Apple to spend billions of dollars on US-made 5G tech

SAN FRANCISCO, United States — Apple announced a multi-billion-dollar collaboration with US tech firm Broadcom to make "cutting edge" components for wirelessly connecting to high-speed 5G telecom networks.

The iPhone maker did not specify exactly how many billions of dollars it would put into the Broadcom alliance, but said it is part of a commitment to invest in the US economy.

"We're thrilled to make commitments that harness the ingenuity, creativity, and innovative spirit of American manufacturing," Apple chief executive Tim Cook said in a statement.

"All of Apple's products depend on technology engineered and built here in the United States, and we'll continue to deepen our investments in the US economy because we have an unshakable belief in America's future."

The alliance will include designing and manufacturing sophisticated radio frequency components and other "cutting-edge wireless connectivity" parts in the United States, according to Apple.

"5G technology is shaping the future of next-generation consumer electronics -- and Apple is spending tens of billions of dollars to develop this field in the United States," the company said.

Apple is on pace to meet a commitment it made in 2021 to invest $430 billion in the US economy over the course of five years, according to the Silicon Valley technology titan.

It said those investments include money put into data centers, capital projects and suppliers.

Agence France-Presse

'It's emotional whiplash’: California is once again at the center of the virus crisis

(Closing a Second Time)

LOS ANGELES — When everything shut down in March as the coronavirus took off in California, Canter’s Deli, a mainstay in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, laid off dozens of employees.

A few months later, it called them back to work. By then, the state appeared to have emerged from the initial virus crisis in much better shape than other parts of the country.

But now California’s caseload is exploding, with rising deaths and hospitalizations. As quickly as things had opened up, they have shut down again.

"To have to call those people up so many times, starting March 15, to say, ‘I’m sorry, we have to lay you off, we have to furlough you,’” said Jacqueline Canter, 59, among the third generation of her family to run the restaurant. “Then call them back: ‘Oh, guess what, we’re opening again, come back.’ Then call them back: ‘Guess what, you don’t have a job anymore.’ It’s just a devastating experience for me.

“It’s an emotional roller coaster,” she added. “It’s emotional whiplash.”

If America is now experiencing a sense of national déjà vu, with coronavirus deaths rising and hospitalizations at a level similar to the spring peak, that feeling is perhaps nowhere more intense than in California.

In the Northeast, the crisis that was so acute this spring in places like New York and Connecticut has now abated and shifted to the Sun Belt, where states like Texas and Florida had managed at first to escape the worst of the virus. But California is now in the unwelcome position of having found itself at the center of the pandemic twice over.

California was the first state to issue a stay-at-home order this spring, helping to control an early outbreak. But after a reopening that some health officials warned was too fast, cases surged, leading to a new statewide mask mandate and the closure of bars and indoor dining again. With more than 420,000 known cases, California has surpassed New York to have the most recorded cases of any state, and it set a single-day record Wednesday with more than 12,100 new cases and 155 new deaths.

And as California struggles once again to contain the virus, the multitude of challenges playing out across America has collided in every corner of the state, as if it were a microcosm of the country itself.

Gov. Gavin Newsom is wrestling with how to convey a consistent message while dealing with local officials who have resisted both new shutdowns and enforcing a mandatory mask order. Some rural areas of the state remain relatively unscathed with low case counts, while cases in Los Angeles are skyrocketing. The city’s mayor, Eric Garcetti, has warned that a new stay-at-home order could come down in the coming days.

In many parts of San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Los Angeles, people do not leave home without a mask. In Huntington Beach and across Orange County, residents have openly defied mask orders and protested against them.

In Los Angeles and San Diego, classrooms will be empty this fall, after public school officials decided they were unwilling to risk in-person instruction. But in Orange County, a recommendation by the Board of Education that children return to school without masks became political fodder for debate, even as the governor announced that most California schools would not be able to teach in person.

The contradictions span the state, creating a sense of regional dissonance. In Imperial County, on the southern border with Mexico, hospitals have been so overwhelmed with virus cases that patients have had to be airlifted elsewhere. But in the northernmost tip, the virus has yet to hit Modoc County, an agricultural community of around 9,000, where there were zero known cases as of Thursday.

“It’s a small town,” said Cynthia Peña, owner of Java Doc, a coffee shop in Alturas, California, where seasonal fires were the most pressing issue for local officials. “Everyone is pretty much social distancing; we already know a cow’s length.” Still, she has shut down her dining room and asked her employees to wear masks when customers arrive at the drive-thru window.

In recent weeks, Newsom has walked a fine line between justifying the state’s reopening and imploring Californians to stay home and refrain from gathering. He has pleaded with residents to wear masks and chided them for allowing their children to hug their cousins or grandparents.

He has repeatedly pointed out that conditions across a huge state are varied, saying, “None of us live in the aggregate; it’s a very different picture you can paint depending on where you live in the state.”

It is in some ways California’s sprawling nature, with 40 million residents spread across urban downtowns and rural areas, liberal strongholds and conservative alcoves, that has aggravated the feeling of back and forth. What applies in one area may not feel necessary in another, even as residents live under statewide orders. And the sense of confusion is often made worse by conflicting political messages from local leaders, the governor and the White House.

“It’s very hard to go backwards,” said Jonathan Fielding, a professor of health policy and management at UCLA and former public health director for Los Angeles County, who worried that a lack of consistent messaging had allowed many Californians to choose which message they wanted to hear at various points in the pandemic.

“When people have been isolated and in some cases lost a job and are hearing all of these different things, what is the message?” he said. “What is the message when you are hearing, basically, a cacophony?”

In Los Angeles — which has seen the most cases in California and where hospitals are filling up — parts of the city feel under siege, and in other areas, there is little palpable sense of the severity of the situation. Unlike in New York City during the height of the outbreak, most Angelenos have not had to absorb the piercing wail of ambulance sirens at all hours, a sound that came to define the pandemic there.

California’s numbers are in part a reflection of its vast population, about double that of New York state, and testing is far more available now than in the spring. Antibody tests suggest that far more people than previously reported were infected in New York City at its peak. But because Los Angeles is so less dense than New York City, there are parts of Los Angeles where the reality of the virus at this stage of the pandemic can go unnoticed.

“It feels as normal as it always did,” said Michael Lee, the owner of a hair salon, Bang Bang LA, in the Los Feliz neighborhood.

For Lee, the past several months have been turbulent in the extreme. He was set to open his business just as the pandemic gained a hold in the country, forcing shutdowns.

“We opened March 19 and got shut down March 20,” he said.

Lee, who rents space to other hair stylists, did not collect any rent for the first months of the shutdown. Now he is charging tenants just 35% of their rent “just to keep the doors open for when we can go back to work.”

He was allowed to open for about five weeks beginning in early June, but many of his clients stayed away, saying they feared another coronavirus wave. “They were right, I guess,” he said.

The salon shut down again last week, and Lee has been spending his time cleaning it, touching up the paint on the walls and researching business loans to help him stay afloat. “I’ve just been watching the numbers every day, hoping to see them start dropping,” he said.

For essential workers, many of whom are people of color who have faced the risk of the virus on a daily basis for months, the latest upticks were especially worrisome.

“It’s scary,” said Christina Lockyer-White, a nursing assistant at a nursing home in Kern County, who watched as dozens of patients and fellow employees fell ill in April. “Nobody should have to go through or see what I experienced.”

As cases rise, Lockyer-White, who said she tested negative this spring, once again worries about contracting the virus and taking it home to her son. “You always wonder if a second wave can come back, because you hear that they can,” Lockyer-White said Thursday during a break from a shift at the nursing home. “It’s always, make sure you don’t let your guard down.”


-The New York Times Company-

'Cut, copy and paste' inventor dies, Silicon Valley mourns

SAN FRANCISCO - Silicon Valley on Wednesday was mourning a pioneering computer scientist whose accomplishments included inventing the widely relied on "cut, copy and paste" command.

Bronx-born Lawrence "Larry" Tesler died this week at age 74, according to Xerox, where he spent part of his career.

"The inventor of cut/copy & paste, find & replace, and more was former Xerox researcher Larry Tesler," the company tweeted.

"Your workday is easier thanks to his revolutionary ideas. Larry passed away Monday, so please join us in celebrating him."

A graduate of Stanford University, Tesler specialized in human–computer interaction, employing his skills at Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

The cut and paste command was reportedly inspired by old time editing that involved actually cutting portions of printed text and affixing them elsewhere with adhesive.

"Tesler created the idea of 'cut, copy, & paste' and combined computer science training with a counterculture vision that computers should be for everyone," the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley tweeted Wednesday.

The command was made popular by Apple after being incorporated in software on the Lisa computer in 1983 and the original Macintosh that debuted the next year.

Tesler worked for Apple in 1980 after being recruited away from Xerox by late co-founder Steve Jobs.

Tesler spent 17 years at Apple, rising to chief scientist.

He went on to establish an education startup and do stints in user-experience technology at Amazon and Yahoo.

Agence France-Presse

Facebook's stock hits record high after extended historic slump

SAN FRANCISCO - Shares of Facebook, which have been doggedly crawling their way back from a historic slump after lapses in users’ privacy sparked fears of lower profits, on Friday struck an intra-day record high for the first time in over a year.

Facebook briefly rose 0.72 percent to touch $219.88 at mid-day, its highest level ever, before giving up the day’s gains to finish down 0.11 percent. The stock on Thursday achieved a record closing high, topping the last record close seen on July 25, 2018.

But the following day, on July 26, 2018, shares of the world’s largest social network tumbled 19 percent, a day after the company unexpectedly warned that it faced a multi-year squeeze on its profit margins.

That bombshell played into concerns that Facebook’s future was under threat following criticism of its handling of users’ privacy and its role proliferating “fake news,” along with dwindling user growth in lucrative markets. The company’s stock lost nearly half its value in a selloff lasting into December 2018.

The strong stock performance of Facebook, which is part of the so-called FANG group of stocks along with Amazon, Alphabet and Netflix, played an outsized role in Wall Street’s rally in recent years.

Even as Facebook struggles to rehabilitate its reputation, companies have continued to use its advertising platform, with analysts on average expecting advertising revenue to have increased by 26 percent in 2019, according Refinitiv.

Underscoring Facebook’s relative fall from grace, the Menlo Park, California-based company dropped to the 23rd spot in Glassdoor’s list of “Best Places to Work” in 2020 from seventh place a year ago.

(Reporting by Noel Randewich; additional reporting by Katie Paul; Editing by Leslie Adler)

source: news.abs-cbn.com

End of an era at Google as founders step aside

SAN FRANCISCO — Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Stanford graduate students who founded Google over two decades ago, are stepping down from executive roles at Google’s parent company, Alphabet, they announced Tuesday.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, will become the chief of both Google and Alphabet.

The move is an end of an era for Google. Page and Brin have personified the company since its founding and have been two of the technology industry’s most influential figures, on a par with the founders of Apple and Microsoft, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Their early work on the Google search engine helped corral an unruly cloud of information on the World Wide Web. And their ideas about how to run an internet company — like offering generous employee perks like free shuttle buses to the office and making rank-and-file employees feel as if they have a stake in the company — became a standard for Silicon Valley.

Page and Brin took a lesser role in day-to-day operations in 2015 when they turned Google into Alphabet, a holding company that includes self-driving car company Waymo under its umbrella.

Since then, they have spent more time overseeing a variety of so-called other bets, like life-extension technology, while Pichai ran Google and its enormous search and advertising business. The business has continued to grow, and Alphabet is among the most valuable companies in the world, but the internet giant is entering one of the most turbulent periods in its history, with antitrust scrutiny, employee walkouts and growing public skepticism of its power.

Page and Brin, who are both 46, will remain directors on Alphabet’s board and the company’s two largest individual shareholders. They retain a majority of the company’s voting shares, which will give them effective control over the board and ensure they still have a say over the company’s future.

“Today, in 2019, if the company was a person, it would be a young adult of 21 and it would be time to leave the roost,” the founders wrote in a public letter Tuesday. “While it has been a tremendous privilege to be deeply involved in the day-to-day management of the company for so long, we believe it’s time to assume the role of proud parents — offering advice and love, but not daily nagging!”

The move confirms the ascendancy of Pichai, 47, as one of tech’s most powerful people. While he has run the core Google business for four years, he has still reported to Page, Alphabet’s chief executive, and Brin, its president.

Now he is the sole executive in charge of a company that has giant businesses in search, advertising, maps, smartphone software and online video, as well as a variety of fledgling bets in far-off areas like drone deliveries and internet-beaming balloons.

In recent years, Page and Brin seemed to have lost interest in running the company they founded. The reorganization into a holding company was in part intended to address that. While Pichai took the reins of the often messy business of Google, Page and Brin would focus on what were effectively science projects.

Brin moved his desk for a time to X, the so-called moonshot lab where engineers worked on projects that were likely to fail — but had big potential if they didn’t. Page was rarely a presence on Google’s campus and was working on long-shot technology problems and personal side projects like his flying-car startup, Kitty Hawk.

They have largely disappeared from public view, at least as company representatives. Despite being the chief of one of the world’s most valuable public companies, Page did not speak on Alphabet’s quarterly earnings calls, appear for congressional testimony like other tech executives over the last year or sit for interviews with journalists.

One of Brin’s few on-the-record comments to journalists in recent years came at San Francisco International Airport when he was protesting President Donald Trump’s immigration policy. He told reporters he was there as a private citizen.

While Page and Brin had been a regular presence at weekly all-staff meetings in Google’s early years, they had all but stopped appearing over the last year.

One of Page’s last appearances at the company meeting was last year when he apologized to employees for his handling of the departure of Andy Rubin, a former senior executive who received a $90 million payout after the company deemed sexual harassment claims against him credible. In June, Page surprised investors and employees when he did not attend Alphabet’s shareholder meeting.

In recent years, the freewheeling work culture promoted by Page and Brin has run into trouble. Employees have staged public protests over the company’s handling of sexual harassment claims against executives, its treatment of contract workers and its work with the Defense Department, federal border agencies and the Chinese government.

The soft-spoken Pichai has been reluctant to confront the protests head-on, but he has quietly cracked down on employee unrest. Google has halted the weekly company meetings and placed restrictions on what employees can discuss on message boards.

Though working at Google is becoming more like working at other giant companies, Page and Brin’s interests and styles — like focusing on passion projects and math jokes — have become part of Silicon Valley iconography.

While other tech titans like Jobs and Gates were known for their sometimes brash and mercurial leadership styles, Page and Brin were low-key and cerebral. But not always. Brin sky-dived for a company event that introduced one of the company’s most disappointing products, the Google Glass wearable device. He was often spotted riding an elliptical bike to work.

That idiosyncratic style, that “Googliness,” became something company managers were told to look for in applicants.

Page and Brin are among the few tech company founders who have walked away from day-to-day roles at the company they created and that made them billionaires. Gates did something similar when he handed the chief executive role at Microsoft to Steve Ballmer in 2000, during his company’s long antitrust fight with the Justice Department.

While Google is now gearing up for its own antitrust fight, with investigations into its power in Congress, the Justice Department and nearly every state, there are notable differences with Microsoft.

When Ballmer took over as chief executive there in 2000, the company had just been found to have repeatedly violated the nation’s antitrust laws in a landmark case brought by the Justice Department. Pichai is still unsure what he faces from regulators and lawmakers. The scrutiny includes Google’s dominant market share in internet search and how it competes with smaller rivals in the digital-ad business.

“For Google, it is still to be determined just what it is facing on the antitrust front,” said David Readerman, a longtime technology analyst and portfolio manager at Endurance Capital Partners. “But that is a clear and present risk.”

In their letter Tuesday, Page and Brin said they would remain committed to the company “for the long term, and will remain actively involved as board members, shareholders and co-founders. In addition, we plan to continue talking with Sundar regularly, especially on topics we’re passionate about!”

Whatever they decide to do, they will have no trouble funding it. Page is worth about $58.9 billion, and Brin is worth about $56.8 billion, the sixth- and seventh-richest people in the world, according to Forbes.


2019 The New York Times Company

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Google's Sundar Pichai named CEO at parent firm Alphabet

SAN FRANCISCO - Google chief executive Sundar Pichai will assume the CEO role at parent firm Alphabet in a shakeup at the top of the Silicon Valley titan, the company said Tuesday.

Pichai will take over from Larry Page, a co-founder of the internet giant, at the holding firm which includes Google as well as units focusing on "other bets" in areas including self-driving cars and life sciences.

Page and Google co-founder Sergey Brin "will continue their involvement as co-founders, shareholders and members of Alphabet's board of directors," the company said.

In a letter to employees, Page and Brin wrote: "We've never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there's a better way to run the company."

They added that Pichai "brings humility and a deep passion for technology to our users, partners and our employees every day" and that there is "no better person to lead Google and Alphabet into the future."

Alphabet was formed in 2015, giving a separate identity to the original company Google and other projects such as autonomous car unit Waymo and smart cities group Sidewalk Labs.

The 47-year-old Pichai, born in India, takes the helm at a time when Page and Brin have been noticeably absent and the company faces a torrent of controversies relating to its dominant position in the tech world.

Pichai is likely to fill a void at the company as it faces antitrust investigations and controversies over privacy and data practices in the United States and elsewhere. 

The company has also faced allegations of failing to adequately address sexual harassment in the workplace and of straying from the ideals espoused by the founders in the company's early code of conduct which included the motto "don't be evil."

"He's a technologist but he's been a steady hand for the last few years and has proven his ability to conduit business at the highest level," said Roger Kay, analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates.

Kay added the move "ratifies that the (Google) founders have stepped aside almost entirely."

Pichai will have a new role as he faces up to claims from President Donald Trump of "bias" in internet search results, and the latest charge from Amnesty International that its business model leads to human rights violations by enabling surveillance of users.

Earlier this year, Pichai met with Trump and appeared to ease the US president's concerns that Google was unwilling to help the US military but was boosting China and its military.

Trump tweeted after the March meeting that Pichai was "totally committed" to US security.

Last December, Pichai kept calm as he parried US lawmakers over complaints of political bias and intrusive data collection.

"We build our products in a neutral way," Pichai said in one exchange with a lawmaker, and added later: "We approach our work without any political bias."

- Chennai to Silicon Valley -

Born to humble beginnings in the southern city of Chennai, he studied engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Kharagpur before heading to the United States to further his studies and career.

After leaving India, he attended Stanford University and later studied at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

In recent years, Alphabet has become one of the world's most valuable companies, with a 2018 profit of some $30 billion on revenue of $110 billion.

The 2015 reorganization appeared aimed at installing the startup mentality for new ventures, described by Google as "moonshots."

These ventures, including the life sciences group Verily and the biotech operation Calico, have been losing money.

Kay said the "other bets" have been struggling because even though they have the financial backing from Google's profits "they don't have the do-or-die element" of other startups.

juj-rl/bfm

Agence France-Presse

Silicon Valley takes on TikTok with knockoffs, censorship scare

SAN FRANCISCO — Teenagers are gaga for TikTok. That’s why Silicon Valley is so worried about it.

TikTok, which is run by a seven-year-old company in Beijing called ByteDance, allows people to create short, snappy videos and share them around the world. That simple concept has fueled its rise to quickly become one of the world’s largest social networks and mount the most direct incursion yet by a Chinese company into Silicon Valley’s turf.

Now US internet companies are pushing back. Through knockoffs, potential acquisitions and not-so-subtle references to Chinese censorship, TikTok’s competitors have been trying to protect their home turf from the service’s advancement. They haven’t had much luck so far.

Over the past 12 months, TikTok’s app has been downloaded more than 750 million times, compared with 715 million for Facebook, 450 million for Instagram, 300 million for YouTube and 275 million for Snapchat, according to the research firm Sensor Tower.

But TikTok’s US competitors could still get some help from their government. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a federal panel that reviews foreign acquisitions of US firms, is now reviewing ByteDance’s two-year-old acquisition of Musical.ly, the US company that became TikTok, The New York Times and Reuters reported Friday. Members of Congress had asked for a review last month.

A government intervention would probably be welcome news to TikTok’s competitors, who have been working from their usual crush-the-upstart playbook.

Late last year, Facebook launched a TikTok clone called Lasso. That app has been downloaded fewer than 500,000 times, mostly in Mexico, according to Sensor Tower. While many videos in TikTok’s endless feed of 15- to 60-second clips have hundreds of thousands of “likes,” the videos in Lasso’s nearly identical feed typically have a few dozen.

At YouTube, executives are also considering ways to imitate TikTok, including adding similar video-editing software within the YouTube app, according to a person familiar with the conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plans are private.

Google, which owns YouTube, also held acquisition talks with Firework, a TikTok imitator that is aiming for older users, according to three people close to the talks who requested anonymity because the negotiations were confidential. One of those people said Google decided against acquiring Firework.

Firework, which has less than 3 million downloads, has also received interest from Baidu, China’s biggest search engine company, and Weibo, which runs the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, according to two people close to the talks. The Wall Street Journal first reported Google’s and Weibo’s interest in Firework.

“They see that TikTok right now is having a moment, and they have natural concern when any other app gains share in attention,” Eugene Wei, a longtime tech and media executive who now tracks the industries, said of the big tech companies. “And we haven’t seen another consumer app make that much headway in attention market share in recent history.”

At Snap, which some analysts believe is most threatened by TikTok’s rise because both target young people, the chief executive, Evan Spiegel, has argued that the companies don’t compete.

TikTok largely gives people entertainment from strangers while Snapchat connects friends, he said. When asked by an analyst during an earnings call last month whether TikTok is a “friend or foe,” he responded that TikTok advertises on Snapchat and has also built services for the app. “I think at a high level, looking at TikTok, we definitely consider them a friend,” he said.

In April, Snap began listing TikTok as a competitor in its regulatory filings.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, told employees in July that TikTok “is really the first consumer internet product built by one of the Chinese tech giants that is doing quite well around the world,” according to a transcript of the meeting published by The Verge.

He noted that it was popular with young Americans and had surpassed Instagram in India. “It’s a very interesting phenomenon,” he said. “So we have a number of approaches that we’re going to take towards this.”

Lasso isn’t Facebook’s only hedge against TikTok. In September, an app researcher in Hong Kong named Jane Manchun Wong noticed some computer code in Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, that revealed the app was testing a feature called Clips. The feature allows users to edit videos much like TikTok, splicing clips together and adding music.

Copying fast-growing upstarts has been a successful playbook for Facebook. Instagram’s popular “Stories” feature, which lets users post short, ephemeral videos, closely resembles Snapchat’s main function.

Zuckerberg suggested those short “Stories” videos are a way Facebook can compete. In response to a question about Facebook’s “plan of attack” against TikTok, Zuckerberg told employees in the July meeting that Facebook was making Stories an even more central part of Instagram.

And last month, Zuckerberg seized on TikTok’s Chinese roots to criticize it publicly. In a speech at Georgetown University in which he promoted Facebook as a US company eager to protect free speech, he said, “China is building its own internet focused on very different values and is now exporting their vision of the internet to other countries.”

As evidence, he cited reports that there were few signs of the Hong Kong protests on TikTok.

“While our services, like WhatsApp, are used by protesters and activists everywhere due to strong encryption and privacy protections, on TikTok, the Chinese app growing quickly around the world, mentions of these protests are censored, even in the U.S.,” he said. “Is that the internet we want?”

Josh Gartner, a ByteDance spokesman, said that the Chinese government does not request that TikTok censor content and that the app’s content policies are led by a team in the United States and are not influenced by any government.

“We have said clearly that these accusations are false,” he said in a statement. “This is an unfortunate attempt by Mark Zuckerberg to redirect scrutiny onto a competitor that he’s failed to copy.”

Tiktok’s has faced earlier scrutiny. In February, ByteDance agreed to pay a $5.7 million fine to the Federal Trade Commission to settle allegations that Musical.ly illegally collected information on users under the age of 13.

While they plot to take on TikTok, tech executives have also tried to play down the threat. Zuckerberg told employees in July that Facebook research shows TikTok is spending a lot to acquire users, who then don’t stick around for long.

Independent estimates suggest TikTok does retain fewer users than rivals. In June, about 26 percent of new TikTok users were still using the app a week later, according to estimates from App Annie, an app data firm. Facebook’s retention rate was 45 percent, Instagram’s was 44 percent and Snapchat’s 32 percent. By September, TikTok’s rate had risen to 39 percent.

“It is growing, but they’re spending a huge amount of money promoting it. What we’ve found is that their retention is actually not that strong after they stop advertising,” Zuckerberg said. “So the space is still fairly nascent, and there’s time for us to kind of figure out what we want to do.”


2019 The New York Times Company

source: news.abs-cbn.com

WeWork founder Neumann: an unconventional leader steps aside

NEW YORK - WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann, whose unconventional approach to business and governance pushed boundaries on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, stepped down as chief executive on Tuesday.

Under pressure from some board members, Neumann will exit the corner office as the company tries to reposition an initial public offering campaign that has sputtered over the last month.

Neumann, who will stay on as chairman, has also faced questions over his perceived self-dealing, as well as the ability of his fast-growing company to become profitable.

Neumann's setback marks a shift in fortune for a charismatic figure who has been embraced by investors even as he has employed unusual imagery to describe the business's meteoric growth since its founding in 2010. 

The company's IPO prospectus says "its mission is to elevate the world’s consciousness."

Neumann's audacious approach to business won support from key investors, including the Japanese group SoftBank.

But his loose approach to corporate governance and conflicts of interest garnered scrutiny, as did a Wall Street Journal expose detailing drug and alcohol use and Neumann's aspirations to become the world's first trillionaire.

Known for long hair and a wardrobe that favors T-shirts, Neumann, 40, is also known as a serial entrepreneur.

BIG AMBITIONS 

Born in Israel, he has described a difficult childhood that included the divorce of his parents and frequent moves.

After serving in the Israeli army for five years, he moved in 2001 to New York. He has lived in the city ever since and it is now WeWork's headquarters.

Neumann initially studied business at Baruch College in the City University of New York but abandoned formal studies to launch his first fledgling business, producing a woman's shoe with a collapsible heel.

A second venture marketed baby clothes with knee and elbow pads, but he told Baruch students at a 2017 graduation ceremony that the venture notched just $2 million in sales compared with $3 million in expenses.

During that period, Neumann also met the woman who became his wife, Rebekah, a cousin of actress Gwyneth Paltrow. The couple now have 5 children.

"The first moment I met my husband, even though he was broke.... I could see that together we were going to create something that was going to be large scale for the planet," Rebekah Neumann said in a November 2018 podcast.

"I just knew he was going to be the man that was hopefully going to help save the world."

Neumann, along with his friend Miguel McKelvey, moved into the shared-office business in 2008.

The company, called Green Desk, was based on "coworking," an old concept but one that was refreshed with new technologies as the financial crisis led to more freelancing and startup ventures, some involving people from finance who lost their jobs.

Neumann describes renters as "members" and built WeWork to be "a community that helped people live life with purpose," according to a blog post earlier this year.

The company today manages more than 500 sites in 30 countries and employs 12,500 people.

But WeWork has struggled with its bottom line, losing almost $2 billion in 2018.

On the jobs site Glassdoor, former WeWork employees praise Neumann's charisma and boundless energy, while others have criticized a cult-like atmosphere.

On Tuesday, Neumann said he was stepping down as CEO, declaring that he was "so proud" of the company's growth.

"While our business has never been stronger, in recent weeks, the scrutiny directed toward me has become a significant distraction and I have decided that it is in the best interest of the company to step down as chief executive," he said.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Facebook evacuates 4 buildings after possible sarin exposure

SAN FRANCISCO - Facebook Inc evacuated four buildings and two people were being evaluated for possible exposure to the nerve agent sarin on Monday after a package at the social media company's Silicon Valley mail facility tested positive for the toxic compound.

The people who came in contact with the suspicious package at about 11 a.m. did not show any symptoms of exposure to sarin, said Jon Johnston, fire marshal for the city of Menlo Park, where Facebook is based.

"The (Facebook) facility tests all of the packages that come in and they had a positive test, so they just initiated their standard protocol. Now we're just waiting to verify whether that’s true or not," he said.

Facebook spokesman Anthony Harrison said the company evacuated four buildings following the positive test and was cooperating with police in the investigation.

"Authorities have not yet identified the substance found. As of now, three of the evacuated buildings have been cleared for repopulation," Harrison said.

Agents from the San Francisco office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were responding to the scene, a spokesman for the agency said. Sarin, a potent toxic compound that disrupts the nervous system, has been used as a chemical weapon. Exposure can be fatal.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

San Francisco votes to ban city use of facial recognition technology

SAN FRANCISCO - San Francisco officials on Tuesday voted 8 to 1 to ban the purchase and use of facial recognition technology by city personnel, in a move to regulate tools that local Silicon Valley companies helped develop.

The ordinance, which also would require city departments to submit surveillance technology policies for public vetting, can become final after a second vote next week by the same officials, the city's Board of Supervisors.

The action puts San Francisco at the forefront of increasing discontent in the United States over facial recognition, which government agencies have used for years and now has become more powerful with the rise of cloud computing and artificial intelligence technologies.

"We have a fundamental duty to safeguard the public from potential abuses," Aaron Peskin, the city supervisor who championed the ban, said before the board's vote.

Peskin said the ordinance was not an anti-technology policy. It allows continued use of surveillance tools like security cameras; the district attorney or sheriff can make an appeal to use certain restricted technology in exceptional circumstances as well.

Rather, Peskin said, the aim is to protect "marginalized groups" that could be harmed by the technology.

For instance, Amazon.com Inc has come under scrutiny since last year for selling an image analysis and ID service to law enforcement. Researchers have said this service struggles to identify the gender of individuals with darker skin, prompting fears of unjust arrests. Amazon has defended its work and said all users must follow the law.

Civil rights groups and companies including Microsoft Corp , which markets a facial recognition service, have called for regulation of the technology in recent months. This has added momentum to the effort in San Francisco and to a parallel ban reportedly in the works in nearby Oakland.

While communities at the heart of the technology industry are moving to limit facial recognition, police elsewhere have increased their use, primarily to spot potential suspects in known offender databases after a crime has occurred.

U.S. customs agents are vetting foreign travelers at airports with facial recognition, and other federal agencies use the technology too.

Daniel Castro, vice president of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, said concerns that the U.S. government would use face identification for mass surveillance, like China has, were overblown. The non-profit includes technology industry representatives on its board.

San Francisco's "ban on facial recognition will make it frozen in time with outdated technology," he said.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Twitter's Jack Dorsey is tech's foremost 'manfluencer

Young men are staggering around, hungry for days. They are throwing themselves into ice baths and cryotherapy pods. There are not enough beds at the silent vegan meditation centers to accommodate them. They need more near-infrared bulbs.

They are the followers of Jack Dorsey, Silicon Valley’s answer to the mega-influencer Gwyneth Paltrow. The lithe, 42-year-old tech founder has become a one-man Goop.

“In terms of influence, no one is at the scale of Jack,” said Geoffrey Woo, whose startup, HVMN, sells fasting tools (like a liquid ketone supplement). He also heads up WeFast, an online support network for intermittent fasters.

It’s unlikely that Dorsey can embrace his wellness guru role as fully as Paltrow. He is already the chief executive of both the payments platform Square (valued at $30 billion) and Twitter (valued at $26 billion). As Twitter’s head, he spends his days navigating issues around free speech for white supremacists, online abuse and the spread of terrorist propaganda, all while facing a deluge of criticism from everyone (including the American president).

Still, Dorsey finds time for himself. For 10 days a year, he sits in silence at a meditation retreat. Before getting dressed each morning, he experiments with using his home infrared sauna and then an ice bath, sometimes cycling through both several times before he leaves home. He walks 5 miles to work. He eats one meal a day and has said that on the weekends when he fasts from Friday to Saturday, “time slows down.”

He talks about starting each morning with salt juice — water mixed with Himalayan salt and lemon. It is dispensed in Twitter offices around the world.

The tech world has two main personalities with cults: Dorsey and his foil, Elon Musk. Followers of Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, are drawn to his brash hypermasculinity and angry tweets — his memes, rockets and flamethrowers.

Musk’s fans see him as a model of aggressive optimism. They swarm critics on Twitter and form Tesla Motor clubs. Some call themselves Musketeers, and there are quite a few Musk-themed tattoos posted to message boards.

He is the billionaire doing the things a billionaire in movies does. His hair has gotten thicker and his arms buffer. He dated a pop star and smoked pot on a podcast.

Dorsey, in comparison, seems to be having less fun.

He is very thin. He looks paler than usual. His beard is longer. The lines on his face have deepened, and he can seem to disappear in one of those high-end, overly long T-shirts. But to his followers, this monastic, pensive leader is a better direction for Silicon Valley. And while Musk’s acolytes seek to mirror an attitude, Dorsey’s have an 11-point lifestyle plan.

Just as an endorsement from Paltrow can make even the most spurious self-help objects instantly covetable, an endorsement from Dorsey can put products out of stock for weeks.

“We’re just really glad he’s spreading the message,” said Harpreet Rai, the chief executive of Oura Ring, which makes a sleep tracking device Dorsey endorsed.

Brian Richards, the founder of SaunaSpace, also owes something to the Twitter founder’s words. His company makes “Personal Near-Infrared Sauna” equipment. (A near-infrared sauna heats by pointing incandescent lights at you.) Its latest product is a Faraday tent, of sorts, that purports to block electromagnetic transmissions — creating “your very own EMF-free ancestral space.” Richards said his company had never been mentioned in the national press until Dorsey started talking about his personal SaunaSpace sauna on a fitness podcast, and now his products are back-ordered by a month.

“The demand’s been insane,” Richards said. “He legitimizes it. He’s a true believer. And now people are like, ‘Hey, if this guy’s doing it, maybe there’s something to it.’”

To Richards, who is based in Columbia, Missouri, it makes sense that Dorsey’s tech followers would find these saunas and become one of his biggest consumer bases.

“An EMF-blocking Faraday sauna is really the only escape these people have from electromagnetic stress,” Richards said. (Though a study of middle-aged and older Finnish men indicates that their health benefited from saunas, there have been no major studies conducted of “Faraday saunas.”)

Those who run meditation centers, especially those running the specific type Dorsey endorses, Vipassana, are seeing booming wait-lists. A recent silent meditation retreat at Spirit Rock near San Francisco was completely full, with about 100 attendees — plus 603 people on the wait-list.

And the new meditators are very young. Since 2013, the number of retreatants between ages 18 and 29 has tripled.

Rachel Uris, the center’s director of development, said she is now getting startup employees who want to come as a group.

“It’s not just one person going on retreats anymore,” she said. “We are in this moment where CEOs are saying, ‘I’m seeing this as a really important tool that can enrich the work experience.’”

Spirit Rock is now expanding.

Many of the activities Dorsey endorses are not inherently fun, and so his personal seal of approval makes a big difference.

“It’s such a strange service — who wants to be in the cold? You need to hear about it from someone you trust,” said Michael Garrett, the head of Reboot, a spa that offers cryotherapy around the Bay Area. (Cryotherapy is when you make yourself get cold.) “And now people are getting their information from CEOs. That’s where the culture is going. Dorsey’s a successful guy. So you listen.”

He said the cold therapy gives him a high, as blood rushes to his head and chest, and he believes practitioners are addicted. “I’m addicted straight up, it’s a high and I love it,” Garrett said.

No community has embraced Dorsey as their guru more than the fasters, who spend days on end just not eating. Dorsey’s very public endorsements of this movement have led to criticism that he is endorsing eating disorders.

The WeFast community, started in 2015, now has around 25,000 members across its closed Slack and Facebook groups. They share about fasting and their blood ketone levels. There is also a private WhatsApp group for Silicon Valley power players who fast.

“We just grew up expecting three meals a day plus snacks. But why? Why does that exist?” Woo asked on a recent day at the HVMN office. Various ketone supplements were scattered around the tables.

While health trends have historically been set by Los Angeles, with people obsessing over an actor’s workout or skin routine, Woo argues that in the current economy, following the habits of a tech CEO like Dorsey makes more sense.

“In LA, there’s an economic value in appearing good, being physically strong, but we’re not physical laborers anymore. I’m not a farmer,” Woo said. “Now we need to optimize for cognitive performance and intellectual labor.”

The movement has grown so fast now, Woo has had to begin warning people not to obsess on Dorsey too much. Just as Paltrow’s Goop was fined $145,000 for claims about jade eggs, Woo cautions that even Silicon Valley’s guru can let his eccentricities go beyond science.

“People should slow down and understand what they’re trying to optimize for before just following Jack,” Woo said. “You don’t want to be in a cargo cult type thing.”


2019 New York Times News Service

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End of an era at Google as ex-CEO Schmidt plans to leave board

SAN FRANCISCO — Google’s parent company, Alphabet, said Tuesday that Eric Schmidt, its former chief executive, planned to relinquish his position on the board of directors in June.

His departure will end an era for the internet giant, in a shake-up of one of the coziest and most stable corporate boards in Silicon Valley. Another member, Diane Greene, who gained her seat in 2012 and had been running Google’s cloud computing business until this year, will also not seek re-election.

Schmidt, who was Google’s chief executive for a decade until 2011 and then its executive chairman for 7 years, oversaw the meteoric rise of Google from a useful search engine into an internet powerhouse.

He was brought into the company in 2001 to provide oversight for its young founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. He helped take Google public and oversaw major acquisitions like YouTube and DoubleClick, which cemented Google as an industry giant.

Schmidt stepped down as executive chairman of Alphabet in January 2018, but kept his board seat. He will not seek re-election when his term expires in June, Alphabet said. On Twitter, Schmidt said he would remain a technical adviser to Alphabet and Google.

Alphabet said it had appointed to the board Robin L. Washington, an executive vice president and chief financial officer of Gilead Sciences, a biopharmaceuticals company. Before the announced changes, seven of Alphabet’s 11 directors had been on the board for more than a decade.

The board has come under scrutiny because of a shareholder lawsuit filed in January that said directors had neglected their fiduciary duties by approving massive exit packages for executives accused of misconduct.

The lawsuit, citing minutes and emails, said board members had rubber-stamped compensation agreements hammered out by Page, Alphabet’s chief executive, who along with Brin owns voting control of the company.


2019 New York Times News Service

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Tech startups Pinterest, Zoom soar in Wall Street debut

Pinterest got off to a flying start on Wall Street Thursday in the market debut for the San Francisco-based visual discovery service, a positive sign for the wave of Silicon Valley firms planning stock listings.

Pinterest shares leapt 28 percent to close at $24.40 after its initial public offering (IPO), which raised some $1.4 billion.

The jump was a positive sign for other venture-backed Silicon Valley firms after a stumble for ride-hailing firm Lyft, which has lost some 20 percent since its market debut last month.

Separately, the videoconferencing startup Zoom surged 72 percent in its market debut after an IPO which raised more than $350 million.

Zoom's market value at the opening was estimated at some $16.6 billion and Pinterest's at $12.5 billion.

The market action comes amid an expect wave of "unicorns," or startups valued at over $1 billion, hitting the public markets.

The biggest of the group, Uber, is expected to make its debut next month with a valuation of close to $100 billion.

Some analysts have expressed skepticism about the ability of Uber and Lyft to reach profitability soon, raising concerns about their valuation.

Pinterest, launched in 2010, is a virtual bulletin board platform, with users decorating their boards with pictures showcasing interests including food, fashion, travel and lifestyle.

It claims some 250 million users, although it does not call itself a social network. It also enables users to link to online shopping and other services to find items they have "pinned."

Pinterest said it had a turnover of $755.9 million in 2018, and a net loss of almost $68 million. 

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Shenzhen, China's reform pioneer, leads tech revolution

SHENZHEN, China -- This southern city is the symbol of the transformative reforms launched by China 40 years ago: former fishing villages that morphed into a global manufacturing hub.

Today Shenzhen is again at the heart of a new policy aimed at turning China into a hi-tech innovator and shed its reputation as an assembly line for foreign companies or -- worse -- an imitator.

Modern skyscrapers housing corporations and ambitious startups tower over the mega-city of 13 million people -- among them is Wu Yebin, 35, who runs his own tech firm from his 35th floor office.

His own story mirrors those of countless others who have risen from modest backgrounds following the reforms spearheaded by late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, which the Communist Party ratified on Dec. 18, 1978.

The son of poor farmers, Wu arrived in the city in 2005 and over the years he assembled devices similar to Apple's iPad or MacBook, joining Shenzhen's army of people making "shanzhai" -- creative knock-offs of foreign electronics affordable for local population.

"Germany, the United States, Japan, South Korea... All developed countries have done this to develop their manufacturing industry," Wu said. "You have to do that to gain experience."

While this economic model used to be "very popular, it is no longer viable today," he said.

He now leads his own electronics firm, MeegoPad, which boasts an annual turnover of $28 million making products such as miniature PCs.

"We are now very attached to intellectual property and patents," Wu said.

'MADE IN CHINA 2025'

Shenzhen, which lived off fishing and rice paddies, became a testing ground for Deng's reforms when it was designated as the country's first Special Economic Zone in 1980.

It grew into a massive manufacturing center, with factories churning out gadgets, computers and phones for foreign firms, which today include Apple and Samsung.

Today China's own global corporations, such as telecom company Huawei and internet giant Tencent, have made Shenzhen their headquarters and the city of tens of thousands of factories is dubbed the "Silicon Valley of Hardware".

The metropolis is now seeking to reinvent itself as the home of Chinese innovation, in line with Beijing's "Made in China 2025" plan to dominate key hi-tech industries such as robotics, electric vehicles and artificial intelligence.

"China is becoming a world leader in this field," Wu said. "Shenzhen is turning into a meeting point for creative engineers from around the world."

Now talent from abroad is flocking to Shenzhen.

Meng Jie, who is French and in his 30s, left California's Silicon Valley in 2017 to create Maybe, a company that makes smart speakers that help people learn Mandarin.

"Silicon Valley is still way ahead in artificial intelligence. But you can find the electronic or mechanical component you need three times faster in Shenzhen," Meng said.

"It's like going from a road to a motorway," he said.

Pointing to the skyscrapers outside his office, he said: "People see Silicon Valley as the tech Mecca. They underestimate Shenzhen a lot because they don't know what's happening here."

"This place was just sand and water 20 years ago. In 10 years, Shenzhen will be a very important world city. It will be the capital of innovation," he said.

US FEARS

Some of China's hi-tech ambitions are running into suspicions about its intentions abroad, with the United States and others fearing that they pose security and espionage risks.

Telecommunications equipment giant Huawei's own global expansion has faced setbacks, with some of its services rejected in certain Western countries and its chief financial officer detained in Canada on a US extradition request over alleged Iran sanctions violations.

But those who have witnessed Shenzhen's rise marvel at its evolution from hi-tech copycat to creator.

Shenzhen is "really nice fertile ground for innovation," said Duncan Turner, managing director of HAX, an incubator for startups based in the city.

"The Chinese government sets up clear plans for innovation in particular sectors that they want to invest in," Turner said.

If a company matches those plans, "you've got a nice path for development and onward funding," he said.

Turner, who moved to Shenzhen in 2009, said the biggest change he has see in the past decade is how young people who used to make fakes are "becoming incredibly inventive, entrepreneurial R&D (research and development) experts that are leading the way of technology in certain areas".

Improved higher education has created a new generation of engineers, such as Zhang Zhaohui, chief executive of Youibot, which set up his company in HAX's incubator to make the first autonomous maintenance robot for buses.

"Shenzhen has huge potential," Zhang, 26, predicted. "The city could very quickly catch up to Silicon Valley."


source: news.abs-cbn.com

Google launch event overshadowed by privacy firestorm

Google was supposed to be focusing Tuesday on its launch of a new smartphone and other devices, but the event was being overshadowed by a firestorm over a privacy glitch that forced it to shut down its struggling social network.

The Silicon Valley giant said Monday it found and fixed a bug exposing private data in as many as 500,000 accounts, but drew fire for failing to disclose the incident.

The revelation heightened concerns in Washington over privacy practices by Silicon Valley giants after a series of missteps by Facebook that could have leaked data on millions.

"In the last year, we've seen Google try to evade scrutiny -- both for its business practices and its treatment of user data," Senator Mark Warner said in a statement.

Warner said that despite "consent" agreements with the US Federal Trade Commission "neither company appears to have been particularly chastened in their privacy practices" and added that "it's clear that Congress needs to step in" for privacy protections.

Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the latest breach suggests the FTC has failed to do its job in protecting user data.

"The Congress needs to establish a data protection agency in the United States," Rotenberg said. "Data breaches are increasing but the FTC lacks the political will to enforce its own legal judgments."

Rising tensions

The internet search leader had already faced tensions with lawmakers after it decided against sending its top executive to testify at a hearing on privacy and data protection, prompting the committee to leave an empty seat for the company.

Last month, Google indicated it would send chief executive Sundar Pichai to testify before Congress.

Google has also been in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump, who alleged that its search results were biased against conservatives, although there was little evidence to support the claim.

The rising tensions come with Google holding an event in New York widely expected to release its Pixel 3, the upgraded premium smartphone that aims to compete with high-end devices from Apple and Samsung.

The Pixel phone is part of a suite of hardware products Google is releasing as part of an effort to keep consumers in its mobile ecosystem and challenge rivals like Apple and Amazon.

On Monday, Google said it was unable to confirm which accounts were affected by the bug, but an analysis indicated it could have been as many as 500,000 Google+ accounts.

Google did not specify how long the software flaw existed, or why it waited to disclose it.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Google executives opted against notifying users earlier because of concerns it would catch the attention of regulators and draw comparisons to a data privacy scandal at Facebook.

Earlier this year, Facebook acknowledged that tens of millions of users had personal data hijacked by Cambridge Analytica, a political firm working for Donald Trump in 2016.

Google has also faced increasing tensions over a reported search engine which would be acceptable to Chinese censors, and over its work for the US military.

On Tuesday, Google confirmed it is dropping out of the bidding for a huge Pentagon cloud computing contract that could be worth up to $10 billion, saying the deal would be inconsistent with its principles.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Startup delivers groceries in self-driving cars

SAN FRANCISCO -- Startup AutoX on Monday announced the Silicon Valley debut of a service that will turn self-driving cars into mobile grocery shops summoned with a touch of a smartphone application.

The service will kick off this month in parts of the California city of San Jose in a partnership with e-commerce company GrubMarket.com which sources food from producers as well as retail shops such as Amazon-owned Whole Foods.

"We're very excited to launch the first autonomous grocery delivery and mobile store service in the heart of Silicon Valley with self-driving vehicles on the road,” said AutoX founder and chief executive Jianxiong Xiao.

"We believe self-driving car technologies will fundamentally change people’s daily lives for the better."

The AutoX application can be used to place grocery orders to be delivered in cars designed to keep produce chilled, according to the startup.

Customers uncertain of what they want in advance will also be able to have cars pull up and open windows so they can browse selections, AutoX said. A human back-up driver will be on board as required by local regulations.

AutoX vehicles rely on high-resolution camera gear instead of more costly sensors and laser arrays for navigation.

The grocery delivery and mobile store pilot program will roll out in San Jose, then expand to Google's home city Mountain View and Palo Alto, where Stanford University is located.

source: news.abs-cbn.com