Unsuspecting members of the public in Canada appear to have been paid by an unknown organization to pretend to be supporters of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou at her recent extradition hearing.

Two members of a crowd of about 20 say they were given money to hold signs and participate in a protest while Wanzhou tried to avoid being extradited to the US on fraud charges.

According to the participants who spoke out, they and others in the group were assembled at the British Columbia Superior Court in Vancouver, and told to hold up signs saying "Free Ms Meng" and "Trump Stop Bullying."

One participant, an actor called Julia Hackstaff, said she was conned into believing she was playing the role of a protester, without realizing it was a real event. She described her experience in a Facebook post the following day

 

A second, warehouse worker Ken Bonson, said she was told a vague story about "something to do with a protest" the next morning. She told her story to the Toronto Star newspaper.

Hackstaff said she was offered 100 Canadian dollars ($76), while Bonson said she and a friend were both offered 150 ($114).

Neither realized what was going on until they showed up, were given pre-written signs, and expected to act like supporters of Wanzhou. Neither knows who was ultimately footing the bill. Huawei has denied involvement.

Georgina Smyth, a reporter for the Canada's CBC News, said there was "something very strange" about the protest, since nobody wanted to discuss Meng's case and did not like answering questions.

 

On Facebook, Hackstaff said she was "victim of a filthy cheap scam that has deeply hurt me." She said she left after five minutes and didn't get paid.

Bonson says she did get paid, but felt bad about keeping the money so gave it to her partner. She said she was offered another payment to go back a different day, but declined.

She told the Star: "I'm honestly pretty ashamed and embarrassed and wish I never went... I want this to be something I can put behind me."

Meng, whose father is Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, has been detained in Canada since late 2018. She is accused of defrauding the bank HSBC by lying about the purpose of a shell company that did business with Iran, defying US sanctions.

Canadian authorities arrested her while she was trying to change flights in Vancouver, on the request of the US government. The court hearing this week is Meng's chance to convince Canada not to extradite her.

Lawyers for Meng argued that she is really wanted for breaking US sanctions, which is not a crime in Canada, and therefore means she should be let go.

Canadian government lawyers argue that the heart of her case is fraud, which is also illegal in Canada.

On Thursday the case ended without immediate resolution. According to the Associated Press, the judge in the case said she would announce a decision at an unspecified later date.

We finally know more about Spotify's long-discussed Car Thing — a voice-activated music-streaming gadget intended for the car (naturally), representing the music-streaming service's first foray into hardware. 

Spotify first announced the Car Thing in May, but said it was a prototype and that it had no plans to mass-produce it for consumers. The idea, Spotify said, was to give it to a select few users as a way to test how they listen to music and podcasts in the car, to give the company more data for future products and services. In other words, Spotify said, it had no plans to get into hardware.

That came as a disappointment to some Spotify users, who were excited at the prospect of buying a Car Thing for themselves: It has a built-in 4G/LTE modem to stream music without pairing to a phone, and it has a cache so that the music doesn't stop when reception cuts out. It also has voice controls so you don't have to look down to pause a track.

Since the gadget was first announced, Spotify hasn't said anything about the Car Thing or the results of its test in public. Indeed, we didn't even know for sure what it looks like, apart from a promotional image that Spotify shared when it was first announced — and any users who might have one don't appear to have shared any reviews or photos on social media.

Even Spotify's first filing with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) at the end of May didn't reveal too many details about Car Thing. However, at the end of September, Spotify updated that filing to include photos of the Car Thing itself, as well as its user manual, giving us our best look yet at the device.

Could the September filing, including the instruction manual, be a hint that things have changed and the Car Thing could go up for sale at some point? We've reached out to Spotify for comment and will update if we hear back. In the meanwhile, here's our best look yet at the device.

Here's what the now-available photos and user manual slides tell us about the Car Thing:

Intel's big bet on the market for data center chips appears to be paying off, but the chip giant is embracing a cautious approach to a market known for unexpected ebbs and flows.

Intel shares rallied more than 6% on Thursday after the chipmaker topped Wall Street expectations for the fourth quarter. The tech giant got a huge lift from its data center business which benefited from robust demand processors from the cloud service providers.

CEO Bob Swan said the results were based on a continuously expanding cloud market with an "insatiable appetite" for data and the processing resources needed to handle it.

Revenue for Intel's data center business rose 19% year over year to $7.2 billion. Its PC business edged up by 2% to $10 billion.

That's a good sign for Intel which has pivoted away from a shrinking PC market. The semiconductor giant has focused increasingly on the lucrative and growing market for processors used to power massive cloud infrastructures and corporate data centers.

Analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategy said Intel had a "great fourth quarter in spite of increased competition and supply challenges."

He was referring to the challenge posed by Intel archrival AMD, whose new server chips have won high praise, and is expected to take more share from Intel.  Intel also has been plagued by production issues that have led to supply constraints.

"The data-centric businesses carried the day," Moorhead told Business Insider. A key reason was the rapid growth of companies building massive cloud platforms, led by Amazon, Microsoft and Google. 

Swan said the cloud — specifically, serving mega-providers like Amazon and Microsoft with chips — is becoming a "bigger and bigger part" of its data center business revenue. But the cloud market can be unpredictable, which Intel learned the hard way last year when an unexpected build-out stalled, causing a dip in demand.

That's why Intel is proceeding with caution, Swan said. "They go into digestion mode and the buying patterns slow down," he told analysts on the earnings call. "Hopefully, we're wrong. Hopefully we're conservative."

But Intel also cheered Wall Street with an upbeat overall outlook for the quarter and the year.

For the first quarter, Intel said it expect a profit of $1.30 a share on revenue of $19 billion. Analysts were expecting a profit of $1.04 a share on revenue of $17.2 billion

For the full year, it sees a profit of $5 a share on revenue of $73.5 billion. Analysts were expecting a profit of $4.61  a share on revenue of $71 billion.

Intel reported a fourth-quarter profit of $6.9 billion, or $1.58 a share, compared with a profit of $5.2 billion, or $1.12 a share for the year-ago period. Revenue rose to $20.2 billion from $18.7 billion. Adjusted profit was $1.52 a share.

Analysts were expecting Intel to report a profit of $1.25 a share on revenue of $19.23 billion.

Got a tip about Intel or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., message him on Twitter @benpimentel or send him a secure message through Signal at (510)

Billionaire George Soros — well-known for his sizable donations to liberal political causes — said Thursday that he believes that Facebook and President Donald Trump are conspiring ahead of this year's presidential election.

"Facebook will work together to re-elect Trump, and Trump will work to protect Facebook," he said, as first reported by Bloomberg.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Soros said he thinks there's an "informal mutual assistance operation or agreement developing between Trump and Facebook," though he did not offer any evidence to back up his claim.

"This is just plain wrong," a Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider.

Soros also said there's "nothing to stop" Facebook from spreading misinformation and that he's "very concerned" about the 2020 elections. Soros has often been vilified by the political right for his ties to liberal causes — indeed, at this year's event, he also described Trump as a "a conman and a narcissist," the BBC reports.

This is not the first time Soros has used the event in Davos to criticize Facebook. In 2018, he argued that the tech giant's size and "monopolistic" behavior had made it a "menace" to society, damaged democracy, and encouraged "addiction" akin to gambling companies.

The New York Times reported later that year that, following Soros' remarks, Facebook had hired a Republican-linked opposition research firm called Definers Public Affairs, to dig up dirt on Soros and push negative press about him. 

Following the report, Facebook cut ties with Definers. Elliot Schrage, Facebook's policy and communications boss, took the fall publicly in a move that may have been meant to take heat off CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, who were both criticized in the Times' story for their mismanagement of controversies involving the company.

Your phone's ringtone can say a lot about your personality. 

The default ringtone that comes with your Android phone isn't always going to feel like it's right for you. You might find it annoying, too similar to another sound, or just want something that's a better fit for who you are.

Luckily, Android phones come with a plethora of ringtones to choose from. You can even set custom ringtones, too. 

Here's how.

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

Samsung Galaxy S10 (From $899.99 at Best Buy)

How to change your ringtone on an Android

1. Open the Settings app on your Android mobile device.

2. Tap on "Sounds and vibration."

3. Tap on "Ringtone."

4. The next menu will be a list of possible preset ringtones. With the volume turned up on your device, tap to test different ringtone options until you find the one you want.

5. Once you've selected a new ringtone, tap on it so that there's a blue circle to the left of the selection.

6. If you want to add a custom ringtone, tap on the "+" icon in the upper-right corner of the screen and select an option from any of the lists available. 

Your new ringtone will be saved as soon as you exit the Settings app.

Note that if you want a custom ringtone that isn't listed under the "+" menu, you'll have to download it directly to your Android device. 

Making it cheap to get humans and their stuff to and from space is no easy undertaking. But Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, is rushing to do just that at the southern tip of Texas.

Musk is so engrossed by the project, in fact, that his Twitter feed suggests he is skipping most of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, to which top executives typically flock. The SpaceX CEO is also crashing in a historic A-frame home to catch what rest he can between long slogs of work, according to at least one local resident.

Musk has been working late on an unprecedented rocket system called Starship. If realized, the final vehicle would be made of steel, stand 387 feet tall, and be fully reusable. Since most rockets today fall into the ocean after one use, Starship's reusability positions it to replace all other systems by slashing the cost of launching to space by more than 90%.

According to Musk, Starship would be even cheaper to operate per flight than SpaceX's own partly reusable Falcon 9 rockets. Where Falcon 9 costs the company tens of millions of dollars to fly up to 25 tons of payload, Starship might cost just $2 million to launch up to 100 tons, Musk said in November.

Such a system could deploy hundreds of SpaceX's next-generation Starlink internet satellites, heave gigantic telescopes into space for NASA, and ferry dozens of passengers into orbit at once. But Musk's big "aspirational" goals for Starship include sending the first cargo to Mars in 2022, launching the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and a crew of artists around the moon in 2023, and rocketing the first crewed mission to Mars in 2024.

"I think we could potentially see people fly next year," Musk said in September while unveiling a Starship prototype in Boca Chica, Texas, where SpaceX is building out a private launch site and basing its development program.

Musk now travels to South Texas at least monthly, according to social-media posts by Musk and others, for hands-on work toward launching the first Starship prototype, which he said might fly as soon as February or March.

During a visit in late December, Musk tweeted he was "up all night" working on the "most difficult part" of Starship's steel structure: the domed ends of 30-foot-wide propellant tanks. (Such a dome failed during a pressurization test weeks earlier, sending it flying hundreds of feet into the air and across a state highway.)

People who live in the area — and whom SpaceX is trying to buy out — find it hard to ignore Musk's presence, given his heavy security detail and onlookers who flock to their remote and formerly sleepy retiree-age beach community.

At least one resident, whose identity Business Insider has verified but who asked not to be named because of ongoing property-sale negotiations with SpaceX, said Musk almost certainly now crashes in an A-frame-style house that SpaceX recently acquired.

"It's perfect," the resident said, adding that the house is not only the nicest of about 30 homes in the area but also the only place that's "secluded and security-controlled."

Here's a look inside the home, which also has a special historic significance to the Boca Chica area.

A new job, a new life direction, a new priority — circumstances change, and sometimes that means a new Gmail account needs to become your top priority.

That's when it's time to change your default Google account, and therefore prioritize a certain one over any others you have. That way, you'll see those emails first, but you'll be able to switch over to your other linked accounts whenever you want.

Luckily, it's easy to set a new default Google account on your Mac or PC. It should only take a few minutes to accomplish. Here's how to do it. 

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

Lenovo IdeaPad 130 (From $299.99 at Best Buy)

MacBook Pro (From $1,299.99 at Best Buy)

How to change your default Google account

1. Go to mail.google.com on your PC or Mac computer, make sure you're logged in, and click on your profile picture icon located in the top-right corner of the screen.

Nearly three dozen brands are set to descend on your TV screens during the Super Bowl this year.

A number of them, including Facebook, pizza chain Little Caesars, and hummus maker Sabra, are first-timers, joining returning Super Bowl advertisers like Budweiser and Pepsi.

For Little Caesars, which is running a 30 second-long ad during the third quarter, the Super Bowl's large captive audience is a big draw as people are migrating away from TV. The Super Bowl drew an average televised audience of around 98.2 million viewers last year, according to Nielsen.

"While the media market is considerably evolving, the Super Bowl remains the best way to reach as many people as possible at once," Jeff Klein, SVP of global marketing at Little Caesars, told Business Insider. "It's not just about viewers, it's about engagement — there are many people that tune in for the commercials rather than the game — there's nothing else quite like it."

Others, like running brand Saucony, wanted to tap into the tentpole nature of the Super Bowl, albeit with a different strategy. The company is buying ads on Fox's streaming platforms, rather than the network, because it's seen recent success on connected TV and streaming platforms, said Don Lane, Saucony's CMO.

"We purposefully are targeting streaming viewers because our research shows they are a discerning and connected audience," Lane said. "We've had good luck with connected TV recently, it drives search interest and traffic to our site."

Other brands including New York Life, Snickers and Squarespace are returning to the Super Bowl after sitting out in recent years. New York Life was a prolific advertiser in the '80s, and is making a comeback after decades to launch a new campaign marking its 175th anniversary.

"This is a significant milestone for our brand, and one that provides us with a once in a generation opportunity to make a powerful statement about our brand and our role in peoples' lives," said Kari Axberg, New York Life's VP of brand marketing. "

Here are the advertisers running Super Bowl commercials for the first time:

PDFs are an integral part of visual communication. 

Flyers, menus, brochures, and newsletters are all commonly saved in the .pdf format.

Facebook does allow its user to attach and upload PDF files to posts, but there's a catch: The feature isn't available on your personal profile page. Instead, you can only use it on business pages and groups.

Here's when — and how — you can upload a PDF to Facebook.

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

MacBook Pro (From $1,299.99 at Best Buy)

Microsoft Surface Pro 7 (From $699.99 at Best Buy)

How to upload a PDF to a Facebook business page

If you have a Facebook business page, you can upload a PDF. However, there's another catch — whatever you upload will be considered a "menu" by Facebook, as if you were a restaurant.

This is great if you actually are trying to post a menu for your restaurant, but might not be what you want otherwise.

1. Open your web browser of choice on your Mac or PC and go to Facebook.com.

2. Under the "Explore" tab on the left sidebar, go to Pages, where you can create or open your business page.

Hearst employees who are unionizing got a big victory this week when the National Labor Relations Board ruled in their favor.

On November 12, Hearst Magazine editorial employees at some of the best-known titles including Cosmopolitan and Esquire announced that they had unionized, joining a throng of other media workers.

A Hearst union would be a big win for the Writers Guild of America East, with some 550 people spanning 24 brands, making it what's believed to be the biggest union in digital media.

The most recent dispute centers over who is a supervisor. Hearst has been fighting to reduce the number of people eligible to vote in an election by arguing that 86 of 550 proposed members are actually supervisors and as such, aren't eligible for the union. Hearst wanted to have those people's status decided before an actual vote.

Because Hearst didn't voluntarily recognize the union, the NLRB decides when an election will take place and who gets to vote. 

Hearst's filings to the NLRB showed its concern over the supervisors, which it called the biggest supporters of the union.

"There is no meaningful disagreement that disputed supervisors are among the most vociferous pro-union advocates — virtually ensuring that the election will lack integrity if their status is not litigated in advance," one Hearst filing read.

But NLRB wrote in a Jan. 22 ruling that Hearst's request "raises no substantial issues warranting review."

The ruling sets the stage for an election, which is expected to be scheduled in the next couple of weeks.

Hearst singled out supervisors as being the most pro-union

In a filing, Hearst pointed to employees posting their support for the union on social media, wearing pro-union pins, signing mass emails to employees in support of representation.

"Employees who have revoked their union authorization cards have faced retaliation and harassment from multiple supervisors," the filing said. "For example, a non-supervisory employee reported that a supervisor confronted and 'grilled' her about a colleague who had revoked his authorization card. And another supervisor has been accused of generally 'coercing and putting a lot of pressure on employees' to support unionization. At least one supervisor attended a 'Thankful for Union' party with employees, held to support representation."

The Writers Guild responded in a filing that most of the pro-union activities that Hearst was referring to were "simple expressions of support for the union, which are lawful even assuming the individuals are supervisors."

"For all of the Employer's bluster, this is a straightforward case," the guild wrote.

The NLRB sided with the guild in denying Hearst's request.

"We are pleased that the NLRB dismissed one of the company's unfounded attempts to divide our union and delay an election," the Hearst Union Organizing Committee said in a statement. "We look forward to completing these NLRB hearings and having a fair election in a timely manner."

Hearst executives haven't commented on the ruling.

Hearst's anti-union stance has rankled some staffers

It's common for management to oppose unions out of concerns that they'll introduce adversity between supervisors and subordinates and introduce processes that make it hard to be nimble. Another common concern is that contracts can make it hard to fire underperformers. 

In digital media, most companies have largely put up little resistance to their employees' efforts to organize in the past few years. 

New York magazine wrote that Hearst "adopted an especially hostile posture toward staff," though. Hearst executives Troy Young and Kate Lewis have called meetings with magazine staffs where they argued that a union would divide the company and slow its progress. 

Some employees said they felt angry and patronized by the company's stance and that its opposition "fueled the fire," as one organizer put it. Some vets meanwhile shared managements' concerns that a union will cause divisiveness and undermine the company's progress at a precarious time.

Email is used in just about every workplace, in just about every industry. Email startup Front wants to change how people use their work email, and in the process take on heavyweights like Microsoft Outlook and Gmail. 

Front CEO Mathilde Collin thinks the goal is broader than just changing email — it's about changing how people work. And she and her team just got a huge vote of confidence from several prominent software executives in the tech industry, who also focus on the future of work. 

Earlier this week Front announced that it raised $59 million in Series C funding, in the round a little bit different than most. It included funding from industry leaders similarly focused on the future of work, including Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, whose videoconferencing startup skyrocketed after seeing one of the most successful public debuts last year. 

In addition to Yuan, executives from Okta, Atlassian, and Qualtrics participated. That includes Atlassian co-CEO and cofounder Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian President Jay Simons, Okta COO and cofounder Frederic Kerrest, Qualtrics cofounder and CEO Ryan Smith, and Qualtrics co-founder and CTO Jared Smith.

"If you're doing a software company or thinking about the future of work, I don't think you can pick a bigger market than email," Collin told Business Insider.

Collin said before this round, she didn't know it was possible to fundraise this way, but she'd been in touch with several of those executives for years and all had shown interest in Front. What appealed to them was the sheer size of the market Front is going after, she says.

Front takes a team-based approach to email. It combines a company's social media, email, texts and other messages into a shared inbox that an entire team has access to. The goal is to make it easier to work together and communicate with customers.

Although the company declined to share a specific number, it said its valuation has grown four-fold from its last round 2 years ago. It now claims 5,500 customers, including companies like MailChimp, Y Combinator, Shopify, Cisco Meraki, eTix, and Stripe. 

Here is the pitch deck Front used to sign companies on for its Series C round:

Chinese shortform video app Douyin has reportedly added features related to the spread of the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China. The app has launched a #FightPneumonia page that "provides updates on the spread of the coronavirus, expert reports and analysis, as well as relevant information on prevention" according to Chinese business and technology website TMT Post.

Pandaily, another Chinese outlet, reported that the Douyin page aggregated information regarding where the illness is spreading and what prevention measures people could take.

Beyond raising awareness, Douyin is also an outlet for support to doctors and medical staff fighting the virus, and for patients who have been infected. Analyst Daniel Ahmad wrote on Twitter that the app had launched a "Jiayou video effect (that signals encouragement) that people are using to leave positive messages in support of doctors, medical staff and patients." Jiayou, which literally means "add oil," was added to the Oxford English Dictionary last year. In practice, it is used to mean "expressing encouragement, incitement, or support: go on! go for it!"

 

Celebrities, influencers, and others users are reportedly posting videos with the effect to show support for patients and medical professionals. They pose with a thumbs up, smiling, while the audio plays.

Douyin's parent company, ByteDance, launched the short-form video app in China in 2016, and it skyrocketed to popularity. Within a year, the app had 100 million users and one billion views per day, and this month reported 400 million daily users. Douyin grew outside of China by a name more familiar to US fans: TikTok, and grew popular in the US after buying another short-form video app, Musical.ly. It has since become the second-most-downloaded app in the App Store and Google Play store in 2019, surpassed only by Facebook-owned WhatsApp. ByteDance, which owns both Douyin and TikTok, is the most valuable private company in the world, at an estimated $75 billion. ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The first case in this outbreak of the coronavirus was reported in Wuhan, China, in December. The virus, with its pneumonia-like symptoms of a fever, cough, and difficulty breathing, has killed at least 18 people so far. More than 600 people have reportedly been sickened, with cases in at least seven other countries. On Wednesday, local authorities in Wuhan announced a quarantine, shutting down transportation for the 11 million residents of the region, though the virus has already traveled to other areas of the country.

This isn't the first time Douyin or TikTok has hosted public health information. In October, TechCrunch reported that TikTok was working with Indian firms and creators to make videos about health tips and mental health awareness. Despite a brief ban in 2019, India is TikTok's largest market.

Layoffs reach 23andMe after hitting Mozilla and the Vision Fund portfolio

Tech layoffs rise as cost-cutting comes into vogue

Yesterday, Josh Felser of Freestyle Ventures wrote a post titled For the Love of Founders and their mental health. In it, he discussed his own struggles with mental health as an entrepreneur.

“Like so many others I just sucked it up, grinded away and punted, hoping for relief down the road. That strategy of denial and repression worked until it didn’t. My founder stress and burnout couldn’t be contained despite my best efforts. In fact, my mental unhealthiness impacted my physical health, by causing debilitating sleep apnea, as diagnosed by UCSF and missed by Stanford (but that is another post). I sold my 2nd company, Crackle, and vowed to leave the high anxiety of being a founder for the relatively easy life of venture, not that it’s actually easy. I was lucky to have exited Crackle before my situation worsened and ultimately found the relief I desperately needed to feel whole again.“

More importantly, he talked about his fear of discussing it with his investors.

“Unsurprisingly, my investors, back then, never once inquired about my mental state and certainly didn’t offer any resources I could tap. In fact if I’d shared my actual state of mind, I would probably have been fired or at the very least encouraged ostensibly to take time off. Those were the times.“

Thankfully, this is changing, in part to leadership by firms like Freestyle. The partners, Josh, David Samuel, and Jenny Lefcourt have announced an initiative initially focused on their portfolio founders in an effort to break down the barriers to better mental health for all in our industry.

To begin, they are underwriting 100% of the cost for two programs – Meru Health and Hoffman Institute, for all of their founders.

I’m fortunate that I have a strong, long-term relationship with a psychologist who works with entrepreneurs. However, he, like many others in the field, is extremely busy so even though he is open to referrals from me, he is limited in who he can take on as a client. Part of the challenge here is the time delay that a referral takes, and Meru Health is an impressive approach to providing rapid response care in a specialized way with an economic model that can work in entrepreneurial contexts.

The Hoffman Institute was new to me, but after spending some time on the website, I went and signed up to attend one of the week-long retreats. While I feel like I’ve explored – in therapy – some of the things they talk about, I know that I’m still struggling with a bunch of this, especially as I shift into the next phase of my life.

As an LP in Freestyle, I’m extremely excited to see their leadership in this area. While they are not the first firm to announce an initiative like this – last year Felicis Ventures gifted Founders 1% Of Every Invested Dollar To Spend On Coaching And Mental Health – I’m hopeful that this is addition momentum in an area that needs a lot more attention, support, and help.

Josh, David, Jenny – thank you!