Sunday, February 9, 2020
Incentives would help raise exports from India: Xiaomi
Buying from foreign ecommerce sites may get costlier
WhatsApp Pay to expand UPI project to 10 million users
E-comm in India is a fantastic revolution, says L'Oréal CEO
Tech platforms take on virus rumours
Live: 2020 Oscars Winners
India joins the list to chase “Quantum Supremacy with Rs 8,000 crore
Inside Netflix's aggressive Oscars campaign that's spending an estimated $100M+ mainly to promote two films, while other studios usually spend $5M-$20M per film (Wall Street Journal)
Inside Netflix's aggressive Oscars campaign that's spending an estimated $100M+ mainly to promote two films, while other studios usually spend $5M-$20M per film — With lavish parties, huge billboards, and screenings around the world, awards campaigning may never be the same
Uber and Ola claims to control market share
Elon Musk tweets out #DeleteFacebook, adding simply, “it’s lame”
Facebook receives plenty of pointed criticism from numerous corners, for refusing to police political speech on Facebook, its seemingly endless string of privacy breaches, and its apparent coziness of late with the Trump administration.
One of the platform’s most prominent critics, somewhat unexpectedly, has become comic, writer, and actor Sacha Baron Cohen. Indeed, his powerful speech to the Anti-Defamation League in November, characterizing Facebook as the “greatest propaganda machine in history,” quickly went viral. (We republished it here.)
Baron Cohen isn’t done railing against Zuckerberg, however. Yesterday, he tweeted in frustration, “We don’t let 1 person control the water for 2.5 billion people. We don’t let 1 person control electricity for 2.5 billion people. Why do we let 1 man control the information seen by 2.5 billion people? Facebook needs to be regulated by governments, not ruled by an emperor!
We don’t let 1 person control the water for 2.5 billion people.
We don’t let 1 person control electricity for 2.5 billion people.
Why do we let 1 man control the information seen by 2.5 billion people?
Facebook needs to be regulated by governments, not ruled by an emperor! pic.twitter.com/o4hNRFNpgt
— Sacha Baron Cohen (@SachaBaronCohen) February 5, 2020
Soon after, Tesla founder Elon Musk responded to the morning diatribe, himself tweeting “#DeleteFacebook it’s lame.”
#DeleteFacebook It’s lame
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 8, 2020
It was short, sweet, and to the point (and presumably gave Cohen a lift).
One might imagine that Musk, who has always spoken his mind, has been emboldened of late thanks to the skyrocketing value of Tesla of late. But Musk has long been a critic of Facebook, tweeting in 2018 after deleting his companies’ Facebook pages that he doesn’t “like Facebook. Gives me the willies. Sorry.”
Musk and Zuckerberg have butted heads in the past over the future of artificial intelligence, too, with Musk calling Zuckerberg’s understanding of the future of AI “limited” in 2017.
Original Content podcast: Netflix’s Taylor Swift documentary feels like a guarded self-portrait
“Miss Americana,” a new Netflix documentary about Taylor Swift, is worth watching — if you go in with the right expectations.
At least, that’s according to two out of three hosts of the Original Content podcast. Darrell was the holdout; he didn’t hate the movie or think it was poorly made, but he’s much more skeptical about celebrity culture in general and argues that everyone would be better off ignoring celebrities altogether.
Your other hosts don’t go quite that far. Instead, we admit to a guarded admiration for Swift and her music, and we enjoyed “Miss Americana” as a window into Swift’s world. Not a completely transparent window — despite being directed by Lana Wilson, the film feels like it was guided by Swift’s perspective, focusing on her chosen themes of tabloid persecution and political awakening — but a revealing one nevertheless.
What comes across clearly is the utter insanity of the musician’s life, lived under intense (and often unfair) media scrutiny.
The film also demonstrates the extraordinary talent, ambition and luck that Swift must have needed to get where she is. And it boasts a few glimpses into her songwriting and recording process, and into what appears to have been an agonizing decision to endorse Democrat Phil Bredesen’s ultimately unsuccessful run for one of Tennessee’s Senate seats in 2018.
In addition to reviewing the film, we also discuss Netflix’s decision to make auto-play previews optional.
You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)
And if you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Intro
0:28 Netflix auto-play discussion
5:02 “Miss Americana” review
After $479M round on $12.4B valuation, Snowflake CEO says IPO is next step
Snowflake, the cloud-based data warehouse company, doesn’t tend to do small rounds. On Friday night word leaked out about its latest mega round. This one was for $479 million on a $12.4 billion valuation. That’s triple the company’s previous $3.9 billion valuation from October 2018, and CEO Frank Slootman suggested that the company’s next finance event is likely an IPO.
Dragoneer Investment led the round along with new investor Salesforce Ventures. Existing Snowflake investors Altimeter Capital, ICONIQ Capital, Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia, and Sutter Hill Ventures also participated. The new round brings the total raised to over $1.4 billion, according to PitchBook data.
All of this investment begs the question when this company goes public. As you might expect, Slootman is keeping his cards close to the vest, but he acknowledges that is the next logical step for his organization, even if he is not feeling pressure to make that move right now.
“I think the earliest that we could actually pull that trigger is probably early- to mid-summer timeframe. But whether we do that or not is a totally different question because we’re not in a hurry, and we’re not getting pressure from investors,” he said.
He grants that the pressure is about allowing employees to get their equity out of the company, which can only happen once the company goes public. “The only reason that there’s always a sense of pressure around this is because it’s important for employees, and I’m not minimizing that at all. That’s a legitimate thing. So, you know, it’s certainly a possibility in 2020 but it’s also a possibility the year thereafter. I don’t see it happening any later than that,” he said.
The company’s most recent round prior to this was $450 million in October 2018. Slootman says that he absolutely didn’t need the money, but the capital was there, and the chance to forge a relationship with Salesforce also was key in their thinking in taking this funding.
“At a high level, the relationship is really about allowing Salesforce data to be easily accessed inside Snowflake. Not that it’s impossible to do that today because there are lots of tools that will help you do that, but this relationship is about making that seamless and frictionless, which we find is really important,” Slootman said.
Snowflake now has relationships with AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, and has a broad content strategy to have as much quality data (like Salesforce) on the platform. Slootman says that this helps induce a network effect, while helping move data easily between major cloud platforms, a big concern as more companies adopt a multiple cloud vendor strategy.
“One of the key distinguishing architectural aspects of Snowflake is that once you’re on our platform, it’s extremely easy to exchange data with other Snowflake users. That’s one of the key architectural underpinnings. So content strategy induces network effect which in turn causes more people, more data to land on the platform, and that serves our business model,” he said.
Slootman says investors want to be part of his company because it’s solving some real data interchange pain points in the cloud market, and the company’s growth shows that in spite of its size, that continues to attract new customers at high rate.
“We just closed off our previous fiscal year which ended last Friday, and our revenue grew at 174%. For the scale that we are, this by far the fastest growing company out there…So, that’s not your average asset,” he said.
The company has 3400 active customers, which he defines as customers who were actively using the platform in the last month. He says that they have added 500 new customers alone in the last quarter.
As competition for jobs among Amazon Flex delivery drivers grows, many of them turn to bots and devices that autotap Flex app's refresh button to secure shifts (Annie Palmer/CNBC)
As competition for jobs among Amazon Flex delivery drivers grows, many of them turn to bots and devices that autotap Flex app's refresh button to secure shifts — - Amazon Flex drivers are using automated software, third-party apps and other tools to get jobs.
Retail-based tech startups experiment with new models
Inside Naver's 1784, a 36-level office tower in Seoul, which has ~4,500 employees working with 120 robots and serves as a testbed for various AI technologies (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)
Saritha Rai / Bloomberg : Inside Naver's 1784, a 36-level office tower in Seoul, which has ~4,500 employees working with 120 robots a...
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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 ...
