Category: UNCATEGORIZED

It’s that time again folks, Samsung has reported guidance for its upcoming Q1 quarter — and things don’t look good.

Samsung is forecasting that revenue for the quarter will reach 51-53 trillion KRW ($44.87-$46.63 billion), which would represent a drop of around 15 percent on one year previous. The Korean tech giant reported a record operating profit in Q1 2018 — $13.76 billion — but this time around that is forecast to fall by a whopping 60 percent for the current quarter of business. According to Bloomberg, that would be the company’s worst slump for four years.

Following a record year is never going to be easy, but the forecast Q1 2019 operating profit of 6.1-6.3 billion KRW — around $5.5 billion — represents a pretty steep 43 percent drop on the previous quarter. That’ll give Samsung shareholders plenty to worry about.

The company’s pre-earnings guidance doesn’t go into details on the predictions, but last year’s record profits were largely down to the success of its consumer handset business and also a strong market for memory chips. There have been plenty of warning signs that those good times might not last.

Samsung itself played down those impressive Q1 2018 results multiple warnings on the future — my colleague Brian Heater pointed out that the words “slowing growth” appeared seven times in Samsung’s announcement at the time — due to concerns around the company’s display panel business and a slowing growth within the general smartphone industry.

As we well know, analyst reports show that people are buying fewer phones for a range of reasons. That’s one explanation for Apple’s multi-device approach which pushes its top-of-the-range model to well beyond the $1,000-mark. Slowing growth means a need to extract more revenue from the most loyal users, to thus increase the overall average selling price (ASP).

Samsung has long played in the mid-tiers — where it is up against tough competition from the likes of Xiaomi, Oppo, Huawei and others from China — but it’ll be interesting to see if it shifts its top-end approach.

We’ll know more when the company releases its full Q1 earnings report later this month so stayed tuned.

Google has abandoned an advisory board on ethics in AI after critics questioned the inclusion of Kay Coles James, leader of the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation, on the 8-person panel. Google employees and thousands more concerned people called for this mistake to be corrected, and in response the company has apparently chosen to drop the whole thing.

The Advanced Technology External Advisory Council was launched late in March to “consider some of Google’s most complex challenges that arise under our AI Principles, like facial recognition and fairness in machine learning, providing diverse perspectives to inform our work.”

Among the names well known in tech and academia, James stood out; She and the Heritage Foundation harbor, as my colleague put it just two days ago, “vehemently anti-LGBT views and a deep track record of advocating for climate change denialism in the service of the oil and gas industry.”

Although a diversity of backgrounds and political affiliations are surely necessary for an advisory body like this one to be effective, the particular stands James has made on immigration, social issues, and climate change, among others, made her inclusion puzzling for a company that is normally rather progressive on those topics. Including opposing viewpoints is one thing, but James and the Heritage Foundation cross the line into conduct that could be called hateful or disinformation.

A group organized within Google to oppose James’s inclusion, saying that it “elevates and endorses her views, implying that hers is a valid perspective worthy of inclusion in its decision making.” As of today 2,380 employees signed a petition asking her to be removed.

Other panelists were asked by many to justify their choices to work alongside James. Some, like Joanna Bryson, felt they could do more good at the table than away from it; another, Alessandro Acquisti, ‘declined the invitation’ after being announced as part of the panel.

Ultimately it seems like Google felt the panel was more trouble than it was worth. In a statement added to the original announcement post (less than 10 days old), it wrote:

It’s become clear that in the current environment, ATEAC can’t function as we wanted. So we’re ending the council and going back to the drawing board. We’ll continue to be responsible in our work on the important issues that AI raises, and will find different ways of getting outside opinions on these topics.

This rather ambiguous statement doesn’t do much to clear things up, and Google did not provide any further details in an email to TechCrunch. But going back to the drawing board sounds like a good idea.

It’s a big day for space: launches, tests, orbits, and now a distant probe is going to shoot an asteroid with its space gun and make a new crater to play in. It’s Hayabusa 2, Japan’s ambitious and so far highly successful sample return mission to an object called Ryugu.

Launched in 2014, Hayabusa 2 has been in the region of Ryugu for several months, carrying out a series of investigations. It has four small landers on board, two of which it dropped off late last year, and which have been hopping happily around the asteroid.

In February the craft itself touched down on the surface, stirring up the dust considerably, but nothing like what will happen when they fire a big old bullet into the surface at 4,400 mph using the Small Carry-on Impactor. Here’s a test of the setup firing into a Ryugu-like substrate in a lab here on Earth:

Now imagine that happening to an asteroid with very little gravity — the dust and flecks are going to fly all over the place. In fact, the robots on the surface have all retreated far away from the impact site so they don’t get showered by debris.

Afterwards — in a few weeks, to be precise — the landers and Hayabusa 2 itself will investigate the brand new crater and the strata of dust and rock that have been exposed. After collecting a few samples, the craft will return home late this year.

This “crater generation” operation will take place later tonight, and images should arrive very shortly afterwards — the team has already posted lots of wonderful imagery from Ryugu (as well as some great kids’ art). In fact, you should be able to follow along more or less in real time below, starting at 6 PM Pacific time:

And if you’re curious how the spacecraft is doing at any time, for instance right now, you can always check in to the Haya2NOW web app, which gives all the relevant details as soon as they’re received. How convenient!

As we saw from our recent TechCrunch Battlefield in Africa last year, the continent is producing bigger and bigger tech players, and one can see this in the consolidation in the market.

Today Jiji, one of the largest marketplaces for classifieds in Africa, has acquired their main competitor on the African market, OLX, and their businesses in Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, and Tanzania.

The acquisition means Jiji will now be able to access 300 million people across five markets. This is something of a coup for a company originally from Ukraine, pulling of an acquisition in one of the world’s the last huge, relatively untapped regions. The transaction is supported by one of Jiji’s principal investors, Digital Spring Ventures.

Jiji is the highest rated app in Nigerian e-commerce with over six million unique active users, and 50,000 professional sellers listing over one million items in a rapidly growing market of 200m people. It’s now aiming for 10 million users in the next couple of years.

Vladimir Mnogoletniy, co-founder of Jiji commented: “This partnership is pivotal to Jiji’s future business model and success, as it paves the way for building the continent’s largest Africa-based classified business serving a market with a combined population of over 300 million in some of the world’s fastest-growing economies. We continue to act as a long-term investor in Africa and are excited by the exceptional opportunities, this young and dynamic continent has to offer. In the next 2-3 years we aim to be one of the top 10 classifieds businesses in the world by traffic.”

Jiji’s main competitors in Africa are Jumia and Tonaton.

Pressure is steadily mounting on U.S. lawmakers to implement comprehensive cannabis banking reform at the federal level, and that pressure is coming from all directions.

Rapid shifts in public opinion and a rising number of states with legal medical and adult-use cannabis sales have laid bare an obvious need to update our banking laws to meet the age of regulated cannabis markets. And earlier this month, Congress tackled the issue head on in a widely anticipated hearing that had huge implications for the future of banking for America’s legal cannabis industry.

The Secure and Fair Enforcement (SAFE) Banking Act was among the most notable topics discussed during the House Financial Services Committee hearing February 13, which was titled “Challenges and Solutions: Access to Banking Services for Cannabis-Related Businesses.”

The legislation, which would provide safe harbor to banks working with state-legal cannabis businesses, counts a large and diverse group of lawmakers, regulators, law enforcement professionals, financial institutions, businesses interests and trade organizations among its supporters.

House Financial Services Committee member Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO), along with Rep. Denny Heck (D-WA), introduced the SAFE Banking Act in the last Congress, with 95 co-sponsors — including 13 Republicans — signing on. Twenty bipartisan co-sponsors signed onto the companion bill, introduced in the Senate by Jeff Merkley (D-OR). The two bills drew some heavyweight co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle, including Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), and in the House, Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX), Rep. David Joyce (R-OH), Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA).

And a bipartisan group of 19 state attorneys general came together last year to urge Congress to advance legislation that would allow state-legal cannabis businesses to utilize traditional banking services available to every other legal industry in the United States.

Groups like the Credit Union National Association, the Independent Community of Bankers of America, American Bankers Association and the National Cannabis Industry Association are also vocal advocates for the measure.

And that wasn’t the first attempt in the House to address the cannabis banking problem. In 2014, House lawmakers passed an amendment to an appropriations bill (228-195) that, much like the SAFE Banking Act, would have extended legal protections to financial institutions working with state-regulated cannabis businesses. The measure failed to move through the Senate, however.

But much has changed since 2014. Ten states and Washington, DC, have now legalized cannabis for adult use; 33 states have legalized comprehensive medical cannabis programs; two in three Americans now support legalizing cannabis nationwide for recreational use, according to Gallup polling data; and a majority of older Americans — a formidable voting bloc — now supports legalization. Momentum around cannabis reform is spreading across the globe as well, with cannabis now legally available to adults for recreational use in both Canada and Uruguay, and numerous countries mulling similar reforms.

A brand new multi-billion-dollar industry has risen up in a few short years, and yet, most financial institutions in the U.S. remain reluctant to work with cannabis businesses due to fears of violating federal money laundering laws. That fear has forced the majority of cannabis businesses to operate on a cash-only basis — creating massive security risks, logistical nightmares and regulatory headaches for all parties involved.

As the U.S. cannabis industry continues along its steady growth trajectory, access to banking services is perhaps the most critical challenge facing operators. The recent House Financial Services Subcommittee hearing represents the committee’s first-ever hearing on this issue — a promising first step toward passing the SAFE Banking Act.

Sixty-seven percent of Americans across the political spectrum want Congress to enact legislation allowing financial institutions to do business with legal cannabis operators, according to polling data from think tank Third Way.

With this new Congress, there may finally be progress. Rep. Perlmutter and Rep. Heck plan to re-introduce the SAFE Banking Act in the House, and Sen. Merkley is expected to re-introduce a similar measure in the Senate. Now we need House lawmakers to prioritize this issue and move these measures through the legislature, so they can become the law of the land.

Yoshua Bengio, who last month won the prestigious Turing award, alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, for his work on AI, is worried about what the technology is being made into behind closed doors. In an interview with Nature, he explains his concerns but takes care to avoid sounding like a doomsayer.

A professor at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, his main concern is not a particular nightmare scenario but simply that AI is being pursued by people who have few controls in place.

“A lot of what is most concerning is not happening in broad daylight,” he said. “It’s happening in military labs, in security organizations, in private companies providing services to governments or the police.”

This we have certainly seen, with all the major tech companies in one way or another providing or considering government and military work, from the benign to the clearly conflict-oriented. “Killer drones are a big concern,” Bengio said bluntly. It may be that AI being researched in this way could save or better many lives — but how can we know unless that research is performed in the open?

Even models and ideas invented with good intentions can be subverted by a bad actor, he said. “The dangers of abuse, especially by authoritarian governments, are very real. Essentially, AI is a tool that can be used by those in power to keep that power, and to increase it.” So it is not enough for one organization or government to promise ethical use or abide by best practices. The next one (or the next leader in the same one) may not.

The solution, he believes, is open and structure discussion, followed by strong, clear regulation enacted internationally.

“Self-regulation is not going to work. Do you think that voluntary taxation works? It doesn’t,” he said. “Companies that follow ethical guidelines would be disadvantaged with respect to the companies that do not. It’s like driving. Whether it’s on the left or the right side, everybody needs to drive in the same way; otherwise, we’re in trouble.”

For a start, he recommends researchers and others study and sign the Montreal Declaration, a set of principles such as respect for autonomy, privacy, and diversity.

Despite all this, Bengio is sanguine as to the future of the technology — it’s hard to imagine someone being so deeply and continuously involved in it without being so. The rest of the interview is similarly interesting, as he has a straightforward and realistic yet optimistic view of other issues facing the AI community. Read it here.

Amazon is ready to challenge Apple with a cheaper, Alexa-powered set of wireless earbuds. If successful it would carve out a space for the popular digital assistant, and its deep connections to the rest of Amazon’s ecosystem, in the mobile world Amazon has hitherto largely failed to penetrate. But that’s a big if.

A report from Bloomberg details the upcoming hardware, which sounds a lot like Airpods (and the handful of other wireless sets that have appeared): a pair of small wireless in-ear buds, a case that doubles as a charger, and built-in controls and a mic so you can control your music, talk to friends, and ask Alexa things on the go.

Of course, the obvious question is how exactly this will work, given that Airpods have special privileges as first-party Apple hardware that let them perform tasks others can’t yet do. If your phone is locked, non-Airpod headphones (for instance Galaxy Buds) can’t connect through their associated app to look stuff up or provide services. You can of course set up a “Hey Siri, OK Google” situation, but that’s a bit sad.

Bloomberg’s report says that the Alexa headphones let you “order goods, access music, weather and other information,” but it isn’t clear under what circumstances. If you have to have the phone unlocked and an app open for it to work, the whole thing is a non-starter. And it seems unlikely that Apple would grant Amazon some kind of clearance to do the kind of things only Airpods can do.

It’s conceivable that the headphones will, when possible, connect instead on detection of a command to a compatible Alexa device nearby with an internet connection — and there’s no shortage of those in many a tech-savvy home. But if you’re walking down the street and need to ask directions, you may have to pull the phone out, which rather negates the already somewhat limited convenience of owning a pair of wireless headphones.

These difficulties, plus those associated with simply making such a sophisticated piece of hardware for relatively cheap, explain why the headphones have reportedly had a bit of trouble getting shipped.

A cheaper price tag and potentially better audio quality may not be enough to make this particular endeavor a winner, but we’ll know more if and when Amazon goes official.

An apparent breakdown in talks between BuzzFeed management and the company’s newsroom union spurred expressions of solidarity from other unions — and even from New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The employees of BuzzFeed News (the company’s journalistic arm) voted to unionize in February, following major layoffs. At the time, Editor in Chief Ben Smith reportedly responded, “We look forward to meeting with the organizers to discuss a way toward voluntarily recognizing their union.”

But those discussions appear to have come to a halt. The union said that yesterday, BuzzFeed executives failed to show up for a meeting, only informing union representatives of this five minutes after the scheduled start time.

“The biggest sticking point has been the company’s opposition to an ‘editorial unit’ — a recognition of the newsroom as a whole rather than a list of specific titles,” the union wrote in a letter to BuzzFeed News staff. “Recognizing an editorial unit is the industry standard across digital and print newsrooms and is a part of all NewsGuild contracts, from the New York Times, Daily Beast, Los Angeles Times, and New Yorker. We were ready to discuss this issue, along with which employees should be included in the union, with management at today’s meeting.”

In response, a BuzzFeed spokesperson told Splinter, “BuzzFeed has made specific, reasonable offers (and concessions) with the goal of voluntarily recognizing a BuzzFeed News union. We hope the union will return to discussing specific titles and positions — the subject of weeks of negotiations — rather than focusing on an area where we continue to disagree.”

A number of other newsroom unions criticized BuzzFeed management’s behavior. For example, the Gizmodo Media Group union wrote, “do BuzzFeed execs know that flagrantly disrespecting your workers’ time and efforts in this manner is, uh, a pretty great way to make a rock solid case for why your company needs a union immediately?”

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted in support of the union as well, declaring that New York is “a union town” and that BuzzFeed management “insulted all working New Yorkers.”

“To the union: This city stands with you,” de Blasio wrote. “To the management: Come. To. The. Table.”

According to The Daily Beast, BuzzFeed responded with the following statement (it’s not clear in what context): “This process is not going to benefit from the involvement of a deeply unpopular mayor who has expressed an open disdain for journalists during his time in office.”

We’ve reached out to BuzzFeed for comment and will update if we hear back.

Welcome to this week’s transcribed edition of This is Your Life in Silicon Valley. We’re running an experiment for Extra Crunch members that puts This is Your Life in Silicon Valley in words – so you can read from wherever you are.

This is your Life in Silicon Valley was originally started by Sunil Rajaraman and Jascha Kaykas-Wolff in 2018. Rajaraman is a serial entrepreneur and writer (Co-Founded Scripted.com, and is currently an EIR at Foundation Capital), Kaykas-Wolff is the current CMO at Mozilla and ran marketing at BitTorrent. Rajaraman and Kaykas-Wolff started the podcast after a series of blog posts that Sunil wrote for The Bold Italic went viral. The goal of the podcast is to cover issues at the intersection of technology and culture – sharing a different perspective of life in the Bay Area. Their guests include entrepreneurs like Sam Lessin, journalists like Kara Swisher and politicians like Mayor Libby Schaaf and local business owners like David White of Flour + Water.

This week’s edition of This is Your Life in Silicon Valley features Mike Isaac, whose upcoming book about Uber –  ‘Super Pumped’ –  is sure to generate controversy. Isaac conducted hundreds of interviews for the book, and answers some pointed questions about his research during this podcast. Isaac also talks about press leaks, Facebook hacks and more during this interview.

If you want to hear what Mike would ask Travis Kalanick if he had the opportunity for a sitdown, you don’t want to miss this transcript.

For access to the full transcription, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free. 

Sunil Rajaraman:

Welcome to season three of This is your Life in Silicon Valley, a podcast about the Bay Area, technology, and culture. I’m your host Sunil Rajaraman, and I’m joined by my cohost, Jascha Kaykas-Wolff-Wolff. This is your Life in Silicon Valley is brought to you by The Bold Italic.