as many of them are making buying decisions, they're looking for at least a story about how Kubernetes will fit into the product plans moving forward," Herrod said. "So the bigger vendors will continue to buy the new vendors for the foreseeable future."

When Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage at Stanford University's commencement ceremony last Sunday, he urged graduates to learn from the recent controversies that have surrounded Silicon Valley tech giants like Facebook and Google in recent years.

"Lately, it seems this industry is becoming better known for a less noble innovation: the belief that you can claim credit without accepting responsibility," Cook said. "We see it every day now. With every data breach, every privacy violation, every blind eye turned to hate speech. Fake news poisoning our national conversation. The miracles in exchange for a single drop of your blood."

Cook made a powerful statement about accepting responsibility when addressing Stanford's 2019 graduates, but it's just one of the many lessons he imparted to college graduates this year.

Google is known for adding fun tricks and games to its services for tech-savvy users and developers to discover. In honor of Pride Month, the tech giant has added a Pride-ful one to make your bland spreadsheets a bit more exciting.

Adding a special function to the A1 cell in Google Sheets will change your spreadsheet from drab black-and-white page to a colorful rainbow sheet celebrating the LGBTQ community. The trick — also called an "Easter egg" — was shared by Ben Collins, a Google Sheets developer who runs a popular weekly newsletter sharing tips and tricks for using Google services.

Read more: 26 games and tricks hidden within your Google search bar

This Pride Month trick relies on the MID spreadsheet formula, a function that allows you to play around with text-based strings of data. But if you're like me, and don't understand how Sheets functions work, there's an easier way to still get the LGBTQ-themed Easter egg.

There's one simple step — just input this code to the A1 cell in your spreadsheet:

=ArrayFormula(TRANSPOSE(MID("PRIDE",ROW(INDIRECT("1:"&LEN("PRIDE"))),1)))

After inputting this string of text, watch your Google Sheets spreadsheet come to life.

Google's Easter egg celebrating Pride Month is a neat trick, but Google hasn't had the best month when it comes to its LGBTQ users and employees. Earlier in June, Google-owned YouTube controversially decided to not remove videos from its platform full of racist and homophobic slurs about a Vox journalist. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki have both apologized for the decision, but said they're standing by their policies to keep the videos online.

You might hear about electric cars all the time these days, but the truth is that they're almost irrelevant to the overall vehicle market worldwide and have been for a decade.

Automakers want you to hear about electric cars all the time because automakers need to convince governments that they have a game plan for higher fuel economy and lower emissions going forward. As long as they make this argument and put money behind their objectives (just not too much money), they don't need to produce very many EVs.

And that's a good thing for them, because few people want to buy EVs.

Read more: It's been 100 years since we've seen anybody like Elon Musk — here's why that's so disorienting

I say this as someone who has driven just about every EV for sale today (and quite a few that have vanished), finding pretty much all of them to be splendid machines that are far superior to gas-powered vehicles in many, many ways.

And just in case you might think that I'm some pie-in-sky electrification booster who can't make a legit comparison with the petrol-burners ... well, sorry, I've driven all those cars, too.

EVs have completely failed to live up to expectations

The Tesla Model 3. Hollis Johnson/Business Insider

Something like 360,000 EVs were sold in the US in 2018 — in a total light-vehicle market of more than 17 million. That means EVs make up roughly 2% of sales, and the important context here is that excellent EVs have been available here for 10 years, and just prior to that period there was a serious gas-price spike that sent a gallon of regular unleaded to $4.

A variety of reasons have been cited for the objective failure of electric vehicles to live up to expectations: range, charging infrastructure, cost. But the real reason that EVs haven't sold better, despite there being lots of dandy EVs to buy, is that gas-powered vehicles have gotten so good that there aren't enough compelling reasons for consumers to make a big switch.

In and around the auto industry, one often hears gas-burners compared with horses: what the EV is to the internal-combustion engine, the IC engine was to the horse.

The analogy is terrible. Horses are living beasts that have to be fed, watered, and cared for in an elaborate way, and even if you did everything right, you could travel just about 30 miles a day at 10 miles per hour. You are exposed to the elements the whole time. The horse has mood swings. And you're not going to be listening to Spotify in the saddle.

Even a cheap modern car can hit 100 mph without much effort, cruise at 65 mph while serving up a bounty of media to occupants and maintaining a quiet environment whose temperature can be fixed at 70 degrees. Car seats are much, much more comfy than saddles. And assuming you're motoring in developed regions, you can go basically forever, racking up 400 miles between refueling stops that consume 10 minutes, maybe a few more if you buy a couple of cans of Red Bull and some beef jerky.

I like to say that when the automobile was invented, humans moved to a different planet. Our sense of time and space was completely changed.

EVs are really just that radical innovation powered by a different drivetrain: stored electrons versus cracked hydrocarbons, magnets in motors against pistons in engine blocks. Probably better on balance, but not better enough to put the old system out to pasture.

The EV buyers don't actually exist in major numbers

The Nissan Leaf. Hollis Johnson/Business Insider

The core problem since around 2010, when the latest generation of EVs started to appear (the Nissan Leaf, the Tesla Model S), is that all the people who were supposed to buy EVs didn't go out and buy them. The EV narrative has been relentless for almost the entire time I've been covering the car business, but ten years after the hoopla started, a crummy 2% of sales was all EVs were able to capture.

What a catastrophe! Well, maybe not. That 2% actually looks kind of stable, and for automakers playing the regulatory compliance game, it's not too expensive to serve that meager buyership. A low plateau, to be sure, but a decent place to start from when the next major wave of innovation arrives, probably in the form of batteries that are much smaller, more efficient, energy dense, and faster to recharge.

So what about Tesla?

Andy Kiersz/Business Insider

Tesla is astonishing, and not just because it's the first successful new auto brand to come along in the US in decades. As I've already explained, pre-Tesla demand for EVs was pathetic. Tesla altered that situation by creating demand. This is important because although Tesla likes to argue that it's taking buyers away from traditional auto brands, it really isn't. Instead, Tesla is capturing buyers who always wanted a premium electric car but were making do with a gas-powered car.

This indicates that there isn't much of an EV market, without substantial government support (China could be the model here, if it forces its market to accept EVs). There is a Tesla market. And the billion-dollar question there is, "Can Tesla grow this market?"

Perhaps. I'm not that optimistic. For my money, Tesla's best strategy for prosperity would be to become a premium automaker, selling electric BMWs. That could lead to healthy annual profits, delighted customers, and wouldn't require massive new investment in factories.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk probably hates this idea, despite its obviousness. All along he's been a world-changer, committed to getting humanity off fossil fuels; for that, Tesla needs to sell millions of EVs, and to induce other automakers to follow its lead.

Quit wasting time on fully electric vehicles as a solution for global warming

We need more Priuses. Matthew DeBord/Business Insider

I've spent months thinking about Musk's master plan while simultaneously digesting the Democrats' Green New Deal, accepting that we have only about a decade to massively move the needle on global warming out of the red zone.

The conclusion I've come to is that although Tesla has done a magnificent thing by creating real demand for EVs where there was none, it's a drop in the climate-change bucket. Ten years, for the car business, is two product cycles. There are over a billion gas-burning vehicles in the world today. We can't afford to waste time on electric cars.

Instead, we need to substantially improve the efficiency of our total energy use. As I've already pointed out, we could get started on this ... today. I mean, like literally today. At 9:59 a.m. EDT, on June 20, 2019, as I type this sentence.

So why aren't we? I call this the Boring Now Problem. Hybridizing the next two cycles of vehicle engines — engineering them to run on gas and electricity — has a been-there-done-that quality. It's also already been invested in; the Toyota Prius has been around for 20 years. Nobody on Sand Hill Road is going to get excited about that.

It also has the collateral damage of turning Tesla into a perfectly nice niche automaker whose destiny is to see its stock trade like all other car companies: in a dreary, routinely profitable (much of the time), but slow-growing manner.

And it kills the Tesla demand debate. Tesla sells half-a-million vehicles per year. End of story. Stable, sustainable demand, created where there was none before.

From where I sit, that's wonderful news. For Tesla bulls and extreme fans, it's a disaster. I hate to break it to them, but a very solid and successful Tesla could mitigate global warming barely at all. My advice for them is to accept that Tesla demand is finite and, you know, move on. They need to throw their support behind climate strategies that could actually work.

Every second they spend arguing about whether Tesla can sell just a few hundred thousand cars a year or a million is another nail in the species' coffin, one we've been building since we started burning dead dinosaurs.

Oracle has been going through a major transistion as it revamps itself into a cloud computing player.

On Wednesday, the company reported its Q4 earnings, and its highest executives — CEOs Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, and foudner/chairman/CTO Larry Ellison — were all smiles, happily reporting that cloud growth is going well.

Hurd, the CEO that runs sales, reported that Oracle's two most popular cloud software businesses, apps for enterprise resource planning (ERP, basically for financial analysis) and human capital management (HCM, basically for the human resources field), were on track to have annual revenue of $2.9 billion, with various of its wider selection of individual cloud apps growing between 25% and 44%.

That puts Oracle's cloud apps business roughly on equal footing with one of its biggest competitors, Workday, which reported annual revenue of $2.82 billion in February and is growing at 33% as of its most recent quarter. There are some differences: Workday is unprofitable while Oracle is highly profitable, although Oracle doesn't report its cloud business in enough detail to see if these units are, by themselves, profitable.

Read more: Oracle spent $36 billion in one year buying its own stock back, and it raises some uncomfortable questions about how it's spending its cash

Ellison offered some promising background on Oracle's new database, running on its Generation 2 cloud, too. He said that there were 5,000 new test databases that launched on that cloud last quarter alone.

Oracle calls this new database an autonomous database, or self-driving database, because it can automatically perform tasks that used to have to be done manually by a human administator. This includes applying security updates or grabbing more computing power as it needs it.

Companies are not yet paying for all of those database trials — both Ellison and Hurd admitted that paying customers for the new cloud database are still really low.

However, Ellison says that once an Oracle customer gives the new database a try, the project often grows from there.

"Within 60, 90, 120 days, that becomes a $120,000 projects and within another few months that becomes a half a billion [dollar] project. So we're really optimistic about this business."

He added: "The thing that I find fascinating are the consumption data curves, which shows our consumption rate growing much faster than the fields currently anticipating. To me, that's just wonderfully encouraging. And hopefully this is the beginning of the trend. We'll find out soon."

And this is where Oracle's potential really shines, should it be able to convince its customers to use its new database cloud.

That's because only a small percentage of Oracle's database customers have selected a cloud provider for their Oracle databases, according to exclusive data shared with Business Insider from enterprise software review site G2 Crowd. Only 17% of over 500 Oracle database customers who have left reviews on G2 Crowd have moved their database to the cloud.

This, even so it is possible for companies to put their Oracle database on Amazon's or Microsoft's clouds. There's an entire ecosystem of consulting companies dedicated to helping people do just that.

Read: Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison says the company added 5,000 new trials for its latest cloud database. Here's what that means

Better still for Oracle, its sales teams managed to convince its app cloud customers to sign up for longer-than-typical cloud contracts of 30 months, G2 Crowd also finds. While those long contracts pertain to its apps cloud business, the same might be true for database clouds.

The process of Oracle convincing its customers to use try its cloud, as we've previously reported, isn't always so friendly. Oracle sales has been known to use all kinds of tactics to convince customers to add cloud to their contracts, wanted or not.

So, like Ellison said, the most important statistic is usage numbers. If Oracle begins to share them and is excited by them, then it really may have turned a corner.

G2 Crowd Relational Database Spring 2019G2 Crowd

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When Index Ventures signed on to Slack's $160 million Series E funding round in 2015, the popular workplace chat app was already one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley.

But on Thursday it also became one of the hottest startups in a new category: a directly listed public company.

Online music company Spotify made waves when it decided to go public via direct listing in February 2018, but Slack's board of investors already knew it would pursue a similar path when the time came for the fast-growing company to make its own debut.

"There was no hesitation that this was the right path for Slack," former Slack board observer and partner at Index Ventures Sarah Cannon told Business Insider on Thursday. "There was only one precedent, which was Spotify, so it was really brave of [Slack CEO] Stewart [Butterfield] to pursue it. There were a lot of risks because it hadn't really been done before."

Read More: The amazing life of Stewart Butterfield, the CEO leading Slack to a potential $15.7 billion valuation when it goes public today

A direct listing bypasses the traditional process that accompanies a public offering, and allows the shareholders in a startup to sell directly to the public on an exchange.

"A direct listing is more transparent to the public more so than the traditional route with investment banks and underwriters because a much broader set of people have access," Cannon said. "It democratizes the process."

Shares of Slack began trading Thursday at a price that was more than 50% higher than the $26 per share "reference price" that had been expected. The stock finished its first day of trading at $38.62. Cannon described the team's energy on the trading floor Thursday as "pure enthusiasm," and credits the leadership team's commitment to values as integral in the decision to pursue the direct listing.

"It's a philosophical choice, and the two driving factors were that Slack is an innovative and transparent company," Cannon said. "It's not surprising to me as a board member that this is the route they choose, because it is core to the product to be transparent and those were the guiding philosophies behind that decision."

Part of Slack's successful debut, according to Cannon, is that the brand was recognizable enough for the general public to want to purchase stock. It was also helpful that the company didn't need to raise money as would be the case in an IPO, she said.

"I imagine you will see more direct listings in the future, because as you have more of a sample set of these listings, more will consider it an option," Cannon said. "It's not right for everyone though because you need cash on your balance sheet and not have to need to raise money. You also need brand awareness so consumers are aware of the company and want to actually buy shares."

Although Cannon is no longer on Slack's board of directors, she insisted growth was still a priority for the company as it endeavors to become profitable and satisfy its public shareholders.

"When we invested four years ago, we invested because they were creating a category that didn't exist," Cannon said. "How we work is fundamentally changing. Growth is a priority for the company and as investors we are quite excited about the unit economics."

Google will no longer pursue making its own tablet devices, Business Insider has learned.

According to a Google spokesperson, the company has halted the production of two unreleased tablet devices and will not come out with a successor to the Pixelbook Slate. Instead, it will shift resources and focus more attention on its Pixelbook laptop line.

This doesn't mean that Chrome OS, Google's operating system for Pixelbook laptops and its most recent tablets, will be going anywhere. The company itself just won't be making tablets that run on that software anymore.

"Chrome OS has grown in popularity across a broad range of form factors, and we'll continue to work with our ecosystem of partners on laptops and tablets. For Google's first-party hardware efforts, we'll be focusing on Chrome OS laptops and will continue to support Pixel Slate," a Google spokesperson told Business Insider on Thursday.

Google employees working on the unreleased (and now discontinued) tablets were told of the news on Wednesday, according to the spokesperson. Many of these employees, the spokesperson said, have been shifted to work on its Pixelbook laptop line, while the rest were moved to "confidential projects."

News of Google foregoing its tablet production comes three months after Business Insider reported that "roadmap cutbacks" had forced dozens on the company's "create" team — which is responsible for its laptop and tablet products — to find new positions. At the time, one person familiar with the matter said the product group had a "bunch of stuff in the works" and that cutting its staff would most likely "pare down the portfolio" of products.

Read more: Google has told dozens of employees in its laptop and tablet division to find new jobs at the company, raising questions about its hardware plans

On Thursday, Google confirmed that two of those future products were tablets smaller than the 12.3-inch Pixelbook Slate it had released in October. These tablets were supposed to launch together sometime after 2019, the spokesperson said, but after quality-assurance testing didn't meet the company's standards, it decided to scrap the devices — and its entire tablet lineup.

Indeed, Google has had a history of struggling to produce a tablet that consumers loved. Its first tablet — known as the Pixel C — was launched in 2015 and received less than stellar reviews. The longtime tech reviewer Walt Mossberg said the Pixel C represented "an object lesson in what Google shouldn't do if it pursues home-grown integration of hardware and software." The company launched its Pixel Slate, a tablet that acts like a laptop and meant to compete with Microsoft's Surface Pro and Apple's iPad Pro, to a similarly cold reception.

With the move away from tablets, the company said to expect new Google-made laptops to be announced as early as this year.

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One of the tried-and-true tactics to keep investors happy when a company is going through a big transition is the stock buyback.

Oracle has vigorously used this tactic in its last fiscal year. It spent a whopping $36 billion on share buybacks in its just-completed 2019 fiscal year alone, the company said on Wednesday.

Safra Catz, the Oracle CEO who runs finance, explained:

"This quarter, we repurchased 112 million shares for a total of $6 billion. Over the last 12 months, we have repurchased 734 million shares for a total of $36 billion. Over the last five years, we've reduced the shares outstanding by almost 25% with nearly 60% of the total reduction this past year in FY19."

Investors like stock buybacks for several reasons. For one, it gives them a ready buyer. It also rewards the steady, go-long investor because, as the company reduces the number of shares in circulation, each share represents a bigger piece of the corporate pie. Having fewer shares in circulations increases the earnings-per-share, which makes the company look healthy. Put this all together, and buybacks can keep share prices stable during a transition.

Read more: Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison says the company added 5,000 new trials for its latest cloud database. Here's what that means

But massive buybacks have also been described as "financial engineering." Companies use them to beat Wall Street's expectations on earnings-per-share, as opposed to increasing profits the old fashioned way - by growing the business.

And these sorts of buybacks carry a real risk that the company is spending its money to placate investors, rather than investing in the business.

For example, in contrast to the $36 billion spent on stock buybacks, Oracle spent $1.66 billion on capital expenditures in 2019, down from the $1.73 billion it spent in 2018.

Remember, Oracle is trying to build itself into a cloud computing giant to take on the likes of mighty Amazon Web Services and, more importantly, keep itself relevant in an age where its customers want the cloud.

Building a cloud is extremely expensive, which is why its customers want their vendors to take on that expense for them. Data centers on the kind of massive scale that Oracle should need cost billions to build.

Take a look at the the number-two player in cloud, Microsoft. It has already successfully transformed itself itself from a mostly old-school software vendor to a cloud giant. It's not in Oracle's position of trying to play catch-up.

Still, Microsoft spent almost $9.9 billion in just its first nine months of FY 2019 investing in "additions to property and equipment" also known as capital expenditures (CapEx), according to its last quarterly report.

Now, you might argue that Oracle is keeping a tight lid on its CapEx, even as it tries to become a cloud player, because it wants to control long-term costs and remain a highly profitable company. Oracle's management keeps insisting that as it grows its cloud business, it will be more profitable than its competitors because its costs are lower.

Read more: Oracle revoked job offers for some people in the UK, blaming a hiring freeze. Yet it says it's both hiring and still restructuring.

But you can't argue that Oracle didn't have the cash to invest in its reinvention. Ironically, Oracle almost could have bought Workday ( currently valued at $50 billion) with what it spent on share buybacks in 2019 ($36 billion) and 2018 ($11 billion) combined.

Some Oracle bears, like Nomura's Christopher Eberle, have noticed. Eberle, who downgraded the stock in March, wondered in his research note if "underinvestment remains at the expense of an elevated capital return program."

On top of that, a massive share repurchase plan isn't sustainable. After three quarters of spending $10 billion a quarter, Oracle slimmed down to $6 billion in Q4, and some analysts believe it will have to spend even less in the future.