Sramana Mitra: Are you familiar with ButcherBox? Elly Truesdell: Yes. Sramana Mitra: I did a story with the entrepreneur. What struck me was that one of the things he faces when talking to investors...
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The Trump administration has added five of Amazon's overseas domains to a "notorious markets" register, in what's become a fraught few months for the tech giant.
The US trade representative's office says the websites â serving the UK, Germany, France, India, and Canada â facilitate the sale of counterfeit and pirated products.
It says it received complaints from US businesses that the five overseas websites didn't provide clear information about sellers, and that the process to remove platforms selling counterfeit goods was "lengthy and burdensome."
The notorious markets register is a list of markets that are reported to "engage in or facilitate substantial trademark counterfeiting and copyright piracy." It includes both physical markets, such as malls or open-air stalls, as well as online platforms such as Amazon.
An Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider that the blacklisting was a "political act" driven by "a personal vendetta against Amazon."
Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos have repeatedly clashed with Trump and his administration. Bezos owns The Washington Post, and Trump has often baselessly claimed that the newspaper is a lobbying tool for the online retail giant.
Amazon is also suing the government after the Pentagon handed a $10 billion defense contract to Microsoft, claiming the decision was motivated by Trump's bias against the company and Bezos.
It also described itself as an "active, engaged stakeholder in the fight against counterfeit."
"Amazon makes significant investments in proactive technologies and processes to detect and stop bad actors and potentially counterfeit products from being sold in our stores," it continued, also citing its past anti-fraud investments.
"In 2019 alone, we invested over $500 million and have more than 8,000 employees protecting our store from fraud and abuse. We also stopped over 2.5 million suspected bad actors from opening Amazon selling accounts before they published a single listing for sale, blocking more than 6 billion suspected bad listings before they were published to our stores."
The spokesperson also claimed that "more than 99.9% of pages viewed worldwide by customers on Amazon have never had a report of counterfeit."
Though the notorious markets register does not bestow legal consequences on Amazon, it does draw negative attention to the company at a time when it's already under scrutiny for its handling of the COVID-19 crisis.
A coalition of workers from Amazon â as well as Walmart, FedEx, Target, Instacart, and Whole Foods â will reportedly go on strike Friday over working conditions during the coronavirus pandemic.
Activists gathered outside Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' $23 billion mansion in Washington DC to paint a huge street mural to protest his firm's treatment of warehouse workers.
The activists were from climate change charity Shut Down DC, and their mural read: "PROTECT AMAZON WORKERS."
Washington Post reporter Marissa Lang was on the scene, and said no movement was seen inside the house.
Lang also added that police were present to ensure the activists remained socially-distanced during their work, which they performed wearing masks, although Lang noted that they did occasionally move closer than 6 feet apart. The mural took them about an hour to complete.
"We're calling him and Amazon out for leaving their workers out here without the proper personal protective equipment," Laura Beth Pelner, the activist who designed the mural, told The Post.
"We're calling all these essential workers heroes â grocery store workers and delivery drivers and everyone working at these Amazon warehouses filling people's orders â but corporations aren't doing enough to protect them. Essential workers are not expendable."
Lang reports that two hours after the mural was completed, a worker wearing a mask hosed it away.
As demand for Amazon deliveries has surged with people staying inside, warehouse and delivery workers have found themselves on the frontline of the pandemic. Amazon has had to counterbalance spike in demand with the health and safety of its own workers. The company has announced new policies around sick pay and time off, and introduced measures like temperature checks, handing out masks, and increased cleaning.
Workers, including ones which have spoken to Business Insider, have said the company's safety measures are either missing, inadequate, or unenforceable.
In France, Amazon has shut down all its warehouses after a court ruled its worker protections were lacking.
Meanwhile, Bezos' personal net wealth has swollen thanks to the unprecedented demand for Amazon's services. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Bezos' net worth is $143 billion, more than double the wealth of Warren Buffet or Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Meet Biloba, a French startup that wants to leverage tech to make it easier to keep your children healthy. The company recently launched a new mobile app that lets you chat with a doctor whenever you want between 8 AM and 8 PM. This way, if you have questions about your kids, you can get a quick answer.
Of course, a text conversation will never replace a visit to the pediatrician. But chances are you have a ton of questions, especially if you’re a first-time parent. Instead of browsing obscure discussion forums, you can go straight to a doctor.
Biloba isn’t working with pediatricians specifically. The company is also partnering with nurses and general practitioners. Eventually, the service is going to cost €10 per month but the company is waving fees during the lockdown.
After just three weeks, the startup managed to attract 4,000 users with around 200 conversations per day. Compared to other telemedicine services in France, such as Doctolib, Biloba doesn’t rely on video consultation. This way, it’ll be easier to deal with a large influx of new patients even with a small group of partner doctors.
The subscription business model is interesting for multiple reasons. First, Biloba isn’t covered by the French national healthcare system. In France, patients only get reimbursed if the doctor knows you already. That restriction has been lifted during the lockdown but it’s probably just a temporary lift.
Many parents probably don’t want to pay €120 per year to chat with a doctor when they could pay €0 through the national healthcare system. But if you can afford it, the barrier to medical advice becomes much lower.
Biloba previously released a vaccine reminder app that lets you enter information about your child’s vaccines and get reminders when the next scheduled vaccine is due.
Prague based Resistant AI has nabbed a $2.75M seed round. The security startup’s machine learning technology is designed to be deployed on top of AI systems used for financial decision making to protect customers in markets such as financial services and ecommerce from attacks such as targeted manipulation, adversarial machine learning and advanced fraud.
The seed round was co-led by Index Ventures (Jan Hammer) and Credo Ventures (Ondrej Bartos and Vladislav Jez). Seedcamp also participating, along with Daniel Dines, CEO of UiPath; Michal Pechoucek, CTO of Avast and other unnamed angel investors. Bartos joins the board of directors on behalf of the investors.
The startup sells an additional layer of protection that’s specifically designed for tightening security around automated functions such as credit risk scoring and anti-money laundering by using tech to detect fake documents that feed such systems. Its tech is also aimed at uncovering suspicious patterns of transactions which might indicate a strategic attack on the model itself or an attempt to copy sensitive data.
“Historically, all systems that make high-value financial decisions become targeted. This is already happening with the automated systems deployed by our fintech and financial customers and we are here to protect them,” said Martin Rehak, founder and CEO, in a statement.
The seed round is Resistant AI’s first tranche of external funding, with the founders bootstrapping the company since starting up in February 2019.
“We have onboarded the first customers in 2019 and the funding will help us scale our sales organisation to meet the rising demand from banks and fintechs,” Rehak told us. “We are protecting the AI&ML systems used in financial automation from manipulation or misuse by smart attackers.”
Resistant AI has two products it offers its customers at this stage: First, document inspection. It offers a machine learning system that’s designed to flag and reject “malicious documents” submitted for automated processing. “Bank statements, payslips, invoices, purchase orders and KYC documents submitted to fintechs and banks are frequently manipulated or completely falsified,” explained Rehak. “Resistant Documents, our first service, identifies and rejects the suspicious or malicious inputs.”
A second offering — Resistant Transactions — applies AI to spot problematic transaction patterns.
“We work with the fact that most attacks on AI systems require extensive interaction to discover the vulnerability,” he said. “Our system is unique by inspecting all the customer queries (which can take form or payments, money transfers or credit applications assessed by the system we protect) in context of similar queries. By looking at the stream of queries statistically, we can recognise and block the attacks that seek to steal the information embodied in the model (information stealing) or, worse, aim to nudge the system into making the wrong decision by exploiting an existing bias in the system.”
Resistant AI isn’t breaking out customer numbers yet but Rehak said it onboarded its first customers last year. “The funding will help us scale our sales organisation to meet the rising demand from banks and fintechs,” he added, saying also that it will be spending on building out product features and extending functionality, as well as on beefing up the sales and go-to-market team.
“Right now, our target customers are financial and fintech startups, as well as other companies deploying the automated process (both software and RPA) in their financial processes,” he added. “The financial systems are our current focus, but the attacks on machine learning are relevant in many other areas: process automation, e-commerce, manipulation of ‘trend detection’ algorithms in social media and other opportunities.”
It’s using a SaaS model — preferring a value approach to pricing, per Rehak. “Our problem and approach is new, and we feel that the value pricing model aligns the incentives between us and the customer in the optimal way,” he said on that.
Asked who he sees as the main competitors for the business, he cited Google Brain plus the tech giant’s activities in adversarial machine learning.
The majority of work in this area is currently done in-house by the large tech companies building their own proprietary systems — such as Google and Microsoft, he added.
Other competitors he mentioned were Inpher, which is enabling machine learning on encrypted data; Sentilink, which is doing detection of synthetic identities in the US; and Bullwall (Denmark) and YC-backed Inscribe (US/Ireland) which are focused on document forgery.
Resistant AI’s founders have a background in machine learning applied to cyber security problems having founded Cognitive Security, an earlier startup which they subsequently sold to Cisco in 2013. Over some 12 years working in the security industry Rehak said they saw how attackers targeting AI systems were getting increasingly sophisticated in avoiding detection — which gave them the idea for their latest business.
Commenting on the seed funding in a statement, Jan Hammer, general partner at Index Ventures, added: “Automation, efficiency and reliability are cornerstones of financial innovation. As machine learning takes more and more nuanced financial decisions, it needs to be protected. And this is not true only in finance, but the attacks will rapidly spread to other domains as well. More of our activity today takes place online, a trend accelerated by COVID-19, and one we believe will last. With criminals ready to take advantage of every vulnerability, the need for solutions such as those from Resistant AI has never been greater.”
Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Thursday.
Amazon reportedly spent nearly $10 million on thermal cameras purchased from a Chinese company blacklisted in the US over allegations it helped the Chinese government detain Uighur and other minorities, according to Reuters. Zhejiang Dahua Technology reportedly sold Amazon 1,500 thermal imaging cameras, 500 of which are intended for use in the United States.Microsoft reported third-quarter earnings on Wednesday, reporting $35 billion in revenue and $10.8 billion in net income. Microsoft's overall commercial cloud business â which includes Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, Office 365 and other cloud services â reached $13.3 billion in sales for the quarter, up 39 percent year over year.Facebook's stock surged 10% in after-hours trading on Wednesday, after the company announced surging user numbers and better-than-expected financial earnings for the first quarter. In the first three months of the year, Facebook netted $17.74 billion in revenue, up 18% year-over-year, though it says it experienced a significant drop in advertising demand.Tesla CEO Elon Musk went on a Twitter rampage protesting the various lockdowns meant to curb the novel coronavirus' spread in the US. Musk tweeted "FREE AMERICA NOW" and shared an article critical about lockdowns. Salesforce is canceling all its events for the rest of 2020 and moving them online, including the massive Dreamforce conference that takes over San Francisco every year. Salesforce said it made the decision as the "COVID-19 situation continues to evolve" and its "first priority is to help ensure the health and safety of our customers, partners, employees and communities."Apple and Google have released the first version of their contact-tracing API to developers. It means governments and public health organizations can test out the tech in their own contact-tracing apps and give feedback.Airbnb has postponed new grad hires until August 2021 but is giving them 10% of their offered salary right now â even if they turn down the job. Glassdoor says that Airbnb's average new grad base salary is about $133,000, meaning the average 10% stipend could be about $13,000.170 cybersecurity experts warned that the British government's contact-tracing app could be used to surveil people even after coronavirus has gone. Experts warn the app could result in a database that could then be used to de-anonymize users.Lyft said on Wednesday that it would cut nearly 1,000 jobs and had furloughed 288 workers. Collectively, the job cuts and furloughs represent more than 20% of Lyft's latest reported headcount of 5,683 employees at the end of 2019. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is now worth two Mark Zuckerbergs. Bezos is now worth $140 billion, while Zuckerberg is worth $70 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk faced a myriad of responses after calling the lockdown measure to curb the spread of the coronavirus 'fascist.'
Musk went on a short expletive-filled rant during a Wednesday earnings call following an announcement about the company's surprise first-quarter profit, Business Insider previously reported.
"Frankly, I would call it forcible imprisoning of people in their homes against all of, their constitutional rights, in my opinion," he said. "It's breaking people's freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong and not why they came to America or built this country. What the f--k. Excuse me. Outrage. Outrage."
Elon Musk faced a myriad of responses after calling the US lockdown to curb the spread of the coronavirus 'fascist.'
Musk also called the government imposed shutdown of all-but-essential businesses undemocratic.
"If somebody wants to stay in their house, that's great and they should be able to," he said. "But to say they cannot leave their house and that they will be arrested if they do: that's fascist. That is not democratic; this is not freedom. Give people back their godd--n freedom."
Mike Murphy an editor at Protocol tweeted: "Elon Musk is a sweary constitutional scholar now."
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The orders have been put in place to limit the spread of the coronavirus, which has thus far infected more than one million Americans and killed more than 60,800. Individuals are still allowed to leave their homes to get essential goods and exercise. Many governors have said the measures are not meant to imprison or arrest individuals.
Jim Kessler, the executive vice president for policy at the think tank Third Way, asked Musk how the Congressional Black Caucus would feel about lifting the lockdown, in a tweet:
Kessler wrote: "before you tell America to get back to work, talk to the black and brown people working the front lines and paying the price," and linked to a The Hill article on how members of the Congressional Black Caucus taking charge during the pandemic as black people have become disproportionately impact by the coronavirus in the US.
According to the article Kessler linked to, 70% of those who died after contracting the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 in Louisiana were black.
Some seemed to feel that this wasn't a surprising Musk response, like journalist Jake Hanrahan who tweeted "Elon Musk is on one again."
This isn't the first time Musk has been critical of the US coronavirus response. On March 6, Musk claimed that panic about the coronavirus "is dumb."
On Tuesday, the billionaire continued his attack on the response efforts and urged leaders to "FREE AMERICA NOW" on Twitter as well as praised Texas' relaxation of rules starting Friday.
However, some seemed to agree with Musk including Dana Loesch, a former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association and former editor at Breitbart News.
On Twitter, Loesch claimed Musk's comments made her want to now buy a Tesla.
And others were still confused about Musk's logic for the statements he made. Ryan Houlihan, an editor at Input Magazine called said the billionaire's statements went "against all science and reason to the point of advocating for mass death."
Others wondered why any attention is paid to Musk at all.
Author Nancy Jo Sales tweeted: "Why does anyone listen to this a-hole? He got lucky early with some Internet stuff. After that, spotty record which includes insanity of shooting a car into space. What is Grimes thinking?"
On Wednesday night, Musk seemed to double down on his argument by tweeting a graph that showed a decline in hospitalization rates in California as a reason to ease lockdown measures.
However, a number of factors, including the elimination of elective surgeries, alongside a reduction in car accidents and trauma due to the lockdown, and that California's mitigation strategies have reduced the number of coronavirus cases, could be contributing to that reduction. The Los Angeles Times reported earlier this month that car accidents in California were down by about half compared to previous years.
Musk later followed up on that tweet with a screenshot that showed the state's Human and Health Services server down and wrote "California HHS server crashed. Maybe it has covid."
Public health officials have urged states to stay at home to slow the spread of the virus â which has proven highly infectious and can be deadly, especially for those who are elderly or have other health conditions. The stay-at-home orders are also in place so that hospitals don't face a surge of patients, overwhelming staff and the PPE supply.
After initially reducing their projected death estimates, models used by the White House began increasing their expected death toll to more than 70,000 last week as states begin to ease stay at home orders.
On April 22nd, Zoom published a blog entry claiming that daily usage of its videoconferencing app "surpasses 300M Daily Users" and "that more than 300 million people around the world are using Zoom during this challenging time."
That figure was reported in a number of press outlets, including Bloomberg and Business Insider, and Zoom's stock surged soon after the blog post went out.
However, at some point since it was first published, the blog was edited â as first noticed by The Verge â to say that the company had "300 million daily meeting participants." That's a related, but different, measure to the more standard daily active user (DAU) metric. You can read an cached copy of the original post here.
"We are humbled and proud to help over 300 million daily meeting participants stay connected during this pandemic," a Zoom spokesperson told Business Insider. "In a blog post on April 22, we unintentionally referred to these participants as 'users' and 'people.' When we realized this error, we adjusted the wording to 'participants.' This was a genuine oversight on our part."
A Zoom spokesperson explained to Business Insider that the "daily meeting participant" measure allows for a single user to attend multiple meetings a day. Taking five Zoom calls per day would count a user as five meeting participants. A DAU is calculated as an individual user logging into the app.Â
Notably, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan used language reflecting the "meeting participants" language in a webcast earlier on the same day the blog post went up.
The distinction is important because it gives more clarity on how much Zoom's user base has actually grown as its profile is raised amid the remote work boom sparked by the pandemic â and calls attention to similar kinds of confusion in previous media coverage of Zoom and its user numbers.
On April 1st, chief executive Yuan published a blog post noting that amid the pandemic, Zoom saw a massive spike in usage up to "more than 200 million daily meeting participants, both free and paid." Several technology news outlets including Reuters, CNBC, and Business Insider inaccurately reported the figure as Zoom claiming to have 200 million daily active users, rather than meeting participants.
Asked why Zoom never corrected the record, the company had no ready explanation.
Zoom's skyrocketing user numbers have only served to spotlight the company's rapid ascent amid the coronavirus pandemic. The company went from a niche enterprise videoconferencing tool, to a vital tool for personal and professional socialization at a time when people are staying at home to stem the spread of COVID-19.
However, a focus on meeting participants, rather than DAUs, makes it harder to gauge how the company is doing against rivals like Microsoft and Slack, both of whom have similarly benefitted from the remote work surge.Â
On Wednesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Wall Street analysts that its Microsoft Teams chat app has 75 million daily active users, and that the app had seen 200 million meeting participants in a single day earlier this month. While Microsoft's app isn't seeing quite as many daily meeting participants as Zoom at this point, it's impossible to know if Teams has more or fewer individual users than its rival.Â
Zoom has faced a myriad of privacy and security issues as its usage grew, including the phenomenon of "Zoombombing," where hackers or trolls join calls uninvited and share indecent material. This has prompted Zoom to make fixes to its security settings like making virtual waiting rooms and passwords on by default for free users. On April 1 it enacted a 90-day feature freeze to focus on improving the privacy and security of its tool.Â
Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email atÂ
Businesses across the United States are being devastated by the coronavirus â losing customers, laying off staff, or being forced to shut down entirely.
But not Facebook.
The California-based social networking giant currently looks set to come out of the pandemic in an increasingly strong position, as the economic crisis reinforces its dominance, helps rehabilitate its image, and accelerates market trends that are working in its favor.
On Wednesday, Facebook announced its financial results for the first quarter of 2020, the period when the crisis began to bite. As expected, Facebook's advertising-business took a hit â but even then, it did better than Wall Street was anticipating and Facebook's stock jumped 10% in after-hours trading.
And in the first few weeks of April â when some of the pandemic and lockdown's impacts have been most acute â Facebook said that its revenue is at roughly the same level as it was during the year-ago period. To be sure, flat revenue is a significant slowdown from Facebook's typical double-digit revenue growth, but it's a sign that the fundamentals of the business remain healthy.
The future is foggier than ever, and a lot could change in the coming months. But for now, in both the near, and long-term, both financially and reputationally, Facebook is positioned to do well.
In the midst of the crisis, advertisers are focusing on advertising campaigns and formats that can deliver direct, tangible results, and away from broader awareness-raising efforts, Facebook executives said on a call with analysts on Wednesday.Â
For Facebook's business thus far, that has meant better performance in verticals like gaming (where the success of the ad can be easy to measure: did the viewer install the game?) over ones like autos (where an advertiser might be trying to less boost their company's reputation in less tangible ways).
It's a trend that will benefit Facebook, which can promise scared and hurting advertisers incredibly precise tools to target narrow segments of the population and track the success of their ads. Advertisers still looking to spend will likely turn to Facebook and similar platforms like Google in the coming weeks and months over other outlets that don't offer the same functionality â like news organizations, who are already reporting a cratering in ad revenues that have sparked industry-wide layoffs.
Facebook has not had a great few years.
Since 2016, the company has been beset by scandals, from Cambridge Analytica's misappropriation of tens of millions of users' data to the social network's role in spreading hate speech that fueled genocide in Myanmar. But now, coronavirus has the potential to help rehabilitate the company's reputation.
With huge swathes of the world unable to go outside, record numbers of people are turning to the company's apps and services to stay in contact with their friends and families. When life eventually approaches a semblance of normal (or some new "normal"), that utility Facebook offered people may translate into significant goodwill.
Facebook is also leaping to try and fill other gaps left by the pandemic shutdowns, including hosting a star-studded virtual graduation event for the Class of 2020 in May that will be headlined by Oprah.
Similarly, Facebook is handing out $100 million in grants to 30,000 small businesses in their time of need. For some companies, this cash injection may mean the difference between life and death. They likely won't forget who helped them stay afloat.
Due to lockdowns in place around the globe, the internet is many businesses' only hope of survival.
"With so many businesses forced to close their physical storefronts, more are looking to build their digital presences and those who already invested in their digital presences are increasingly viewing them as their primary storefronts," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday.
In the short-term, Facebook may be a major beneficiary of this, as companies use the platform as a free way to build out a long-term presence, and perhaps even take out ads to try to attract customers.
But over the longer-term, it also points to a shift that will also work in the social network's favor.
Over the last decade, the rise of ecommerce and online shopping has been the defining trend of the retail landscape. With physical stores closed, the pandemic is drastically accelerating this, not only bringing more businesses online but forcing ever-more people to adopt online shopping to fulfill their needs.
For years, Facebook has quietly been investing in shopping tools, particularly on Instagram. While this functionality is likely too early to give a material short-term boost to Facebook's revenues, it means the company is well-positioned to take advantage of consumers' shifting shopping habits over the coming years.
It also sounds like Facebook is doubling down on this area: On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg said the company would have more to share on this front in the coming weeks.
Do you work at Facebook? Contact Business Insider reporter Rob Price via encrypted messaging app Signal (+1 650-636-6268), encrypted email (
The state of New York paid $69 million for ventilators to a man with no background in medical supplies after he tweeted at President Donald Trump and the White House coronavirus task force recommended him as a vendor, BuzzFeed News reported.
The ventilators never arrived.
On March 27, as the novel coronavirus was surging through the US, Trump urged Ford and General Motors on Twitter to "START MAKING VENTILATORS, NOW!"
Yaron Oren-Pines, an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley, replied to the tweet, writing, "We can supply ICU Ventilators, invasive and noninvasive. Have someone call me URGENT."
BuzzFeed reported that New York shelled out $69.1 million to Oren-Pines three days later for 1,450 ventilators â at least three times the standard price for high-end models. A state official told the outlet that New York entered into the contract with Oren-Pines at the "direct recommendation" of the White House coronavirus task force. It's unclear who specifically authorized the recommendation.
New York has since terminated the contract and the state is reportedly trying to recover its money. Reached for comment by phone, Oren-Pines told BuzzFeed News, "Neither me nor my company is providing any comment on this," and hung up.
In a similar case earlier this month, the Trump administration awarded a $55 million contract to a bankrupt company with no employees for N95 masks, according to The Washington Post.
The company, Panthera Worldwide LLC, describes itself as a tactical training company for the US military and other government agencies, has no record of producing medical supplies or equipment, The Post said.
Panthera's parent company filed for bankruptcy protection last fall, and one of its owners last year said it'd had no employees since May 2018, The Post reported, citing sworn testimony. It is no longer listed as an LLC in Virginia, where its main office is located, after fees went unpaid.
The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus, which causes a disease known as COVID-19, a pandemic last month.
As of Wednesday evening, 3,187,030 people around the world have been infected, and the US is the global epicenter of the outbreak, with more than one million confirmed cases.
New York is the hardest-hit state, with 305,024 cases and 23,317 deaths. Gov. Andrew Cuomo said on Wednesday that the death rate in the state has been flat for three consecutive days but that the number of new hospital admissions for the coronavirus increased slightly for the first time in 12 days.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk slammed US infrastructure on Wednesday during the electric-car maker's first-quarter earnings call, saying it was in need of new investment.
"I think it's high time we invested in infrastructure in this country," Musk said when asked what message he would send to the US government for the years after the country recovers from the spread of the novel coronavirus.
"We have a lot of crumbling highways and bridges and, frankly, when I visit China, I see their infrastructure as being much better than ours. It's great. Europe has better infrastructure. It's really quite sad that US infrastructure, especially roads and highways, is where it is today," Musk said. "And our airports, in a lot of cases, are an embarrassment."
Improving US infrastructure will require money to be spent wisely on projects that are oriented toward the future, Musk added.
"Sometimes we spend a lot of money on these things, but what do we gain for it? We really need to be thinking about what is the transportation of the future, not the transportation of the past," he said.
The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has criticized the state of American infrastructure, giving it a grade of D+ in its 2017 report card, the most recent one the organization has published. At the time, the ASCE estimated the US would have to spend $4.59 trillion by 2025 to make the necessary improvements.
Tesla announced a surprise first-quarter profit on Wednesday, saying it made $1.24 per share, on an adjusted basis, on revenue of $5.99 billion, despite factory closures and sales disruptions caused by the spread of the novel coronavirus. Wall Street analysts had predicted an adjusted loss of $0.34 per share on revenue of $5.8 billion. The first quarter of this year marks the first time Tesla has posted three consecutive quarterly profits in its 17-year history.
Are you a current or former Tesla employee? Do you have an opinion about what it's like to work there? Contact this reporter atÂ
Salesforce is cancelling all its events for the rest of 2020 and bringing them online, including its annual Dreamforce conference that typically takes place in the fall.Â
Dreamforce is Salesforce's largest annual conference, held in San Francisco, where the cloud giant's headquarters is located. The event usually draws up to 170,000 attendees, and has generated more than $150 million in annual spending for the local economy, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
This comes as the coronavirus pandemic has already canceled or moved online many tech conferences and tech company events in this past spring. Salesforce plans to move all upcoming 2020 events online, inlcuding Dreamforce, Tableau Conference 2020, Tableau Conference Europe, TrailheaDX India and its World Tour customer conferences.Â
"As the COVID-19 situation continues to evolve, our first priority is to help ensure the health and safety of our customers, partners, employees and communities. With this in mind, we have decided to reimagine our events through the end of the year in new and virtual ways," Salesforce wrote in a blog post.
It already took a similar approach with its World Tour Sydney event in March, and said the event, normally attended by 11,000 people, turned into one "viewed by 80,000 people."Â
Salesforce says it will refund all passes purchased for upcoming events and will refund all sponsorship fees.Â
Salesforce isn't the only tech company to cancel future events amid concern about the coronavirus pandemic. Facebook has canceled all events with more than 50 people through June 2021.Â
Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email atÂ
In a short rant complete with expletives, Elon Musk doubled down on his stance against the shelter-in-place orders introduced by various US states in recent weeks in an effort to stop the novel coronavirus' spread.
The Tesla chief executive did not mince words on a Wednesday conference call following the company's surprise first-quarter profit when he said Tesla's forced factory shutdowns were a "serious risk" to the electric-car maker's business.
"Frankly, I would call it forcible imprisoning of people in their homes against all of, their constitutional rights, in my opinion," he said. "It's breaking people's freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong and not why they came to America or built this country. What the f---. Excuse me. Outrage. Outrage."
Back on March 6, as the US first began reporting cases within its borders, the billionaire first said panic about the coronavirus "is dumb." Known US cases now top 1 million. On Tuesday, he ratcheted up his complaints on Twitter, urging leaders to "FREE AMERICA NOW" and praising Texas' plan to relax rules starting Friday.
"It will cause great harm, not just to Tesla but to many companies," Musk said on the call. "And while Tesla will weather the storm, there are many companies that will not. Everything people have worked for their whole life is being destroyed in real time."
Musk even went so far as to call it undemocratic for state governments to order shutdowns of businesses deemed nonessential.
"If somebody wants to stay in their house, that's great and they should be able to," he said. "But to say they cannot leave their house and that they will be arrested if they do, that's fascist. That is not democratic â this is not freedom. Give people back their goddamn freedom."
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday that he is "extremely confident" the electric-car maker's Autopilot advanced driver-assistance system will be able to drive from an owner's home to their office by the end of this year.
"Most of the time," the system will be able to do so without the driver having to take control, Musk said. A version of Autopilot Musk is testing is close to achieving this capability, he added.
Last year, Musk promised Autopilot would be able to pick an owner up and drive them to their destination without human intervention by the end of 2019.
"I would say that I am certain of that. That is not a question mark," Musk said at the time.
Tesla missed that deadline, but has in the past year added new features to Autopilot, like the ability to drive in parking lots and recognize stop signs and traffic lights, that have brought the system closer to Musk's vision while also raising safety concerns.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Musk has a history of making, and missing, aggressive timelines for Tesla's autonomous-driving technology. In 2015, Musk said the company's vehicles would be able to drive themselves by 2017. He also said Tesla would send a self-driving vehicle across the US by the end of 2017, and when the company missed that deadline, he pushed it to the first half of 2018, a target Tesla also failed to hit.
Tesla announced a surprise first-quarter profit on Wednesday, saying it made $1.24 per share, on an adjusted basis, on revenue of $5.99 billion, despite factory closures and sales disruptions caused by the spread of the novel coronavirus. Wall Street analysts had predicted an adjusted loss of $0.34 per share on revenue of $5.8 billion. The first quarter of this year marks the first time Tesla has posted three consecutive quarterly profits in its 17-year history.
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Analysts see Google Cloud as one of the company's "bright spots" amid the slowdowns in its advertising business that it reported in its first quarter earnings on Tuesday.
Alphabet revealed that Google Cloud generated $2.8 billion in revenue, a 52% year-over-year increase that was in line with its 53% increase the quarter before. That's compared to sluggish 10% year-over-year growth for its ad business, which grew about 16% in 2019.Â
These results show that Google Cloud is emerging as a "formidable competitor" in the cloud market, where it's up against Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, Jefferies equity analyst Brent Thill wrote in a note to clients following the report.Â
Not that Google Cloud is completely immune to the effects of the pandemic. It's started cutting costs, Â slowing down both hiring and its rate of building cloud data centers.
Here's what analysts had to say about Google Cloud's biggest strengths and challenges during the pandemic:
While companies are slashing their marketing budgets â which in turn impacts Google's advertising business â analysts predict that the cloud division could see a major pick-up as more people work remotely and businesses move to the cloud.
As SunTrust managing director Youssef Squali put it, the pandemic may even be an "accelerant" for Google Cloud, which he described as one of the company's "bright spots."
Google Cloud's growth was driven in large part by GCP, especially its data and analytics platform. In addition, the coronavirus pandemic could prompt more businesses to move from on-premise data centers to the cloud, where they can rent out as much capacity as they need. CEO Sundar Pichai said on the call that business that were once "hesitant to shift their budgets" are now "asking the questions deeper" and moving to the cloud.Â
Pichai said that that was a "longer-term trend" that the company is "excited about," and analysts agree:
"We believe the COVID-19 crisis will accelerate the overall shift to digital," Doug Anmuth, J.P. Morgan managing director, wrote in a note to clients,"And over time we believe that will result in incremental online ad dollars, greater adoption of the cloud, and increased dependence on technology."Â
Google Cloud's productivity tools, G Suite, saw increased adoption, too, hitting 6 million paying customers. Â
"The offering is helping companies and employees be productive in a distributed and remote work environment," Ralph Schackart, partner at William Blair, wrote in a note to clients following the report. "Continued growth in both seat count and average revenue per seat is propelling the ongoing growth of G-Suite."
Still, it's not all sunshine and rainbows for Google Cloud.
While analysts predict that it will continue growing during the pandemic, the unit still faces some significant challenges.Â
Google Cloud had previously been on a hiring spree as it worked to triple its salesforce over the next few years. However, that ambition goal may be stunted as Google has slowed down hiring for the rest of the year.
The company also expects to face delays in data center construction because of the coronavirus pandemic, Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat said on the company's earnings call. That's particularly important because it needs those data centers to scale its cloud as it tries to catch up to AWS and Microsoft.
Finally, CEO Pichai also pointed out on the call that although Google Cloud is still winning deals, it's "taking a bit longer" as its customers also feel the impact of the economic downturn:Â
"Naturally, as you would expect, our customers are impacted through moments like this, too."
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The "most exciting" day in Tesla's history will happen in May, chief executive Elon Musk said Wednesday.
He was referring to "battery day," an event the electric automaker intended to host in April to show off its technology soon, but was disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.
Now, Musk said on a conference call, that symposium is most likely set for the third week of May and will either be in Texas or California, "depending on what we are allowed to do."
Texas is likely an option because the state plans to lift some restrictions and restart businesses on Friday, starting with restaurants and retail stores at a quarter of their capacity.
Earlier this week, Musk praised Gov. Greg Abbott's plan, saying we must "FREE AMERICA NOW" and "Bravo Texas!"
When he first announced battery day, Musk heralded the event as "a comprehensive review of cell chemistry, module and pack, architecture, and manufacturing plan that has a clear roadmap to a terawatt-hour per year."
In 2019, Tesla held an "autonomy day" where it showed off its partially self-driving technology to journalists, investors, and analysts.
Microsoft's workplace chat app Teams now has 75 million daily active users, CEO Satya Nadella said on the company's earnings call with analysts on Wednesday.Â
The announcement comes as the coronavirus pandemic has forced businesses to operate remotely, and has boosted the demand for Microsoft's products that enable comminication and collaboration. It also highlights the rapid growth of the tool: On March 18, Microsoft said Teams had hit 44 million daily active users. That was itself up from the 32 million daily active users Teams had just the week before that.
"As COVID-19 impacts every aspect of our work and life, we've seen two years' worth of digital transformation in two months," Nadella said on the call. He touted Microsoft Teams as the only tool that combines meetings, calls, chat and collaboration in one place, given that it integrates with the rest of the Office 365 cloud suite.Â
Indeed, Teams is part of the broader Microsoft 365 bundle of productivity tools offered by the company, meaning that customers of one are customers of the other, and have merely to turn it on to start using it.Â
Microsoft also said it plans to release a consumer version of Teams later this year as part of a revamped bundle of its Office 365 tools for consumers, to try and capture that market as well.Â
This comes as the landscape for video conferencing and communication have become increasingly competitive, as people's personal and professional lives rely on tools like Microsoft Teams to stay connected.Â
Zoom, in particular, has seen its prominence rise amid the pandemic, with 200 million daily active users at last count. The company confused the issue when, in a recent blog post, it said that it had 300 million daily active users â but then later amended it to say that the number referred only to the number of Zoom meeting participants. Zoom has yet to comment on the matter, first spotted by The Verge.
Microsoft, for its part, says that it had 200 million meeting participants in a day this month. The distinction between the two metrics is that "daily meeting participants" count across multiple meetings: If you take five Zoom or Teams meetings in a day, then you're counted five times.Â
Slack, which offers a competing chat app, has seen a boost recently as well, but has not released a new daily active user number since October when it said it had 12 million. On March 25, Slack did say it added 9,000 new paid customers about halfway through its current quarter.Â
On the call, Nadella highlighted that healthcare and educational institutions using Teams, saying in healthcare there were more than 34 million Teams meetings in the past month and that over 183,000 educational institutions are using the tool.
He highlighted a few large customers who are using Teams including the NFL, which used it for its draft and Accenture which is the first organization to surpass 500,000 users on Teams.
"More broadly, we continue to see momentum with organizations across Microsoft 365," Nadella said.Â
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The Small Business Administration has told banks it will no longer accept stimulus loan applications processed using robotic automation tools as the agency began a new round of funding after the first ran out in just two weeks.
The technology, called robotic process automation, or RPA, helps businesses automate common, repetitive tasks, such as filling out forms or sending routine email responses.Â
The SBA suggested the tool lets some lenders submit applications at a much faster rate â although Automation Anywhere, a leading RPA startup, argued that it was the agency's first-come-first served policy for securing the loans that created problems.
The SBA said banks and lenders that use RPA "burden the processing system and diminish its capabilities," the agency said in a Tuesday notice to the financing institutions.
Miryam Mora Barajas, an SBA regional communications director, said the agency also told lenders that it is also adjusting the "pacing of applications."
"All lenders would be able to submit at the same rate per hour," she told Business Insider. "The pacing mechanism prevents any one lender from submitting thousands of loans an hour" to the SBA system. "If a lender goes above the pacing limit they will get timed out."
Max Mancini, an executive vice president with Automation Anywhere, said the new guidelines meant banks would not be able to submit more than 350 loan applications in an hour.
The SBA put out the notice on the use of RPA as the agency came under fire after a big chunk of the first round of loans under the federal the Paycheck Protection Program went to public companies, instead of small businesses, including mom and pop shops that are struggling to survive in the downturn.
But Manicini argued that robotic automation was not the root cause of the SBA's problems. Instead it was the first-come-first served policy which caused the first round of funding to be exhausted rapidly without a system in place for making sure the funds went to the businesses that really needed the money, he said.
Over the past weeks, there's been a public outcry over the stimulus loans that went to public companies or large organizations Los Angeles Lakers, instead of smaller, local enterprises.
"The reason this problem exists is because of the first -come-first-served policy," Mancini told Business Insider. "Otherwise, they would have been able to take all the applications and figure out how to deliver them. Because it's first-come-first-served, the people with the best technology win. That's the reality. And that tends to not favor smaller players."
Contrary to the view that RPA is a tool used mainly by big financial institutions, he said smaller banks have actually turned to robotic process automation as a low-cost tool for processing loan applications faster.
"The small lenders can't manually process everything," he said. "They're not going to get through everything before the money runs out. My view is RPA helps level the playing field because RPA is a low cost way to implement automation without hiring a large IT team or consulting firm. So it's painful to hear them say in a broad stroke that RPA is a problem because it's not about RPA."
Mancini said Automation Anywhere has made adjustments to its technology to help clients who will still be able to use RPA on the backend of the process while preparing applications before they are submitted to the SBA.
Another major RPA startup, UiPath, has not been impacted by the SBA rule, according to Chief Marketing Officer Bobby Patrick, who also cited the contribution of the technology.
"It is incredible that banks were able to process more than 14 years of loans in less than 14 days," he told Business insider. "This could not have been possible without RPA. The load on SBA's systems must be unprecedented. The good thing is that the SBA is delivering loans at volumes never seen before, saving American workers and saving the economy."
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It was good news in Facebook's first-quarter earnings on Wednesday, with the company beating Wall Street expectations and announcing surging user numbers, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg began the company's earnings call with a somber tone as he pondered the harmful effects that opening up society too soon might have during the coronavirus pandemic.
"I worry that reopening too quickly will almost guarantee future outbreaks and worse health and economic outcomes," Zuckerberg said.
The CEO also said he was fearful that the health emergency and economic fallout of the pandemic would last longer than people might realize.
While Zuckerberg's comments may not seem all that controversial, the Facebook cofounder's remarks come as another high-profile tech exec â Elon Musk â has been busy protesting the coronavirus-related lockdowns, tweeting things like "Give the people their freedom back!"
Facebook said the coronavirus outbreak hit its ad revenue hard in March, as the prices of its ads plunged and businesses in sectors like travel and automobiles halted marketing efforts on the social network.
But users have flocked to Facebook's collection of products, which includes WhatsApp and Instagram, during the pandemic. The total number of people using at least one Facebook product per month reached 2.99 billion in the first quarter.
Facebook credited the surge in user engagement to the pandemic and the lockdowns in countries across the world, as people sought ways to stay connected with friends and family and to learn more about the disease. Even virtual reality â a technology that has struggled to catch on with mainstream users â appears to be getting a boost.
Facebook's "other revenues" category, which includes hardware like its Oculus VR headset and Portal smart speakers, were up 80% year-on-year.
"Technology that allows us to feel present" is appealing when people can't travel in real life, Zuckerberg said on the call. "It's possible that this accelerated some of the trends around adoption."
But Zuckerberg stopped short of predicting a long-term acceleration in virtual reality. And Facebook acknowledged that once the threat of the pandemic subsided, the crowds now visiting its various online services would thin out.
"We expect that we will lose at least some of this increased engagement when various shelter-in-place restrictions are relaxed in the future," the company said.
Workers from Walmart, FedEx, Target, Instacart, Amazon, and Amazon's Whole Foods Market plan to go on strike to protest what they say are unsafe working conditions amid the coronavirus pandemic, The Intercept first reported Wednesday.
The members of an unprecedented coalition of employees and gig workers in at least half a dozen states plan to call in sick or walk off their jobs during their lunch breaks on Friday, International Workers' Day, according to The Intercept.
According to The Intercept, the workers are making a variety of demands, including back pay for unpaid time off they've used since the beginning of March, hazard pay or paid sick leave for the remainder of the pandemic, company-provided protective equipment and cleaning supplies at all times, and increased transparency from the companies about the number of COVID-19 cases in their facilities.
The organizers say their employers, all of which have been considered essential business and remained open during the pandemic, are seeing record profits at the expense of workers' health and safety.
"We are acting in conjunction with workers at Amazon, Target, Instacart and other companies for International Worker's Day to show solidarity with other essential workers in our struggle for better protections and benefits in the pandemic," Daniel Steinbrook, a Whole Foods employee and strike organizer, told The Intercept.
Christian Smalls, who was fired by Amazon after his participation in a protest over the company's refusal to close a New York warehouse when a worker there tested positive for COVID-19, tweeted a picture of flyer advertising the strike.
"It's time to join up! Protect all workers at all cost we are not expandable or replaceable enough is enough TAKE THE POWER BACK!" Smalls said in the tweet.
News of the protests comes as essential workers are increasingly speaking out about working conditions and lawmakers and labor regulators are paying closer attention to companies' responses.
Amazon workers have organized multiple strikes in New York, Chicago, Minnesota, and Italy, as well as virtually, as colleagues have tested positive for COVID-19, calling the company's coronavirus response inadequate and criticizing its refusal to provide information about the number of its warehouses that have seen outbreaks of the disease.
Amazon defended its warehouse conditions and safety procedures, telling Business Insider in a statement that "masks, temperature checks, hand sanitizer, increased time off, increased pay, and more are standard across our Amazon and Whole Food Market networks already."
The company also disputed workers' allegations about a lack of protective equipment, inadequate safety measures, and retaliation for employee activism.
"While we respect people's right to express themselves, we object to the irresponsible actions of labor groups in spreading misinformation and making false claims about Amazon... The statements made are not supported by facts or representative of the majority of the 500,000 Amazon operations employees in the U.S. who are showing up to work," it said.
The company is now also facing multiple inquiries from the National Labor Relations Board about whether it unlawfully retaliated against workers who spoke out, as well as an investigation brought by New York City's human-rights commissioner concerning the same issue. Earlier this week, New York's attorney general said Amazon may have violated the state's whistleblower law by firing Smalls after he went on strike.
In March, more than 10,000 Instacart grocery shoppers went on strike to demand hazard pay and safety equipment, with some eventually calling the company's response, which met some but not all of their demands, "insulting" and "a sick joke."
"Our team has been diligently working to offer new policies, guidelines, product features, resources, increased bonuses, and personal protective equipment to ensure the health and safety of shoppers during this critical time. We welcome all feedback from shoppers, and we will continue to enhance their experience and ensure this important community is supported," an Instacart spokeswoman told Business Insider.
Also in March, Whole Foods workers across the country called in sick and asked for better sick-pay policies and free coronavirus testing. They were joined by workers from Amazon and Instacart.
A Whole Foods spokesperson disputed that the protest resulted in any absenteeism among its workers.
"Statements made by this group misrepresent the full extent of Whole Foods Market's actions in response to this crisis and do not represent the collective voice of our more than 95,000 Team Members," the spokesperson told Business Insider, adding that Whole Foods has increased pay and benefits, enhanced cleaning measures, and provided protective gear for workers.
A Target spokesperson said the company has taken a number of steps directed at improving working conditions, including increased pay for hourly workers, bonuses for store managers, expanded sick-pay policies (such as 30 days of sick pay for elderly, at-risk, and pregnant employees), protective equipment, and social-distancing measures.
Walmart and FedEx did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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