Memorial Day weekend has historically been a slow one for the movie theater business, despite Disney's efforts.

Last year its standalone "Star Wars" movie, "Solo: A Star Wars Story," took in $103 million over the four-day holiday weekend. A major disappointment for a movie set in a galaxy far, far away. And before that, the studio had worse performers from the likes of "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales" (2017), "Alice Through the Looking Glass" (2016), and "Tomorrowland" (2015).

This year they slotted the live-action remake of "Aladdin" over the holiday and it seems Disney finally found itself a title that motivated people to take a break from pool parties and barbecues to go to the multiplex.

"Aladdin," a remake of the beloved 1992 Disney animated movie, took in an estimated $86.1 million over the weekend domestically, and by Monday's holiday will have a $105 million take. It was released on 4,476 screens, the widest ever for a Disney release over Memorial Day weekend.

Read more: How "Booksmart" went from a 2009 script collecting dust to this year's must-see movie of the summer

The $105 million four-day gross is the sixth-best opening ever over the holiday weekend, passing 2011's "The Hangover Part II" ($103.4 million).

It is also the third-best opening of the year, knocking off Universal's "Us" ($71.1 million). Disney now holds the top three domestic openings of the year, as "Aladdin" joins "Captain Marvel" ($153.4 million) and "Avengers: Endgame" ($357.1 million).

Audiences are certainly feeling differently about the movie than critics. The critical score on Rotten Tomatoes is a rotten 58%, however, it has a 93% audience score with over 6,300 of those being verified audience members. "Verified" is the new audience feature Rotten Tomatoes launched last week, which highlights how many people out of the audience score bought tickets to see the movie.

With "Aladdin" at the top of the domestic box office, that makes four out of the last five weeks a Disney title has been the number one movie since April 26. Previous to this, "Avengers: Endgame" was tops for three-straight weekends. Last week's win for "John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum" is the only movie to take the gold from the house Mickey built.

But staying at the top won't be easy for "Aladdin" going forward. There's a lot of competition next week with Warner Bros.' "Godzilla: Kind of the Monsters," Paramount's Elton John biopic "Rocketman," and Universal's latest Blumhouse release "Ma."

Average demand expressions: 23,431,928

Description: "DOOM PATROL reimagines one of DC's most beloved groups of Super Heroes: Robotman aka Cliff Steele (BRENDAN FRASER), Negative Man aka Larry Trainor (MATT BOMER), Elasti-Woman aka Rita Farr (APRIL BOWLBY) and Crazy Jane (DIANE GUERRERO), led by modern-day mad scientist Niles Caulder aka The Chief (TIMOTHY DALTON). Each member of the Doom Patrol suffered a horrible accident that gave them superhuman abilities, but also left them scarred and disfigured. Traumatized and downtrodden, the team found their purpose through The Chief, coming together to investigate the weirdest phenomena in existence. Following the mysterious disappearance of The Chief these reluctant heroes will find themselves in a place they never expected to be, called to action by none other than Cyborg (JOIVAN WADE), who comes to them with a mission hard to refuse. Part support group, part Super Hero team, the Doom Patrol is a band of superpowered freaks who fight for a world that wants nothing to do with them."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score (Season 1): 95%

What critics said: "DC's Doom Patrol isn't the first television show to bring about a team of unconventional heroes, but Doom Patrol places itself among the best of them." — Joseph Dominguez, Film Inquiry

The chair you sit on matters.

Sitting puts pressure on your body, and having insufficient support can lead to pain or poor posture, which puts stress on your shoulders, back, and neck.

After sitting uncomfortably in a standard office chair for too long, I decided to upgrade. But instead of just buying another office chair, I decided to look at gaming chairs instead.

PC gamers spend extraordinary amounts of time in front of a computer screen. They need supportive chairs so they can stay focused and perform at their best for long periods of time. I figured, if a chair can be good enough for them, it will definitely be good enough me, a regular computer user who spends a lot of time sitting in front of a desk.

I reached out to Secretlab— a company founded in 2014 by two competitive "Starcraft II" players — which was kind enough to send me one of their most popular chairs, the Omega, to use at home. The Omega retails starting at $360.

Here's why I'm never going back to a traditional office chair after spending time working in Secretlab's Omega chair.

Brands that sell their products online and directly to consumers — think Harry's for razors or Allbirds for shoes — have been able to establish major businesses because without physical stores or working with wholesale partners, they're able to deliver quality products at a reasonable price.

But as Public Goods CEO Morgan Hirsh told Business Insider in a recent interview, one major flaw in the direct-to-consumer model could be that over time, people will become tired of having to buy different products from different brands.

That's why in 2015 Hirsh co-founded Public Goods — an online marketplace of over 100 products (from paper towels, to toothpaste, to food products like pasta or apple sauce) all touting the Public Goods brand.

"Walmart essentially consolidated mainstream shopping and mom-and pop-shopping," Hirsh said. "Amazon's been a consolidation of e-commerce. And so, really what we need to do is be the consolidation of direct-to-consumer."

Hirsh — who previously ran a leather goods manufacturing company — said that soon after starting Public Goods, he worked with an advisor who had ten years experience at both Trader Joes and Whole Foods. From that key connection, Hirsh said he was able to establish relationships with top manufacturers who met his standards for quality and sustainability. Those manufacturers work with Hirsh and his team to develop new products, which are then packaged under the unified Public Goods brand.

Today, the Public Goods lineup includes personal care, household, and food categories, but over time, Hirsh says he plans to expand the offering even further.

Read more: Here are the pitch decks that helped hot startups raise millions

As for where Public Good's customers — who pay a $59 per year membership fee — are located, Hirsh says they aren't concentrated on the coastlines or in major cities across the US, but rather, they're more likely from secondary cities or suburbs. Many are moms looking for an easy, affordable, and eco-friendly options for their children, Hirsh tells us.

"It's not like your cool, New York City, San Francisco, LA brand," he said. "It's for practical people that want to buy healthy products, but don't want to pay ridiculous prices for them."

To date, Hirsh and his New York City-based team have raised $6 million from seed round investments to help fund their vision for creating the direct-to-consumer marketplace for everything.

But Public Goods isn't the only company to believe in this industry shift. One of its biggest competitors, Brandless, has raised almost $300 million to date.

Still, Hirsh remains confident that a value driven company and product lineup will attract a loyal following regardless of the competition.

"The idea has always been the same — to build a one-shop-stop for essential items that people need across categories guided by our values, and their values," Hirsh said. "We're building products that are healthy, sustainable, and beautiful, but all at a fair price."

Here's the pitch deck that has helped Public Goods raise millions:

Lissa Minkin's first project as VP of People and Workplace at hardware startup Tile was bound to make her an unpopular new face.

The task: quickly and respectfully let go of 30% of her new colleagues.

Following a disappointing holiday season, the company, which makes small devices customers can use to track lost items like keys, was scrambling financially. By the time Minkin joined from startup Addepar in January 2018, leadership had decided to cut 30% of its staff.

Minkin says that she was made aware during the interview process that the company was facing some challenging personnel decisions, but said she didn't realize the gravity of the situation until stepping in the door on her first day.

Read More: New Y Combinator President Geoff Ralston explains why he's so excited about investing in the youngest startups, and his philosophy for helping them to grow

"It was awful but I'm glad I was here because I can make sure we treat every single person with utmost respect," Minkin told Business Insider. "I've spent the rest of the time here trying to figure out how to retain the people who were left. We still had a viable business and excellent talent."

Winning back trust

So Minkin, a human resources industry veteran with experience at Facebook and eBay, set out on the gargantuan task of turning around the small company's culture to improve employee retention.

First, she said, she went on a listening tour of remaining employees to gauge sentiment and uncover where the problems persisted. She relied on over-communication and transparency, something she says is key to building trust within a workforce of any size.

"First and foremost I answered the Glassdoor reviews," Minkin said, referencing the popular career reviews site, where employees can leave feedback on management.

"We had some really awful [reviews] when I first got there because people were angry, so I went in and answered every single one. It was a lot of tough feedback for our CEO at the time, so I told him to get up and tell people, hey, 'I am taking it to heart.' I give him a ton of credit for that," she said.

Tile's popular trackers help you locate lost items using an app on your phone. Tile

Minkin also said she set up a weekly all-hands meeting with leadership so any employee could ask whatever was on their mind. Giving employees a regular forum in which to hear from executives and provide direct feedback helped cut down on gossip that tends to run rampant in an information vacuum, she said.

"Obviously I didn't have a ton of resources to work with, but I'm a scrappy person so I rolled up my sleeves and got to work," Minkin said. "It's not always about money, it's really about integrity and communication and transparency and truth and making sure people know where they stand. We wanted to make sure we care for these people, and that drives the business."

Reforming the culture

By September, then-CEO and cofounder Mike Farley stepped down and was replaced by board member CJ Prober, who left his job as COO at GoPro to become Tile's current CEO. Although Minkin won't name names, she said that a big factor in changing the culture at Tile to something more transparent and inclusive involved getting leadership on board with prioritizing the development of corporate culture and values.

"When I came in, the company was much more of a 'command and control' culture," Minkin said. "There was no transparency, no feedback, and it was very hierarchical. Over the past 16 months, we've made a concerted effort to change that. If you hire smart people, you should be honest with them and have them help solve problems."

Minkin told Business Insider that one of the biggest mistakes she's seen founders of high-growth startups make is deprioritizing culture and hoping that it will "figure itself out."

"You have to be deliberate about culture," Minkin said, "It has to be something you talk about at exec staff meetings. You can't just ignore it and expect it to be good. That's what I learned at Facebook. [CEO] Mark [Zuckerberg] and [COO] Sheryl [Sandberg] talked about culture every day and what was expected at the company and of us every day. The leadership team has to make it a priority as much as anything else the company does."

Unlike Uber, Lyft is focusing more on partnerships with other companies than in-house development of self-driving cars. On the day of its first quarter earnings, for example, it announced that Waymo self-driving minivans would be available in the Lyft app in certain Arizona locations.

"We have two pieces of our autonomous strategy," Co-founder John Zimmer told analysts and investors on the earnings call. "One is first party, which is our Level 5 group. We believe we're in a great position, given our platform, our access to data, and an amazing talented team to build our own self-driving components."

To date, the company has provided over 35,000 autonomous rides in Las Vegas as part of its partnership with Aptiv.

"Something that's important to note is that those investments that we're making today and our first-party system can benefit the existing business even before there's autonomous vehicles through mapping a better ETAs and therefore a higher utilization and efficiency in the marketplace," he continued.

"But we are agnostic to where this technology comes from. And so therefore we have a third-party part of our strategy, and Waymo is a phenomenal partner with leading AV technology. And so it's part of that two-pronged strategy, and it doesn't affect the other relationships that we have. And you can expect more developments on both sides of that strategy."

Read more: Lyft executive suggests drivers become mechanics after they're replaced by self-driving robo-taxis

Amazon's Prime member service has almost become synonymous with the company and comes with dozens of perks. I won't try to sell you a membership, but if you order from Amazon multiple times a month, a Prime membership will bring tons of value. There's certainly a reason more than 100 million people have invested in the service.

You can share an Amazon Prime membership with one other adult, and kids who share the account can access perks like Amazon Prime Instant Video. Amazon Family provides a 20% discount on diapers, baby food, and household items.

If you're a student, you can use an email ending in .edu to sign up for Amazon Prime Student. The service offers a six-month trial and costs $6.49 a month after that. People receiving Medicaid or EBT benefits are also eligible for a discounted Prime membership at $5.99 per month.

Hello!

Direct-to-consumer brands like Away, Brooklinen, and SmileDirectClub grew up on Google, Facebook, and Instagram, upending the retail business along the way. Now, they're starting to broaden their horizons.

"We found that digital platforms scaled well for our first few years, but we struggled to cut through the clutter and tell the story we wanted," Caroline Bank, associate director of marketing at ice-cream brand Halo Top, told my colleague Tanya Dua last month.

That presents a sizeable opportunity. As my colleague Lucia Moses reported this week, in the TV world, NBCUniversal and CBS are building teams to go after direct-to-consumer dollars. Comcast Ventures is even training startups like Away and Hippo to become TV advertisers, and says they're spending millions of dollars a year on TV.

(It could also be good news for other social-media platforms. Popular direct-to-consumer brands like Brooklinen, Curology, and MeUndies are flocking to Story Ads on Snapchat Discover, for example, as Instagram gets crowded and pricier.)

It's small fry right now, with DTC brands representing just 3% of TV advertising, though that's growing. But it's a rare bit of good news for the TV business, which faces competition for TV ad budgets from the likes of Roku, Hulu, and Amazon.

Separately, I'm excited to announce that Business Insider is hosting a finance event at the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, June 10, from 8:00 - 9:30 a.m. IGNITION: Transforming Finance will feature top Wall Street executives and innovators who are disrupting from within.

Attendees will hear from the likes of Omer Ismail, the head of digital finance for the Americas at Goldman Sachs, Megan Brewer, head of the technology innovation office at Morgan Stanley, Huw Richards, the head of digital investment banking at JPMorgan, and more.

Interested in attending? Admission is free but space is limited. Please complete this form to be considered for our invitation list. And as always, you can contact me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. if you have any ideas or suggestions.

-- Matt

Quote of the week

"Every pitch, every presentation is primarily about telling a story and not about designing beautiful slides, necessarily." - Mitch Grasso, a Silicon Valley founder, on how to design the perfect pitch deck.

In conversation

Traveling back in time to the age of the dinosaurs is beyond the reach of science. But that doesn't stop photographer Christian Voigt from trying to re-animate creatures from the Mesozoic era through the lens of his camera.

Voigt has traveled to five natural history museums across Europe to photograph dinosaurs and other extinct animals' skeletons, producing a collection of images that depict these long-dead creatures in a new light.

"I sought to really bring these animals to life," Voigt told Business Insider, adding, "I have to remind people that these aren't Hollywood images, but rather real animals that lived millions of years ago."

But photographing museum specimens presents unique challenges for a photographer, since the skeletons cannot be shifted, posed, or removed from their display cases. Museums also restrict the use of additional lightning, so Voigt photographs the dinosaurs using only natural light and relies on a black back-drop to separate each animal from its neighbors.

"I can't touch them, or ask them to move a little to left, so I have to look for the best angle," he said.

Read More: The real T. rex looked nothing like the monster in 'Jurassic Park.' These 13 discoveries have upended our picture of the 'king of the dinosaurs.'

Voigt said he was inspired to work with dinosaur skeletons after a visit to the Natural History Museum in London some years ago. Seeing the displays made him want to photograph each specimen individually.

"It all started with wanting to bring these animals out of their glass boxes," he said. "In a museum, when you look at certain collections of animals and skeletons, they're always very packed together."

He said he sometimes spends an hour finding and capture a single, ideal shot. The resulting images reveal every groove, divot, and eye socket of the skeletal bodies of creatures like the triceratops, T. rex, and stegosaurus.

Here are 15 breath-taking images from Voigt's collection.

It's nearly impossible to run a successful retail business these days without some kind of online presence. And when it comes to selling wares online, small businesses have options.

Steve Wymer, eBay's chief communications officer and its head of global impact, highlighted the tools the e-commerce platform offers to independent sellers looking to move inventory online in a recent interview with Business Insider.

eBay provides guidance on things like inventory management, pricing, and discounting strategy to its tens of millions of sellers, many of whom have never sold things online before.

"What motivates a consumer to pull the trigger to buy something is a sophisticated science," Wymer said. "This is not something you guess at."

The company has made a series of partnerships with small business owners through its Retail Revival program, which has centered on specific cities including Lansing, Michigan; Greensboro, North Carolina; and Akron, Ohio. Small business owners selected for the program receive support from eBay to grow their customer base via the e-commerce marketplace, beyond whatever brick-and-mortar presence they might have.

eBay most recently announced it had selected Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as its next Retail Revival city.

"They can get, sort of, an e-commerce store in a box through eBay, where they can move those items and they don't have to pay for a content engine to drive traffic back to a site that they have to maintain," Wymer said.

He cited one example of a vintage store owner in Baton Rouge who told eBay: "I have a great website, I just don't sell anything on it."

Wymer also pointed out a major difference that sets eBay apart from at least one of its big rivals in the e-commerce space.

"We don't compete with our sellers, and we don't have our own inventory. We're a pure marketplace," Wymer said. "We succeed when our sellers succeed. Our whole goal is to help our sellers find the right buyers."

Steve Wymer is eBay's chief communications officer and head of global impact. Courtesy of Ebay

eBay has made this kind of comment before. It wrote in its first-quarter earnings release in April: "The company made measurable progress against protecting its unique advantage as a true marketplace in service of — not in competition with — sellers of all sizes, improving how people buy and sell on the platform."

While eBay does not mention any company by name, e-commerce observers might note that this could be seen as a subtle dig at Amazon, which has faced criticism for being both an operator of a third-party marketplace and a seller of its own goods.

Amazon has launched hundreds of private labels and exclusive brands in the last several years. Many of them, critics have pointed out, compete directly with third-party sellers on Amazon's own website.

Read more: Elizabeth Warren accuses Amazon of using a 'special information advantage' for 'anti-competitive' practices

Sen. Elizabeth Warren in March unveiled a plan to break up tech companies she says have gotten too big. In a blog post published to Medium, she specifically calls out Amazon:

Warren reiterated those criticisms in a town hall speech in April, to which Amazon responded in a statement to Business Insider:

Studies by third parties have borne this point out. A recent piece of analysis by Marketplace Pulse has suggested that Amazon's private labels have yet to take off with consumers.

In a survey of third-party Amazon sellers by Feedvisor, 68% said they had not been negatively affected by Amazon's private-label brands. Only 14% said they had been negatively affected, while 18% were unsure.

Amazon has also not shied away from throwing punches at eBay. In his annual letter to shareholders in April, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos compared the growth in merchandise sales of third-party sellers on eBay and on Amazon in the years from 1999 to 2018, concluding that independent sellers did "so much better selling on Amazon than they did on eBay."

"To put it bluntly: Third-party sellers are kicking our first party butt. Badly," Bezos wrote.

eBay said it has partnered with 300 small businesses through its Retail Revival program so far. The platform as a whole has 180 million active global buyers and 1.2 billion active listings.

The signs are all there. The tech and automotive industries are becoming increasingly intertwined. Brands such as Tesla are as much tech firm as they are a car company. It's not just Tesla. Mainstream mass-market brands are also fully on board with the tech revolution.

Read more: These are the 10 most useless features in cars.

Semi-autonomous drivers assistance tech such as adaptive cruise control are now commonplace on everything from $150,000 Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedans to entry-level Subaru Crosstrek crossovers. And there's the connectivity. For example, General Motors has made Wi-fi hotspot capability available across its entire lineup products from the Cadillac Escalade to the Chevrolet Corvette.

As a result, it far easier to find a new car that's packed to the hilt with tech than it is to find one that's without tech. But there are a few new cars out there for the technophobes among us.

Low tech offerings these days run the gamut from economy cars that provide basic no-frills daily transportation to bare-bones speed machines designed for lightweight performance.

Here's a closer look at 10 cars for people who don't like tech.

As CEOs go, Gerry Smith is not short of experience.

Since 2005, Smith has led Densify, an award-winning cloud computing company that has worked with the likes of Dell, HP, and IBM among others.

Before that, he served as CEO of Changepoint, a software company he founded in 1992, helping it raise more than $40 million in venture capital.

This week, Smith told Business Insider how he sold Changepoint for $100 million in 2004, four years after a fire at his family home prompted him to call off an IPO.

It was a defining moment in his career, in which he felt he made the right call. But Smith doesn't reflect on everything in his career so warmly. There is one thing, in particular, he wishes he had done more often — and it concerns his approach to recruitment.

'Hire slow and fire fast'

"Hire slow and fire fast," Smith says, distilling his experience into a handy motto.

He explains: "I need to hire people, and move people on, a little faster than I have done in the past. I need to look more earnestly and make sure I'm doing the best for the company by looking a little more deeply at the people I'm hiring. Sometimes, that's been a challenge."

Without naming names, there is one case that sticks in Smith's mind.

"Years ago, I had a gentleman who regularly came into my office," he says. "He would say 'so, do you think I should be the president and CEO, now, Gerry?'

"I finally came to make up my mind and I said 'if I made you president, then everyone who reported to you would quit. I can't have that.' I then let him go.

Smith admits he needs to be more cautious when recruiting. Densify

"After I [fired him], a whole bunch of people came into my office who said 'thank god you fired him; I was writing my resignation letter.'

"So the fact [I took a long time to fire him] comes from my innate looking for goodness in people. I believe that all people have good value. Sometimes, they may have good value, but not for the position I've hired them for."

Smith also admits his natural lack of caution can hinder his hiring decisions.

Read more: This tech CEO cancelled a lucrative IPO hours after his house caught fire. He later sold his firm for $100 million.

"Most companies seek out reasons not to do something," he says. "I don't suffer from that when sometimes I should. I'm a 'ready, fire, aim' person.

"Sometimes I need a little more aiming before I fire; a little more research; a little more of a systematic approach. I need to be more critical of business plans, and of my own ideas. I'm a glass-half-full type of guy; I'm so convincing at times that I convince myself."

'I don't want to go into a business meeting with someone and not want to chat to them'

This isn't to say that Smith doesn't do any background research, however. What's more, his tendency towards seeing the good in people doesn't mean he's prepared to work with just anyone.

"One thing I look for in new hires - and this is absolutely critical - is that I don't want to work with d******ds," he explains. "I don't want to go into a business meeting with someone and not want to chat to them.

"To gauge whether a prospective employee is a good person, I ask other people whether they'd happily follow [the prospective employee] and move to my company.

Smith with the Densify team. Densify

"I'm looking for words that suggest they're good to work with, that the other person enjoys their personality - it's important to me. I want to enjoy them as a person."

Sometimes, Smith adds, a focus on hiring good people can have unexpected knock-on effects.

"I recently hired a new chief resource officer for Densify," Smith says. "Within months, a whole bunch of people who had worked for him [followed him to Densify]."

"There's an example of someone who is clearly well-liked, because people were prepared to follow him.

"That doesn't mean I don't like people who challenge others, but learn how to challenge so you get the most out of the person you're challenging."

AI researchers at Samsung have developed a way to animate classic portraits, bringing them to life.

In a new paper, researchers from Samsung's AI center in Moscow, along with the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, detail how they built a system for modelling human faces using as few images as possible.

The findings build on existing so-called "deepfake" techniques, which is used to graft one person's face onto a video of someone else.

Read more: The AI tech behind scary-real celebrity "deepfakes" is being used to create completely fictitious faces, cats, and Airbnb listings

Deepfake software usually relies on capturing lots of data about a person's face, usually using clips of video. The new technique focuses on using just a few photographs, or even just one still image.

They achieved this by feeding the software with a huge dataset of celebrity talking-head videos from YouTube, training it to pinpoint significant "landmarks" on human faces.

This works together with a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), which pits two algorithms against each other — one generating fake images, and the other trying to catch it out by spotting which images are fake.

Here it is when applied to photos of Marilyn Monroe and Salvador Dalí:

The technology is adept enough at identifying human faces that it can even be applied to old paintings, such as the Mona Lisa:

The researchers note that just using one picture makes the software less effective, you can see the animated versions all have distinct "personalities" they're deriving from the people they're being modelled onto.

Amazon is offering its third-party sellers discounts on storage fees as part of its plan to fulfill speedy shipping promises.

According to CNET, Amazon emailed its network of sellers on Wednesday offering a 75% discount on storage fees at its warehouses in exchange for storing best-selling items there.

This would enable Amazon to offer more items on its Prime one-day delivery service. Amazon recently announced that it would be reducing its speedy two-day shipping policy down to one-day.

A spokesperson for Amazon did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

Read more: Amazon reveals how third-party sellers are kicking its butt on sales as part of small business charm offensive

Amazon's third-party marketplace has become one of the most profitable areas of its business. Sales from these sellers now make up for more than 58% of the physical gross merchandise sold on Amazon, growing from $0.1 billion in 1999 to $160 billion in 2018.

CEO Jeff Bezos commented on the success of this arm of the business in the company's annual letter to shareholders in April. "To put it bluntly: Third-party sellers are kicking our first party butt. Badly," he said.

But Amazon's role as both a direct seller and a platform for other merchants has also drawn criticism. Most recently, by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who accused Amazon of using the data from its top sellers to create its own private label products. This practice would "knock out" competition, she said.

Amazon denied this in a statement to Business Insider. A spokesperson said: "Amazon does not use individual sellers' data to determine which private label products to launch. Private label products are a common retail practice, and Amazon's private label products are only about 1% of our total sales."

US President Donald Trump has made his first meaningful remarks on the Huawei firestorm since his administration blacklisted the Chinese tech giant last week.

The president was speaking at a news conference announcing a $16 billion aid package for farmers caught up in the China trade war when he addressed Huawei, which has been placed on a list that means US firms need permission to do business with the Chinese company.

Trump started out by saying that Huawei poses a huge security threat to the US. US officials have long floated suspicions that Huawei acts as a conduit for Chinese surveillance.

"Huawei is something that's very dangerous. You look at what they've done from a security standpoint, from a military standpoint, it's very dangerous," the president told reporters.

Read more: Here are all the companies that have cut ties with Huawei, dealing the Chinese tech giant a crushing blow

He then immediately switched gears to suggest that Huawei could form part of a trade deal with America and China. "So it's possible that Huawei even would be included in some kind of a trade deal. If we made a deal, I could imagine Huawei being possibly included in some form," he said.

Trump: "Huawei is something that's very dangerous. You look at what they've done from a security standpoint, from a military standpoint, it's very dangerous. So, it's possible that Huawei even would be included in some kind of a trade deal. If we made a deal, I could imagine Huawei being possibly included in some form of, or some part of a trade deal."

Journalist: "How would that look?"

Trump: "It would look very good for us."

Journalist: "But the Huawei part, how would you design that."

Trump: "Oh it's too early to say. We're just very concerned about Huawei from a security standpoint."

Trump did not explain how Huawei can go from being a "very dangerous" national security threat, to then potentially having its restrictions lifted so that it can become a key cog in a trade settlement between the US and China.

Russell Brandom, the policy editor for tech news site The Verge, said the two remarks are "incompatible." In an op-ed, he added: "They only make sense if the security threat is a bluff. You can't negotiate away a security threat as part of a trade deal."

Trump's remarks also represent a doubling down on an intervention he made in the Huawei dispute in December last year. His administration had been trying to treat the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou and the US-China trade talks as two separate issues, but Trump then suggested Meng could be used as a bargaining chip in the trade talks. His comments on Thursday linked the issues of Huawei and the China trade war even more directly.

SpaceX, the rocket company founded by Elon Musk, successfully launched its first five dozen Starlink telecommunications satellites on Thursday night.

If all goes according to plan in the coming weeks, the new fleet of experimental spacecraft may pave the way for a global and lucrative high-speed internet revolution— and possibly within a couple of years.

SpaceX live-broadcasted the inaugural Starlink mission, which launched aboard a Falcon 9 rocket at 10:30 p.m. ET from Cape Canaveral, Florida. A little more than an hour after liftoff — somewhere over the ocean about halfway between Australia and Antarctica — the rocket's upper stage deployed the 30,000-lb (13,600-kilogram) stack of satellites all at once. (Video of the maneuver is shown below.)

SpaceX stuffed a fleet of 60 Starlink internet-providing satellites into the nosecone of a Falcon 9 rocket for launch in May 2019.Elon Musk/SpaceX via Twitter

Elon Musk, the rocket company's founder, previously described it as an odd yet efficient way to get five dozen spacecraft off a rocket.

"This will look kind of weird compared to normal satellite deployments," Musk told reporters during a call on May 15.

When a rocket launches many satellites at once, typically a device at the top of the rocket's uppermost stage deploys them, one by one, with complex and heavy spring-loaded mechanisms. SpaceX launched one such mission in December, deploying a cornucopia of 64 satellites with one rocket.

But SpaceX eschewed that approach for unusual one: It slowly spun the rocket's upper stage, then let the stack of Starlinks float off into space.

"There are no deployment mechanisms between those spacecraft, so they really are slowly fanning out like a deck of cards into space," Tom Praderio, a SpaceX software engineer, said while hosting the mission's webcast.

Praderio quickly added: "You can kind of see one breaking away from the pack right now. Those spacecraft will slowly disperse over time."

The video below shows the Starlink deployment 360% faster than it actually happened.

Each Starlink satellite is roughly the size of an office desk and weighs about 500 pounds (227 kilograms), comes with a single solar panel, and a suite of internet antennas.

The spacecraft also have a weak but highly efficient Hall thruster (or ion engine) for avoiding other satellites, dodging known space junk, and eventually deorbiting and destroying themselves. But most immediately, the engines will shoot out krypton gas ions to slowly ascend from 273 miles (440 kilometers) to 342 miles (550 kilometers) above Earth.

SpaceX's first 60 Starlink satellites lack a critical component, though: laser beams.

Such lasers would connect each Starlink satellite to four others, forming a robust mesh network above Earth that can move internet traffic at close to the speed of light in a vacuum. That's nearly 50% faster than fiber-optic cables can transmit data on the ground, and it'd grant Starlink a huge advantage in cutting lag.

With this first batch, though, Musk said SpaceX will test the Starlink internet concept by talking to the spacecraft from ground stations and routing data from one satellite to another.

SpaceX's goal with Starlink is to launch up to 12,000 similar satellites — nearly seven times the number of operational spacecraft in orbit now — before a 2027 deadline established by the US Federal Communications Commission. To achieve that amount, SpaceX would have to launch more than one Starlink mission per month over the next eight years.

But not nearly that many are required to make the concept work and bring global internet access.

An illustration of Starlink, a fleet or constellation of internet-providing satellites designed by SpaceX. This image shows the shortest path in the network between New York and London.Mark Handley/University College London

Musk said SpaceX had "sufficient capital" to get Starlink operational and suggested the Starlink project could start making money long before the full constellation maxes out.

"For the system to be economically viable, it's really on the order of 1,000 satellites," Musk said, "which is obviously a lot of satellites, but it's way less than 10,000 or 12,000."

The pervasiveness of the overhead satellites also means Starlink could bring almost lag-free broadband internet to most regions of Earth, as well as airplanes, ships, and even cars (perhaps Tesla electric vehicles to start). Musk has said multiple times that he'd like to make such internet access affordable, particularly in areas with little to no web service.

Mark Handley, a computer-networking researcher at University College London who has studied Starlink, previously told Business Insider that the project could affect the lives of "potentially everybody" by bringing high-speed and pervasive broadband to most parts of the world.

"This is the most exciting new network we've seen in a long time," Handley said.

Investors have already started to worry that Apple may get caught in the crossfire of the Trump administration's attacks on Huawei and the broader US-China trade war.

But the iPhone maker may not be the only tech giant that suffers collateral damage in the conflict, warns Gregor Berkowitz, a longtime tech-industry consultant. The administration's moves against Huawei could end up giving a leg up to the Chinese competitors to US behemoths such as Google and harm those tech giants' ability to compete, particularly in the developing world, he said.

"There are many secondary effects" of the attack on Huawei "that are maybe more significant than the primary effect," Berkowitz said.

US officials have charged that units of Huawei have conspired to steal trade secrets from T-Mobile, and have cautioned that the company's equipment could be used to spy on people and companies on behalf of the Chinese government.

Last week, as part of its targeting on Huawei, the administration issued an order barring US companies from supplying Huawei with their products and services. That move not only barred smaller component makers from dealing selling their products to the Chinese company, but it also will prohibit Google and other tech companies from offering their software to Huawei. On Monday, the US government gave Huawei a temporary repreive from the restrictions, allowing it to continue to work with US companies to serve current customers.

Read this:President Trump's national emergency likely won't stop you from buying a Huawei phone, much less an iPhone. Here's what it means for you.

As part of the restrictions, Huawei will no longer be able to use the Google-supplied version of the Android operating system, nor will it be able to offer its phone users access to the Google Play app store. The company has said that it is working on its own homegrown alternatives to both.

Chinese alternatives to Google and Facebook could get a boost

Huawei is the second largest smartphone maker. Although its phones haven't gotten much traction in the US, they're popular in China and in many other countries around the world.

Ren Zhengfei, CEO of Huawei, which has been targeted by the US government. Kyodo News via Getty Image Inside China, Huawei already offers local alternatives to US tech services, because Google's Play store and many US apps and services — such as Facebook and Uber — are unavailable there. But now that it's unable to work with US companies, Huawei will likely start promoting those Chinese alternatives outside of China, Berkowitz said.

"People like Google begin to lose out, because Huawei will point its search [box] at Baidu, not at Google," Berkowitz said. He continued: "As the conflict or trade war between the US and China [heats up] ... we're going see that set of Chinese suppliers begin to spread throughout the world."

Many US tech companies have struggled to gain traction in China or, finding themselves in untenable positions due to the country's censorship and domestic surveillance policies, have abandoned the market. Now, they may find themselves in losing out to Chinese firms in developing countries also, Berkowitz said. Huawei could promote Didi's ride hailing services instead of Uber's, or Chinese messaging service WeChat instead of Facebook's WhatsApp, he said.

US tech companies may find themselves not just facing trouble in China, but also "that Baidu becomes the default search engine for India and for consumers in Africa and the email provider and online transaction provider," Berkovitz said.

In the developing world, price trumps all

At least right now, the US tech services in general tend to be better known and more popular outside of China than their Chinese rivals. But that brand strength may not matter all that much in developing countries.

Much of Huawei's success in the smartphone market has come from offering devices with top-end features at prices that are significantly lower than their rivals. If a Huawei phone is selling in a developing country at a steep discount to the price of an iPhone or Samsung phone there — but is perceived to offer similar features — it's going to be attractive to consumers in those countries, regardless of whether it has the Google Play store or Google's search app, Berkowitz said.

What's going to matter to such customers is "more pure economics and the cost of the phone," he said.

Amazon is aggressively growing its private label business, but at the same time, it's trying to compete with Facebook and Google for advertising. Those two goals can conflict — causing headaches for some advertisers.

Over the past couple of years, Amazon has pushed into its own brands in areas like packaged goods, fashion and electronics and has used splashy ad formats on its own site to promote the products. That makes some advertisers uneasy and frustrated that Amazon gets preferential treatment in its own advertising network.

"Amazon is a huge threat to CPGs because any time Amazon decides to look at a category, they're going to own it," said Jon Reily, VP and global commerce strategy lead at Publicis Sapient. "It's difficult to have a conversation about those products when the main avenue for selling things is also your main competitor."

In fact, Amazon is under growing scrutiny from regulators for selling its own items in a marketplace that it manages. In March, Sen. Elizabeth Warren proposed splitting up Amazon for competitive reasons.

Amazon says about 1% of its sales come from private labels. Private label brands represent 25% or more of sales for other retailers, Amazon said in April.

Amazon's savviest advertiser is Amazon

Amazon routinely uses prominent ad formats on Amazon.com to advertise its private label and exclusive brands.

One is sponsored brands, a large display ad that appears at the top of search results. Another is called hero quick promo that shows a product image and how many review stars it has next to it on product pages where consumers read reviews and add items to the shopping carts. Occasionally Amazon's retail team will take over prominent placements and they'll be unavailable to other advertisers, said Joshua Kreitzer, founder and CEO of Channel Bakers, an agency that helps marketers advertise on Amazon.

Earlier this year, Amazon tested a feature that promoted its own products as pop-up windows when consumers clicked on search listings for a competitor. Amazon said at the time that the test was not an advertisement but a way to show browsers cheaper product options.

"When they're [advertising] on the actual detail page where the consumer is ready to buy, they're closer to the bottom of the funnel and making purchase decisions," Kreitzer said.

An Amazon spokesperson pushed back on the idea that it gets first dibs on advertising on its platform.

"Our ad policies work back from customers to provide them the best experiences in our store," the spokesperson told Business Insider. "Both our selling partners and private brands can bid on sponsored ads. Our advertising algorithms optimize for the best possible customer experience, starting with relevance to the shopping query, and treat all bids equally when determining which ad to show."

Read more: Amazon wants to take on OTT heavyweights like Roku for advertising dollars. Here's the pitch deck it's using to sell marketers video ads.

Amazon vets ad creative for competitors

Advertisers also have run into creative and messaging challenges on Amazon.

Most of Amazon's ad revenue comes from ads that run on its own properties, but the company also programmatically places ads on publishers' sites. The catch is that these programmatic ads can appear on Amazon's own site, making them subject to vetting by Amazon's policy team, said a manager who buys Amazon ads at a large programmatic agency.

The policy team also analyzes the copy and color schemes on ads to determine if an advertiser's message looks too similar to Amazon's own ads and products, and if it does, Amazon can stop campaigns from running, said the same agency executive.

Asked about the policy team's role in vetting ads, the Amazon spokesperson said its ad policies are geared towards giving customers the best experience.

Amazon's own advertising policy states that advertisers must include borders around ads with a white or off-white background to show the placement was paid for by an advertiser, for example. And if an ad campaign includes the names of both an advertiser and Amazon, "your brand name or logo must be the largest and most prominent," the policy reads.

"Amazon wants any display creative that appears on Amazon.com to conform to its brand guidelines and not be a disruptive user experience," said the agency exec.

When asked what a disruptive ad campaign looks like, the agency exec said that based on his understanding of Amazon's policy, an ad with bright colors and a neon box on it because the colors could be considered distracting. Amazon also doesn't allow advertisers to use rich media ads that use animated graphics to show a product or expand across the page when clicked on, according to its policy.

As Amazon expands into new business lines like delivery, it can be difficult to keep up with which advertisers Amazon deems competitors, the person said.

The same agency exec worked with a fast-food chain on a campaign that promoted a delivery service. While the fast-food chain itself was not a competitor to Amazon, the delivery service was a competitor to Amazon's same-day delivery service, Prime Now. The agency had to tweak the creative to focus on the fast-food chain. The campaign ultimately ran, but the exec was unclear on what change ultimately led Amazon to run the campaign.

In another example, coupon sites — which could lead to non-Amazon websites — are not allowed to advertise on Amazon's properties, according to the company's policy.

"Because Amazon has so many business units, there's not a hard and fast rule or a pre-existing list [of banned advertisers,]" the agency exec said. "It's really difficult for us to know beforehand which advertisers will be competitive."

Brands are creating their own keywords to get around Amazon's brands

Amazon is known for buying up its own search ads targeted at generic keywords like "coffee" or "batteries." Roughly 70% of Amazon searches are for these types of generic words.

One way advertisers are responding is by bidding on highly specific keywords that match people's searches, like "dark-roast coffee" or "long-lasting batteries," said multiple agencies.

These more niche keywords convert better, are cheaper, and less competitive, said John Ghiorso, CEO of Amazon-focused ad agency OrcaPacific. But brands need to bid against thousands of niche keywords to get the same scale as a generic keyword, he said.

Established brands may not have that much to fear from Amazon

Amazon's move into private label and exclusive brands is similar to the practices of physical retailers like Walmart, Target and Kroger.

The difference with Amazon's private labels is that competitors don't have to fight for shelf space as they do with physical stores and have multiple digital tactics they can reach the exact customer they want, said OrcaPacific's Ghiorso.

"If anything, there's more ability to go after the customer segments that you want to capture," he said.

It's unclear how successful Amazon's private labels have been outside of a few brands like AmazonBasics. Amazon also has a quick turnover strategy with private label and exclusive brands. If a product racks up negative reviews or doesn't sell, Amazon swiftly pulls the product.

Eric Heller, EVP of marketplace services at Wunderman Thompson Commerce, said Amazon's products don't have the same name recognition and brand loyalty as established advertisers do.

"A lot of their weak spots are that they don't know how to build what traditional brands already have: Brand love, loyalty, and trust," he said. "Amazon's generics are opening more people to be willing to buy and test product online; as long as you're not selling a commodity, then there's still room for brands to win plenty of business on the periphery."