Samsung reports Q2 earnings with sales of ~$44.5B, down 5.6% YoY, but an operating profit of ~$6.8B, up 23.5% YoY, as demand for memory chips increased — Samsung posted 8.15 trillion won in second quarter operating profit, with its semiconductor business contributing 5.43 trillion won of that.
Apple CEO Tim Cook defended the company’s App Store commission structure in his sworn testimony before the House Antitrust Subcommittee on Wednesday. He claimed the majority of the apps pay no commission at all, with others paying either 15 or 30 percent, based on the specifics of their particular situation. He said developers were all treated equally and that Apple wouldn’t raise commissions, because it had to compete for developer interest in its platform as well.
But the documents shared by the House subcommittee as part of their investigation indicate that exceptions to Apple’s rules have been made — notably, with Amazon’s Prime Video app. In addition, Apple may have never raised commissions, but discussions weren’t off the table. It had once even considered raising commissions to 40% in particular situations.
The lawmakers had come to the hearing armed with internal Apple emails and interviews from App Store developers who argued that Apple doesn’t uniformly enforce its rules and plays favorites. But their questioning of Cook over App Store fees, combined with a format that limited execs’ ability to respond at length, initially seemed to reveal little in terms of new information about Apple’s practices.
For instance, when asked directly about how the App Store worked, Cook simply restated the store’s published rules — that is, for app developers who have to pay commissions, they pay only 15 or 30 percent. The current guidelines require 30% for apps selling digital goods or services, with a drop to 15% in year two for subscription apps. The rules also document a carve-out for “reader” apps like audiobook apps, streaming services, news publications, and other competitive products which have the option of forgoing in-app purchases.
Cook also squeezed in a mention about how the vast majority of App Store apps, 84%, pay nothing to Apple in commissions. It’s the remaining 16% that pay, he noted.
And when asked if Apple was the sole gatekeeper as to what gets published on the App Store, Cook agreed that it was — given that the App Store was a “feature of the iPhone, much like the Camera and the chip is.” He clarified that Apple’s control over apps only extended to native software applications, not web apps, but denied Apple treated developers unfairly.
“We treat every developer the same. We have open and transparent rules,” Cook said, in his testimony. “It’s a rigorous process, because we care so deeply about privacy and security and quality. We do look at every app before it goes on,” he added.
But emails in 2016 between Apple SVP Eddy Cue and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, shared here on the House Judiciary Committee’s website, indicate that Apple, in fact, appears to have negotiated a special deal with Amazon over its Amazon Prime Video app for iOS and Apple TV. In an email dated Nov. 2016 — before the 2017 launch of the Prime Video tvOS app — Apple agreed to take only a 15% revenue share for customers that signed up in the app using Apple’s payment mechanism. (Typically, subscription apps don’t drop from 30% to 15% until year two.)
Apple this April confirmed it had a special program for Prime Video and a small handful of other apps, which were subscription video entertainment providers. The program allowed those companies to rent or sell movies and TV shows to customers using the payment methods the companies already had on file, as well as more deeply integrate with Siri. But Apple hadn’t said that this special program would include a reduced commission on subscriptions or any other in-app upsells, as these emails confirm were points of discussion.
This wouldn’t be the first time Apple saw its commission structure as having some room to flex.
When Cook was questioned as to whether there was anything that could stop Apple from raising commissions to, say, 50%, the CEO responded that Apple had never increased commissions since day one. He also argued, when asked if anything could stop it from doing so, that competition for developer interest would stop it from raising its cut.
“There is a competition for developers, just like there’s a competition for customers. And so the competition for developers — they write their apps for Android or Windows or Xbox or Playstation,” said Cook. “We have fierce competition on the developer side and the customer side which is essentially — it’s so competitive, I would describe it as a street fight for market share in the smartphone business,” he added.
But in internal emails from 2011, Apple did discuss raising commissions — all the way to 40% for the first year of recurring subscriptions. “I think we may be leaving money on the table if we just asked for about 30% of the first year of sub,” Cue had written at the time.
Documents from the Hearing on “Online Platforms and Market Power: Examining the Dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google” pic.twitter.com/42o2Ye13jI
— House Judiciary Dems (@HouseJudiciary) July 29, 2020
Of course, Apple didn’t go so far as to actually make that change in the years that passed. But these emails indicate there’s more to Apple’s thinking — and its discussions around the commission structure — than the even playing field Cook testified to.
While much of today’s Congressional grilling into the anticompetitive practices of the big tech giants focused on their core businesses, Amazon’s hardware also came in for close inspection during the hours-long interrogation.
It was a small but significant exchange, because it touched on the breadth of the company’s services and how dominance in one area can mean potentially anti-competitive behavior in another part of the tech giant’s business.
For Maryland’s Representative Jamie Raskin, both Amazon’s best-selling Echo and the Fire TV devices became targets thanks to recent reporting on the company’s business practices and negotiations regarding both devices.
The Echo is the company’s foray into the smart home market that’s widely seen as the next major battleground in consumer technology. It’s one of the most widely adopted pieces of Amazon’s technology and has captured about 60% of the smart home market, according to Raskin.
The congressman hammered Bezos on two points about the Echo. The first was the company’s pricing scheme which had the Echo priced well below the cost to produce the device making it all but impossible for other tech companies to compete.
The Echo’s wide adoption has also led Amazon to engage in other anti-competitive behavior, Raskin asserted — some of which was outlined in previous questioning from Colorado Rep. Ken Buck citing a Wall Street Journal report that Amazon had used its investment unit focused on its Echo product and Alexa voice assistant to copy technology coming from small startup companies.
But beyond its appropriation of another company’s intellectual property, Amazon also used the Echo platform to promote its own products over competitors when customers used its voice services.
“Is Alexa trained to favor Amazon products?” Raskin asked.
Bezos responded that he wasn’t sure if Amazon had specifically trained the Alexa to default to Amazon services or to promote the company’s own brand of products, but that he wouldn’t be surprised. “It wouldn’t surprise me if Alexa sometimes does promote our own products,” the Amazon chief executive said.
Raskin also took Bezos to task for the company’s recent negotiations with WarnerMedia, the production studio, streaming service, and network giant. Specifically, he was concerned with how negotiations around the distribution of WarnerMedia’s HBO Max service on the company’s Fire TV devices included discussions around Amazon’s access to WarnerMedia productions.
“You’re not only asking for financial terms but also for content from Warner Media,” Raskin said. “Is it fair to use your gatekeeper status role in the streaming device market to promote your position as a competitor in the video streaming market with respect to content?”
Bezos responded that the negotiations were “normal commerce,” but Raskin tried to make the case that the negotiations over access to the Fire was yet another way in which the company’s leverage in one market impacted its ability to exercise unfair advantage against a competitor in a different industry.
“You’re using your control over access to people’s living rooms essentially,” Raskin said. “You’re using that to obtain leverage in terms of getting creative content that you want. Are you essentially converting power in one domain into power in another domain where it doesn’t belong?”
The comments and line of inquiry from Raskin were part of an intense bout of questioning that seemed to hone in on the purported topic of the hearings — the anti-competitive and potentially monopolistic power wielded by four of the nation’s largest tech companies. Facebook, Apple and Alphabet were all raked over the Congressional coals in bouts of questioning, but it seemed that the most sustained criticism on anti-competitive behavior was reserved for Bezos and Amazon.
During hearing, Rep. David Cicilline confronted Mark Zuckerberg on the spread of misinfo on Facebook, saying it has grown too big to contain dangerous content — Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), the chairman of the House antitrust subcommittee, on Wednesday confronted Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg …
Amazon emails released by the antitrust subcommittee show Amazon's plan to weaken Diapers.com before buying its parent company Quidsi in 2010 — - Representative Scanlon says emails show Amazon is too powerful — Bezos testified that he couldn't remember Diapers.com episode
Tim Cook defended Apple's removal of rival screen time apps from the App Store when questioned during the hearing, saying Apple was concerned for kids' privacy — Apple in early 2019 removed or restricted many popular screen time and parental control apps on the App Store due to their use …
Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg will defend their companies before the House Antitrust Subcommittee Wednesday in a hearing that will make tech industry history, no matter what happens.
Given that the tech giants are accustomed to answering to no one in particular, collecting four of them on a substantive topic is notable in its own right. Remarkably, Wednesday will mark the first time Amazon’s CEO has faced lawmakers in a public hearing — and they’re bound to have plenty of questions for the take-no-prisoners online retail behemoth.
For Apple and Cook, who prefer to stay above the public-facing political fray, it’s the first time before Congress in years. Facebook and Google have both been called to Congress more recently, but lawmakers have still barely scratched the surface of two companies that have completely reshaped modern life.
If you’re just catching up, read our explainer about why this whole thing is happening at all and what to expect. You can also read the opening statements from Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google and skip them tomorrow so you can spend more time with your Nespresso or whatever it is we’re all doing to get by these days. The statements provide a good idea of how the companies will play defense against regulators keen to install some safety features before we barrel into a fresh decade of unchecked growth.
There are a lot of unknowns heading into the hearing. Will lawmakers extract any useful revelations or will it be five hours of “let us get back to you on that?” Could tech executives manage to be even more evasive now that they’re appearing remotely via video chat? Will some subcommittee members lead the hearing so far into off-topic territory that we learn nothing about the business practices that scaled an industry of market-owning giants? And most importantly: On a scale of one to supervillain, what kind of vibes will Bezos give off?
We hope to know the answers to all of these questions and more — possibly even a question from a lawmaker or two — as we cover Wednesday’s events closely. If you’re interested in watching it go down yourself, you can tune into the livestream right here (well, up there) on Wednesday July 29 at 12PM ET.
Profile of Imint, a Swedish company that makes deep learning software for phone manufacturers like Huawei, Vivo, and Oppo to stabilize videos in real time — If your phone takes amazing photos, chances are its camera has been augmented by artificial intelligence embedded in the operating system.
Preston Estep was alone in a borrowed laboratory, somewhere in Boston. No big company, no board meetings, no billion-dollar payout from Operation Warp Speed, the US government’s covid-19 vaccine funding program. No animal data. No ethics approval.
What he did have: ingredients for a vaccine. And one willing volunteer.
Estep swirled together the mixture and spritzed it up his nose.
Nearly 200 covid-19 vaccines are in development and some three dozen are at various stages of human testing. But in what appears to be the first “citizen science” vaccine initiative, Estep and at least 20 other researchers, technologists, or science enthusiasts, many connected to Harvard University and MIT, have volunteered as lab rats for a do-it-yourself inoculation against the coronavirus. They say it’s their only chance to become immune without waiting a year or more for a vaccine to be formally approved.
Among those who’ve taken the DIY vaccine is George Church, the celebrity geneticist at Harvard University, who took two doses a week apart earlier this month. The doses were dropped in his mailbox and he mixed the ingredients himself.
Church believes the vaccine designed by Estep, his former graduate student at Harvard and one of his proteges, is extremely safe. “I think we are at much bigger risk from covid considering how many ways you can get it, and how highly variable the consequences are,” says Church, who says he has not stepped outside of his house in five months. The US Centers for Disease Control recently reported that as many as one-third of patients who test positive for covid-19 but are never hospitalized battle symptoms for weeks or even months after contracting the virus. “I think that people are highly underestimating this disease,” Church says.
Harmless as the experimental vaccine may be, though, whether it will protect anyone who takes it is another question. And the independent researchers who are making and sharing it might be stepping onto thin legal ice, if they aren’t there already.
The group, calling itself the Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative, or Radvac, formed in March. That’s when Estep sent an email to a circle of acquaintances, noting that US government experts were predicting a vaccine in 12 to 18 months and wondering if a do-it-yourself project could move faster. He believed there was “already sufficient information” published about the virus to guide an independent project.
Estep says he quickly gathered volunteers, many of whom had worked previously with the Personal Genome Project (PGP), an open-science initiative founded in 2005 at Church’s lab to sequence people’s DNA and post the results online. “We established a core group, most of them [from] my go-to posse for citizen science, though we have never done anything quite like this,” says Estep, also the founder of Veritas Genetics, a DNA sequencing company.
To come up with a vaccine design, the group dug through reports of vaccines against SARS and MERS, two other diseases caused by coronaviruses. Because the group was working in borrowed labs with mail-order ingredients, they wouldn’t make anything too complicated. The goal, says Estep, was to find “a simple formula that you could make with readily available materials. That narrowed things down to a small number of possibilities.” He says the only equipment he needed was a pipette (a tool to move small amounts of liquid) and a magnetic stirring device.
In early July, Radvac posted a white paper detailing its vaccine for anyone to copy. There are four authors named on the document, as well as a dozen initials of participants who remain anonymous, some in order to avoid media attention and others because they are foreigners in the US on visas.
The Radvac vaccine is what’s called a “subunit” vaccine because it consists of fragments of the pathogen—in this case peptides, which are essentially short bits of protein that match part of the coronavirus but can’t cause disease on their own. Subunit vaccines already exist for other diseases such as hepatitis B and human papillomavirus, and some companies are also developing subunits for covid-19, including Novavax, a biotechnology company which this month secured a $1.6 billion contract from Operation Warp Speed.
To administer its vaccine, the Radvac group settled on mixing the peptides with chitosan, a substance from shrimp shells, which coats the peptides in a nanoparticle able to pass the mucous membrane. Alex Hoekstra, a data analyst with an undergraduate degree in biology who previously volunteered with the PGP, and who also squirted the vaccine up his nose, describes the sensation as, “like getting saline up your nose. It’s not the world’s most comfortable feeling.”
A nasal vaccine is easier to administer than one which must be injected and, in Church’s opinion, is an overlooked option in the covid-19 vaccine race. He says only five out of about 199 covid vaccines listed as in development use nasal delivery, even though some researchers think it’s the best approach.
A vaccine delivered into the nose could create what’s called mucosal immunity, or immune cells present in the tissues of the airway. Such local immunity may be an important defense against SARS-CoV-2. But unlike antibodies that appear in the blood, where they are easily detected, signs of mucosal immunity might require a biopsy to identify.
George Siber, the former head of vaccines at Wyeth, says he told Estep that short, simple peptides often don’t lead to much of an immune response. Moreover, Siber says, he doesn’t know of any subunit vaccine delivered nasally, and he questions whether it would be potent enough to have any effect.
When Estep reached out to him earlier this year, Siber also wanted to know if the team had considered a dangerous side-effect, called enhancement, in which a vaccine can actually worsen the disease. “It’s not the best idea—especially in this case, you could make things worse,” Siber says of the effort. “You really need to know what you are doing here.”
He isn’t the only skeptic. Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Medical Center, who saw the white paper, pans Radvac as “off-the-charts looney.” In an email, Caplan says he sees “no leeway” for self-experimentation given the importance of quality control with vaccines. Instead, he thinks there is a high “potential for harm” and “ill-founded enthusiasm.”
Church disagrees, saying the vaccine’s simple formulation means it’s probably safe. “I think the bigger risk is that it is ineffective,” he says.
So far, the group can’t say if their vaccine works or not. They haven’t published results showing that the vaccine leads to antibodies against the virus, which is a basic requirement for being taken seriously in the vaccine race. Church says some of those studies are now underway in his Harvard laboratory, and Estep is hoping mainstream immunologists will assist the group. “It’s a little bit complicated, and we are not ready to report it,” Estep says of the immune responses seen so far.
Despite the lack of evidence, the Radvac group has offered the vaccine to a widening circle of friends and colleagues, inviting them to mix the ingredients and self-administer the nasal vaccine. Estep has now lost count of exactly how many people have taken the vaccine. “We have delivered material to 70 people,” he says. “They have to mix it themselves, but we haven’t had a full reporting on how many have taken it.”
One of the Radvac white paper’s co-authors is Ranjan Ahuja, who volunteers as an events manager for a nonprofit foundation that Estep started to study depression. Ahuja has a chronic condition that puts him at heightened risk from covid-19. Although he can’t say whether the two doses he took have given him immunity, he feels it’s his best chance of protection until a vaccine is approved.
Estep believes taking the peptide vaccine, even if it’s unproven, is a legitimate way to reduce risk. “We are offering one more tool to reduce the chance of infection,” he says. “We don’t suggest people change their behavior if they are wearing masks, but it does provide potentially multiple layers of protection.”
“If you are just making it and taking it yourself, the FDA can’t stop you.”
By distributing directions and even supplies for a vaccine, though, the Radvac group is operating in a legal gray area. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires authorization to test novel drugs in the form of an investigational new drug approval. But the Radvac group did not ask the agency’s permission, nor did it get any ethics board to sign off on the plan.
Estep believes Radvac is not subject to oversight because the group’s members mix up and administer the vaccine themselves, and no money changes hands. “If you are just making it and taking it yourself, the FDA can’t stop you,” says Estep. The FDA did not immediately respond to questions about the legality of the vaccine.
Estep says the group did seek legal advice and its white paper begins with extensive disclaimers, including a statement that anyone who uses the group’s materials takes “full responsibility” and must be at least 18 years old. Among those who Estep says advised the group is Michelle Meyer, a lawyer and ethics researcher at Geisinger Health System, in New York. In an email, Meyer declined to comment.
Given the international attention on covid-19 vaccines, and the high political stakes surrounding the crisis, the Radvac group could nevertheless find itself under scrutiny by regulators. “What the FDA really wants to crack down on is anything big, which makes claims, or makes money. And this is none of those,” says Church. “As soon as we do any of those things, they would justifiably crack down. Also, things that get attention. But we haven’t had any so far.”
According to Siber, experimenting on oneself with covid-19 vaccines wouldn’t have any chance of winning ethics approval at any university in the US. But he acknowledges there is a tradition among vaccinologists of injecting themselves as a quick and cheap way to get data. Siber has done so himself on more than one occasion, though not recently.
The chance to speed up research makes self-experimentation tempting even today. There have been reports of Chinese scientists taking their own covid-19 vaccines. Hans-Georg Rammensee, of the University of Tubingen, in Germany, says he injected a covid-19 peptide vaccine into his abdomen earlier this year. It caused a bump the size of a ping-pong ball and a profusion of immune cells through his blood.
Rammensee, who cofounded the company CureVac, says he did it to avoid red tape and quickly get some preliminary results about a vaccine being developed at his university. He says it was acceptable to do so because he is a “renowned expert in immunology” and understood the risks and implications of his action. “If someone like me who knows what he is doing [does it], it’s fine, but it would be a crime for a professor to tell a postdoc to take it,” Rammensee said in a phone interview. He claims Germany has no clear rules on the subject, leaving self-experiments in a gray zone of actions which, as he puts it, “are not forbidden and which are not allowed.”
Because more people are involved in the Radvac project, it may be viewed differently by authorities, who could decide the group is in fact operating an unsanctioned clinical trial. In recent weeks, Estep and other Radvac members have started to publicize their work and contact acquaintances to encourage them to participate.
“He called me and said ‘Do you want it?’ and I said ‘no.’”
“It’s real, he’s a solid scientist, but I wouldn’t do what he is doing,” said one executive to whom Estep offered the vaccine. The executive asked to remain anonymous because he doesn’t want to be associated with the effort. According to the executive, “He called me and said ‘Do you want it?’ and I said ‘no.’ ‘Do you want me to send you some?’ I said ‘No, I am not going to do anything with it, so don’t waste it on me.’ I told him, ‘The less I know, the better.’”
Whether or not regulators step in, and even if the vaccine proves to be a dud, the DIY covid-19 vaccine is already changing the attitudes of those who’ve taken it. Hoekstra says that since twice spraying the formulation into his nose, he moves through an “unsafe” world differently.
“I am not licking doorknobs,” says Hoekstra, who joined the group after departing his day job due to the shutdown. “But it’s an amazingly surreal experience knowing that I may have an immunity to this constant danger [and] that my continued existence through this pandemic will be a useful dataset. It lends a level of meaning and purpose.”
I asked Hoekstra if I could join the group and get the vaccine, too. “Consider the invitation open,” he said.
https://ift.tt/2EqQKTr https://ift.tt/30Vp8O3Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg : A profile of Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters, who led the company's successful crackdown on password sharing and ...
