Monday, October 28, 2019
Google's Search for Sales in Cloud, Hardware Clip Alphabet Profit
Report analyzing 800 Facebook posts about the Assam region in North India finds 26.5% constituted hate speech, and were shared 99K+ times with 5.4M views (Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch)
Report analyzing 800 Facebook posts about the Assam region in North India finds 26.5% constituted hate speech, and were shared 99K+ times with 5.4M views — A report by campaign group Avaaz examining how Facebook's platform is being used to spread hate speech in the Assam region …
Moto G8 Plus sale in India today: Price, specs, offers and more
Motorola introduced a new member to the G-series recently. The Moto G8 Plus was launched in Spain on October 24. Now, the smartphone is all set to go on sale in India. The Moto G7 Plus successor sports a new design, better cameras and more. It will go on sale at 12 PM through Flipkart. The Moto G8 Plus' price in India is Rs 13,999 and it will be made available in two colour options, Cosmic Blue and Crystal Pink.
Moto G8 Plus specificationsMoto G8 Plus comes equipped with a 6.3-inch FHD+ IPS LCD display that has a resolution of 2280 x 1080 pixels and 19:9 aspect ratio. It is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 665 chipset, paired with Adreno 610 GPU. The smartphone features 4GB RAM and 64GB of internal storage. Further, it supports up to 512GB of internal storage via microSD card slot. It packs a 4000mAh battery that supports 15W fast charging.
In the optics department, the Moto G8 Plus sports a triple rear camera setup: 48 MP main sensor (f/2.0, Quad Pixel) + 5 MP depth sensor (f/2.2, 1.12um) + 16MP action cam (sensor, f/2.2, Quad Pixel, 2.0um, dedicated ultra-wide camera with FOV 117° video). On the front lies a 25MP selfie shooter ((f/2.0, Quad Pixel). You can check out the camera samples in our first impressions of Moto G8 Plus here.
Moto G8 Plus also supports FM Radio, Bluetooth 5.0, NFC and more. As for sensors, it comes with a fingerprint reader, proximity, accelerometer, ambient light, sensor hub, gyroscope, ultrasonic, and e-compass.
Moto G8 Plus price in India and launch offersAs mentioned earlier, the Moto G8 Plus costs Rs 13,999 for the lone 4GB RAM + 64GB storage variant. As for launch offers, buyers will get a Reliance Jio instant cashback of up to Rs 2,200, Cleartrip coupon worth Rs 3,000 and Zoom Car Vouchers worth Rs 2,000.
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Dissent erupts at Facebook over hands-off stance on political ads
Revisiting Jumia’s JForce scandal and Citron’s short-sell claims
In advance of Jumia’s November financial reporting, it’s worth revisiting the company’s second quarter results, the downside of which included some negative news beyond losses.
The Africa focused e-commerce company — with online verticals in 14 countries — did post second-quarter revenue growth of 58% (≈$43 million) and increased its customer base to 4.8 million from 3.2 million over the same period a year ago.
But Jumia also posted greater losses for the period, €67.8 million, compared to €42.3 million in 2018.
What appears to have struck the market more than revenues or losses was Jumia offering greater detail on the fraud perpetrated by some employees and agents of its JForce sales program.
This was another knock for the firm on its up and down ride since becoming the first tech company operating in Africa to list on the NYSE in April. The online retailer gained investor confidence out of the gate, more than doubling its $14.95 opening share price after the IPO.
That lasted until May, when Jumia’s stock came under attack from short-seller Andrew Left, whose firm Citron Research, issued a report accusing the company of fraud. That prompted several securities related lawsuits against Jumia.
At quick glance, Citron’s primary claim — that Jumia’s SEC filing contained discrepancies in sales figures — shares some resemblance to Jumia’s own disclosures.
The company’s share-price has suffered due to both — falling to less than 50% of its opening in April.
This has all funneled into an ongoing debate across Africa’s tech ecosystem on Jumia’s legitimacy as an African startup, given its (primarily) European senior management. Some of the most critical voices have gone so far as to support Left’s claims on Jumia’s fraud — and accept Jumia’s August admission as validation.
Sound messy and confusing? We’ll, yes, it is. But so go some IPOs.
Jumia’s info vs. Citron’s claims
Evaluating Jumia’s J-Force scandal vs. Citron’s short-sell claims is really Chartered Financial Analyst stuff. Citibank Research issued a brief rebutting Left’s claims in May and then another in August — though the firm has not made either public.
Judging by Jumia’s share-price fluctuation and chatter that continues in Africa’s tech ecosystem, there’s still confusion around both matters.
A simple exercise is to lay out the core of what Jumia has released vs. the crux of Citron Research’s claims.
On the J-Force/improper sales matter, here are excerpts of Jumia’s statement. Note that GMV is Gross Merchandise Value — the total amount of goods sold over the period:
As disclosed in our prospectus dated April 11, 2019, we received information alleging that some of our independent sales consultants, members of our JForce program in Nigeria, may have engaged in improper sales practices. In response, we launched a review of sales practices covering all our countries of operation and data from January 1, 2017 to June 30, 2019.
Jumia did disclose this in its IPO prospectus on page 34.
In the course of this review, we identified several JForce agents and sellers who collaborated with employees in order to benefit from differences between commissions charged to sellers and higher commissions paid to JForce agents. The transactions in question generated approximately 1% of our GMV in each of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019 and had virtually no impact on our 2018 or 2019 financial statements. We have terminated the employees and JForce agents involved, removed the sellers implicated and implemented measures designed to prevent similar instances in the future. The review of this matter is closed.
And finally, Jumia noted this:
More recently, we have also identified instances where improper orders were placed, including through the JForce program, and subsequently cancelled. Based on our findings to date, we believe that the transactions in question generated approximately 2% of our GMV in 2018, concentrated in the fourth quarter of 2018, approximately 4% in the first quarter of 2019 and approximately 0.1% in the second quarter of 2019. These 0.1% have already been adjusted for in the reported GMV figure for the second quarter of 2019. These transactions had no impact on our financial statements. We have suspended the employees involved pending the outcome of our review and are implementing measures designed to prevent similar instances in the future. We continue our review of this matter.
That’s the gist of Jumia’s disclosure: a small number of employees cooked some sales numbers and commissions, it was negligible to our financials, we flagged the investigation in our IPO prospectus, we took action, we ended it.
The Citron Research report Andrew Left issued to support his short-sell position made several critical claims regarding Jumia, but labeled “the smoking gun” as alleged material inconsistencies between an October 2018, Jumia investor presentation and Jumia’s April SEC Form F-1.
For the year 2017, there’s a difference of 600,000 active customers and 10,000 merchants in Jumia’s reporting between the fall 2018 investor presentation and the recent 2019 F-1, according to Citron Research. Citron also goes on to press concerns with GMV:
In order to raise more money from investors, Jumia inflated its active consumers and active merchants figures by 20-30% (FRAUD).
The most disturbing disclosure that Jumia removed from its F-1 filing was that 41% of orders were returned, not delivered, or cancelled.
This was previously disclosed in the Company’s October 2018 confidential investor presentation. This number is so alarming that is screams fraudulent activities. Instead, Jumia disclosed that “orders accounting for 14.4% of our GMV were either failed deliveries or returned by our consumers” in 2018.
TechCrunch connected with Jumia’s CEO Sacha Poignonnec and Citron Research’s Andrew Left since the August earnings reporting and disclosures.
On whether Jumia’s revelation of improper sales practices validated the fraud claims in Citron’s Brief, “It’s not the same,” Poignnonec,” told me on a call last month.
“For every one of those allegations,” he said referring to Left’s research, “there is a clear and simple answer for each of them and we have provided those,” said Poignnonec.
Where is Andrew Left on the matter? “I’m no longer short the stock” he told TechCrunch in a mail this week.
“But that does not mean the stock is a buy whatsoever,” he added — sticking to the fundamentals of his May brief.
What to make of it all?
It appears that what Jumia disclosed in its April prospectus (and added more detail to in August) does not provide one-to-one validation of the claims in Citron Research’s May report.
But then again, the entire matter — the data, the similar terminology, the multiple docs and disclosures — is still all a bit confusing.
That was evident in an exchange between Sacha Poignonnec and CNBC contributor John Fortt after Jumia’s 2nd quarter earnings call (see 1:19). Fort pressed Poignonnec on Left’s claims vs. Jumia’s admissions and still came away a bit puzzled.
The market, too, appears to be impacted by the fuzziness around Jumia’s disclosure of improper sales practices and Andrew Left’s claims.
Jumia’s share price plummeted 43% the week Left released his short-sell claims, from $49 to $26.
The company’s stock price has continued to decline since Jumia’s August earnings call (and sales-fraud disclosure) to $6.52 at close Monday.
That’s 50% below the company’s opening in April and 80% below its high before Citron’s Research brief and Andrew Left’s short-sell position.
Jumia’s core investors appeared to show continued confidence in the company this month, when there wasn’t a big selloff after the IPO lockup period expired.
Even so, Jumia’s 3rd quarter earning’s call on November 12 could be a bit make or break for the company with investors given all the volatility the e-commerce venture has faced since listing and its rapid loss in value.
As a public company now, the most direct way for Jumia to revive its share-price (and investor confidence) would be demonstrating it has reduced losses while maintaining or boosting revenues.
Of course, that’s the prescription for just about any recently IPO’d tech venture.
What Jumia may want to evaluate pre-earnings call is the extent to which its own sales-fraud disclosure and Andrew Left’s allegations are still being mashed together and impacting brand-equity in Africa and investor confidence abroad.
From there it could be wise to address both head on and explain — in a way that is as easy as possible for people to understand — how the two are not the same and don’t have a bearing on Jumia’s brand or business model.
Facebook is failing to prevent another human rights tragedy playing out on its platform, report warns
A report by campaign group Avaaz examining how Facebook’s platform is being used to spread hate speech in the Assam region of North East India suggests the company is once again failing to prevent its platform from being turned into a weapon to fuel ethnic violence.
Assam has a long-standing Muslim minority population but ethnic minorities in the state look increasingly vulnerable after India’s Hindu nationalist government pushed forward with a National Register of Citizens (NRC), which has resulted in the exclusion from that list of nearly 1.9 million people — mostly Muslims — putting them at risk of statelessness.
In July the United Nations expressed grave concern over the NRC process, saying there’s a risk of arbitrary expulsion and detention, with those those excluded being referred to Foreigners’ Tribunals where they have to prove they are not “irregular”.
At the same time, the UN warned of the rise of hate speech in Assam being spread via social media — saying this is contributing to increasing instability and uncertainty for millions in the region. “This process may exacerbate the xenophobic climate while fuelling religious intolerance and discrimination in the country,” it wrote.
There’s an awful sense of deja-vu about these warnings. In March 2018 the UN criticized Facebook for failing to prevent its platform being used to fuel ethnic violence against the Rohingya people in the neighboring country of Myanmar — saying the service had played a “determining role” in that crisis.
Facebook’s response to devastating criticism from the UN looks like wafer-thin crisis PR to paper over the ethical cracks in its ad business, given the same sorts of alarm bells are being sounded again, just over a year later. (If we measure the company by the lofty goals it attached to a director of human rights policy job last year — when Facebook wrote that the responsibilities included “conflict prevention” and “peace-building” — it’s surely been an abject failure.)
Avaaz’s report on hate speech in Assam takes direct aim at Facebook’s platform, saying it’s being used as a conduit for whipping up anti-Muslim hatred.
In the report, entitled Megaphone for Hate: Disinformation and Hate Speech on Facebook During Assam’s Citizenship Count, the group says it analysed 800 Facebook posts and comments relating to Assam and the NRC, using keywords from the immigration discourse in Assamese, assessing them against the three tiers of prohibited hate speech set out in Facebook’s Community Standards.
Avaaz found that at least 26.5% of the posts and comments constituted hate speech. These posts had been shared on Facebook more than 99,650 times — adding up to at least 5.4 million views for violent hate speech targeting religious and ethnic minorities, according to its analysis.
Bengali Muslims are a particular target on Facebook in Assam, per the report, which found comments referring to them as “criminals,” “rapists,” “terrorists,” “pigs,” and “dogs”, among other dehumanizing terms.
In further disturbing comments there were calls for people to “poison” daughters, and legalise female foeticide, as well as several posts urging “Indian” women to be protected from “rape-obsessed foreigners”.
Avaaz suggests its findings are just a drop in the ocean of hate speech that it says is drowning Assam via Facebook and other social media. But it accuses Facebook directly of failing to provide adequate human resource to police hate speech spread on its dominant platform.
Commenting in a statement, Alaphia Zoyab, senior campaigner, said: “Facebook is being used as a megaphone for hate, pointed directly at vulnerable minorities in Assam, many of whom could be made stateless within months. Despite the clear and present danger faced by these people, Facebook is refusing to dedicate the resources required to keep them safe. Through its inaction, Facebook is complicit in the persecution of some of the world’s most vulnerable people.”
Its key complaint is that Facebook continues to rely on AI to detect hate speech which has not been reported to it by human users — using its limited pool of (human) content moderator staff to review pre-flagged content, rather than proactively detect it.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has previously said AI has a very long way to go to reliably detect hate speech. Indeed, he’s suggested it may never be able to do that.
In April 2018 he told US lawmakers it might take five to ten years to develop “AI tools that can get into some of the linguistic nuances of different types of content to be more accurate, to be flagging things to our systems”, while admitting: “Today we’re just not there on that.”
That sums to an admission that in regions such as Assam — where inter-ethnic tensions are being whipped up in a politically charged atmosphere that’s also encouraging violence — Facebook is essentially asleep on the job. The job of enforcing its own ‘Community Standards’ and preventing its platform being weaponized to amplify hate and harass the vulnerable, to be clear.
Avaaz says it flagged 213 of “the clearest examples” of hate speech which it found directly to Facebook — including posts from an elected official and pages of a member of an Assamese rebel group banned by the Indian Government. The company removed 96 of these posts following its report.
It argues there are similarities in the type of hate speech being directed at ethnic minorities in Assam via Facebook and that which targeted at Rohingya people in Myanmar, also on Facebook, while noting that the context is different. But it did also find hateful content on Facebook targeting Rohingya people in India.
It is calling on Facebook to do more to protect vulnerable minorities in Assam, arguing it should not rely solely on automated tools for detecting hate speech — and should instead apply a “human-led ‘zero tolerance’ policy” against hate speech, starting by beefing up moderators’ expertise in local languages.
It also recommends Facebook launch an early warning system within its Strategic Response team, again based on human content moderation — and do so for all regions where the UN has warned of the rise of hate speech on social media.
“This system should act preventatively to avert human rights crises, not just reactively to respond to offline harm that has already occurred,” it writes.
Other recommendations include that Facebook should correct the record on false news and disinformation by notifying and providing corrections from fact-checkers to each and every user who has seen content deemed to have been false or purposefully misleading, including if the disinformation came from a politician; that it should be transparent about all page and post takedowns by publishing its rational on the Facebook Newsroom so the issue of hate speech is given proportionate prominence and publicity to the size of the problem on Facebook; and it should agree to an independent audit of hate speech and human rights on its platform in India.
“Facebook has signed up to comply with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights,” Avaaz notes. “Which require it to conduct human rights due diligence such as identifying its impact on vulnerable groups like women, children, linguistic, ethnic and religious minorities and others, particularly when deploying AI tools to identify hate speech, and take steps to subsequently avoid or mitigate such harm.”
We reached out to Facebook with a series of questions about Avaaz’s report and also how it has progressed its approach to policing inter-ethnic hate speech since the Myanmar crisis — including asking for details of the number of people it employs to monitor content in the region.
Facebook did not provide responses to our specific questions. It just said it does have content reviewers who are Assamese and who review content in the language, as well as reviewers who have knowledge of the majority of official languages in India, including Assamese, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali and Marathi.
In 2017 India overtook the US as the country with the largest “potential audience” for Facebook ads, with 241M active users, per figures it reports the advertisers.
Facebook also sent us this statement, attributed to a spokesperson:
We want Facebook to be a safe place for all people to connect and express themselves, and we seek to protect the rights of minorities and marginalized communities around the world, including in India. We have clear rules against hate speech, which we define as attacks against people on the basis of things like caste, nationality, ethnicity and religion, and which reflect input we received from experts in India. We take this extremely seriously and remove content that violates these policies as soon as we become aware of it. To do this we have invested in dedicated content reviewers, who have local language expertise and an understanding of the India’s longstanding historical and social tensions. We’ve also made significant progress in proactively detecting hate speech on our services, which helps us get to potentially harmful content faster.
But these tools aren’t perfect yet, and reports from our community are still extremely important. That’s why we’re so grateful to Avaaz for sharing their findings with us. We have carefully reviewed the content they’ve flagged, and removed everything that violated our policies. We will continue to work to prevent the spread of hate speech on our services, both in India and around the world.
Facebook did not tell us exactly how many people it employs to police content for an Indian state with a population of more than 30 million people.
Globally the company maintains it has around 35,000 people working on trust and safety, less than half of whom (~15,000) are dedicated content reviewers. But with such a tiny content reviewer workforce for a global platform with 2.2BN+ users posting night and day all around the world there’s no plausible no way for it to stay on top of its hate speech problem.
Certainly not in every market it operates in. Which is why Facebook leans so heavily on AI — shrinking the cost to its business but piling content-related risk onto everyone else.
Facebook claims its automated tools for detecting hate speech have got better, saying that in Q1 this year it increased the proactive detection rate for hate speech to 65.4% — up from 58.8% in Q4 2017 and 38% in Q2 2017.
However it also says it only removed 4 million pieces of hate speech globally in Q1. Which sounds incredibly tiny vs the size of Facebook’s platform and the volume of content that will be generated daily by its millions and millions of active users.
Without tools for independent researchers to query the substance and spread of content on Facebook’s platform it’s simply not possible to know how many pieces of hate speech are going undetected. But — to be clear — this unregulated company still gets to mark its own homework.
In just one example of how Facebook is able to shrink perception of the volume of problematic content it’s fencing, of the 213 pieces of content related to Assam and the NCR that Avaaz judged to be hate speech and reported to Facebook it removed less than half (96).
Yet Facebook also told us it takes down all content that violates its community standards — suggesting it is applying a far more dilute definition of hate speech than Avaaz. Unsurprising for a US company whose nascent crisis PR content review board‘s charter includes the phrase “free expression is paramount”. But for a company that also claims to want to prevent conflict and peace-build it’s rather conflicted, to say the least.
As things stand, Facebook’s self-reported hate speech performance metrics are meaningless. It’s impossible for anyone outside the company to quantify or benchmark platform data. Because no one except Facebook has the full picture — and it’s not opening its platform for ethnical audit. Even as the impacts of harmful, hateful stuff spread on Facebook continue to bleed out and damage lives around the world.
Israeli seed fund Remagine is financing media’s AI revolution
While large entertainment companies scramble to catch up to streaming content platforms, more fundamental upheaval is headed their way as a result of technological advances in artificial intelligence and 5G.
Former ProSiebenSat.1 executive Kevin Baxpehler (based in Tel Aviv) and former Google Ventures partner Eze Vidra (based in London) launched Remagine Ventures earlier this year with a $35 million fund that bridges the gap between technologists at the forefront of change and the largest owners of content.
Backed by a roster of multi-billion-dollar media companies in Europe, Asia and the U.S. as its limited partners, their firm operates independently (and focuses on financial return) but aims to provide strategic value to portfolio companies and insight into the future for its LPs. Vidra referred to it as “a multi-corporate Google Ventures type of model.”
The firm’s focus on entertainment technologies has a B2B bent, with a geographic focus on Israel as its primary hub and with most of its initial portfolio selling to enterprise media companies. That makes Remagine’s ability to guide entrepreneurs through the halls of traditional media giants highly relevant; it also means it can gauge whether traditional media companies are likely to buy a startup’s product before they invest.
I spoke with Baxpehler and Vidra to learn more about their playbook and why they believe a wave of entertainment tech companies is about to come out of Israel. Here’s the transcript of our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Eric Peckham: Are there specific investment theses within entertainment that you are hunting for startups in?
Kevin Baxpehler: Our investment thesis is based on two main drivers: new advancements in so-called AI technologies — specifically deep-learning, computer-vision and NLP — coupled with new consumer trends such as esports, visual search, and engaging with computer-generated imagery (CGI) like Lil Miquela.
We believe that recent technological developments such as GANs (generative adversarial networks), coupled with new powerful computing power like new microprocessing chips and 5G, will change how brands, consumers, and stars/influencers will all interact. It creates tremendous opportunities to invest.
Eze Vidra: Remagine Ventures invests independently in seed and pre-seed startups at the intersection of entertainment, tech, data and commerce. Seed investing is particularly hard for corporates to do directly (because of a combination of reasons including speed, signaling risk and the challenges of deal flow for corporates) so we specialise at that stage by sourcing real time feedback from the market.
We are seeing industries and disciplines converge and find the intersections to be the most ripe areas of opportunity. For example, content + commerce, AI + entertainment, gaming + live stream tech giving us esports as a cultural phenomenon changing consumer behaviour.
Give me some examples of what startups at these intersection points will look like.
Vidra: The two core tenants of our thesis are 1) changing consumer behavior — for example, how esports is moving young viewers to engage with gaming — and 2) new technologies that make new forms of entertainment possible, primarily driven by AI.
Our portfolio company Syte is an image-recognition and computer-vision company that recognizes the products inside images and videos with a very high degree of accuracy. They are working with top retailers globally and Samsung selected them to power the Bixby assistant and is rolling them out globally. It’s been tried before, but the difference with Syte’s product is the level of accuracy.
We invested in HourOne, which is a synthetic video company using generative adversarial networks to generate video without the camera. It has multiple use cases, from reducing the cost of video production to programmatic video, to text-to-speech to gaming.
Another example is Vault, which uses deep learning to predict the success of scripted projects, whether it’s movies or TV shows down to the box office opening Rotten Tomatoes scores, the probability of there being a season two, the demographics that are most impacted, etc. So bringing a more data-driven approach to marketing films and shows.
Being vertically-focused means that we can attract relevant dealflow from both entrepreneurs and co-investors. As we evaluate startups, we look for interesting teams that are leveraging new technology (or taking an interesting consumer angle) that can scale and we focus on helping them open doors internationally.
To what extent is your interest focused on startups selling their technology to enterprise media companies versus startups building tools for the broader landscape of small content creators?
Following Xi Jinping's speech urging adoption of blockchain tech, the CPC releases a decentralized app for members to attest their loyalty on a blockchain (Wolfie Zhao/CoinDesk)
Following Xi Jinping's speech urging adoption of blockchain tech, the CPC releases a decentralized app for members to attest their loyalty on a blockchain — China's Communist Party (CPC) is taking its leader's support for blockchain to heart. — Following Xi Jinping's bombshell speech …
Facebook unveils its first foray into personal digital healthcare tools
Nearly a year and a half after the Cambridge Analytica scandal reportedly scuttled Facebook’s fledgling attempts to enter the healthcare market, the social media giant is launching a tool called “Preventive Health” to prompt its users to get regular checkups and connect them to service providers.
The architect of the new service is Dr. Freddy Abnousi, the head of the company’s healthcare research, who was previously linked to an earlier skunkworks initiative that would collect anonymized hospital data and use a technique called “hashing” to match the data to individuals that exist in both data sets — for research, according to CNBC reporting.
Working with the American Cancer Society; the American College of Cardiology; the American Heart Association; and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Facebook is developing a series of digital prompts that will encourage users to get a standard battery of tests that’s important to ensure health for populations of a certain age.
The company’s initial focus is on the top two leading causes of death in the U.S.: heart disease and cancer — along with the flu, which affects millions of Americans each year.
“Heart disease is the number one killer of men and women around the world and in many cases it is 100% preventable. By incorporating prevention reminders into platforms people are accessing every day, we’re giving people the tools they need to be proactive about their heart health,” said Dr. Richard Kovacs, the president of the American College of Cardiology, in a statement.
Users who want to access Facebook’s Preventive Health tools can search in the company’s mobile app to find which checkups are recommended by the company’s partner organizations based on the age and gender of a user.
The tool allows Facebookers to mark when the tests are completed, set reminders to schedule future tests and tell people in their social network about the tool.
Facebook will even direct users to resources on where to have the tests. One thing that the company will not do, Facebook assures potential users, is collect the results of any test.
“Health is particularly personal, so we took privacy and safety into account from the beginning. For example, Preventive Health allows you to set reminders for your future checkups and mark them as done, but it doesn’t provide us, or the health organizations we’re working with, access to your actual test results,” the company wrote in a statement. “Personal information about your activity in Preventive Health is not shared with third parties, such as health organizations or insurance companies, so it can’t be used for purposes like insurance eligibility.”
The company said that people can also use the new health tool to find locations that administer flu shots.
“Flu vaccines can have wide-ranging benefits beyond just preventing the disease, such as reducing the risk of hospitalization, preventing serious medical events for some people with chronic diseases, and protecting women during and after pregnancy,” said Dr. Nancy Messonnier, Director, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, CDC, in a statement. “New tools like this will empower users with instant access to information and resources they need to become a flu fighter in their own communities.”
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ZOMG there’s a new ‘The Mandalorian’ trailer (now with more Werner Herzog)
There’s probably no more hotly anticipated series from any new streaming service than “The Mandalorian” on Disney+ — and now the good folks at Disney have given us a new trailer to hypothesize about.
There’s more action, more world-building, and much much more Werner Herzog (who could ask for anything more?).
The Lucasfilm team has been relatively mum about the details of the new live-action Star Wars series that Jon Favreau created for Disney+.
What we do know is that the series will star Pedro Pascal (he of the glorious “Game of Thrones” guest turn as Oberyn Martell), who will star as a “lone Mandalorian gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy.”
Mandalorians, a group of warriors whose ranks included Jango and Boba Fett, are notorious bounty hunters and it looks like Pascal’s character will be no different.
Other cast members include Gina Carano, Giancarlo Esposito, Nick Nolte and the aforementioned Herzog.
Directors for the show include Dave Filoni, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Taika Waititi (whose work on Marvel’s Thor: Ragnarok wasincredible).
As the production values from the trailer indicate, it appears “The Mandalorian” is well worth the $100 million price tag for its 10-episode run.
Disney+ aired the first “Mandalorian” trailer back in August.
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A profile of Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, the chess-obsessed intelligence chief who oversees UAE's $1.5T sovereign wealth and wants to make UAE an AI superpower (Bradley Hope/Wired)
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