President Trump says he will act as soon as Saturday to ban TikTok from the United States — - President Donald Trump on Friday told reporters he will act as soon as Saturday to ban Chinese-owned video app TikTok from the United States. — President Donald Trump on Friday told reporters …
President Donald Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he will act as soon as Saturday to ban TikTok from the US, CNBC reported.
The story is updating.
Netflix will add playback speed controls to its Android app tomorrow. Once you get the new update, you will be able to choose 0.5x, 0.75x, 1.25x, and 1.5x, aside from 1x of course, which has been the only option up until now - and will remain the default. So if you're a fan of sped-up or slowed-down playback on Netflix, you will need to manually pick your favorite speed for every single title you want to watch. On the flip side, the playback speed options will be available regardless of whether you're streaming something or watching a show or movie that you have previously...
When companies have too many smaller teams, slicing problems too thinly, they face high coordination costs as teams become too dependent on each other — “The two pizza team” paradigm has become really popular in the context of organizing software teams. The idea is to have small …
Lemonaid Health, which offers an on-demand service for accessing health care online, raises $33M Series B, bringing its total raised to $55M — Interest in telemedicine continues to increase, and Lemonaid Health raised an oversubscribed $33 million Series B round of funding to develop …
This is a preview of a research report from Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. This report is exclusively available to enterprise subscribers. To learn more about getting access to this report, email Senior Account Executive Jeff Jordan at jjordan@businessinsider.com, or check to see if your company already has access.
Although competition in the US wireless carrier market remains fierce, the price war among the Big Four US carriers — Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint — began to cool over the past year.
In an attempt to avoid further competition on price, carriers began shifting their focus to adding value to their mobile plans with new offerings to differentiate from the competition. This helped average revenue per user (ARPU) start to stabilize across all carriers in Q1 2018, after declining over the last two years.
The Big Four have now begun reshuffling their unlimited plans to lure subscribers by providing more options. This strategy has been unrolling in two flavors: introducing new, expensive unlimited plan tiers loaded with an array of features and choices, while also catering to price-sensitive customers with more affordable plans that strip away extra perks like free digital content and international coverage. As a result, a new battleground is emerging, with differentiation now coming down to the value loaded in their mobile plans.
Looking forward, the US carrier market will see competitive pressure pick up due to a number of trends:
All of this means fostering loyalty and winning over new subscribers is more important than ever for the Big Four, making it crucial for these mobile carriers to understand consumer sentiment around their services.
In this report, Business Insider Intelligence uses consumer survey data from our proprietary panel, collected during 2017 and 2018, to evaluate which features are most important to consumers when selecting a mobile provider, as well as to determine which features would convince them to switch to the competition. It contains insights that can help telecoms guide strategic investment and marketing decisions to win and retain customers in this increasingly competitive space.
The companies mentioned in the report are: AT&T, Amazon, Apple, Charter, Comcast, Hulu, Netflix, Pandora, Sprint, T-Mobile, Tidal, and Verizon.
Here are some key takeaways from the report:
In full, the report:
SEE ALSO: 5G in the IoT: How the next generation of wireless technology will transform the IoT
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Apple acquires Mobeewave, whose app lets shoppers tap their credit card or phone on a smartphone to make a payment; one source says the deal is worth ~$100M — - Apple acquires Canada's Mobeewave for about $100 million — Apple Inc. has acquired Mobeewave Inc., a startup with technology …
In reportedly preparing an order to force TikTok's Chinese parent company to sell it off, the Trump administration chooses a peculiar cyberdefense beachhead in an emerging battle over information espionage.
If you're in the US and have been eyeing Samsung's Galaxy S20 Ultra but haven't bought one yet, and if you don't mind using it on Verizon, this is definitely one for you. This weekend, Best Buy is taking $400 off the price of the device, if you activate it with Verizon. As usual with these types of deals, you'll have to grab the smartphone on the carrier's monthly installment plan. You will be paying $36.66 each month for two years, bringing the grand total to $879.84, which is the best price we've seen for the S20 Ultra so far. It's not the only Samsung handset that's on offer,...
COVID-19 has pushed museums to improve their online offerings, including virtual tours, as they explore potential business models based on digital content — When Covid-19 forced museums to shut their buildings spring, many created new virtual offerings for visitors. That digital content is likely here to stay.
Even the hard-charging world of early-stage startups has its share of procrastinators, lollygaggers, slow-pokes, wafflers and last-minute decision makers. If that’s your demographic, today is your lucky day.
You now have an extra week (courtesy of Saint Expeditus, the patron saint of procrastinators), to score early-bird savings to Disrupt 2020, which takes place September 14-18. Buy your pass before the new and final deadline — August 7 at 11:59 p.m. (PT) — and save up to $300. Who says prayers (or secular entreaties) go unanswered?
Your pass opens the door to five days of Disrupt — the biggest, longest TechCrunch conference ever. Drawing thousands of attendees and hundreds of innovative early-stage startups from around the world, you won’t find a better time, place or opportunity to accelerate the speed of your business.
Here are four world-class reasons to attend Disrupt 2020.
World-class speakers. Hear and engage with leading voices in tech, business and investment across the Disrupt stages. Folks like Sequoia Capital’s Roelof Botha, Ureeka’s Melissa Bradley and Slack’s Tamar Yehoshua — to name just a few. Here’s what you can see onstage so far.
World-class startups. Explore hundreds of innovative startups exhibiting in Digital Startup Alley — including the TC Top Picks. This elite cadre made it through our stringent screening process to earn the coveted designation, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more varied and interesting set of startups.
World-class networking. CrunchMatch, our AI-powered networking platform, simplifies connecting with founders, potential customers, R&D teams, engineers or investors. Schedule 1:1 video meetings and hold recruitment or extended pitch sessions. CrunchMatch launches weeks before Disrupt to give you more time to scout, vet and schedule.
World-class pitching. Don’t miss Startup Battlefield, the always-epic pitch competition that’s launched more than 900 startups, including big-time names like TripIt, Mint, Dropbox and many others. This year’s crop of startups promises to throw down hard for bragging rights and the $100,000 cash prize.
Need another reason to go? Take a page out of SIMBA Chain founder Joel Neidig’s playbook:
Our primary goal was to make people aware of the SIMBA Chain platform capabilities. Attending Disrupt is great way to get your name out there and build your customer base.
It’s time for all you last-minute lollygaggers to get moving and take advantage of this second, final chance to save up to $300. Buy your pass before August 7 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
Patriotism, as Samuel Johnson observed some 245 years ago, is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Making an appeal to national sentiments — or, relatedly, warning about the dire threat from foreign competitors — is also a time-worn tactic of corporate leaders who seek to evade scrutiny of their companies' behavior or shed what they see as onerous regulations.
And so, on Wednesday, with Big Tech under the harsh glare of a Congressional antitrust investigation, the CEOs were quick to dust off the old playbook.
The success of Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon — four companies with a combined market value of roughly $5 trillion — is the epitome of the American Dream, their CEOs told lawmakers at the House of Representatives antitrust hearing.
The success of these four tech giants is something to be cheered; the result of the American system, not any nefarious actions or problems in the market's rules, they insisted.
Apple, CEO Tim Cook said, is "a uniquely American company whose success is only possible in this country."
Amazon's Jeff Bezos discussed the lessons in self-reliance and ingenuity that he learned being the son of a high-school aged single mother and the adopted son of an immigrant father. And on it went.
Most importantly, the CEOs implied or said directly, the US needs national champions like their companies to lead the internet age, because without them, foreign competitors — most worryingly, Chinese ones — will take over.
"China is building its own version of the internet focused on very different ideas, and they are exporting their vision to other countries," warned Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of "proud American company" Facebook.
"We believe in values — democracy, competition, inclusion and free expression — that the American economy was built on," he said.
These types of arguments aren't new. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, deflected questions about her company's power by pointing at the threat from Chinese competitors in an interview with CNBC last year.
In fact, these types of arguments long predate the scrutiny of the tech giants. They've been used for decades by all stripes of American corporations to evade concerns about their power.
Financial services companies made similar arguments in the 1980s when they sought the repeal of regulations that limited their size and ability to operate across states lines, arguing that they needed to grow large to be able to compete against giant foreign banks. IBM and AT&T made such appeals when they faced antitrust scrutiny in the 1970s and 1980s, arguing that they were needed to help defend the US from the rising threat of competition from Japanese tech companies.
Indeed, such patriotic or nationalist arguments go back as far as the 1910s, during some of the first efforts in the US at breaking up monopolies, said Matt Stoller, the author of "Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy."
"This is a long-standing trend," he said. He continued: "It's always, 'give us more power, we'll defend you.'"
The problem with such arguments is they're banal, irrelevant, and misleading.
Pretty much any US company big or small has an all-American story to tell. At a basic level, the success of Amazon or Apple is no more or less impressive than that of the corner grocery that was founded by immigrants fleeing war or oppression. Nearly all founders and entrepreneurs have to overcome challenges and hardships, and the American system has led to outsized success for lots of companies past and present. Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, and Facebook weren't the first, and they won't be the last, regardless of whether regulators seek to limit their power.
What's more, many of the companies that are being quashed by the tech giants have American stories too. We shouldn't ignore, for example, how Amazon used underhanded tactics to undermine Quidsi, the owner of Diapers.com, or how it allegedly throttled the business of a small company that sold books through its site just because Amazon has lots of American workers and Jeff Bezos was born to a single mother. While Americans may benefit from the services Amazon offers and the jobs it fills, they're hurt when it throttles competition. Prices can go up and employees of the competitors Amazon has stymied lose their jobs.
There's little doubt that China and Chinese companies have a different vision for the internet than US companies. There are legitimate concerns about Chinese companies spreading the kind of surveillance and censorship that are endemic in China to other countries. But the best way to meet such international challenges is through encouraging innovation and competition here at home — not by giving the US tech giants a free pass to trample on their smaller domestic rivals.
Giant monopolies tend to stop innovating. They become sclerotic and have trouble adapting as markets and fashions change. But breaking up said monopolies can spur innovation and the creation of whole new markets.
History bears this out, repeatedly. The worldwide dominance of the Big Three automakers in the 1950s and 1960s left them wholly unprepared for the oil shocks of the 1970s and the onset of competition from more nimble Japanese companies. Likewise, Boeing's troubles in recent years are attributable to its ability to wipe out all US competitors in the commercial airline market, said Stoller.
"When you concentrate power, you destroy companies," he said.
On the flip side, the antitrust actions against IBM and AT&T opened up the tech industry for Microsoft, Apple, and Intel and for the internet itself. And the later antitrust case against Microsoft allowed Google, Facebook, Netflix, and other companies to emerge.
"It's pretty obvious that those companies wouldn't exist" if the Microsoft antitrust case hadn't happened," Stoller said.
So ignore the patriotic appeals and the grim warnings about Chinese competition from the desperate CEOs. We'll all be better off if we break up Big Tech.
Got a tip about Big Tech? Contact Troy Wolverton via email at twolverton@businessinsider.com, message him on Twitter @troywolv, or send him a secure message through Signal at 415.515.5594. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.
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