Thinking about leaving your tech job, but getting lost in a sea of job postings?

On Tuesday, the jobs and recruiting site Glassdoor revealed its annual list, The 100 Best Places to Work in 2019, which could help those looking to narrow their job search. The ranking was decided based on employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor, and of the 100 best-reviewed companies to work at, 29 were tech companies.

Some are household names, like Facebook — which was #1 on the 2018 list but dropped several spots following a scandal-filled year. Others companies that made the cut are lesser known but are still providing exceptional experiences for their employees.

Here is Glassdoor's 2019 list of the best places to work in tech:

New York City is the first US city to adopt a minimum wage for drivers working for ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft.

The city's Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) said on Tuesday that it passed rules that will require "high volume" drivers of for-hire vehicles to receive a wage per trip that corresponds to $27.86 per hour, or $17.22 after expenses. The rules will go into effect in mid-January.

"New York City is the first city globally to recognize that the tens of thousands of men and women who are responsible for providing increasingly popular rides that begin with the touch of a screen deserve to make a livable wage and protection against companies from unilaterally reducing it," TLC chair Meera Joshi said in a statement.

According to the commission, the rules will result in the equivalent of a $10,000 annual raise for 96% of New York City's Uber, Lyft, Juno, and Via drivers. A report commissioned by the TLC found that median earnings for high-volume drivers of for-hire vehicles decreased by over 10% between 2016 and 2017.

Read more: The company that's empowering ride-hailing drivers already has 20 million miles of data under its belt — and its launch in the US' hottest market should have Uber and Lyft very worried

Representatives for Uber and Lyft told Business Insider that the companies disagreed with the wage floor, saying it would have a negative effect on prices and driver behavior, respectively.

"The TLC's implementation of the City Council's legislation to increase driver earnings will lead to higher than necessary fare increases for riders while missing an opportunity to deal with congestion in Manhattan's central business district," an Uber representative said.

"The TLC's proposed pay rules will undermine competition by allowing certain companies to pay drivers lower wages, and disincentives drivers from giving rides to and from areas outside Manhattan. These rules would be a step backward for New Yorkers, and we urge the TLC to reconsider them," a Lyft representative said.

A Via representative did not indicate that the company opposed the wage floor.

"As the industry leader in driver earnings in New York City, we are looking forward to working with the TLC on implementing this rule," the representative said in a statement.

Juno did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

The New York City Council in August voted in favor of establishing a minimum wage for ride-hailing drivers and preventing ride-hailing services from hiring new drivers for a year. The decision came after a report from transportation analyst Bruce Shaller that said ride-hailing services increased traffic congestion.

In July, the New York Unemployment Insurance Appeal Board issued a ruling that requires Uber to provide unemployment benefits for its drivers.

The TV industry is changing dramatically, with people watching shows on all kinds of devices.

David Levy, president of media giant Turner, said he's confident he knows what the company's founder and his longtime boss Ted Turner would say about the current state of the business.

"Ted was a visionary," Levy said Tuesday at Business Insider's IGNITION Conference in New York in a conversation with Geoff Ramsey, chairman and cofounder of eMarketer. "He launched Cartoon Network. Everyone advised him not to launch a 24-hour news channel. He understood content was king."

"He would be very bullish on the TV industry," he added. "He would say, television is everything. We don't think about it as this thing on the wall. We think about it as generating fans, where fans are."

Part of the industry's response to the rise of Google and Facebook has been to get bigger. Levy discussed the benefits of AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner, now WarnerMedia, which Turner belongs to. Levy said he's confident the merger will work because it serves both sides.

"Turner needed data," he said. "We needed to understand the consumer much better than we did. Having that understanding of first-party data would allow us to have better advertising products, understand consumers better. Being able to download B/R Live or having the CNN logo on your phone is extremely valuable. AT&T needed quality premium programming. There was a need for both, so I think it's a good marriage."

To adapt, Turner is developing more of a consumer-oriented mindset. The concept of "TV Everywhere" in its early form "was a little clunky. That catapulted Netflix into where it is today," Levy said.

Turner has focused on making content available wherever people want to see it. One recent experiment showed the effort is still a work in progress, when there were technical snafus that made it hard for people to watch Bleacher Report''s Tiger vs. Phil match.

"We had a little technical difficulty there," Levy acknowledged.

"You made it free, right?" said Ramsey.

"Thank you for reminding me," winced Levy.

The rise of Amazon, Netflix and other digital streaming companies funding original content means a plethora of premium content choices for viewers. Despite that, Levy said the competition is good, but Turner has plenty of its own premium programming.

"We have great brand with our own IP," he said. "Every SVOD product would love to have 'Rick and Morty.' We just had 33 Emmy nominations for our content."

A Fender guitar can be obtained for a very reasonable price, but for many players, it's the American-made instruments that are the beginning of their serious journey into the 72-year-old brand.

That journey used to commence with the American Special lineup, but now Fender has updated that offering for the first time in a decade and rechristened it "American Performer" to highlight a combination of value and excellence intended to appeal to gigging musicians.

The updated Stratocaster HSS. Fender

"The American Performer Series blends traditional Fender design with new elements for modern tone and performance," Fender said in a statement. "Together, the updates deliver sonic versatility, tonal flexibility and ease of use for performers, helping them create the perfect sound for every musical genre."

Fender upped its game for the new instruments.

"We put a lot more into these than in prior iterations," Justin Norvell, executive vice-president of product, said.

As with any update to Fender's iconic designs, there were challenges. "A Stratocaster from ten paces looks like a Stratocaster," Norvell said.

Input from performing artists was imperative, and Fender spent two years both refining stalwarts such as the Stratocaster and Telecaster while refining the Jazzmaster and the Mustang and introducing a Jazz, Precision, and Mustang bass. What Norvell described as "quirks" were addressed, such as the Mustang's notorious tremolo arm.

The range of advice that Fender received was thanks to location: with an office in Hollywood, near numerous recording studios, the company could rely on a steady stream of musicians providing opinions. According to Norvell, their preferences in Fender instruments ranged from "super modern to super vintage."

Pickups were of particular interest. New "Yosemite" units are intended to combine muscle and finesse in a single instrument. A double-tap humbucking pickup enables a player to switch between the single-coil cut that Fenders are known for, yet also access humbucking beef, without have to compromise volume.

Tuners also got an update, with a modest, vintage look, but more precise and stable tuning.

The new Jazzmaster. Fender

Overall, the revamped American Performer range seeks to continue Fender's process of improving its classics for musicians who aren't as indebted to styles of the past and might want to treat the six-string (as well as the bass) as a sort of synthesizer, creating sonic textures through the use of effects pedals and a wide variety of amplifiers (both of which Fender also makes).

When it came to personal favorites from the new range, Norvell highlighted the Stratocaster HSS, which replaces the traditional single-coil bridge pickup with a humbucking unit, solving the problem of Stratocaster players avoiding the bridge and favoring the guitars legendary neck pickup. The new Performer Strat HSS is about $1,000.

He also enthused over the Jazzmaster, a guitar that was a failure for Fender when introduced decades ago, but a massive success much later when cheap axes were taken up by punk-rock musicians in the 1980s. A new trem system borrowed from the Strat provides a simpler way to whammy. The new Jazzmaster is priced at about $1,200.

Chipmaker Qualcomm announced its new mobile processor, the Snapdragon 855, which will enable mobile devices to connect to the latest mobile networking standard, 5G.

5G is the evolution of the 4G LTE networks that most smartphones connect to for data and internet. The main benefits of 5G include significantly faster data speeds, as well as significantly less latency. If you have any issues streaming a video over the current 4G LTE network, for example, 5G should supposedly fix that.

Qualcomm's announcement means that some Android smartphones in 2019 are likely to have 5G connectivity, provided manufacturers take advantage of the chip.

There are two variants of the Snapdragon 855 processor: One with 5G support, and one without. While each new generation of Snapdragon usually finds its way into flagship Android phones, it's unclear which models will run the Snapdragon 855 with 5G connectivity.

Samsung's Galaxy S9 phone. Antonio Villas-Boas/Business Insider

So far, Verizon and AT&T have confirmed that Samsung will release a 5G-capable smartphone in the first half of 2019. Which device, exactly, wasn't specified, but almost every finger is pointing towards Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S10 smartphone.

With that said, Verizon and AT&T's 5G networks will only be available in a small number of markets when smartphones running Qualcomm's 5G-enabled chips roll out.

So far, AT&T's 5G rollout will only include 12 cities in the USA by the end of 2018: Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Waco, Jacksonville, Louisville, New Orleans, Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, Indianapolis, and Oklahoma City.

As for Verizon, the company has only just begun rolling out its 5G home internet service this year to four cities, including Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Sacramento. Verizon's 5G service for smartphones will only begin rolling out in "early 2019."

T-Mobile is also developing its 5G network with an estimated roll-out of 2020. The carrier is promising that its own 5G network will be available nationwide rather than in a few cities.

A worker climbs on a cellular communication tower on March 6, 2014 in Oakland, California. Justin Sullivan/Getty

5G poses an exciting prospect, as it promises faster and more reliable connectivity to common data-intensive tasks, like streaming video, video calls, streaming music, and general smartphone use. 5G will, indeed, be the killer feature for smartphones of 2019, and it'll be a big differentiator.

However, 5G won't burst onto the smartphone scene. At first, 5G's rollout is likely to be slow and gradual, with only a few devices having 5G connectivity at first, and it'll only be available in a few markets initially.

We also have yet to see how well 5G will work on mobile devices, as 5G primarily transmits on the "millimeter wave" spectrum that has trouble penetrating walls and other obstacles. It's even been said that a tree's leaves could interfere with the strength of a 5G signal. The potential limitation of 5G could be a reason why it's unlikely we'll see 5G-capable iPhones next year.

Either way, early 2019 will give us a better idea of what to expect with 5G.

Apart from 5G connectivity, Qualcomm also announced its "3D Sonic Sensor," a fingerprint scanner for smartphones that will lay underneath the screen completely hidden from sight. The 3D Sonic Sensor will use ultrasonic waves to register fingerprints, which is said to be more accurate and reliable than similar in-display fingerprint sensors you'd find on phones like the OnePlus 6T.

You could just about buy McDonald's with the amount of value the most widely watched tech stocks shed on Tuesday.

If you include Microsoft's market losses, you could snap up Burger King's owner as well — or a heck of a lot of Big Macs and Whoppers.

On a down day for the markets, the big tech stocks got crushed. Collectively, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google parent company Alphabet, lost $141 billion in market value, as their stocks declined 4.5% on average.

Microsoft, which has been vying with Apple for the title of most valuable public company in the world, saw its shares fall 3%, as the company's market capitalization dropped $27 billion.

Read more: Microsoft's surprising comeback over Apple is the outcome of two new CEOs with radically different game plans

By comparison, McDonald's has a market value of $143 billion and Restaurant Brands International, the parent company of Burger King, has a market value of $26 billion.

Among the big tech shares, Amazon was the biggest loser. With its stock falling nearly 6% to $1,668.40, the e-commerce giant's market capitalization plunged $51 billion. That's about the same amount that General Motors is worth in total.

Apple was the next biggest loser, at least in terms of the market value it lost. The iPhone maker saw its capitalization drop $39 billion thanks to its stock falling 4% to $176.69.

In terms of percentage declines, Netflix was second to Amazon. Its stock fell 5% to $275.33, resulting in a drop in its valuation of $6.5 billion.

The sell-off in shares of the big tech companies has been going on for months amid broader concerns about slowing growth and stricter regulations. Although Facebook only saw its shares and market valuation drop by 2% Tuesday, its stock has declined the most from its peak this year of any of its peers. Since hitting their apex in July, Facebook's shares are down nearly 37% at $137.93.

Netflix is a close second in that category. Its shares are down 35% since they peaked in June.

Tuesday's decline in tech shares extended far beyond the giants, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index falling 3.8% to $7,158.43.

Intel's shares fell by 5% to $47.75. Western Digital, Micron, and Nvidia all saw their shares drop by more than 7% to $43.04, $36.88, and $157.11, respectively. E-Trade declined by 8% to $48.65. And AMD shares fell by a whopping 11% to $21.12.

Amazon's annual cloud conference, AWS re:Invent, is a gargantuan spectacle of crowds, EDM and a seemingly never-ending stream of new announcements.

Most of all, it's a finely-choreographed production designed to hammer home the message of Amazon Web Service's dominance in the cloud computing market.

Financial research firm Wedbush estimates that about 30% of computing workloads are in the cloud today, and that the number will reach 55% by 2022. It's a colossal market worth hundreds of billions of dollars and Amazon is vying for all the customers it can get.

As the dust settles on Amazon's annual show, industry observers and analysts say this year's conference had one clear takeaway: The increasingly fierce and heated battle with Microsoft.

Onstage, AWS CEO Andy Jassy knocked at Microsoft Azure, constantly referring to it as the "next closest provider." But there's a reason why Amazon wants to bolster itself as the lead. Last quarter, Microsoft Azure saw 76 percent growth, and analysts say it's likely to continue its cloud momentum in the next 12 to 18 months.

Here's what analysts that Business Insider spoke to have to say about AWS's recent announcements.

Hybrid cloud is the reality

On Wednesday, Amazon announced AWS Outposts, which lets users run Amazon cloud services or VMware Cloud in data centers and at on-premises facilities. That's a big deal because until now AWS hadn't invested much in on-premises infrastructure, in which servers and computer storage are located at the customer's facilities rather than at Amazon's datacenters.

A Microsoft data center. Microsoft Outposts is a sign that Amazon is embracing reality — the fact that, at least in the near future, many customers need a "hybrid" cloud that combines on-premise and remote offerings. And IBM's recent announcement that it would acquire Red Hat, as well as its push into hybrid cloud also underlines this fact. It's also an acknowledgement that pure public cloud growth is slowing, and the direction in cloud is shifting to hybrid, wrote analysts at BTIG.

Many customers are not yet ready to go all-in on cloud, says Sanjeev Mohan, senior director analyst at Gartner, even if they embrace a cloud strategy.

"A lot of customers are going to be on-prem for some time in the near future," Mohan told Business Insider. "I've talked to customers who tell me they will not move some of their workloads to the cloud, but their strategy is cloud-first. This information is so sensitive, they won't move it to the cloud, even though their strategy is cloud first."

AWS's closest competitor, Microsoft Azure, had long embraced a hybrid cloud. But Amazon is a trendsetter, and with the announcement of Outposts, it's going to set off a wave of companies moving to hybrid, whether in AWS, Azure or other cloud providers.

"Until Bezos and AWS embraced it was not going to reach significant momentum in enterprise," Daniel Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, told Business Insider. "Now that AWS has embraced this, I think it's a significant catalyst to more hybrid cloud workloads, both on AWS and Azure, on the coming year."

A stronger partnership with VMware to take down Microsoft

Underpinning Ouptosts is a partnership between AWS and VMware. And that's one of the other major takeaways: a tighter partnership between the two enterprise companies. While AWS is still the winner in the cloud wars, Microsoft Azure is a looming threat. The gap between the two companies is closer than Amazon would like customers to think. In fact, analysts say, Microsoft's on a roll with cloud now.

What Amazon lacks that Microsoft thrives in, Ives says, is a longstanding enterprise presence. Microsoft knows this, too, so it's massively amped up its spending among enterprises and hybrid cloud deployments. AWS and VMware have been partners for a while, but this stronger partnership will likely attract more enterprise customers.

"VMware gives AWS a partner and really fills a hole or a void when they go up against Microsoft," Ives said. "When you look at the VMware-AWS partnership, as more enterprises move to the cloud, where Amazon lacks is they don't have an enterprise presence. They weren't an established enterprise presence like VMware or Microsoft."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GoX9h_gD3M

Ives believes that this stronger partnership has been forged by competition with Microsoft Azure. AWS's partnership with VMware will be a key ingredient in the recipe for sustaining its #1 position in the cloud wars.

"As they get more aggressive in traditional partnerships, that VMware lynchpin is going to be crucial to the AWS success," Ives said. "Without VMware in tow, it would be difficult going up head-to-head (with Microsoft)."

Read more: Amazon's cloud is now embracing an idea that it spent almost a decade trashing — and it's a big sign that Microsoft was right

More artificial intelligence technologies

AWS came out with a barrage of artificial intelligence technology, including a document-reading AI called Textract, a machine learning chip called Inferentia, and even DeepRacer, a mini AI-powered autonomous racecar.

"They're constantly lowering the barrier and usage of AI," Mohan said. "They are making it faster, cheaper and leveraging open source frameworks. They make it easier for the general public to take advantage of machine learning without having to know machine learning."

These new technologies will also give AWS an edge in competing with Microsoft in the coming year, especially now that companies need to move more complex workloads to the cloud, analysts say.

Microsoft also has been arming Azure with AI capabilities, and this year it's made a series of acquisitions of AI startups. Last month, Microsoft announced it would acquire XOXCO, a Texas-based AI startup.

Even more databases

At re:Invent, Jassy asserted that Amazon will move off of Oracle's databases by the end of 2019, and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels even said onstage that moving off of Oracle's largest data center in November was his happiest day at Amazon this year.

Jassy also highlighted AWS's massive portfolio of databases, notably Amazon Aurora and DynamoDB. AWS also announced a new database, called Amazon Timestream, which helps users quickly analyze and store time-stamped events.

"Companies say I have a relational database, no-relational database, check check," Jassy said onstage. But AWS, he boasted, has 11.

However, more databases isn't always a good thing for cloud providers, Mohan says. Customers may get "analysis paralysis."

"When you have a lot of choices, you have to spend a lot of time figuring out what are the best solutions," Mohan said.

Still, BTIG analysts note that AWS continues to make strides on all its databases, as it continues moving its operations onto its own databases.

Facebook temporarily took down a post by a former employee that complained of racism at the company and alleged the social network was failing its black users.

Last week, Mark Luckie, a strategic partner manager for influencers, publicly announced his departure from the company, and shared the goodbye note he had written to his Facebook colleagues earlier in the month.

It was a highly critical memo, detailing his experiences of racism at Facebook and highlighting what he says are the company's failures to build a more inclusive workplace that is supportive of people of color.

"Facebook's disenfranchisement of black people on the platform mirrors the marginalization of its black employees," he wrote. "Too many black employees can recount stories of being aggressively accosted by campus security beyond what was necessary."

Facebook has been reeling from successive scandals over the past year or so, from Cambridge Analytica to the spread of misinformation on the platform amid genocide in Myanmar. Luckie's memo sparked a fresh firestorm of criticism of the company. But he subsequently discovered that the social network temporarily blocked users' access to the post.

He wrote on Twitter on Tuesday: "Turns out Facebook took down my post challenging discrimination at the company, disabling users' ability to share or read it."

(It's not clear how long the post was unavailable to other users; Luckie only discovered the issue had occurred on Tuesday morning, having spent the last several days moving.)

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In a statement, Facebook spokesperson Anthony Harrison said the company was investigating why it was blocked. "Mark Luckie's post does not violate our Community Standards and is available on our site. We are looking into what happened," he said.

There's no indication that Facebook deliberately tried to suppress or censor Luckie's message. Instead, it seems more likely that it was taken down as a result of overzealous moderation efforts by Facebook, given its sensitive subject — though whether this was a result of a human moderator or an automated system isn't yet clear.

But the incident highlights the extraordinary power Facebook has to shape public debate that happens on its platform, and how apparent mistakes can have significant consequences. And it raises questions as to how frequently moderation mistakes might occur when non-high-profile users discuss sensitive subjects, those who don't have the company or media connections to seek recourse.

In the original memo, Luckie had said that black users appeared to be unfairly targeted by Facebook's moderation efforts, writing: "Black people are finding that their attempts to create 'safe spaces' on Facebook for conversation among themselves are being derailed by the platform itself. Non-black people are reporting what are meant to be positive efforts as hate speech, despite them often not violating Facebook's terms of service. Their content is removed without notice. Accounts are suspended indefinitely.

"There is a prevailing theory among many black users that their content is more likely to be taken down on the platform than any other group. Even though the theories are mostly anecdotal, Facebook does little to dissuade people from this idea."

While we don't yet exactly what happened with Luckie's post, it's an unfortunate coincidence that it was subject to the exact same problems that he sought to highlight.

"Further proves my point," he tweeted.

Apple announced three new iPhones in 2018: the iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR.

The iPhone XS and XS Max are only available in three colors — black, gold, and silver — but the iPhone XR is available in six colors.

If you don't feel like visiting an Apple Store to see the new iPhone XR colors for yourself, YouTuber Marques Brownlee, a.k.a. "MKBHD," spent some time with the colorful phones at Apple's big September launch event and took some beautiful footage with his 8K camera rig.

Take a look at the red, blue, yellow, white, black, and "coral" versions of the new iPhone XR.

The electric vehicle startup Faraday Future has put at least 250 employees on furlough, The Verge reports. The automaker has reportedly decreased its US workforce from around 1,000 employees as of October to under 350.

Faraday confirmed in a statement to the press that it had put additional employees on furlough, but the automaker did not disclose the number of employees who had been affected. The statement said the automaker had received interest from investors and hopes to solve its funding problems within three months.

Read more: The company that's empowering ride-hailing drivers already has 20 million miles of data under its belt — and its launch in the US' hottest market should have Uber and Lyft very worried

Faraday has attributed its financial difficulties to one of its investors, Evergrande Health, which the automaker claims has failed to make scheduled payments while preventing Faraday from seeking outside funding. Evergrande said in an October filing on the Hong Kong stock exchange that Faraday had not met the terms necessary to receive the disputed funding.

Evergrande did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

According to The Verge, Evergrande had wanted Faraday CEO Jia Yueting to resign from director positions at other companies affiliated with Faraday and to give up his controlling stake in the automaker. Faraday and Evergrande reportedly failed to reach a resolution over whether the automaker had fulfilled those two requirements, and Faraday is attempting to cancel its $2 billion deal with Evergrande.

The automaker says it is awaiting the results of an arbitration case against Evergrande, though it was allowed in October to seek a maximum of $500 million in outside funding, according to an Evergrande filing.

This latest round of furloughs follows a round of layoffs and wage cuts first reported by The Verge in October. Nick Sampson, one of the automaker's founders, reportedly resigned in October, saying Faraday Future is "effectively insolvent" in an email to employees.

Faraday Future was founded in 2014 and has struggled to build its planned FF91 electric SUV amid financial concerns. The automaker has faced lawsuits and liens from suppliers who claim they have not been paid, and the first pre-production version of the FF91 caught fire hours after it was shown to employees and their families, according to The Verge.

Yueting, who is also the founder and chairman of the Chinese tech company LeEco, last year had $182 million in assets frozen by the Chinese government because of unfulfilled loan payments.

You can read Faraday Future's full statement below:

FF's recent financial crisis was brought about by investor Evergrande Health refusing to make its scheduled payments. The investor has further breached its contractual obligations to FF and refused to release its liens over FF's assets as it was required to do. This has resulted in making it more difficult for FF to achieve short-term financing through asset-backed loans resulting in the current temporary cash flow difficulties. This action has unequivocally harmed FF employees worldwide, our suppliers, our partners and all of our reservation holders.

We are filing the new emergency relief application on the main arbitral tribunal soon. Since the ruling may be delayed by two to three months, FF will continue to experience a negative impact on our already very tight cash flow, therefore we unfortunately must take further cost-reduction measures to deal with the current financial situation which includes putting additional employees on furlough beginning this week. We are grateful to all of the one thousand global employees, especially hundreds of employees in the US who are willing to stay and continue to work on the FF 91 production and delivery as well as those who will be on a temporary furlough.

This was an extremely tough decision to make, and we recognize the emotional stress and financial strain this puts on people's personal lives. In addition, we take our relationships with our suppliers seriously, and we hope to receive support and understanding from our global partners as FF overcomes our difficulties.

The FF executive team is receiving interest from investors from around the world who see strong value in FF's seasoned tech and automotive management. We will continue to push forward on the delivery of the hyper-performance FF 91 luxury vehicle and secure our medium- and long-term strategies. We hope to solve the funding issue in 2-3 months.

Hulu will add more subscribers in the second half of the year than it did in the first half, CEO Randy Freer said Business Insider's IGNITION Conference in New York on Tuesday.

"We think the live TV market is robust," Freer said. "DirecTV Now announced their numbers in 3Q. We grew 10x of where DirecTV was. We'll have our best October, our best November."

DirecTV, which is owned by AT&T, reported that it added 49,000 new subscribers in the third quarter. Hulu's live TV offering launched in 2017 and added 3 million this year through May, to top 20 million subscribers. At that rate, his comment suggests that Hulu will have more than 23 million subscribers by the end of the year.

Freer said he's optimistic about the opportunity to grow the business, while the industry should focus on profitability.

"I think we all have to ultimately run a business that can turn profit," he said. "We closed the gap on margin from where we started by 50%, and we see that continuing. Our ad revenue has grown north of 50% over the last year."

Looking ahead, Freer said live sports will be on Hulu's radar.

"We're a subscription driven business, and we know over history that sports has a tendency to drive subscriptions," Freer said. "We will certainly be evaluating sports as an opportunity and hopefully be at the table when the time comes."

The New York motorcycle show is one of my favorite events of the year.

The 2018 installment didn't disappoint. The floor at the Javits Center on Manhattan's West Side was crammed with all manner of two-wheeled delights (as well as some three- and four-wheeled attractions).

All the major players were represented. We had big ole hogs from Harley-Davidson, cool flat-track racers from Indian, style machines from Triumph, Ducati, and Aprilia, and some flash new bikes from Royal Enfield, the freshest brand to hit the US market.

Suzuki, Yamaha, Honda, and Kawasaki also showcased their wide range of bikes, ATVs, and of course, JetSkis.

I also sampled helmets, riding gear, and even tires!

Let's have a look.

Instacart rolled out a new payment system last month, and many of its shoppers weren't too happy about it.

Instacart is a grocery delivery company that relies on contract workers — whom it calls "shoppers" — to pick out and transport items to customers.

Hundreds of shoppers took to social media and Reddit forums to complain about the changes, saying that they had caused substantial cuts to their earnings. Some are now rejecting jobs while others are threatening to boycott the company.

Read more: Instacart workers are threatening to boycott the company over a payment policy change that they say has cut their wages

And it seems that this could be having a domino effect on the customer experience.

Several Instacart customers have recently taken to Twitter to complain about delays in the service.

"Order was supposed to be delivered between 9 & 10pm. It's 11:11 & still no order... oh don't worry it's not like I have to be up at 6 and or anything," one customer wrote on Twitter on November 27.

"My order is 40 minutes late, no one has started shopping, and I'm sitting here on hold. Fuming. WTF?" another said a few days later.

Several Instacart shoppers responded to these tweets by saying that the delays were likely due to some shoppers declining orders because they thought they weren't worth their while financially.

A spokesperson for Instacart denied that any recent delays were related to the payment changes.

"We value our 70,000 dedicated shoppers and appreciate all of their feedback. As our business has grown over the last year to 15,000 stores in 4,000 cities, we've also been investing in our shopper experience with new tools and features to make our shopper's jobs easier. As we've scaled our new earnings features to more shoppers over the last month, we've seen no meaningful impact on delayed customer orders as a result of those changes," a spokesperson for Instacart told Business Insider on Tuesday.

In a call with Business Insider on Monday, Instacart's chief product officer, David Hahn, said that average earnings for shoppers had stayed the same under the new payment structure. He added that the response from shoppers so far has been "overwhelmingly positive."

The new payment structure, which is currently running in certain parts of the United States and will be rolled out nationwide by the end of the year, has been causing problems for some shoppers, who say they have seen their wages cut as a result.

In the new system, shoppers are no longer paid a set fee for delivery but rather a variable fee determined by the order's number of units, the type of items, the overall weight of the order, the trip length, and the location.

Facebook/Instacart

Instacart said it made the changes to ensure that shoppers are adequately reimbursed for more complex or heavier orders, but shoppers say that under the new system, Instacart's payment is typically low and seemingly random.

"While a bonus for heavy deliveries is meant to be factored into the new incentive fee, it is not always consistent," Mark Johnson, who has been an Instacart shopper in the Seattle area for 14 months, told Business Insider. "I've seen crazy jobs of 30 to 50 items for $10 or $15. Before, we were making twice as much."

Before these changes, Johnson said he would be averaging around $25 to $30 an hour for his work. In the new system, he barely makes $20 an hour. "It's a significant cut," he said.

Hahn said the fee may seem more random because more factors are being taken into consideration to determine it.

"Now that we are taking all these inputs into the batch, there are more variants in the batch price than there was in the old system," he said, adding that the changes are going to be a "continuous process."

But as a result of these changes, many shoppers say they are now declining more orders that they believe to be too low-paying to be worth their while.

Andrew P., who has been a shopper since February, said that up until these changes were put in place, he hadn't rejected a single job. He said that since the changes were made in his market on November 19, he has turned down six jobs in two weeks.

This trend may now be causing delays on the customer's side as the app works to find replacement shoppers:

One of the main reasons that people buy the iPhone is for its ability to take high-quality, detailed photos. And it certainly does that!

But based on the results of a new video from YouTube vlogger Marques "MKBHD" Brownlee, it seems like another factor may be far more important: Brightness.

In a massive blind photo test that Brownlee conducted over social media, he pit 16 different smartphones against each other. Both the iPhone X and the iPhone XS flunked out in the first round to less capable smartphones — Xiaomi's Pocophone F1 and TCL's BlackBerry Key2, respectively.

That's right: Apple's flagship iPhone from this year and last failed out in the first round, against phones that are barely considered competition normally.

Google's flagship Pixel line did just as poorly, albeit against more technically competitive devices.

The photo on the left is from the Huawei Mate 20 Pro, which won overall. The runner up, on the right, was the Pocophone.MKBHD/YouTube

His test was simple: Put two photos of the same subject next to each other and have his millions of social media followers vote on which looked better to them.

It's hardly a scientific poll, but that's not the point — what you see is what matters.

Most people are looking at photos on smartphone screens, through social media apps that compress images. They're using apps on their smartphone to edit images before sharing. They're trying to see faces clearly. Does the image "pop?" Is it bright?

That kind of interaction with photos leads to a different type of preference.

"The most important thing to people, when viewing these photos straight out of camera, was just exposure — brightness, basically," Brownlee says in the video. "Nine times out of ten, the brighter, more saturated, more punchy-contrasty photo, won. Every single round — it's pretty consistent."

Brownlee used a bracket system for the voting, a la March Madness — a necessity given the wide competition across 16 different smartphones.Marques Brownlee/YouTube

It says a lot about what actually matters in smartphone cameras, and what may matter to you.

Are you taking a lot of extremely detailed photos with your smartphone? If the answer is no, then maybe you can wait a little longer next time before upgrading your smartphone — or maybe it's finally time to start considering those mid-range, less expensive smartphones.

If nothing else, the video is a fascinating look into modern smartphone camera options — see it for yourself right here:

Ted S. Warren / AP Images

Amazon's cargo planes are poised to take market share from the logistics giants UPS and FedEx, Morgan Stanley says.

"The market is missing the risk Amazon Air poses to UPS/FDX growth," a group of Morgan Stanley analysts led by Ravi Shanker said Tuesday. 

Police in the Northern California town of Redwood City arrested a man who was traveling on Highway 101 early Friday morning while sleeping behind the wheel of his Tesla Model S.

Officers first spotted the electric luxury sedan driving south at about 70 mph around 3:40 a.m., California Highway Patrol Officer Art Montiel told Business Insider on Friday night.

Montiel said the officers took action when it became clear that the driver, 45-year-old Alexander Samek, was sleeping.

"The driver wasn't responding to lights and sirens," Montiel said.

The officers believed the Tesla may have been operating on Autopilot, a semi-autonomous-driving feature that allows Teslas to drive and change lanes in traffic with minimal human input.

In order to get the sleeping driver's Tesla to stop, Montiel said officers blocked traffic behind the vehicle while another officer traveling in front of the car gradually slowed down, forcing the Tesla, which can respond to varying traffic speeds and accelerate or slow down accordingly, to a complete stop.

"Once the vehicle came to a stop, the officers got out of their patrol cars, approached the Tesla, and knocked on the windows to wake up the driver," Montiel said.

Officers placed Samek in a patrol car, while another one drove the intoxicated man's Tesla off the freeway and parked it at a nearby gas station.

Samek was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence. Montiel applauded the CHP's "quick thinking" to get the Tesla and its driver out of harm's way.

Several Teslas have crashed while operating on Autopilot in recent months. A man was killed when his Model X SUV slammed into a highway barrier in Mountain View, California, in March.

Teslas equipped with Autopilot cannot drive themselves. The system deploys an escalating series of warnings if it detects that the driver does not have their hands on the steering wheel. If the driver does not respond, the system deactivates itself.

Tesla declined to comment on the incident.

It's finally here.

On Tuesday, preorders opened for a Big Mouth Billy Bass that connects to Amazon's voice assistant, Alexa.

Once the plastic fish is hooked up to an Amazon Echo, it can respond to Alexa voice commands, dance to the beat of songs from Amazon Music, and it even syncs its fishy lips with Alexa's words.

Because it supports Alexa commands, you can ask the fish about the weather, news, or random facts. It's officially an "Alexa gadget," an Amazon certification.

It costs $40 on — where else — Amazon.com.

"This is not your father's Big Mouth Billy Bass," said Steven Harris, vice president of product development at Gemmy Industries, which is the Big Mouth Billy Bass parent company, in a statement.

The original Big Mouth Billy Bass was first sold in 1999 and plays short songs like "Don't Worry, Be Happy." It's been a kitschy favorite in dens and recreation rooms ever since. This version has the original "Fishin' Time" song built in, too.

Amazon announced the Alexa-compatible Big Mouth Billy Bass last year.

If you've ever taken a probiotic, eaten yogurt, or added pickles to your sandwich, you've taken a step toward nourishing the vital community of life in your gut collectively known as your microbiome.

In recent years, scientists have described the microbiome as the "forgotten organ," thanks to its emerging role in affecting everything from your mood to your risk of disease.

The communities of bacteria living in our guts and elsewhere are thought to influence everything from our mental health to our ability to process fat and gluten.

So when I recently got the chance to try a microbiome testing kit at home for free, I took it. Called the "Explorer," my kit was made by uBiome, a Silicon Valley startup. Since its founding in 2012, uBiome has raised nearly $110 million in funding and transformed from a citizen science project to a key player on the life science venture scene.

Investors call uBiome a game-changer. Before the company, we had virtually no central repository for data on the microbiome — data that could ultimately lead to new treatments for deadly diseases.

"We will look back and say, 'I can't believe we lived our lives without this knowledge,'" Bryan Johnson, the cofounder of a venture firm called OS Fund that led uBiome's latest funding round, told Business Insider.

My uBiome test results came with a significant surprise. Here's what the experience was like.

The biggest game in the world — "Fortnite" — is showing no signs of slowing down.

That's clear from the latest statistic to come out of "Fortnite" creator Epic Games: More than 200 million players have registered accounts, Epic Games confirmed on Tuesday.

Between June 2018 and November 2018, 75 million new players registered, putting the total at more than 200 million.

That's a pretty remarkable number. It puts "Fortnite" registered player numbers in the same realm as the most popular games of all time — games like "Tetris" and "Minecraft" and "Grand Theft Auto 5."

"Fortnite:Battle Royale"/Epic Games

That said, there's a big difference between "Fortnite" and those games: "Fortnite" is free, and available on pretty much anything that will play video games. It also doesn't hurt that the focus of "Fortnite" is an online-only multiplayer mode named "Battle Royale" that's endlessly re-playable.

It's that mix of attributes that's helped "Fortnite" become the most popular game in the world since the Battle Royale mode launched in September 2017.

Read more: Forget about 'Fortnite' — the new 'Call of Duty' makes 6 brilliant changes to the Battle Royale formula

It's been barely a year since "Fortnite" began its climb to the top, and already its victory dances have bled into professional sports.

It feels like months since Drake joined up with Tyler "Ninja" Blevins to stream the game on Twitch, thus boosting its visibility even more — but that's because it was months ago, way back in March. March!

Ninja and Drake played "Fortnite: Battle Royale" together on PlayStation 4, over the internet, and streamed it on Twitch. It broke Twitch streaming records by hundreds of thousands of viewers. Youtube / Ninja

And now, just one year after Battle Royale hit "Fortnite," more people are playing it monthly than there are people living in Drake's home country — by a factor of two! Way to make Canada look underpopulated, "Fortnite."

And if we're talking about registered players? At over 200 million, "Fortnite" has a player base that's nearly two-thirds of the entire US population.

Ketamine, a drug once associated with raucous parties, bright lights, and loud music, is increasingly being embraced as an alternative depression treatment for the millions of patients who don't get better after trying traditional medications.

The latest provider of the treatment is Columbia University, one of the nation's largest academic medical centers.

Starting this month, Columbia joined a growing list of major medical centers offering ketamine infusions to patients with severe depression, for whom traditional antidepressants like Prozac or Celexa have failed.

Elsewhere in the US, patients can get ketamine at a smattering of private clinics, but not all of them are subject to the strict medical oversight that's generally required of academic medical centers. In some cases, patients can also get the treatment by participating in research studies, but Columbia's move helps make the treatment more broadly available.

Ketamine is not cheap, and it isn't quick to administer. Because it's given by way of an IV drip, the process can take between 45 minutes and two hours. Each session costs $500 to $750 (Columbia is charging $650) and is not covered by insurance, because ketamine is only approved in the US for use as an anesthetic.

Patients given ketamine for depression are typically advised to get 8 to 12 sessions, bringing the total cost to as much as $9,000.

Despite its hefty price, ketamine has been called "the most important discovery in half a century" for mental illness. The drug appears to engage a different part of the brain from traditional antidepressants, and its apparent rapid-fire effects may be especially useful for staunching suicidal thinking in people who are considering taking their own lives, experts say. Ketamine also has a long history of being used to prevent pain, which suggests to clinicians that it's relatively safe.

"Ketamine is the real deal in that it's a genuine pharmacologic agent that's been used for a long time for anesthesia," Jeffrey Lieberman, the chair of the psychiatry department at Columbia University's Irving Medical Center, told Business Insider.

And while ketamine's applications for mental illness are relatively recent, Lieberman is hopeful that the drug will eventually be more widely available to patients in need.

'The most important discovery in half a century'?

Cozine/Shutterstock Most antidepressants, from Abilify to Zoloft, work by plugging up the places where our brain takes up serotonin, a chemical messenger that plays a key role in mood. The result is more free-floating serotonin and, in some people, relief from a dark curtain of depressive symptoms. But as many as one in three patients fail to respond to the medications, and no new type of depression drug has been invented since then.

Those are the patients who experts say ketamine might help.

In those patients, it can be helpful to think of depression as akin to severe pain, Cristina Cusin, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an assistant professor at Harvard University, told Business Insider this spring. When the pain gets so intense that it gets in the way of everyday activities — even something as simple as writing an email — patients can feel desperate enough to do anything to alleviate the suffering. But antidepressants take 4-6 weeks to work.

That's not good enough for patients who need help now, said Cusin.

Read more: A handful of clinics is embracing a 'party drug' that could be a rapid-fire depression treatment — we got a look inside

A growing list of providers offering ketamine

The ketamine clinic at Columbia University Medical Center Columbia Doctors Large institutions are starting to embrace ketamine therapy.

On the West Coast, the University of California in San Diego began offering the infusions to select patients with severe depression in 2010. Kaiser Permanente started administering ketamine as part of a pilot program in Northern California for people who didn't respond to other medications in 2015.

On the opposite side of the country, a handful of specialty centers recently began offering the treatments. They include Emory University, Yale University, and Massachusetts General Hospital, which began offering the treatments this fall.

Several other medical centers, including the Cleveland Clinic, the Mayo Clinic, and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, are administering the drug as part of ongoing research on ketamine and depression.

"The rapid antidepressant effects of ketamine in patients with severe, chronic, and treatment-resistant forms of this illness may represent a true medical breakthrough," James Murrough, the director of the mood and anxiety disorders program and an associate professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine, wrote in an October story for Scientific American.

Columbia University's program is one of the first to not require patients to show a specific number of failed treatments for depression in the past. (At Kaiser, patients must show that they've tried at least three different antidepressants and failed to respond to each one.)

Still, Lieberman stressed to Business Insider that experts carefully weigh the benefits and risks before recommending the treatment to a patient, and they always advise people to try traditional medications first.

"We have to do a very careful history and if [someone has] a mood disorder, what's their treatment been? Is the person genuinely unresponsive to standard treatments?" Lieberman said.

How ketamine works

Ketamine is believed to engage a different brain system from the one targeted by traditional antidepressants. It appears to act on key switches in the brain called NMDA receptors, which influence mood and help keep our brain's synapses — the delicate branches that serve as the ecosystem for our thoughts — flexible and resilient.

Depression damages these brain switches. And while traditional drugs may help to rescue them over time using serotonin, ketamine appears to deliver its aid directly to the source, plugging up NMDA receptors like a cork in a bottle and nipping depressive symptoms quickly.

A spate of recent research supports this idea of how ketamine provides relief.

Last December, researchers working with depressed and suicidal patients concluded in a study that ketamine was better at curbing suicidal thoughts than a commonly used sedative. Most participants in the study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, said their moods began to lift within 24 hours of receiving the drug. In some people, those effects lasted more than a month.

Similarly, the authors of a 2012 review of four preliminary studies on ketamine in patients with severe depression expressed surprise at how rapidly the drug appeared to produce positive and precise results.

Read more: Pharma giants are looking to ketamine for clues to the next blockbuster depression drug — and science says they're onto something big

But ketamine also has several drawbacks, aside from its steep price tag.

Ketamine induces what many people refer to as a high. This includes feelings of being dissociated from one's body and floating, as well as seeing bright colors and shapes. Some experts have suggested this could lead to issues with addiction.

In addition, ketamine's side effects can include blurred vision, headaches, and increased heart rate. And clinicians aren't yet sure how long ketamine's anti-depressive effects last. While some patients appear to experience a complete alleviation of their symptoms after several weeks of treatment, others either fail to respond or only see improvement for several days or weeks.

Nevertheless, several clinics outside of established medical centers are also offering the treatments, and while some are legitimate, others are what Lieberman described as "scary" and "aggressive" in their marketing tactics.

"It's not that ketamine shouldn't be available — it absolutely should — it just has to be available in a legitimate and medically controlled and rigorous setting," Lieberman said.

Ketamine is inspiring several attempts to create the next blockbuster depression drug

Ketamine is also inspiring research into other new depression drugs that work on the brain in a similar way. Homing in on this channel appears to provide depression relief that is better, arrives faster, and works in more people than existing drugs.

Allergan, the multinational pharmaceutical giant known for Botox and birth control, recently dove deep into research on an injectable depression drug called Rapastinel, which works on the same brain pathway as ketamine. San Francisco-based drug company VistaGen is working on a similar drug known only as AV-101.

Similarly, Johnson & Johnson submitted a nasal spray formulation of ketamine called esketamine to the FDA in September for its review. New York-based biotech company Seelos Therapeutics also has a nasal form of ketamine in its pipeline called SLS-002.

But research is still early, experts say.

"We are just scratching the surface of the mechanisms of action with ketamine," Cusin said this spring.