Kairos Society founder Ankur Jain. Sarah Jacobs

Perhaps you are looking to move to a new apartment. You find a great place, but you'll need to pay first month's rent plus a security deposit equal to at least one month's rent.

In big cities like New York, where rent prices are exorbitant to begin with, many millennial renters struggle to come up with the extra cash for a security deposit. Even for those who can afford it, it's frustrating to have thousands of dollars tied up in a landlord's hand until you move out.

Rhino, a company launched by venture-capital fund Kairos Ventures, is aiming to help eliminate those cumbersome housing costs for renters. Rhino allows renters to pay the company a monthly fee — typically between $10 and $20 — in lieu of a one-time security deposit paid to a landlord.

Upfront rental costs are a "huge financial burden for folks at a time where most people don't have that kind of savings available to them," Kairos Society founder Ankur Jain told Business Insider. "Our goal is to make cost of living cheaper whether you're a low income household or renting a luxury apartment."

Landlords, meanwhile, will receive double the protection through Kairos' partner insurance company. They will have more security by receiving money within 48 hours and not worrying about small claims suits.

Rhino's deposit-free program will be available in other US cities soon. Courtesy of Rhino

"By replacing traditional deposits with a small monthly fee, Rhino is able to cut down the cost of a new apartment significantly," Jain said. "That means more access to better apartments for more renters."

In November, Jain announced a fund to fix problems facing middle-class Americans, including child care and retirement planning, along with a $25 million commitment to help "make housing more affordable for everyday people." Tackling the obstacles associated with sky-high rent in urban centers is a priority.

Rhino's deposit-free program is currently available for 22,000 New York City apartments, where renters will also be able to get any existing security deposits returned to them. Jain told Business Insider the service will be available throughout "a significant portion" of the US within six months.

Rhino fits into a greater trend of deposit-free housing, which is as of now restricted to the luxury market, according to Jain.

Watch the video below to learn more about how Rhino works:

FILE PHOTO - A monitor shows various cryptocurrencies' exchange rates against Japanese Yen including NEM coin (middle in the top) at 'nem bar', where customers can pay with NEM coins, in Tokyo Thomson Reuters

If you know someone looking for a job in the crypto, tell them the exchanges are hiring en masse.

Exchanges - the gate keepers of the crypto world where buyers and sellers come together and tokens change hands -- struggled to shepherd a niche market into the mainstream during the crypto boom of 2017.

At the end of 2017 - when bitcoin was trading close to $20,000 - 24-hour trading volumes across the cryptocurrency market soared as high $70 billion. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of new users jumped on the bandwagon. This precipitated countless exchange outages and even forced a handful of exchanges to close their doors to new users.

Volumes have since come back down to Earth since the beginning of 2018. Still, at around $20 billion, they are still four times higher than they were in November of last year. But the relative calmness of the market has provided a chance for crypto exchanges to take a breath and ramp up hiring.

Coinbase, Kraken, and Circle, which recently announced its acquisition of crypto exchange Poloneix, are all looking to double their headcount in 2018. Many of those positions will be in the back office, working on building out systems to fend off the type of outages that were wide-spread in 2017. Bulking up customer service teams is another priority.

"We're effectively doubling the numbers in terms of headcount, from roughly 250 to 500," Dan Romero, VP and general manager at San Francisco-based Coinbase, told Business Insider.

The company has more than 50 job posts on LinkedIn, spanning positions from compliance to tech to customer services to human resources.

It's the same story over at Kraken, another San Francisco exchange. A person familiar with the company's operations said it is on the fast track to 1,000 employees and it's prepared to add 800 people to its staff in 2018.

Sean Neville, the cofounder of Circle, told Business Insider that the company, which has under 200 employees, is set to double its head count within the year.

"There is some work to do in addressing customer support requests and technical issues," Neville said.

There's no doubt that this will be a tough feat, especially considering how rare crypto and blockchain talent is.

"There is a significant shortage of people who have expertise and acumen in this space," said Mike Poutre, the chief executive of The Crypto Company, a crypto market structure firm. "A lot of them who are well-versed in these topics are pretty financially independent."

National Police Air Service

An incredible photograph taken from a police helicopter shows the moment a freezing cold weather system hit London with its worst snow and cold in years.

The image, taken on Tuesday afternoon, shows a huge cloud formation moving over the centre of the city, partly obscuring its skyline.

The cold air, which originated over Siberia but moved west due to unusually warm weather over the North Pole, has earned the nickname "The Beast from the East" in Britain.

Familiar buildings like The Shard, western Europe's tallest skyscraper, and other landmarks in London's main business area could just about be identified in the image.

National Police Air Service/Business Insider

It was posted to Twitter by the National Police Air Service, which operates a helicopter over London that helps with searches, reconnaissance and, on the odd occasion, taking amazing pictures.

The photograph was taken over Hampstead, a northerly area of London, and shows the view south towards the centre.

The officers in the helicopter were on their way to another task at the time, and did not take off specifically to take pictures of the weather.

They also recorded video of the snowy front moving through the city:

The photo encapsulated the gravity of the weirdly cold and snowy weather engulfing Britain, much of Europe, and especially London, where all the national newspapers are produced.

As a result, it produced the relatively rare spectacle of the same image being used on the front page of half of the national papers on the newsstand:

The Snapchat hotdog. Shona Ghosh/Business Insider

Good morning! Here is the tech news you need to know this Wednesday.

1. Amazon will spend a reported $1 billion to acquire smart doorbell startup Ring. Ring offers a video-enabled doorbell that beams footage of whoever's outside to the homeowner's phone.

2. Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth has disputed claims that Donald Trump's camp paid more for Facebook ads during the 2016 election campaign than Hillary Clinton's. Bosworth shared a chart showing Trump's cost-per-impression surged in the final weeks.

3. Snapchat downloads surged after its redesign, despite massive criticism over the changes. Snapchat's average growth in first-time installs was up 55% week on week, when comparing the week before and after the redesign.

4. Bill Gates said cryptocurrencies had "caused deaths in a fairly direct way" unlike almost any other technology. In a Reddit AMA, Gates noted cryptocurrencies were used to buy drugs, launder money, and fund terrorists.

5. Ex-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has shut down his new venture, a fitness app called Chorus. The idea was that a group of friends would sign up and declare their fitness goals to motivate each other, but the app struggled to keep users beyond a few weeks.

6. Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak said he had $70,000 in bitcoin stolen from him. A scammer paid him for the bitcoin via a credit card, but the card number turned out to be stolen.

7. Secretive data firm Palantir has been quietly using New Orleans as a testbed for its "predictive policing" technology, according to The Verge. The tool traced gang members' connections to other criminals.

8. Uber executive Frances Frei, who was hired to fix the company's culture, is leaving after less than a year. Now that ex-CEO Travis Kalanick is out, many of the company's cultural problems have seemingly been resolved.

9. Google said it's complied with about 43% of 2.4 million "right to be forgotten" takedown requests received over three years. Most requests come from individuals, but a growing number come from celebrities and politicians.

10. A pple has hired another big-name director to create an original series. M. Night Shyamalan has signed up for a 10-episode show.

Hollis Johnson/Business Insider

Since the Tesla Model 3 launched in July and started its uneasy path as a mass-market vehicle, Tesla watchers have been carefully scrutinizing the vehicle's quality.

Last April, Reuters reported that Tesla skipped the "soft tooling" phase, which is a pre-production process that helps automakers work out manufacturing problems before starting mass production.

The company took a big risk by skipping this stage before commencing deliveries, and it has paid off. Holdups have kept Model 3 production well below its expected levels, with fewer than 3,000 cars officially delivered.

CEO Elon Musk has called this "production hell" and reminded everybody that no Tesla vehicle has enjoyed a smooth rollout. And naturally, all over the internet, there have been deep dives into how well the Model 3 is bolted together.

Tesla let us borrow a Model 3 for a few hours, and we gave it a good once-over. While there were some glitches here and there, the so-called build quality of our top-of-the-line vehicle — a press car — was good.

But what, exactly, is build quality? And why does it matter?

For many years, it wasn't the forte of US automakers. American cars may have looked cool, but when Japanese and European vehicles began to show up in real numbers in the US in the 1970s and '80s, US manufacturing started to look sloppy by comparison.

These days, build quality of American cars and trucks is generally excellent.

Tesla has been an exception, but the company is still relatively young. Ford and General Motors are each more than 100 years old, while Tesla has been around for just 14 years.

Build quality is both general and specific. If you look at a Tesla vehicle, the overall impression is usually pretty good. They're beautifully designed, with a vibe that's classic and futuristic.

But if you focus, you may notice body panels that aren't consistently spaced, known as "panel gaps." Or misaligned door handles. Or interior plastic components that look really plasticky. Or upholstery that's crinkled. Or other various minor components that aren't up to snuff for a vehicle that can cost $100,000.

On our Model 3 tester, for example, I was bothered by some steering-wheel stitching that was too far toward the back of the wheel.

Build quality tends to improve over time as a carmaker gets better at building its vehicles and learns from customer feedback.

Interestingly, Tesla has been somewhat immune from build-quality criticism because owners think of its vehicles as rolling technology, completely different from gas-powered cars, regardless of how well those machines are made.

We're under no illusions about Tesla's build quality — it's better than it once was, but it could be improved.

A comparable German or Japanese car creates a superior impression, and for some buyers, that will matter. But Tesla sold 100,000 vehicles last year and has a tremendous level of customers satisfaction.

So while the auto industry has across the board learned to respect build quality, Tesla has proved that it isn't the only thing that matters.

Lithuania's fans wave flag and cheer on their team during their FIBA Basketball World Championship game against France in Izmir September 1, 2010.REUTERS/Sergio Perez

LONDON — Lithuania is betting that Brexit can help it become a global fintech hub, as the Eastern European country seeks to attract British companies setting up subsidiaries in the EU.

"I cannot deny that," Marius Jurgilas, a member of the board of the Bank of Lithuania, told Business Insider when asked if Lithuania saw Brexit as an opportunity.

"We are not saying that we will be attracting top firms from the fintech hub of the world, which is and always will be London, to the new booming financial sector in Lithuanian, no," Jurgilas said. "But there is a huge flow of firms — and we want to participate in that flow — who want to hedge the risk of Brexit."

"This is the state of affairs that everyone has to deal with and we're just part of the game," Jurgilas said. Lithuania's position in Europe. Google Maps

Britain's future relationship with the European Union remains up in the air and finance firms fear they could lose passporting rights, which allow them to sell services across the 27 member bloc. To hedge against this risk, many businesses are setting up licensed subsidiaries in other EU countries.

Lithuanian MEP Antanas Guoga told BI: "I think [Brexit] is a big opportunity because we're cost-wise a very competitive country, people are very diligent and hard-working, and, because of Brexit, a lot of companies are in a position to move out of the United Kingdom to make sure they're safe and secure."

Guoga helped to set up a Blockchain Centre in the country's capital Vilnius last year, dedicated to exploring applications of the new technology that banks are excited about. The centre launched in January with the support of PwC among others.

'One of the most exciting fintech hubs in Europe right now'

Lithuania is an unlikely contender to become Europe's next fintech hub.

Unlike Paris or Amsterdam, it does not have a strong history of financial services. Unlike Berlin, Vilnius does not have startup scene of any international renown. The entire country has a population of 2.8 million, around a third of London.

TransferGo's CEO and founder Daumantas Dvilinskas. TransferGo

But its pitch appears to be working. Invest Lithuania announced in January that 117 fintech companies are now operating in Lithuania, employing 2,000 people. It may not sound like a huge amount but the growth is impressive — 35 new businesses were registered in 2017.

Hot London-based banking startup Revolut and fellow UK startup TransferGo are among the fintech businesses to choose Lithuania. Revolut praised the country as "one of the most exciting fintech hubs in Europe right now" in a statement last year announcing they were applying for a banking license there.

"They recognise the opportunity of Brexit," TransferGo CEO Daumantas Dvilinskas told BI. Dvilinskas is originally from Lithuania but said he chose Vilnius for an EU office not just because of personal ties, but also because of its "innovative regulating body."

The Bank of Lithuania has a "business-friendly attitude," according to board member Jurgilas. The central bank has got the licensing process down to as little as three months, for example.

"We identified that the thing that is really tilting the scales in the decision-making process is time," Jurgilas said. "It's not about monetary cost or regulatory burden, it's about how much time do I have to invest to get a decision? Firms want certainty and quick decisions."

Other fintech-friendly initiatives include the central bank's regulatory "sandbox", where firms can try out innovative new business ideas with the regulators blessing, and a blockchain sandbox, dubbed LBChain, that will give companies a safe space to experiment with blockchain projects under the regulator's supervision.

Can Vilnius compete with Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam?

Lithuania is not alone in looking to attract fintech business off the back of Brexit. Many European capitals are trying to woo businesses, with Paris lobbying particularly hard. Why should firms choose Vilnius?

"Being in the eurozone gives us the same status of Frankfurt," Guoga said. "We've got a lot of hard-working people with knowledge of fintech who are not costing as much as they would in other cities because of the living costs. The country is very clean. There's a lot of different benefits and that's why there's only more and more people coming here."

Established players are also choosing Lithuania for development facilities, which helps create an ecosystem Guoga argued.

"I'm just in the blockchain centre here and I can see the building next to me is all filled by Barclays," he said. "Barclays has the biggest centre of development here in Vilnius. Further on I can see Nasdaq. A lot of the IT is all done from here.

"Having Barclays here, having Danske Bank, having Nasdaq here and having many many other startups and also big multinationals have cemented our place as a place for fintech development."

"I think we'll be on target to do a lot more [e-money licenses] this year. The momentum is definitely there. We should aim to issue 100 a year as soon as possible. The demand is very wide."

A self-driving Ford vehicle. Screenshot via YouTube

Ford has big plans for full autonomous vehicles. By 2021, the carmaker intends to launch a car that can drive itself and deliver goods — and have no steering wheels or other controls.

That ambitious objective took a leap forward on Tuesday when the company announced that after considering several US cities in which to test new services and businesses and develop autonomous technology, it had settled in Miami as the location for its pilot program.

"We've spent years researching and developing self-driving technology, studying changing customer behaviors, serving some of the largest fleets in the country with help from our dealers, and working with governments big and small," Sherif Marakby, the Ford vice-president overseeing autonomy and electrification, said in a Medium post.

"Now it's time to pull it all together head for the finish line!" he added. "So now, we're headed to Florida to test and prove out our business model. With the help of Miami-Dade County, we're taking our service directly to the streets of Miami and Miami Beach."

Why Miami?

The Miami area presents unique development opportunities.Wikimedia Commons

The Miami area was chosen, Marakby said, because it combines a dense urban environment with suburban spaces. Miami itself is the "the tenth most congested city in the world and the fifth most congested city in the United States," Markaby noted.

But the weather is also relatively predictable and, for the purposes of AV and EV testing, more benign than what one might find in Michigan or the Northeast. Companies diving into autonomy have favored environments in regulation- and rain-light Arizona, but as General Motors has learned with its Cruise self-driving unit and operations in San Francisco, a viable autonomous business will have to contend with urban density at some point.

"Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos A. Giménez is a champion of innovative technology and applying it to help improve life for residents of the county," Marakby wrote on Medium. "He's on the forefront of thinking about the future of transportation."

Ford is designing an all-new, fully autonomous vehicle that it will roll out in three years and that can be used, Marakby said on a conference call with reporters, to transport people in a robotaxi framework or deliver stuff. The company will rely on ArgoAI to shepherd the technology. Ford made a $1-billion investment in the startup last year.

The carmaker isn't waiting for that car to begin working on logistics and business models, however. In Miami, Ford will create a centralized self-driving hub.

"Situated close to downtown, it will be the base from which we'll develop our vehicle management processes and house our test fleet," Marakby wrote on Medium. "The vehicles will be washed and have their sensors cleaned here; routine maintenance will be conducted, including troubleshooting problems that arise and more."

Ford has partnered with Domino's. Ford

The pizzas are coming

Ford will also expand its partnerships with Domino's and delivery service Postmates in Miami.

"What we learn from this customer experience research will be applied to the design of our purpose-built self-driving vehicle that we plan to launch in 2021 to support the expansion of our service," Marakby wrote on Medium.

He also told reporters during a press call that Ford will look to add additional partners, including local Miami businesses.

Ford could be accused of putting the cart before the horse in Florida, as it will essentially be conducting a trial-and-error process for several years before it has a truly autonomous platform. GM has taken a different tack with Cruise, rapidly developing an all-electric self-driving vehicle and putting it on the street to amass real-world experience. At some juncture, GM will link Cruise with its ride-hailing and sharing service, Maven, and possibly make its autonomous fleet available to ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft.

But under CEO Jim Hackett, who took over last year when Mark Fields was ousted amid a lagging stock price, Ford has been taking a broader view of new businesses. In Miami, the goal is clearly to have coherent businesses and reliable partners signed up before injecting autonomous vehicles into the system.

"We have to map the city and map the area before we can run in autonomous mode," Marakby said. "But the business and technology will converge in future."

He also told reporters that by 2021, Ford will be adding thousands of vehicles per year to its self-driving fleet.

"Starting the business two or three years ahead of launch is perfect," he said.

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Companies like Apple are starting to take a more active role in their employees' healthcare.

That includes confronting the rising cost of healthcare, along with attempts to try and improve the quality of the care their employees receive.

One way to pull that off is by building healthcare clinics built solely for employees. Clinics located in or near company headquarters have traditionally been a benefit at certain companies, including banks, and of course hospitals.

Now, Apple's joining in.

Apple's clinics, called AC Wellness Networks, will be run independently from Apple but will be exclusively for its employees, CNBC first reported on Tuesday. Apple employs about 25,000 people in the Bay Area in California, according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal.

"AC Wellness Network believes that having trusting, accessible relationships with our patients, enabled by technology, promotes high-quality care and a unique patient experience," wrote on one of its job listings. AC Wellness is expected to launch in the spring, according to its website.

According to the clinic's website, Apple's hiring everything from exercise coaches to primary care doctors and blood-testing experts.

The goal of having healthcare facilities onsite or near where employees spend most of their day is that they might have better access to healthcare with fewer excuses not to go to the doctor's office for routine check-ups or when they're feeling under the weather. That way, you might be able to prevent more costlier visits down the line, which companies like Apple would be on the hook for covering.

The move, along with news that JPMorgan, Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway are forming a new independent nonprofit venture aimed at lowering healthcare costs for their employees, has people looking at employer-sponsored health plans in a new light.

The insurance companies are there in the middle to handle the logistics of getting the claim from one place to another, which means you might not realize your employer's footing the entire bill on the other end. Employers pay insurance companies for their services on a per member, per month basis. More than half of the non-elderly population is covered by an employer-sponsored plan, and almost 80% of large companies are self-insured.

"I tell people, JPMorgan Chase already buys a $1.5 billion of medical, and we self-insure," JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told Business Insider. It's why his company, along with Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway, two other massive self-insured employers, are looking for new options. "Think of this, we're already the insurance company, we're already making these decisions, and we simply want do a better job," Dimon said.

But, in order to make an impact that extends massive employers like Apple, JPMorgan, Amazon, and Berkshire Hathaway, it'll take new initiatives that don't just focus on cutting a few costs.

"It isn't difficult to shave a little bit off here," Warren Buffett said on Monday. "The question is whether we can come up with something better. I'm hopeful, but don't expect any miracles."

Because the companies cover so many people, they might have the negotiating power to make that happen, at least in one of a number of ways, like negotiating better prices or building out better plans of their own.

Screenshot taken from the Yakuza 6 teaser trailer Sega

Sega quickly pulled the highly anticipated "Yakuza 6: The Song of Life" demo from the PlayStation Store after discovering some players had inadvertently gained access to the full game using the demo.

This discovery came only hours after the demo was initially released for PlayStation 4.

The Japanese video game company tweeted, "We are as upset as you are, and had hoped to have this demo available for everyone today. We discovered that some were able to use the demo to unlock the full game."

In a follow-up tweet, Sega explained they don't yet know how players were able to access the full game via the demo.

At the time of publishing, Sega has not yet returned Business Insider's request for comment on the decision to take down the demo.

When the demo was initially released it required more than 36 GB of storage, to the surprise of many video game critics. Kotaku, an online entertainment publication, suggests that the demo was so large because it actually contained the entire game, but was supposed to restrict everything beyond the first few stages of the game.

Some players, who had downloaded what they thought was the free demo, simply continued playing through the rest of the game when the restrictions failed, according to Kotaku. It's still unclear how many people gained access to the full game, or whether they will be allowed to maintain the progress they achieved before Sega pulled the plug.

The action RPG was supposed to be released in full in April 17, and is expected to be one of Sega's biggest titles of the year.

Here's the official teaser trailer:

MixMax cofounders, left to right: Brad Vogel, Olof Mathé, and Chanpory Rith Mixmax

If Chanpory Rith learned one thing during his time at Google, it's that email isn't dead. Now, he's at the helm of Mixmax, a small, but profitable, company that's trying to prove it.

In 2011, Rith was leading the design the Gmail app for iOS. His team wanted to measure if people how often people were using Gmail. Unsurprisingly, they found college students didn't really use email much. But when they graduated and entered the workforce, their email use skyrocketed.

That gave him an idea: What if he could make using email at work easier? That idea eventually led to the creation in 2014 of Mixmax, a small company co-founded by Rith, that makes handy tools to improve Gmail — including the ability to track emails, schedule when emails are sent, make in-email polls, and schedule meetings with one click.

With Mixmax, users can schedule when emails are sent. Mixmax

And not only is Mixmax already profitable, with about 10,000 customers — earlier in February, it announced $10.4 million in new funding in a round led by personal investments from venture capitalists Jason Lemkin (of SaaStr Fund) and Carl Fritjofsson (of Creandum). All told, Mixmax has raised $13.4 million since its inception.

Prices range from $9 per month for individual users to $50 or more per month for businesses. Mixmax's customers are mostly small businesses: It says its products are especially popular with sales, customer support, and recruiting teams.

"People still use email," Olof Mathé, Mixmax's CEO and co-founder, told Business Insider. "And one of the biggest problems we've seen is communicating with people outside of your organization. It takes five or six emails to schedule a meeting."

Right now, the company employs 20 people. With the additional funding, Mixmax wants to expand to 50 employees.

Here's how a long commute put Rith — now a designer with Mixmax — on the path to starting his own, profitable, growing company.

Rith left Google in 2012, after about a year working as Gmail's iOS design lead. He had been pushing the company to build a features, like email tracking and scheduling, specifically for businesses — but was told that Gmail would continue focusing efforts on its broader audience, Rith told Business Insider.

Plus, he was commuting two hours in traffic from San Francisco to Google headquarters in Sunnyvale, California every day and it was beginning to take a toll.

"Although I really loved working at Google, the commute really got to me," Rith said. "And I wanted to work on something that gave me a lot for space for expressiveness, like I wanted customers to be able to express themselves much more richly, and Gmail at the time was still very text based."

That brought Rith to Inkling, a company that lets users make visually appealing e-textbooks. That's where Rith met Olof Mathé and Brad Vogel, with whom he would eventually go on to start Mixmax. Mixmax allows users to schedule meetings with one click. Mixmax

Rith and Mathé, a former Skype employee, are both immigrants and self-proclaimed "communication geeks." Growing up — Rith in Cambodia, and Mathe in Sweden — they became interested in making communication better, especially because both were bilingual and often had to translate for their families. Both see Mixmax as a key utility to make it easier for people to communicate with one another.

Rith and Mathé got along so well, they left Inkling with Vogel in 2014 to found Mixmax, using the idea Rith had while working at Google: Email for work, but better.

They experimented with making Mixmax a free product, but ultimately decided to "make a product so good, people will want to buy it," Mathé said. That was one of the most important decisions they made, putting them on the path to profitability — and it's their advice to other entrepreneurs.

"Always charge for the things you build," Rith said.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg AP Photo/Noah Berger

The media industry's worst fears about Facebook's huge algorithm tweak are coming true.

The women-focused publisher LittleThings is shutting its doors, in large part due to Facebook's recent move, the company's CEO Joe Spieser told Business Insider.

LittleThings' demise was first reported by Digiday's Lucia Moses.

LittleThings focused on a mix of feel good news and service content along the lines of Valentine's Day dinner recipes. The company also produced a regular slate of live video content on Facebook, even featuring celebrity guests.

Since launching in 2014, LittleThings had amassed over 12 million Facebook followers and its videos regularly generated thousands, if not millions of views.

But Spieser said that the recent algorithm shift, which Facebook has said was designed to tamp down content that is consumed passively - and would instead focus on posts from people's friends and family - took out roughly 75% of LittleThings' organic traffic, while hammering its profit margins.

Back in 2016, Spieser told the Wall Street Journal that he was highly optimistic about Facebook and its desire to help web publishers.

Now, as one source close to the company put it: "Facebook is the destroyer of worlds."

LittleThings was actually born out of a pet e-commerce venture. In 2015 the company raised an undisclosed amount of cash through debt financing as it shifted towards becoming a full fledged media company, according to TechCrunch.

This past November LittleThings had hired a bank to explore strategic options.

Here's the memo the company issued on Tuesday:

"Urgent: LittleThings Closure"...

Today, February 27th, LittleThings will be permanently closing its doors. It comes after 8 years of starting as an e-commerce company, and then 4 years ago as LittleThings. I've watched a rag tag group of talented hardworking individuals create one of the largest and most emotional brands on Facebook. So many of you have become super stars in the social media space it's incredible. I've never felt so proud and blessed to be part of such an amazing group of people. It pains me to have to write this and hang up our hat, but there are only so many hits a digital media company can afford to absorb in this day and age, and we just exceeded ours.

As most of you remember, we took some especially large setbacks in August 2017, but were able to quickly right the ship, and rebuild the company with new business lines and revenue streams. Instead of waiting for the next Facebook newsfeed update, we entered into a sale-process in November that would allow us to merge with a large media entity that could bring our business diversification of both traffic and revenue. By early February we had numerous acquisition offers for LittleThings that would have generated a substantial return for everyones' options, as well as guarantee their careers well into the future.

Unfortunately, as we were receiving those offers a full on catastrophic update to Facebook's algorithm took effect. The prioritization of friends/family content over publishers was the last straw. Our organic traffic (the highest margin business), and influencer traffic were cut by over 75%. No previous algorithm update ever came close to this level of decimation. The position it put us in was beyond dire. The businesses looking to acquire LittleThings got spooked and promptly exited the sale process, leaving us in jeopardy of our bank debt convenants and ultimately bringing an expedited end to our incredible story.

What happens to the LittleThings brand, we all know and love, is uncertain at this point. It's my deep hope that we can find a way to resurrect it and reemerge from the ashes with a new will, but that may take many months.

What this means for you:

All wages earned will be paid with no exceptions, payroll has already been submitted for tomorrow. Marcella is preparing information on healthcare (Cobra), and other important transition documents. While severance will not be up to us, as the bank now has control over the outgoing payments, we feel confident that everyone should be seeing additional money soon. We will get the specific amounts after the bank transition is complete. (This may take a few weeks)

What this means for the office:

You can take as long as you need, and come back tomorrow as well, the doors will not be locked. The only restriction, and it's an important one, is that all electronics, cameras, computers, etc stay behind. Anything non-personal removed from the office will be against the bank's policy and could jeopardize severance.

Marcella, Gretchen and myself are available tonight and all day tomorrow to talk through this with any and all of you. I'm also more than willing to be a reference for any of you when necessary. In addition I'm close with a media recruiter with which I can help you connect if you are interested. Please make sure you lean on the resources we make available. What happened here is not any of your faults, and I don't want this to slow down your career growth and success.

For LittleThings.com and social accounts:

We won't be shutting down the site yet. I want to make sure we have enough time to inform our readers, fans and viewers that LittleThings is closing. If you want to do one final farewell video, editorial post, FB/IG post, etc now is the time. I've also paid to keep all of your emails open for another 30 days so you have that additional access.

If any press reaches out please forward them over to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and one of us will answer it.

Again, if you want to talk, please don't hesitate. It's going to be an emotional time for all of us, please reach out to anyone struggling and be their shoulder.

While LittleThings may be winding down, the friendships, and connections we have made here will continue to endure.

Sincerely,

Joe + Gretchen

Pro-net neutrality internet activists at a rally in 2014. Reuters/Jonathan Alcorn

Net neutrality advocates may seem like they're on the opposite side of the debate from AT&T and other big telecommunications firms — but that's not how Ma Bell sees it.

Not only does AT&T oppose the blocking or throttling of access to websites or online content — just like net neutrality proponents — it is also, just like them, against the creation of internet fast lanes.

Well, with a few exceptions that is.

"Let me [be] clear about this — AT&T is not interested in creating fast lanes and slow lanes on anyone's internet," Bob Quinn, AT&T's senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs, said in a blog post published on the company's site on Tuesday.

But, he added, the company does want the freedom to essentially do just that — give preferential treatment, or a speedier virtual lane, to certain classes of applications. Among the data AT&T would like to prioritize: that coming from self-driving cars, remote surgery applications, and virtual reality devices.

"I think we can all agree that the packets directing autonomous cars, robotic surgeries, or public safety communications must not drop. Ever," Quinn said in his post. "So, let's address concerns around paid prioritization without impacting those innovations."

Quinn's statement came amid an on- and offline protest by consumer advocates on Tuesday aimed at urging Congress to reinstate the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules. The commission in December voted to rescind the Obama-era regulations that require internet service providers such as AT&T to essentially treat all data equally.

AT&T and other big telecommunications companies opposed the former net-neutrality rules and have argued against having them put back in place, charging that the rules were too onerous and thwarted their ability to innovate.

The question of paid prioritization — the creation of fast lanes — has never really been about whether internet providers could offer services that gave special treatment to data from applications such as self-driving cars. Even the Obama-era rules allowed internet providers to essentially prioritize certain data by creating so-called managed services. Although those services are carried over the same wire lines and wireless frequencies as internet traffic, their data is kept apart from the internet.

In his blog post, Quinn acknowledged that AT&T and other internet providers could offer such services, but charged that they were forced to seek permission from the government first under the old rules.

The conversation concerning paid prioritization needs to be about banning "fast lanes and slow lanes, while also ensuring that innovative, new real-time technologies like those described above continue to live in a world where permission-less innovation exists," Quinn said in his post.

But AT&T and other companies have been offering managed services over their broadband networks for years. It's not clear whether they've ever sought permission for them from the FCC.

For net neutrality advocates, the fight over internet fast lanes hasn't been about the ISPs' ability to ensure remote surgeries go smoothly, but about the concern that companies such as AT&T would use such practices to favor their own sites and services — and those of paid partners — over their competitors. Such companies have already been engaging in a related practice — dubbed zero rating — through which they offer discounted or free access to their own and partners' sites and services.

The FCC under the Obama administration began an investigation into whether the ISPs' zero rating practices were unfairly giving a leg up to their own related businesses, but Ajit Pai quashed that investigation soon after he took over as chairman of the FCC under President Trump.

Quinn's statement is only the latest example of AT&T or other ISPs trying to convince the public of their support for net neutrality. Activists have cautioned that such statements have been symbolic at best.

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

"The first opportunity we have to delight or to upset a client is when they walk through the door either physically or virtually."

Sounds like a tech executive, right? Jeff Bezos even? The Amazon boss often talks about delighting customers, after all, although until recently the ecommerce giant didn't really have doors to physically walk through.

But no, that's not a tech founder, or a retail CEO. It's Marianne Lake, the CFO of JPMorgan Chase.

In an investor day presentation Tuesday February 27, Lake went through the Wall Street giant's "Digital Everywhere" strategy. And later, JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon, who's teamed up with Bezos and Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway on a healthcare initiative, discussed Amazon Prime.

Taken together, the comments hint at JPMorgan's vision of the future of banking.

A generational shift

There's a generational shift taking place, according to Lake. Customers are demanding digital capabilities in all their interactions with the firm. "Think streaming films versus DVDs," she said. "Banking is no exception."

JPMorgan

Now there are drawbacks to this shift, of course. The movie business used to make good money out of DVDs. Streaming films has been a more challenging business. For Wall Street, it means margins are likely to be compressed, meaning less money per trade.

"Jeff Bezos says 'Your margin is my opportunity,'" Dimon said in the Q&A portion of investor day. "You know, that's called competition. And so some of it gets passed on to the customer in terms of lower prices and lower spreads."

But there are clear benefits to these digital relationships.

"They create loyalty, they give us more shots on goal to deepen relationships," Lake said. "This drives higher volume for us, and leveraging our scale, that higher volume is much more profitable."

This shift is playing out across JPMorgan's business, according to Lake's presentation. For example:

"We are already deeply embedded in our customers lives at a scale and a frequency that we believe is unmatched," Lake said.

JPMorgan

Amazon Prime for banking

It also allows JPMorgan to take a different approach when rolling out new products. Dimon cited the example of Amazon Prime going into movies, likening it to how JPMorgan would roll out online investing.

"Who thought Jeff Bezos would go into movies?" Dimon asked the audience at the investor day. "And he just gives it away for free to Prime because Prime pays for itself and he's just trying to make you a happy Prime customer."

"Well we do a little bit of the same by giving a lot of things away for free as part a package. We look at the price of the whole package, not necessarily the products."

He said:

"That's why when we do online investing, we're going to be thinking about 'How are we going to add that to the product set in a simple way ... that the customer wants, so that they'll say 'I love this.'' Remember, if you're a great client, we can do it for free."

Now, JPMorgan's not the only bank thinking this way, of course. Goldman Sachs has said it wants to be to risk what Google is to search, for example. And McKinsey has highlighted the risks to traditional finance posed by so-called platform companies like Amazon, Alibaba, and Rakuten.

But JPMorgan's ability to implement these digital shifts across multiple business lines, many of which just happen to be market share leaders, has the potential to reshape the entire industry. JPMorgan might have the ability to "do it for free" for great clients, but many competitors won't.

"Digital capabilities will really differentiate players in our industry in the coming years. And in a digital world, we are always open for our customers, continuously, 24/7," Lake said.

"We do have a complete strategy, a plan for every customer type, for all of their needs, in each business and around the world," she added.

Sound familiar?

The Google Home app seems like a great idea.

In theory, it should show me what's currently playing through my Google Home Mini (whether it's a YouTube video, show on Netflix, playlist, podcast, or whathaveyou) and allow me to pause, control volume, rewind, and all the other functions that you usually find on a remote control. In addition, the app is intended to offer content that I might be interested in, and offer helpful tips and suggestions for using the Google Home.

In reality, the app is never synced with what's really happening in my device, rendering it pretty useless as a replacement for the remote control. The "Browse" section is entirely generic, and not catered to my search histories at all.

The suggested commands are helpful, and I'm often surprised at some of the cool things I can ask the device. One of my favorites right now is, "Ok, Google. Tell me a joke." Unfortunately, I have no reason to open the app and browse the suggested commands if it's otherwise of no use to me, so I rarely interact with it.