Wednesday, 7 November 2018
Oath is dead. Long live Verizon Media Group/Oath – TechCrunch
Friends, readers, internet browsers, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Oath, not to praise it.
The subsidiary brands that companies own live after them;
Their terrible rebranding is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Oath. The new Verizon chief executive,
Hans Vestberg, told you Oath was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous ambition,
And grievously hath Oath answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Vestberg and the rest of Verizon’s leadership —
Come I to speak in Oath’s funeral.
It was TechCrunch’s parent company, distant and somewhat comical to me:
But Vestberg says it was ambitious;
And Vestberg is an honourable man.
Oath did merge Yahoo and AOL under one brand
Whose ad networks and media outlets (like TechCrunch and HuffPo) did the Verizon coffers fill:
Did this in Oath seem ambitious?
When that the Go90 staff have cried, Oath hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Vestberg says it was ambitious;
And Vestberg is an honourable man.
Y’all saw that when the merger was first proposed
I said it was a really bad idea,
But my parent company didn’t listen to me: was this ambition?
Yet Vestberg says Oath was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I write not to disprove what Verizon issued in a press release,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
Y’all thought the branding was terrible, not without cause:
So don’t let us stop you now from mocking it.
O judgment! You were lost when branding was left to brutish beasts,
And men with no reason. Bear with me;
My LOLZ are in the coffin there with Oath,
And I must pause till I can stop cackling.
Anyway, Oath is now going to be Verizon Media Group/Oath as part of a corporate restructuring undertaken by Verizon’s CEO, Vestberg. The company is going to operate under three different business units — a Consumer Group, led by Ronan Dunne, a current executive vice president of Verizon and president of Verizon Wireless; a Business Group, led by Tami Erwin, currently executive vice president of wireless operations — which will focus on government, small and medium businesses, large business customers, and operate the company’s telematics arm; and a Media Group / Oath, which will be led by Guru Gowrappan, currently Oath’s chief executive.
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Alibaba rival JD.com plays the long-game on technology investment – TechCrunch
China’s JD.com has made it clear recently that it’s venturing into artificial intelligence and automation. Every few months over the past year, the online retailer – China’s second-largest by transactions after Alibaba – has unveiled new products based on cutting-edge technology: for example drone delivery, self-driving trucks, fully automated warehouses, to name a few.
Most of these technologies are still in their testing phase and JD’s ever expanding technology investment is already eating into its profitability.
In the second quarter, the retail titan’s technology expenses were up over 70 percent year-over-year for the third consecutive quarter, costing the company 2.8 billion yuan, or $400 million. Net income slipped more than 50 percent to 478 million yuan, versus 977 million yuan last year.
By comparison, marketing and fulfilment, which traditionally make up the bulk of JD’s overall operating expenses, grew at less than 30 percent over the same period.
When will JD start to seriously capitalize on its technologies? When it can do things at scale, according to the company’s head of technology.
“If there is no scale, there is saving,” JD’s chief technology officer Zhang Chen told a group of reporters in Beijing on Tuesday.
“If you build something, you want other people to use that. It takes a lot of time to make a product perfect before you say it’s done. AI is all about iteration and how much data you get,” Zhang continued.
As of August, JD had over 314 million annual active user accounts. That’s a sizable chunk of China’s 800 million internet users (even given the fact that people may hold more than one accounts). Its archival Alibaba, however, reached twice the size of JD at 601 million annual active customers in September.
Alibaba also enjoys much wider profit margins than JD, thanks to a light-asset platform approach that connects vendors to consumers and derives the bulk of its revenue from advertising. JD, on the other hand, runs a more costly model that sees it operates most of the supply chain and deliver goods from warehouses to customers – like Amazon .
Alibaba’s operating margin in Q3 stood at 16 percent, while JD posted a 0.8 percent non-GAAP operating margin in Q2. That said, Alibaba has also suffered a margin squeeze in recent quarters as it continues to invest heavily in offline operations such as food delivery.
To secure more user traffic, JD has been leaning on its ties with Tencent, a major shareholder in its business and the builder behind the massively popular WeChat messenger. While Alibaba’s e-store links are blocked on WeChat, JD runs smoothly through a “mini program,” a light-weight application that runs inside WeChat’s interface that allows buyers to bypass app stores.
It’s unclear how much traffic WeChat brings over to JD. But WeChat has proven to be an effective channel for acquiring ecommerce users. This is evident in the case of group-buying app Pinduoduo, which started out as a WeChat mini program. In June, the three-year-old company leapfrogged JD in mobile penetration to reach 26.2 percent, according to data services provider Jiguang.
Pinduoduo’s rise was so impressive that its shares popped 40 percent in their first day of trading on NASDAQ in July though later nosedived following accusations over fake goods sold on the ecommerce platform.
Counterfeiting is a decade-old problem in the Chinese internet, tarnishing the name of both Alibaba’s online bazaar Taobao and even JD, which boasts of its authenticity of direct sales.
JD has also been looking overseas for growth. In August, Google poured $550 million in JD as part of a strategic partnership to help the Chinese company grab more users around the world. While JD’s vice president of strategy Ling Chenkai did not reveal details on the firm’s European plans when asked by TechCrunch on Tuesday, he assured going global has always been “an aspiration” for JD and partnership will play a key role amid the process.
But JD understands that it can’t always fall back on its partnerships, even with its close allies.
“Every company protects its data like [there will be] none tomorrow, even with strategic partners. Data sharing is a very serious business,” says Zhang the CTO.
“Most Chinese companies have a really big security team,” he observed, adding that while partners do not directly share data, they collaborate by exchanging user insights.
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Facebook connects Russia to 100+ accounts it removed ahead of mid-terms – TechCrunch
The 115 accounts Facebook took down yesterday for inauthentic behavior ahead of the mid-term elections may indeed have been linked to the Russia-based Internet Research Agency, according to a new statement from the company. It says that a site claiming association with the IRA today posted a list of Instagram accounts it had made which included many Facebook had taken down yesterday, and it also has since removed the rest. The IRA was previously llabeled as responsible for using Facebook to interfere with US politics and the 2016 Presidential election.
Facebook’s head of cyber security policy Nathaniel Gleicher issued this statement to TechCrunch:
“Last night, following a tip off from law enforcement, we blocked over 100 Facebook and Instagram accounts due to concerns that they were linked to the Russia-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) and engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior, which is banned from our services. This evening a website claiming to be associated with the IRA published a list of Instagram accounts they claim to have created. We had already blocked most of these accounts yesterday, and have now blocked the rest. This is a timely reminder that these bad actors won’t give up — and why it’s so important we work with the US government and other technology companies to stay ahead.”
Yesterday, Facebook had published that it would provide an update on whether the removed accounts were connected to Russia, as some were in Russian languages:
“On Sunday evening, US law enforcement contacted us about online activity that they recently discovered and which they believe may be linked to foreign entities . . . Almost all the Facebook Pages associated with these accounts appear to be in the French or Russian languages, while the Instagram accounts seem to have mostly been in English — some were focused on celebrities, others political debate . . . Typically, we would be further along with our analysis before announcing anything publicly. But given that we are only one day away from important elections in the US, we wanted to let people know about the action we’ve taken and the facts as we know them today. Once we know more — including whether these accounts are linked to the Russia-based Internet Research Agency or other foreign entities — we will update this post.”
Attribution of foreign interference into politics via social media can be difficult to accurately attribute, however. Facebook could have provided stronger wording in this update regarding its own evidence about the connection between Russia and the 80 Facebook accounts and 35 Instagram accounts it removed yesterday. Now with the mid-term results being counted, we’ll see if politicians or researchers suggest election interference could have influenced any of the results.
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UK energy price cap to save customers 1 billion pounds a year from January 1
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