Tech Nuggets with the Technology

Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Apple overcomes iPhone slump with strong Q4 numbers

Apple's recent success has been driven largely by strong growth in its services division, which primarily feeds off the roughly 1.4 billion iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches already in use https://ift.tt/332W86P https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Samsung posts Q3 operating profit of $6.6B, down 56% YoY, on revenue of $53B, while the revenue from its mobile division grew 17.4% YoY to ~$25.2B (Steven Musil/CNET)

Steven Musil / CNET:
Samsung posts Q3 operating profit of $6.6B, down 56% YoY, on revenue of $53B, while the revenue from its mobile division grew 17.4% YoY to ~$25.2B — Declining demand for chips hurts the electronics giant's bottom line. — Samsung was hit hard in its third quarter by the slowdown in tech.

Dorsey's political ad ban is a worthy dare to all social networks, which have become hostage to abuse and manipulation with their growth-at-all-costs mentality (Kara Swisher/New York Times)

Kara Swisher / New York Times:
Dorsey's political ad ban is a worthy dare to all social networks, which have become hostage to abuse and manipulation with their growth-at-all-costs mentality — Twitter will no longer allow political advertising, a move that places Twitter and Jack Dorsey in stark contrast to Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg.

Twitter's India arm profit doubles in FY19

Net profit at Twitter Communications India rose 108% to Rs 5.8 crore for FY19, while revenue climbed to Rs 56.9 crore https://ift.tt/2PEIDpM https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Swiggy says it is working with restaurants to resolve issues

The key contentions with the food delivery service Swiggy has been on deep discounting and private labels. https://ift.tt/2NsBFS5 https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

MakeMyTrip, HDFC Bank fight over money gone down with Jet Airways

MakeMyTrip has filed a case in the Delhi High Court accusing HDFC Bank of deducting money from its accounts to refund customers who had booked Jet Airways tickets https://ift.tt/332RhCD https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Indians downloaded 5 billion apps between July and September 2018

The list was dominated by American, Chinese and Russian messaging, social media, ecommerce and streaming apps. https://ift.tt/326eGBX https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Tim Cook says Apple Pay transactions more than doubled YoY to 3B+ transactions in Q4, exceeding PayPal's volume and growing 4x faster (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)

Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
Tim Cook says Apple Pay transactions more than doubled YoY to 3B+ transactions in Q4, exceeding PayPal's volume and growing 4x faster — Apple Pay has been growing at a brisk pace recently, and Tim Cook is making a point to emphasize that fact. During Apple's Q4 2019 earnings call today …

ByteDance starts clocking in profit in India

ByteDance's entry in India so far has been a mixed bag with excellent user growth interspersed with a backlash from regulators, politicians and some activists https://ift.tt/2N4y5il https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Hyundai & Kia's $300M investment in Ola gets CCI nod

Ola parent ANI Technologies’ is likely to see its valuation bump by close to 20% to $8 billion as it stitches together another investment round https://ift.tt/2Wu4baf https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Deadspin writers quit after being ordered to stick to sports

Writers Laura Wagner, Kelsey McKinney, Tom Ley, Lauren Theisen, Patrick Redford, Albert Burneko and Chris Thompson all tweeted today that they have resigned from Deadspin, the sports-focused site owned by G/O Media.

A quick refresher: G/O Media was formerly known as Gizmodo Media Group, and before that as Gawker Media. It took on its current name and current leadership earlier this year when Univision sold the unit to private equity firm Great Hill Partners, who appointed former Forbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller as its new chief executive.

Since then, the relationship between G/O Media leadership and the editorial staff has been rocky, as you would have learned by reading Deadspin itself, particularly an in-depth story by Wagner in August about how employees were unhappy with “a lack of communication regarding company goals, seeming disregard for promoting diversity within the top ranks of the company, and by repeated and egregious interference with editorial procedures.”

Just now I resigned my position at Deadspin today along with many of my colleagues. I have been here only five months but they have been some of the best of my career and I will miss it deeply.

— kelsey mckinney (@mckinneykelsey) October 30, 2019

A few weeks later, Deadspin’s editor in chief Megan Greenwell resigned, saying that G/O Media’s new editorial director Paul Maidment was directing the staff to stick to sports coverage — a decision that she argued wasn’t dictated by traffic, since “posts on The Concourse, Deadspin’s vertical dedicated to politics and culture and other topics that are not sports, outperform posts on the main site by slightly more than two to one.”

Apparently Maidment repeated that edict in a memo earlier this week, which was leaked to The Daily Beast, and in which he said, “Deadspin will write only about sports and that which is relevant to sports in some way.”

The Deadspin homepage was subsequently filled with non-sports content, and editor Barry Petchesky tweeted that he had been “fired from Deadspin for not sticking to sports.”

I quit today too https://t.co/W7meIcW0Cx

— Laura Wagner (@laurawags) October 30, 2019

At the same time, Deadspin also posted a story criticizing auto-playing ads on the site, declaring, “We, the writers, editors, and video producers of Deadspin, are as upset with the current state of our site’s user experience as you are.” The post is no longer live, but the criticism reportedly prompted advertiser Farmers Insurance to pull the campaign.

This all appears to have prompted a mass exodus from Deadspin today. The Gizmodo Media Group union also issued this statement:

Today, a number of our colleagues at Deadspin resigned from their positions. From the outset, CEO Jim Spanfeller has worked to undermine a successful site by curtailing its most well-read coverage because it makes him personally uncomfortable. This is not what journalism looks like and it is not what editorial independence looks like.

“Stick to sports” is and always has been a thinly veiled euphemism for “don’t speak truth to power.” In addition to being bad business, Spanfeller’s actions are morally reprehensible. The GMG Union stands with our current and former Deadspin colleagues and condemns Jim Spanfeller in the strongest possible terms.

We’ve reached out to G/O Media for comment and will update if we hear back.