Month: October 2018

Today, Jack Dorsey tweeted a link to his company’s latest gesture toward ongoing political relevance, a U.S. midterms news center collecting “the latest news and top commentary” on the country’s extraordinarily consequential upcoming election. If curated and filtered properly, that could be useful! Imagine. Unfortunately, rife with fake news, the tool is just another of Twitter’s small yet increasingly consequential disasters.

Beyond a promotional tweet from Dorsey, Twitter’s new offering is kind of buried — probably for the best. On desktop it’s a not particularly useful mash of national news reporters, local candidates and assorted unverifiable partisans. As Buzzfeed news details, the tool is swimming with conspiracy theories, including ones involving the migrant caravan. According to his social media posts, the Pittsburgh shooter was at least partially motivated by similar conspiracies, so this is not a good look to say the least.

Why launch a tool like this before performing the most basic cursory scan for the kind of low-quality sources that already have your company in hot water? Why have your chief executive promote it? Why why why

A few hours after Dorsey’s tweet, likely after the prominent callout, the main feed looked a bit tamer than it did at first glance. Subpages for local races appear mostly populated by candidates themselves, while the national feed looks more like an algorithmically generated echo chamber version of my regular Twitter feed, with inexplicably generous helpings of MSNBC pundits and more lefty activists.

For Twitter users already immersed in conspiracies, particularly those that incubate so successfully on the far right, does this feed offer yet another echo chamber disguised as a neutral news source? In spite of its sometimes dubiously left-leanings, my feed is still peppered with tweets from undercover video provocateur James O’Keefe — not exactly a high quality source.

In May, Twitter announced that political candidates would get a special badge, making them stand out from other users and potential imposters. That was useful! Anything that helps Twitter function as a fast news source with light context is a positive step, but unfortunately we haven’t seen a whole lot in this direction.

Social media companies need to stop launching additional amplification tools into the ominous void. No social tech company has yet exhibited a meaningful understanding of the systemic shifts that need to happen — possibly product-rending shifts — to dissuade bad actors and straight up disinformation from spreading like a back-to-school virus. 

Unfortunately, a week before the U.S. midterm elections, Twitter looks as disinterested as ever in the social disease wreaking havoc on its platform, even as users suffer its real-life consequences. Even more unfortunate for any members of its still dedicated, weary userbase, Twitter’s latest wholly avoidable minor catastrophe comes as a surprise to no one.

After nine years of service, half a million stars surveyed, and thousands of planets discovered around those stars, NASA’s astonishingly successful Kepler space telescope is finally taking a well-earned rest. Out of fuel but in a safe orbit, the spacecraft will drift through the solar system looking at nothing in particular as its immense trove of data continues to drive discoveries here on Earth.

Kepler launched in 2009 after, as is so often the case, decades of preparation, studies, and delays. Its mission, slated to last three and a half years, was to stare unblinkingly at one small patch of sky, watching each star for the minute changes that could indicate a planet briefly blocking its light.

The mission was successful beyond all expectations, and once the telescope was operational the data began producing exoplanets not by the dozen but by the thousand. And some came closer to an Earth analogue than astronomers had dared hope — suggesting rocky planets about our size aren’t all that rare. (Good news if we need to relocate.)

Kepler’s “first light” image showing its original field of view.

In 2014 the original mission was complete but Kepler was still going strong, largely due to robust construction and frugal fuel use. A second mission, dubbed K2, was approved, different from the first: instead of looking at a single patch for years, Kepler would shift its view to a new location every three months. Naturally the number of stars catalogued and observed skyrocketed.

Not all was well aboard, though: The craft lost one of its four reaction wheels, used to reorientate the craft against the pull of the sun and other forces, though fortunately it was designed to function without all of them. It was only the later failure of another wheel that essentially put a hard time limit on K2.

Without a reaction wheel to change its direction along all three axes, Kepler would have to burn precious fuel every time it needed to change its view or spin around to send data home.

Fuel or no fuel, Kepler was still churning out the data. Scientists verified and announced the existence of more than 1,200 more exoplanets in one go, while AI tools like Google’s were working to find others hidden in the noisy data.

But the end has come at last, and Kepler used the last of its reserves to maneuver into position to relay its final batch of data through the Deep Space Network. This, like the rest, will soon be available to citizen scientists and research organizations as well as NASA’s own teams.

As for the exoplanet hunt, that’s been taken up by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, launched earlier this year and now in operation. There’s every reason to think it’ll be as productive and inspiring as its predecessor and perhaps more so.

“When we started conceiving this mission 35 years ago we didn’t know of a single planet outside our solar system,” said Kepler’s founding principal investigator, William Borucki, since retired. “Now that we know planets are everywhere, Kepler has set us on a new course that’s full of promise for future generations to explore our galaxy.”

Having delivered its last package, Kepler has completed its final duty and now enters a rather pleasant retirement. Unlike Cassini, which ended up a new crater on Saturn’s surface (a sudden but glorious end), Kepler will simply fall into an Earth-like orbit some distance behind its home planet, likely to remain stable (barring the extraordinarily unlikely possibility of a cosmic debris strike) for many years to come.

We won’t hear from Kepler, and Kepler won’t hear from us. But it’s nice to think it’ll still be looking.

Let’s start with a basic premise that the vast majority of the world’s workloads remain in private data centers. Cloud infrastructure vendors are working hard to shift those workloads, but technology always moves a lot slower than we think. That is the lens through which many cloud companies operate.

The idea that you operate both on prem and in the cloud with multiple vendors is the whole idea behind the notion of the hybrid cloud. It’s where companies like Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Oracle are placing their bets. These died-in-the-wool enterprise companies see their large customers making a slower slog to the cloud than you would imagine, and they want to provide them with the tools and technologies to manage across both worlds, while helping them shift when they are ready.

Cloud-native computing developed in part to provide a single management fabric across on prem and cloud, freeing IT from having two sets of tools and trying somehow to bridge the gap between the two worlds.

What every cloud vendor wants

Red Hat — you know, that company that was sold to IBM for $34 billion this week — has operated in this world. While most people think of the company as the one responsible for bringing Linux to the enterprise, over the last several years, it has been helping customers manage this transition and build applications that could live partly on prem and partly in the cloud.

As an example, it has built OpenShift, its version of Kubernetes. As CEO Jim Whitehurst told me last year, “Our hottest product is OpenShift. People talk about containers and they forget it’s a feature of Linux,” he said. That is an operating system that Red Hat knows a thing or two about.

With Red Hat in the fold, IBM can contend that being open source; they can build modern applications on top of open source tools and run them on IBM’s cloud or any of their competitors, a real hybrid approach.

Microsoft has a huge advantage here, of course, because it has a massive presence in the enterprise already. Many companies out there could be described as Microsoft shops, and for those companies moving from on prem Microsoft to cloud Microsoft represents a less daunting challenge than starting from scratch.

Oracle brings similar value with its core database products. Companies using Oracle databases — just about everyone — might find it easier to move that valuable data to Oracle’s cloud, although the numbers don’t suggest that’s necessarily happening (and Oracle has stopped breaking out its cloud revenue).

Dell, which spent $67 billion for EMC, making the Red Hat purchase pale by comparison, has been trying to pull together a hybrid solution by combining VMware, Pivotal and Dell/EMC hardware.

Cloud vendors reporting

You could argue that hybrid is a temporary state, that at some point, the vast majority of workloads will eventually be running in the cloud and the hybrid business as we know it today will continually shrink over time. We are certainly seeing cloud infrastructure revenue skyrocketing with no signs of slowing down as more workloads move to the cloud.

In their latest earnings reports, those who break out such things, the successful ones, reported growth in their cloud business. It’s important to note that these companies define cloud revenue in different ways, but you can see the trend is definitely up:

• AWS reported revenue of $6.7 billion in revenue for the quarter, up from $4.58 billion the previous year.
• Microsoft Intelligent Cloud, which incorporates things like Azure and server products and enterprise services, was at $8.6 billion, up from $6.9 billion.
• IBM Technology Services and Cloud Platforms, which includes infrastructure services, technical support services and integration software reported revenue of $8.6 billion, up from $8.5 billion the previous year.
• Others like Oracle and Google didn’t break out their cloud revenue.

Show me the money

All of this is to say, there is a lot of money on the table here and companies are moving more workloads at an increasingly rapid pace.  You might also have noticed that IBM’s growth is flat compared to the others. Yesterday in a call with analysts and press, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty projected that revenue for the hybrid cloud (however you define that) could reach $1 trillion by 2020. Whether that number is exaggerated or not, there is clearly a significant amount of business here, and IBM might see it as a way out of its revenue problems, especially if they can leverage consulting/services along with it.

There is probably so much business that there is room for more than one winner, but if you asked before Sunday if IBM had a shot in this mix against its formidable competitors, especially those born in the cloud like AWS and Google, most probably wouldn’t have given them much chance.

When Red Hat eventually joins forces with IBM, it at least gives their sales teams a compelling argument, one that could get them into the conversation — and that is probably why they were willing to spend so much money to get it. It puts them back in the game, and after years of struggling, that is something. And in the process, it has stirred up the hybrid cloud market in a way we didn’t see coming last week before this deal.

Self-driving startup Waymo, a Google spin-off owned by parent company Alphabet, has been granted the first permit in California to begin driverless testing on public roads. Yes, that means self-driving cars without a human behind the wheel will be cruising around California, beginning with a limited geographic area in Silicon Valley.

The company’s autonomous vehicles are a common sight on public roads in and around Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. The startup, which began as a moonshot project under X, has been testing on public roads for years now. But this permit, issued by the California Department of Motor Vehicles, allows Waymo to test these self-driving cars without a human test driver behind the wheel.

New California DMV regulations that took effect in April allow companies to apply for fully driverless testing within carefully defined limits. Waymo is the first to get approval. At least one other company is waiting in the wings.

Where you’ll find them

Waymo said its driverless test cars will initially hit the streets near its Silicon Valley headquarters, including parts of Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills and Palo Alto. See the map below for the initial driverless launch.

Perhaps anticipating wariness from the public, Waymo emphasized that it knows this area “well.”

“Mountain View is home to more than a dozen autonomous vehicle companies, and has supported safe testing for years,” the company said in its announcement.

Waymo will eventually expand its driverless testing territory. Before it moves into a new area, Waymo said it will notify the new communities where this expansion will occur, and submit a request to the DMV.

Members of the public won’t be invited into these driverless cars just yet. However, Waymo is working toward that goal. The first driverless rides will be for Waymo employees. Waymo said it will eventually “create opportunities for members of the public to experience this technology,” similar to its early ride program in Arizona.

What Waymo is allowed to do

The driverless permit allows Waymo to test its driverless vehicles during the day and night on city streets, rural roads and highways with posted speed limits of up to 65 miles per hour. Waymo is also allowed to test in fog and light rain, conditions that the company said its vehicles can handle.

If one of its driverless vehicles encounters a situation it doesn’t understand it will come to “safe stop,” Waymo said, adding that it has well-established protocols that include contacting fleet and rider support.

The company announced earlier this month that its autonomous vehicles have driven 10 million miles on public roads in the United States since it began working on self-driving technology in 2009.

California is not the first state to test true driverless vehicles on public roads. Arizona gets that distinction. Waymo began testing self-driving Chrysler Pacifica Minivans in Phoenix suburbs, notably Chandler, in 2016. The company launched an early rider program in April 2017. Later that year, Waymo removed employees and passengers from its test fleet, sending empty self-driving minivans onto the streets of greater Phoenix.

With its shiny new $8 billion valuation, Coinbase is now worth more than all but the top three cryptocurrencies that trade on the platform.

That’s right, the only cryptocurrency assets that are worth more than the platform that trades them are Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple. Bitcoin Cash, the currency forked from Bitcoin, is a distant fourth in valuation at $7.3 billion.

Coinbase’s Series E is nearly three times as much as the company raised in its Series D, and the fresh cash brings Coinbase’s total-capital-raised-to-date to over $520 million.

That’s a lot of money. Indeed, if Coinbase’s capital raised figured is compared to the market cap of the world’s various cryptocurrencies and other similar assets, it would rank around 20th.

But the bet for investors is, and should be, that if cryptocurrencies are indeed the next big idea in the ways that humans determine value, then Coinbase should be worth far more than any of the assets that trade on its exchange.

The fact that it’s neither indicates how much farther the company has to grow, or the limits of the thesis that cryptocurrencies will take over the world.

It shows that the wager on a particular crypto company is looking like a better investment than putting money to work in nearly any of the other crypto assets that are for sale. During the last few crypto booms, some investors said that it was probably simpler to just invest in various tokens instead of companies working on blockchains — faster returns and your money would be more liquid, to boot.

However, at least in the case of Coinbase, that wager likely wouldn’t have worked. Coinbase is also the company that every investor has wanted to invest in; it’s been a known winner for a while now, so its performance isn’t a huge surprise.

And now with $300 million, Coinbase is well-capitalized to survive either a market downturn (one will come eventually), and the current Crypto Interregnum.

Coinbase’s chief executive certainly thinks the market will grow. As we noted, Coinbase currently allows trading to just a handful of cryptocurrencies, but it has long harbored ambitions to expand beyond that.

Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in September, CEO Brian Armstrong revealed that he sees a future in which every cap table will have its own token. Based on that, he said he believes that Coinbase could host hundreds of tokens within “years” and even potentially “millions” in the future.

After last quarter’s bloodbath earnings report that cut 20 percent from Facebook’s share price, the social network stumbled in Q3 2018, reaching 2.27 billion monthly users, up 37 million users or 1.79 percent — only slightly better than Q1’s slowest-ever growth rate of just 1.54 percent, and compared to an 2.29 billion Wall Street estimate. It added 24 million daily active users hit 1.49 billion, up 1.36 percent compared to Q1’s 1.44 percent, missing the 1.51 billion estimate.

But the real growth story depends on its core US/Canada and Europe markets where Facebook saw zero growth and lost 1 million users respectively last quarter. In Q3, Facebook added 1 million monthly users to reach 242 million in the US/Canada region, but held flat at 185 million dailies there. It lost 1 million users in Europe in both dailies and monthlies. Those markets make up over 70 percent of its revenue, which is scaring Wall Street.

As for Facebook’s business, the company earned $13.73 in revenue, compared to Refinitiv’s consensus estimate of $13.78 billion, and saw $1.76 EPS compared to an estimate of $1.47, making for a mixed report. Facebook blamed foreign exchange headwings for $159 million in Q3, which was the difference between its miss and a beat on revenue.

Facebook’s share price closed at $146.22 before earnings were released, still massively down from its $217 peak for before it announced user growth troubles and slowing revenue growth in Q2’s earnings report. Facebook shares climbed 2 percent upon the announcement of earnings, in part thanks to Facebook pulling in $5.14 billion in profit

Facebook hoped to show that its business can keep growing even as it spent massively to double its security and content moderation team from 10,000 to 20,000 this year. It did note that “more than 2.6 billion people now use Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, or Messenger each month, and more than 2 billionpeople use at least one of our Family of services every day on average.”

But the company’s revenues and profits have been overshadowed by the non-stop parade of scandals ranging from election interference to its biggest security breach ever. Next quarter we’ll see if the breach scared users away or if Facebook logging them out for safety led some to never log back in.

“Fierce competitor” is one of the biggest, and most culturally ingrained, compliments that exists in sports. The same is true in the technology world. However, as competitors originating from outside of Silicon Valley rise, so do the stakes for previously unchallenged tech firms, like Uber, Facebook and Google, to enter new markets responsibly. Companies that were once earnest startups helmed by say-anything, hoodie-wearing twenty-somethings are now big corporations with boards, stakeholders and tremendous impacts on society.

They need to start acting like it.

Amid mounting government and public pressures, tech firms famous for pushing far beyond boundaries now need to play by the rules when they enter new cities and towns. They now have to embrace more humble methods of conducting business and admit defeat when younger upstarts create better, faster innovations. Freshly relocated tech companies need to respect the indigenous innovation scene in a chosen location — not simply conduct headquarter operations somewhere else. They need to bring to every new market entrepreneurial thinking, jobs and a willingness to develop strong connections with public and private sector leaders.

The good news is that it’s not too late for tech giants to learn to be responsible, self-aware competitors. However, a few central questions need to be answered: Will big tech companies begin to bring more to cities than they take? Will they become responsible community partners building smart technologies in a way that respects new market values — especially around diversity, privacy and respect for people’s data? Or will they use their heft to out-maneuver municipal authorities, outbid local startups for engineering talent and ship intellectual property and data back to headquarters?

As Uber’s rebrand takes hold, for instance, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi needs to guide his organization toward working with municipal and community leaders — rather than coexisting with them at best. He and his team need to deepen their understanding of regulatory environments at the city level, play within the rules governing specific places and work to encourage homegrown tech talent in Uber’s new markets to pursue career opportunities with international reach. Uber needs to back up the company’s newly rolled out softer, safer image with concrete efforts to complement the innovation ecosystems already flourishing in cities outside of its hometown of San Francisco — and compete collaboratively in markets around the world.

Other tech giant founders, CEOs and executive teams around the world need to follow suit — regardless of whether actual suits are involved.

Indeed, there’s a right way for tech companies to contribute to local causes and be good corporate citizens in general. The process starts with bigger tech companies establishing information exchanges with new communities that build trust and prioritize learning. After establishing operations and understanding the needs of communities surrounding them, tech companies need to prove their genuine interest in local innovation ecosystems. One way to do this is by donating money to a relevant charity or nonprofit organization that provides useful skill development to underserved communities.

Another, more humbling, option for tech giants is to invest in native startups building innovations that help them improve corporate citizenship — a technology that reduces their global carbon footprint, for example — and complement their own capabilities.

I am a serial entrepreneur and optimist. That’s why I believe that technology companies like Uber, Google and Facebook have a unique opportunity to deliver more than monetary investment into communities around the world. They need to assume responsibility for advancing innovation and talent upon arrival in a new city — and actively build programs that bridge location-specific digital, skill and transportation gaps.

Tech giants need to work with government and community peers to connect with local competitors already building the next generation of technology platforms. Success requires a balance of fierce competitiveness and humble respect. The entry of a tech giant to a new place should inspire connectivity, understanding and competition that lifts a community’s entire innovation ecosystem.

Apple (NASDAQ: APPL) has had a great 2018.

Even as the other FAANG stocks slumped, the trillion-dollar electronics company has continually satisfied Wall Street with quarter-over-quarter revenue growth. But will Apple’s momentum continue after it reports its fourth-quarter earnings on Thursday?

The consensus, so far, is yes. Apple is expected to post revenue of $61.43 billion (earnings per share of $2.78), an increase of 17 percent year-over-year and GAAP EPS of $2.78, according to analysts polled by FactSet. Investors will be paying close attention to iPhone unit sales, which account for the majority of Apple’s revenue, as well as Mac sales, which accounted for roughly 10 percent of the company’s revenue in Q3.

The company reported its Q3 earnings on July 31, posting $53.3 billion in revenue, its best June quarter ever and fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth, the company said.

At today’s hardware event in Brooklyn, Apple’s chief executive officer Tim Cook shared that the company’s Mac business had grown to 100 million monthly active users — a big accomplishment for the nearly 10-year-old product. Cook also showcased the new MacBook Air and introduced the new iPad Pro and Mac Mini.

Not even Lana Del Rey’s surprise performance at the event was enough to rile up Wall Street. Apple’s stock was unreactive today, as is typically the case with hardware spectacles like these. Apple ultimately closed up about .5 percent. That’s a better outcome than its last hardware event in September, which despite the highly anticipated announcements of the iPhone XS and Apple Watch Series 4, forced the company’s stock down about 1.2 percent on the news.

Apple’s stock performance year to date

Year to date, Apple’s stock has risen more than 30 percent from a February low of $155 per share to an October high of $229.

If it fails to meet analyst expectations on Thursday, it’s bad news for the stock market: “Apple is the last domino standing,” Market Watch wrote earlier today. “Its FAANG brethren have all crashed, even the mighty Amazon, which has slumped about 25% from all-time highs.”

If you missed today’s event, we live-blogged the whole thing here and detailed all the new hardware here.

Late this past summer, Meetup founder and CEO Scott Heiferman moved into the chairman position, leaving the CEO role vacant. Today, Meetup has announced that David Siegel will be taking the helm at the 15-year-old company.

Siegel hails from Investopedia, where he served as CEO for three years, tripling the company’s revenue and doubling its traffic in that period. Before his time at Investopedia, Siegel was president of Seeking Alpha, overseeing U.S.-based functions including sales, marketing, product and bizdev.

At the end of 2017, co-working behemoth WeWork acquired Meetup for a reported $200 million. Meetup’s entire premise is based on the idea of community — use the internet to get people off the internet and talking in real life. That’s a central theme in the WeWork strategy.

Here’s what Siegel had to say about the transition:

In a world where technology often drives greater distances between people, Meetup uses technology to bring real, in-person and life-changing connections to millions of people globally. Together with WeWork, Meetup is reinventing how people work, live, learn, play, and create community every day. I am thrilled to be a be a part of this incredibly exciting venture to bring more people together.

Meetup currently has more than 40 million members, 320,000 Meetup groups and facilitates 12,000 meetups per day around the world.