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Facebook is working on a voice assistant to rival the likes of Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri and the Google Assistant, CNBC reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The tech company has been working on this new initiative since early 2018. The effort is coming out of the company's augmented reality and virtual reality group, a division that works on hardware, including the company's virtual reality Oculus headsets. A team based out of Redmond, Washington, has been spearheading the effort to build the new AI assistant, according to two former Facebook employees who left the company in recent months. The effort is being lead by Ira Snyder, director of AR/VR and Facebook Assistant. That team has been contacting vendors in the smart speaker supply chain, according to two people familiar. It's unclear how exactly Facebook envisions people using the assistant, but it could potentially be used on the company's Portal video chat smart speakers, the Oculus headsets or other future projects.

Apple and Qualcomm have settled their royalty dispute, the companies said on Tuesday. From a report: The settlement includes a payment from Apple to Qualcomm as well as a chipset supply agreement, suggesting that future iPhone may use Qualcomm chips. The two companies started proceedings in a trial in federal court in San Diego on Monday, which was expected to last until May. Both sides were asking for billions in damages. In November, Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf said that he believed that the two companies were on the "doorstep" to settling. Apple CEO Tim Cook contradicted him shortly after, saying that Apple hasn't been in settlement discussions since the third calendar quarter of 2018.

The complicated legal battle centered around modem chips and had been raging in courts around the world since 2016. For years, Apple bought modem chips from Qualcomm, but chafed under Qualcomm's prices and requirement that any company using its chips would also pay licensing fees for its patents. New iPhone models released in 2018 used Intel modem chips, and Apple said in a previous FTC trial that Qualcomm. UPDATE: Intel announced this afternoon that it plans to exit the 5G smartphone modem business, leaving Qualcomm as the only supplier for Apple's iPhones.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings will not be nominated for re-election at the company's 2019 annual stockholders meetings, Facebook said on Friday. CNBC reports: Hastings has served on the board of the social media company since 2011. The company said it will also not be re-nominating Erskine Bowles the president emeritus of the University of North Carolina, and it will instead nominate Peggy Alford, PayPal senior vice president of core markets. The addition of Alford, an African-American woman, comes as Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies strive for the inclusion of more women and minorities in their boards and throughout their workforces.

Hastings departure had been talked about for some time due to Facebook's growing interest in video services, according to Andrew Ross Sorkin. In 2017, Facebook launched Watch, its video streaming service, and last year, the company released IGTV, its Instagram video streaming app. Hastings' departure comes about three years after he got into a tussle with fellow board member Peter Thiel over their political leanings. In an August 2016 email, Hastings told Thiel that he planned to dock his performance review over his endorsement of then Republican Presidential-nominee Donald Trump, according to a New York Times report.

Video streaming services like Netflix and Hulu don't appear to be negatively impacting the box office like many would assume. Michael Pachter, analyst at Wedbush, expects the U.S. box office will grow about 1% to $12 billion this year, setting another record.

"Our takeaway is that Netflix and the expansion of [streaming video on demand] platforms will have minimal impact on box office given the vast supply of content, plenty of which is ideal for theatrical release (and most talent fiercely and contractually objects to a straight-to-streaming release)," Pachter wrote in a research note Monday. CNBC reports: Last year, the domestic box office had a record-breaking year, hauling in $11.9 billion, there was a 5% rise in the number of movie tickets sold, and 263 million people -- 75 percent of the population -- saw at least one movie in theaters. "Everyone has a kitchen, but everyone still goes out to eat," Charles Rivkin, CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, said, quoting Sterling Bagby, the late co-founder of B&B Theatres, during a "State of the Industry" panel last week.

Rivkin said that with each new innovation in the entertainment industry, there has been worry that it will kill the movie industry. Talking pictures, technicolor movies, television, basic cable and smartphones were all seen as disruptors. "And yet we're still here," Rivkin said. "The theatrical and home entertainment sectors both grew strongly in 2018, and that's great news, because we are all part of the growth together," he said.

One of Google's top minds in artificial intelligence has joined Apple in a director role. Ian Goodfellow said on his LinkedIn profile that he switched employers in March. He said he's a director of machine learning in the Special Projects Group. CNBC reports: Goodfellow is the father of an AI approach known as generative adversarial networks, or GANs. The approach draws on two networks, one known as a generative network and the other known as a discriminative network, and can be used to come up with unusual and creative outputs in the form of audio, video and text. GAN systems have been used to generate "deepfake" fake media content.

Goodfellow got his Ph.D. at the University of Montreal in 2014, and since then he has worked at OpenAI and Google. At OpenAI he was paid more than $800,000, according to a tax filing. His research is widely cited in academic literature. At Google Goodfellow did work around GANs and security, including an area known as adversarial attacks. People working on AI at Apple have previously done research that drew on the GAN technology.

Verizon announced today that it has turned on its 5G wireless network in Chicago and Minneapolis -- two of the first markets in the world to receive this next-gen network. Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg told CNBC that the company will activate 30 additional markets this year. From a report: Vestberg added that Verizon is unlikely to see any impact on revenue from people who upgrade to new 5G phones until around 2021. This network complements Verizon's existing "5G Home" service which launched in October in select areas and is a wireless alternative to a traditional cable-based home internet connection, but does not work far beyond the walls of your home.

Verizon said the wireless network will give customers access to peak speeds up to 1 Gbps. That's about 10 times faster than you might traditionally find on the LTE connection you have now. Put plainly: You'll be able to download movies in seconds instead of minutes. Only a select number of phones will support the network at first. Samsung will launch a Galaxy S10 5G model later this quarter that will be exclusive to Verizon to start. AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint will begin to sell it in the second half of the year. That leaves the Motorola Z3 as the only phone that supports Verizon's new 5G network right now, and it requires a separate accessory to work on it.

As tech giants face growing scrutiny over their market power, Amazon has quietly removed some of the most aggressive promotional spots for so-called private label products on its website. CNBC reports: Private label products are created by Amazon or partners and are sold only on Amazon's website under an exclusive brand name. They benefit Amazon in many ways: They expand the selection of products on the site, offer better profit margins than selling third-party products, make supply-chain management easier and can help Amazon persuade big brands to cut prices to remain competitive on its site. Amazon has been ramping up the number of private label brands during the last three years, stoking fear and concern among some sellers and brands that sell competing products on the marketplace.

Amazon's promotions for these products, which started showing up at least a year ago, were exclusively reserved for Amazon's own private label products and appeared in highly visible areas of the site, like the top of search results or next to the "buy box" of a competitor's product page. Other companies spend billions buying Amazon ads that link to their product listings on the site, vaulting Amazon into the number three spot among U.S. digital advertising providers, behind Google and Facebook, according to eMarketer. However, in recent weeks, Amazon has significantly scaled down or relocated on-site promotions for its private label products, according to multiple Amazon sellers and consultants. The report goes on to cite Sen. Elizabeth Warren's call for breaking up big tech companies like Amazon and Google as a reason why Amazon is scaling back its promo spots. "Amazon's practice of exclusively promoting its own private label products on the most prominent parts of its site has drawn the ire of many sellers and brands for being unfair and abusive," the report adds.

Burger King is testing a vegetarian version of its Whopper that uses an Impossible Burger for its patties, becoming the first national fast-food chain to sell the plant-based burger. From a report: The Restaurant Brands International subsidiary is offering the Impossible Whopper at 59 St. Louis locations. The chain already sells veggie patties made by Kellogg's vegetarian brand, Morningstar Farms. To announce the launch, Burger King released a video on April Fools' Day that shows unsuspecting Whopper fans eating the version with the Impossible Burger and then exclaiming that they can't taste the difference. Silicon Valley-based Impossible Foods genetically engineers heme, a protein that makes the vegetarian-friendly burger taste like meat. The ingredient is also responsible for giving the patty red juices that make it look like it's bleeding, just like a piece of beef.

schwit1 quotes CNBC: In the first test of its kind, the Pentagon on Monday carried out a "salvo" intercept of an unarmed missile soaring over the Pacific, using two interceptor missiles launched from underground silos in southern California.

Both interceptors zeroed in on the target -- a re-entry vehicle that had been launched 4,000 miles away atop an intercontinental-range missile, the Pentagon said. The first interceptor hit and destroyed the re-entry vehicle, which in an actual attack would contain a warhead. The second interceptor hit a secondary object, as expected, according to a statement by the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency.

Tesla vehicles sent to the junk yard after a crash carry much more data than you'd think. According to CNBC, citing two security researchers, "Computers on Tesla vehicles keep everything that drivers have voluntarily stored on their cars, plus tons of other information generated by the vehicles including video, location and navigational data showing exactly what happened leading up to a crash." From the report: One researcher, who calls himself GreenTheOnly, describes himself as a "white hat hacker" and a Tesla enthusiast who drives a Model X. He has extracted this kind of data from the computers in a salvaged Tesla Model S, Model X and two Model 3 vehicles, while also making tens of thousands of dollars cashing in on Tesla bug bounties in recent years. Many other cars download and store data from users, particularly information from paired cellphones, such as contact information.

But the researchers' findings highlight how Tesla is full of contradictions on privacy and cybersecurity. On one hand, Tesla holds car-generated data closely, and has fought customers in court to refrain from giving up vehicle data. Owners must purchase $995 cables and download a software kit from Tesla to get limited information out of their cars via "event data recorders" there, should they need this for legal, insurance or other reasons. At the same time, crashed Teslas that are sent to salvage can yield unencrypted and personally revealing data to anyone who takes possession of the car's computer and knows how to extract it. The contrast raises questions about whether Tesla has clearly defined goals for data security, and who its existing rules are meant to protect. A Tesla spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC: "Tesla already offers options that customers can use to protect personal data stored on their car, including a factory reset option for deleting personal data and restoring customized settings to factory defaults, and a Valet Mode for hiding personal data (among other functions) when giving their keys to a valet. That said, we are always committed to finding and improving upon the right balance between technical vehicle needs and the privacy of our customers."

The report serves as a reminder for Tesla owners to factory reset their cars before handing them off to a junk yard or other reseller because that other party may not reset your car for you. "Tesla sometimes uses an automotive auction company called Manheim to inspect, recondition and sell used cars," reports CNBC. "A former Manheim employee, who asked to remain anonymous, confirmed that employees do not wipe the cars' computers with a factory reset."

The researchers were able to obtain phonebooks "worth of contact information from drivers or passengers who had paired their devices, and calendar entries with descriptions of planned appointments, and e-mail addresses of those invited." The data also showed the drivers' last 73 navigation locations, as well as crash-related information. The Model 3 that one of the researchers bought for research purposes contained a video showing the car speeding out of the right lane into the trees off the left side of a dark two-lane route. "GPS and other vehicle data reveals that the accident happened in Orleans, Massachusetts, on Namequoit Road, at 11:15 pm on Aug 11, and was severe enough that airbags deployed," the report adds.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Huawei's revenue grew 19.5 percent in 2018, surpassing $100 billion for the first time, despite continuing political headwinds from around the world. Sales came in at 721.2 billion yuan ($107.13 billion) last year. Net profit reached 59.3 billion yuan, higher by 25.1 percent compared to a year ago. The revenue growth was faster than that seen in 2017, but the net profit rise was slightly slower.

Huawei's numbers are a bright spot for the firm, which has faced intense political pressure. The U.S. government has raised concerns that Huawei's network gear could be used by the Chinese government for espionage. Huawei has repeatedly denied those allegations. Sales in its carrier business, which is its core networking equipment arm, reached 294 billion yuan, slightly below the 297.8 billion yuan recorded in 2017. The real driver of growth was the consumer business, with revenue for that division rising 45.1 percent year-on-year to reach 348.9 billion yuan. For the first time, consumer business is now the biggest share of Huawei's revenue.

Former Facebook executive Alex Stamos explained how Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is able to consistently make decisions that only make sense with the benefit of hindsight. From a report: "Mark Zuckerberg is sitting on more data about what people want to do online than anyone else in the world," said Stamos, who was speaking at the Washington Post's technology and policy conference on Wednesday evening. He cited the acquisitions of private messaging WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion, and photo-sharing service Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, as examples of bets "that people think are insane but turn out to be prophetic because he knows the direction the world is going," Stamos said. Further reading: Facebook Used Its VPN App To Track Competitors, Documents Reveal.

The U.K. government warned on Thursday Huawei's telecommunications equipment raises "significant" security issues, posing a possible setback to the Chinese tech firm as it looks to build out 5G networks. From a report: In 46-page report evaluating Huawei's security risks, British officials stopped short of calling for a ban of Huawei's 5G telecommunications equipment. But the assessment cited "underlying defects" in the company's software engineering and cybersecurity processes, citing "significantly increased risk to U.K. operators." The findings give weight to warnings from U.S. officials who have argued Huawei's networking equipment could be used for espionage by the Chinese government. Huawei has repeatedly said it does not pose any risk and insists it would not share customer data with Beijing. In a statement Thursday, Huawei said it takes the U.K. government's findings "very seriously."

hcs_$reboot shares a report from CNBC: Boeing previewed its software fix, cockpit alerts and additional pilot training for its 737 Max planes on Wednesday, saying the changes improve the safety of the aircraft which has been involved in two deadly crashes since October. By the end of this week, Boeing plans to send the software updates and plan for enhanced pilot training to the FAA for certification approval. After the FAA approves the fix, Boeing said it will send the software update to customers. Among the notable changes to the MAX flight controls:

• The plane's Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, automated flight control system, will now receive data from both "angle of attack" sensors, instead of just one.
• If those disagree by more than 5.5 degrees, the MCAS system will be disabled and will not push the nose of the plane lower.
• Boeing will be adding an indicator to the flight control display so pilots are aware of when the angle of attack sensors disagree.
• There will also be enhanced training required for all 737 pilots so they are more fully aware of how the MCAS system works and how to disable it if they encounter an issue.

Bank of America tech and operations chief Cathy Bessant said she is bearish on blockchain, the technology underpinning cryptocurrencies. "I will be curious to see what the actual volume of usage is on the JPM Coin in a year," she said. Slashdot reader technocrattobe shares a report from CNBC: "What I am is open-minded," Bessant said recently in an interview at the bank's New York tower. "In my private scoreboard, in the closet, I am bearish." Bessant is wading into the debate about the blockchain, whose proponents have claimed will be as significant as the internet. A blockchain is an encrypted database that runs on multiple computers, potentially cutting out the need for centralized authorities like banks or governments to settle transactions between parties.

The technology got a boost from rival J.P. Morgan Chase, which revealed last month that it created the first cryptocurrency backed by a major U.S. bank to facilitate blockchain-related payments. But Bessant, who oversees 95,000 technology workers and was named the most powerful woman in banking last year, is a pragmatist. She started out at Bank of America in 1982 as a commercial banker, eventually rising to a series of top roles, including head of corporate banking and chief marketing officer. She has run the bank's global technology and operations division since 2010. Most of what she sees doesn't make sense for finance or significantly improve upon existing methods. She said it's a technology in search of a use case, rather than something designed specifically to solve existing problems. "I haven't seen one [use case] that even scales beyond an individual or a small set of transactions," Bessant said. "All of the big tech companies will come and say 'blockchain, blockchain, blockchain.' I say, 'Show me the use case. You bring me the use case and I'll try it.'" She added: "I want it to work. Spiritually, I want it to make us better, faster, cheaper, more transparent, more, you know, all of those things."

The report notes that Bank of America "has applied for or received 82 blockchain-related patents, more than any other financial firm, including payment companies Mastercard and PayPal."

UPS has partnered with autonomous drone company Matternet and hospital WakeMed in Raleigh, North Carolina, to test a new drone delivery service for transporting medical samples to nearby facilities. The FAA is overseeing the program. CNBC reports: UPS said the service will utilize Matternet's M2 "quadcopter" drone, which can carry medical samples of up to 5 pounds as far as 12.5 miles. The program will begin with "numerous planned daily revenue flights at the WakeMed Raleigh campus," UPS said. The drone delivery service aims to replace WakeMed's reliance on a fleet of courier cars, which currently transports most of the hospital's medical samples. Using a UPS "secure drone container," WakeMed employees can load medical specimens like blood samples and send them quickly to a nearby WakeMed facility.

Matternet has completed "more than 3,000 flights for healthcare systems in Switzerland," UPS added. The WakeMed program is also under the FAA's broader effort called the "Unmanned Aircraft System Integration Pilot Program," which "aims to test practical applications of drones by partnering local governments with private sector companies."

"Machines will need to make ethical decisions, and we will be responsible for those decisions," argues Mike Loukides, O'Reilly Media's vice president of content strategy: We are surrounded by systems that make ethical decisions: systems approving loans, trading stocks, forwarding news articles, recommending jail sentences, and much more. They act for us or against us, but almost always without our consent or even our knowledge. In recent articles, I've suggested the ethics of artificial intelligence itself needs to be automated. But my suggestion ignores the reality that ethics has already been automated... The sheer number of decisions that need to be made means that we can't expect humans to make those decisions. Every time data moves from one site to another, from one context to another, from one intent to another, there is an action that requires some kind of ethical decision...

Ethical problems arise when a company's interest in profit comes before the interests of the users. We see this all the time: in recommendations designed to maximize ad revenue via "engagement"; in recommendations that steer customers to Amazon's own products, rather than other products on their platform. The customer's interest must always come before the company's. That applies to recommendations in a news feed or on a shopping site, but also how the customer's data is used and where it's shipped. Facebook believes deeply that "bringing the world closer together" is a social good but, as Mary Gray said on Twitter, when we say that something is a "social good," we need to ask: "good for whom?" Good for advertisers? Stockholders? Or for the people who are being brought together? The answers aren't all the same, and depend deeply on who's connected and how....

It's time to start building the systems that will truly assist us to manage our data.
The article argues that spam filters provide a surprisingly good set of first design principles. They work in the background without interfering with users, but always allow users to revoke their decisions, and proactively seek out user input in ambiguous or unclear situations.

But in the real world beyond our inboxes, "machines are already making ethical decisions, and often doing so badly. Spam detection is the exception, not the rule."

Bill Gates said he talked to Google researchers about the application of artificial-intelligence technology in healthcare. "While Microsoft and Google are arch-competitors in many areas, including cloud computing and artificial intelligence research, the visit is an example of how Gates' broad interest in technology trumps Microsoft's historical rivalries with other tech companies," reports CNBC. From the report: Gates talked about the use of AI in weapons systems and autonomous vehicles before arriving at the subject of health care. "In the medical field, you know, we just don't have doctors. Most people are born and die in Africa without coming near to a doctor," said Gates, who is co-chair of the nonprofit Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which concerns itself with improving global health among other things. "We're doing a lot of work with analyzing ultrasound, and we can do things like sex-blind the output, because we're not having anybody actually see the image. We can tell you what's going on without revealing the gender, which is, of course -- when you do that, it drives gendercide. And yet, we're doing the analysis, the medical understanding, in a much deeper way, and that's an example where it's all done with a lot of machine learning."

"I was meeting with the guys at Google who are helping us with this this morning, and there's some incredible promise in that field, where, in the primary health-care system, the amount of sophistication to do diagnosis and understand, for example, "Is this a high-risk pregnancy?' 'Yes.' 'Let's escalate that person to go to the hospital level,' even though you couldn't afford to do that on a widespread basis. So this stuff is going to be very domain-specific."

Amazon is testing a new way to bolster its relationship with startups and possibly bring in more capital to the ecosystem. From a report: The fledgling effort, known as the Amazon Web Services Pro-Rata Program, is designed to link private investors with companies that use AWS, as well as venture funds whose portfolios are filled with potential cloud customers. Amazon is not investing money through the program.

The Pro-Rata program is being run by Brad Holden, a former partner at TomorrowVentures (founded by ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt), and Jason Hunt, who are both part of AWS's business development team focused on angel and seed relationships, according to an email they sent to investors in January. "The Pro-Rata Program is a new pilot intended to connect family offices and venture capitalists for specific investment opportunities from the AWS ecosystem," according to the email, which was viewed by CNBC. "Pro rata" refers to the rights investors have to put money in subsequent rounds. Mike Isaac, a reporter at The New York Times, writes, "If Amazon is using its direct knowledge of startups' health based on the fact that Amazon literally owns and operates the servers, how is this at all ethical? If that's not the case, Amazon should make that crystal clear (even though i'd have a hard time believing it). It's like Facebook's years of insights into [various] apps' data with the Onavo team, only instead of ripping companies off (which FB did), they invested in them."

"In the cloud wars, Microsoft has been able to win big business from retailers, largely because companies like Walmart, Kroger, Gap and Target are opting not to write big checks to rival Amazon," reports CNBC: The more Amazon grows, the more that calculation could start working its way into other industries -- like automotive. In a recent interview with CNBC, Volkswagen's Heiko Huttel, who runs the company's connected car division, said the carmaker chose Microsoft Azure late last year for its "Automotive Cloud" project after considering Amazon Web Services... "If I take a look at all the competitors out there, you see they have capabilities in disrupting you at the customer interface," Hüttel said. "Then you have to carefully choose who is really getting down into the car, where you open up a lot of data to these people, and then you have to carefully choose with whom you are doing business."

Microsoft likes to tout the merits of its cloud technology, but the company is fully aware that taking on AWS, which has a commanding lead in the cloud infrastructure market, isn't just about offering the best services... Microsoft doesn't break out Azure revenue, but analysts at Morgan Stanley estimate that it accounted for almost 10 percent of sales in the latest quarter.

CNBC reports Dungeons and Dragons "has found something its early fans never expected: Popularity." The days of hiding away in a basement rolling dice and playing "Dungeons and Dragons" in darkness is over. More than 40 years after the first edition of "Dungeons and Dragons" hit shelves, video platforms Twitch and YouTube are leading a renaissance of the fantasy roleplaying board game -- and business is booming. "DnD has been around for 45 years and it is more popular now than it has ever been," said Greg Tito, senior communications manager, at Wizards of the Coast. In each of the last five years, sales of "Dungeons and Dragons" merchandise has grown by double digits.

The company, owned by toymaker Hasbro, attributes this massive sales boom to the launch of the fifth edition of the game in 2014 and to "Critical Role," a weekly show on live streaming video platform Twitch that features voice actors from TV shows and video games playing "Dungeons and Dragons...." "When a new edition for a game like this releases, there is that flurry of activity, people get really excited about it and then, historically, that excitement has waned," he said. "The fifth edition has completely blown that model out of the water. With the release in 2014, it has grown and only continued to grow. Every kind of statistical model we've been able to to use from the history of 'Dungeons and Dragons' has been broken at this point. So, we are in uncharted territory...."

"Critical Role" has become so popular that when it launched a Kickstarter last week to create an animated special based on the characters from the first campaign, it was funded within one hour. The team behind the web series had wanted $750,000 to fund the endeavor. With 33 days remaining in the crowdfunding campaign, "Critical Role" has raised more than $7.3 million from 53,000 backers.

It is now the most-funded film/video project in Kickstarter history.
Over the years Dungeons & Dragons -- and the people who played it -- have usually been played for laughs in TV sitcoms like Freaks and Geeks, several episodes of Community, and an episode of Big Bang Theory with William Shatner, Joe Manganiello, Kevin Smith, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

nj_peeps shares an excerpt from a report via Wired: [Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley says the company is working on a new game.] Think Candyland, but instead of fantasy locations like Lollipop Woods, the game's virtual board includes place categories associated with New York City neighborhoods. There's a Midtown Bar, a Downtown Movie Theatre, Brooklyn Coffeeshop, Uptown Park, and so on. As in Candyland, you move your game piece forward by drawing cards. But in Crowley's version, the cards are the habits and locations of real people whose data has been turned into literal pawns in the game. Foursquare knows where their phones are in real time, because it powers many widely used apps, from Twitter and Uber to TripAdvisor and AccuWeather. These people aren't playing Crowley's game, but their real-world movements animate it: If one of them goes into a bar in midtown, for example, the person playing the game would get a Midtown Bar card.

Ask someone about Foursquare and they'll probably think of the once-hyped social media company, known for gamifying mobile check-ins and giving recommendations. But the Foursquare of today is a location-data giant. During an interview with NBC in November, the company's CEO, Jeff Glueck, said that only Facebook and Google rival Foursquare in terms of location-data precision. You might think you don't use Foursquare, but chances are you do. Foursquare's technology powers the geofilters in Snapchat, tagged tweets on Twitter; it's in Uber, Apple Maps, Airbnb, WeChat, and Samsung phones, to name a few.

Barclays internet analyst Ross Sandler says the new cryptocurrency that Facebook is working on could be part of a multibillion-dollar revenue opportunity. "Sandler forecasted as much as $19 billion in additional revenue by 2021 from 'Facebook Coin,'" reports CNBC. "Conservatively, the firm sees a base-case of an incremental $3 billion in revenue from a successful cryptocurrency implementation. 'Merely establishing this revenue stream starts to change the story for Facebook shares in our view,' Sandler said." From the report: Facebook is reportedly developing a cryptocurrency for global payments that will be tied to the value of traditional currencies and available to use through its messenger "WhatsApp," according to Bloomberg and The New York Times. Facebook has not publicly commented on the reports. Price volatility has been one major roadblock to bitcoin's widespread adoption as an everyday payment option. But Facebook's digital currency, a "stable coin," would likely be less attractive to speculators because of its fixed price tied to a currency like the U.S. dollar.

"Any attempt to build out revenue streams outside of advertising, especially those that don't abuse user privacy are likely to be well-received by Facebook's shareholders," Sandler said. Barclays based its Facebook revenue estimates off of Google's digital distribution service, which is also the official app store for Android's operating system. "Google Play," as it's called, generates $6 in "net" revenue per user now. Facebook could see a "similar cadence," across its nearly 3 billion users in 2021. A Facebook virtual currency would allow for more premium content to find its way back to Facebook, Sandler said, as companies re-establish themselves on the social network as a strategic partner.

Boeing is making an extensive change to the flight-control system in the 737 MAX aircraft implicated in October's Lion Air crash in Indonesia, going beyond what many industry officials familiar with the discussions had anticipated. From a report: The change was in the works before a second plane of the same make crashed in Africa last weekend -- and comes as world-wide unease about the 737 MAX's safety grows. The change would mark a major shift from how Boeing originally designed a stall-prevention feature in the aircraft, which were first delivered to airlines in 2017. U.S. aviation regulators are expected to mandate the change by the end of April.

Boeing publicly released details about the planned 737 MAX software update late Monday [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. A company spokesman confirmed the update would use multiple sensors, or data feeds, in MAX's stall-prevention system -- instead of the current reliance on a single sensor. The change was prompted by preliminary results from the Indonesian crash investigation indicating that erroneous data from a single sensor, which measures the angle of the plane's nose, caused the stall-prevention system to misfire. Then, a series of events put the aircraft into a dangerous dive.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The Boeing 737 MAX, the type of plane involved in a deadly crash in Ethiopia over the weekend, is still airworthy and the Federal Aviation Administration plans to issue a notice to the international aviation community later Monday, a person familiar with the matter said. "The FAA continuously assesses and oversees the safety performance of U.S. commercial aircraft," the FAA said in a statement. "If we identify an issue that affects safety, the FAA will take immediate and appropriate action."

Aviation officials in China and Indonesia ordered domestic airlines to ground their fleets of the popular Boeing single-aisle planes after the deadly crash of one operated by Ethiopian Airlines on Sunday. The 149 passengers and eight crew members on board were killed when the plane crashed shortly after takeoff. The incident was the second deadly crash of the new Boeing planes in less than five months. A Lion Air Boeing 737 MAX 8 plunged into the Java Sea shortly after taking off from Jakarta in October, killing all 189 people on board.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is examining the rise of injuries related to shareable electric scooters. From a report: "We want to identify the risk factors for those who get injured, how severe the injuries are and why they're getting hurt," said Jeff Taylor, manager of the Epidemiology and Disease Surveillance Unit with Austin Public Health. Taylor, who is overseeing the investigation, is working with three CDC epidemiologists to examine severe injuries that occurred in Austin from September to November 2018. He said both agencies have completed collecting data and are currently in the process of summarizing various reports. "There's a perception that scooter-related injuries occur at night. Well that's not true," Taylor said. "Our study will show they occur during all times of the day. People may also perceive there's typically a car involved. But our study finds most of the time the rider may hit a bump in the road or they simply lose their balance."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Fearing that China could be spying on them using power cords and plugs, several U.S. technology companies have asked their Taiwanese suppliers to shift production of some components out of the mainland, Nikkei Asian Review reported on Friday. The report cited unnamed executives from two Taiwanese companies: Lite-On Technology, a manufacturer of electronic parts, and Quanta Computer, a supplier of servers and data centers. Lite-On's clients include Dell EMC, Hewlett-Packard and IBM, while Quanta counts Google and Facebook among its customers, according to Nikkei. The executives told Nikkei that some of their American clients -- without specifying which companies -- asked them to move out of China partly because of cyberespionage and cybersecurity risks. The U.S. tech firms were worried that even mundane components such as power plugs could be tapped by Beijing to access sensitive data, according to the report. According to the report, Lite-On Technology is building a new factory in Taiwan to manufacture power components for servers due to China's cybersecurity concerns. Quanta has also shifted production out of mainland China to Taiwan due to similar concerns, as well as additional tariffs imposed by Washington as a result of the U.S.-China trade war.

Microsoft's Windows 10 is getting bigger. The operating system for desktop PCs, internet-connected devices and other systems is now running on more than 800 million devices. From a report: The total is up from 700 million as of September last year, and it suggests that the newest rendition of Windows could now be the most widely deployed version of Windows, ahead of Windows 7 and other versions. Although Microsoft -- the most valuable publicly traded company in the world -- has shifted to focus more on cloud and third-party platforms under CEO Satya Nadella, Windows is still a key element of the company, contributing almost 15 percent of total revenue in the fourth quarter. It's also a notable contributor of operating income, as former CEO Steve Ballmer pointed out last year.

"Haven" is the new name of the joint health-care venture between Amazon, JPMorgan, and Berkshire Hathaway. The CEOs of the three companies last January announced they were teaming up to tackle rising health-care costs. They formed a nonprofit company and named renowned surgeon, author and speaker Dr. Atul Gawande as CEO in June. CNBC reports: Prior to the big reveal, many industry insiders referred to the venture as "ABC" or "ABJ." The company said the name choice of "Haven" lines up with its mission to be a "partner" to care providers and to focus on the health-care needs of the 1.2 million Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and J.P Morgan workers. Since his appointment, Gawande has been meeting with employees at these three companies to understand their health-care experiences. In addition to its new brand, the company also unveiled a website with more details about the venture, including a number of areas of focus. These include: Improving the process of navigating the complex health-care system, and accessing affordable treatments and prescription drugs.

Haven also said on its website that it's interested in working with clinicians and insurance companies to improve the overall health-care system, suggesting the venture wants to work with existing players such as insurers, providers and pharmacy benefit managers rather than uprooting them. The website also includes a letter where Gawande describes Haven's role as being "an advocate for the patient and an ally to anyone -- clinicians, industry leaders, innovators, policymakers, and others -- who makes patient care and costs better."

Ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft are planning to give some drivers money to buy stock in their initial public offerings, WSJ reported Thursday [The link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: Both Uber and Lyft's IPOs will include programs that would give some of their most-active or longest-serving drivers a cash award with an option to put it toward stock in the IPOs, according to people familiar with the matter. It is typically hard for an ordinary investor to buy a company's stock at its IPO price before it begins trading on an exchange, so this move would give drivers access they likely wouldn't have had otherwise.

Uber is working out the details of a program expected to be valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars that would give a significant portion of its 3 million active drivers and couriers globally either a cash bonus or the option to use that cash to purchase shares at the IPO price, people familiar with the matter said. These awards will be tiered based on a sliding scale related to the driver's length of service and number of trips or deliveries, these people said.

The CEO of Vodafone, the world's second-largest mobile operator, warned excluding Huawei from Europe's 5G networks could be "hugely disruptive" to national infrastructure and consumers. CEO Nick Read said that it would be "very very expensive" for operators and consumers if companies were forced to swap their Huawei equipment in favor of competitors', adding it would delay Europe's 5G rollout by "probably two years." CNBC reports: Speaking at a press conference at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Monday, Vodafone CEO Nick Read said banning Huawei from providing 5G infrastructure in Europe would hamper competition in the supply chain. China's Huawei, Finland's Nokia and Sweden's Ericsson are the three biggest providers of telecommunications equipment in the world, accounting for more than half of revenues in the market, according to research firm Dell'Oro Group. "If we concentrate it down to two players I think that's an unhealthy position not just for us as an industry but also for national infrastructure in the country," Read said.

"It structurally disadvantages Europe," he said "Of course the U.S. don't have that problem because they don't put Huawei equipment in." Vodafone's Read said governments need to take a "fact-based" approach to assessing security concerns with Huawei, adding he will not be meeting with any U.S. officials in Barcelona this week. "I would at this stage prefer to be working with governments and securities on a national basis and making sure we have a fact-based conversation," he said. Vodafone's Read said there is "high competition" among the three equipment providers but added Huawei has had "leading technology." In a roundtable with media on Sunday in Barcelona, Huawei's rotating chairman Guo Ping claimed the company is 12 months ahead of its competitors when it comes to 5G technology. Huawei has been left out of the U.S. market with officials citing security concerns that its technology could enable spying from the Chinese government, accusations Huawei denies. The U.S., the UK and Germany are weighing possible bans on Huawei's 5G equipment citing security risks.

PepsiCo is kicking off a four-year restructuring plan that is expected to cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars in severance pay. "This week, PepsiCo employees in offices including Plano, Texas, and the company's headquarters in Purchase, New York, were alerted that they are being laid off," reports Business Insider, citing two people directly impacted by the layoffs.

The latest job cuts come after CFO Hugh Johnston told CNBC that the company plans to lay off workers in positions that can be automated. CEO Ramon Laguarta said on Friday that PepsiCo is "relentlessly automating and merging the best of our optimized business models with the best new thinking and technologies." From a report: This week, PepsiCo employees in offices including Plano, Texas, and the company's headquarters in Purchase, New York, were alerted that they are being laid off, according to two people who were directly impacted by the layoffs. These two workers were granted anonymity in order to speak frankly without risking professional ramifications. At least some of the workers who were alerted about layoffs will continue to work at PepsiCo until late April as they train their replacements in the coming weeks, the two workers told Business Insider.

By PepsiCo's own estimates, the company's layoffs are expected to be a multimillion-dollar project in 2019. Last Friday, PepsiCo announced in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it is expected to incur $2.5 billion in pretax restructuring costs through 2023, with 70% of charges linked to severance and other employee costs. The company is also planning to close factories, with an additional 15% tied to plant closures and "related actions." Roughly $800 million of the $2.5 billion is expected to impact 2019 results, in addition to the $138 million that was included in 2018 results, the company said in the SEC filing.

Earlier this week, Disney, Nestle and others pulled its advertising spending from YouTube after a blogger detailed how comments on Google's video site were being used to facilitate a "soft-core pedophilia ring." Some of the videos involved ran next to ads placed by Disney and Nestle. With the company facing similar problems over the years, often being "caught in a game of whack-a-mole to fix them," Matt Rosoff from CNBC writes that it's only a matter of time until YouTube faces a scandal that actually alienates users, as happened with Facebook in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. From the report: To be fair, YouTube has taken concrete steps to fix some problems. A couple of years ago, major news events were targets for scammers to post misleading videos about them, like videos claiming shootings such as the one in Parkland, Florida, were staged by crisis actors. In January, the company said it would stop recommending such videos, effectively burying them. It also favors "authoritative" sources in search results around major news events, like mainstream media organizations. And YouTube is not alone in struggling to fight inappropriate content that users upload to its platform. The problem isn't really about YouTube, Facebook or any single company. The problem is the entire business model around user-generated content, and the whack-a-mole game of trying to stay one step ahead of people who abuse it.

[T]ech platforms that rely on user-generated content are protected by the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which says platform providers cannot be held liable for material users post on them. It made sense at the time -- the internet was young, and forcing start-ups to monitor their comments sections (remember comments sections?) would have exploded their expenses and stopped growth before it started. Even now, when some of these companies are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, holding them liable for user-generated content would blow up these companies' business models. They'd disappear, reduce services or have to charge fees for them. Voters might not be happy if Facebook went out of business or they suddenly had to start paying $20 a month to use YouTube. Similarly, advertiser boycotts tend to be short-lived -- advertisers go where they get the best return on their investment, and as long as billions of people keep watching YouTube videos, they'll keep advertising on the platform. So the only way things will change is if users get turned off so badly that they tune out. Following Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal, people deleted their accounts, Facebook's growth largely stalled in the U.S., and more young users have abandoned the platform. "YouTube has so far skated free of any similar scandals. But people are paying closer attention than ever before, and it's only a matter of time before the big scandal that actually starts driving users away," writes Rosoff.

Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps. Unbeknown to most people, in many cases that data is being shared with someone else: Facebook. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; here's an alternative source.] The Wall Street Journal reports: The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook, according to testing done by The Wall Street Journal. The apps often send the data without any prominent or specific disclosure, the testing showed. [...] In the case of apps, the Journal's testing showed that Facebook software collects data from many apps even if no Facebook account is used to log in and if the end user isn't a Facebook member.

In the Journal's testing, Instant Heart Rate: HR Monitor, the most popular heart-rate app on Apple's iOS, made by California-based Azumio, sent a user's heart rate to Facebook immediately after it was recorded. Flo Health's Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker, which claims 25 million active users, told Facebook when a user was having her period or informed the app of an intention to get pregnant, the tests showed. Real-estate app Realtor.com, owned by Move, a subsidiary of Wall Street Journal parent News Corp, sent the social network the location and price of listings that a user viewed, noting which ones were marked as favorites, the tests showed. None of those apps provided users any apparent way to stop that information from being sent to Facebook. Update: New York Governor Cuomo has ordered probe into Facebook access to personal data.

Social network Pinterest has taken a big step to stop the spread of false content that is damaging people's health, which could put pressure on competitors to follow. From a report: Pinterest said Wednesday that it would no longer return any search results, including pins and boards, for terms related to vaccinations, whether in favor or against them. It took that step in late 2018 after noticing that the majority of shared images on Pinterest cautioned people against vaccinations, despite medical guidelines demonstrating that most vaccines are safe for most people. Pinterest told CNBC on Wednesday that it's been hard to remove this anti-vaccination content entirely, so it put the ban in place until it can figure out a more permanent strategy. It's working with health experts including doctors, as well as the social media analysis company called Storyful to come up with a better solution, the company said.

Goldman Sachs analysts attempted to address a touchy subject for biotech companies, especially those involved in the pioneering "gene therapy" treatment: cures could be bad for business in the long run. "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?" analysts ask in an April 10 report entitled "The Genome Revolution." From a report: "The potential to deliver 'one shot cures' is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies," analyst Salveen Richter wrote in the note to clients Tuesday. "While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow."

Richter cited Gilead Sciences' treatments for hepatitis C, which achieved cure rates of more than 90 percent. The company's U.S. sales for these hepatitis C treatments peaked at $12.5 billion in 2015, but have been falling ever since. Goldman estimates the U.S. sales for these treatments will be less than $4 billion this year, according to a table in the report. "GILD is a case in point, where the success of its hepatitis C franchise has gradually exhausted the available pool of treatable patients," the analyst wrote.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: In a not-too-distant future, renewable energy becomes the world's biggest source of power generation. A quarter of the distances that humans travel by vehicle will be in electric cars. U.S. dominance in the oil market begins to wane, and OPEC's influence is resurgent, as crude demand finally peaks. That is the vision laid out by British oil and gas giant BP on Thursday in its latest Annual Energy Outlook. The closely followed report lays out a vision through 2040 for Earth's energy future, provided government policy, technology and consumer preferences evolve in line with recent trends. BP forecasts that the world's energy demand will grow by a third through 2040, driven by rising consumption in China, India and other parts of Asia. About 75 percent of that increase will come from the need to power industry and buildings. At the same time, energy demand will continue to grow in the transportation sector, but that growth will slow sharply as vehicles become more efficient and more consumers opt for electric cars. But despite the increase in supply, BP thinks two-thirds of the world's population will still live in places with relatively low energy consumption per head. The takeaway: The world will need to generate more energy. The report says natural gas consumption will grow by 50 percent over the next 20 years, increasing in virtually every corner of the globe. "Throughout most of that time, the world will continue to consume more oil year after year, until demand ultimately peaks around 108 million barrels per day in the 2030s," reports CNBC. "This year, OPEC expects global oil demand to reach 100 million bpd."

Meanwhile, coal consumption is forecasted to flatline, as China and developed countries quit the fossil fuel in favor of cleaner-burning and renewable energy sources. "However, BP sees India and other Asian nations burning more coal to meet surging power demand as the nations become more prosperous," reports CNBC.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In early 2018, a Facebook user made a public threat on the social network against one of the company's offices in Europe. Facebook picked up the threat, pulled the user's data and determined he was in the same country as the office he was targeting. The company informed the authorities about the threat and directed its security officers to be on the lookout for the user. "He made a veiled threat that 'Tomorrow everyone is going to pay' or something to that effect," a former Facebook security employee told CNBC. The incident is representative of the steps Facebook takes to keep its offices, executives and employees protected, according to nine former Facebook employees who spoke with CNBC.

The company mines its social network for threatening comments, and in some cases uses its products to track the location of people it believes present a credible threat. Several of the former employees questioned the ethics of Facebook's security strategies, with one of them calling the tactics "very Big Brother-esque." Other former employees argue these security measures are justified by Facebook's reach and the intense emotions it can inspire. The company has 2.7 billion users across its services. That means that if just 0.01 percent of users make a threat, Facebook is still dealing with 270,000 potential security risks.

[...] One of the tools Facebook uses to monitor threats is a "be on lookout" or "BOLO" list, which is updated approximately once a week. The list was created in 2008, an early employee in Facebook's physical security group told CNBC. It now contains hundreds of people, according to four former Facebook security employees who have left the company since 2016. Facebook notifies its security professionals anytime a new person is added to the BOLO list, sending out a report that includes information about the person, such as their name, photo, their general location and a short description of why they were added. In recent years, the security team even had a large monitor that displayed the faces of people on the list, according to a photo CNBC has seen and two people familiar, although Facebook says it no longer operates this monitor.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In early 2018, a Facebook user made a public threat on the social network against one of the company's offices in Europe. Facebook picked up the threat, pulled the user's data and determined he was in the same country as the office he was targeting. The company informed the authorities about the threat and directed its security officers to be on the lookout for the user. "He made a veiled threat that 'Tomorrow everyone is going to pay' or something to that effect," a former Facebook security employee told CNBC. The incident is representative of the steps Facebook takes to keep its offices, executives and employees protected, according to nine former Facebook employees who spoke with CNBC.

The company mines its social network for threatening comments, and in some cases uses its products to track the location of people it believes present a credible threat. Several of the former employees questioned the ethics of Facebook's security strategies, with one of them calling the tactics "very Big Brother-esque." Other former employees argue these security measures are justified by Facebook's reach and the intense emotions it can inspire. The company has 2.7 billion users across its services. That means that if just 0.01 percent of users make a threat, Facebook is still dealing with 270,000 potential security risks.

[...] One of the tools Facebook uses to monitor threats is a "be on lookout" or "BOLO" list, which is updated approximately once a week. The list was created in 2008, an early employee in Facebook's physical security group told CNBC. It now contains hundreds of people, according to four former Facebook security employees who have left the company since 2016. Facebook notifies its security professionals anytime a new person is added to the BOLO list, sending out a report that includes information about the person, such as their name, photo, their general location and a short description of why they were added. In recent years, the security team even had a large monitor that displayed the faces of people on the list, according to a photo CNBC has seen and two people familiar, although Facebook says it no longer operates this monitor.

In a blog post today, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is building new data centers and offices and expanding several key locations across the U.S., spending $13 billion this year. CNBC reports: Pichai outlined the plans, which include opening new data centers in Nevada, Ohio, Texas and Nebraska, the first time the company will have infrastructure locations in those states. The company is also doubling its workforce in Virginia, providing greater access to Washington, D.C., with a new office and more data center space, and expanding its New York campus at Hudson Square.

Google is showing its willingness to further open its wallet, after a year in which capital spending more than doubled to $25.46 billion. The company didn't say home much each location will cost or provide information on tax incentives from local communities. Pichai said the plans will likely create tens of thousands of construction jobs across Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Texas and Virginia, as well as Oklahoma and South Carolina, where the company is expanding existing data centers. Google didn't say how many new jobs the data centers and business offices would create. Pichai also said that the company is adding new office buildings in Texas and Massachusetts, building out more space in Illinois, Wisconsin, Washington state and Georgia, and redeveloping California locations near Los Angeles and in the Bay Area, including the Westside Pavillion and Spruce Goose Hangar.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: On September 7, 2017, the world heard an alarming announcement from credit ratings giant Equifax: In a brazen cyber-attack, somebody had stolen sensitive personal information from more than 140 million people, nearly half the population of the U.S. It was the consumer data security scandal of the decade. The information included social security numbers, driver's license numbers, information from credit disputes and other personal details. CEO Richard Smith stepped down under fire. Lawmakers changed credit freeze laws and instilled new regulatory oversight of credit ratings agencies. Then, something unusual happened. The data disappeared. Completely.

CNBC talked to eight experts, including data "hunters" who scour the dark web for stolen information, senior cybersecurity managers, top executives at financial institutions, senior intelligence officials who played a part in the investigation and consultants who helped support it. All of them agreed that a breach happened, and personal information from 143 million people was stolen. But none of them knows where the data is now. It's never appeared on any hundreds of underground websites selling stolen information. Security experts haven't seen the data used for in any of the ways they'd expect in a theft like this -- not for impersonating victims, not for accessing other websites, nothing. Most experts familiar with the case now believe that the thieves were working for a foreign government, and are using the information not for financial gain, but to try and identify and recruit spies.

The SEC Wednesday charged a former Apple executive with insider trading. From a report: Gene Levoff, senior director of corporate law and corporate secretary until September, "traded on material nonpublic information about Apple's earnings three times during 2015 and 2016," according to the lawsuit filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court of New Jersey. "Levoff also had a previous history of insider trading, having traded on Apple's material nonpublic information at least three additional times in 2011 and 2012. For the trading in 2015 and 2016, Levoff profited and avoided losses of approximately $382,000," the complaint says. Levoff's position at Apple granted him insider access to not-yet-public earnings results and briefings on iPhone sales, the complaint says. On more than one occasion, he disobeyed the company's "blackout" period for stock transactions, selling or buying stock worth tens of millions of dollars, according to the SEC.

Reddit's latest funding round values its users at a lower price than any other social network. "The company announced Monday it had raised $300 million in its Series D investment round at a valuation of $3 billion," reports CNBC. "CNBC previously reported the company's annual revenue topped $100 million, according to sources familiar with the matter, and at 330 million monthly active users (MAUs), this would make Reddit's average revenue per user (ARPU) about $0.30." From the report: That estimate would make Reddit's ARPU significantly lower than other social networks, even those with similar MAUs. Twitter, for example, reported 321 MAUs for its latest quarterly report, and with annual revenue of about $3.04 billion in 2018, that would make its ARPU about $9.48. Facebook reported 2.32 billion MAUs in its latest report and ARPU of $7.37. Snap does not report global MAUs, but reported $2.09 ARPU in its latest quarterly report.

Pinterest, which has yet to go public but is preparing for an IPO this year, says on its website it has 250 million monthly users. Pinterest declined to comment on their revenue, but a September article in The New York Times said the company was on track to top $700 million in revenue for 2018. That would bring its ARPU to about $2.80. While Reddit's value per user is much lower than its peers, it is betting its access to a valuable demographic will appeal to advertisers and potentially even draw their dollars from larger rivals like Facebook and Google. The company said half of its MAUs are between the ages of 18 and 24.

Reddit's latest funding round values its users at a lower price than any other social network. "The company announced Monday it had raised $300 million in its Series D investment round at a valuation of $3 billion," reports CNBC. "CNBC previously reported the company's annual revenue topped $100 million, according to sources familiar with the matter, and at 330 million monthly active users (MAUs), this would make Reddit's average revenue per user (ARPU) about $0.30." From the report: That estimate would make Reddit's ARPU significantly lower than other social networks, even those with similar MAUs. Twitter, for example, reported 321 MAUs for its latest quarterly report, and with annual revenue of about $3.04 billion in 2018, that would make its ARPU about $9.48. Facebook reported 2.32 billion MAUs in its latest report and ARPU of $7.37. Snap does not report global MAUs, but reported $2.09 ARPU in its latest quarterly report.

Pinterest, which has yet to go public but is preparing for an IPO this year, says on its website it has 250 million monthly users. Pinterest declined to comment on their revenue, but a September article in The New York Times said the company was on track to top $700 million in revenue for 2018. That would bring its ARPU to about $2.80. While Reddit's value per user is much lower than its peers, it is betting its access to a valuable demographic will appeal to advertisers and potentially even draw their dollars from larger rivals like Facebook and Google. The company said half of its MAUs are between the ages of 18 and 24.

"Verily, Alphabet's life science division, is building a tech-focused rehab campus in Dayton, Ohio to combat the opioid crisis," reports CNBC. Verily will join two health networks, Kettering Health Network and Premier Health, to create a nonprofit named OneFifteen. Alexandria Real Estate Equities will design and develop the campus, which will offer both inpatient and outpatient services. There is no single solution to treating substance abuse, with strategies spanning from intensive rehabilitation programs to drop-in meetings. Verily hopes to get a better understanding of what works and what doesn't work in helping people get and stay sober....

Initially, Verily will focus on understanding what works in the clinic and then track patient behavior when they get out to see what sticks, Danielle Schlosser, senior clinical scientist of behavioral health at Verily, said in an interview. Verily will use a "variety of means" to track what works, she said, adding that patients would have to consent to being monitored... OneFifteen CEO Marti Taylor said "Because we will have facilities, an entire ecosystem and data, we'll be able to take a more holistic understanding of a person's health both inside and outside as we follow them long-term."
Verily's blog points out that Americans under 50 years old are more likely to die from unintentional overdoses than any other cause, and that two-thirds of those deaths involve an opioid. "In the face of one of the greatest public health crises the U.S. has seen, we feel compelled to act," they write, saying their company is "focused on making health information useful so people can live healthier lives."

Their blog says their team recognized "the absence of high quality information to guide individuals, communities, and legislators" for picking effective recovery treatements. "Leaning into our capabilities of building health platforms, we are setting out to create a 'learning health system' that aims to address this critical information gap in addiction medicine."

An anonymous reader quotes CNBC: It is inevitable that artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation will take over some jobs, internet entrepreneur Arianna Huffington told CNBC in a recent email exchange, but that will place a premium on uniquely human qualities in the future labor market -- creativity, compassion, empathy and complex problem-solving. That's where Huffington sees a pressing problem to solve. She says these human qualities are at risk today and the cause is -- no surprise -- too much technology. Her advice: Reevaluate your relationship with technology before it is too late. "These are the very qualities that are diminished when we're burned out from being always on," Huffington said of human abilities like creativity. "One of the next frontiers in the tech world is technology that helps us disconnect from technology and create time and space to connect not with screens but with other people and with ourselves...."

Huffington, who is an executive producer on the new '90s tech-sector docudrama "Valley of the Boom," said the consumer relationship with technology is one of the most important issues of the modern era, and it is time to reevaluate the seeds that were planted back in the '90s during that first internet boom.... "Even for those of us old enough to remember the first boom and to have lived through it, it's sometimes hard to remember that there was a time before we were all hyperconnected and glued to our screens. And seeing the decisions that were made that led to our current moment makes us realize we can also make decisions about how we use this technology."
To this end Huffington has launched a startup called Thrive Global "to go beyond raising awareness and create something real and tangible that would help individuals, companies and communities improve their well-being and performance and unlock their greatest potential." CNBC reports that Huffington "sees a bright future for a new kind of technology -- the kind that helps individuals disconnect from the damage done by the internet's first generation."

In a related story, Bloomberg reports that the Ashton Kutcher-backed meditation app 'Calm' now has a valuation of $1 billion.

schwit1 shares a report from Business Insider: Amazon declared in its 2018 annual filing that it competes against transportation and logistics companies, as CNBC first reported. It's a clear warning shot against UPS and FedEx, two companies that used to claim Amazon is simply their customer. Meanwhile, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky told analysts last week that the retail giant will "continue to expand (its) Amazon logistics and (its) delivery capability" in 2019. Meanwhile, UPS CEO David Abney said the company "monitor(s) them (Amazon) as is if they were a competitor." And FedEx claimed, seemingly out of nowhere, last week that Amazon is not their largest competitor, claiming just 1.3% of the company's 2018 revenue.

Amazon.com is reconsidering its plan to bring 25,000 jobs to a new campus in New York City following a wave of opposition from local politicians, The Washington Post reported Friday [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], citing two people familiar with the company's thinking. From the report: The company has not leased or purchased office space for the project, making it easy to withdraw its commitment. Unlike in Virginia -- where elected leaders quickly passed an incentive package for a separate headquarters facility -- final approval from New York state is not expected until 2020. Tennessee officials have also embraced Amazon's plans to bring 5,000 jobs to Nashville, which this week approved $15.2 million in road, sewer and other improvements related to that project. Amazon executives have had internal discussions recently to reassess the situation in New York and explore alternatives, said the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about the company's perspective.

The string of hotter-than-average annual temperatures continued in 2018, as Earth experienced its fourth-hottest year on record, according to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [PDF]. From a report: Also in 2018, the United States suffered 14 weather and climate disasters with costs surpassing $1 billion during a warmer- and wetter-than-average year, NOAA reports. Global temperatures across land and sea were 1.42 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average, making 2018 the fourth-warmest year since record-keeping began in 1880, NOAA said in a report Thursday. In a separate report, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies said global temperatures were 1.5 degrees above the 1951 to 1980 mean, also the fourth highest going back to 1880.

The 2-degrees Fahrenheit increase in global temperatures since the late 19th century has been driven largely by growing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from human activity, said the institute's director, Gavin Schmidt. The conclusion reaffirms NASA's long-established finding that man-made emissions are driving climate change, which President Donald Trump and some senior administration officials frequently challenge. By both agencies' measures, Earth has now recorded its five hottest annual average temperatures in the past five years. "2018 is yet again an extremely warm year on top of a long-term global warming trend," Schmidt said in a press release.

Amazon has for the first time acknowledged sales of counterfeits and pirated items as a risk in its annual earnings report to investors and the U.S. SEC. "Some third-party sellers have been using the reach of Amazon's marketplace as an opportunity to sell counterfeit and pirated items," reports Quartz. "The pressure on the company has been growing as brands such as Birkenstock and Mercedes Benz have lambasted it for not being able to control the problem." From the report: Under the section of "risk factors" to the business, Amazon says it "could be liable" for the activities of its sellers, and explains: "Under our seller programs, we may be unable to prevent sellers from collecting payments, fraudulently or otherwise, when buyers never receive the products they ordered or when the products received are materially different from the sellers' descriptions. We also may be unable to prevent sellers in our stores or through other stores from selling unlawful, counterfeit, pirated, or stolen goods, selling goods in an unlawful or unethical manner, violating the proprietary rights of others, or otherwise violating our policies. Under our A2Z Guarantee, we reimburse buyers for payments up to certain limits in these situations, and as our third-party seller sales grow, the cost of this program will increase and could negatively affect our operating results. In addition, to the extent any of this occurs, it could harm our business or damage our reputation and we could face civil or criminal liability for unlawful activities by our sellers."