It's usually not huge news when the founders of a startup leave after their company is acquired.

But the departure of Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger from Instagram is a big deal — and not just because it was so unexpected. Their resignations are a huge blow to parent company Facebook.

Their move puts the future of Instagram up in the air even as it has become increasingly important to Facebook's overall business. And their departure — which follows that of other other top executives — comes as it's become increasingly clear that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg could use more, not fewer, strong voices to check his impulses and guide the company.

Perhaps not so coincidentally, the early indications are that Systrom and Krieger are leaving Instagram precisely over a difference of opinion with Zuckerberg about the future of Instagram.

Up until recently, Systrom was largely able to run Instagram on his own, according to multiple reports. Although Instagram tapped into Facebook's engineering resources and infrastructure, its founders were largely able to stick to their own vision when running the service, and to shrug off product suggestions from their corporate parent.

But Facebook had recently begun to alter the nature of its relationship with the photo-sharing service. Zuckerberg has been personally taking a more active interest in Instagram's direction of late, according to the Wall Street Journal. A management shakeup earlier this year appeared to decrease Systrom's power over the service and access to the CEO, the Journal reported. Meanwhile, Facebook has dramatically cut back on promoting Instagram inside its main social networking app, according to the Journal.

Systrom and Krieger were upset about the loss of the site's autonomy and their ability to steer its direction, according to multiple reports.

Instagram was doing great under Systrom and Krieger's leadership

At least from the outside, the two have done a terrific job with the service. In the six years since Facebook acquired Instagram, it's grown from 30 million to a billion active users. When it became part of Facebook, Instagram was basically generating no revenue. This year, it's expected to pull in $8 billion advertising sales, according to eMarketer.

Under cofounder Kevin Systrom's leadership, Instagram grew from 30 million users at the time it was acquired by Facebook to 1 billion now. Getty As it's grown, Instagram has become an increasingly key part of Facebook's overall business. This year, the photo service's revenue will account for an estimated 17% of its corporate parent's ad sales, up from 9% last year.

Instagram's fast sales and user growth have come as the revenue growth from Facebook's core app has started to slow. They also come as the number of Facebook users in developed countries has started to stagnate and the amount of time those users spend on the service has started to fall.

Indeed, Instagram has started to look like Facebook's bright hope for the future. Young consumers increasingly signing up for and spending time with it instead of with Facebook's main social network. And while the reputation of Facebook's main service has been sullied by a succession of scandals, including the Cambridge Analytica fiasco, Instagram has largely maintained its positive image.

But Facebook is risking that success with Systrom and Krieger leaving. Consumers bought into their vision, which was a site that was distinct from Facebook. If Facebook muddies that vision by remaking the service so it's more like, or more integrated into the company's core social network, users may go elsewhere.

It's clear that Zuckerberg needs outside voices on his team

But that's not the only danger Facebook faces from the departure of the Instagram founders. Perhaps the bigger risk is to the company's management and leadership.

Thanks to a stock structure that gives him outsized voting power in any corporate matter, Zuckerberg appears to rule Facebook unchecked by the company's board. That makes the role of the top managers around him even more important, giving them a key role in help shape shape and influence the company's direction.

It's clear that Zuckerberg could use some help. The company has been stumbling through a series of crises for much of the last two years, from the Russian-linked propaganda campaign during the 2016 election to the persecuting of Myanmar's Rohingya people to the massive compromise of customer data to Cambridge Analytica. To a large degree, those problems have been of the company's own making, stemming from a culture that promoted growth above just about all else, no matter whether it was privacy or social harm.

WhatsApp cofounder Jan Koum, who left Facebook earlier this year, was reportedly upset with with the company's efforts to commercialize the chat app. Reuters But at a time when Zuckerberg could use some voices in the upper levels of management who might offer a different vision for how to grow and run a social network, he's been losing just the kinds of executives who could provide that kind of insight.

Jan Koum and Brian Acton, the cofounders of WhatsApp, who promoted privacy within the chat app and criticized Facebook's efforts to commercialize it, left within the past year. Alex Stamos, Facebook's security chief who warned that the US is unprepared from a security standpoint for this year's election, left last month. And now Systrom and Krieger are gone.

The remaining cadre around Zuckerberg is mostly comprised of managers who have been at the company and working on its core social network for years, many since its early days. They're precisely not the sort of people who might be able to offer Zuckerberg an outside perspective that's not heavily steeped in how the company has always done things.

If Instagram falters in the wake of Systrom and Krieger's departure, that will be a bad thing for its users, for Facebook, and for Facebook's shareholders. But if their resignation helps lead to a CEO and company that are even more insulated from outside perspectives and contrary visions, that will be bad for the rest of us too, given how much power the company has and how much social harm it can and has caused.

In the wake of a new partnership between Apple and Salesforce, Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff seems to have had a change of heart about Apple's CEO Tim Cook.

On stage at during Benioff's keynote at Salesforce's enormous Dreamforce tech conference taking place this week in San Francisco, Benioff said:

"Thank you to Apple for becoming a strategic partner. Thank you, Tim Cook. Thank you for fighting for gender equality. Thank you for fighting for equality and love in our industry. You are somebody in our industry we all can follow."

It's not exactly clear what he's referring to when it comes to crediting Cook with fighting for gender equality. Earlier this year, Apple released a gender pay gap analysis for its workers in the UK, where such disclosures are now required by law. Apple's report showed that the company pays women equally to their male counterparts. The report also shows that Apple's workforce is about 30% women, which is about average for the tech industry.

As for fighting for "equality and love," Benioff is likely talking about how Cook publicly came out as gay back in 2014. However, in 2016, when Salesforce was fighting with several states to defeat bills that appeared to legalize discrimination against gay and transgender people on the basis of religion, Benioff was less impressed. Back then, Benioff criticised Cook for not supporting the efforts to defeat such bills, particularly one in Georgia.

For its part, Apple has adopted protecting consumer privacy as its keystone social issue. It's a self-serving issue to tackle, given that Apple's latest and greatest smartphones use facial scanning technology, leaving the company to reassure customers that the technology isn't creepy.

Now that Apple is a partner to Salesforce, Benioff seems a lot happier with Cook's efforts in matters of gender equality and equal pay — two of Benioff's own pet causes.

Interestingly, during the same speech, Benioff also seemed to give a nod to the big controversy that banged up Salesforce's own image on social issues in recent days: the fact that it supplies services to US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The CBP, and companies that do business with it, have come under sharp criticism in the wake of President Donald Trump's zero tolerance policy on immigration, and the controversial policy of family separations.

More than 650 Salesforce employees signed a letter calling the family separation policy "inhumane," and asked the company to reconsidering its contract with the agency. However, Salesforce insisted that its products were not being used in that effort, and did not end the contract. Benioff did publicly condemn the family separation policy, and said he donated to efforts to help legal efforts to reunite affected families. He also wrote a letter to the White House condemning the situation.

RAICES, a nonprofit that advocates for immigrant rights, publicly refused a donation from Salesforce because of this contract.

On stage on Tuesday, Benioff seemed to recognize the PR hit his company has taken over the situation, subtly addressing by saying that when it comes to social issues, "We're not perfect. We're not always going to get it right. Sometimes you have to take a big two-by-four and hit me over the head."

Amid the CBP firestorm, and the storm of controversy otherwise sweeping Silicon Valley over app addiction, the spread of misinformation, and the potentially disruptive effects of artificial intelligence, Benioff also pointed out that the company is currently looking to hire a chief ethical officer who will ensure the "humane" use of its technology.

There's a high-stakes race among the biggest tech companies, from Google to Amazon, to stake out turf in the burgeoning artificial intelligence market.

But ask IBM, and it will tell you it has the home-field advantage.

After all, in 1957, the company helped prove that AI had practical uses when it programmed an IBM 704 to play checkers and to learn from its experiences. In 2011, an IBM super-computer named Watson became the champ of the TV trivia game show "Jeopardy."

And although IBM's focus is on technology for enterprise customers, rather than direct to consumer products, the 107-year-old company is not about to let its AI reputation be stolen by upstarts like Google, Facebook, Amazon.

On Monday, IBM announced that it has released AI specially "pre-trained" for nine industries, including human resources, supply chain, manufacturing, and advertising.

These AI tools, part of the Watson Decision Platform, come pre-programmed to understand the language, tasks and challenges of each industry. The pre-trained AI still allows customers to customize for their specific situation. Among the companies already signed up are H&R Block, Ingersoll Rand, and Subway.

Earlier this month, IBM launched a new tool that scans AI software and uncovers all kinds of nasty bias. If an insurance company isn't giving loans to members of a particular minority group, this tool will unearth it.

David Kenny, senior vice president of IBM Cognitive Solutions, told Business Insider that IBM's AI has more than 16,000 applications applied in more than 20 industries and across 80 countries.

The IBM team that participated in the June 2018 debate that saw two experienced debaters compete against IBM's AI system (center). Greg Sandoval/Business Insider

"AI is becoming a better way for people to make decisions," Kenny said. "We are focused on helping businesses improve their work flows and get more out of all their data."

For IBM, all the attention paid to the likes of Facebook, Google, and Amazon over their AI efforts must be strange. Part of that is due to the skill the tech companies have in putting on a good show.

Google Home and Amazon Alexa are consumer AI, digital assistants that speak with their owners. This is the kind of futuristic tech that sparks the public's imagination. In May, when Google unveiled Duplex, the appointment-making software that can carry on conversations in a human-sounding voice, the tech press couldn't write enough.

That doesn't rattle IBM's brass says Kenny. First of all, IBM has also showcased its own talking AI, called Debater, that received a lot of positive press. Secondly, much of what the other guys are doing involves consumers.

IBM has some experience with consumer goods. The company was once among the dominant PC makers. But that was an anomaly for the company, according to Kenny. With AI, Big Blue has its sights squarely on the enterprise market, an area where it has more than a century of experience.

See Also: A former TV comedy writer learned three ways to succeed at impossible tasks when he taught an IBM computer how to argue

"The digital assistants are in a big, broad market," Kenny said. "I don't see us going into the crowded consumer space."

IBM says it recently surveyed 5,000 executives, asking them where AI could provide the greatest value. Some of the areas the execs identified were IT, information security, customer service and risk management.

"Those are clearly areas where IBM has both deep experience and street cred," said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, an IT research company. "There are problems that are well beyond the current capabilities of Amazon Alexa and Google Voice so IBM has what you might call great field advantage."

The Instagram cofounders' Monday night bombshell, that they were resigning from Facebook, has all the telltale signs of a bad breakup.

But to people inside the organization, the divorce was a long time coming, even if the announcement came without warning.

The photo-sharing app was acquired by Facebook in 2012 and has flourished under the wings of Facebook. With more than 1 billion users and a fast-growing ad business, Instagram is considered by many to be Facebook's smartest acquisition and among the best deals in tech industry history.

The success masked many of the tensions between Instagram and its parent company. The two cultures are very different, with separate traditions and priorities.

To Instagrammers, Facebook is the soul-less corporate giant that happens to own them. To many Facebook employees, Instagram people are arrogant, "too cool for school," and not team players.

After years of finding common ground and resolving differences, the leadership of the two companies appears to have reached a breaking point this week. Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the two founders of Instagram, announced their plans to leave in a freighted farewell note.

Exactly what triggered the breaking point remains unclear, but according to several sources that Business Insider spoke to, there's been a long buildup of friction between the two organizations.

Kevin likes getting things perfect, Facebook prefers iteration

Instagram and Facebook's teams work very differently. Instagram has an extremely heavy focus on design, with significant thought going into new products before launch, with the intent to perfect them before unveiling them to the world.

Facebook, in contrast, has a more iterative and data-driven approach, looking at what users are already doing, and frequently making minor changes to the product. "Kevin focuses a lot on visual feel and getting things perfect, while Facebook prefers iteration," a source said.

Instagram's design-heavy focus stems from the top down — Systrom is into fashion, while Krieger collects art. When Instagram was rushing to get its Stories product out the door in the summer of 2016, Krieger personally jumped in and built the neon effects pen that gives the feature some of its distinctive flair, another source recalled.

With the duo out of the picture, sources predicted ever-closer integration between the two groups, with Instagram morphing from a semi-autonomous organization into a product unit within the Facebook organization.

Although Systrom and Krieger were always careful to be diplomatic in public comments about the relationship with Facebook, the growing pressure from Facebook to integrate the two platforms was a longstanding source of tension that required them to push back at times and to acquiesce at others.

The Justin Bieber stress test

One such area was advertising: Early in Instagram's history, its focus when it came to ads was high-quality, glossy ads: At one point, Systrom was approving every single one himself. But the model could not scale, and Facebook pushed the company into integrating more closely with its own advertising business. Instagram employees were worried at the time, but it ultimately resulted it a sustained growth in revenues and profits for the app.

Another early example was the launch of Instagram's web profiles back in November 2012, shortly after Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion. Systrom was worried that it doing so could lead to spam on the platform, but Facebook pushed for it because of its potential for businesses and to grow the userbase.

At the same time, Instagram has benefitted immeasurably from Facebook's guidance and technical expertise. Prior to the acquisition, the social network would buckle under the weight of Justin Bieber, its servers crashing as they struggled to handle his millions of fans. It remains an open question whether Instagram could have succeeded the same way — recently hitting the one-billion-user mark — without Facebook's help.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Facebook and Instagram have clashed recently

There have been significant more recent clashes leading up to Systrom and Krieger's exits. Employees at Instagram felt they were losing autonomy, as the two products became more closely integrated over the last year.

One recent flashpoint: Users can share photos from Instagram to Facebook, and historically this included an attribution line leading back to Instagram. But this was removed, to the frustration of Instagram. (Recode also previously reported that this was a point of contention.)

"Kevin [Systrom] has been super-pissed-off" at Mark [Zuckerberg]," an anonymous 'high-level" source told NBC News.

Interestingly, last week there was also a report from The Verge alleging that Instagram was considering a feature that would let users re-share friends' photos onto their own feed. Facebook initially declined to comment on the report, and only later denied it was true. (The Verge stands by its reporting.) It's not clear what the truth of the matter is, or if it played any part in Krieger and Systrom's ultimate exit.

One source said they expected Systrom's recent paternity leave following the birth of his first child to have played a part in his decision to go.

The departure of both cofounders simultaneously — with no staggered transition period between them — has alarmed some observers, but a source didn't think it was surprising that they jumped ship together: "They have a really, really strong cofounder relationship. That's always ... been the case."

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After a Hawaiian telescope spotted 'Oumuamua traveling through space in October 2017, astronomers realized it was weird.

Very weird.

The object had a cigar-like shape and was 750 feet by 115 feet in size, or roughly as large as a skyscraper. It was dark red in color and moving inexplicably fast. Just in case, one group of astronomers even scanned it for alien radio emissions (yet heard nothing).

Most importantly, 'Oumuamua wasn't circling the sun like a typical space rock. Instead, it had dived between Mercury and the sun, swooped below our home star, and was zooming past Earth on its way out of our solar system.

This showed that 'Oumuamua — whose name means "a messenger from afar, arriving first" in Hawaiian — was actually an interstellar traveler from beyond the solar system.

The path of the object 'Oumuamua through the solar system in September and October 2017.nagualdesign and Tomruen/Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Astronomers eventually determined 'Oumuamua wasn't an asteroid but instead a "mildly active" comet.

But if it is not from our solar system, then where did it come from?

Using the newest and most precise star map ever created, eight astronomers have located four stars that are candidates for 'Oumuamua's home. Each star's path in relatively recent cosmological history matches somewhat closely to the comet's historic path.

Their study, highlighted Tuesday in a European Space Agency (ESA) press release, was recently accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal, a peer-reviewed science publication.

How the team found candidate homes for 'Oumuamua

An illustration of the Gaia spacecraft.ESA

The research team began its search with an unprecedented map of 1.7 billion stars created by an ESA spacecraft called Gaia. The new map, released in April, is the second Gaia dataset published by the ESA since the spacecraft launched in December 2013.

The map doesn't just note the position of the stars, though: It also shows where stars are moving through space and how fast.

About 7 million stars in Gaia's database have motion data that is detailed enough to let astronomers to precisely "rewind" their positions to millions of years in the past.

By comparing the historic path of 'Oumuamua against these millions of stars, the team discovered four candidates which line up within a few light-years of the comet. One of these star systems may have ejected 'Oumuamua toward Earth, likely via a giant planet early in the system's formation.

All of the candidates are dwarf stars, which means they are small and burn very hot. Two were previously studied (HD 292249 and HIP 3757) and two others were temporarily named "home-3" and "home-4" by the tem.

The closest match to the path of 'Oumuamua was with the dwarf star HIP 3757. The paths of the star and wayward comet came within two light-years of each other some 1 million years or so ago.

Why the search is not over

Gaia's all-sky view of our Milky Way Galaxy and neighbouring galaxies, based on measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars. ESA/Gaia/DPAC

The team still isn't confident they've found 'Oumuamua's home.

For one, Gaia's latest and most detailed sample of 7 million stars — while vast — is only partial. Some 180 million stars exist closer to Earth than the ones examined by the research team.

"Hence it is [therefore] unlikely that we would find the home system in our study," the authors wrote in their study.

The team also looked for encounters within the past few million years. In reality, 'Oumuamua may have traveled much farther and longer before reaching our solar system — perhaps tens of millions of years or more, the authors said.

In addition, the four stars pinpointed by the search aren't yet known to harbor any planets, let alone worlds large enough to kick 'Oumuamua out of its home star system.

Finally, the speed of 'Oumuamua is better explained by a two-star (or binary) system, yet none of the four systems described by the study have more than one star in them.

The astronomers behind the work are waiting for Gaia's third star map to be released. Those data should describe the ultra-precise motions of 10 times as many nearby stars as the team looked at for their study — perhaps including the one from which our interstellar visitor originated.

"The search for 'Oumuamua's home continues," the authors said.

On Monday, Instagram cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger made the unexpected announcement that they would be leaving the company in the the coming weeks.

They didn't provide a reason for quitting, but in the last interviews he gave before announcing his departure, Systrom may have hinted at why he and Krieger decided to leave the company.

Systrom recently made an appearance on the Masters of Scale podcast hosted by Reid Hoffman, where he discussed his visions for Instagram and how the company came to be. In the interview, Systrom spoke about his decision to sell Instagram to Facebook, and how he was initially optimistic about the relationship.

"The decision to sell was mostly about whether or not we were aligned in our vision of Instagram, and I think Mark and I both saw at the time that Instagram was a special thing," Systrom said in the interview. "It wasn't going to be like, 'Oh, we'll buy this thing and it'll just be Facebook Photos.' Like, 'We'll rebrand it as Facebook Photos.' It's a unique community and had a unique angle and he wanted to invest in it."

Systrom also explained how Facebook's infrastructure had a huge effect on Instagram's growth, and the relationship between the two companies was mutually beneficial. However, according to Recode, this relationship began to decay as Facebook began to take Instagram in a different direction — a direction that was antithetical to Systrom's vision of keeping Instagram "simple" and distinct from Facebook.

"The whole idea of joining Facebook was that we could scale way more quickly than we would independently," Systrom said in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, which was conducted before his departure announcement. While the ability to quickly scale the Instagram platform was an upside to selling to Facebook, Systrom may have come to disagree with how the parent company was treating that relationship.

However, it's been rumored that the duo's departure came as a result of some headbutting with Facebook executives over their conflicting visions of what Instagram should be, and whether the social media app was competing with Facebook's userbase. Multiple sources told Recode that Systrom and Krieger were frustrated with how Facebook had been dealing with Instagram lately, after an initially smooth and co-beneficial relationship for the first six years.

In the last year or so, Facebook lessened its promotion of Instagram, according to Recode, removing the Instagram label when pictures from the platform were shared to Facebook and decreasing the amount of Instagram promotion from within Facebook, in addition to testing Instagram notifications that would send people to Facebook. Recode is also reporting that there was conflict over the introduction of Instagram TV, and that Facebook was worried it would draw users away from Facebook's own in-app video service. Given the sum of these actions, Recode's sources claim Instagram executives were worried Facebook may have been intentionally slowing Instagram's growth.

For now, Systrom isn't setting the record straight one way or the other, but that could change once the executive officially departs the company in coming weeks — or perhaps the next time he sits down with a reporter to talk about whatever new project he's working on next.

You can listen to or read Systrom's interview with Hoffman on the Masters of Scale podcast here. You can read the full Wall Street Journal article here.

On Thursday of last week, Social Capital co-founder and early Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya published a Medium post outlining his firm's new ambitions. No longer would Social Capital operate as traditional venture firm, Palihapitiya wrote; instead, it would act as a "technology holding company" that would invest off of a "a multi-billion dollar balance sheet of internal capital."

While Palihapitiya has portrayed Social Capital's recent aspirations as what he describes as a "return to the firm's founding principles," some insiders say that Palihapitiya's change of heart might have more to do with the firm's troubles raising outside capital than anything else.

"It didn't come out of the blue," one person said. "The issue is he can't fundraise."

Exactly what led to the change has become one of the most buzzed about topics inside Silicon Valley's startup and investing circles. The abrupt change, at a firm that had emerged as one of the industry's most celebrated new players, has left many scratching their heads and wondering whether it reflects the iconoclastic streak of a visionary tech executive or the storyline of a familiar fall from grace.

A former Facebook executive, Palihapitiya has raised billions of dollars from investors eager to benefit from his insight and his connections. And to hear Palihapitiya tell it, he recently decided that dealing with outside investors was a hassle he didn't need.

"By the summer of 2018," writes Palihapitiya, "we had finished a detailed examination of the many ways we could expand...  it wasn't about raising more money from outsiders..."

But according to people familiar with the matter, in the summer of 2018, Palihapitiya was still very much interested in and actively discussing raising money from outsiders.

At at an all-hands meeting in late July, Palihapitiya announced Social Capital's intentions to begin fundraising for Fund IV in September 2018, a person told Business Insider. Palihapitiya had been absent from the office for many months, but he turned heads by arriving at the office that day chauffeured in a Bentley and bearing the news. The firm should get its pitch deck in order, he is said to have announced.

But new fundraising efforts had been delayed again and again, sources say, making many insiders unsure of Palihapitiya's latest directive. Often, Palihapitiya would say that a fund was close to being closed, or that a new fund was in the process of being raised, but nothing would ever come of it, multiple people said.

While Palihapitiya was something of a golden child in Silicon Valley when he launched Social Capital, raising money from big name investors and star-studded tech executives, his star had recently begun to fade. There were signs that some investors, including some of the firm's heavyweight limited partners, were unhappy, multiple people said. It was well known that many limited partners had declined to reinvest when Social Capital raised its third fund in 2015, another person said.

Multiple people said that many of the firm's recent voluntary departures were the result of the on-again-off-again attempts to fundraise. Those departures created a vicious cycle, by spooking some investors. Some limited partners had even begun asking to have their stakes paid out in recent months.

Palihapitiya himself has said that he doesn't have much interest in his investors' input. In an interview with The Information last week, Palihapitiya said that he doesn't review investor feedback. "Who cares?" he told The Information when asked his thoughts on his investors' insight."It doesn't matter."

A spokeswoman for Social Capital declined to comment.

Parisa Tabriz, director of engineering at Google Chrome, indicated on Tuesday that the company is ready to make changes involving a controversial new Chrome feature that some security researchers have called a threat to privacy.

In an Twitter post, Tabriz, who calls herself the "browser boss," said: "We've heard — and appreciate — your feedback from the last few days, and we'll be making some product changes."

Tabriz offered no specifics about the changes.

On Sunday, Matthew Green, a cryptography and security researcher as well as a professor at Johns Hopkins University, on Sunday helped bring to light that Google had quietly begun logging users into the Chrome browser without their knowledge or consent.

In a blog post titled, "Why I'm done with Chrome," Green wrote Google tucked the login change into the latest Chrome update. The way it works is that anytime someone logs into one of Google's properties, such as YouTube or Gmail, they will automatically get signed into Chrome.

For years, Google has given users of Chrome, the world's most popular browser, the option of surfing the web without logging in. What's important about that is that users had to login first and then consent to the sync feature before their private browser history was shared with Google.

Because Google was logging in people involuntarily, and because of changes to the sync-consent page, it had become much easier for users to accidentally agree to share their browser histories, Green said.

Tabriz said Google made the login change to "clarify when you're signed in/out of the browser as well as Google websites."

Green was skeptical and said Google's reasoning made no sense.

Green's blog stirred debate among Chrome fans, with many not seeing the change as a problem. Still, dozens of others criticized Google via the social networks. On Tuesday, some Chrome users were exchanging instructions on Twitter on how to disable the auto-login feature.

One of the main questions of the critics: Why would Google's managers make this change without notifying users? Answers are not immediately forthcoming.

Ng Han Guan/AP

Nio, widely seen as the Tesla of China, is tumbling this week, which echoes an investor's bearish view.

"Nio's not a stock we have any interest in," said Mark Tepper, president and CEO of Strategic Wealth Partners, managing over $1 billion in assets. "An unproven management team along zero experience in manufacturing cars makes this an easy stock to steer clear of."

Nio has gained 21% since the company's initial public offering on September 12. Shares priced at $6.26 apiece, the low end of its range, causing the electric-car maker to fall short of raising the $1.8 billion it had sought. But one day after its lackluster debut, the stock soared 75%, sending its market capitalization above $12 billion — despite Bernstein analyst Robin Zhu assigning an "underperform" rating and saying he thinks a capital raise is coming in the next 12 to 18 months.

Now with the shares sliding from their post-IPO high, Nio's market cap has dropped below $8 billion. But the company is still overvalued based on its sales, according to Tepper. "With $7 million of sales and an $8 billion market cap, we can’t justify owning it," he said. 

The Tencent-backed electric-car startup delivered its first volume-manufactured vehicle — the ES8 — to users on June 28, and started to generate revenue this year, according to its IPO filing. Nio said it generated revenue of $6.95 million in the first half of 2018, and that it had 6,201 unfilled ES8 reservations by the end of August, for which non-refundable deposits had been made but customers could still cancel their orders.

And for Nio, scaling production may take some time. Tesla has suffered through production problems nearly every time it rolled out a new model. 

In July 2017, CEO Elon Musk warned Tesla would face manufacturing challenges for "at least six months of production hell" as it ramped up Model 3 production to 500,000 per year. The electric-car maker endured even larger production hell with its previous three vehicles, the original Roadster, the Model S sedan, and the Model X SUV, Musk told Business Insider.

"Look at Tesla’s recent struggles," Tepper said. "That makes it even less attractive for us."

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Amazon is doubling down on the home.

The company's Alexa Fund, which it usually uses to fund voice-technology ventures, has invested in prefabricated housing startup Plant Prefab, the startup announced on Tuesday. Plant Prefab focuses on building new, prefabricated, single- and multi-family homes using sustainable practices, and it claims it can build faster and with less waste than traditional methods, according to the company's website.

Obvious Ventures also participated in the startup's $6.7 million round of funding.

Why is Amazon's Alexa Fund interested in a prefab home startup? It's just the latest move that suggests that Amazon's Alexa technology is all about the home.

"Voice has emerged as a delightful technology in the home, and there are now more than 20,000 Alexa-compatible smart home devices from 3,500 different brands," Paul Bernard, director of Amazon's Alexa Fund, said in a prepared statement.

"Plant Prefab is a leader in home design and an emerging, innovative player in home manufacturing. We're thrilled to support them as they make sustainable, connected homes more accessible to customers and developers."

Bernard refers directly to connected homes, an area that could spell growth for Amazon if the company is able to integrate Alexa into a home before it is even built and delivered to customers.

Amazon is looking to own the home more completely. Earlier in September, it unveiled updates and additions to its Alexa-powered device lineup that are designed to enhance playback of music and video, as well as more easily control smart-home devices. The new devices further entrench Alexa as a leading platform for the connected home as Amazon builds out its ecosystem of entertainment and utility.

The iPhone XS is faster than the Galaxy Note 9, according to a new speed test from PhoneBuff posted on YouTube.

This speed test is non-scientific: Basically, the test consists of opening a series of apps, and whichever phone finishes first wins the test.

But we've been following PhoneBuff's tests for a while, because they do a good job of showing how quickly the phone opens up apps like the camera, Microsoft Word, and various popular games. To add additional objectivity, PhoneBuff's test is no longer done by a person, but rather a mechanical arm equipped with a stylus.

This year, Apple's fastest phone blew Samsung's flagship phone out of the water, beating it by 14 seconds.

Last year, Samsung's Galaxy Note 8 actually beat Apple's iPhone 8. But in 2016, Apple's iPhone beat Samsung's fastest Note.

The latest version of iPhone software, iOS 12, placed an emphasis on speed and stability, with several users observing that it seemed like Apple cut back on how long operating system animations took to complete.

"It seems like Apple's claim that the A12 Bionic chip can load apps up to 30% faster holds true," PhoneBuff host David Rahimi said. "But at the same time, at least some of the difference can be attributed to the optimizations in iOS 12."

Fitbit is making a move to become more than just a fitness device at a time when wearable competition is fierce.

The company on Wednesday announced the launch of Fitbit Care, a health platform that combines coaching, virtual care, wearable devices, and self-tracking.

Best known for its simple fitness band aimed at getting people moving, Fitbit is developing new products as its stock price has taken a tumble amid competition from companies like Apple.

After Apple debuted its new watch, which includes features like new heart-rate tracking and fall detection, shares of Fitbit fell earlier in September as much as 6%.

Here's how Fitbit Care works: The platform encompasses Fitbit's wearable band, which tracks sleep habits, activity, heart rate, and female health. Then, through a new Fitbit Plus app used on a smartphone users can get health coaching sessions and virtual care to help them reach a particular health goal, such as lowering blood pressure.

For now, the program is just for people whose employers, health plans, or health systems opt into it and pay Fitbit on a per member per month basis. That means individual people can't sign up to use the program on their own, at least for now.

"With healthcare costs and rates of chronic disease increasing, there is a clear need for innovative tools and services to help people make the lifestyle and behavior changes necessary to reverse this trend," Adam Pellegrini, the general manager of Fitbit Health Solutions, said in a news release.

For many Americans, their employers are the ones picking up the tab for their healthcare. More than half of the non-elderly population is covered by an employer-sponsored healthcare plan, and almost 80% of large companies are self-insured.

As healthcare costs go up, employers are the ones feeling the pressure. Some are starting to get fed up and looking for new ideas. Platforms like Fitbit Cares are one of those ideas. In addition to employers, Fitbit said that about 5 million Humana members — those in its employer group segment — will have access to Fitbit Cares coaching.

See also:

Johnson & Johnson Innovation's Manhattan outpost of its startup incubator, JLabs, is the new kid on the NYC-health-tech block.

First opened in June, JLabs host startups looking for a space to grow their businesses — whether that be developing drugs, coming up with new medical devices, or applying new technology to the world of healthcare. In addition to NYC, there are JLabs in San Diego, San Francisco, Toronto, Houston, Boston and Belgium as well as another planned in Shanghai.

The incubators provide J&J, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, with a front-row view of what's happening at the startup level. Though J&J doesn't take an immediate stake in the companies, it does end up investing in some in the long-run. The relationship works like this: J&J will provide all the infrastructure, operation management, network, and programming, and the startups just have to bring new and innovative ideas.

It's part of J&J's plan of looking to the future and adapting to become more nimble as it evolves for the new generation of consumers.

"We're the leading healthcare company," Kate Merton, head of the NYC and Boston JLabs, told Business Insider. "In the future we want to be the leading digital healthcare company."

Take a look inside JLabs' NYC digs, which with its coffee-shop vibes looked unlike any startup space we've ever seen.

LONDON (Reuters) - Comcast beat Rupert Murdoch's Twenty-First Century Fox in the battle for Sky after offering around 30 billion pounds ($39 billion) for the British broadcaster in a rare auction to decide the fate of the pay-television group.

U.S. cable giant Comcast bid 17.28 pounds a share for control of London-listed Sky, versus an offer of 15.67 pounds a share offer by Fox, the Takeover Panel said in a statement shortly after final bids were made on Saturday.

The two media titans faced off in a rare one-day auction that took three separate sealed rounds of bids to produce a victor. Comcast's winning offer brings to a close a months-long battle to win the Sky, and the 23 million pay-tv subscribers in seven countries that make up its business.

Comcast's final offer was significantly higher than its bid going into the auction of 14.75 pounds, and compares with Sky's closing share price of 15.85 pounds on Friday.

It is a blow to 87-year-old media mogul Murdoch and the U.S. media and entertainment group that he controls, which already holds 39 percent of Sky and had been trying to take full ownership of the business since December 2016.

It is also a setback for U.S. entertainment giant Walt Disney, which agreed a separate $71 billion deal to buy the bulk of Fox's film and TV assets, including the Sky stake, in June and would have taken ownership of the British broadcaster following a successful Fox takeover.

If Comcast's winning offer is approved, it will own the 61% of Sky. Disney will need to decide whether it will sell it's 39% stake to Comcast, or if it will remain a minority partner.

Sky is an attractive asset to both Comcast and Disney as they work to expand their international footprints. The British pay-TV business serves 23 million customers, mostly direct-broadcast-satellite subscribers, in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland.

It has a strong content portfolio, with exclusive rights through 2020 to run HBO shows like "Game of Thrones" and "Westworld" across Europe and with the majority of Premier League TV rights and exclusive rights to the German Bundesliga.

($1 = 0.7648 pounds)

On a Monday night at a brewery in San Francisco's hipster Mission District, the co-founders of a startup called New Age Meats helped cook up samples of pork sausage made entirely out of cells grown from a live pig named Jessie.

As scientists-turned-entrepreneurs Brian Spears and Andra Necula watched, the sausage they'd spent the past two months making at a nearby lab began to sizzle. Slowly, its sides turned brown and, as the aroma of breakfast meat filled the room, samples were doled out to taste.

New Age Meats aims to make meat from animal cells without killing any actual animals. They are one of roughly half a dozen nascent companies aiming to create an alternative to factory farming. In so doing, they hope to reduce waste, improve health, and eliminate animal suffering.

New Age Meats' sausage was the first in history to be made with fat and muscle cells — an important combination that could prove key for nailing the taste of "cell-based" or "cultured" (meaning simply: not from slaughter) meat. Here's what it was like.

Last week, amid the hoopla surrounding the new iPhones, Apple quietly killed off one of the best smartphones it's ever made: the iPhone SE.

At $350, the iPhone SE was one of the best "budget" smartphones you can buy. Though it didn't have the big and flashy high-definition screens of modern smartphones like Samsung's Galaxy phones, the iPhone SE offered great performance in an adorable package.

But the iPhone SE wasn't just a "small phone" — it provided an alternative for people who didn't want to buy a large -screened iPhone.

The sweet spot

For the first six years of iPhones, the screen never got bigger than four inches.

The original iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and iPhone 4S all had screens that measured 3.5 inches.

In 2012, with the arrival of the iPhone 5, Apple bumped the screen size up to 4 inches. Even that was a huge shift, especially since developers had to re-size all their apps, and the iPhone 5S and 5C the following year kept that same 4-inch screen.

The 4-inch iPhone 5 (left) next to a 3.5-inch iPhone 4 Reuters/Yves Herman Then, suddenly, in 2014, Apple introduced the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, its largest iPhones ever, with 4.7- and 5.5-inch screens. They were huge!

Lots of people loved the larger screens of the iPhone 6-era phones, but plenty of customers who preferred the smaller designs worried about the eventual retirement of the iPhone 5S, the last remaining iPhone with a 4-inch screen.

The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus Business Insider To the surprise of many, Apple in late 2016 announced the iPhone 5S would get a true successor, called the iPhone SE. It would feature the same internals as the year-ago iPhone model, the iPhone 6S, but in the package of the 4-inch iPhone 5S.

Since 2016, the iPhone SE has remained in Apple's lineup as not only the last "small" iPhone, but also its most affordable, at just $350.

Business Insider/Steve Kovach

This, in turn, gave Apple an incredibly diverse iPhone lineup: As of last year, Apple's iPhone lineup featured models priced from $350 all the way to $1,149, giving customers a wide range of options to choose from.

Having so many different iPhone models gave Apple a big advantage: While most smartphone makers could only afford to focus on one phone launch at a time, Apple was selling phones for just about everyone, whether you wanted something affordable or high-end, big or small.

Apple missed the opportunity to make an iPhone XSE (pronounced "Tennessee")

As of now, you can no longer buy an iPhone SE directly from Apple.

This means the most affordable — and smallest! — iPhone is now the iPhone 7, which, at $449, is actually an absolute steal. The iPhone 7 is not very old at all, even if 2016 feels like a long time ago, and it's an incredible design and overall experience.

To be fair, as much as I lament the discontinuation of the iPhone SE and that particular design, Apple almost certainly has more data to support the fact it made the right decision. Who knows, maybe Apple will sell more iPhones this holiday season than ever before with the adjusted lineup. But the iPhone SE was still clearly serving a significant number of people: Back in 2016, Apple announced it had sold 30 million 4-inch iPhones in 2015, despite the availability of the newer and larger iPhone 6 and 6S models.

So, as much as I love the current iPhone X-style designs, I do believe Apple got it right with the iPhone SE, and hope to see 4-inch iPhones eventually make a return. Maybe we'll see an iPhone X-style redesign at some point (I think it would have to be called iPhone XSE — a.k.a. "iPhone Tennessee" — as it most certainly could not be called iPhone SEX). But even if a redesigned iPhone SE costs more than $350, having a new 4-inch iPhone would satisfy customers who want a smaller smartphone that runs iOS, and customers in general would benefit by having more options to choose from.

This Apple ad from 2012 had it right when it called the 4-inch iPhone design "common sense":

Amazon uses fake packages to catch delivery drivers who are stealing, according to sources with knowledge of the practice.

The company plants the packages — internally referred to as "dummy" packages — in the trucks of drivers at random. The dummy packages have fake labels and are often empty.

"We might pull something out of our pocket and put it in there" to give it some weight, a former Amazon logistics manager told Business Insider. This person, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, said instructions for the practice came from Amazon's corporate offices in Seattle.

"It's meant to be a trap ... to check the integrity of the driver," he said.

In response to this story, Amazon said, "Checks and audits are part of overall quality programs and are administered at random."

Here's how the practice works, according to the sources:

During deliveries, drivers scan the labels of every package they deliver. When they scan a fake label on a dummy package, an error message will pop up.

When this happens, drivers might call their supervisors to address the problem, or keep the package in their truck and return it to an Amazon warehouse at the end of their shift.

Drivers, in theory, could also choose to steal the package. The error message means the package isn't detected in Amazon's system. As a result, it could go unnoticed if the package were to go missing.

"If you bring the package back, you are innocent. If you don't, you're a thug," said Sid Shah, a former manager for DeliverOL, a courier company that delivers packages for Amazon.

Dummy packages are just one way that Amazon is trying to control theft, which is a giant problem for the company — and all retailers, for that matter.

Shrinkage — the industry's term for losses attributable to theft, error, or fraud — cost retailers nearly $47 billion last year, according to the National Retail Federation.

Amazon recently started delivering packages in customers' cars and homes. Both programs are designed to give customers more options for delivery, as well as reduce theft rates.

The company has also been known to deter potential thieves by showing its warehouse workers videos of colleagues being caught stealing, according to a 2016 Bloomberg report.

Amazon doesn't say how many packages it loses to theft each year. The company delivered more than 5 billion packages to Prime customers worldwide last year.

In a 2017 survey conducted by the packaging company Shorr, 31% of respondents said they had experienced package theft.

According to the former Amazon logistics manager, the "dummy" traps could be effective at catching thieves.

"We caught people not being honest," he said.

Amazon is known as the leading online store for consumers, but it's quickly becoming a destination spot for businesses, too.

The amount of goods sold through Amazon Business, the company's business-to-business marketplace, has hit $10 billion on an annualized basis, Amazon said in a blog post Tuesday. But by 2021, that amount, using "conservative" assumptions, should exceed $25 billion, according to a research note from Colin Sebastian, a financial analyst at Baird Equity Research.

"We believe Amazon [Business] over the very long-term has the potential to surpass the size of the core [consumer] segment, and remains an underappreciated opportunity by many investors," Sebastian said in his report.

Investors and analysts that are bullish on Amazon have largely concentrated on Amazon Web Services, which is its fast-growing cloud-computing segment, and its booming advertising business. Few, by contrast, have focused on Amazon Business.

But it, too, is showing impressive growth — and lots of potential.

More than $11 billion in goods will likely be sold through the business marketplace this year, up from $1 billion in annualized sales just two years ago, Sebastian said. By contrast, Amazon's consumer business took seven years to grow that same amount, he said.

In interview with Business Insider, Bill Burkland, who heads the UK operations of Amazon Business, noted that the company didn't even launch its business marketplace until April 2015. Although the marketplace offers a wide range of goods, its most popular products are those with widespread appeal across many different kinds of businesses, such as PCs and janitorial supplies, he said.

To hit an annual run rate of $10 billion in sales through the marketplace in fewer than four years "is certainly a reflection that this is a big and fast-growing business," Burkland said.

The products sold through Amazon Business are sold by both Amazon itself and by third-party vendors. Those vendors now account for more than half of the total value of goods sold through the marketplace, according to Amazon's blog post. Amazon gets subscription fees from the third-party vendors and takes a commission on their sales.

Amazon offers its business marketplace in eight countries, including the United States, Germany, and Japan. Earlier this year, the company opened it to customers in France, Spain, and Italy.

Although little attention is devoted to outside of industry publications, the business-to-business e-commerce market worldwide is huge, with some $7 trillion in sales last year, according to Sebastian, citing figures from Shopify. That's more than three times as big as the consumer e-commerce market, which tallied about $2.3 trillion in 2017 sales.

With its big investments in recent years in warehouses and delivery services, Amazon is poised to become a major player in business-to-business sales, Sebastian said. Already, Amazon Business is used by 55 of Fortune's top 100 US businesses, and 40% of the local governments in the 100 most populous US cities use the service, Amazon said. It's also used by 80% of the top 100 US educational institutions in terms of enrollment, hosts some 150,000 sellers in the US, and serves "millions" of business customers worldwide, according to the company.

"Amazon has indicated in the past that over the very long-term, [Amazon Business] should be larger than its consumer business," Sebastian said.

In his note, Sebastian reiterated his "outperform" rating on Amazon's stock and his $2,100 price target. Amazon's shares closed regular trading Tuesday up $48.14, or 2.5%, to $1,987.15.