Entrepreneurs are invited to the 484th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, May 7, 2020, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur,...
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Nick Adams is Managing Partner and Co-founder at Differential Ventures, an enterprise focused firm. We discuss counter-cyclical ventures in this Covid-19 world.
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Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”
“Dear Sophie” columns are accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one or two-year subscription for 50% off.
Dear Sophie:
I was recently laid off but found another position at a growing biotech company. My new employer just submitted the H-1B petition before the end of my grace period. I would like to stay permanently in the United States. How long do I have to apply for a green card?
If my employer isn’t willing to sponsor me, I heard I can self-petition for an EB-1A or EB-2 NIW green card?
—Hopeful in Hayward
Dear Hopeful:
Congrats on your new job offer and H-1B transfer. Many companies are hiring talented individuals right now. Every company has the right to their own immigration sponsorship policy, so it can be worthwhile to discuss this going into your new role to make sure that everybody’s on the same page as to how things can unfold with respect to your green card.
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
In December of 2019, this column wrote an entry detailing Uber’s micro-mobility efforts. Just six months ago — a mere two quarters — Uber’s Jump team was on the record saying that its parent company wanted to “double down on micro-mobility.” At the time, before COVID-19 and the decline in human travel, it made some sense.
Things have changed for both Uber and micro-mobility sector. Uber’s financial performance was looking up before the pandemic, with the company promising a more aggressive adjusted profitability timeline. Lime, a dockless scooter company, was also making noise about profits—or something close to them.
Both goals now seem out of reach. Bird and Lime, the best-known American scooter companies, have both cut staff this year. And The Information recently reported that Uber may invest in Lime at a dramatically lowered valuation with an option to buy the company at a later date.
As Uber already has its own micro-mobility bet (recall that it bought JUMP and thus has its own scooters in-market), why would it go through the bother of repricing Lime to maybe buy it later? The Information notes that Uber’s own micro-mobility bet is expensive. But given Lime’s own persistent losses and cash burn I couldn’t make the idea square in my head. So, this morning let’s peek at Uber’s numbers ahead of earnings and see what we can learn about its 2019 in the micro-mobility world, and if that helps us understand why it might drop up to nine figures on Lime during the smaller company’s struggles.
M&A activity has generally slowed down in the weeks since the novel coronavirus took a grip on the world, but there have been some pockets of activity in the tech industry when the price is right or when the divestment/acquisition just makes sense.
The world of messaging brings us the latest development in that theme: SAP, the CRM and enterprise software giant, is selling its Digital Interconnect messaging business to Sinch, a Swedish cloud voice, video and messaging company.
Sinch said it is paying €225 million (around $250 million) on a cash and debt-free basis for the business, which has 1,500 enterprise customers that use it for various messaging services, such as the now-popular option of running “omnichannel” conversations with customers over SMS, push, email, WhatsApp, WeChat and Viber; and messaging technology for carriers.
The deal will give Sinch, based in Sweden, a foothold in the US market — the Digital Interconnect business is headquartered in Silicon Valley — and access to a trove of customers using the kind of messaging technology that Sinch develops and sells.
The significance here is that messaging continues to be a very popular and high-volume, but low-margin (or even no-margin in some cases), business. So it makes sense for Sinch to pursue a bigger strategy for more economy of scale, a trend that I think will continue to play out. As a case in point: Sinch has been on an acquisition spree in the last month, and other deals have included Latin American messaging provider Wavy ($119 million, announced March 26), and ChatLayer ($6 million, announced April 20).
“With SAP Digital Interconnect now becoming a part of Sinch, we build on our scale, focus and capabilities to truly redefine how businesses engage with their customers, throughout the world,” comments Oscar Werner, Sinch CEO, in a statement. “The transaction strengthens our direct connectivity globally. Plus, it enables us to expand and accelerate a range of business-critical services to mobile operators, including products for person-to-person messaging, reporting and analytics.”
The news caps off nearly a month of speculation that SAP was gearing up for a sale of the legacy unit as part of a bigger strategy to focus more squarely on its CRM and newer enterprise IT services. It comes amid a particularly challenging economic environment, and that’s before considering all the IT, security and other challenges companies were facing even before COVID-19. SAP also has other fish to fry. It acquired Qualtrics in November 2018 for $8 billion, spearheading a stronger move into employee and customer experience, surveys and research; and other SAP exits this year have included shuttering travel business Hipmunk, which was part of Concur (another acquisition made by SAP), back in January.
Between then and now SAP has also seen a very notable personnel change. Its co-CEO Jennifer Morgan stepped away from the company by mutual agreement with the board, leaving Christian Klein as sole CEO (the two had been in the co-CEO roles for only six months). At the time, the company said that the abrupt change — a mere 10 days between late-Friday announcement and departure — was in response to “the current environment [which] requires companies to take swift, determined action which is best supported by a very clear leadership structure.”
It would appear that this sale is an example of the kind of swift and determined action that the board was hoping to see.
SAP’s messaging unit has been around in one form or another for years. It became a part of SAP in 2010 as part of its acquisition of Sybase, but even before that Sybase acquired Mobile 365, which had developed the messaging technology that ultimately became SAP Digital Interconnect, back in 2006.
At the time, the messaging business was the primary part of Mobile 365, and Sybase paid $417 million for that company. In that regard, it might look like SAP is now selling it for a loss, although you could also argue that 15+ year-old technology in the fast-moving world of messaging would have depreciated at this point.
The business itself is very typical of messaging: huge volumes but not huge revenues.
In 2019, SAP said that the enterprise messaging business processed 18 billion messages, while its carrier services processed 292 billion carrier messages. The Bloomberg report that broke the news about the intent to sell the division said that it made $50 million in EBITDA and $250 million in revenue last year. But actually this is small relatively speaking: SAP altogether had revenues of nearly $30 billion in the same period. In other words, it’s an okay business but not really core to SAP and where it’s going.
On the other hand, it’s a better fit for Sinch. The company originally spun out from low-cost IP calling company Rebtel, was then acquired by publicly-traded CLX, which subsequently rebranded as Sinch. It is a much smaller company than SAP — market cap of about $3.1 billion (30.82 billion Swedish krona), versus SAP’s market cap of $139 billion — but is squarely focused on messaging services similar to those that the former SAP division offers.
“SAP Digital Interconnect is a leader in its area showing profitable growth and reaching 99 percent of the world’s mobile subscribers. Looking at Sinch’s innovation and investment strategy in the area of cloud communication platforms, we welcome them as the new owner of SDI. Sinch is perfectly positioned to unleash further growth potential we see in SDI,” said Thomas Saueressig, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, responsible for SAP Product Engineering, in a statement.
M&A continues on in the wider European region even while so much else has slowed down or stopped in the current market. This deal follows on the heels of Intel acquiring Israel’s Moovit for $900 million this week, and Avira in Germany getting acquired by Investcorp at a $180 million valuation several weeks ago.
The world has changed dramatically since May 2019 when we last surveyed venture capitalists about the trends they were seeing in media, entertainment and gaming.
Since then, COVID-19 and the resulting physical distancing measures have created plenty of demand for companies helping to inform and entertain us as we’re stuck at home. At the same time, there’s a dramatic reduction in ad spending, making it harder to monetize that consumer attention.
So we checked in a variety of top VCs about the new landscape, where they’re investing and what kind of advice they’re giving their portfolio companies.
Not all of them invest directly in what (paraphrasing Betaworks’ Matt Hartman) we might call media media — the companies whose business models revolve around content creation and advertising — but each of these investors are backing startups looking to change the way we stay connected and entertained.
Here’s who we surveyed:
Kevin Zhang (Partner, Upfront Ventures)Pär-Jörgen (PJ) Pärson (General Partner, Northzone)Vasu Kulkarni (Partner, Courtside Ventures)MG Siegler (General Partner, GV)Jana Messerschmidt (Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners)Matthew Hartman (Partner, Betaworks Ventures)Gigi Levy-Weiss (Managing Partner, NFX)The consensus? You can’t count on the ad business to recover in the next few months, but there are still opportunities for startups exploring new formats and new business models. And there’s still plenty of excitement about gaming and esports.
You can read their full responses, lightly edited, below.
What (if any) media trends are still exciting you from an investing perspective?
Live and interactive formats, especially shorter form, continue to be very exciting, made even more evident in this time of shelter-in-place. What has worked in China and broader Asia has not yet translated into explosive success in the West. As interesting as celebrity live broadcasts are from their homes, the lack of real interaction and participation features hampers long-term engagement and doesn’t make up for the lack of production quality.
Modern content production technology is needed to push both production and live ops cost down while enabling more interactive and engaging formats. Game engines are one example, there’s of course the Travis Scott concert that just happened in Fortnite built on the Unreal engine, but that 15-minute, pre-rendered show took months to create, we’re only just scratching the surface of what’s possible.
One of our investments in this space is Tellie for live-action formats, another is The Wave for rendered, live formats, and we continue to look for great combinations of tech and media talent innovating on new formats.
Speaking of gaming, multiplayer games continue to grow and grow exponentially, there is a lot to unpack in popular titles from new favorite Animal Crossing to classics like World of Warcraft to indie hits like For the King. They all have social cooperation as a core part of the game loop and design. I’d love to see more teams working on cooperative play and just overall a broader diversity in multiplayer experiences beyond purely competitive ones.
Where most companies are facing the heat on account of the global virus-inflicted lockdown, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is seeing strong growth. The stock recently climbed to 52-week high levels as the...
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Cockroach Labs, the NYC enterprise database company, announced an $86.6 million Series D funding round today. The company was in no mood to talk valuations, but was happy to have a big chunk of money to help build on its recent success and ride out the current economic malaise.
Altimeter Capital and Bond co-led the round with participation from Benchmark, GV, Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Capital and FirstMark Capital. Today’s funding comes on top of a $55 million Series C last August, and brings the total raised to $195 million, according to the company.
Cockroach has a tough job. It’s battling both traditional databases like Oracle and modern ones from the likes of Amazon, but investors see a company with a lot of potential market building an open source, on prem and cloud database product. In particular, the open source product provides a way to attract users and turn some percentage of those into potential customers, an approach investors tend to favor.
CEO and co-founder Spenser Kimball says that the company had been growing fast before the pandemic hit. “I think the biggest change between now and last year has just been our go to market which is seeing pretty explosive growth. By number of customers, we’ve grown by almost 300%,” Kimball told TechCrunch.
He says having that three-pronged approach of open source, cloud an on-prem products has really helped fuel that growth. The company launched the cloud service in 2018, and it has helped expand its market. Whereas the on-prem version was mostly aimed at larger customers, the managed service puts Cockroach in reach of individual developers and teams who might not want to deal with all of the overhead of managing a complex database on their own.
Kimball says it’s really too soon to say what impact the pandemic will have on his business. He recognizes that certain verticals like travel, hospitality and some retail business are probably going to suffer, but other businesses that are accelerating in the crisis could make use of a highly scalable database like CockroachDB.
“Obviously it’s a new world right now. I think there are going to be some losers and some winners, but on balance I think [our] momentum will continue to grow for something that really does represent a best in class solution for businesses, whether they are startups or big enterprises, as they’re trying to figure out how to build for a cloud native future,” Kimball said.
The company intends to keep hiring through this, but is being careful and regularly evaluating what its needs are much more carefully than it might have done prior to this crisis with a much more open mind toward remote work.
Kimball certainly recognizes that it’s not an easy time to be raising this kind of cash, and he is grateful to have the confidence of investors to keep growing his company, come what may.
Orca Security, an Israeli cloud security firm that focuses on giving enterprises better visibility into their multi-cloud deployments on AWS, Azure and GCP, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series A round led by GGV Capital. YL Ventures and Silicon Valley CISO Investments also participated in this round. Together with its seed investment led by YL Ventures, this brings Orca’s total funding to $27 million.
One feature that makes Orca stand out is its ability to quickly provide workload-level visibility without the need for an agent or network scanner. Instead, Orca uses low-level APIs that allow it to gain visibility into what exactly is running in your cloud.
The founders of Orca all have a background as architects and CTOs at other companies, including the likes of Check Point Technologies, as well as the Israeli army’s Unit 8200. As Orca CPO and co-founder Gil Geron told me in a meeting in Tel Aviv earlier this year, the founders were looking for a big enough problem to solve and it quickly became clear that at the core of most security breaches were misconfigurations or the lack of security tools in the right places. “What we deduced is that in too many cases, we have the security tools that can protect us, but we don’t have them in the right place at the right time,” Geron, who previously led a security team at Check Point, said. “And this is because there is this friction between the business’ need to grow and the need to have it secure.”
Orca delivers its solution as a SaaS platform and on top of providing work level visibility into these public clouds, it also offers security tools that can scan for vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, password issues, secret keys in personally identifiable information.
“In a software-driven world that is moving faster than ever before, it’s extremely difficult for security teams to properly discover and protect every cloud asset,” said GGV managing partner Glenn Solomon . “Orca Security’s novel approach provides unparalleled visibility into these assets and brings this power back to the CISO without slowing down engineering.”
Orca Security is barely a year and a half old, but it also counts companies like Flexport, Fiverr, Sisene and Qubole among its customers.
Lily Stoyanov: At that time, I already had an idea about Transformify. It started when I was still at Coca-Cola. When you lead a business transformation project, you know that processes need to be...
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What is bootstrapping? from Sramana Mitra on Bootstrapping by Sramana Mitra Bootstrapping means building a business without external financing. See how this differs from businesses funded by...
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The Amazon VP who quit the company with a searing attack on how it targeted whistleblowers says he has been approached by numerous other tech companies already.
Tim Bray's resignation went viral on Monday after the VP â who held the title of "distinguished engineer" â launched an attack on Amazon in a blog post.
Bray wrote he had left the company after it fired workers who openly criticized its warehouse conditions during the coronavirus pandemic, a move he called "chickenshit." (He later retracted the insult, calling it "mean-spirited.")
This seems to have caught the eye of some other tech companies. "Recruiters so far: Google, Comcast, Huawei. And a bunch of startups," Bray tweeted on Monday, adding he's not currently looking for work.
Bray said in his initial blog post that leaving the company would cost him $1 million per year, and speaking to Business Insider's Eugene Kim he added that there was no "agenda" behind the post. "I'm a blogger â I write the story of my life," said Bray.
Bray's concerns come after Amazon fired a number of staff who either organized or protested against the way the firm is operating during the pandemic. Amazon has seen a huge uptick in demand from online shoppers, and has had to balance that demand with the safety of its warehouse workers.
Amazon in March fired employee Chris Smalls after he organized a protest of the working conditions inside the Queens, New York warehouse where he worked. A leaked memo also showed high-level executives discussing Smalls in unflattering terms at a meeting with CEO Jeff Bezos. "He's not smart, or articulate, and to the extent the press wants to focus on us versus him, we will be in a much stronger PR position," Amazon's top lawyer David Zapolsky wrote about Smalls.
Amazon in April also fired two web designers who had criticized the company's treatment of its warehouse workers. One of the designers, Emily Cunningham, thanked Bray for his resignation.
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Biometrics startup Yoti has unveiled its design for a tool which could be used to prove the results of patients' COVID-19 tests, alongside a draft code of conduct around the use of so-called "immunity passports."
As the pandemic pushes the global economy further into recession, officials around the world have mooted the idea of immunity passports or "certificates" for those who have recovered from the disease. The idea is that people could slowly be allowed to return to work and normal life.
But how exactly such a scheme would work is subject to intense debate, thanks to the privacy implications.
One startup pitching a solution is British ID verification startup Yoti.
In recent weeks, UK ministers have discussed how such passports might work with at least three European technology firms, Yoti, Onfido and IDnow, as previously reported by Business Insider.Â
Yoti CEO Robin Tombs has been skeptical of the concept of an "immunity passport", warning that tech-driven solutions should focus on proving recent COVID-19 test results. One issue with the term "immunity" is that it is not yet established whether being infected with COVID-19 means a person won't be infected a second time.
Following talks with UK government officials, Yoti gave Business Insider an exclusive look at its new service â including a newly-drafted "global code of practice" for sharing personal health credentials.Â
In Yoti's report, seen by Business Insider, the firm warns that the idea of an "immunity passport [is] vague and potentially confusing, as well as lacking in granularity and adaptability".
It suggests breaking down users' test results through a range of key factors, including (but not limited to): the presence of antibodies when tested, the type of test used, which medical authorities have approved its use, and a time stamp indicating when said test was performed.Â
According to Yoti, those that have very recently tested negative for COVID-19 might be considered relatively low risk for transmitting the disease, and as such could be allowed "to return to work, to board a flight or return to some specific, limited access venues and activities."
By combining users' official ID documents (such as passports and driving licenses) with facial recognition and unique QR codes, Yoti says its software â which it says is already used by 6 million people worldwide â could be used to ease lockdowns across the globe.Â
Under the firm's plans, health organizations like hospitals and pharmacies will be able to register on the app, and access special permissions which allow them to verify a patient has been tested for COVID-19.Â
If they have tested negative, the patient will then be able to provide a QR code to registered verifiers, who may be installed in airports, workplaces or at limited access venues.Â
Critics remain wary of the limits â and the dangers â of private companies recording individuals' medical data en masse.Â
Across social media platforms, each new story about contact tracing apps and immunity passports prompts fresh comparisons with Orwell's "1984". It's a concern Yoti is conscious of.Â
"We believe that abiding by a code of practice is the right approach to achieving the required public health objectives and organizational requirements," Yoti said. "Without compromising privacy and security."Â
Still, in drafting its own "global code of practice", the firm may be accused of shifting the goalposts to its own advantage.
"Yoti are not health experts," said Tombs. "We have listened carefully to immunologists as well as privacy experts and are publishing our draft Code of Practice for wider feedback and to raise awareness of the important health data issues and digital identities.
"Transparency underpins trust and encourages fair and effective scrutiny."
The five pillars of Yoti's proposed code include: the ability to prove an individuals' identity, a transparent understanding of the uses and limits of testing, a trustworthy means of storing data, the ability to prove someone's test results without compromising their security, and an emphasis on privacy.Â
"As a UK company, Yoti is subject to GDPR and the UK Data Protection Act 2018, and has a comprehensive privacy governance framework in place to apply these standards to its business globally."Â
Senior executives at two ID startups â both in the running to design COVID-19 immunity passports for the UK â have suggested creating an international database to track infections.Â
German startup IDnow and Lithuania's iDenfy submitted their designs for immunity passports to the British government last month, following an open call for tech-driven solutions to the pandemic from NHS officials.Â
There has been speculation the UK could roll out such passports in the next 12 months, as Prime Minister Boris Johnson seeks to end the nation's ongoing lockdown.Â
Health minister Matt Hancock said in April that the UK was looking at an immunity certificate.
But Downing Street said on Monday that the UK's healthcare system was still in the early stages of seeing what was viable. The UK published proposals from tech firms late last week on how the immunity passport might work.
In a Linkedin post published on Monday, Domantas Ciulde, CEO of iDenfy, called on his counterparts at IDnow, Yoti, Onfido and OCL to consider "[combining] our efforts" to share patient information across borders.Â
He wrote: "I believe biometric recognition companies can make important things in such pandemic situations...
"If [the World Health Organization] would support the idea of using immunity passports, what do you think about the opportunity to combine our efforts in developing a standard and shared database of immunity passports, test results and other important information?"Â
He added: "The great thing about such a database is that it could be built very quickly...It is much easier and faster for local companies to implement new products in a native region...Â
"Guys, what do you think?"Â
Responding to the post, Roger Tyrzyk, iDenfy's UK manager, said the idea was "something to consider" moving forward.Â
"We would have to find a way [of staying] GDPR-compliant, and make sure that governments would actually want this," he wrote. "It does make sense to take a step forward to bring identity in line as a whole."Â
The concept of a cross-border database to track COVID-19 will likely trigger alarm among privacy experts, who fear that the tech under consideration may evolve into a wider form of surveillance.
On Monday, lawyers at data rights agency AWO, alongside experts from Matrix Chambers and Blackstone Chambers, outlined their legal recommendations for immunity passports, contact tracing and data sharing, in a legal opinion published online.
It read: "Such a step would engage a number of fundamental rights under [human rights] and EU/UK legislation concerning the right to privacy and protection of personal data.
"Any proposals would require very substantial evidential justification to show that they are necessary and proportionate.
"We are unsure if such evidence could be provided."
French tech startup Back Market has raised $120 million from investors including Goldman Sachs, Aglaé Ventures (the venture arm of Groupe Arnault), and Eurazeo Growth.
The company, founded in 2014, operates an online marketplace for refurbished electronic items across Western Europe and the US. Back Market itself estimates the market for refurbished electronics to be $80 billion annually.
"The company trajectory has been spectacular and this raise is about continuing that," Serge Verdoux, managing director at Back Market, told Business Insider in an interview. "Demand has never been so strong because confined people need electronics more than ever."
Coronavirus has forced people to stay indoors, and internet usage is on the up as people work from home, search for jobs, and help teach their children. That's led to increased orders for devices that make working from home a little easier.
At the same time, e-waste is also increasing. Over 44 million tons of electronic waste was produced in 2016, and that's projected to grow to 52.2 million tons by 2021.
On Back Market's website you can find refurbished AirPods for £193, down from the £249 retail price. Buyers can also look for refurbished phones, laptops, and headsets.
Back Market is riding a trend towards re-using equipment rather than buying new products. In France, belief-driven consumers make up 65% of the market, while that figure is 59% in the US, as people look to buy more sustainably, per Edelman.Â
"Customers care about sustainability and this is a top of mind issue for consumers and will continue to be going forward," Verdoux added. "The environment is a core concern of our mission."
Back Market started operations in France before expanding to Spain, Germany, Italy, Belgium, and most recently, the United Kingdom and Austria. The company expanded into the US in 2018 and it is now the startup's second-largest and fastest-growing market.Â
Funds from the raise will be used to build out the company's quality control teams, continue its geographic expansion and strengthen existing markets, and grow the Back Market team. The company has over 300 employees worldwide and will be adding to its headcount during the year, Verdoux said.Â
Back Market has now raised $175 million in total. Conversations about the fundraise began last autumn before the deal closed in mid-March.Â
As CEO of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst had witnessed the "massive momentum" of artificial intelligence in the last few years. But IBM's new president said he had been underwhelmed by the role that the tech powerhouse had played in the trend, especially given IBM's vaunted leadership in AI.
AI, which had been an esoteric field of study in universities and big corporate labs like IBM Research, took off as a widely-used technology in the last five years, highlighted by the popularity of such tools as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa.
"Frankly, you didn't see IBM much there," Whitehurst told Business Insider.
Whitehurst, who joined the IBM leadership in January after its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, said he now has a deeper appreciation of the tech behemoth's capabilities, particularly in AI, which new CEO Arvind Krishna has said will be a key area of focus for Big Blue.
On Tuesday, Whitehurst unveiled IBM's new offensive on AI.Â
The company announced a new offering based on Watson, IBM's flagship AI technology famous for impressive feats such as beating humans in Jeopardy. IBM is deploying the technology to monitor enterprise networks, and rapidly detect problems. The new product, called Watson AIOps, is designed to flag network glitches that Whitehurst said could cost roughly $260,000 an hour if left unchecked.
The new Watson product is part of IBM's aggressive push to deploy its AI technology for more commercial applications.Â
Two months ago, IBM also unveiled a new AI initiative based on Project Debater, which drew media attention by engaging in a debate with humans. IBM announced it was incorporating features from that project into Watson to give businesses more language-based capabilities in mining and analyzing their data.
Rob Thomas, an IBM senior vice president for cloud and data platform, said the initiative underscored a new push to turn IBM's research into viable products faster. "There was a lot of stuff we were doing that wasn't getting into products that I thought was a big opportunity," he told Business Insider.
And there are many more opportunities, said Whitehurst. One of the things that became clearer to him since joining the IBM leadership is the tech giant's impressive tech arsenal, he says. That includes AI, where IBM's strengths are legendary, although they are not as widely known as the consumer-facing tools.
"The problem, frankly, is because we are really focused on enterprise specific business process problems, it's not something you see out in the press, like the Alexa speakers or any of that stuff," Whitehurst said.
"You don't see how far advanced IBM is in areas of AI, right. It's a marketing problem we have to figure out how to solve. But I've been really impressed with the depth, the technical expertise."
Got a tip about IBM or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and musician Grimes have had their first child together.Â
Musk announced the birth of their child Monday evening on Twitter, saying, "Mom & baby all good." In follow-up tweets, Musk wrote that the couple has a baby boy.
One Twitter user asked Musk the name of their child, to which the tech billionaire responded, "X Ã A-12 Musk."
Musk posted a photo of him holding the newborn late on Monday evening.Â
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It's Grimes' first child â Musk has five sons with his first wife, Justine.
Grimes announced she was pregnant in January via a cryptic social media post that showed her with a fetus Photoshopped into her belly. During a livestream on Twitch in February, she said that the baby's due date was May 4th. Musk tweeted that the baby was due on Monday.
The couple's first child together comes almost exactly two years after they made their debut as a couple. In May 2018, Musk and Grimes, whose real name is Claire Boucher, took both the business and music worlds by surprise when they revealed they were dating, walking the red carpet together at that year's Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Â
Uber is reportedly in talks to lead an emergency fundraising round of $170 million in the scooter startup Lime, according to a new report by the Information's Cory Weinberg and Amir Efrati.Â
The news comes as the coronavirus outbreak has decimated the startup's business. Stay-at-home orders and social distancing guidelines have deterred the startup's usual source of customers, forcing it to consider this emergency round as early as March.Â
Uber, already an existing investor in the scooter-sharing startup, is said to be putting in $85 million of its own money to help Lime increase its runway.Â
However, the terms of the deal will hit the scooter startup hard. The round will reportedly slash Lime's valuation to $510 million, a 79% slide from the startup's whopping valuation of $2.4 billion in 2018.Â
The round also grants Uber the opportunity to buy Lime at a set price between 2022 and 2024, the report said. In return, Uber would "transfer" its existing bike and scooter-sharing business to Lime.Â
Both Uber and Lime did not immediately respond to Business Insider's requests for comment.Â
Uber last invested in Lime back in 2018, in a Series C round worth $335.1 million, according to Pitchbook data. The ride-hailing giant also doubled down on Lime in recent years, most notably through its acquisition of its rival Jump.Â
But while the terms of the new proposed deal swing in favor of Uber, it's worth noting that the round comes at a time when the ride-hailing giant has also been under severe pressure as the coronavirus outbreak has slammed its core business. Uber has already revoked its previous financial guidance, and told its employees to expect layoffs that could cut up to 20% of the workforce.Â
The full extent of the damage caused by the coronavirus to Uber's business this quarter should be apparent soon, when the company reports its earnings on May 7th.Â
Tim Bray, a longtime Amazon executive and influential software developer who stepped down last week after writing a critical blog post about the company's firing of activist workers, says he's not expecting to get anything out of his widely publicized move.
The blog post, he said, is simply meant to be a record of his life.
"I'm a blogger â I write the story of my life," Bray told Business Insider. "Sorry, there's no master plan."
Bray said he was "genuinely" just writing a story on his blog because it was a major life event. While acknowledging there's now a lot of online buzz around his blog post, Bray said he didn't expect this level of attention as it's always hard to tell what goes viral online.
"When you write something, you never know whether the response is meaningful and actually affected people's lives until much later," said Bray, who helped create the XML language that's a key element of the web and who has spent decades in tech working at companies like Sun Microsystems and Google.Â
Whether he intended it or not, Bray's blog post has now become one of the biggest national stories with potential for further repercussions around Amazon's future.Â
In the blog post, Bray slammed Amazon's firing of whistleblowers who criticized the company's treatment of warehouse workers, calling it a "chickenshit" move. His initial tweet about the post has been shared over 4,000 times, and the sudden spike in traffic has slowed his blog, he said in another tweet Monday.
"I put a whole lot of effort into writing that blog piece and it represents what I want to say at this point," Bray said over the phone.
Amazon's representative declined to comment on this story.
Bray's post comes at a time when Amazon, which has a history of being anti-union, is facing unprecedented pushback from its employees over its working conditions. Amazon's warehouse workers have staged multiple walkouts over the past month in protest of the company's lack of safety measures, while some office employees publicly criticized the treatment of those workers.
Amazon fired some of the employees who led those protests, including warehouse workers Chris Smalls and Bashir Mohammed, as well as corporate employees Maren Costa and Emily Cunningham, who have criticized the company's climate policies. Bray said in his post that he "escalated" his concerns internally but didn't elaborate on how those talks went.
"That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned," he wrote.
Erin Hatton, a sociology professor at University of Buffalo, said Bray's move is "hugely symbolic," given how rare it is for a senior executive to resign over the treatment of lower-ranked employees. She said Bray's move could go a long way in pushing Amazon to do more for its warehouse workers.
"This is an incredibly powerful move, one we need to see much more of â high-level management vocally supporting frontline workers, even to the point of resigning, when other avenues of support have not worked," Hatton said.
It's unclear how exactly this will lead to more change. Robert Bruno, who teaches labor and employment relations at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said there's no indication of these moves leading to other executives to speak out, in part because it's so rare. This could be helpful for workers attempting to get more regulatory attention as they could point out a high-profile executive of the company represents a larger body of the workforce.
"It helps to push a bit against the company that probably feels it's untouchable, given its importance to the economy," Bruno said.
Tesla owners who have had their on-board computers replaced may also need to worry about their personal information being for sale online, InsideEVs reported on Sunday.
White-hat hacker GreenTheOnly told InsideEV that he was able to purchase four used Tesla media control units (MCUs) from eBay and access their previous owners' information, which he said included "home and work location, all saved wi-fi passwords, calendar entries from the phone, call lists and address books from paired phones, Netflix and other stored session cookies."
When Tesla owners sync their phones or third-party accounts like Netflix and Spotify to their vehicles, the MCUs store that information, but some older model Teslas experienced issues with the computers and their owners had to get them replaced.
However, after migrating customers' information to replacement computers, Tesla hasn't been properly wiping data from the old units, and since the data is stored unencrypted, GreenTheOnly was still able to gain access to it after buying the units online, according to InsideEVs.
Technicians had been instructed to damage the MCUs before pitching them, InsideEVs reported, a policy GreenTheOnly said was ineffective: "I also heard a prerequisite to throwing the unit into a dumpster is to hit it with a hammer a few times. This obviously does not destroy any data and I did see these units for sale too."
GreenTheOnly had previously discovered that customers' personal data could be obtained from crashed Tesla Model S, Model X and Model 3 vehicles purchased from salvage yards for research and testing, CNBC reported.
As more vehicles become wired with on-board computers that connect to the internet, Tesla as well as other automakers are increasingly dealing with security vulnerabilities that could impact drivers' safety and privacy. UK consumer watchdog group Which? found flaws present in the on-board computers for Ford and Volkswagen models that could allow hackers to manipulate safety features.
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
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