Robots Are Really Bad At Folding Towels

Notes BRETT, the Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks, can fold a towel.

BRETT, the Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks, can fold a towel. But it takes a long time.

Credit: UC Berkeley Robot Learning Lab

Seven years ago, Pieter Abbeel set out on a quest: to teach a robot how to fold laundry. This proved to be a remarkably difficult task — and the difficulty of the task illuminates some key things about the limits of machines.

Abbeel, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, named his robot BRETT — short for the "Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks."

For a robot, it's remarkably hard to figure out what's going on in a pile of laundry — to see, say, where the underwear stops and where the towel begins. Every pile of laundry is different, and remarkably complex.

Abbeel's team spent months staring at laundry baskets, holding towels up in the air, and taking pictures of laundry.

The solution was super complicated. "Can you use multiple images to build a 3-D model of the current shape?" Abbeel says. "Because once you can do that, then you can analyze that 3-D shape [and] find where the corners are."

Abbeel and his colleagues solved the problem, sort of. After years of work they taught BRETT to fold a towel in 20 minutes — eventually he learned to do it in a minute and a half. But he can still get stumped by things like a bundled-up sock or an inside-out onesie.

In other words, years of work from dedicated, smart researchers have produced a towel-folding robot that can't keep up with an average 8-year-old. This problem, Abbeel says, is not limited to towels.

"Once you start working in robotics," he says, "you realize that things that kids learn to do up to age 10 ... are actually the hardest things to get a robot to do."

Lots of things that seem simple and orderly to us are incredibly complex and chaotic for a robot. Machines need clear rules. One of the ways to figure out if a robot is going to take your job is to ask yourself: What are the rules here? Is my job a series decisions based on an orderly pattern? Or is my job really more like a giant pile of messy laundry?

Facebook Courts News Giants Into A Deal To Share Viewers, And Revenues

Nine media organizations, including The New York Times and National Geographic , have signed a deal to distribute their content through a new Facebook feature called "Instant Articles." Facebook hide caption toggle caption Facebook
Nine media organizations, including The New York Times and National Geographic , have signed a deal to distribute their content through a new Facebook feature called "Instant Articles." Facebook
In recent years, Twitter has become the go-to destination for news junkies.

In recent years, Twitter has become the go-to destination for news junkies. Now, Facebook is entering a deal with nine news organizations, including The New York Times, NBC News and Buzzfeed, to run some of their in-depth articles, photos and videos inside Facebook. No need to leave the app! The move gives the social media giant a whole lot more content — and power.

It's called "Instant Articles,"and for now it's only available on iPhones. The point is to create an experience that is seamless. Today roughly a billion people will visit Facebook to chat and see what their friends are reading or streaming. If you try to click on a short documentary about bees from National Geographic , for example, the loading bar gets in the way.

Facebook declined an interview but released a promotional videoin which chief product officer Chris Cox explains: "One of the huge issues we see is how long it can take for those articles and news to load."

With the new tool, it loads instantly inside the app. The viewer doesn't leave Facebook's platform.

Mobile Strategy

Years ago, Facebook would never have marketed itself as a news site. It was fun and social.

Now, it's got brainy partners like The Atlantic . The magazine's editor-in-chief, James Bennet, says things over at Facebook have changed. "They say they have an interest in promoting significant consequential work, and I take them at their word," he says.

Perhaps more important, Facebook knows how to make ad money on smartphones. (Industry insiders often say the company is "killing it" in mobile, giving formidable competitors like Googlea run for their money.)

The participating publishers get to keep 100 percent of the revenue from the ads they sell with their content on Instant Articles. Or the news companies can have Facebook sell unsold ad positions through its mobile ad Audience Network. In that case, the publishers split the revenue with Facebook.

Distribution Of Power

NPR says in a statement that it's currently talking to Facebook about this new program.

Besides the money, The Atlantic's Bennet expects the deal will also get him more eyeballs. And he's not worried about leaning too hard on the Silicon Valley giant and then suddenly losing editorial control.

"Look, it's not hard to conjure dystopian visions of possible futures," Bennet says.

Vivian Schiller, a media consultant who used to be NPR's CEO, counters: "This is not a theoretical concern. This is a real concern. It's happened in the past, and certain organizations that had certain practices that they built in order to rise higher to the top on Facebook's site then turned out to be losers."

In Silicon Valley, there's a well-known story about Zynga, the company that made the game Farmville. Zynga thought it was riding high on Facebook. Then the algorithm that organizes the news feed changed — and Zynga lost a ton of traffic and money.

In this deal with news giants, Facebook keeps sole control of its news feed algorithm. While the company posts updates to changes, it doesn't have a legal obligation to explain those changes.

"Guessing which direction Facebook is going to go and adjusting your entire organization around that is an incredibly risky proposition," Schiller says.

Yet despite those cautious words, she says it's "absolutely necessary" for news publishers to enter these kinds of deals — because now is the time to experiment.

While Facebook focuses on distributing content — not creating it — the company recently published a paper in Sciencedescribing how people around the world increasingly get their news from social media.

Inside Alibaba’s war room on the world’s biggest online shopping day

HANGZHOU, China—At Alibaba’s headquarters here, one man is commanding the world’s largest day of online shopping: China’s “Singles Day.”
“This is my war room,” Daniel Zhang, Alibaba’s chief operating officer, said to Quartz from behind a small faux wooden desk.

“This is my war room,” Daniel Zhang, Alibaba’s chief operating officer, said to Quartz from behind a small faux wooden desk. In front of him is a Macbook and three large screens attached to a wall, all dark right now—some of the information is confidential, Zhang explained, apologizing. Printouts of contingency plans—in case the company’s e-commerce sites buckle under the torrent of traffic, or the customer service center fails—are taped to a white board next to his desk.

It was Zhang’s idea some six years ago to offer shopping promotions on Nov. 11, an anti-Valentines Day started by a group of single Chinese university students in the 1990s. Now, the holiday has morphed into an annual flagship event whose sales surpass those of America’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. Preparation for the day consumes the company and many of the over 20,000 merchants that sell their wares on Alibaba’s platforms during the event. Alibaba has trademarkedthe “11.11” logo for the holiday, to some controversy.

A video ad for Singles Day at Alibaba’s main campus in Hangzhou says, “I can’t imagine life without Alibaba.” (Quartz)

After the e-commerce giant’s blockbuster listingon the New York Stock Exchange earlier this year, the company and today’s performance are under even more scrutiny. Alibaba’s operation on Singles Day mirrors the complex operations that underlie the company, which its executives have taken to calling Alibaba’s “ecosystem” of e-commerce. Executives have taken pains to stress Alibaba’s distinction from Amazon or its smaller Chinese rival, JD.com: Rather than holding inventory or delivering goods itself, Alibaba connects merchants, customers, and logistics firms to complete e-commerce sales.

It’s a model that Alibaba believes can handle the exponential growth of a holiday whose sales so far today—49 billion yuan, or $8.1 billion—are already almost 40% higher than last year’s Singles Day, which itself was 90% bigger than the year before. “The most important thing is that our business model is scaleable. If we are simply keeping our own inventory, we would not be able to handle this kind of volume,”Alibaba vice president Joseph Tsai said.

For Alibaba’s staff, long hours fueled by Red Bull and Starbucks—there is one on the Alibaba campus, which is also home to a gym, a library, and a post office—have become the norm over the past few weeks. About 11,000 staff have been involved in the holiday’s execution.

“I know that people will be happy if they get a good number,” Zhang said from the temporary office he uses for Singles Day, “but here, we have to keep quiet and I have my team around me, a small team, I call them my brain.”

(Quartz)

From his perch, Zhang can see everything from how much stock various merchants have, conversion rates that measure how page views translate into purchases, and data on whether people are paying with their bank cards, through cash advances, or Alibaba’s third party payment system, AliPay. Zhang and his small team of two or three staffers analyze this data to make decisions throughout the day, including which merchants to feature on the site or how to target customers.

Of the various operations that have to be coordinated—technology, customer service, marketing, working closely with the merchants, and Alipay—maintaining Alibaba’s Tmall platform, where most of the discounts take place, is perhaps the most important. In another building on the Alibaba campus, hundreds of engineers and staff from Aibaba’s technology department have been standing guard since before the clock struck midnight on Nov. 11. A banner hanging in the back of the room says, “Global shopping party, Ali tech team united.” Zhang, who was stationed in that room last night, said he had to ignore a call from founder Jack Ma who was visiting the various operation centers. “I sent a text to him saying, “Sorry boss, I cannot host you right now. He said, ‘that’s all right,'” Zhang recounted.

Alibaba’s tech team at work in Hangzhou on Single’s Day. (Alibaba) Tmall staff on Nov. 11 at Alibaba’s main campus in Hangzhou. (Reuters/Aly Song) Tmall staff on Singles Day at Alibaba’s headquarters in Hangzhou. (Reuters/Aly Song)

There are always things that can’t be predicted. In 2011, incorrect colors and sizes were being listed on merchant sites. In 2009, when Alibaba held its first Singles Day, one contingency plan was to change all the photographs to black and white from color if the website began to fail. More sophisticated contingency plans are in place now that would shut down less important systems, Zhang says.

The holiday generates an enormous amount of traffic and attention for Alibaba but it’s not so clear what the ultimate net gain might be. Some merchants complain of depressed sales ahead of 11.11, the cutthroat discounting means lower profit margins, and for some, the entire production is a logistical nightmare.

For Alibaba, Singles Day accounts for only 2% of its annual volume of transactions, but consumes an increasingly large portion of the company’s marketing and advertising budget. Last year, expenses during the fourth quarter when the holiday takes place, were almost double what they were for the third quarter, and 50% higher than the year before during the same period, according to the company’s prospectus.

Tsai says that the holiday brings more than just revenue—it creates traffic and with that brand awareness. And he argues that transactions have started to pick up before the holiday, as shoppers start to browse Tmall in preparation. “If you look at the few days leading up to Singles Day our [gross merchandise volumes] are improving. We’re not deferring people’s purchases and bunching everything into Singles Day. It’s actually the opposite,” he told Quartz.

Alibaba says Singles Day also allows the company to put its entire operation under a kind of stress test. In the hallways of Alibaba, outside of Zhang’s office, the smell of instant noodles is strong. Stacks of plastic lunch boxes, crackers, and candy are strewn across desks that are decorated with balloons and images of the black cat that is Tmall’s mascot: Tianmao , or “sky cat.”

Some of the staff have been here through the night—two are tucked away in a corner asleep in a set of chairs, wrapped in sleeping bags; a tent has been set up on the carpeted floor nearby.

“It’s like a war,” Zhang said. “A virtual war but no enemy.”

How Alibaba invented the world’s biggest online shopping holiday

Every November, on the eve of one of China’s most quirky holidays, Singles Day, groups of unattached young Chinese get together and celebrate their singleness with a night of online shopping.

China’s guanggun jie— literally, “bare branches holiday”—on Nov. 11, was once a little-known celebration of life as a bachelor or bachelorette. Now, thanks to the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, it is the world’s largest online shopping event in terms of sales—and an illustration of how the retail and internet giant that is on its way to going public in the US almost singlehandedly built the foundation of online retail in what’s now one of the world’s largest e-commerce markets.

Singles Day, also known as “11.11” for its annual date, has outstripped older online shopping holidays, with retailers offering discounts of at least 50% off. (Other sellers offer smaller discounts, but they won’t be featured on Alibaba’s standalone 11.11 site.) Last year, transactions on Alibaba’s online payment system Alipay reached 35 billion yuan(pdf) or $5.8 billion– more than the combined salesof US retailers during Cyber Monday and Black Friday. About 100 million yuan was spent every minute over the course of 24 hours. And almost a third of the Chinese population, about 402 million people, visited Alibaba websites during the day, the company said.

That growth didn’t happen on its own. The 11.11 holiday was launched in the 1990s by a group of university students at Nanjing University, a few years before the Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma founded Alibaba. In 2009, Alibaba encouraged merchants on Tmall, an Alibaba platform that’s similar to Amazon, to offer promotions on the day as a way to boost sales in between two holiday seasons in China—Golden Week, a national holiday at the beginning of October, and the winter holidays of Christmas and the Lunar New Year. Alibaba advertised the day as an occasion to splurge on oneself—an answer to Valentine’s Day and most other popular holidays in China, where the focus is on buying gifts for others.

Jack Ma at Alibaba’s headquarters in Hangzhou, where they track sales across the country. (Reuters/Carlos Barria)

Growing internet usage and wealth, especially in second- and third-tier cities where traditional retail options are limited, meant stronger-than-expected demand. By 2009, e-commerce in China was already becoming popular, with sales more than doubling between 2008 and 2009, to 263 billion yuan. Even with only 27 merchants participating in Alibaba’s 2009 Singles Day event, consumers spent over 50 million yuan.

“The first year, they were surprised at how well it went, and the second year promoted it more, and then it took on a life as its own,” says Porter Erisman, a former Alibaba employee and director of a documentary about Alibabatitled Crocodile in the Yangtze.

Today, advertising for 11.11 makes Christmas season advertising in the US look mild: It begins as early as three months before the day and ranges from social media campaignsto text messages and phone calls promoting deals. Rebates are offered in the form of “red envelopes” or hongbao that are traditionally given as gifts. Last year, Alibaba struck a deal with China’s two largest telecommunications firms, China Mobile and China Unicom, to give free datato subscribers for the months of November and December.

Moreover, ads for the shopping holiday appeal to the country’s youth by playing on the idea of singleness—a reality millions of young Chinese face because of a widening gender gap—represented by the four ones in 11.11:

The promotion seems to have worked. Last year, over 20,000 merchants, including Nike, Adidas, Gap, and Uniqlo, offered deals on Alibaba platforms. Between 2009 and 2013, sales grew 700-fold.

The popularity of Alibaba’s Single’s Day prompted other firms to follow its lead and has arguably been an impetus for the entire online retail industry. Between 2009 and 2013, e-commerce in China showed a compound annual growth rate of 71%. By 2020, e-commerce transactions in China are projected to be larger(pdf, p. 2) than that of the US, the UK, Japan, Germany, and France combined.

Value of US and China e-commerce transactions. (KPMG)

Chinese e-commerce rivals such as Jingdong, a retailer that started out focused on electronics, and Suning, an appliance seller, now feature deals on Singles Day. Last year, Jingdong promoted half-price diapers and 70% off items such as slimming belts and facial products. Suning began promotions early, with ads featuring the slogan: “Four days, four nights, shop non-stop.” There is so much shopping energy around the holiday that brick and mortar stores such as Intime, a retail chain that Alibaba recently bought a 26% stakein, also started running promotions during 11.11 of last year.

“Singles day stands out to me as the ultimate example of just how much a role Alibaba has in pushing forward e-commerce in China,” Erisman said. “This is an invented holiday.”

Today, the holiday serves as a gauge of consumer sentiment on everyday goods, as well as a survey of the more eclectic. Popular products have included American toilet seats, chandeliers, and French wine; last year a Chinese car website offered a promotion on BMWs. While last year’s top-selling merchant was the Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi, baby formula and intimates were also big. Half a millioncans of baby formula had been sold by 10:30am Beijing time last Singles Day—enough to feed all of China’s two-month old infants for two weeks. And the number of bras sold—1.6 million—could have been stacked up to more than three times the height of Mount Everest, the company said.

Despite the shopping holiday’s success, it’s not clear how much retailers really benefit from Single’s Day. The town of Dongfeng in the north of Jiangsu province calls itself China’s “ number one e-commerce village” (link in Chinese) and has built its entire economy around selling on Alibaba’s platforms. But some merchants opt out of Singles Day because the glut of orders and backup at shipping companies means they often have to send goods late and end up getting poor customer reviews.

Employees sort through packages at a shipping hub in Wuhan, Hubei province the day after Singles Day. (Reuters/Stringer)

Undercutting among merchants is another problem. “You can get price wars,” David Michael, a consultant at Boston Consulting Group tells Quartz. “It is also a situation where you do have a battle going on, as different sites try to outdo themselves in terms of promotions.”

Alibaba itself shells out a pretty penny for the day: its prospectus shows that expenses during the fourth quarter of 2013, a reporting period that includes Singles Day, were almost doublethat of the previous period—9.9 billion yuan, spent on payment processing and extra bandwidth, among other things. General and administrative costs, as well as sales and marketing expenses were about triple that of the quarter just before. And on annual basis, those numbers appear to be increasing: Alibaba spent 50% more on sales and marketing during the fourth quarter of last year, compared to 2012. (The company makes its revenues from commission and advertising from merchants, not actually selling the merchandise itself.)

Still, Alibaba is already trying to manufacture another shopping holiday: “12.12” a day, on December 12, for small-scale consumer-to-consumer merchants on Alibaba’s platform Taobao to offer promotions on niche items that aren’t sold in high volumes—from pill boxes to nail clippers with built-in mirrors.

Despite the giant size of the Chinese e-commerce market, there’s still plenty of room to grow: online retail only accounts for 7.9% of total retail in China and only 49% of internet usersin China actively shop online. In time, China’s Single’s Day holiday may beget yet even more invented shopping holidays.

SalesforceIQ-Desk.com Integration Gives Small Business Enterprise Capabilities

It’s challenging for a fast-growing small business to offer great customer service while continuing to increase sales at a rapid rate.

It’s challenging for a fast-growing small business to offer great customer service while continuing to increase sales at a rapid rate. It would probably go more smoothly if the two departments had access to a common set of information, but making that happen for a small business has been a difficult and expensive undertaking.

Salesforce.comwants to change that and today it introduced an integrated product combining Salesforce IQCRM and Desk.comcustomer service — its tools aimed at small businesses. By integrating the two, sales and service reps can get a full picture of the client across multiple channels, something that has previously only been available to much larger business using enterprise software that’s way out of reach of most small business owners.

What this means is that sales reps working in SalesforceIQ can see notes and interactions that customer service had with the customer and CSRs working in Desk.com can see the buying history of the customer.

Desk.com with SalesforceIQ info embedded.

The integration itself is free and will be included with Desk.com Pro and Business Plus Editions and with SalesforceIQ Growth and Business Plans. These plans aren’t cheap, but Brent Leary, co-founder and partner at CRM Essentialssays certain SMBs can’t afford to ignore this.

“I think the high-growth, fast-growth SMBs who need to scale quickly while maintaining, and in some cases enhancing customer relationships will have no choice but to get it,” he said.

What’s more, Leary has done research with Social Media Today on what they call “ The Social Customer Service Index” and they’ve found that sharing information from customer service across the organization becomes increasingly crucial as a small business begins to scale.

“This year’s study found that companies which had a structured process for sharing service insights with other parts of the business (sales, marketing, product development, etc.) were way more likely to see a very positive impact on company goals and objectives in terms of customer engagement,” Leary explained.

It’s possible for a small business to start with Desk.com if they are more oriented toward customer service or SalesforceIQ if they are more sales-centric, but Leary says if the business begins to grow quickly, it becomes useful to integrate them.

“Managing retention while accelerating the uptake of new customers is a tough balancing act, and will only get tougher without these kinds of integrations in place,” he said.

The trick is balancing these rapidly growing sales with the ability to service a larger body of customers, which becomes especially challenging the faster you grow.

“The ones who plan for that [growth] up front, even though they may emphasize one aspect more in the beginning, will be the ones successfully handling their growth in a way that will keep current customers happy while they bring on new ones [onboard] at an accelerated rate,” he said.

If you have both products, turning on the integration is as simple as going to the Admin panel of each and turning on the Sharing switch.

This integration is available today to all qualified customers.

Microsoft says super-cheap Windows devices are on the way

It used to be that if you only wanted to pay $199 for a brand-new laptop, you'd have to try your luck on Black Friday or pick up a Chromebook .

. Not so anymore. Microsoft COO Kevin Turner outed a $199 HP Windows laptopcalled the Stream at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference this morning, and it should see the light of day in time for the holiday season. Fine, it doesn't sound like the biggest deal ever. There are already a few solid Windows laptops floating around there for less than $100 more, after all, and at this point no one's sure what $199 will actually get you. That's a fair point, but c'mon: on some level this move is all about symbolism. Microsoft is telling the industry -- and the consumers that fuel that immaculate machine -- that it's not giving up low-end computing to Google without a fight.

Nadella and his crew are banking on the fact that Windows provides greater functionality and extensibility than ChromeOS right out of the box. When computer shoppers can own the full Windows experience (for better or worse) for the same price as committing to a Chrome-y connected lifestyle, they'll have to mull that choice over. That's exactly what Microsoft wants. Turner also confirmed that the next few months would bring at least a few full-blown Windows tablets priced to move at $99. That announcement wasn't as much of a surprise since the folks in Redmond revealed that the OS would be freeto manufacturers when its installed on device's with screens under 9 inches. It was only a matter of time, but hey -- that doesn't make the gesture any less meaningful.

See for yourself what Bloomberg’s terminal contract says about spying on customers

Bloomberg’s standard contract for its terminals gives the company the right to monitor customer usage “solely for operational reasons,” according to several of those customers and a copy of a contract obtained by Quartz.

So, first of all, here’s the contract.

It’s from the city of Oceanside, California, which has subscribed to a Bloomberg terminal since 2001 in order to manage its investments. The city recently renewed its contract at a rate of $24,000 a year, plus some fees and taxes.

The contract should help shed light on whether Bloomberg faces any legal risks following the revelation that, until April, all of its journalists could view data about how and when customers used their terminals. Bloomberg executives have called that access a “ mistake” and “ inexcusable,” and the company has hired outside lawyersto advise it on handling the fallout.

Oceanside’s contract with Bloomberg was written and signed in 2001; it has been renewed every two years, and remains in effect. The city posted the contract online. The passages in it that pertain to surveillance haven’t changed in more recent contracts drawn up for terminal subscribers, according to people who have signed them. Some Bloomberg customers, like large banks, undoubtedly sign much more complex contracts than Oceanside’s.

We aren’t lawyers, and won’t pretend to be. But there are two passages in Oceanside’s contract that seem to permit Bloomberg to monitor usage of the terminal. However, both include important caveats:

“Lessee acknowledges and understands that Lessor may monitor, solely for operational reasons, Lessee’s general use of the Services.” (The lessee, in this case, is Oceanside, and the lessor is Bloomberg.) ​ “Lessor reserves the right to audit and monitor (whether physically or electronically) (i) the requests of Lessee for the Information, the Exchange Data, and Additional Information and (ii) the number of Authorized Computers enabled to access the Information, Exchange Data and Additional Information.” ​

What qualifies as “operational reasons”? And what does “audit and monitor” mean? The contract doesn’t say. A Bloomberg spokeswoman declined to comment.

Bloomberg reporters had access tothe last time any customer logged in, the number of times customers used particular functions on the terminal, and transcripts of chats with customer service. Current and former Bloomberg journalists say the information aided reporting there, but no one has pointed us to a specific article that was published based on the terminal usage data. Instead, it seems to have guided further reporting. Data for some famous clients was also accessed simply for amusement.

It’s also worth noting that access has only been revoked for Bloomberg’s 2,400 or so journalists. The rest of the 15,000-person company can still view the data, which is made available for customer service and sales efforts. And as we’ve previously reported, Bloomberg employees have been told the company keeps a record of every action taken by every terminal user.

Terminal customers large and small have complained about the reporter access, but none has publicly dropped their subscription. Goldman Sachs, which lodged the complaint that led to reporter access being cut off, is said to be working on a private messaging systemthat would reduce its reliance on communicating through its Bloomberg terminals. Some government agencies, meanwhile, have voiced mostly tepid concern that their employees may have been monitored.

The Bank of England today offered the strongest statement by a regulatory body, calling the terminal snooping “ reprehensible.” Agencies and firms in Europe, where privacy laws are generally stricter than in the United States, may pose the greatest threat to Bloomberg’s efforts to contain the controversy.

If you have anything to contribute to our reporting, please feel free to get in touch.

More to read: Bloomberg’s culture is all about omniscience, down to the last keystroke

What Bloomberg employees can see when they snoop on customers

Bloomberg LP is in damage-control mode.

Bloomberg LP is in damage-control mode. Some of its largest customers have publicly accused the firm’s journalists of snooping on their usage of Bloomberg terminals, the firm’s wildly profitable information service for investors.

Until recently, all Bloomberg employees could access information about when and how terminals were used by any customer . But after complaints by Goldman Sachsand JP Morgan, Bloomberg says its 2,000 or so journalists no longer have access to that information, though other staff still do. Bloomberg has more than 15,000 employees.

The banks were concerned that Bloomberg News was keeping tabs on terminal usage in order to aid its reporting. JP Morgan specifically citedcoverage of the bank’s disastrous derivatives trading, known as the “London Whale,” which Bloomberg was the first to reveal. Ty Trippet, a spokesman for Bloomberg, said he “is unaware of any record of any such complaints” by JP Morgan.

Bloomberg hasn’t detailed what “customer relationship information” was available to its journalists (and remains available to other staff), but current and former Bloomberg employees say they could access a wide array of data. Much of it was accessible through the function on their terminals. Here’s a rundown of what was available…

Transcripts of chats with customer service

Every Bloomberg terminal customer knows you just need to tap twice on the green button in the top-left corner of the keyboard in order to chat with a customer service representative. Fewer of them are aware that the transcripts of those conversations are stored by the company and could be viewed by any employee.

Several former Bloomberg employees say colleagues would look up chat transcripts of famous customers, like Alan Greenspan, for amusement on slow workdays. The transcripts were typically mundane and hardly incriminating, but who wouldn’t enjoy watching a former US Federal Reserve chairman struggle to use a computer? And, in theory, the substance of someone’s query to customer service could reveal specific information that he’s interested in, tipping off a reporter to a story.

It’s common for companies to keep logs of their interactions with customers. What makes Bloomberg different is that any employee, including journalists, could access those logs through the function on their terminals. Trippet said that access was revoked from journalists.

Data on what functions people use

Bloomberg employees can also see how many times any terminal customer has used a particular function over the past 30 days. In Bloomberg-speak, functions are the commands that help users navigate the labyrinth of information inside their terminals, ranging from (news) to (corporate bond trades) to (weather) to (take a screenshot). Employees can see how many times each function was used but not further details, like which company’s bonds were being researched.

The data is accessible to Bloomberg employees so they can help customers use the terminals and promote other services. Journalists who used to work at Bloomberg say they typically made use of the feature to lightheartedly snoop on each other and some famous customers. But, they said, journalists who covered Wall Street were presumed to be using the feature for their reporting, as well.

The last time someone used his terminal

Every Bloomberg terminal customer can see if another customer is logged in, which helps the messaging system function and is often used within companies to keep tabs on their employees. But those red and green dots, which signify whether someone is logged in or off, can be disabled and, in any event, only provide current information. Bloomberg employees, however, can also see the date and time that any customer last logged into his terminal.

Goldman cited this functionalityin its complaint to Bloomberg, saying a reporter had surmised that a Goldman partner left the firm after seeing that he hadn’t logged into his terminal for a while.

Update at 4:49 p.m. EDT: Bloomberg CEO Dan Doctoroff just sent this memo to employees:

Since our founding more than 30 years ago, the proper safeguarding of customer data has been a central tenet of Bloomberg’s culture.

A Bloomberg client recently raised a concern that Bloomberg News reporters had access to limited customer relationship management data through their use of the Bloomberg terminal. Although we have long made limited customer relationship data available to our journalists, we realize this was a mistake.

Having recognized this mistake, we took immediate action. Last month we changed our policy so that all reporters only have access to the same customer relationship data available to our clients. Additionally, we decided to further centralize our data security efforts by appointing Steve Ross, one of our most senior executives, to the new position of Client Data Compliance Officer. Steve is responsible for reviewing and, if necessary, enhancing protocols which among other things will continue to ensure that our news operations never have access to confidential customer data.

To be clear, the limited customer relationship data previously available to our reporters never included access to our trading, portfolio, monitor, blotter or other related systems or our clients’ messages. Moreover, reporters could not see news stories that clients read, or the securities they viewed. Bloomberg has very strict data security policies in place, in addition to significant and rigorous training, processes and protocols. Upon hiring, all Bloomberg employees enter into confidentiality provisions, including Bloomberg News.

Client trust is our highest priority and the cornerstone of our business, and we are deeply committed to ensuring the complete integrity and confidentiality of our clients’ data in all situations and at all times.

Dan

Holiday Shopping Season For SMBs? Not So Much

It’s an established fact that Americans love to shop during the holidays.

Karthik Sridharan Crunch Network Contributor

Karthik Sridharan is co-founder and CEO of Kinnek.

How to join the network

It’s an established fact that Americans love to shop during the holidays. The frenzy of rushing to the local mall or Main Street to snap up the latest “Black Friday” deals is a time-honored tradition, and, in the last decade, so is shopping online on “Cyber Monday.”

We go on to joyously spend our way through the month of December until stores close on Christmas Eve — only to embark on the after-Christmas-sales surge on December 26.

During the 2014 holiday season, U.S. consumers shelled out around $610 billion on retail purchases. This represents about 19 percent of the entire year’s retail sales (Source: U.S. Census Bureau, National Retail Federation). For 2015, holiday retail sales are expected to remain at similar stratospheric levels, with the notable difference of a larger-than-expected shift from brick-and-mortar shopping toward buying online.

The holiday spike in retail purchasing is a fascinating social and economic phenomenon that transcends cultural, religious and geographic boundaries here in the U.S. With all this talk about consumers buying things, it begs the question: Do businesses, specifically small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), also spend a disproportionately large amount on purchases during the holiday season? Surprisingly, the answer is a resounding “no.”

In fact, the holiday season actually has a slightly negative impact on SMB purchasing behavior.

Source: Kinnek

Shopping Culture Contrast

So how can this trend be explained? Why do many SMBs purchase on a different cycle than consumers? There are three main reasons.

First, the consumer culture of holiday gift-giving is a primary driver of retail shopping. The absence of this behavior at any meaningful level for businesses means that they lack the same drivers to purchase during the holidays.

Additionally, because B2B-focused suppliers are cognizant of this lack of holiday excitement for business purchasing, they in turn don’t give out as many “Black Friday,” “Cyber Monday” or “Holiday” deals. This lack of deals consequently yields less excitement among SMB buyers…and so on and so forth.

Second, purchasing seasonality does exist for a lot of small businesses, but is often driven by events that impact business production or sales, like weather and harvest cycles versus public holidays. For example, equipment purchases among wineries and cideries are typically made in the months leading to the fruit harvest in late summer/early fall.

Colleges and universities start purchasing auxiliary products for dorms and dining rooms after school lets out for the year. In mid-summer, breweries begin to stock up on specialty bottles or packaging to prepare for the now-ubiquitous pumpkin ale season.

Source: Kinnek

And finally, due to the consumer-facing nature of many SMBs (i.e., they sell to consumers), business  purchasing habits are in fact driven by holiday shopping spikes, but with a phase shift. Many B2C companies experience during the holiday rush a massive spike in consumer demand for their products and services. So, their priority is to prepare for that spike in holiday-time demand, and that often means preparing way in advance.

For example, bars, restaurants and other retail stores that want themed promotional items and glassware in time to meet the holiday demand surge will need to begin planning those purchases weeks or months in advance. This has the effect of smoothing out small business purchasing across the latter half of the year instead of concentrating it during the last few weeks of the holiday season.

Delayed Holiday Decisions

A secondary impact of this surge in demand seen by consumer-facing SMBs during the holidays is that these businesses tend to prioritize catering to that demand over planning for long-term capacity increases. SMBs don’t drastically slow down their rate of research and requesting quotes for new purchases during the busy holiday season. However, they do delay their purchase decisions until after their busiest season is over.

Source: Kinnek

The unique nature of SMBs yields a very different approach to purchasing than consumers. Consumer holiday exuberance highlights the stark contrast between these groups. If you are a B2B company trying to cater to small businesses, taking the time to understand this different pattern of behavior will pay dividends.

FiveStars Gets $50M To Help Small Retailers Run Loyalty Programs Like Their Bigger Rivals

FiveStars , a five year-old startup that has built a platform and app to run loyalty programs and shopping analytics for small brick-and-mortar retailers, has received a reward of its own: the company has raised a round of $50 million, funding that it plans to use to continue its focus on “mom and pop shops” and building its brand and business across the U.S., CEO and co-founder Victor Ho told me.

To date, some 10,000 merchants across the U.S. and Canada are using FiveStars’ loyalty services to track customer visits and give them incentives to come back for more in the form of discounts, couponsand other perks; 10 million consumers have used its apps; and FiveStars has logged more than 35 million visits to stores in the last year based on its messages and reward offers.

The Series C round was led by HarbourVest Partners. Previous investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, and DCM Ventures also participated. This latest funding brings the total raised by FiveStars — which launched out of Y Combinator back in 2011— to around $105 million.

(And in case you are wondering, FiveStars is not disclosing its valuation. Sources tell us that it’s in the hundreds of millions and “very solid”, but Ho refuses to be drawn out on the specifics. “We do not want to be a part of the whole stack ranking game,” he says.)

The company has come a long way from its origins.

Starting out as a basic rewards and loyalty service, the company has grown into a larger marketing and analytics platform over the years.

“The overarching goal is to bring the customers back in more often,” Ho said. “We do that by helping merchants collect data on things like what customers are ordering, and through our tools we have a CRM and marketing automation suite to reach out and engage customers.” (It also provides a pretty extensive privacy policyto explain how and what it does.)

Ho and co-founder Matt Doka first met each other working at McKinsey, where they were helping to build loyalty and reward products for the kinds of huge businesses — Fortune 50 brands, Ho calls them — that employ huge consultancy firms to do this.

“We thought to ourselves that the smaller businesses were missing out, and we wanted to try to fix that,” Ho said.

Why? He and Doka could see that smaller businesses were going out of business at a much higher rate, and made a guess that loyalty was one of the drivers. “There is no way that small businesses can compete on price against a company like, say, WalMart. But without better loyalty services, they couldn’t compete on personalization, either. And yet customer service is probably one of the only ways to help them win.” (I’d add product quality to that, of course.)

The company first started out a very low-tech approach: it integrated with merchant’s point-of-sale systems and customers used a FiveStars card that they swiped at participating merchants to gain loyalty points and other rewards, more or less an aggregated replacement for the paper punch-card. (The original URL for the company was actually “fivestarscard.com”.)

FiveStars eventually upgraded to a more tech-savvy system. Today, customer visits are marked either through the use of in-store beacons or an app-based check-in, if a customer has the FiveStars app installed.

The check-in has been much-maligned as a concept, with companies like Foursquare, which popularised the action, recently raising money in a down-roundin part because it’s struggled to turn that feature, core to its location-based app, into a big business (although that’s changing now, it seems). Ho believes what FiveStars offers is different, however, since users have incentives to check in outside of any social game: because of the rewards they get in return (a concept that Foursquare has tried to capitalize on now, too).

The FiveStars system allows for retailer employees to be able to identify users, along with their purchasing preferences in order to better serve them once they enter the premises. Think of it as the physical equivalent of the personalization you have when you, for example, visit Amazon.com as a logged-in user.

Simply setting out to target much-overlooked and ignored small businesses, however, hasn’t exactly translated into instant business from them, Ho said.

“All of the difficulties of selling to small businesses are true,” he said with a little laugh. “It’s incredibly difficult. They will not find you, and you often can’t find them through Google. They are small retailers and the only way to get them is to get in front of them with a direct sales force.” He notes that this is one of the details that isn’t really talked about when discussing startups that target small businesses. “Even Square uses one,” he said. About half of FiveStars’ employees today are sales people.

But this doesn’t mean that everything that FiveStars does is analogue. Back in 2012 the company hired Chris Luo, who is now the startup’s VP of marketing. Before this, Luo had been head of global SMB marketing at Facebook, and before that head of acquisition marketing for Asia-Pacific for Google. Luo helped the company build a pretty impressive sounding algorithmic database that helps FiveStars identify and target retailers with their products, so that they’re not simply going out there with a spray-and-pray approach to find new customers.

Ho says the machine learning algorithms are able to look at, for example, whether a business is making regular updates to its Facebook page or whether it engages on Twitter, and whether and how it has built its website.

All of these are signals about whether the retailer in question is already considering ways of reaching out to new customers; or improving the relationship with existing customers; and even if they are the kind of business that is willing to dedicate budget to technology to improve business. Ho says FiveStars typically charges a $300/month fee for its full solution that includes the tablet and tablet-based software, the analytics and app integration.

As for the longer-term picture, FiveStars wants eventually to branch out beyond North America — the UK, being a nation of shopkeepers, is likely to be the first place FiveStars will go, said Ho. But for right now, the aim is to become a much bigger brand on its home turf.

What’s his definition of big enough? Hard to say exactly, Ho told me, but he did note that companies like Groupon and Yelp, which also target small businesses, each had around 20,000 merchants a year before they went public.

“Everyone was sharing offers with each other by that point, and everyone knew what they were,” he said. “They really started to take off.” It competes against other companies like Belly( backedby the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and also having raised around $25 million); Perkville(also VC backed) and Canada’s Sweet Toothfor targeting small businesses with rewards programs.

The spectre of Yelpand Grouponare interesting, given these seem like they would be obvious competitors or potentially acquirers, along with the likes of Amazonor even Facebook. Companies like these are always looking for ways to get closer to small businesses and extend the larger commercial relationships they may already have with them around other products like daily deals, point of sale systems, paid listings or advertising.

Ho says that FiveStars has been approached for acquisition several times already but without a deal that has tempted the team to make the leap instead of continuing to grow independently.

Updated with further pricing clarification and other details.

HP SlateBook 14 review: Android? On a laptop?

SlateBook 14
Get more info
Engadget
60
5.2
Users
Not yet scored
Type Midsize
Bundled OS Other
System RAM 2 GB
Maximum battery life Up to9 hour
Pointing device Trackpad
From $799.99
There's mounting evidence that HP, once the leading PC maker, does not know what it's doing.

Critic 3 Reviews

There's mounting evidence that HP, once the leading PC maker, does not know what it's doing. After announcing plans to cutup to 5 percent of its work force, the company is basically throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. Recent experiments include a luxury smartwatch, Chromebooks, a $199 Window notebookand now, a laptop running Android. Here's the sales pitch, and bear with me if this doesn't make sense: The SlateBook 14, according to HP, is for students and teens who already use Android on their mobile devices. In other words, they already own a Galaxy S5 or what have you, and they should have an Android laptop to match. The idea is that they might choose this over a Chromebook because it has more apps, and because it's more familiar. Ditto for Windows laptops -- except, you know, Windows actually has lots of apps too. Setting aside HP's flawed logic (they never said Windows users should stick to Windows Phone): Why would you pay $430 for a laptop running an OS that was primarily meant to be used with the fingers?

Gallery: HP SlateBook 14 review | 28 Photos

And Just Like Magic, GoButler Is A Virtual Assistant Founded By Ex-Rocket Internet Execs

Unlike Magic, however, GoButler is based in Berlin, Germany.

“Text us to get whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you are – it’s really simple and cool,” says GoButlerco-founder CEO Navid Hadzaad.

He could of course be describing Magic, the Silicon Valley startup (and Y Combinator alum) that offers an SMS-based virtual assistant and promises to get you anything on-demand.

Unlike Magic, however, GoButler is based in Berlin, Germany. Along with Hadzaad, who was previously co-founder of on-demand laundry app ZipJet, the company is founded by a number of other ex-Rocket Internet executives.

We can already see the traction and lock-in effects by relationships built with customers. — Navid Hadzaad

And whilst GoButler can be seen as a Rocket Internet-styled clone, in one aspect at least, it represents a very un-Rocket-like story: Hadzaad and his team launched GoButler in early March as a weekend project, but within 48 hours had quit their jobs at Rocket, raised seed funding, and saw the service receive 10,000 requests.

In fact, Hadzaad says that demand was so high that after only two hours the startup had to revert to a waiting list. Just three weeks later, GoButler is available in Canada, UK, Germany, Austria and Switzerland and has processed over 100,000 requests. Its now 30 ‘butlers’ are handling more than 5,000 requests per day.

“People love it. We can already see the traction and lock-in effects by relationships built with customers,” he says.

Like Magic, you simply send a text message to GoButler and the service’s ‘butlers’ — who act as virtual assistants — process your request, keeping you informed along the way. So, for example, you could have GoButler book a movie or order your favourite pizza.

“We want to make convenience services actually convenient and personal,” says Hadzaad. “We want to be the meta-aggregator layer above all vertical market services – online and offline. We are your one-stop-shop for everything you need.”

VCs are referencing “the future of search” in the discussions we have with them. — Navid Hadzaad

Interestingly, along with location, GoButler’s business model may diverge from Magic too. Aside from paying for the goods and services you request, GoButler itself is currently free to use (presuming you can get bumped up the waiting list in your respective country) and Hadzaad says the startup isn’t planning to change this anytime soon.

“The obvious part would be monetising on the customer end through premiums, but where we see the real value is on the supply side,” he says. “If you understand the way e-commerce and lead generation works, you understand what value this business has; some VCs are referencing “the future of search” in the discussions we have with them. The goal is to have customers going through us for whatever service, product or information they desire, and we’ll make it happen.”

That suggests some kind of affiliate revenue model. Or perhaps more direct partnerships with retailers and service providers. “The value you have when you’re the market maker on an aggregator level is very clear,” adds Hadzaad.

But how scalable is a service like GoButler? By its very nature it requires humans to act as your virtual assistant.

“You won’t be able to eliminate human interaction at some level (and quite frankly we don’t want that at all), however, you can generate a lot of efficiency gains by developing the Product/IT/Database to a high level of sophistication,” says Hadzaad.

“Think of it this way: in 6 months, when you tell us “I want my favourite pizza now. I’m at home” – we know what you’re favourite pizza is, we know where you live, we have your payment details. In the background, our integrated-API with our food delivery partner will trigger the order, the payment will automatically be processed and you’ll get a confirmation. Isn’t that convenient?”

Convenient, yes. And infinitely more attractive to VCs. To that end, GoButler is currently raising a Series A round that it expects to close in the coming weeks. The startup’s early backers, who invested a “six-digit-figure”, already include Jan Beckers (co-founder of HitFox), Cherry Ventures (the VC arm of Zalando/Quandoo founders’ Filip Dames, Christian Meermann and Daniel Glasner), and Gunther Schmidt (co-founder of Ekomi).

Gears of War 4' multiplayer beta starts April 18th

'Gears of War 4' multiplayer beta starts April 18th
Your Xbox One gets its first taste of the revived series in a matter of weeks.

If you've been wondering whether or not Gears of War 4 can live up to the reputation set by ( most) of its ancestors, you won't have to wait long to get a good sense of where it's going. Microsoft and The Coalition have revealedthat the Gears 4 multiplayer beta for Xbox One starts on April 18th, when existing Gears of War: Ultimate Edition players will get their first shot. An open beta for any Xbox Live Gold member will start a week later, on April 25th, and the whole shebang will wind down on May 1st. Two weeks (at best) isn't a long time to try the game, and there's no single player in the beta, but this test run should let you know whether Gears 4 's late-year launch will fill you with hope or dread.

Source:

In this article:

Shares

Share

Tweet

Share

Save

Comments

GoDaddy’s CFO Talks About Taking The Company Public

GoDaddy's IPO Is No April Fools'
GoDaddy was founded all the way back in 1997, but in the past few years, we’ve seen some new names leading the company — Scott Wagner joined from investor KKR and became interim CEO in 2012, then he shifted to the COO and CFO roles after Blake Irving took over as chief executive .

Web hosting company GoDaddyjust finished its first day of trading as a public company, with the stock both opening and closing at $26.15 (31 percent over its IPO price).

GoDaddy has also been making a number of startup acquisitions. Asked whether those acquisitions will continue, Wagner said, “We’ll keep doing it.”

“You’ll see us continue to add services, whether they be helping our customers be online, market to their customers, or run their back office,” he added. “We’ll either do things organically, partner, or buy some things if they make sense.”

Wagner also suggested that the IPO could help introduce GoDaddy to the broader public. Sure, you’ve probably seen the Super Bowl ads, and sure, NASCAR driver Danica Patrickwas on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for the start of trading. However, Wagner described GoDaddy as a company that “everybody’s heard about, but unless you’re a customer, you may not be familiar with it.”

GoDaddy also has a reputation for edgy advertising— it actually had to pull a controversial Super Bowl ad this year. Now that the company has gone public, will its ads get a little blander and safer?

“I think if you look at the ads that we’ve run over the last 18 months, you see the spirit of our customers and their journey,” Wagner said — though he said the ads will still be funny, too.

You can see my interviews with Wagner and NYSE President Tom Farley in the video above.

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition' lands August 25th, beta starts today

'Gears of War: Ultimate Edition' lands August 25th, beta starts today
Yes, the leaks were accurate.

were accurate. Microsoft and The Coalitionhave taken the wraps off Gears of War: Ultimate Edition , a remastered version of the original Gears of War for the Xbox One. The cover-based shooter is getting the obligatory visual upgrade, including 60-frames-per-second graphics -- important when you're ambushing an unsuspecting multiplayer rival. Ultimate Edition launches on August 25th, but a free public beta is starting today.

Check herefor everything happening at E3 2015!

Source:

In this article:

Shares

Share

Tweet

Share

Save

Comments

It’s not just department stores: US retail sales are slowing in general

“We’re not economists, we’re merchants,” he said on the company’s earnings call.

Nordstrom earnings last night were bad. Very bad. When flummoxed analysts asked what happened, co-president Blake Nordstrom had trouble explaining it himself.

“We’re not economists, we’re merchants,” he said on the company’s earnings call. “And we concur with you that if you get to a higher altitude and you look at the scorecard, there are a number of economic indicators that look real positive for the USand the consumer and spending, yet all we can tell you is in our business, we saw a slowdown.”

Well, it turns out they’re not alone, as actual economists are noting. As consumer-facing companies from Walmart(pdf) to Advance Auto Partsstart prepping analysts for rougher-than-expected fiscal years, the Census Department reports that US retail sales growth is grinding lower(pdf) almost everywhere.

They were up 1.7% in October from the same time last year, and only grew 0.5% if you cut out auto sales.

A portion of that (in a pretty volatile data point) is less money spent at the gas station, as fuel prices are still super-low. But that doesn’t explain everything, as gas station sales declined a little bit less. Healthcare, building materials, and non-store retailers (e-commerce and the like) excluded, everything else is slowing down.

“This is clearly a mixed report. Headline soft, revisions better.” wrote Bank of Montreal’s economics team in a note to clients. “It doesn’t help retailers get into festive mood, however.”

Sean Diddy Combs Allegedly Poised To Invest In Picture Messaging App Pleek, Built For Generation Selfie

As social media continues to come up with new and weird ways to give us dopamine hits — the latest is the resurgence of live streaming apps — a new startup has come up with yet another take on it all.

Pleek, is a new picture messaging app that allows users to communicate via images, and has launched on Androidand iOS.

The France-based startup has somehow managed to attract some celebs including Nicki Minaj, Karim Benzema, and Vine sensation, Jerome Jarre.

It’s now garnered $600,000 in a round led by Paris-based Partech Ventures. Furthermore, well-placed sources allege that rap star Diddy is poised to become an angel investor in the company. However, Pleek denies this and Diddy’s people claim this is erroneous.

Whatever the case, the app allows users to start an open thread to share reactions back and forth with photos and videos. Users can also add text and stickers to photos.

These archive threads can later be turned into photo collages to share over social networks or sent to friends via SMS or saved to the phone’s photo album.

Pleek Co-Founder Cyril Paglino calls it “picture messaging with a twist.”

Other Pleek features include overlay stickers (Grumpy Cat, etc.), video up to 8 seconds and Group Chat.

I can see this app appealing to the selfie generation, and especially the young demographic. It’s too early to tell if it’ll still be around in a few months, however.

Facebook Brings Auto-Play Video Ads To Apps In Its Mobile Ad Network

Facebook’s making a killing with its native, in-feed, auto-play video ads, and now it’s going to let other developers earn money off them too.

Facebook’s making a killing with its native, in-feed, auto-play video ads, and now it’s going to let other developers earn money off them too. Today Facebook announcedthat it’s opening up its own best-performing ad units to publishers that show Facebook’s Audience Network adsto monetize their apps. Facebook says Audience Network publishers using its native ad units get 7X better performance than on their traditional banner ads.

These new ad formats include auto-play video, as well as its multi-image Carousel Ads that can give deeper looks at a product or tell stories, Dynamic Product Ads that retarget users with items they’ve considered buying elsewhere on the web, and more traditional interstitial Click-To-Play Video Ads. Some users might find these flashy ads annoying, but at least they’re well-targeted and run properly.

Facebook’s spent years improving its ad user experience so videos don’t stutter when you scroll. Product Marketing Manager Brett Vogel tells me getting access to the slick auto-play video ads was “the number one thing” publishers were asking for. Now Facebook’s passing this ad tech on to its partners so they can both make more money through the Audience Network revenue share. The shift is working. Eighty percent of Audience Network impressions are for native ads, up swiftly from 60 percent in March.

Facebook originally announced its Mobile Audience Network ad network at F8 back in April 2014. For years, other analysts and I had expected Facebook could earn a lot more money if it used its trove of personal info to target people with ads while they’re using other apps.

By October, Facebook opened up the ad network to all apps. When users who are logged in to Facebook visit an app on the Audience Network, they get shown personalized ads sold by Facebook that are targeted based on that person’s Facebook info like their age, gender, interests and activity. Facebook takes a cut for doing the targeting and gives the rest to the app developer who doesn’t have to hire their own ad sales team.

Now more of its top ad types will be available through Audience Network. [Update: Facebook is also beefing up the capabilities of Dynamic Product Ads. Advertisers can now run ads showing products they’ve designated as related to something a user looked at, added to their shopping cart, and now, purchased. Plus, the ads can now be optimized to drive sales, not just clicks.

The better Facebook can make the ads that run on its Audience Network partners’ apps, the fewer it needs to show in its own. Ideally for Facebook, it could give users a less-cluttered experience in the News Feed by simply using its own apps to collect targeting data that’s applied to ads shown elsewhere. That way, it could earn just as much money without shoving as many ads in the News Feed.

Behold! The first economics cliché of 2015!

Lowflation.

All of a sudden this not-so-clever portmanteau is everywhere.

But what it lacks in wit, it makes up for in usefulness.

Large chunks of the emerging global economy—including Brazil, Russia and China—are slowing. Established economies such as Germany and Japan aren’t growing like gangbusters. And oil prices are collapsing. All of that adds up to a global decline in prices that is scrambling financial markets and economic expectations. The latest evidence? The euro zone slipped into outright deflation in December, with prices falling 0.2% year-on-year.

The flurry of economic and market outlooks recently published have been liberally peppered with references to lowflation. (Here are a smattering, bolding is ours.)

Goldman Sachs: A mechanical reduction in core inflation could have an important impact on monetary policy, especially if other indicators such as wages remain consistent with continued lowflation .

Nomura: With a global disinflationary shock, we think market participants will be more confident about the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England’s ability to address the lowflation issue.

Morgan Stanley: In our view, the dominant macro theme in 2015 will be central banks’ battle against lowflation –excessively low inflation that has become pervasive, persistent and pernicious.

Proliferation of the term lowflation suggests a shifting mindset in financial markets, as investors come to expect perseverant low or falling prices. The difference between that and “deflation,” is just a matter of degree. When widespread, enduring price declines are seen to be the norm, it can spark a vicious cycle of falling profits, investments, jobs and income, which in turn further depress economic activity.

That negative feedback loop has proven very difficult to break (see Japan’s decades-long wrestling match with deflation).

Economic policymakers are anxious to prevent this mindset from spreading across Europe, one of the world’s largest economic entities. The European Central Bank has a chance to do so at its upcoming meeting on Jan. 22, by moving toward a Federal Reserve-style bond buying program, known as Quantitative Easing, or QE.

But policymakers are divided about whether such measures, which aim to lower borrowing costs to boost spending and investment, would be effective. After all, yields on long-term Spanish debt, for example, are already below 2%. So it isn’t borrowing costs that are keeping businesses from investing. It’s the tight credit from Europe’s crippled banking system and the horrific state of many of its largest economies. (Italy’s unemployment rate is a record 13.2%. That’s the third largest economy in the euro zone).

The real value of an ECB bond-buying program would probably be more psychological than what can be measured in terms of bond yields. Draghi said he was willing to do “whatever it takes” back in July 2012. Now it’s time for him to act.

Information Sharing Is Key To Avoiding A Cyberattack

V. Gerard Comizio Crunch Network Contributor
President Obama’s recent extraction of a pledge from Chinese leader Xi Jinping that neither government would conduct or continue economic espionage in cyberspace, while important, still comes up far short of addressing the significant and growing global concerns about the potential for a 9/11-style cyberattack on critical financial sectors.

V. Gerard Comizio is chair of the global banking group of Paul Hastings LLP.

How to join the network

Now more than ever, dramatically increased cyberthreats to the financial and business sector call for laws governing cyberthreat information sharing between the government and industry — before it’s too late.

Author James Michener once wrote, “ We are never prepared for what we expect.” Cyberattacks involving data breaches, destructive software and attempts to disable critical segments of the financial sector worldwide have been dramatically increasing. This is not new news — alarm bells have been ringing.

In a statement before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence outlining the worldwide threat assessment of the U.S. intelligence community, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence reported in early 2011 that there has been a major increase in malicious cyber activity targeting U.S. computers and networks, including more than triple the volume of malicious software attacks since 2009.

Similarly, a 2011 U.S. Government Accountability Office report entitled Critical Infrastructure Protectionreported that threats to financial institutions have included increased attacks from a variety of sources, including criminal groups, hackers, disgruntled employees, foreign governments engaged in espionage and information warfare and terrorist groups.

Furthermore, the media has reported that these cyberattacks have included, among other things:

Attempts by cybercriminals to use online banking and payment systems to transfer money from financial institutions to their own accounts. Government and terrorist attacks designed to disrupt or disable key parts of the financial sector and probe infrastructure weaknesses. Data breaches of confidential customer data used to cause reputational and financial harm. Data breaches of confidential customer data used for extortion.

Cyberattacks involving data breaches, destructive software and attempts to disable critical segments of the financial sector worldwide have been dramatically increasing.

U.S. financial regulators are increasingly recognizing the threats of cyberattacks, with one senior regulator characterizing it as “ the biggest system risk we have facing us.” The Financial Stability Oversight Counsel recently warned that the U.S. financial system is “ highly dependent on” often interconnected information technology systems that create — and thus, enhance — the risk of a single cyber incident impacting many institutions simultaneously, with malicious actions infiltrating internal systems and infrastructure in ways that may be hard to detect.

Given the real and rising threats of cyberattacks against major financial institutions, and the potential for significant impact on the global economy, financial regulation and law enforcement have not only heightened their scrutiny of cybersecurity programs, but are increasingly adopting new laws, regulations and policies that focus on cyber resilience and threat response. The U.S., for example, has in recent years issued hundreds of cybersecurity regulatory guidance documents related to the banking and finance sector.

These cyberattack concerns extend to the U.S. government itself, with Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) recently co-sponsoring the RECOVER Act, in response to the fact that the federal government has been recently subjected to various cyberattacks compromising the personal data of 21.5 million federal workers, including OPM’s recent disclosure that the fingerprints of 5.6 million government employees had been stolen in these data hacks.

Notably, Presidential Executive Order 13691, issued by President Obama on February 13, 2015, characterizes cyberthreats as a “national emergency” and calls for increased cooperation and information sharing on such threats within both the government and private sector, as well as enhanced cyber resilience standards. Executive Order 13691 encourages — but does not require — information sharing. Legislation establishing a legal and procedural framework for cyberthreat information sharing is viewed by many as a necessary next step.

In response to recent cyberattacks on Sony, JPMorgan Chase, Home Depot, Target and other major companies, important legislative efforts are already underway to require information sharing on cyberthreats. The U.S. House of Representatives recently voted on a bipartisan basis 307-116 to approve the Protecting Cyber Networks Act. Similarly, S. 754, the proposed Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, was recently reconciled with the House bill and passed by the Senate on a bipartisan basis, with a 74-21 vote.

Companies are likely to raise competitive concerns about pooling cyberthreat information in their industry. Also, the possibility of government turf battles is reminiscent of pre-9/11 “compartmentalization” of important threat information dispersed among various agencies.

Thus, these concerns, while important, can be resolved, consistent with protecting privacy and competitive concerns, and certainly pale in comparison to the potential threats presented. Both the private sector and government will benefit from a shared database of threat assessment information.

The ability to analyze trends and data in a comprehensive cyberthreat information database will help both government and private sector to be in a far better position “connect the dots” and, thus, take steps to address and prevent cyberthreats. As with terrorist threat information — notably, also a potential source of current cyberattacks — post-9/11 legislation has provided for information sharing among critical agencies; the same can be done for cyberthreat information sharing.

The results of a cyberattack that would potentially cripple critical financial sector infrastructure and businesses cannot be underestimated.

Interestingly enough, financial institutions already are generally required to file a SAR (suspicious activity report) with the U.S. Department of Treasury’s FinCEN office, and with their primary regulatory agency, regarding any reasonable suspicion of illegal cyberhacking or data breach activity — which certainly includes data breaching and cyberattacks. To expand this type of reporting to other segments of the critical business sector is important.

The Senate bill’s provisions provide immunity from lawsuits by consumers and shareholders for companies sharing information, and will help to encourage information sharing. The real question is whether voluntary information sharing will ultimately prove to be enough. The results of a cyberattack that would potentially cripple critical financial sector infrastructure and businesses cannot be underestimated, and could result in catastrophic effect on the U.S. and global economies.

This potential threat requires strong and decisive legislative action soon to put private sector companies and the U.S. government in a position to share potential cyberthreat information in order to protect our country and the global economy.

Excerpts from this article are taken from his recent book, International Bank Law , (West Academics 2015).

Google Updates Its Container Services With Focus On Speed, Scaling And Authentication

The Container Engine, Google’s service for automatically managing clusters to run and orchestrate container deployments, now supports the latest version of Kubernetes ( ).

With its Docker Registryand Container Engine, Google has made a big bet on containers for its Cloud Platform this year. Today, the company is launching updates to both of these services.

). This new version introduces a number of performance improvements and those are now also available to Container Engine users.

This means Container Engine now also features horizontal pod autoscaling (which basically adds more servers to your cluster when needed), as well as an HTTP load balancer that lets developers route traffic to different Kubernetes services based on traffic.

The team also re-architected the networking system with an eye on speed. Google says this work (which introduced native iptables to Container Engine) “virtually eliminates CPU overhead and improves reliability.”

The Google Container registry got a similar range of updates today as well. There, the team added support for the Docker Registry V2 API, improved performance (by up to 40 percent), and added support for advanced authentication. This last feature especially will make life for developers a bit easier because it means they can now more easily integrate the Google Container Registry into their continuous delivery systems like Codeship, CircleCI, Drone, Jenkins, Shippable and Wercker.

Google has also partnered with TwistLockto bring that company’s container security services to its platform. Using this service, Container Registry users on Google’s Cloud Platform can now set up policies for who can access containers, for example.

Three myths about the ruble’s miraculous recovery

The Russian ruble has beaten record after record.

The Russian ruble has beaten record after record. While at the end of 2014 it was falling in value faster than ever, in the first quarter of 2015, it has become the best currency in the world in terms of growth. This has allowed Russia’s Finance Minister Anton Siluanov to declare that the ruble has become a “strong currency.” Here’s why he’s wrong.

Myth 1: The crisis is over, the ruble has become a strong currency

According to Anton Siluanov, Russia’s finance minister: “The nadir of Russia’s economy has passed and the ruble has become a strong currency.”

Here’s why he’s wrong: It’s true that the ruble has gained in strength against the euro and dollar in recent weeks, but if we take into account the last three months, this strengthening looks pretty modest. At the end of 2014, the dollar bought 56 rubles. Now it buys 52. The strengthening of Russia’s currency speaks to the low base effect. Speculators were so anxious to get rid of their rubles several months ago that they drove its price down to the lowest level ever. A rainy July is not evidence that the whole summer will be rainy.

The fact that the ruble is far from being a “strong currency” is demonstrated by its growing price. It’s pretty rare for a “strong currency” to fall from 33 to 68 units to the dollar over a few months, then level out at 54. It’s possible that Anton Siluanov means that sharp fluctuations in the ruble’s value won’t be seen again in the coming months, but the Ministry of Finance is in no position to guarantee this, as the price of the ruble is decided on the basis of external factors, such as the situation in Ukraine, sanctions, and the price of oil. These factors are currently relatively stable, but no one can say for sure that they won’t change again.

Finally, it’s no secret that the Russian Ministry of Finance has little need of a strong ruble. Russia is an export-oriented country (more specifically, oriented on the price of oil and gas), and the lower the national currency falls, the more advantageous it is to sell these goods abroad, and less advantageous to import goods.

The drive towards import substitution and the need to fulfill budgetary commitments without increasing government debt both mean that the ministry prefers a weak ruble.

Myth 2: The price of oil has remained low, but the ruble isn’t falling, so the ruble is strong

According to the Washington Post, economists predicted that the ruble will continue to be weak as long as the price of oil remains low, as Russia is highly dependent on oil revenues. But the price of oil has remained low, while the ruble is slowly but surely gaining strength against the dollar.

Here’s why that’s wrong: There’s no disputing that the Russian currency is highly dependent on the oil market—this is a fact. Looking at the end of 2014, it’s important to remember that back then, investors were selling off rubles not just because the price of oil was falling, but because they didn’t know when it would “hit the bottom.” Many of them assumed that oil would fall to 30 or even 20 dollars a barrel and were “trying to stay on top” of the currency market. Now that the price of oil has leveled out between 51-62 dollars a barrel and stayed that way for more than two months, there’s no reason to panic.

The ruble began strengthening back in early Feb. 2015, precisely when the price of oil began to rise. This means that the ruble and oil have not been “decoupled” for two months, or even a month, but for all of a few weeks. Such a short period is clearly insufficient evidence to prove that the ruble is capable of fighting against the low price of oil for a significant period of time, especially without the help of speculators (see the next section). To use a simple analogy: a rainy July is not evidence that the whole summer will be rainy.

Myth 3: Okay fine, so the ruble won’t strengthen, but it won’t fall, either!

The Minister of Economic Development, Aleksei Ulyukayev, has said: “We can now say that the price of the ruble is returning to its fundamental level.”

Here’s why he’s wrong: The minister most likely means that the ruble’s exchange fell because of speculators, and now the price of Russia’s currency is returning to a sort of mythical “exchange rate without speculators’ influence.” At the same time, there is ample evidence that behind the ruble’s growth stand the same speculators who were betting against it just a few months ago. The thing is, speculating on the ruble in the last few weeks has been really easy: borrow credit in currency with a very low interest rate, deposit the money in rubles (lets say at 10 to 15%), and at a certain point do the whole thing in reverse and make profit on the arbitrage. This is a fairly rough description of the scheme, but it captures the main principle. Considering that the ruble has been relatively stable for a few weeks, the risks are practically non-existent.

The Russian Central Bank has been encouraging these speculators in every way it can, giving out “cheap” credit in rubles and maintaining high interest rates (which of course also means a high interest rate on deposits).

But this situation will have to change soon. Firstly, the economy can’t be relaunched with high interest rates, since growing deposits come with growing interest rates on credit. Secondly, the Central Bank would like to beef up its depleted foreign currency reserves during this period of stability in the oil market, and it can only do this by buying foreign currency (in other words, by betting against the ruble).

N.B. We at Meduza don’t believe that we can predict exchange rates or advise our readers what currency they should invest in. The aim of this article is merely to show that there are different points of view on the changes in the ruble’s exchange rate.

The article originally appeared on Meduza. Follow Meduza on Twitter at @meduza_en. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

NTT DoCoMo confirms successful 10Gbps wireless test, clears a path to 5G

No, it's not the world's most conspicuous surveillance van -- it's one of the first steps toward 5G data .

. NTT DoCoMo has just confirmed that the gear-laden vehicle above successfully conducted a 10Gbps wireless test in Ishigaki this December with the help of the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The dry run relied on frequencies and bandwidth well outside of usual cellular service, in the 11GHz band with 400MHz of spectrum, but proved that it was possible to blow past the speeds of LTE and LTE-Advancedwhile moving outdoors; the test used 24 antennas to maintain the link. DoCoMo ultimately hopes for similar speed in frequencies over 5GHz, and it's not shy about hoping the technology will define mobile communication as it improves. Although we're not expecting this kind of breakneck performance in a phone for years, it's good to know that 4G isn't necessarily the end of the line.

Source:

In this article:

Shares

Share

Tweet

Share

Save

Comments

What’s behind Tesla’s charm offensive

Elon Musk and Tesla have been engaged in quite the PR offensive lately.

Today, the electric vehicle company announced a slew of upgrades to its entry level Model S sedan (which is now in its third year of production). On April 3, there was the surprise early announcement about a record quarter for Model S deliveries.

Last month was also particularly eventful. Elon Musk held a press conference, unveilingdesigned to eliminate the problem of “range anxiety” (concern that the car will run out of power far from a charging station). At the event, Musk also teased a looming update that would include autonomous driving functionalityto its cars, such as self-steering on long highways.

Musk also tweeted about a looming product announcement for the end of the month ( despite his denials, when Musk tweets about Tesla, it usually lifts the stock price).

So why the publicity flurry?

For one thing, Tesla overhauledits public relations team late last year. Maybe the new team is simply being more proactive about getting good news out there. That’s only its job, after all. Or maybe it just reflects the reality that Tesla, a company in hyper-growth mode, simply has a lot going on.

Or maybe there is a deeper explanation.

Tesla is a highly volatile stock. The company isn’t making money at the moment, and opinions among investors are split between the highly ebullient and the viciously skeptical. The share price is so sensitive to headlines that its public relations strategy takes on added importance. The surprise announcement on deliveries was made to combat “ inaccurate” information being spread by short sellers. As Stifel auto analyst Jamie Albertine explained to investor clients this morning.”Tesla appears focused on retaining the ball in the battle for headline catalyst news flow”.

Wining the PR war is particularly important if the company needs to raise more capital from investors to fund its aggressive expansion plans this year. The Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column(paywall), for one, thinks this is likely.

Remember, Musk admitted in February that Tesla plans to spend staggering amountsof money on capex in 2015 ($1.5 billion is the forecast). Since the company is expected to lose more money this year, and only has $1.9 billion of cash on its balance sheet, it might need external funding to pay for it. “We don’t comment on speculation,” Tesla spokesman Ricardo Reyes told Quartz.

A good time for a company to raise new equity is when its share price is strong (because issuing new shares dilutes existing stockholders and usually pressures the share price). Of course, Tesla could instead raise debt, or like last time, issue debt that could eventually convert into equity.

Tesla timed its last capital raising perfectly—it coincided with then record levels in the stock price—and came amid highly optimistic commentary on Wall Street about the company’s potential (some of that coming from one of the firms that underwrotethe convertible debt issue). This is worth keeping in mind as the Tesla newsflow picks up.

Elon Musk says he is actually building that Hyperloop test track

Remember the Hyperloop?

Elon Musk just keeps doing Elon Musk things.

Remember the Hyperloop? The futuristic high-speed train systemdesigned by Musk in the spare time afforded to a man who is CEO of an electric car company (Tesla Motors) and a space company (SpaceX)?

Musk is now taking steps to move the idea toward reality. He tweeted Jan. 15 that he will build a Hyperloop test track where students and industry can work on designs for the system:

Will be building a Hyperloop test track for companies and student teams to test out their pods. Most likely in Texas.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 15, 2015

Musk also considering holding races where student-designed Hyperloop pods could duke it out:

Also thinking of having an annual student Hyperloop pod racer competition, like Formula SAE http://t.co/HV9BLCoMb8

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 15, 2015

Musk has been pondering the Hyperloop idea for several years, but has said little about it since August 2013, when he dropped the 58-page “Hyperloop Alpha”rough design on the world like a surprise Beyoncé album.

Musk never intended to lead the project; the idea was adopted by a group of engineers from NASA, SpaceX, and Boeing, who formed Hyperloop Transportation Technologies and recently released a 78-page proposal for how to bring the Hyperloop to fruitionin 10 years. But it’s clear from Musk’s recent words that the CEO and technologist still intends to contribute.

ThinkingPhones Becomes Fuze And Grabs $112 Million Investment Led By Summit Partners

The round was led by Summit Partners with help from current investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures.

ThinkingPhones, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, cloud service that offers messaging, phone service and video streaming, announced $112 million investment round today.

The company also announced it was changing its name to Fuze, which happens to be the name of the cloud video company it purchased last fall.

The round was led by Summit Partners with help from current investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures. Today’s investment brings the total to almost $200 million, according to Crunchbase.

They did not want to discuss a valuation. “Our view is the unicorn situation is overdone,” CEO Steve Kokinos told TechCrunch.

The company actually went on a little buying binge between 2014 and 2015. In addition to Fuse, Crunchbase reports the company bought Contactive in February 2014, giving the company pop-up contact information about the caller. It then acquired Whaleback Managed Services in August that year.

Fuze has been adding these pieces with a purpose of building a full communications stack in the cloud, that not only provides these major services around messaging, phone and video; but also pulls them together and provides contextual data to link the call to real business requirements, Kokinos said.

He sees that data integration as a key differentiator. For instance, it allows a customer service rep to see the call is from a customer with red flag problem from Zendesk or a sales person to see this is a blue chip customer from Salesforce. This kind of integration adds value throughout the service offerings, while using machine learning and analytics to help push the right information at the right time, Kokinos explained.

He says another differentiator is they are a pure cloud business offering all these service to enterprises with at least 1000 employees.

The company started slowly launching in 2006, but by 2012 it had begun to take off. Today it has 1500 customers. The company has doubled revenue each year since 2013, Kokinos said.

Today’s funding comes on the heels of three previous healthy rounds including a $16.5 million round in 2012, another $10 million in 2013 and $56.7 million at the end of 2014.

The company took that massive influx of funds and grew from 200 employees at the beginning of 2015 to 700 by the end of the year. With the latest round it’s ready to grow even more, hoping to double the number of employees by the end of this year, at least partly through increasing its international presence. That means building up the sales and marketing teams in Europe and Asia and building a new data center in Latin America in 2016. And of course it will continue to invest in research and product development.

As for an IPO, he’s says while it’s something he thinks about, nothing is imminent. “We are not in a hurry. We’ll assess it over the next couple of years. We have plenty of cash,” he said.

With a fresh $112 million in pocket, he’s not kidding.