Netflix's office building in Los Angeles and a nearby local television station went into lockdown Thursday afternoon after a person connected Netflix said he had a gun.

Some Netflix employees were reportedly evacuated from their building, while some employees of television station KTLA were reportedly told to "move to interior spaces." The Los Angeles police later arrested the person who started the incident and found "no indication" he actually had a weapon, Tony Im, a public information officer for the police department, said.

Netflix's office building and KTLA's studios are both on the lot of Sunset Bronson Studios in Hollywood.

The incident started when a former Netflix employee called a current one and said he had a gun, the Los Angeles Times reported. LAPD received a call about the alleged armed person at 3:53 p.m., Im said. Police took the person into custody off-site, he said.

Im said the person was connected with Netflix, but didn't know if he was a current or former employee. Im declined to release the suspect's name.

Netflix has received an "all clear" from police, company spokeswoman Sarah Jones said late Thursday.

"There was never an individual with a firearm on the property," she said.

Jones declined to confirm any connection between the person who started the incident and the company.

Just five years ago, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says that when it comes to acquisitions, it was the technology and product that mattered most.

Now, he says, he's made a complete turnaround: The billionaire tech exec says that when Salesforce wants to buy a company, he first does his "due diligence" in looking at the company's culture, how fairly and equitably it pays employees, and its ratings on popular employer review site Glassdoor.

Said Benioff onstage Thursday at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference:

"We bought 50 companies in the last decade or more. We now have to look at pay scales with due diligence ... Five years ago, I didn't look at pay scales, at culture, at Glassdoor ratings. When you buy a company, you don't just buy the technology. You buy the culture."

Benioff says that in this day and age, company culture is "more important than ever," and Salesforce is doubling down. He believes that culture, equal pay for women, and how a company handles sexual harassment are all related, and says that employees expect CEOs to have clear positions in those areas.

Seeing Google employees walk out to protest the company's handling of sexual misconduct cases last November was "eye-opening for a lot of people," Benioff said. He added that Silicon Valley has already seen several executives get taken down for committing sexual harassment, or for not doing enough to fight it.

"We have CEOs who are not paying attention to their culture and allowed toxic cultures to emerge," Benioff said.

Salesforce has spent $8.7 million on pay raises for women after a group of Salesforce employees, including Chief People Officer Cindy Robbins and executive vice president Leyla Seka, investigated the wage gap at the company. Benioff has also previously spoken about how he had to fire an executive for crossing a line in sexual harassment.

Read more:Salesforce has spent $6 million on pay raises for women — and fired an executive

"You can't just be a domain expert in financial services, software, AI," Benioff said. "You've got to know your stuff when it comes to handling your culture at your company."

The Detroit Free Press reported on Thursday that CFO Bob Shanks could be retiring after a long career at the automaker, beginning in 1977. Shanks has been CFO since 2012.

In a statement to Business Insider, Ford said, "As all boards of responsible companies do, our board of directors regularly reviews executive succession plans to ensure we have access to the best talent available and are prepared for orderly transitions to take place should the need arise."

The Free Press didn't provide a timeframe for Shanks' departure, but the paper cited sources with knowledge of the matter who said that the groundwork for the CFO retirement was being laid.

Read more: Ford's CFO says the automaker's $11 billion restructuring plan could pay off sooner than expected

Ford is in the midst of an $11-billion restructuring under CEO Jim Hackett, and Shanks told Business Insider in an interview after the carmaker reported fourth-quarter earnings that he wasn't happy about the company's 2018 performance.

"We should have made $14 billion," he said.

Ford booked $7 million in profits globally in 2018.

Shanks' retirement hasn't been rumored in the auto industry, but if he were to start considering it, he would leave Ford with a strong balance sheet, built on years of profits in North America from the sale of pickup trucks an SUVs.

He would also be moving on after over four decades with the Blue Oval. His crosstown counterpart at General Motors, Chuck Stevens, retired last year after a similar tenure with the Detroit giant. Shanks is also 66, an age at which retirement is often prepared for.

Any executive changes at Ford are likely to encourage outsized conclusions about the company, which has seen its stock slide over 30% for the past three years. Hackett assumes the CEO's job in 2017, following the ouster of Mark Fields. Wall Street has expressed impatience with his turnaround plans, and that impatience has collided with Ford's struggles outside the US market.

Following is a transcript of the video:

Amazon is canceling HQ2 in New York City.

The company announced in November that it would build a new headquarters in New York.

Amazon claimed it would provide "25,000 full-time high-paying jobs," as well as a $2.5 billion investment in New York's Long Island City neighborhood.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio were supportive of Amazon coming to the city.

But local politicians like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez panned the deal.

Twitter reads:"Amazon is a billion-dollar company. The idea that it will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks at a time when our subway is crumbling and our communities need MORE investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here."

"We've been getting calls and outreach from Queens residents all day about this.The community's response? Outrage."

Amazon would have received an estimated $3 billion in tax incentives.

The company cited local opposition as a reason for canceling its New York plans.

Governor Cuomo's office estimated HQ2 could have created over 107,000 total jobs, as well as $27.5 billion in city and state tax revenue over the next 25 years.

Cuomo said the opposing politicians "should be held accountable for this lost economic opportunity."

Mayor de Blasio criticized Amazon's decision in a statement: "You have to be tough to make it in New York City," and "Instead of working with the community, Amazon threw away that opportunity."

Amazon said it won't reopen its search for another HQ2 location at this time.

However, the company will move forward with its plans to build a headquarters in Northern Virginia, as well as an operations center in Nashville.

Three months after announcing its decision to split its second headquarters between Northern Virginia and Queens, Amazon has reversed course.

On February 14, the company canceled its plans for a New York City HQ2, which was expected to introduce around 25,000 new employees and a multi-billion-dollar headquarter site into Long Island City.

The plan had met significant backlash from local residents and their elected representatives, who feared that the tech giant's arrival would exacerbate challenges in their neighborhoods.

Read more: Amazon just cancelled its New York City HQ2 plans. Here's what the development was supposed to look like.

In November, protests led by Senator Michael Gianaris and City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer featured signs reading "Scamazon" and "Rent hikes now with two-day shipping."

As late as February, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents New York's 14th congressional district, called on supporters to rally against the "creeping overreach of one of the world's biggest corporations."

The opposition appears to have motivated Amazon's change of heart.

In a statement, the company said that dissent from local and state politicians prevented them from "go[ing] forward with the project we and many others envisioned in Long Island City."

The statement also claimed that 70% of New Yorkers supported Amazon's plans and investment, though recent polls from Quinnipiac University and the Sienna College Research Institute found that less than 60% of New York City voters approved of the city's deal with Amazon.

Here are the main reasons why some New Yorkers didn't want Amazon in their backyard.

Following backlash and criticism over the spread of anti-vaccination rhetoric and sponsored advertisements targeting pregnant women in states seeing a surge in measles outbreaks, Facebook said it may reduce or remove the false information from the platform, according to a statement received by Bloomberg. The social network also said it could decide to demote anti-vaccination content from Facebook search results too.

Users have the ability to report content for review at any time, and health-related information is eligible for fact-checking by Facebook's fact-checking partners in 25 countries. The company told Business Insider it is exploring ways to make educational information about vaccines more easily available while also minimizing harm caused by misinformation, however it is still "thinking through what the right approach for this effort might look like."

"We are committed to accurate and useful information throughout Facebook," a company spokesperson told Business Insider in a statement on Thursday. "We remove content that violates our Community Standards, down-rank articles that might be misleading, and show third-party fact-checker articles to provide people with more context. We have more to do, and will continue efforts to provide educational information on important topics like health."

It is unclear when Facebook may be rolling such efforts out or if it has already.

As of right now, a simple Facebook search shows groups like Rage Against the Vaccine and The Truth About Vaccines (both spreading false information about vaccines) have over 40,000 members.

Facebook did not respond to request for comment on how the platform has been used by anti-vaccine advocates to target women, ages 20 to 60, interested in pregnancy in states seeing an increase in measles-related cases, as was first reported by The Daily Beast.

According to the CDC, there have been over 100 instances of measles since January — more than the entire year of 2016 when there were only 86. The World Health Organization listed vaccine hesitancy as one of the top 10 threats to global health for 2019.

Critics, like Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democrat from California, have called on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai in a letter Thursday to take action on the spike in false vaccine information running rampant on the platforms.

"The algorithms which power these services are not designed to distinguish quality information from misinformation or misleading information, and the consequences of that are particularly troubling for public health issues," said Schiff in the letter addressed to both tech execs.

"Additionally, even parents and guardians who seek out accurate information about vaccines could unwittingly reach pages and videos with misinformation."

Read Schiff's entire letter here.

Amazon just folded like a house of cheap cards, in a development that should alarm its fellow tech giants.

Thanks to the company's decision to abandon its plans to build a new campus in New York, activists now have a model for defeating Amazon and its peers. Politicians who have been all-too-eager in the past to hand out massive giveaways to them, and to other big corporations, may not be as ready to do so in the future.

And Big Tech is likely to face much more scrutiny going forward than it's ever seen in the past.

Lessons learned

On its surface, Amazon's HQ2 project in New York looked like a great deal for the Big Apple. The company planned to build a new campus in Queens that would be home to some 25,000 workers. The move, according to studies commissioned by the New York governor's office and and the city of New York, would have brought in some $27.5 billion in tax revenue over the next 25 years.

But activists moved quickly to oppose it. They protested at City Hall, and badgered politicians about the deal and its impact.

Activists questioned the fairness of the city and state giving out up to $3 billion in tax breaks to one of the world's largest and wealthiest corporations. They criticized the fact that the deal was negotiated behind closed doors with little input from the communities that would be affected by it. Union officials in a labor-friendly city faulted Amazon for opposing unionization efforts. And many worried about how Amazon's presence would affect already high housing prices and the area's already stressed transportation systems.

Of course, activists have opposed similar corporate giveaways with similar arguments in the past. What made this effort different and more successful was that the political landscape has changed. Populist anger and energized New York voters helped Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gain an upset victory over old-school Democrat Joe Crowley for a seat in the US House of Representatives, and powered the Democratic takeover of the New York Senate.

After that, politicians who might have dismissed the activists' concerns in the past were newly attentive to them. Indeed, at least two prominent figures — state Senator Michael Gianaris and Queens City Councilmember Jimmy Van Bramer— changed their position on Amazon's new campus from support to opposition following the company's public unveiling of its plans.

What's notable about Amazon's decision to withdraw is that the opposition — while vocal — never seemed to be overwhelming. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo strongly supported the deal, as did New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio. Polls indicated that a majority of New Yorkers — around the state and in the city — backed it too.

Meanwhile, opponents appeared divided with differing goals. Union leaders, for example, likely would have gotten behind the plan if Amazon would have given them a relatively small concession: a commitment to remaining "neutral" on any unionization efforts among its New York workers, The New York Times reported.

Indeed, if Amazon had decided to stick it out or tried to do the hard work of trying to address opponents concerns, it still likely could have gotten the deal done — a point De Blasio made in his statement following the company's announcement.

Which is to say, Amazon's opponents were able to get the company to scuttle the deal largely by just making the process of finalizing it more difficult.

That's going to be a lesson for activists in other cities — such as San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle — who are targeting similar deals for similar reasons. They may not need to build massive or united fronts against such deals, or put in place insurmountable obstacles to get tech giants to abandon them. They may need only increase the friction enough that the companies tire of the approval effort — or abandon it early out of fear of how much time and energy it will require.

Reasons to be skeptical

Activists may not necessarily have majority backing, but they do have good reasons to be skeptical of corporate giveaways and of tech companies opening big offices in their neighborhoods.

Numerous studies have indicated that tax incentives rarely determine where corporations set up shop; generally, they would choose the same location with or without the breaks. What's more, tax incentives often don't pay off for themselves, or don't end up delivering the jobs or economic activity they promised.

Another high-profile move to lure a big tech investment is a case in point. Wisconsin used a record-breaking $4.5 billion in tax incentives to lure Foxconn to build a TV factory there. Even with the personal intervention of President Donald Trump, however, Foxconn has reportedly scaled back the project and its potential to create jobs— leaving state and local officials holding the bag.

What's more, residents in tight housing markets like New York and the San Francisco Bay Area should rightly wonder about the tradeoffs involved in building massive new corporate campuses in their regions, particularly if they don't include plans for more housing or mass transit. Such developments risk making already unaffordable areas practically unlivable.

And there's good reason to question the idea of giving tax breaks to already rich corporations, particularly those in the tech sector. Companies such as Amazon and Apple have been among the most notorious when it comes to avoiding paying their fair share in taxes, taking advantage of numerous tax breaks and sketchy schemes to minimize their payments to the governments. Amazon, for example, is expected to pay $0 in federal income taxes for 2018 for the second year in a row.

The tech giants are already facing scrutiny on the national level for thwarting competition, spreading propaganda, subverting democracy, promoting addictive and potentially harmful technologies, and undermining privacy. Amazon's New York experience indicates that the local harms they cause are going to get more attention as well.

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday congratulated New Yorkers for "standing up to the power of Amazon" after the tech giant canceled a plan to build a second headquarters, called HQ2, in the New York City borough of Queens.

"The people of New York and America are increasingly concerned about the power of large multinational corporations and the billions in corporate welfare they receive. Our job is to end the race to the bottom where taxpayers in one city or state are forced to bid against each other for desperately needed jobs. This is what the rigged economy is all about," Sanders said in a statement to INSIDER.

The Vermont senator added, "I congratulate New Yorkers for standing up to the power of Amazon."

A number of local politicians, including Democrats like New York City Council speaker Corey Johnson, New York Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, New York state senator Mike Gianaris, were opposed to the plan for a new Amazon headquarters in Long Island City. The politicians expressed concern with the impact on the city's residents and economy.

Amazon on Thursday pointed to this opposition from local leaders as part of its reasoning behind scrapping the plan for the new headquarters.

"For Amazon, the commitment to build a new headquarters requires positive, collaborative relationships with state and local elected officials who will be supportive over the long-term ... A number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward with the project we and many others envisioned in Long Island City," Amazon said in a statement.

Read more: 'Queens is not for sale': Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York activists celebrate Amazon's decision to cancel HQ2 in Long Island City

Other progressive politicians with similar views to Sanders, such as Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also applauded by Amazon's decision to cancel the plan to expand into New York City.

"Anything is possible: today was the day a group of dedicated, everyday New Yorkers & their neighbors defeated Amazon's corporate greed, its worker exploitation, and the power of the richest man in the world," Ocasio-Cortez said in a tweet.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who worked hard to bring Amazon to the state, was not enthused by Thursday's developments. Cuomo attacked the New York politicians who stood against the plan and called for these politicians to be "held accountable for the lost economic opportunity."

56% of registered voters in New York state supported the plan to build the new Amazon headquarters in Queens, according to a Siena College poll released Tuesday. And a report commissioned by Cuomo suggested the plan would've brought $27.5 billion in tax revenue for the state and city.

But some of the local leaders critical of Amazon expressed concerns with the $3 billion in tax incentives the state and city would pay to the company as part of the deal.

Sanders, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, has been a consistent and unabashedly vocal critic of Amazon's treatment of its workers.

The senator, who's seemingly poised to make another run for president in 2020, has made tackling wealth inequality and the influence of corporations in US politics the centerpiece of his long career in politics.

Thursday marked the end of Denver's first teacher strike in 25 years.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Denver Public Schools (DPS) and the Denver Classroom Teachers Association reached a deal that includes, amongst other things, raises of up to 11% for teachers. The strike, which began on Monday, was spurred following failure to reach a satisfactory pay deal with administrators this month.

Data released by the OECD reveals that in the US, the average American teacher makes a starting salary of around $39,000 a year, and about $67,000 for a veteran teacher.

The OECD's full data set reveals a yawning gap between the highest and lowest paid teachers around the world. When converted to US dollars, many of the salaries fall well short of the average American teacher. For comparison, the starting salary for a high school teacher with no experience in Luxembourg is about $70,000. The peak salary for a veteran teacher is $124,000.

Elementary school teachers — best and worst

Luxembourg is the best country to be an elementary school teacher, salary-wise. Shayanne Gal/Business Insider

In Luxembourg, one of the richest countries in the world, an inexperienced teacher can expect to make more on his or her first day than teachers in nearly all other countries can hope to make in their entire careers.

The only exception is Switzerland, where elementary school teachers make nearly $86,000 at the top range of salaries.

Meanwhile, salaries in the four lowest-paid countries all top out below the starting salaries in the 10 best-paid countries. End-of-career salaries in the Slovak Republic, Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary remain below $30,000.

High school teachers — best and worst

Luxembourg is also the best country to be a high school teacher, salary-wise. Shayanne Gal/Business Insider

Luxembourg's and Switzerland's dominance continues on for high school teachers. Likewise, Korean teachers still see the biggest jumps in pay over their careers.

Though a brand-new teacher in Korea makes just $30,000 in their first year, by the time they've hit the 10-year mark, their salary rises to around $50,000, and at the top end, it's $84,000.

Austria is one of the only countries to jump significantly from elementary school pay to high school. High school teachers make about $10,000 more at the top of the scale.

Google pays Apple to be the default search engine on the iPhone, a deal worth billions to Cupertino.

In 2018, Google may have paid Apple as much as $9.46 billion in what's called "traffic acquisition costs," or TAC, according to Goldman Sachs analyst Rod Hall, citing Google financial results.

The amount Google pays Apple could increase to $12.2 billion next year, and $15.6 billion in 2021, according to the Goldman estimate, although TAC growth is slowing, Hall says.

Hall's argument is that while Apple has recently drawn investor focus to its "services" revenue stream, the composition of that is weighted towards things like TAC, and the 15% to 30% fee Apple collects from the App Store, instead of recurring monthly subscriptions like Apple Music, which is often what Apple executives focus on in conversations with investors.

"Combining our TAC work with App Store data from Sensor Tower we conclude that TAC and Apple's share of app store downloads represented 51% of Services revenues in 2018 and an even larger 70% of Services gross profits," according to the Goldman note distributed on Monday.

Apple's services business totaled about $37 billion in the company's fiscal 2018, and investors hope its growth will account for the majority of Apple's total revenue growth.

Goldman analysts suggest that in order to hit those targets, Apple will need to launch a new content bundle, potentially bundling a subscription to online video, magazines, and online storage.

"We expect Apple to launch an 'Apple Prime' type package in late March though the profitability and attractiveness of this are key to better Services growth and profits than we currently model," the Goldman Sachs analysts wrote.

In 2017, Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi estimated that Google was paying Apple $3 billion per year in TAC costs. The only hard number we know for sure is that Google paid Apple $1 billion in 2014, thanks to court filings.

Here's how Goldman Sachs sees Apple's services line item breaking down:

Goldman Sachs

Nebia, the water-saving shower head company that made a splash in its 2015 Kickstarted debut, is back with a new and improved nozzle.

On Tuesday the company announced its new Nebia Spa Shower 2.0, which it says can create 29% warmer temperatures and comes at a more affordable price. The new $499 shower head (compared to the $649 predecessor), preserves the original elegant, halo-shaped style but is now available in a matte black color, along with the traditional matte silver finish.

Nebia — which counted Apple CEO Tim Cook and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt among its initial backers — launched pre-order sales for the new model on Kickstarter this week. The company has already tripled its $100,000 goal within the first 24 hours, and offered early bird prices for the latest model are as low as $349.

As with the first version, water conservation is the central principle behind the product. Nebia's process of atomization — which breaks up water into tiny droplets — is supposed to create a more enveloping shower experience, all while using 65% less water than standard shower heads.

The company says since first launching in 2015, it has helped save 100 million gallons of water.

Read more: Tim Cook and Eric Schmidt stripped down to try this new kind of shower head and wound up investing

Along with announcing the new product and Kickstarter campaign, Nebia also announced it has raised a Series A funding round for an undisclosed amount, led by North America's largest shower head company Moen.

Phillip Winter, Nebia's co-founder and CEO, told Business Insider in an interview Tuesday that the partnership with Moen is a "three-part deal," that includes assistance with design, manufacturing, and distribution.

"Moen enabled us to get there five times faster," Winter said of Moen's involvement with the 2.0 model.

Other notable investors in the Series A include Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, Starwood Hotel founder Barry Sternlicht, and the startup accelerator Y-Combinator. Eric Schmidt and Tim Cook also re-upped for second investments with the shower head disruptors.

Cook, in particular, has been "incredibly supportive" according to Winter, as the Apple chief exec has particular expertise in the materials that Nebia works with (aluminum).

"When we touch base, it's really when we have important decisions, and we have something that's very strategic," Winter said. "We don't just ping him unless it's something really important. He takes one or two days to respond to the email, and then he sends back six or seven paragraphs of a super thoughtful response."

ASMR, short for autonomous sensory meridian response, refers to a phenomenon where soft sounds like whispering or soft tapping triggers a tingling or relaxation effect in the listener.

It's become a whole subculture on YouTube, which hosts some 45 million ASMR videos. Rapper Cardi B has gotten in on the action with her own ASMR video, and even Michelob Light turned its Super Bowl ad into an ASMR sensation.

But, as Wired UK reports, there's another side to the subculture: Kids as young as 5 years old are making their own ASMR videos — and making good money in the process. Wired spoke to 13-year-old Makenna Kelly, who makes ASMR videos for the 1.3 million subscribers to her "Life with MaK" channel. In some of her most-viewed videos, Kelly eats instant ramen noodles, or glides makeup brushes over a microphone.

Here's one of her recent videos, in which she "eats" a Gucci shoe:

It was reported in October that Kelly's channel brings in an estimated $1,000 a day. That puts her on a par with ASMR Darling, also known as Taylor Darling, the biggest name in the ASMR space with 2.2 million subscribers, and who Wired now reports also brings in about $1,000 a day.

Some of the money comes from YouTube advertising. However, Wired reports that Kelly also makes money from her channel by letting viewers pay for special requests. For example, Kelly was paid $50 over PayPal for 10-minute ASMR videos where she chewed whole pieces of honeycomb. The video brought in 12 million views.

This clearly raises some challenges in keeping the children safe from online predators and other bad actors — especially since finding these channels is a simple search for "child" and "ASMR" away. YouTube says that it's prioritizing keeping these children safe, and has even taken channels down while it talks with the families of young creators.

Claire Lilley, YouTube's child safety policy manager, told Wired in a statement:

"We believe technology presents great opportunities for young people to express themselves creatively and access useful information, but we also know we have a responsibility to protect young creators and families and consider the potential impact of emerging trends on them. We've been working with experts to update our enforcement guidelines for reviewers to remove ASMR videos featuring minors engaged in more intimate or inappropriate acts. We are working alongside experts to make sure we are protecting young creators while also allowing ASMR content that connects creators and viewers in positive ways."

Spokespeople for Kelly and YouTube did not respond to a request for comment.

Read the full story at Wired.

Angela Ahrendts' departure from Apple may end up being a blessing in disguise for the iPhone maker.

A big part of Ahrendts job was to transform Apple into a luxury brand. But it's just that kind of thinking — and the nosebleed prices that go with it — that's gotten the company in trouble lately.

With revenue falling amid plunging sales of its all-important iPhone line, Apple could use a fresh perspective on its ritzy remake. Ahrendts' resignation gives it the opportunity to get just that.

Apple, of course, has always charged a premium for its products. The original Macintosh was expensive even in its day, compared with rival computers. Consumers had to pay more for the iPod when it launched than for comparable MP3 players.

But under former CEO Steve Jobs, Apple recognized that in order to attract a mass market, it needed to offer products at lower prices and it needed to try to keep its prices stable rather than continually ratcheting them up. To broaden the market for the iPod, the company introduced a lower-priced iPod mini and then the budget-priced iPod shuffle. To expand the market for the Mac, it launched the relatively inexpensive Mac mini.

Apple under Jobs also launched the iPad at $500, which was considered an surprisingly low price at the time. And when initial sales of the first iPhone were slower than expected, he worked with AT&T to subsidize the cost, slashing the upfront price and making the device a lot more appealing to many consumers.

Apple has been pushing up the price ladder

But in its drive to become a luxury brand, the company in recent years seems to have forgotten that history and the importance of price in attracting and retaining a mass market of customers. It also seems to have been oblivious to the inherent problem of a company that depends on large and growing sales to mainstream consumers trying to upscale its offerings without losing much of its current customer base and stalling out its business.

Apple touted the gold version of the Apple Watch when it launched the device in 2015, then quietly discontinued the gold-cased line a year later. Stefanie Loos/Reuters One of Apple's first stabs at its upscale transformation came with the launch of Apple Watch, soon after Ahrendts joined the company. Although Apple offered versions of the device at relatively affordable prices, it gave particular attention to its gold-cased models that retailed for $10,000 on up.

There's been plenty of other examples since. Apple struck a deal with Hermès to create a version of the Apple Watch that carried the luxury goods purveyor's brand and used its straps. In its iPad line, Apple has put most of its energy lately into its Pro line, which retails for $800 on up, at a time when Amazon and others have been offering tablets for as little as $50. Apple offers a $150 version of Apple TV; but that's no bargain when compared with Roku's $25 streaming stick or even it's top-of-the-line model, which costs $100.

But it's in the iPhone line where Apple has really been pushing upward on pricing. It launched one of the first $1,000 phones in 2017 with the iPhone X then followed that up with an even pricier model last fall with the iPhone XS Max, which starts at $1,100. Even Apple's supposed mid-tier model — the iPhone XR — cost $750.

That was the starting price of the most expensive model just two years ago — the iPhone 7 Plus. By contrast, the original iPhone when it launched cost $500 — or about $602 in today's money.

Apple keeps learning tough lessons about high prices

The problem with Apple's premium push is that as prices go higher, the number of consumers who can afford or can be convinced to pay them gets smaller. That's particularly true when it comes to computer products; there just aren't that many consumers who will pay top dollar for a product that will become obsolete in a few short years.

Apple has faced weak demand for its latest iPhones, the $1,000 XS (left), the $1,100 XS Max, and the $750 XR. Apple Apple seems to have learned that the hard way with the gold version of the Apple Watch. Within a year of launching those models, the company discontinued them, replacing the gold-cased models with a much more affordable — but still pricey — ceramic encased version. Last fall, Apple dropped even that model. You can bet if either version had sold particularly well, Apple would still be offering it.

But the company seems to keep having to learn that same lesson over and over. Its iPad sales consistently shrank for years amid its premium push with the Pro and its resistance to introducing a truly low-cost model. Its share of the streaming media player market declined too. And in terms of the number of phones it sells in a given year, Apple peaked in 2015 and hasn't come close to reaching that level since.

Read this:Hey Tim Cook, there's a simple solution to your iPhone sales problem

Boosting prices can be beneficial. Even though the number of iPhones Apple sold in its last fiscal year was basically flat with the year before, its revenue from selling them jumped 18%, thanks to its new $1,000 phones.

But that kind of revenue surge tends to be fleeting, as Apple is starting to discover this year. Because the number of people able to pay higher prices is so much smaller, companies tend to reach saturation quicker and unit sales can quickly fall. That's precisely what's happening with the iPhone. Unit sales plunged in the holiday quarter, taking Apple's iPhone revenue down with it.

Worse, the decline iPhone sales imperils the company's move to remake itself as a services company. Much of its services revenue, including AppleCare warranties, commissions on App Store sales, and Apple Music subscriptions, is closely tied to purchases of new phones.

You can't blame all of Apple's premium push on Ahrendts. Tim Cook is the CEO, after all, and Ahrendts was just one of his top lieutenants.

Ahrendts was a key part of Apple's rebranding

But since she came aboard in 2014, she exemplified and personified the company's prioritizing of the premium over the plebeian. Indeed, Cook brought her in from fashion house Burberry specifically to remake Apple as a luxury brand.

Apple was criticized over its store proposal for Melbourne, Australia's cultural center, Federation Square. Foster + Partners Pushing the gold Apple Watches — and the new devices, generally, as exclusive products— was just the first step in that effort. Under her direction, Apple redesigned the interiors of its stores to make them more of a showcase for premium goods and the company made room on its shelves for super-pricey products, such as the $2,000 Phantom wireless speaker. The company also began opening up more stores in high-end locations and in historic buildings in city centers, attempting to cater to the affluent customers it was now targeting.

These moves sparked a backlash in some cases and ridicule in others, particularly when she attempted to rebrand the stores as Town Squares. Many found that move in poor taste, particularly when Apple was trying to convert formerly public areas in some cities into its private retail space.

But the biggest downfall of the Ahrendts era has been Apple becoming increasingly out of touch with its mainstream customer base. Those consumers have long been willing to pay a premium for the perceived quality of Apple's products. But now many have come to think of them as just to darn pricey.

It's time to go back to school for members of Barclays' equities trading desk.

The bank has been encouraging and enabling its traders to learn how to code in the programming language Python in recent months. Daniel Nehren, Barclays' head of statistical modeling and development for equities, told Business Insider the goal is to have traders develop and run their own post-trade analysis, as opposed to relying on Nehren's team of roughly 30 quants to do it for them.

Doing so will free up Nehren's team to have more time to analyze post-trade reports and make adjustments to improve how the bank executes trades for clients.

Read more: Barclays has the fastest growing stock trading team around — and it's posing a threat to some of the biggest players

It's a move that indicates a shift in how the bank services clients — gone are the days of on-size-fits-all. Clients of the British bank, which has one of the fastest growing stock trading teams in the industry, don't want to be overburdened with a 40-page document that covers more information than they need, Nehren said. Instead, they're interested in specific analysis geared exactly towards what they are looking for.

The issue, however, is that Nehren's team only has so much time and resources.

"You have to find a way to balance, essentially, that bespoke resource-intensive view with the reality of, we are not going to have 500 quants running post-trade analytics for everybody," Nehren said.

Barclays is setting up traders with code, template examples and blogs and online training classes they can watch to teach themselves how to code. No formal classes are held, but Nehren said his team is happy to sit down with any of the traders to talk through issues they are having or to help them code.

One of Python's key benefits is its readability. Unlike other coding languages, Python can be more easily understood by those without a background in programming. Just because it is easily digestible doesn't mean it has sacrificed any power, though. Python can be used for machine learning and data analysis.

Sign up here for our weekly newsletter "Wall Street Insider," a behind-the-scenes look at the stories dominating banking, business, and big deals.

The language has become increasingly popular within the finance community. According to a recent GitHub report ranking the top technologies favored by its community, Python was the third most popular programming language.

Nehren also said he believes traders will be able to offer suggestions for improvements to algos the bank is using as they gain better insight through their Python programs.

"As we give them the depth of being able to look at what these algos do and how they behave, the innovation comes actually from this cross-pollination," Nehren said. "The depth of partnership that just this effort has brought between my team and the coverage team and sales team, I think that just could be a game changer on its own.

Barclays' equities business posted $614 million in 2018 third quarter revenue, an 33% increase from the year-ago period. It will report fourth quarter results later in February.

Trump's executive order comes amid tense brinkmanship between the US and China, driven by a trade war declared by the US

Simply signaling an all-hands push by the White House on AI is valuable, says Michael Allen, of Beacon Global Strategies and a former member of President George W. Bush's National Security Council.

The billion-dollar question is how the government's new priorities will be funded.

What the plan does do, however, is tee up civilian agencies to make AI investments, and encourages them to do so.

So far, US funding for AI has been anemic.

These numbers pale in comparison to estimates of Chinese spending on AI. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but just two Chinese cities — Shanghai and Tiajin— have committed to spending about $15 billion each.

One element of funding is building and maintaining talent superiority, and education is a pillar of Trump's executive order.

Apple is planning to hold a special event on March 25 during which it's expected to share details on its rumored subscription news service, according to a new report from BuzzFeed.

The event would mark Apple's first major product announcement for 2019. Although the company has unveiled new iPads during events held in March in years past, the report indicates a subscription news service will be the focus of the event. Other rumored products like a new iPad mini and second generation Air Pods are not expected to make an appearance at this event.

The report comes hours after The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple has run into resistance during negotiations with top news publishers over the terms of its subscription news service. Apple is looking to partner with publishers on a subscription news service that would allow readers to pay around $10 per month to read content that is usually paywalled, but Apple's proposed 50% revenue split with publishers has not gone over well, according to the Journal.

Apple CEO Tim Cook recently teased that "new services" from Apple are coming in 2019 during an interview with CNBC's Jim Cramer. "On services, you will see us announce new services this year," Cook said. "There will be more things coming, I don't want to tell you what they are."

The launch would be Apple's latest push to grow its services revenue with a goal of hitting $50 billion by 2020. Services revenue will be an important metric for Apple moving forward as it grapples with slowing iPhone sales in China. Since Apple announced in November that it would no longer break out iPhone sales in its quarterly earnings reports, investors will likely be looking to the growth of its services business moving forward, which reached an all-time high of $10 billion during the holiday quarter.

Apple declined to comment on or confirm a March 25 event.

Startup:SambaNova Systems

Total raised: $61 million

What it does: The point of artificial intelligence is that the computer is continuously learning and changing on its own.SambaNova is building new chips, hardware and a platform for AI, machine learning and big data analytics that can change and adapt to support this type of computing.

VC who selected it: Dave Munichiello, GV

Relationship to the startup: Investor

Why it's hot in 2019: The tech is based on the research of its two former Stanford professor cofounders. The third cofounder is a chip pioneer. One of the co-founders, Chris Re, previously founded Lattice, a GV-backed company acquired by Apple.

"Huge market. A+ team and founders. Tremendous interest from customers," says Munichiello. "AI and learning approaches are powering tremendous enterprise gains and will require new platforms to keep up."

Helios and Matheson Analytics, the parent company of movie-ticket subscription service MoviePass, has been kicked off the Nasdaq, it disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday. It will now trade over the counter under the same ticker, HMNY.

Helios had failed to meet the Nasdaq's listing standards by trading under $1 per share since July. In December, the Nasdaq sent Helios a warning that the company would delisted, but Helios appealed the decision. The effort failed.

"The Company timely appealed the delisting notice and appeared in front of the Panel on January 31, 2019," Helios wrote in the filing. "The Panel issued a decision on February 11, 2019, and determined to delist the Company's common stock from The Nasdaq Capital Market. The suspension of trading in the Company's common stock on the Nasdaq Capital Market will be effective at the open of business on February 13, 2019."

Helios raised its profile in the summer of 2017 when it acquired MoviePass and lowered the service's monthly subscription price to $9.95 a month to see one movie in theaters per day. The move led to millions of new subscribers, but also hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. Helios has primarily used the selling of billions of new shares to cover its losses, and has seen its stock lose over 99% of its value.

Despite this, the company said in a statement to Business Insider that "HMNY's delisting has no effect on the day-to-day business operations of HMNY or its subsidiaries, including MoviePass and MoviePass Films."

Read more: A MoviePass product manager resigned and blasted its leadership in a scathing letter to all staff

In January, Helios announced that it had sent a registration statement to the SEC to make MoviePass a separate public company. In a statement Tuesday to Business Insider, Helios said that effort would continue.

"HMNY will consider applying to be listed on an exchange again should it meet the applicable listing criteria in the future," the company also noted.

Helios had a complicated history as a Nasdaq-listed company before getting kicked off.

Before the MoviePass era, the New York outpost of Helios and Matheson was controlled by an Indian company (Helios and Matheson Information Technology), which stands accused of defrauding at least 5,000 creditors in India, including banks and senior citizens.

Here is Helios' full statement on its delisting:

"HMNY's delisting has no effect on the day-to-day business operations of HMNY or its subsidiaries, including MoviePass and MoviePass Films. HMNY expects that its common stock will begin trading on the over-the-counter market on Wednesday, February 13, 2019. HMNY will consider applying to be listed on an exchange again should it meet the applicable listing criteria in the future. In the meantime, HMNY is proceeding with its planning efforts to effectuate a partial spin-off of MoviePass Entertainment Holdings Inc. ("MoviePass Entertainment"), which would take ownership of HMNY's film industry related assets, including its shares of MoviePass Inc., membership interest in MoviePass Films and MoviePass Ventures and the Moviefone entertainment information service. The spin-off remains subject to numerous conditions, as previously described in HMNY's SEC filings."

Apple is trying to line up big publishers to participate in its planned subscription service, but it's facing pushback from outlets that are balking at the terms, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The phone giant reportedly plans to keep half the subscription revenue it makes from the so-called "Netflix for news" service, which could cost about $10 a month, and share the rest of the revenue with publishers.

Apple sees the service as a way to help shore up sales of its iPhones.

The report lists The New York Times and Washington Post as major outlets that haven't agreed to be part of the service, while talks between Apple and The Journal are ongoing.

Those publications all get substantial revenue from selling subscriptions directly to consumers, and risk giving up revenue and a direct relationship with readers by being part of a subscription bundle. On the other hand, the subscription service represents a potentially huge audience of Apple device owners to be put in front of subscription publishers.

The strained relationship speaks to an ongoing tension between tech giants and publishers that depend on these tech companies for distribution but are wary of their control of the revenue, data, and publishers' brand.

After being burned by Facebook, which has cut the amount of traffic it's sending publishers, many publishers have found a welcome traffic source in Apple News, the news aggregation app that's baked into Apple's mobile products.

Apple News also represents a safe, hand-picked environment for quality news publishers.

Publishers also have groused that despite helping send readers to their stories, Apple News doesn't do much to help them sell advertising on those pageviews because of Apple's historic anti-advertising stance.