Stringer/REUTERS

Tencent Music Entertainment, the biggest streaming-music service in China, reported better-than-expected earnings for the fourth quarter. But shares were down more than 6% to $17.42 apiece after monthly average revenue per paying user.

Here are the key numbers, compared to what analysts surveyed by Bloomberg were expecting:

"Our initial public offering in December 2018 has launched us onto the international stage, elevated the global recognition towards our brand, and endorsed our successful track record," Kar Shun Pang, CEO of Tencent Music said in a press release. 

"During the fourth quarter of 2018, we recorded strong growth across our business lines, including both online music and social entertainment services, and solidified our market leadership."

This is the first time that Tencent Music has released earnings since going public in the US in December. The company postponed its initial public offering for two months over fears that the brutal sell-off that wreaked havoc on markets in October and November would affect its pricing. Tencent Music's offering raised $1.1 billion, making it the fourth-largest Chinese IPO by deal value last year. 

Tencent Music operates several popular music brands in China — including QQ Music, Kugou, Kuwo and WeSing — and had more than 800 million unique monthly active users in the second quarter of 2018, according to its filing.

Tencent Music was up 48% this year through Tuesday.

Kickstarter co-founder Perry Chen announced Monday that he is stepping down as CEO following the announcement that staff at the company will attempt to form a union.

"I've decided to step away from the CEO position at Kickstarter to focus on high-level and long-term company needs in my role as chairman of the board," he wrote in a blog post.

The news came hours after staff announced that they would form a union.

Read more:Staff at crowdfunding giant Kickstarter are unionizing in a potential first for big tech in the US

Chen re-joined Kickstarter in July 2017, but his tenure proved controversial.

In April 2018, BuzzFeed News reported that the company was in turmoil under Chen's leadership. At the time of BuzzFeed's reporting, nearly 50 of the company's 120 staff had reportedly left, including seven out of eight members of the company's executive team.

According to BuzzFeed, "employees said Chen strongly exerted his will on the company — making sudden changes to planned-out Kickstarter features, scrapping project timelines at the last minute, forcing out highly respected employees, and trying to shake up office culture in ways that struck the rank and file as simply bizarre."

This post is developing. Check back for updates.

In Tuesday, Google announced its huge new push into gaming: a streaming service called Stadia, which it promises will bring high-quality games to just about any device.

And in the last minutes of its hour-long keynote came its final big reveal: Jade Raymond, a long-time industry veteran, will be leading Stadia Games and Entertainment — a division that will create games and other experiences specifically for the service.

News that Google had hired Raymond came out last week, though no one knew then what exactly she'd be doing for the search giant. She'll be working with Google VP Phil Harrison, who has stints with PlayStation and Xbox under his belt.

Raymond is an industry veteran best known for helping to create and shepherd the blockbuster "Assassin's Creed" series, having worked at publisher Ubisoft for much of her career. But she also worked at EA, where she was overseeing games including the hotly-anticipated "Star Wars: 1313." However, she left EA in October, in the wake of the cancellation of "1313" and the closure of developer Visceral.

Ultimately, Raymond is more than just a top executive. As Google plants its flag in the video game business, hiring Raymond can be taken as a sign that the search giant is also trying to do its part in making the industry more welcoming to women.

Read: A group of women trying to change the sexist culture of open source software have been harassed online

A big opportunity

As harsh as the whole tech industry has been to women, the video game world might actually be worse. It's been described as downright toxic to players, game developers, video game journalists, and even female characters in games.

Six years ago, when the blog Feminist Frequency shined a light on toxic attitudes towards women and sexist tropes in the video game industry, the author Anita Sarkeesian, received threats of violence. Today, Sarkeesian says her work helped bring much-needed attention to the subject.

Jade Raymond www.jade-raymond.com The gaming industry is aware of its reputation but its progress to make gaming less hostile has been slow.

Just this month, Valve, which runs market-leading PC game store (and, now, Stadia competitor) Steam, was pressured into withdrawing support for a new indie title slated to come its service: a game about raping women. After public outcry, Valve said it wouldn't allow the title to come to the Steam store.

So the gaming industry needs more high profile, powerful women in top roles that can turn the industry away from its misogynistic ways.

More women running new gaming services could at least translate into better women game characters, fewer sexist tropes in games, and more women entering the game development world. Ultimately, it could very well result in more women playing games — which would mean a big opportunity on which Google could be poised to capitalize.

Read: Oprah: 'No matter what you think about my life, it's 10 times better than that' — and your life can be just as good

Victory not assured

Not that Raymond may not be automatically successful at Google, which has sometimes come under fire for how it treats matters of gender equality.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that founder Larry Page offered a giant golden parachute to its star Android developer when that man was under an internal investigation for sexual-misconduct complaints.

And Google has previously hired women executives to lead major businesses, only to have them leave a relatively short time later. Last year, for instance, Diane Green stepped down as CEO of Google Cloud after only about three years in the role — and was replaced by a man, Thomas Kurian, who was hired from Oracle.

That said, Raymond is a fantastic choice as one of the main faces for its push into gaming and Google deserves props for hiring her.

The S-1 paperwork for Lyft's anticipated multibillion IPO is now open to the public, and it lists who the major shareholders are and how many shares they own. These are the executives and venture investors who will reap a huge financial windfall should the public love the stock and drive the share price up.

While we don't know exactly how much this IPO will enrich each one of the early investors until the shares are priced, Lyft has revealed a share price range, giving us a better idea of who will reap the biggest rewards when Lyft goes public.

The company plans to sell just under 30.8 million Class A shares, which it plans to price between $62 and $68 each. That price could could higher if its roadshow with the initial investors goes well. At $68 per share, Lyft would be valued at roughly $20 billion, up from its last private financing round, which valued the company at $15 billion.

Only Class A shares will be sold to the public. Class B shares, which carry more voting power, are being split between Lyft's co-founders, Logan Green (who will own just over 60%) and John Zimmer (who owns just under 40%). So, even though they hold relatively small stakes of the public Class A shares, they will control nearly one-third, and nearly one-fifth of the total shareholder votes respectively.

If either of them were to sell their Class B shares (except in certain cases, like putting them in trust to a non-profit), they would convert to Class A shares, Lyft says in its documents. Therefore, for the sake of this estimate, we have calculated the value of the Class B shares as if they were Class A.

Here are all the people with sizeable stakes in the ride-hailing company:

Keen-eyed gamers who watched Google's announcement of its new Stadia game streaming service on Tuesday will surely have noticed a tribute to historic video game lore.

The "Konami Code" is hidden in plain sight on the back of Google's new Stadia controller. It's a series of button presses that activates a cheat in certain games. That code is "up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A."

The (upside down) view of the Konami Code located on the back of Google's Stadia controller. Google

It's most directly associated with the game "Contra" developed and published by Konami in 1987 on video arcade machines. The game was released on the Nintendo Entertainment System a year later in 1988.

It's a little piece of gaming culture that's pretty well known within the gaming community, but the sort of thing that could go easily unnoticed by anyone who's never played a video game before.

You can learn more about the history of the Konami Code in the video below, courtesy of the Gaming Historian YouTube channel.

Employees at Brooklyn's crowdfunding giant Kickstarter are forming a labor union called Kickstarter United, which will aim to secure more rights for the company's workers.

In a statement, the group said:

If recognized by the company, Kickstarter would become the first major tech company in the US to have union representation.

In a statement provided to Business Insider, Kickstarter responded to the news by saying, "We're proud that everyone here at Kickstarter cares deeply about its mission and its future. We're aware that there are team members at Kickstarter who are interested in forming a union, and we look forward to hearing more about our employees' concerns."

Kickstarter employees are working with the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) Local 153.

Kickstarter is notably community-minded for a tech company. Its charter classifies it as a public benefit corporation, which is supposed to make the company accountable to the needs of the community and society rather than profit and shareholders alone.

Read more: Disappointed backers who raised more than $1 million to fund a coffee startup are revolting and calling it the 'Fyre Festival' of French presses

In an email Kickstarter United sent to the entire company, which The Verge obtained, the group said the company had fallen short in delivering for its employees.

"Kickstarter's efforts are incomplete," the group reportedly said in the email, calling for increased inclusion, solidarity, transparency, and accountability. "These values have failed to manifest in our workplace. We can do better together — for ourselves and our industry."

In April 2018, BuzzFeed News reported that the company was in turmoil after co-founder Perry Chen returned as CEO in July 2017. At the time of BuzzFeed's reporting, nearly 50 of the company's 120 staff had reportedly left, including seven out of eight members of the company's executive team.

According to BuzzFeed, "employees said Chen strongly exerted his will on the company — making sudden changes to planned-out Kickstarter features, scrapping project timelines at the last minute, forcing out highly respected employees, and trying to shake up office culture in ways that struck the rank and file as simply bizarre."

Facebook is under pressure over its livestreaming video feature, after the man accused of shooting 50 people in New Zealand is thought to have broadcast the attack live via the social network.

The company stated on on Twitter on Sunday morning that it had deleted 1.5 million videos of the attack in 24 hours, and that it will remove all edited versions of the video from its platform.

It said it had blocked 1.2 million videos at upload — meaning 300,000 videos of the shootings did appear on Facebook at some point. The company didn't comment on how many people may have viewed those videos, nor did it give detailed specifics on how it blocks content.

New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern said she planned to take up the issue of the livestream with Facebook.

She told reporters during a press conference in Wellington on Sunday that Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg had reached out to acknowledge the attacks.

"Certainly, I have had contact from Sheryl Sandberg. I haven't spoken to her directly but she has reached out, an acknowledgment of what has occurred here in New Zealand," Ardern said.

"This is an issue that I will look to be discussing directly with Facebook," she added. "We did as much as we could to remove, or seek to have removed, some of the footage that was being circulated in the aftermath of this terrorist attack.

"But ultimately it has been up to those platforms to facilitate their removal."

Ardern also said the US tech giants had "further questions" to answer.

Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year-old Australian man, was charged on Friday with murder over the massacre in Christchurch. Tarrant is so far accused of murdering one man, but the judge said that number would probably go up.

Tarrant is accused of livestreaming the attack, which saw the massacre of 50 people in two Christchurch mosques, via Facebook. A further 50 people were injured, according to authorities.

Although the social network deleted the 16-minute video, it and other services such as YouTube and Twitter have struggled to keep up with the proliferation of copies being uploaded to their platforms.

Business Insider on Friday was easily able to find copies of the disturbing footage both on Facebook and YouTube through simple search terms.

Exactly a year ago, the news broke that Facebook had enabled the mass, possibly illegal, collection of people's information by a rogue researcher who handed that data on to a political consultancy called Cambridge Analytica.

The resulting privacy furore engulfed Facebook, and dragged it into unwelcome debates about election interference, online misinformation, and the monopoly power of online tech giants.

Many thought a privacy scandal of this size would finally bankrupt the public's trust in the platform, leading to an exodus.

But a year later, Facebook seems to have weathered the storm pretty well in terms of engagement, in part thanks to its earlier bet to acquire photo-sharing network Instagram.

Read more: Facebook is being abandoned by top executives. Here's everyone who has left since the Cambridge Analytica catastrophe last year.

A survey of 18 to 25-year olds commissioned by Business Insider and carried out by British market research startup Streetbees showed that while the majority of them still use Facebook, generally it's not their platform of choice. When asked which their favourite social media platform was, 36% answered with Instagram. Facebook was second with 26%.

A few of those surveyed said that privacy was a reason they were less inclined to use Facebook, but for most the reasons for abandoning Facebook were much more prosaic. One 19-year old said she was using Facebook less, "because more of my friends use Instagram or WhatsApp now."

Happily for Facebook, it owns both Instagram and WhatsApp.

Eleven users said Facebook had become "boring," with one adding that teenagers can't use it freely because it's full of family members. "More old people are on it now," another said simply.

"It's just not very appealing anymore, older people are using it more and my feed is often clogged up with annoying political posts. I have moved to instagram [sic] so I could focus more on living and food and travel," said one 25-year old.

A few also took issues with the Facebook app's look and feel. "Facebook is now very much outdated. There is no new features in it," wrote one 20-year old. Recurring gripes included the ads on Facebook and well as the number of fake users.

Streetbees' survey involved 1,235 people across the UK, US, and India, of which 820 fell into the 18-to-25 age group.

Facebook acquired Instagram and 2012, and WhatsApp in 2014. The research highlights that it was, perhaps, a smart move to maintain Instagram's separate brand identity. There is comparatively little integration between Instagram and Facebook's app, even six years after the acquisition.

It also might explain why Facebook is less keen than ever to break out user numbers on its individual apps, instead referring to a collective userbase across its "family" of services in financial results.

All the cofounders of Instagram and WhatsApp have now left Facebook — three of them since the Cambridge Analytica Scandal broke. Notably the founders of WhatsApp left after reportedly clashing with Facebook executives over user privacy.

While Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp outwardly maintain distinct brand identies, it's likely that the trio will become more closely integrated at the back-end now all the acquired founders have left.

Mark Zuckerberg has stated his ambition to knit together the backends of the instant messaging on Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

So even the ground Facebook loses, it gains.

The academic who created an app allowing Cambridge Analytica to collect personal details of millions of Facebook users sued Facebook for defamation on Friday, The New York Times reported.

According to The Times, Aleksandr Kogan said Facebook defamed him by saying he lied about how the data collected by the app would be used. Facebook said it was told the data would be used for academic purposes. Kogan insisted that the fine print of the app explained that the data could be used commercially.

"Alex did not lie, Alex was not a fraud, Alex did not deceive them, this was not a scam," Kogan's lawyer, Steve Cohen, said, The Times reported. "Facebook knew exactly what this app was doing, or should have known. Facebook desperately needed a scapegoat, and Alex was their scapegoat."

Facebook did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment. However, in a statement to The Times, spokeswoman Liz Bourgeois described this as a "frivolous lawsuit" from a person who "violated our policies and put people's data at risk."

Kogan created the 'This is Your Digital Life' quiz app, which harvested 87 million Facebook user profiles and then passed this information to Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based political firm hired by President Donald Trump during his 2016 campaign.

Kogan previously played down the role that his data had in the campaign but said he was aware that it was likely to be used by Cambridge Analytica during the elections.

Read more: The man at the centre of the Facebook data scandal says it's 'nonsense' that Cambridge Analytica got Trump elected

"I knew it was going to be for elections … And I had an understanding or a feeling that it was going to be for the Republican side," he told CBS News in April 2018.

He later said that Facebook and Cambridge Analytica used him as a "scapegoat" after being depicted as the villain in the scandal.

As the smartphone wars rage on, there's an onslaught of new iPhones released every year. For the past few years, Apple has made its iPhone lineup more complex by releasing multiple version of the iPhone each year.

We've tracked down prices from around the internet to answer the question, "How much does the iPhone cost?" We break down the prices for all the models you can buy online from Apple, Walmart, Best Buy, and the four major cellular providers — Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T— as well as the price on Amazon with Simple Mobile Prepaid.

Before getting into the details, the prices we're listing are based on the lowest possible storage amount (64GB for the iPhone XS to 8, 32GB for the iPhone 7, and 16GB for the iPhone 6S). If you want more storage, the price will be higher.

Also, as we get to the models that are a few years old, there may not be an option to buy it new. You can also read our full iPhone buying guide for more buying recommendations and advice.

Keep scrolling to see how much every iPhone model costs.

Filling your house with speakers can be an expensive endeavor. Not only are many smart speakers pricey, but they don't always work together very well, and they don't all have access to the same digital assistants.

If you're a fan of the Google Assistant and you use lots of Google services, then the JBL Link smart speaker series is definitely worth considering. The speakers aren't overly expensive, have the Google Assistant built in, and sound pretty good. The JBL Link 300, in particular, offers nice big sound and the smarts of Google without breaking the bank.

But at $250, the JBL Link 300 still isn't cheap — unless it's on sale, which it happens to be right now for $124.99 at Best Buy. Is it the speaker for you? We put the JBL Link 300 to the test to find out.

A simple, all-black design

If you've seen any other JBL Link speakers, then the Link 300 will look familiar to you. It features the same all-black design so it'll look right at home in any space without drawing too much attention to itself.

On the front of the device, you'll see a simple JBL logo and nothing else. Around the back, you'll find a 3.5-inch woofer for pumping out the lower frequencies. The playback controls — including a play/pause button, volume up and down buttons, a microphone mute button, and a Bluetooth button — are all on the top of the speaker. There's also a Google Assistant button the top that activates the Google Assistant, so you don't have to say, "Hey Google" or "OK Google" to summon your smart assistant.

The size of the speaker isn't bad, either. It's a little larger in size than some of the other smart speakers like the Echo or the original Google Home, but it's also a little shorter. While it will take up a good amount of space on a shelf, we don't think it'll be hard to find a spot for it — and it's still not as big as speakers like the Google Home Max.

Ultimately, we think the JBL Link 300 is a pretty good-looking speaker. The all-black design ensures that the speaker won't draw too much attention to itself, and while it doesn't look quite as modern as the Sonos One speaker, it still looks great.

Specs

Best Buy

Set-up process

As with any Google Assistant-enabled speaker, setting up the JBL Link 300 is very easy — especially if you already have the Google Home app and have used Google Assistant-enabled speakers before.

If not, start by downloading the Google Home app and signing in with your account. After that, if you plug in the speaker, it should automatically show up in the app. Then, simply follow the on-screen instructions to connect the speaker to your home Wi-Fi network and enable the Google Assistant — and you should be good to go.

After that, you'll be able to ask the Google Assistant to control your smart home devices, ask it questions, cast content to the speaker from apps on your phone, and so on.

Special features

Ultimately, the most important thing about any speaker has to be its sound, and the JBL Link 300 sounds pretty darn good — especially for a speaker in this price range. The speaker is a little larger than most of the other speakers in the Link lineup, so it has a boosted low end compared to smaller speakers. It can also get quite a bit louder than its smaller counterparts, though not quite as loud as the largest speaker in the series, the JBL Link 500.

Since it is part of a multi-room speaker lineup, you can connect the Link to other Link-series speakers or Chromecast-enabled speakers around your home. So if you wanted to have your speakers play the same music in every room of your house, you could sync them up to do that.

There are other features on offer here, too. Notable is the fact that the JBL Link 300 has Google Assistant built right in to it, so you can use it like any other Google Assistant-enabled device. That means you can use the speaker to control smart home devices, tell it to play music, ask it questions, and more. Google Assistant is generally considered to be one of the best digital assistants out there, and for good reason. It's super smart, and it's only getting smarter.

The Assistant works with thousands of popular smart home devices, and it has access to Google's smart search engine, so you're more likely to get the right answer to your question than you would with other smart voice assistants.

JBL

Downsides

As mentioned, the JBL Link 300 speaker sounds pretty great, but it's not necessarily audiophile-level in terms of its sound quality. The low frequencies sound great, and while the high frequencies are certainly present enough for most, we would have liked to hear a little more clarity and detail. That said, we don't think the majority of buyers will have any complaints with the sound quality, though audiophiles may prefer to look elsewhere.

Price may also be an issue for some, though we think the speaker offers excellent value for money. If you don't want to spend $250 on a speaker, then we recommend looking at other speakers in the JBL Link line, which may be a little cheaper. However, the speaker is currently on sale for $124.99, so if you can catch that deal, it's an even better buy.

The bottom line

The JBL Link series of speakers is a great way to get smart, multi-room audio on a budget, and the JBL Link 300 is no exception to that rule. The speaker looks good and boasts plenty of bass, and while it may not live up to audiophile standards, we think the vast majority of people will find it to be a great-sounding speaker. Add in the fact that the Link 300 has the Google Assistant and Chromecast compatibility, and you have a fully featured and great-value package.

Pros: Great bass response, nice design, Google Assistant, Chromecast compatible, decent audio, reasonable price

Cons: Could use a little more high-end detail

Buy the JBL Link 300 from Best Buy for $124.99 (originally $249.99) [Price may vary when it's not on sale]

When Mariatta Wijaya went to a conference for the popular programming language Python in 2015, it sparked an interest to join the volunteer community of developers that create and maintain the language. Later, after a mentor reached out, she became even more involved in the Python community.

While Wijaya, a platform engineer at Zapier, has had positive experiences in Python, she found that not all open source projects were as welcoming, especially to women. That's one reason why she's running for the board of the Open Source Initiative, an influential organization that promotes and protects open source software communities.

"I really want to see better diversity across the people who contribute to open source," Wijaya told Business Insider. "Not just the users, the creators of open source. I would love to see that diversity improve. I would like to see better representation. I did find it a barrier initially, not seeing more people who look like me in this space, and I felt like an outsider."

Currently, there are three women on the OSI board of directors and a total of nine are running for seats or reelection.

But leading up to the election, Wijaya and other female candidates saw online harassment.

One person posted on Slashdot, a social news website focused on technology, discussing six female candidates in misogynistic language. The poster then labeled each woman with how much of a "threat" they were.

Although this post came from just one anonymous user, and was removed by Slashdot, shortly afterward the OSI started seeing inappropriate comments posted on its website. Each OSI candidate has a Wiki page about their platform, and some people were posting comments targeting their gender, their work or their background.

The OSI elections close Friday, and current board members Molly de Blanc and Patrick Masson said this is the first time they've seen this type of harassment of female OSI board candidates.

They say it seemed to coincide with that Slashdot post while also admitting that harassment in open source projects is not uncommon.

Meanwhile, OSI moderators are working to curtail harassment on the OSI election Wiki and remove vulgar or inappropriate comments.

All of this comes at a time when interest in the work OSI does has skyrocketed.

In the past few months, some open source software based startups have changed the licensing on their software to restrict how businesses can use it and prevent cloud providers from making money off of their free software. The OSI approves whether licenses are open source or not, and it was put under spotlight after the publicly traded database company MongoDB submitted its new license to the OSI for approval.

These licensing changes are controversial, as experts say these licenses go against the definition of open source, and MongoDB has since withdrawn its license from the approval process.

Meanwhile, the OSI has taken a stand to defend the Open Source Definition, the official definition that lists out requirements for what makes software open source, an issue that many software programmers have strong opinions about. It basically defines when software is free to use and share and under what circumstances software is legally protected and must be paid for. The definition has become a hot-button issue in these OSI elections.

All this, de Blanc says, has led to increasing visibility for OSI, making people more aware about what the OSI does.

Read more:An influential group sponsored by the Silicon Valley tech titans warns that efforts are underway to 'undermine the integrity of open source'

"Seeing this type of abuse, being targeted in the context of the OSI, that's new," de Blanc told Business Insider.

Harassment in open source

The gender imbalance in tech is no secret but it's even more intense in the open source software world, where 95% of the people participating in such projects are men, according to GitHub's Open Source Survey.

"I see that the community can still be toxic to underrepresented groups," Wijaya said. "It hasn't been a safe environment. We are easier targets for harassment just because of gender or skin color or where we come from."

Although women were as likely as men to say they're interested in making future code contributions, only 45% of women said they were very likely to do so, compared to 61% of men, GitHub's survey said.

Meanwhile, the survey says, women were more likely to face harassment than men -- 25% of women said they encountered language or content that made them feel unwelcome, and 6% had dealt with unsolicited sexual advances.

Molly de Blanc, director on the Open Source Initiative Board, speaks at DebConf 2018. Screenshot from a DebConf 2018 video captured by Patrick Masson, CC-BY-SA

de Blanc, who is running for re-election, has seen firsthand this type of harassment in open source. Terms like "social justice warriors," "SJW," and "feminists" are also used as insults to target women and underrepresented minorities.

Behaving badly to others online has long been considered a normal practice in many open source communities. Last September, Linus Torvalds, the creator of the popular open source operating system kernel Linux, briefly stepped down after years of verbally abusing programmers who contributed code to the project. He promised to be more civil when he returned.

Today, most open source projects want their communities to behave civilly and many have created or revised their codes of conduct to address online abuse of all types, including those directed at women or other under represented groups.

"When you're using the word feminist as an insult, you're creating spaces where not only people who identify as feminist are not welcome, but people who identify as women aren't welcome," de Blanc said.

Not "surprising at all"

Masson, general manager at the OSI, says that that after trolls arrived to the OSI board Wiki pages, the OSI took immediate action.

"We never know where the harassment will come from," Masson said. "The best we can do is remain vigilant and consistent in how we treat our community. This is really the first year we've had anything like this is. The profile of the organization is increasing, but at the same time, it's a lot of unwanted attention."

Masson says that some controversy is to be expected, but the OSI is determined not to leave its volunteer leaders fend for themselves.

"All these candidates are volunteers who are stepping forward into the public spotlight," Masson said. They have criticism they're going to get just because of the role they're going to take on. I'm very concerned with making sure that we're inviting these people to participate and make sure that they're not being beat up with the generosity of stepping forward."

Other women running for election were less surprised by the harassing comments.

"The software industry and open source software industry in particular has been dealing with issues of bias in the industry," Pamela Chestek, principal of Chestek Legal, told Business Insider. "I don't think this Slashdot thing was surprising at all. I think it's unfortunate that it happened."

The 'anti-harassment team'

de Blanc is active in the Debian project, an open source operating system based on the Linux. In addition to contributing code, she serves on the anti-harassment team, which deals with harassment incidents, and the outreach team, which helps underrepresented people in technology become involved in the open source space and find job opportunities.

Just like Wijaya, she's running for the OSI board to make open source more inviting for underrepresented folks in tech.

She's been vocal about the issue of cyberbullying on her blog. She counts about eight times when she was the target of cyberbullying and online abuse, some of which revolved around gender.

Similarly, Masson says one of ways the OSI's is fostering diversity among its ranks is to reach out to developers outside of North America. It's working on growing its membership in Asia, South America and Africa.

Mariatta Wijaya, platform engineer at Zapier and Python developer Veronica Hanus

Wijaya believes that mentorship could be a good way to help the underrepresented feel more comfortable participating in open source.

She says that part of the reason for a lack of diversity is because contributing to these projects requires free time outside of work. Women and people of color, who already face pay gaps, may feel like their careers would be better served by spending more time at work than by volunteering on open source projects. Mentorship programs may help them see that their volunteer efforts on open source can enhance their careers, not detract from them.

"The reality is, women and people of color are still getting paid less compared to men," Wijaya said. "That itself makes it more difficult to justify contributing. When we do find time to do that in the open source space, it is easier for us to be a target for harassment and communities aren't always as welcoming."

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Roughly two months after Apple CEO Tim Cook said his company's "greatest contribution to mankind" would be in health, a new study provides the first glimpse at how that vision is beginning to take shape.

The unprecedented analysis, known as the Apple Heart Study, involved teaming up with cardiologists at Stanford University and studying more than 400,000 people. Their aim was to learn whether the Apple Watch and its heart-rate sensor could properly pick up on irregularities in people's heartbeat.

An early look at the work suggests it can. Of course, there are caveats.

The researchers are scheduled to present a summary of the Apple-sponsored study at the American College of Cardiology's annual meeting on Saturday in New Orleans. The full study has not yet been published.

According to their presentation, the watch appeared capable of picking up on abnormalities linked with a common but serious condition called atrial fibrillation or afib. Afib is an irregular heart beat, and people with the condition can experience shortness of breath and poor blood flow. The condition can also increase the risk of more serious problems like stroke and heart failure.

"The study's findings have the potential to help patients and clinicians understand how devices like the Apple Watch can play a role in detecting conditions such as atrial fibrillation, a deadly and often undiagnosed disease," Mintu Turakhia, the study's lead author and an associate professor of cardiovascular medicine at Stanford, said in a statement.

While the research offers a hopeful glimpse at the power of the Apple Watch to improve people's health, there is also potential for the device to overburden the healthcare system, according to some researchers. That could happen if the device tells too many people that they have a health problem when they actually don't.

Here's what you need to know.

An example for tech giants with their eyes on health

Apple isn't the only Silicon Valley tech giant with its eye on health. In recent years, companies such as Facebook, Google parent company Alphabet, and Fitbit have all made an effort to detect and prevent illness — whether it's picking up on someone who might be at risk of suicide or diagnosing a condition like afib or sleep apnea. Still, ailments like afib — which is equal parts common, serious, and preventable — are a kind of holy grail.

Outside experts who reviewed Apple's latest study see strengths and weaknesses in how it was done. Some major bright spots include the fact that it was done in collaboration with a well-respected university like Stanford, included lots of people, and took place over a fairly long time period. Additionally, the study design was kept separate from Apple, who funded it.

"This study is a great example for tech of how to design future studies," Mohamed Elshazly, an assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College who reviewed the study's design and saw its preliminary results, told Business Insider.

The Apple Watch's optical sensor uses light to measure your heart rate. Hollis Johnson

One big caveat: The study did not include the latest Apple Watch with its ECG

Still, Elshazly and other experts warn that the study had some important caveats.

The biggest? It didn't include the most recent Apple Watch, the series 4.

That watch, released after the study began, features a built-in electrocardiogram or ECG, the medical test typically used to detect heart-rhythm problems.

The series 4 was also the source of some controversy: experts worried that the device would over-diagnose irregularities, sending a lot of healthy people running to their doctors.

"Imagine the impact on a health care system as thousands of young, healthy people suddenly want to schedule appointments with cardiologists," Larry Husten, the former editor of TheHeart.Org, wrote in a recent opinion piece for Stat News.

But previous versions of the Apple Watch still have something else that can be used to check on your heart.

The series 1, 2, and 3 versions of the watch contain what are known as optical heart-rate pulse sensors. They use lights to take your pulse. So for the Stanford study, Turakhia and his co-investigators studied 400,000 people with one of these Apple Watches. The researchers also had the participants use a corresponding heart health app on their iPhones.

When people's Apple Watches picked up on an irregularity, they notified the participant with a pop-up and asked them to schedule a video chat with a doctor involved in the study. Then, to check that the irregular readings were correct, the researchers sent those participants ECG patches.

The Apple Watch identified heart problems in a small number of people

The study came away with some positive findings. They suggest that the Apple Watch does a fairly good job of detecting heart problems in people who have them, especially in cases where the problem also happens to be afib. But in some cases, the devices also detect problems when there aren't any.

This phenomenon, known in clinical parlance as a false-positive, is most concerning when it affects a large number of people. At first glance, this doesn't seem to be an issue with Apple's study: out of its more than 400,000 participants, only 0.5% (or 2,000 people) got notifications indicating they had an irregular heart rate.

However, when you consider that several million people are already wearing Apple Watches, that 0.5% figure could actually be quite troubling, Elshazly said. It's especially troubling when you also consider the fact that sometimes the notifications are wrong.

Hollis Johnson

According to comparisons with ECG patch recordings taken at the same time, the watches were correct in flagging a problem 71% of the time. In other words, in roughly seven out of 10 cases in which the watches told someone they had a problem, that problem turned out to be real. Additionally, in about eight out of every 10 abnormal cases, people were found to have afib at the time of the alert, suggesting that the Apple Watch is good at flagging people with that serious condition.

But those findings also mean that roughly a third of people who got flagged had nothing wrong with their hearts. And some of them still went on to seek medical care.

Those are the people Elshazly and Husten are worried about.

"These are people who are pursuing care when they shouldn't have," Elshazly said.

Another problem the study doesn't address is what happens to the people with afib whose symptoms are not picked up by the Apple Watch. In contrast to the people without a problem who the Apple Watch flags incorrectly, the people with a problem that get missed by the Apple Watch might never get the care they need.

In other words, they might "feel falsely reassured by the absence of any alert," Husten wrote.

Despite these issues, researchers like Elshazly still think wearables like the Apple Watch could play an important role in helping to predict and prevent serious illnesses like afib — especially if they're provided to populations who are known to face a higher risk of those illnesses. With afib, the risk increases dramatically with age, suggesting to Elshazly that perhaps the watches should be given primarily to older people.

Detecting heart problems is just the start

"Atrial fibrillation is just the beginning," Lloyd Minor, the dean of the Stanford School of Medicine, said in a statement about Apple's study.

"This study opens the door to further research into wearable technologies and how they might be used to prevent disease before it strikes," he said.

Other tech companies are working on similar applications for their devices in healthcare. Fitbit, for example, has been exploring the idea of using its fitness trackers to detect both afib and sleep apnea. Two years ago, the company enrolled in a new precertification program with the Food and Drug Administration that's designed to help speed the approval process for new digital health products.

"The billion dollar question is, does using the Apple Watch — with all its features — actually lead to me living longer and having better health?" Elshazly said. "We don't know yet. We don't have the data."

When it comes to delivery, Chinese food and pizza are about all that many Americans are used to ordering.

Outside of New York City and other metro areas, that's often still the case, especially in the suburbs. That's the exact market Uber wants to corner with its food delivery business as the ride-hailing giant continues its quest for global domination.

"The demand that we've experienced from the suburbs over the last year and a half has been truly phenomenal," Ana Mahoney, head of US cities for Uber Eats, said in an interview with Business Insider. "It shows the power and potential to expand our business everywhere."

Uber Eats first launched more than three years ago, and has expanded to more than 350 markets served by 300,000 couriers. Not only is delivery one of the fastest-growing areas of Uber's business, it showcases the "power of the Uber platform," as executives are quick to point out. In other words, a vast global network of services powered by a phone app can mean just more than digital taxi hailing. The company hopes it can soon reach everything, and has a focus on groceries next.

An Uber Eats rider cycles through central London. Jack Taylor/Getty Images

But while the densely-populated New York metro area is easily the most lucrative market for Uber's ride-hailing business, delivery is growing in areas with less density, where walking to grab a takeout meal might not be an option. In France, for example, more than half of Uber Eats orders take place outside of Paris, the company said.

Financially, that geographical difference compared to ride-hailing will be key as Uber races towards an IPO, which the company is reportedly set to being in April. Suburbs and towns outside of major urban centers are deeply unprofitable for ride-hailing companies. Uber Eats could help the company plug the $370 million hole in its balance sheet from 2018.

"We're seeing a lot of demand out there from families and people who eat differently than people do in our urban cores," Mahoney said.

Read more:Uber will officially launch its $120 billion IPO in April

It's not just diners who benefit, either. Uber can leverage its massive network of data to expand local restaurants reach. Many of those small eateries might not have even had delivery options before.

"The amount of revenue that restaurants have access to is limited to the number of tables they have in their restaurant as well as how quickly they can provide meals to customers and how often those tables turn over," Mahoney said.

"Delivery enables [restaurants] to, within the same fixed-cost structure, not just make money off of in-store sales, but also have a second avenue to sell their meals."

Then there are the massive enterprise deals Uber nailed down recently: Starbucks and McDonald's, neither of which had delivery options before, joined the platform in recent months. Not only has McDonald's seen higher checks on average on Uber Eats orders, but the hamburger chain has already sent out more than 10 million McNuggets, it said last year.

Uber Eats' McDonald's trial started with a pilot in Miami before it expanded nationwide last year. "Once we found a playbook, if you will, that worked, we started expanding that across the rest of the country, "Mahoney said, adding that it was an easy process to repeat for Starbucks.

Mahoney offered no specifics for what chains might be next on the list, but added that the company is "actively working on bringing all of our eaters favorite brands and local favorites onto our platform."

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After two deadly crashes in five months involving its 737 Max 8 aircraft, Boeing finds itself in a precarious position. The damage the crashes cause for Boeing will depend on the findings of investigators, said Henry Harteveldt, the founder of the travel research company Atmosphere Research Group.

"This definitely damages Boeing's reputation," he said. "The question is, how quickly will the investigations in Indonesia and Ethiopia reveal conclusive evidence of what may have caused those accidents?"

Read more: The government's grounding of all Boeing 737 Max jets is a reminder that the US still doesn't have a leader for its top air safety agency

Investigators may find that the airlines involved in each crash, Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines, didn't properly train their pilots. They may also conclude that the crashes occurred for reasons beyond Boeing or the airlines' control.

But in the worst outcome for Boeing, investigators could find that the aerospace manufacturer "deliberately took shortcuts" with instruction manuals, training procedures, or anything else related to its 737 Max aircraft, and airlines could lose their trust in Boeing, Harteveldt said. In that case, airlines could cancel orders for 737 Max or other Boeing aircraft.

"Boeing has an excellent reputation for designing aircraft, but it's not a foolproof organization," Harteveldt said.

Boeing declined a request for comment.

There's no guarantee investigators will find more fault in one party than any other. The circumstances behind the United States' decision to ground 737 Max aircraft were unusual, Harteveldt said, and may have been influenced by international pressure. In the days before President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he would issue an order to ground the aircraft, many other nations, like China, Australia, Britain, and France, announced their own bans.

"You never have had a president in the United States order an airplane grounded until [Wednesday]," Harteveldt said. "I think that the president felt the US had to act because we would look unusual on the world stage."

The FAA prefers to make decisions about grounding aircraft based on facts and data that indicate such a move is necessary to make sure it doesn't inconvenience passengers and airlines without good reason, Harteveldt said. In this case, a decision was made for the agency.

"I would have preferred that the FAA had objectively, independently, on its own conclusion, decided whether or not to ground the 787, rather than having its hand forced," Harteveldt said. "I don't want to ever see a passenger or crew put in harm's way. But I also don't like knee-jerk reactions."

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These days SAP CEO Bill McDermott signs his emails. "XO, Bill," he tells Business Insider.

But he's not sending virtual hugs and kisses. He's reiterating his marketing message of why he spent $8 billion cash to buy a Utah software company, Qualtrics, three days before its IPO.

The X stands for "experience data," the kind of data Qualtrics collects such as feedback from product testers, customer surveys, marketing campaigns, or employee satisfaction surveys. Qualtrics calls this "eXperience data" and it bills itself as the creator of a new category of tech called "experience management." That's when companies look across all their constituents — customers, employees, partners, etc. — to understand the kind of experiences they are having with the company and its products.

The "O" stands for operational data, the stuff SAP has traditionally collected like finances, inventory, sales and human resources information.

"When you take the 'o' data and you marry with 'x' data, you change world," McDermott told Business Insider in a 1:1 interview at Qualtrics customer conference last week in Salt Lake City.

"We talk about the digital board room. We look at the business of SAP. We run the whole company on one single instance of SAP HANA. So one database, one ERP system for the whole company," he says, referring to SAP big -data database, HANA, and its world-famous financial software known as enterprise resource management (ERP) software.

"In real time, we know how's our customers doing? What's our loyalty results? What's the top 25 things in terms of the commercial interests of the company at any one time," he says.

But as good as all that data is, it doesn't answer the most important question: why? Why is this product selling but not that one? Why is this sales team exceeding expectations and that one failing?

"With Qualtrics, we'll know how we're doing every day and why," he says.

McDermott believes that this combo will be game-changing for companies, helping them spot and fix problems instantly, and increase everyone's satisfaction.

And very satisfied customers "spend three times more money with you than those that are satisfied," McDermott says.

Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith says that several of his biggest customers, that also use SAP, have already called him and volunteered to be guinea pigs as SAP and Qualtrics integrate their products.

Ultimately, Smith believes that by combining the data they keep in their SAP systems and what they get from their Qualtrics survey/feedback systems, that companies will be able offer a level of customer service that just isn't possible today.

He gives the example of an airline.

"SAP has all the airport data. And we're collecting all the experience data from the airlines. Imagine an airline being able to send a note to their medallion customers and let them know that the security lines are a little long. That's not their world. That's the airport world. But that's the kind of thing that will be a available," he said.

Shocked the tech world

Four months ago, SAP shocked the software world by buying Utah-based market research software company Qualtrics for $8 billion in cash.

SAP CEO Bill McDermott Qualtrics Qualtrics was three days from a highly anticipated IPO. It was a profitable company, earning $2.5 million in net profit on $289.9 million in revenue in 2017. It expected to raise about $495 million in the IPO at about a $5 billion valuation.

Yet, when McDermott and Smith announced their Sunday-night deal, the first question an analyst asked on the call was: "why did you spend $8 billion on a company we've never heard of?," Smith remembers.

McDermott, who rose to the corner office of Europe's biggest software company from a career as a salesman, was ready to explain.

And he's been explaining ever since, including changing the signature on his emails to XO, Bill. (Qualtrics is in on the marketing message, too. They've painted an X and an O on all their office elevator doors.)

As we previously reported, McDermott wooed Ryan Smith and his brother cofounder, Jared Smith, for months, trying to get them to sell, in a courtship that included bicycle rides, dinners with the wives, the whole nine yards.

McDermott told us his revelation, the reason he charged after Qualtrics, came from his own experience in running SAP, as well as listening to his customers lament about their decision-making processes.

SAP is an enormous multi-national company with 96,000 employees in 140 countries, 425,000 customers, hundreds of enterprise software products. When he went in search of tech to understand the "why," he found Qualtrics. He checked out the competition and made up his mind to acquire the company.

SAP wasn't a Qualtrics customer at the time but it is starting to use it internally.

"We're now putting Qualtrics into 45 different processes in the company," he said. For example, he's using it for customer retention, asking customers why they do or don't use a product, and to better understand employee performance.

As for the ongoing criticism that the $8 billion price tag, at 20-x sales, was too high, McDermott also has an answer: The price will look cheap in hindsight.

He compares SAP's purchase of Qualtrics to when Steve Jobs went back to Apple because Apple bought his company NeXT. Or when EMC bought VMware. Or when Facebook bought Instagram.

And he notes that Qualtrics was profitable and growing at over 50%.

With SAP's massive sales force and army of consultants like Deloitte, he believes its growth will accelerate. He also says he paid in the neighborhood of the multiple Salesforce paid for MuleSoft. That was 16x sales. Or what Microsoft paid for GitHub. That was 30x sales. Although, neither of those transactions were all cash deals.

Also ... layoffs

Truth be told, McDermott has to find growth.

While SAP's revenue has been slowly growing, and the stock price has fared well under his decade of leadership, SAP is the quintessential old-school software company that's being overthrown by cloud computing upstarts.

SAP isn't, itself, a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services. Instead, it's selling more of its software on clouds run by Amazon, Alibaba, Google and Microsoft.

Qualtrics should help him show big growth in cloud software.

SAP employeesGlassdoor/SAPIronically, on the same day that McDermott was on stage at Qualtrics conference, SAP also started implementing the layoffs it announced at the end of January.

First-hand accounts of the layoffs tweeted out by laid-off employees showed that pink slips were sent to some prominent business application developers, who worked on its old-school software.

The restructuring reportedly impacted some 4,400 employees, some of whom can apply to be transferred into other positions.

McDermott didn't discuss the layoffs much with Business Insider, except to say that the company is adding employees this year. It expects to grow by at least 4,000 net people this year to employ 100,000 at the end of 2019.

A few years back, after Tesla posted an unexpected quarterly earnings beat and CEO Elon Musk took to the opportunity to undersell what was then the yet-to-be-produced Model 3 sedan, I wrote that he was the greatest car salesman who has ever lived.

I'm not going to judge my own verdict, but Tesla did finish 2018 by delivering almost 250,000 cars, and most of them were Model 3's. That's what happens when Musk says he isn't going to try that hard.

Last week, Musk revealed the Model Y — Tesla's lastest vehicle, a compact/midsize crossover that's really the vehicle the all-electric automaker needs most, as consumers in the US switch in droves to SUVs.

Musk has endured, to put it mildly, a lot of ups and downs since I called him a great salesman. For any other CEO, a 2017 spent struggling to manufacture the Model 3 at scale and a 2018 that featured a failed go-private effort, an SEC investigation, and sort of ongoing social-media meltdown would have been justification for retiring to run your other company that just launches rockets.

Read more: Elon Musk is the greatest car salesman who has ever lived

Musk reviews the Model Y's specs. Matt Debord/Business Insider

That Musk can even take to a stage in Los Angeles, as he did on Thursday, and continue selling is a testament to his resilience. There have been some impressive, passionate, and even sort of crazy visionaries in the history of the auto industry. But if Henry Ford or Enzo Ferrari had been dealing with what Musk is up against, I'm not sure the companies that bear their names would have survived.

The Model Y. Tesla

In a relatively short period of time, Musk and Tesla have achieved two goals that more or less everybody in the car business thought were impossible: start a new auto brand and create and dominate a market for electric vehicles.

Yes, Tesla is over a decade old. But in the past five years, it's gone from selling a micro-volume two-seat sports car to three quite compelling electric cars in the Model S, Model X, and Model 3, soon to be joined by the Model Y (deliveries commence in 2020).

That progress is stunning, all the more so because Tesla's current trio of cars are some of the best vehicles ever built in an industry that's been around for over a century (that they're electric cars is even more impressive). It's safe to assume that the Model Y will continue this pattern of excellence.

None of this means that Tesla won't have to continue to fight for its life. By the standards of the car business, it's running on a shoestring. And while it's cars are great, some new electric vehicles are headed onto the field of competition. So far, I've driven the Jaguar I-PACE, a very solid crossover, and I'm looking forward to the Porsche Taycan, a high-performance four-door.

"This is a tough business," Bill Ford, great-grandson of Henry and chairman of the company that bears his name, once told me. "You have to fight for every sale." That's what Musk has in store for him. But after establishing himself as the greatest living car salesman, he proved something else: he's nothing if not a fighter.

When Apple unveiled its revamped Apple TV set-top box in 2015, it framed the update as a dramatic rethinking and much-needed modernization of the medium. "And our vision for TV is simple, and perhaps a little provocative," CEO Tim Cook said during the company's September keynote that year. "We believe the future of television is apps."

Now, more than three years later, Apple may be preparing to give the world an even clearer picture of exactly what that statement means. On March 25, the company is slated to hold an event at the Steve Jobs Theater on its Apple Park campus where it's expected to unveil a new streaming video service among other announcements. The service will likely be integrated into Apple products and would allow access to Apple original programming as well as shows from other media giants like CBS, Showtime, and HBO among others.

Apple pioneered the modern smartphone when it launched the iPhone in 2007, and its original iPad set the standard for modern tablets in 2010. But it's struggled to make a similar impact with its more recent hardware products.

The Apple Watch, which is now the most popular smartwatch in the world, was more of a slow burn than an overnight game changer, as some reviewers criticized the first generation Apple Watch for not doing enough. Average consumers, too, weren't initially blown away by the watch, as more than half of those surveyed in a 2016 poll by advertising firm Fluent thought the watch was a flop. (One could argue that the now-defunct Pebble, which raised more than $10 million on Kickstarter and still remains one of the platform's most-funded projects, was the first smartwatch to excite the masses about wearable technology).

Amazon's Alexa and the Google Assistant have already established themselves as being the most pervasive digital assistants in the home. In the fourth quarter of 2018, the Amazon Echo accounted for 35.5% of smart speaker shipments while Google Home devices were responsible for 30%, according to findings from Strategy Analytics reported bt VentureBeat. Apple's HomePod speaker only claimed 4.1% of the market, although shipments did increase by 45% quarter-over-quarter.

That leaves many investors, analysts, and industry watchers wondering what's next for Apple. And if the latest reports are to be believed, the answer is clearly new digital services. Bolstering its services business is particularly important for Apple in 2019 as iPhone sales — and worldwide smartphone sales — have slowed down.

Apple said in its earnings report from January that iPhone sales in the ever-important holiday quarter declined 15% compared to the year prior. The company attributed this drop to macroeconomic factors and the fact that consumers are holding onto their phones for longer periods of time.

But Apple's services business, which includes products like the App Store, Apple Pay, and Apple Music, served as the silver lining in the company's earnings report. It grew by 19% in the December quarter and reached an all-time high of $10.9 billion in revenue.

Business interests aside, Apple's long-anticipated presence in the video streaming market will be key for the company to maintain its reputation as an innovator. The smartphone market has matured, and the next-generation technologies Apple is reported to be working on like augmented reality glasses and a new car platform likely won't be ready in the immediate future.

New smartphone models introduced by industry giants like Apple and Samsung have felt iterative more than revolutionary in recent years, with the biggest advancements coming in the form of camera upgrades and revamped designs. At the same time, smartphones are becoming increasingly expensive; even the entry level iPhone XR is roughly $50 more expensive than 2017's iPhone 8, which started at $699. That is making it increasingly difficult for companies like Apple to convince consumers to upgrade to new devices.

Apple is also still readying its plan for whatever it believes the next evolution of the personal computer will be, whether that's augmented reality glasses or self-driving car technology. The company is reportedly preparing to release an augmented reality headset in 2020 that would run on a new Apple-designed chipset and operating system, but that timeline could change, according to Bloomberg.

The company is also reportedly devoting resources to building autonomous driving software under its Project Titan initiative, as Bloomberg also reported. But it's unclear exactly when the company will release any products stemming from that project. Apple initially intended to design an electric vehicle that would launch by 2020, but it shifted its focus to self-driving software in 2016, the report says. Apple also laid off 190 employees from its Project Titan division last month.

That means Apple may have to prove it can do more with the products it already sells, and launching a new video streaming service would certainly be one way to do that. But as a newcomer in the space, the company will undoubtedly face stiff competition from rivals like Netflix and Amazon, especially when it comes to content.

Apple is developing its own programs for the service, which it's expected to preview during its event on March 25, and has invested $1 billion in original content, according to The Wall Street Journal. Apple has signed a multiyear deal with Oprah and is reportedly working with M. Night Shyamalan on a thriller and Steven Spielberg on a revival of the Amazing Stories anthology series, according to Variety and The Wall Street Journal. It also acquired James Corden's Carpool Karaoke in 2016.

But $1 billion is just a small sliver of what Netflix spends on programming, as the company said in its most recent earnings report that it spent $12.04 billion on content last year. Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives recently urged Apple to pursue content acquisitions in a bid to catch up in a note to investors on February 21.

"Now is the time for Apple to rip off the band-aid and finally do significant content [mergers and acquisitions] with the landscape ripe," Ives wrote in the note. "Otherwise it will be a major strategic mistake that will haunt the company for years to come, as content is the rocket fuel in the services engine and currently missing in the portfolio."

Yet Apple does have a key advantage that Amazon and Netflix lack: the iPhone. Apple recently announced that there are now 900 million active iPhones around the world. And if Apple does incorporate this new streaming app into iPhones, iPads, and Apple TVs as it's expected to, it will certainly have a broad means of distribution. Wedbush predicts that Apple's streaming service could have 100 million subscribers in three to five years if it proves to be a hit.

Apple may have established its vision for television in 2015, proving that the Apple TV is no longer a "hobby." But if successful, this new video service will be the missing puzzle piece necessary to execute on that mission. And it's more important for Apple now than ever.

The most popular new game of 2019 arrived as a complete surprise; Electronic Arts released "Apex Legends " on the same day it was announced, February 4th, with no advance marketing.

That's an incredibly bold move in the gaming industry, which typically builds anticipation for a hot new title months in advance by spending millions of dollars in marketing campaigns.

Skipping the pre-release ad blitz was a gamble, but the makers of "Apex Legends" had a secret weapon: EA and developer Respawn Entertainment partnered with a group of popular professional gamers to help promote "Apex Legends" directly to their massive online followings during the first two days of the launch.

"Apex Legends" influencers included Tyler "Ninja" Blevins, the world's most popular professional gamer, and other top video game streamers like Michael "Shroud" Grzesiek, "Jack "CouRage" Dunlop, and Herschel "Dr. Disrespect" Beahm IV. An anonymous source told Reuters that Electronic Arts paid Ninja $1 million to participate in the Apex Partner program; other partners were paid as well but their rates were not specified.

Here's why EA's decision to partner with influencers was so smart: