YouTube has terminated the popular FamilyOFive channel, in which couple Michael and Heather Martin posted "prank" videos featuring their children, over child abuse concerns.

Michael Martin started vlogging on the channel DaddyOFive, where he and his wife Heather orchestrated "pranks" on their five children. The Martins drew criticism as many viewed the "pranks" as child abuse.

In one video, Michael prompted one of the children to slap his sister, and another showed him pushing his young son Cody into a bookcase.

The Martins have maintained in the past that the videos are in part staged, and the children are in on the joke. Nevertheless in September, following outcry about a video where Michael and Heather squirted invisible ink on Cody's carpet and then screamed obscenities at him, the pair were sentenced to five years probation for child neglect and lost custody of their two youngest children, Emma and Cody.

Following the conviction, the couple deleted all the videos on the DaddyOFive account — save one which stated that the pranks were fakes — and moved from Maryland to West Virginia where they recommenced vlogging from an account called FamilyOFive. The new account racked up 176 million views, according to the Guardian.

On Wednesday, YouTube shut down the FamilyOFive account, as well as an affiliated gaming channel operated by Michael. A YouTube spokesman said "content that endangers children is unacceptable to us."

"We have worked extensively alongside experts in child safety to make sure we have strict policies and are aggressively enforcing them," he told Business Insider. "Given this channel owner's previous strikes for violating our guidelines prohibiting child endangerment, we're removing all of his channels under our terms of service."

The Martins told local news station WUSA9 in a written statement they have "worked very hard to reestablish and heal ourselves over the last 18 months" and intend to continue producing videos "within the strict boundaries we have set for ourselves."

After YouTube banned the Martins, their children Jake, Ryan and Alex uploaded a video to a channel called Team DO5 Fans entitled "Goodbye Youtube," in which they say that the pranks are harmless and planned.

WhatsApp is dramatically limiting the ability for people to forward messages after the Indian government blamed fake news going viral via messages for a recent spate of mob violence.

The change means it'll be much harder for people to forward messages — including fake news — to lots of contacts at once. Now users around the world will only be able to forward messages to 20 people at once.

In India, where viral fake news on WhatsApp has been blamed for increased mob lynchings, people will only be able to forward messages to five people at once. The previous forwarding limit was 250.

WhatsApp explained the changes in a blog post on Thursday. The company said: "We believe that these changes — which we'll continue to evaluate — will help keep WhatsApp the way it was designed to be: A private messaging app."

The company will also end the "quick forward" function in India, which allowed users to quickly forward on videos and photos.

The use of WhatsApp to spread fake news is an extremely serious issue in India. Recently, 30 people were arrested after a 2,000-person mob became incensed by WhatsApp rumours of a child kidnapping and lynched a man.

The Indian government threatened to take legal action against WhatsApp after this and a string of other lynchings. There have reportedly been at least 20 lynchings in the past two months caused by child abduction allegations, according to The Guardian. There have been similar issues in Sri Lanka and Myanmar.

WhatsApp's own privacy functionality, end-to-end encryption, means the company can't actually track who is spreading fake news or how. That suggests there won't be a full crackdown any time soon.

And WhatsApp's parent company, Facebook, is reluctant to police speech on any of its platforms. In a recent interview with Recode, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company wouldn't theoretically ban Holocaust deniers because they weren't "intentionally" getting it wrong and because people deserved a voice.

Facebook is, however, going to start pulling down fake news if it incites violence. The strategy was outlined this week and will involve Facebook working with outside organisations to determine if false information is potentially dangerous. It will initially be rolled out in Sri Lanka and Myanmar.

Topping out at 1,296 feet this week, 30 Hudson Yards is the second tallest skyscraper in New York City.

The tower is part of a new $25 billion neighborhood by the same name. Hudson Yards is the most expensive real-estate development in American history. Located between 30th and 34th street on Manhattan's Far West Side, it features a mix of office space, expensive condo buildings, retail, and outdoor public space.

Big tech companies and financial firms, including Amazon, JPMorgan, and BlackRock, have moved or plan to move to Hudson Yards. These moves point to a larger corporate migration trend from Midtown to the lower end of the island. Much of the city's Fortune 500 is now relocating below 42nd Street, an area with a growing tech scene.

Hudson Yards, which will span 28 acres by 2024, is also part of a larger luxury development boom that has accelerated in Manhattan over the past several decades. The island's Far West Side was once home to warehouses, tenements, and rail yards. Today, it features bars with $14 cocktails, multi-million-dollar apartments that overlook an lush elevated park, boutiques, and restaurants founded by celebrity chefs like David Chang, José Andrés, and Thomas Keller.

The High Line near Manhattan's Hudson Yards. Shutterstock/Marco Rubino

Over the next three years, Amazon is hiring 2,000 more employees for its new 360,000-square-foot office at 5 Manhattan West in Hudson Yards. To attract the online retail giant, New York state provided $20 million in performance-based taxed credits through Empire State Development's Excelsior Jobs Program. New York City is also a finalist for Amazon's $5 billion second headquarters, dubbed HQ2, with Hudson Yards listed as one of four potential sites across three boroughs.

In December, BlackRock, a financial company that manages $5 trillion in assets, struck a deal with Hudson Yards developer Related Companies to headquarter there for at least 20 years, too. As The New York Times reported, BlackRock will move to 15 floors at 50 Hudson Yards in 2022, pledging to keep 2,672 jobs in Manhattan and create another 700. As it did with Amazon, the state has awarded the company special tax credits, which could be worth up to $25 million.

Inside BlackRock's headquarters at Hudson Yards, New York City. Hollis Johnson/Business Insider Many corporations, including JPMorgan, Google Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs, and Coach, have already made the move to Hudson Yards.

For JPMorgan, the new headquarters is ground zero for growing tech ambitions. The firm recently told Business Insider it has a $10.8 billion tech budget and 50,000 technologists on its payroll. Many employees moved to the Hudson Yards office this year.

Companies including TimeWarner, CNN, Wells Fargo, HBO, and the global investment firm KKR will settle into the neighborhood's tallest tower, 30 Hudson Yards, following its completion in 2019.

Three week ago, employees at ad tech firm LiveRamp officially learned that they would be parting ways with more than 2,000 colleagues they worked alongside under the umbrella of parent company Acxiom.

Acxiom had announced the sale of its marketing solutions business to Interpublic Group for $2.3 billion, and LiveRamp was not part of the deal.

That's left a cloud of uncertainty hanging over LiveRamp, which makes technology to help brands reach consumers with targetted online ads.

Inside LiveRamp's San Francisco offices, a source tells Business Insider, employees are anxious but optimistic as they await direction from management on what the next months and years hold. Overall, there is a sense that whatever change happens, it will be for the best at the company, which has maintained its startup ethos despite being owned by the Little Rock, Arkansas Acxiom corporation since 2014.

Outside the company, speculation is rife about the fate of the LiveRamp business, which could be worth billions if a larger tech company decides to buy it from Acxiom.

While Acxiom maintains a market cap around $3 billion on the public markets, bankers and insiders alike believe that LiveRamp could be valued even higher once it's looked at as a standalone company. One insider floated $4 billion as a reasonable purchase price for LiveRamp, and sources told AdAge that they see the business going for $2.5 billion to $3 billion.

But the sale of LiveRamp is no sure thing. Management could try to run LiveRamp as an independent public company and capitalize on its growing valuation to make big impact investments, including some acquisitions and strategic partnerships of its own.

Here's what industry insiders think could happen to the company.

Salesforce, Oracle and Adobe could all take a look

LiveRamp is a data onboarding platform, or middleware company, which moves data from across multiple websites and sources. It's used by marketers to connect vasts amounts of customer data to individual customer profiles.

It's a tool for marketers to understand their customers better, but LiveRamp itself doesn't actually own any of the data. Instead, it runs the pipes that move marketing data around the internet.

Some think Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen could go after LiveRamp. Rick Wilking/Reuters The company hasn't stated publicly whether it's selling itself. But sources told Business Insider's Mike Shields in May that it's shopping LiveRamp around.

Though LiveRamp is marketing tech, insiders believe that its new home will likely be an enterprise tech company, if not a private equity firm.

Insiders said it could attract the offers from companies like Oracle, Salesforce, Adobe or SAP, which have competing marketing platforms, or one looking to grow in that space like IBM.

"Most companies don't have any idea how good the LiveRamp business is because Acxiom doesn't really describe it in anyway that is comprehensible," said one source, who believed that Acxiom chose to sell its marketing solutions business separate from the whole as a way to maximize LiveRamp's value in a future sale.

Adding to LiveRamp's fire is that fact that it's a busy year for M&A both inside and outside of marketing tech.

Salesforce, for instance, acquired another middleware company MuleSoft for $6.5 billion in March — a 36% premium on the company's stock price at the time. And AT&T reportedly paid $1.6 billion for the ad tech company AppNexus in June.

"I wouldn't be surprised to see an M&A food fight erupting in this space," said Paul Inouye, a partner at Union Square Advisors. "I think the back half of this year in the space is going to be active."

LiveRamp could thrive on its own

Acxiom, which has a market cap around $3 billion, got just 23% of its revenues from LiveRamp in 2018. But some think that LiveRamp's own market value could grow once investors start seeing it as a Software-as-a-Service company along the lines of Salesforce or Workday.

"I've seen this before in other businesses where you just get two very different types of businesses," added Inouye, who said that Acxiom reminds him of previous iterations of Hewlett-Packard, as well as eBay and PayPal when they were under the same roof.

Acxiom CEO Scott Howe could continue to run LiveRamp as an independent company. John Lamparski/Stringer

"I think what happens if you have that as your financial profile, your stock holder constituency is bifurcated. It makes it hard to operate because you have two different investor bases."

This is because SaaS companies typically trade based on a high revenue multiple, where as non-SaaS companies often trade based on EBITDA — earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.

The EBITDA model favors companies with low growth but high margins. IPG bought Acxiom's marketing assets for $2.3 billion, which William Blair analyst Adam Klauber pointed out suggests an EBITDA multiple of around 13x.

On the other hand, the median public SaaS company was valued 9.2 times its 2018 revenue, according to the Bessember Venture Partners Cloud Index. As Menlo Venture principal Steve Sloane noted in January, this tends to value smaller companies higher based off of their growth potential.

LiveRamp's business brought in $211 million in revenue in fiscal 2018, which was up 43% from the year before. So if it fell in line with the median valuation, LiveRamp would be worth $1.94 billion — more than half of the Acxiom's overall market cap. But since LiveRamp now has $2.3 billion in cash from the sale of Acxiom's assets, the company, Klauber said, should trade in the $40 to $45 per share range — which gives LiveRamp a maximum valuation of $3.7 billion.

Once LiveRamp is officially on its own, it could see its stock move quickly. Across the board, public SaaS companies have performed better than the rest of the market. The BVP Cloud Index is up 41.2% since the start of 2018, where as the tech-heavy Nasdaq is up just 11.4% and the more generalist S&P 500 is up just 3.8%.

"Assuming this deal is completed, Live Ramp should be a stand-alone entity. Its characteristics should make a very attractive stock," Klauber wrote on July 2. "The unique nature of the asset suggests that this will be a compelling stock over the longer term."

Are you an insider with information on what's coming next for LiveRamp? We want to hear more. Contact Becky Peterson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

25 men were arrested in India on Sunday, after a 2,000-person mob killed a 27-year-old man over baseless rumors that he was a child kidnapper.

The deadly incident was the latest in a flood of deadly lynchings across the country sparked by hoaxes on social media — and now the Indian government is threatening WhatsApp with legal action over them.

AFP reports that the Indian government has now publicly warned that it may take action against WhatsApp over the issue, with the information technology ministry issuing a harshly-worded statement on Thursday.

"Rampant circulation of irresponsible messages in large volumes on their platform have not been addressed adequately by WhatsApp," says the statement. "When rumours and fake news get propagated by mischief-mongers, the medium used for such propagation cannot evade responsibility and accountability."

"If (WhatsApp) remain mute spectators they are liable to be treated as abettors and thereafter face consequent legal action."

The Facebook-owned messaging app has come under intense scrutiny in recent months over hoaxes and disinformation circulating on its platform, leading to sometimes deadly mob violence. There have reportedly been at least 20 lynchings in the last two months caused by child abduction allegations, according to The Guardian.

WhatsApp's messages are end-to-end encrypted for security, meaning the company cannot monitor users' messages for misinformation or deliberate hoaxes the way Facebook can on its Messenger app. The company is taking some steps to try and tackle the issue, including flagging messages that have been forwarded, to make it clear that the sender isn't the original author of the post. It has also taken out full-page newspaper ads to warn about these hoaxes.

"Fortnite: Battle Royale," the free video game mode that took the world by storm last Fall, is a billion dollar business. That's according to a new report by SuperData, which estimates that the game has generated more than $1 billion in revenue across all platforms.

For some perspective, this means that Fortnite has now made more money than several of last year's highest worldwide-grossing blockbuster films, including "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle," Marvel Studios' "Spider-Man: Homecoming," and "Wonder Woman;" and more than double the gross worldwide earnings of the latest Star Wars flick, "Solo."

The report points out that the revenue comes entirely from in-game purchases, which — in Fortnite's case — offer no competitive advantage to the game. In the game, an entirely optional $10 Battle Pass allows players to earn and collect in-game currency called V-bucks, which they can spend on costumes, accessories and dance moves for their playable character. But if you don't want to play the game enough to unlock these perks, you can also purchase more V-bucks with real bucks, at a rate of 1,000 V-bucks for $9.99.

The most expensive character outfits — called "skins" in the gaming world — go for 2,000 V-bucks, or $20.

Fortnite was not the first game to bring the battle royale genre the to the masses. Games like DayZ, H1Z1, and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds popularized the "Hunger Games"-style formula, in which a hundred players are dropped onto a shrinking play area, and must scavenge for weapons and supplies in an effort to be the last man standing.

At launch, the game was available for PC and PlayStation 4. Today, it can be played for free on PCs, any gaming console, and on mobile iOS devices.

Fortnite: Battle Royale was first introduced as a free-to-play, early access mode of the original "Fortnite" title, a $60 zombie survival game that creators at Epic Games had been developing for more than five years.

The "Battle Royale" mode has now become vastly more popular than the original game — so much so that it is widely referred to with the full game's shorter title — thanks in large part to attention from celebrities and a large group of prominent video game streamers, like Tyler "Ninja" Blevins, who play the game on live streaming platforms like Twitch or YouTube Gaming for millions of fans to watch.

Fortnite has, in turn, helped Blevins, a former professional esports athlete, become a celebrity in his own right, complete with multi-million-dollar sponsorships, official merchandise, and an invitation to the 2018 ESPY Awards.

Since Fortnite has skyrocketed the battle royale genre to worldwide popularity, several other video game series have sought to emulate their success, and they're right to do so. SuperData predicts that games which feature a battle royale mode will earn 12 percent of all gaming revenue in 2018. Most notably, the upcoming installment of "Call of Duty: Black Ops" will feature the franchise's first take on battle royale.

The data shows that Fortnite saw its largest spike in players early this year, and at the time, many speculated that the free game was simply experiencing a fleeting moment of hype that would quickly dissipate.

Today, ten months after its launch in 2017, Fortnite is still the most-streamed and most-watched game on Twitch, an this impressive benchmark has placed the game among the most popular video games of all time, and signals that Fortnite is going to continue to be very profitable for a very long time.

Wall Street analyst Mark Mahaney, managing director at RBC Capital Markets, is widely known as one of the most accurate stock pickers on the Street.

He recently spoke at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado, on the surprising methods he's developed over his 20-year career for spotting winners and losers on the stock market.

He's the first to admit that he hasn't gotten every single call right. His misses, although rare, clearly burn in his memory.

His most major misfires, in his own words: "I put a sell on Amazon in 2003 right before it began one of its major inflection points. I've had a buy selectively on Snapchat since its IPO, and I did put a buy on Blue Apron at its IPO," he admitted on stage during his talk, to an appreciative audience.

He said that one key tenet of getting rich on tech stocks is that it's not for short term thinkers looking to make a few quick bucks.

He also warned that, no matter how solid tech companies look at the time they go public, "there will be blood." They may flourish as startups, and land big checks from a savvy private equity investors, but they "can still blow up" after they go public, he said. "It comes with the territory."

So Mahaney's top advice was to "focus on fundamentals" while thinking long term. Does the company have a real shot at growing its customer base for many more years to come? If it operates in a huge market, like global advertising (Google), global retail (Amazon) or entertainment (Netflix), the answer is yes. As big as those companies are, they have still only scratched the surface of the global spending in their industries.

He also offered one surprising tips on a good time to pounce on a tech stock: "look for the lucky lexicons." That means to listen for how people talk about companies.

"When companies become verbs, nouns, when they become part of the popular vernacular, that's usually a pretty good time to invest in the stock," he said.

For instance, it was a good time to invest in Google when people started saying they were going to "Google"for something instead of search for it, "tweet" something instead of share on social media, it or "Netflix and chill" instead of — well, whatever their evening plans entailed.

When that happens to a company, "their need to advertise has dramatically shrunk because they are already part of the vernacular" and those companies are "usually a safer investment."

As for spotting losers, he said the telltale sign is a sharp decline in growth. This means "there's something going wrong," he said, like maybe the company has maxed out its market and can't think of new ways to expand. Tons of turnover in the CEO spot is also a "disaster" for investors.

The whole talk is excellent and punctuated with humor. Take a look.

Microsoft posted $110 billion in revenue in its 2018 fiscal year, the company announced on Wednesday. That's the first time Microsoft has passed $100 billion in annual revenue, ever.

Buried in the earnings report is another first: Microsoft's gaming business generated just over $10 billion in annual revenue. The company says this is the first time that its gaming business has ever crossed that threshold.

In the final quarter of its fiscal year, Microsoft's overall gaming business grew 39% from the same period in 2017 "driven by higher revenue from Xbox software and services," the company said in a press release.

To that point, Xbox software and services alone are up 36% over the same period, "mainly from a third-party title," said Microsoft CFO Amy Hood on a conference call to discuss its earnings report. While Hood didn't specify which particular game drove such material growth, the most likely suspect is "Fortnite," the international phenomenon.

That doesn't tell the full story, though. Over the last year, Microsoft has renewed its push to take its gaming business beyond selling hardware and software, and moving into services. At the same time, it promoted Xbox boss Phil Spencer to the newly-created role of Executive VP of Gaming, to give him more room for this push.

The clearest example of this is Xbox Game Pass, a $10/month service that gives unlimited access to hundreds of Xbox One games. Game Pass launched in June 2017, and Microsoft has continued to push it — even committing to bringing first-party blockbusters like the upcoming "Forza Horizon 4" to the service on the day they hit store shelves.

Another relative newcomer is Mixer, Microsoft's answer to the massive success of Amazon's Twitch. While Mixer isn't nearly as popular among video game streamers as its rivals, it's won a loyal community. Microsoft has indicated that Mixer is a major push, as it works to reach gamers on iPhone and Android.

To that end, Microsoft continues its investment on Xbox Live, its online gaming service. It had 57 million active users during the quarter, Microsoft reported. That's up from the 53 million it had in the same period of 2017, but a little bit down from the 59 million it reported in the previous quarter. It's free to join Xbox Live, but there's a $60/year Xbox Live Gold plan with premium features — notably, the ability to play online multiplayer games.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella highlighted the combination of Game Pass, Mixer, and Xbox Live as "driving record levels of growth and engagement." In other words, as much as the Xbox business is still going strong, it's these less-traditional focus areas where Microsoft is pinning its hopes. And with a $10 billion year for the first time ever, you can only expect Microsoft to dig in.

Finally, to put this in context: Microsoft no longer releases Xbox One sales figures, but it's generally accepted to be second place to the Sony PlayStation 4 by a country mile. While Microsoft just launched a new Xbox One X console last year, and says that it's already working on new hardware, it's clear that the company is hedging its bets.

Alphabet Inc, Google's parent company, must become more transparent about the company's financial performance if investors are to have any chance at accurately valuing the company, according to one Wall Street analyst.

Against a backdrop of mostly positive expectations for Google heading into Monday's quarterly earnings report, Ben Schachter senior analyst at Macquarie Research, stood out for taking a much more cautious approach to the company's shares.

"We are increasingly frustrated with the lack of visibility into GOOG's core revenue drivers, and valuation is starting to become an issue," Schachter wrote in his report. "However, with revenues growing (at 20 percent year from last year) , we don't think Google is wildly expensive, but see upside as limited."

Schachter has a neutral rating on Alphabet's shares.

Getty / Chip Somodevilla

A lack of transparency about Google's financial performance has long been a complaint on Wall Street, and Schachter argues reporting is less clear than ever.

He wrote: "We are approaching a point where we, and we believe The Street collectively, are not understanding the size of search vs YouTube vs programmatic (advertising), which may lead to increasing volatility."

And that wasn't his only problem. In his report, the analyst called attention to the excitement on Wall Street over the potential growth of some of Google's side businesses. This presumably includes Waymo, Alphabet's autonomous car operation, which has taken an early lead in the nascent self-driving car market.

Google has invested heavily in businesses that managers hope will one day be on par with search advertising, the company's bread-and-butter business. Wall Street too is eager for Google to diversify, a means to ensure the company can better weather any downturns in advertising as well as remain a growth story among investors. But Schachter pointed out that in terms of revenue, most of these bets have yet to pay off.

"Advertising today still represents 86% of revenues," the analyst wrote. "In our view, while there have been innumerable notes, articles, and discussions posted about all the fascinating technologies that Google is pursuing the single most important driver of the stock over the past five years is related to the number of ads it shows in its mobile search results."

Most financial analysts say they believe that Wednesday's big news, the $5 billion fine imposed on Google by the European Union, represents little to no threat to the overall health of Google's business in the short- and medium- term.

Beyond that timeframe, there are some concerns that some of the restrictions imposed on Google by the EU could benefit some of Google's competitors. The EU's competition watchdog demands that Google end or alter several trade practices.

European regulators claim Google forced manufacturers to pre-install its browser and search apps on their mobile devices, and also paid manufacturers to exclusively preinstall Google search. According to the EU, this stifled competition. Google also allegedly broke the law by preventing device makers from running alternative versions of Android — known as forks — that would enable owners to run derivative software, such as Amazon's Fire OS.

Many on Wall Street were unimpressed with the allegations or the fine.

"We view the European Commission's ruling against Google as a bit misguided, but likely a relatively minor inconvenience in the short and medium terms," wrote Colin Sebastian, senior research analyst for Baird Equity Research. "Longer term, we see modest (but not unexpected) added risk from requirements to support forked versions of Android, and secondly, from the direct and/or indirect benefits of this ruling for Apple and Amazon."

As for the other growth areas in Google's business, such as advertising, cloud enterprise and retail, they appear to be running smoothly, according to analysts.

John Blackledge at Cowen Equity Research wrote Wednesday that his firm spoke to a digital advertising agency that spends $1 billion in US digital advertising "across paid search and paid social channels."

That ad agency told Cowen that spending on Google search was up between 15% to 20% due in part to strong demand for mobile, and the growing number of ad impressions.

Blackledge wrote that according to its ad agency source, "mobile continues to drive Google Search spend."

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong Anthony Harvey / Stringer

Coinbase is best known for being one of the largest venues for mom-and-pop investors in the US to buy cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum.

But the San Francisco-based firm also has a band of ex-Wall Street executives working on addressing the biggest pain point in the crypto market: the lack of a full scale prime-broker.

On Wall Street, middlemen called brokers sit between institutional investors, like a hedge fund or money manager, and exchanges and other trading venues. Such operations are hard to come by in the crypto world because the barriers to entry are high.

Coinbase, however, is looking to overcome these barriers. It launched earlier this year a prime broker business, Coinbase Prime, joining a family of businesses spanning asset management, venture capital investing, and retail trading. 

As part of the business, Coinbase is offering some of the services of a traditional prime broker, including the onboarding of large institutional clients and custody, which had previously been announced by the firm. What's new, however, is that Coinbase is preparing to offer margin finance as early as the end of the year, people familiar with the matter said. 

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong Anthony Harvey / Stringer

That would allow institutional investors to borrow to trade, which can help magnify returns, or leverage a short position, according to the people.

In the future, it is possible that Coinbase's broker business could help clients find the best venue to make a trade, even if that means sending it to a rival trading outfit, a service known as best execution. 

"Coinbase is pursuing a lot of different initiatives that make sense and take it closer to or are more similar to traditional finance: custody, financing, lending, security tokens, and the institutional portal," said Greenwich Associates' consultant Richard Johnson. "They have the resources to fund them and will surely have some successes."

Already, the firm has onboarded a $20 billion hedge fund through its prime business, the people said, declining to specify which fund. The team is working on getting other large hedge funds onto its trading platform. 

At the same time, the firm is actively building out its teams in New York, Chicago, and London. Notably, it hired Christine Sandler from the New York Stock Exchange as cohead of institutional sales, as well as Hunter Merghart from Barclays as a sales trader. 

Prime brokers arose in the equities markets in the early 1990s, about the same time the hedge fund industry started to take off. According to the banking research firm Coalition, the 12 largest banks collectively brought in $4.9 billion from their prime-broker units in the first quarter of 2018, the highest level in three years.

Colleen Sullivan, the head of the crypto venture firm CMT Digital, said the lack of a end-to-end prime broker was among the bigger issues holding back large Wall Street firms from entering the crypto space.

Having to self-finance at each exchange opens the firm to above-average risk on Wall Street. She described the lack of prime services in crypto as CMT Digital's "biggest pain point."

"Without a prime broker, trading firms are directly subject to events that an exchange may suffer like hacks, regulatory issues, operational issues, technology issues (and many more) — all of which may lead to loss of the trading firm's cash and coin," she said.

Coinbase's decision to enter into the broker business is a bit ironic. Bitcoin, the largest digital currency on the market, was founded in the aftermath of the financial crisis as an alternative peer-to-peer financial system to Wall Street that would render middlemen useless. Coinbase's entrance into the institutional broker business also raises red-flags to some market observers. 

"There are many potential conflicts of interest in such a vertically integrated model," David Weisberger, a market structure specialist and CEO of CoinRoutes, said. 

The SEC, according to Weisberger, has been keen on keeping strict barriers between different Wall Street businesses because of the various conflicts that could arise. Specifically, Weisberger said he was concerned about confidential exchange info — who is trading and what funds are sitting on their accounts — leaking over to the broker side, which could be used to provide color to trading partners.

Institutional exchanges have historically taken steps to address potential conflict of interest. 

NYSE Group sold Wave Securities, a brokerage unit, which it acquired when it bought Arca in 2005, after the SEC expressed concerns about conflicts. 

There are parallels between the two situations, insiders say, although it may take some time to play out since the crypto market is so nascent. 

"But right now, there's so many mature players, it is probably a good thing for Coinbase to do this because it is filling a much bigger gap," said Kyle Tuskey, a former Wave technologist, and current COO of Deep Systems, a financial technology firm. 

Since Coinbase is not a registered securities exchange, it isn't clear whether the SEC would have the authority to step in and create firewalls or flat out prohibit Coinbase from operating such a business. 

A representative for the SEC could not be reached for comment about Coinbase's ambitions. A spokesman for Coinbase also could not be reached for comment. 

Still, Robert Hockett, a professor of law at Cornell University, said "it seems likely the SEC will take interest in Coinbase's intention to offer prime brokerage services."

"This raises conflict concerns, given Coinbase's also running a coin exchange, reminiscent of those that the Commission has found when securities firms have attempted to combine these two roles."

Amazon's servers couldn't handle the flood of traffic from shoppers during Prime Day — and the company cut off all international traffic and launched a backup landing page in an effort to fix the problem, according to internal documents obtained by CNBC.

Amazon declined to comment to CNBC and did not immediately respond to request for comment from Business Insider.

At exactly at 12 p.m. PDT on Monday, right Amazon's annual doorbuster sales event began, the company's website was riddled with glitches and outages. A source told CNBC that the scene inside Amazon was "chaotic" and about 300 people got on an emergency conference call to try and deal with the issues.

According to outside experts who reviewed the documents for CNBC, Amazon's auto-scaling technology may have broken down under the burden, which would have limited the number of servers available to respond to the boom in traffic. Auto-scaling automatically increases or decreases cloud server capacity based on changes in traffic.

During the first minutes the site was experiencing glitches, Amazon created a "scaled-back" front page to relieve pressure on servers, CNBC reported. At the time, users who clicked on buttons on Amazon's main landing page weren't taken anywhere. The company also cut off all international traffic in an effort to reduce server load.

The reduced server capacity allegedly started to effect another tool called Sable, which coordinates several other internal infrastructure services at Amazon. At about 1pm PDT, says the report, Sable sounded a "red" emergency alert, which could have been related to problems at other parts of the site, including the Alexa voice service and Prime Video.

At the time, the company acknowledged the technical hiccups in a short statement, which said "some customers are having difficulty shopping, and we're working to resolve this issue quickly."

But despite the embarrassing glitches, Amazon reported that Prime Day saw a record number of sales, becoming the biggest shopping day in the company's history.

Read the full CNBC report here>>

CHICAGO — McDonald's only began delivering fast food in the United States less than two years ago. But, those two years have been explosive.

On Thursday, McDonald's celebrated "Global McDelivery Day," a holiday of sorts that the chain created last year, the first July that the fast-food giant was offering delivery in any major capacity. McDonald's now offers delivery through a partnership with UberEats at 12,000 locations in 60 markets, including 5,000 restaurants in the US.

"I think we're just getting started," Lucy Brady, the McDonald's senior vice president who has overseen delivery at the chain, told Business Insider.

"Everybody who tries it loves it," Brady said. "There's always a little bit of, 'Well will the fries taste good? Will they show up hot?' ... If [they] have a great experience, we're finding, customers repeat over and over."

McDonald's fries are a delivery best seller — but also a challenge. Hollis Johnson

McDonald's launched delivery in the US as a test at just 200 restaurants in Florida in early 2017. To go from 200 locations to 5,000 in under two years is an impressive feat in its own right. More than that, it represents a new strategy for McDonald's — one that prioritizes "progress over perfection," Brady says.

Over the past three years, under the leadership of CEO Steve Easterbrook, McDonald's has realigned its strategies to roll out more tests and adopt new tech in an effort to modernize the chain. The results have included self-order kiosks rolling out across the US, new menu items such as fresh-beef burgers, and a delivery deal with UberEats.

"Uber prides ourselves on moving quickly, but in so many different circumstances I feel like McDonald's moves faster," Liz Meyerdirk, the head of business development at UberEats, said.

"The pace of change is accelerating," Brady said. "The ability to anticipate and react quickly is really important."

Making things happen quickly can sometimes mean McDonald's hits bumps in the process and floors the metaphorical gas, fixing the problem while continuing to speed ahead. Making sure fries stay warm has been a top customer concern and a problem that has plagued McDonald's since it began testing delivery.

While cold, floppy fries can convince customers to never order McDonald's via UberEats again, the chain has pressed onward, trying to boost reliability as delivery simultaneously expands.

"It's never 100% solved," Brady said. "But, it's our best-selling item. Satisfaction is very high."

Hollis Johnson

If McDonald's can boost delivery orders, the chain can see some concrete benefits.

Delivery allows for more late-night orders, with roughly 60% of orders currently coming after 4 p.m. The average delivery check is 1.5 to two times as large as a typical customer's order. And, it helps make McDonald's seem more modern and relevant more generally.

"We're not just growing the delivery business," Brady said. "The rising tide is actually going to lift both the delivery business and the restaurant business. And, that creates a really vibrant brand and energy."

The biggest challenge right now, according to Brady, is simple awareness. Even in cities that offer McDonald's delivery, many customers simply aren't aware that it is available, something McDonald's is trying to combat with initatives like the McDelivery Day giveaways. And, there's still the question of how to speed ahead and expand delivery while ensuring reliability.

"How do you make sure you're moving fast enough and scaling fast enough, as a global business, but still taking into account all the various local nuances to really represent what the people want?" Meyerdirk said.

For these two global brands, part of the solution is tweaking delivery based on local needs as the service expands. In skyscraper-filled Hong Kong, for example, some UberEats delivery people have ditched their cars to make deliveries on foot.

As McDonald's hustles to stay ahead of the growing pack of chains trying to boost sales with delivery, not everything will be be perfect immediately. But, for the fast-food chain, forging ahead — both in delivery and in modernizing the company overall — is worth risking a cold fry or two along the way.

For two years, a team of 100 engineers at Google have secretly been working on the successor to Android, the operating system that powers three quarters of the world's smartphones, according to a Bloomberg report published Thursday.

Sources close to the project, which is called Fuchsia, told Bloomberg that engineers working on the software want to begin incorporating it into voice-controlled speakers and other "connected home devices" in the next three years, and on larger devices like laptops in the next five years.

The report also asserts that members of the team say that Fuchsia could someday power all of Google's devices, including Pixel smartphones and Google Home speakers, as well as third-party devices that currently rely on Android and or Chrome OS.

The existence of Google's Fuchsia software has been public for some time now, with details about the open-source software available online, but this is the first time we're hearing about its potential scope and future applications. Google acknowledged the existence of Fuchsia in 2017, when Android VP of engineering Dave Burke called it an "early-stage experimental project." You can see additional screenshots of a previous version of the open-source software here.

When asked to confirm these plans for the operating system Thursday, a Google spokesperson provided the following statement to Business Insider:

"Fuchsia is one of many experimental open source projects at Google. We're not providing additional details about the project at this time."

Google has been quietly posting code related to Fuchsia online since 2016, and according to Bloomberg's findings, the software will likely be designed to address the shortcomings of Android, focussing particularly on voice commands and frequent security updates.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai and founding member of the Android team, Hiroshi Lockheimer, have been reluctant to commit to future plans for Fuchsia, according to the report, given that a re-vamp of the most popular operating system in the world could have massive ramifications for Google's core business as an advertising platform and its hardware partners.

Read more about the project over at Bloomberg.

Mark Zuckerberg called Donald Trump soon after the 2016 US presidential election to congratulate him on his shock victory, according to a new report from BuzzFeed News— and also reportedly congratulated him on his "successful [advertising] campaign on Facebook.

The new report comes after Business Insider reported in May 2017 that Trump and Zuckerberg had spoken multiple times over the phone since the election, and sheds light on the subjects that the tech titan and then-president-elect discussed.

Mark Zuckerberg has made veiled criticisms of Trump, and has long championed political causes at odds with Trump's platform, like immigration reform. But the Trump campaign was also a major customer for Facebook's advertising business, spending $44 million in the run-up to the 2016 election.

According to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News, Facebook internally views the Trump campaign as an "innovator," and has gone on to use the campaign's techniques to refine its own advertising efforts.

While Zuckerberg and Trump have chatted behind the scenes, it's not clear if the pair have ever met face-to-face. In December 2016, Trump convened a meeting of high-profile tech executives including Apple's Tim Cook and Microsoft's Satya Nadella, but Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg went instead of Zuckerberg.

Reached for comment, a Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider: "We declined to comment on the speculation to Buzzfeed and have nothing else to add."

Conservative politicians have claimed, without proof, that Facebook has an anti-conservative bias — but this hasn't dulled Trump operatives' taste for Facebook advertising. According to a recent study publicized in The New York Times, Trump and his Political Action Committee are currently the single biggest political advertiser on Facebook, spending $274,000 on adverts since May.

Warner Bros. finally revealed how much its upcoming streaming service, DC Universe, will cost.

During San Diego Comic-Con on Thursday, the studio announced that the service will cost $74.99 annually for those who pre-order the service. For those who wait, they'll be able to sign up for a monthly plan that costs $7.99 a month, but they'll miss out on the first three months free that come with the pre-order.

You can pre-order the service now before the full service launches later this fall. To sign up, visit DCUniverse.com.

Numerous original programs based on DC Comics characters are currently in development for the service. The first will be the live-action "Titans" series, featuring the likes of Robin, Starfire, and Beast Boy. It debuts later this year, and the first, violent trailer was released on Thursday.

In 2019, live-action shows "Swamp Thing" and "Doom Patrol" will premiere, along with animated programs like adult comedy "Harley Quinn" and the third season of "Young Justice," rebranded as "Young Justice: Outsiders." "Young Justice" originally aired on Cartoon Network but was canceled in 2013.

In addition to original programs, the service will also offer other DC movies and shows, including the first two seasons of "Batman: The Animated Series," the entire 1970s "Wonder Woman" TV show starring Lynda Carter, "The Dark Knight," and all four of the original "Superman" movies starring Christopher Reeve.

But it wouldn't be a DC service without comics. The service will feature a library of thousands of digital DC comic books from a selection that spans decades — even the first appearances of Superman and Batman in the 1930s. Comics can be read on smartphones, tablets, or TV screens, and will be available to download for offline reading.

DC Universe will be available at launch on iOS, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, and the website.

Check out images from DC Universe shows below, as well as screenshots of the service:

Brenton Thwaites as Robin in "Titans" DC Universe/Warner Bros.

"Harley Quinn" DC Universe/Warner Bros.

"Young Justice: Outsiders" DC Universe/Warner Bros.

DC Universe/Warner Bros.

DC Universe/Warner Bros.

DC Universe/Warner Bros.

Marvel

Disney's Hollywood dominance will soon expand, and with it, Marvel's reign over the superhero genre.

Comcast announced that it was backing out of its bid for Fox assets on Thursday, leaving the door wide open for Disney to finally acquire the Fox film studio and other assets for $71.3 billion.

There are a lot of questions that arise from this merger, notably how it will affect the Hollywood and box-office landscapes. But it also means big things for the Disney-owned Marvel Cinematic Universe, which now has a chance to incorporate Fox-owned properties into the franchise.

Characters like the X-Men, Wolverine, Deadpool, and Fantastic Four will be at Marvel's disposal once the deal is finalized. Disney CEO Bob Iger has said that the MCU may try a "new franchise beyond 'Avengers'" in the future, and Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige called next year's "Avengers 4" a "conclusion."

On top of that, veteran actors of the franchise like Chris Evans, who plays Captain America, have teased that they are ready to retire after "Avengers 4." "Avengers: Infinity War" set up a reunion between the original Avengers in the sequel, and I've written about why that could mean some of those characters' last hurrah.

With all of that in mind, Disney's merger comes at a perfect time if the MCU is planning to head in a new direction after "Avengers 4," but it could also have huge ramifications for all of the characters involved.

Below are 11 heroes, villains, and events that could be introduced to the MCU after the Disney/Fox merger, and what it could mean for the franchise:

Microsoft reported earnings after the bell on Thursday. After initially moving not much at all, Microsoft stock jumped over 4% in after-hours trading. The jump occurred after Microsoft gave guidance for the next quarter on a conference call with investors. 

Here's what Microsoft reported:

Notably, this marks the end of Microsoft's 2018 fiscal year. The company reported $110.4 billion in revenue over the past 12 months, marking the first time it has passed the $100 billion mark.

For the quarter, Microsoft showed strong growth in all three of its major reporting areas — especially in cloud computing, where Wall Street most wants to see growth.

Productivity and Business Processes, the unit that includes Microsoft Office, was up 13% from the year-ago period, to $9.7 billion. Intelligent Cloud, which encompasses the Microsoft Azure cloud-computing platform and related technologies, was up 23%, to $9.6 billion. And More Personal Computing, which includes Windows, the Xbox, and the Surface hardware business, was up 17%, to $10.8 billion.

Notably, Azure — considered the leading rival to the dominant Amazon Web Services — saw revenue growth of 89% from the same period in 2017, though Microsoft doesn't disclose specific financials for the service.

Overall, Microsoft says its commercial cloud revenue, which includes cloud business software and services like Azure and Office 365, is up 53% year over year, to $6.9 billion.

The Windows business was up 7% from the year-ago period, drawn by a stronger demand for PCs preinstalled with the professional version of Windows 10.

Other standouts include revenue from LinkedIn, up 37% from the same time last year, and gaming revenue, up 39%, with Xbox software and services up 36%. The Surface business is up 25% from this time last year, something Microsoft credits to both a strong hardware lineup this year and a 2017 performance that set the bar lower.

Also of note is that Microsoft says its GAAP results reflect a net benefit of $104 million related to the new tax law, as well as a $306 million charge related to restructuring.

Get the latest Microsoft stock price here.