Wednesday, October 23, 2019
WeWork plans to lay off 4,000 staff: Report
ETtech Top 5: Govt on e-comm predatory pricing, WeWork layoffs & more
WeWork's new chairman defends payouts to founder, says company will survive
E-commerce companies cooperating with the government: Piyush Goyal
India, US plan to revitalise defence tech sharing pact
PayPal reports solid third-quarter results, with total payment volume growing 25%
PayPal reported third-quarter results today that were slightly ahead of analysts’ expectations, driven by an increase in total payment volume.
The company’s quarterly revenue grew 19% year-over-year to $4.38 billion. Its GAAP net income was 39 cents per share, or $462 million, a 7% year-over-year increase. On a non-GAAP basis, net income was 61 cents a share, a 5% increase.
These figures included a negative impact from strategic investments in MercadoLibre and Uber; without that, GAAP net income would have increased 48% to 54 cents per share, and non-GAAP net income would have rose 31% to 76 cents per share.
During the third quarter, PayPal added 9.8 million active accounts, increasing the total number by 16% to 295 million. Total payment volume (TPV) increased 25% to $179 billion. Venmo processed more than $27 billion in TPV during the quarter, an increase of 64%.
For its full-year results, PayPal said it expects earnings per share ranging from $3.06 to $3.08 per share, on revenue of $17.7 billion to $17.76 billion.
In September, PayPal announced it will acquire a 70% equity interest in GoPay (Guofubao). The deal is expected to close during the fourth quarter and will make PayPal the first foreign payments company licensed to provide online payment services in China, an important potential driver of future growth.
LinkedIn’s degree problem
A couple of years ago, the cofounder and CEO of the blood-testing company was publicly taken to task for implying in articles and professional profiles that he has a PhD when in reality, he’d left a prestigious graduate group three years after enrolling, without a degree.
The CEO is hardly alone in intentionally or otherwise sewing confusion around his credentials, however. Over the years, we’ve mistakenly believed that a number of founders have obtained specific college degrees based on their LinkedIn bio, only to learn offline that they enrolled for some period of time in a particular program that they didn’t complete.
It happened most recently with the cofounder of a startup who one would might surmise based on his LinkedIn profile has a master’s degree from Harvard but does not. We also misunderstood the CEO of a robotics company to have a PhD based on her LinkedIn. It was our fault; it mentioned under the credit that she’d left to start a company. But anyone scanning the site might have come to the same wrong conclusion. (We pointed this out to her team, and mention of the PhD program on her LinkedIn page was deleted.)
In a high-profile case, James Damore, the fired Google engineer who authored that infamous memo about the company’s diversity practices and whose LinkedIn page cited under “Education” a “PhD, Systems Biology,” removed mention of those doctoral studies after Wired confirmed with Harvard that he was enrolled in the program but didn’t complete the doctorate.
Damore tried to defend his own LinkedIn profile, tweeting at the time, “I never told anyone I have a PhD. LinkedIn can’t distinguish between being in the PhD program and having a PhD (I forgot to update it).”
Though few on Twitter found him credible, he wasn’t mistaken on this front. In creating a profile on LinkedIn, the choices one is given are to a.) list a completed degree and leave off anything partially completed, no matter how much time was invested in a program (or minuscule its acceptance rate) or b.) list an incomplete degree without a clear way of explaining that it’s no longer being pursued or whether it will ever be obtained.
LinkedIn doesn’t view the issue as its fault. Asked whether LinkedIn members might be posting incomplete degrees because of the company’s user interface, a spokesperson emailed us today, writing that LinkedIn’s user agreement and “professional community policy” guidelines — which, of course, no one reads or cares about — are “clear that members should provide factual information about themselves on LinkedIn.”
Added this person: “People should definitely add their education details to their LinkedIn profile. The education section includes ‘Start Year’ and ‘End Year (or expected)’ fields. If a member has a partial degree, we recommend they clearly state the status of their degree within the ‘Degree’ and/or ‘Description’ fields.”
Still, that “description” field isn’t easy to find, and why LinkedIn — which has more than 600 million users — hasn’t added fields for partially completed degrees is a bit of a mystery.
Cynically we will note that LinkedIn makes a lot of its revenue off recruitment services. Before it was acquired by Microsoft, and the companies’ financials were consolidated, 65 percent of LinkedIn’s revenue came from recruitment services. And often the more distinguished the degree, the more people will pay to associate themselves with the ostensible degree holder. (LinkedIn itself strongly encourages loading up one’s profile with education-related details, saying these attract “11x” more profile views.)
A much bigger factor, however, is human nature, argues Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, a renowned professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business who has written extensively about organization theory. Asked if he has reason to think that more students are listing incomplete degrees on LinkedIn — or even dropping out of school with less compunction, knowing they might — he points us to numbers published in 2001 by the payroll and benefits managing company ADP.
What they show: of 2.6 million background checks that the company performed that year, 44 percent of applicants were discovered to have lied about their work histories, 41 percent lied about their education, and 23 percent falsified credentials or licenses.
“People lie about everything all the time,” says Pfeffer. “I’m not sure that it’s any worse now than it was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago.”
It’s something recruiters anticipate, he says. He recalls a conversation with a top executive from the search giant Heidrick & Struggles, who Pfeffer had interviewed for one of the many books he has authored. “He said to me, ‘So many people make up credentials that we no longer use fudged credentials as a reason to disqualify a candidate.’ He said recruiters will correct what they find wrong with someone’s resume. But he said if they used exaggerated — even made-up — credentials as a reason to disqualify people, they would never have enough candidates.”
LinkedIn’s limited menu of options may give more cover to people. But Pfeffer cautions not to assign the company too much blame, no matter its reach. It’s a little like shooting the messenger, he suggests.
“Sure, LinkedIn could play some role. But they could change the way they operate tomorrow, and people would still find a way to make themselves look more accomplished than they are.”
Samsung rolls out a patch for Galaxy S10 and Note10 to fix the fingerprint sensor flaw that caused 3D patterns in screen protectors to be read as fingerprints (Reuters)
Samsung rolls out a patch for Galaxy S10 and Note10 to fix the fingerprint sensor flaw that caused 3D patterns in screen protectors to be read as fingerprints — SEOUL (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930.KS) has updated software to fix problems with fingerprint recognition features …
Moto G8 Plus to Launch Today: All You Need to Know
Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo: Global IT spending to rebound and grow 3.7% in 2020
Facebook to unveil news tab at an event Friday with News Corp's Robert Thomson; sources: direct payments to 200 publishers will go up to millions of dollars (Craig Timberg/Washington Post)
Facebook to unveil news tab at an event Friday with News Corp's Robert Thomson; sources: direct payments to 200 publishers will go up to millions of dollars — Facebook plans to launch a “News” tab on Friday that will offer stories from hundreds of news organizations, some of which will be paid fees …
Samsung unveils Exynos 990, its new flagship SoC that's 20% faster overall and 2x faster on AI-specific tasks, and a new 5G modem, both made with a 7nm process (Stephen Shankland/CNET)
Samsung unveils Exynos 990, its new flagship SoC that's 20% faster overall and 2x faster on AI-specific tasks, and a new 5G modem, both made with a 7nm process — If you buy next year's flagship Samsung Galaxy phone, it might come with a performance boost from a new processor the Korean electronics giant announced Wednesday.
Sarah Lacy and Paul Carr sell Pando, seven years after launching it, to ad-tech company BuySellAds, which bought Digg in 2018 (Sarah Lacy/Pando)
Sarah Lacy and Paul Carr sell Pando, seven years after launching it, to ad-tech company BuySellAds, which bought Digg in 2018 — If there is a single moment when it seemed like my journalism career suddenly caught fire, it was the 2006 Business Week cover story I wrote about the rise of Web 2.0 companies.
Elon Musk predicts Tesla energy could be ‘bigger’ than its EV business
Tesla CEO Elon Musk forecast that the company’s energy business will eventually be the same size as— or even bigger than — its automotive sector, the latest sign that the company plans to put more time and resources to scaling up its solar and storage products.
“It could be bigger, but it will certainly be of a similar magnitude,” Musk said during an earnings call Wednesday. The company surprised Wall Street by reporting a return to profitability in the third quarter.
The bulk of Tesla’s revenue is generated from sales of its Model S, Model X and Model 3 electric vehicles. In the third quarter, automotive revenues were $5.35 billion. The company doesn’t break out revenue generated from solar, energy storage or other products and services. However, the total revenue in the third quarter was $6.3 billion, which gives some indication of the size of automotive compared to its other businesses.
Tesla’s energy and solar businesses languished for nearly two years as attention and resources were directed to the Model 3. That diversion of resources included redirecting battery cell production lines meant for its home Powerwall and commercial Powerpack energy storage products to the car because the company didn’t have enough cells.
“We had to do it because if we didn’t solve the Model 3, Tesla wouldn’t survived,” he said. “So, unfortunately that shorted other parts of the company.”
Now, the company is committed scaling up energy storage and solar. Kunal Girotra, who initially joined Tesla in 2015 as a senior product manager for Powerwall, was promoted to senior director of the company’s energy operations.
In the third quarter, Tesla installed 43 megawatts of solar, a 48% increase from the previous quarter. Solar installations are still 54% lower than the same period last year.
Energy storage deployments have continued to grow, reaching an all-time high of 477 MWh in the third quarter, according to earnings posted Wednesday.
Part of this new effort includes its solar roof tile product, which was originally unveiled in 2016. Musk said that a new, third iteration of its solar roof tile will debut Thursday afternoon.
Google Pay net profit jumps 83% to Rs 33 lakh
A case study of the amount and kinds of ads in 12 shows on the ad-supported tiers of Netflix, Peacock, Disney+, Max, Paramount+, and Hulu (Jon Keegan/Sherwood News)
Jon Keegan / Sherwood News : A case study of the amount and kinds of ads in 12 shows on the ad-supported tiers of Netflix, Peacock, Disne...
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Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
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Lorena O'Neil / Rolling Stone : A look at the years of warnings about AI from researchers, including several women of color, who say ...
