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• WeWork, the coworking-space company, is valued at $47 billion, but it's hemorrhaging money.
• WeWork is losing $219,000 hourly. In 2018, the company's losses and revenues both doubled, to $1.9 billion and $1.8 billion, respectively.
• As WeWork moves toward an initial public offering, it will need to convince investors that it's a worthwhile long-term investment and can survive an economic downturn despite its losses.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

WeWork, the 9-year-old coworking startup now operating under the We Company umbrella of companies, may have a whopping $47 billion valuation, but it's hemorrhaging money: $219,000 every hour of every day during the 12 months leading up to March, according to the Financial Times.

In 2018, WeWork's losses and revenue both doubled, to $1.9 billion and $1.8 billion, respectively, according to FT. Though the company in March projected $3 billion in revenue in the next year, it lost $700 million in the first quarter of 2019.

In April, CEO Adam Neumann announced WeWork confidentially filed initial-public-offering paperwork in December as the We Company, which also includes Neumann's coliving venture, WeLive, and the "conscious entrepreneurial school" WeGrow. As the company moves toward an IPO, it will need to convince investors that its significant growth makes it a worthwhile long-term investment despite equally large losses. 

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son is the major investor in WeWork and a mentor to Neumann (his wife, Rebekah, refers to Son as "Yoda"). Son has invested more than $10 billion in WeWork. In December, Softbank was expected to invest $16 billion in WeWork but ended up investing only $6 billion, with $1 billion of that going toward existing shares, prompting renewed scrutiny of its business model.

Uncertainty about WeWork can be boiled down to three concerns: the stability of its model (pairing long-term office leases with short-term occupants and what that might look like during a recession), its categorization (Should WeWork be compared against tech companies or real-estate companies?), and the wild card that is Neumann.

New York magazine's Intelligencer published a profile of Neumann in June, depicting the CEO as zany and idealistic. Neumann forbid employees from expensing meals containing meat last summer. His commencement speech at Baruch College in 2017 recounted his early years in New York City, which he spent clubbing and "hitting on every girl in the city."

When asked about his personal superpower, Neumann brought up a character from the TV show Heroes ("Neumann neglected to mention that this was the show's villain: a serial killer who murdered people to get their powers," Reeves Wiedeman wrote for New York magazine.)

A surfing fan, he has seemingly blurred the lines between his personal interests and WeWork's, investing on behalf of the company in a wave-pool startup called WaveGarden and the big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton's so-called superfood startup, which sells things like "performance mushrooms," powdered coconut water infused with beets and turmeric, and highly caffeinated coffee.

And yet, Neumann's ambition and salesmanship are the forces that have skyrocketed his company to a nearly $50 billion valuation in under a decade. 

"There are hundreds of co-working companies around the world, but what has long distinguished WeWork is Neumann's insistence that his is something bigger," Wiedeman wrote.

According to WeWork's website, the company has 743 coworking sites open and coming soon in 124 cities in more than 36 countries. FT reported that WeWork has 485 offices and was in 105 cities as of the first quarter of 2019; New York magazine reported that the company has 12,000 employees. WeWork is the largest private office tenant in Manhattan.

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NOW WATCH: Apple just launched a $6,000 Mac Pro, available this fall

Amazon can be sued over third-party sales on its platform, a federal court ruled today, setting a potentially damaging precedent for the company.

While Amazon sells goods itself, it also allows vendors to sell their products through its Marketplace platform, taking a cut in the process. In late 2014, a woman named Heather Oberdorf ordered a dog collar from a Marketplace seller, but it broke on a walk, sending the leash flying and permanently blinding her in one eye. The seller hasn’t been found, but Oberdorf sued Amazon, accusing the company of negligence.

A district court in Pennsylvania found that Amazon couldn’t be sued because it wasn’t a “seller” under the law, and because it is protected by...

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• Amazon has several tiny houses on sale that come in build-it-yourself kits, starting at just over $5,000.
• Tiny houses have cropped up in popularity as housing prices are rising and minimalistic downsizing is becoming trendy.
• One tiny house, a two-floor "getaway cabin" for $18,800, is advertised as taking only two to three days to build.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Amazon prides itself on being the go-to easy-to-use online marketplace for everything you need — and that apparently includes tiny houses.

Tiny homes have become increasingly popular in the past few years, whether that's because of rising costs of living or because they encourage minimalist living. Tiny homes make it possible to own your own property, even if that house measures only between 100 and 400 square feet.

But while constructing a functional housing unit may seem like a daunting task, Amazon has stepped in to make a hot millennial trend available to the masses by making these tiny homes easy to buy and simple to build. There are more than two dozen options on Amazon for DIY tiny-home kits, including 113-foot cabins at $5,350 and loft-bedroom houses at $20,000.

Surprisingly, some of the Amazon listings say these tiny homes can be built in as little as two days with two people.

To get an idea of how buying a tiny house on Amazon works, take a look at this "getaway cabin" being sold on Amazon for nearly $19,000:

SEE ALSO: How to use TikTok, the short-form video app Gen Z loves and that's ushering in a new era of influencers

This is one of the tiny homes for sale on Amazon — a build-it-yourself kit for a "getaway cabin."

The company selling this tiny-house kit on Amazon is a United Kingdom-based company called Lillevilla, which manufactures log cabins. The tiny-home kits on Amazon are mainly sold by Lillevilla and the wood-production e-retailer Allwood Outlet.

The all-wood home is advertised as a cabin and not a full-fledged residence, likely because the tiny home comes with only bare materials and few features.

The tiny home is "large enough to function as a summer house, granny flat, home office or even a stand-alone retail building," the description says. 

The floor map for the tiny home shows a little bit more about its specifications. The setup is simple: three rooms on the main floor spanning 292 square feet and an attic-level loft bedroom above.

The home also includes a partially covered deck out front, which is optional if you're not feeling the outdoor wooden floor.

To make best use of the small property, and to make the home easy to build, amenities are sparse. Without gas, it'd be hard to set up a kitchen. To make up for the lack of electricity, each room in the tiny home has at least one window for natural lighting.

To turn the cabin into a "primary residence," Allwood suggests adding utility hookups for electricity and internet, and insulation for colder temperatures. 

Behind the tiny home's French doors, here's what the main 16-foot-wide area looks like.

The room is split up, however, by the ladder in the center that leads up to the small loft room above.

The loft area is where Allwood advertises that the bedroom would be. The slanted roof makes hitting your head a strong possibility — at its tallest height, the room measures less than 5 feet tall.

The Allwood listing for the tiny home shows that the building comes in three big parcels when it's shipped to you. All the materials needed for constructing the tiny home apparently come in the shipped package: roof shingles and gables, glass panes, nails and screws, and the lock for the door.

Allwood says only "minimal tools are needed." For the interested buyer who has minimal building experience, the package is accompanied with "easy to use" instructions that should be simple to follow.

However, it is possible you'll need outside expertise for building the tiny home. The tiny-home kit comes with floorboards but not with materials for building a foundation that ensures the home is secure and stable.

Adding a foundation made of gravel or concrete can help give a house a stable base, especially if you're trying to build a tiny house on grass (that can soften in the rain) or on ground that's not flat.

This particular tiny home kit goes for $18,800 on Amazon. The listing suggests that building the cabin can take as little as two days with two people working.

Fortunately, shipping on this home is free.

But Amazon also sells other tiny homes of varying sizes and designs, too. On the cheaper side, this one-room 113-square-foot cabin goes for $5,350.

Lillevilla also suggests not using this as a tiny home, but instead as a "home office, lake house, guest cottage, yoga studio, retail kiosk, or simply a retreat in your back yard."

On the pricier side, Amazon sells this Timberline cabin. For $34,900, this home is 354 square feet and more customizable, which makes changing the home's floor plan much easier

Amazon sells other build-it-yourself home kits for $46,900 and $64,650. However, these houses are much bigger than the 400-square-foot maximum under the definition of a "tiny house."

When President Trump announced plans over the weekend to ease trade restrictions on Huawei, it seemed to upend America’s crackdown on the Chinese tech giant.

“At the request of our High Tech companies, and President Xi, I agreed to allow Chinese company Huawei to buy product from them which will not impact our National Security,” Trump tweeted after a meeting with the Chinese president. Tech stocks have soared in the wake of the statement, anticipating a rollback to the damage done by the commerce order in May.

But if Trump’s announcement was a reprieve, it’s still not clear, even days later, who will be getting that help. The White House’s restrictions on Huawei remain in effect, and...

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The Ajit Pai FCC has pissed off yet another subset of the population still reliant on factual data.

Scientists and researchers at NASA, NOAA, and the American Meteorological Society (AMS) have been warning that the wireless industry's use of select bands for 5G could interfere with transmissions of weather-satellite imagery. In a letter (pdf) sent to the FCC last month, warning that the industry's plan to use 24GHz band could severely hamper weather forecasting. The FCC recently auctioned off spectrum in this band for private companies, but a growing roster of scientists say precautions weren't taken first:

"NOAA and NASA have conducted studies that show interference in passive collection at the 23.6-24 GHz band from the adjacent 5G band (24.25 GHz); as such it is expected that interference will result in a partial-to-complete loss of remotely sensed water-vapor measurements. It is also expected that impacts will be concentrated in urban areas of the United States first."

More plainly, water vapor emits radiation at 23.8GHz. Both the NOAA and NASA say monitoring these vapors won't be possible if the neighboring band is too noisy. Things like hurricane forecasts, they say, could take up to two to three days longer if adequate protections aren't put in place. There's far more detail in this recent article in Nature, where academics note that while far more scientific study is needed, the interference potential here is a very real threat.

AT&T and other industry players recently gobbled up spectrum in the band at auction, and have an obvious vested interest in getting the spectrum in place quickly as they look to cash in on fifth generation wireless (5G). This being Ajit Pai, his response to the concerns has been to tell the NOAA, NASA, Navy, and AMS that they don't know what they're talking about. Senators have since pressed Pai to provide insight into exactly what his agency did to mitigate the potential harm:

"Explain and provide supporting documentation related to the FCC's public interest analysis, including any cost-benefit analysis, on the FCC's emissions limit. In particular, explain how the FCC addressed the costs to taxpayers from the loss of billions of dollars of investment in weather-sensing satellites, the costs to public safety and national security, and to the nation's commercial activities that rely on this critical weather data."

As if on cue, representatives of the "American Consumer Institute" (a non-profit pretending to be a consumer advocacy firm but actually backed by big telecom companies) has been pushing editorials trying to claim the problem doesn't actually exist either, and that the Navy, AMS, NASA, and NOAA are all somehow suffering from some form of scientific delusion. Meanwhile a separate but similar controversy has emerged over the FCC's plan for the 1675-1680MHz band. There too the American Geophysical Union (AGU), American Meteorological Society (AMS), Boeing, Accuweather, and National Weather Association (NWA) have all been warning the FCC that its spectrum sharing plan for that band could also cause forecasting problems.

It's yet another example of the discord created when you have a regulatory agency driven by ideology, alternative facts, and a blind fealty to big companies involved in overseeing issues that require nuance, objectivity, and at least a fleeting regard for science and data.

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Depending on which social circles you run in, you may believe that the exodus from social media has begun, or, on the contrary, that such an exodus is impossible. One can't deny, however, that the past year has seen a tidal shift in the way all of us perceive, value, and participate in online social networks.

Only six months after snapping up virtualization specialist Parallels, Canadian software company Corel is itself getting acquired. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed with multiple sources that private equity giant KKR has closed a deal to buy the company from Vector Capital, which has owned some or all of Corel since 2003.

KKR’s interest in Corel was first rumored in May, when PE Hub reported the two were in talks for a sale valued at over $1 billion. At the time, representatives of Corel declined to comment, although our sources inside the company indicated that the reports were not inaccurate.

Fast-forward to today, and both KKR and and a spokesperson for Parallels/Corel declined to comment. But, we now have a copy of the memo provided by an internal source that has been sent out to staff announcing that the deal has indeed closed, and that Corel is now officially part of the KKR family of companies.

According to the memo, KKR is very optimistic about Corel’s prospects. It plans to give Corel an “infusion of capital” to accelerate its growth, which will go into two areas. First will be expanding operations for the existing business: Corel is the company behind a number of longstanding software brands including WordPerfect, Corel Draw, WinZip, PaintShop Pro. Second will be making acquisitions (and the sheer proliferation of promising startups in the last decade dedicated to all variety of apps and other software that may have found it a challenge to scale means Corel could have rich pickings).

There are no layoffs planned as part of the deal, and the official announcement had been planned to go out next week, but now looks like it may be moved up to tomorrow (Wednesday).

Vector and Corel itself have never publicly disclosed much on user numbers or financials, but Vector has described the company as “highly profitable,” with dividends of more than $300 million to date. The memo we’ve seen notes that Corel (including Parallels) has millions of customers across its various software platforms and apps.

The acquisition of Corel by KKR marks another chapter in the company’s long corporate history.

Founded in the 1980s — when personal computers were just starting to enter the mainstream but well before we had anything like the internet (not to mention the world of cloud-based apps) that we know today — Corel once positioned itself as a potential competitor to Microsoft in the software wars.

When Corel purchased WordPerfect from Novel in 1996, Corel founder Michael Cowpland viewed the software package as an integral part of that rivalry, describing it as the Pepsi to Microsoft’s Coke — that is, Word.

Microsoft proved the mightier of the two, and it even eventually signed a partnership with Corel that saw it investing in the company: a sell out, as one disappointed Canadian journalist described it at the time. The two have also sparred over patents.

Corel, which went public early in its life, got battered in the first dot-com bust (which was not helped by an insider trading scandal that led to Cowpland’s departure). Vector stepped in and took it private in 2003.

After restructuring the company, Vector listed Corel again in 2006. But, amid another recession that again hit Corel hard, it once more took it private in 2010. In the intervening years, Corel has been focused on modernising its offerings, bringing in e-commerce, direct downloads, subscriptions and acquisitions to bring the company’s products and wider business closer to how consumers and workers use computers today.

Parallels was a part of that strategy: its products help people work seamlessly across multiple platforms, letting employees (and IT managers) run a unified workflow regardless of the device or operating system, with Parallels providing support for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Chromebook, Linux, Raspberry Pi and cloud — a timely offering in the current, fragmented IT market.

If the $1 billion+ figure is accurate, that strategy seems to have worked: across the two times that Vector took Corel private, it never paid more than $124 million for the company (the second time, as its stock was tanking, it paid just $30 million).

Multiple police departments across the country reported an outage for AT&T on Tuesday morning, meaning customers on the carrier couldn't dial 911. The issue has since been resolved, according to AT&T.

"Approx an hour ago Minneapolis was made aware that AT&T is experiencing a 911 outage resulting in their customers unable to be directly connected to 911," Minneapolis Police tweeted early Tuesday morning. "Be advised this outage is a nation-wide issue affecting AT&T customers," the department added in a follow-up tweet.

"AT&T is experiencing interruptions or degradation to wireless 911 calls and/or wireless phase one/two location information. We will update when service returns to normal," Bellingham Police tweeted.

The Tarrant County 911 District reported the outage in a tweet as well, Dallas News reported. In one of its tweets, the Minneapolis Police temporarily provided an alternative number for people to ring.

Do you know anything else about this case? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, OTR chat on jfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.

An AT&T spokesperson told Motherboard in a statement "Earlier this morning some wireless customers may have been unable to connect to 911. This has been resolved and we apologize to anyone who was affected."

This isn't the first time this has happened. In 2017, police departments across the country reported a nationwide AT&T outage that interrupted 911 calls. In fact, there were two outages that year, in March and in May, that together resulted in over 15,000 failed 911 calls. The Federal Communications Commission investigated, and in 2018 fined the company $5.5 million USD.

Spokespeople for the FCC weren't immediately available to comment.

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Machine learning can be an incredible addition to any tinkerer’s toolbox, helping to fix that little problem in life that no commercial gadget can handle. For Amazon engineer Ben Hamm, that problem was stopping his “sweet, murderous cat” Metric from bringing home dead and half-dead prey in the middle of the night and waking him up.

Hamm gave an entertaining presentation on this subject at Ignite Seattle, and you can watch a video of his talk above. In short, in order to stop Metric from following his instincts, Hamm hooked up the cat flap in his door to an AI-enabled camera (Amazon’s own DeepLens) and an Arduino-powered locking system.

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• SpaceX just revealed new details about the 60 internet-providing satellites the company launched into orbit in May as part of a program called Starlink.
• The long-term goal of Starlink is to eventually put thousands of satellites into orbit in order to bathe the planet in high-speed internet.
• According to SpaceX, three spacecraft failed and will fall back to Earth. But 45 of the satellites already succeeded in reaching their final orbits.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

SpaceX just provided a raft of significant updates on the launch of its first five dozen internet-providing satellites.

The long-term goal of the program, called Starlink, is to eventually launch thousands of satellites into orbit around Earth in order to bathe the planet in high-speed internet access.

Elon Musk's company rocketed the first 60 spacecraft into space and shuffled them into orbit on May 23. On Friday, a SpaceX spokesperson revealed that 45 of those satellites succeeded in using their small ion engines to reach their final orbits, and five more are on their way now. An additional five satellites are being checked out before they are raised to their final place around Earth.

The spokesperson added that at least three of the spacecraft "are no longer in service" and "will passively deorbit." In other words, the three spacecraft failed and will fall back to Earth, likely within a year because of their relatively low orbit of 273 miles (440 kilometers) above the planet's surface.

SpaceX seems relatively unfazed by the failures, though, since the company never expected all of them to function perfectly given the mission's experimental nature.

"There is a lot of new technology here, so it's possible that some of these satellites may not work," Musk said during a call with reporters on May 15.

In addition to letting the three failed spacecraft fall back down, SpaceX plans to intentionally bring down two others using ion engines; this is meant to demonstrate the company's ability to prevent spacecraft from turning into harmful space debris.

On June 12, the company sent an upbeat letter to the Federal Communications Commission (which gave the company permission to deploy Starlink) notifying the agency that the company is successfully communicating with the satellites via stations on Earth.

Here's the full statement that a SpaceX spokesperson emailed to Business Insider:

Just a little over a month after a successful Falcon 9 launch, Starlink is now the first NGSO system to operate in the Ku-band and communicate with US ground stations, demonstrating the system's potential to provide fast, reliable internet to populations around the world.

57 Starlink satellites are communicating with SpaceX's Earth stations using their broadband phased array antennas. 45 Starlink satellites have reached their operational altitude using their onboard propulsion systems, five additional satellites continue their orbit raise, as five others are going through check-outs prior to completing their orbit raise. Two satellites are being intentionally deorbited to simulate an end of life disposal. Three satellites which initially communicated with the ground but are no longer in service, will passively deorbit. Due to their design and low orbital position, all five deorbiting satellites will disintegrate once they enter Earth's atmosphere in support of SpaceX's commitment to a clean space environment.

SpaceX implemented slight variations across the 60 satellites in order to maximize operational capability across the fleet. While we are pleased with the performance of the satellites so far, SpaceX will continue to push the operational capabilities of the satellites to inform future iterations. And, now that the majority of the satellites have reached their operational altitude, SpaceX will begin using the constellation to start transmitting broadband signals, testing the latency and capacity by streaming videos and playing some high bandwidth video games using gateways throughout North America.

In addition, SpaceX added that it "continues to monitor the visibility of the satellites as they approach their final orbit" and that they will be measured for their visibility from the ground once there. Those comments are likely meant to address concerns lodged by astronomers about the reflectivity of Starlink spacecraft — and the bright streaks they've caused in telescope images.

"We have also proactively reached out to leading astronomy groups from around the world to discuss the Starlink mission profile, scientifically assess the impacts on astronomy activities and evaluate any helpful mitigations moving forward," the company said in an email.

It's unclear how or why three of SpaceX's satellites failed, and a company spokesperson declined to elaborate on the matter.

However, given the need to deploy perhaps 12,000 of the spacecraft over the next eight years, it's likely the company is still investigating the loss of its experimental satellites and sussing out every last detail about the failures.

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk has a 2027 deadline to surround Earth with high-speed Starlink internet satellites — but the service would work far sooner than that

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NOW WATCH: Watch SpaceX's 'most difficult launch ever'

The interruption has caused issues with messaging, posts, calls, apps/integrations, connections, link previews, notifications, search and organization administration.

Somerville, Massachusetts just became the second U.S. city to ban the use of facial recognition in public space.

The "Face Surveillance Full Ban Ordinance," which passed through Somerville's City Council on Thursday night, forbids any “department, agency, bureau, and/or subordinate division of the City of Somerville” from using facial recognition software in public spaces. The ordinance passed Somerville’s Legislative Matters Committee on earlier this week.

The ordinance defines facial surveillance as “an automated or semi-automated process that assists in identifying an individual, capturing information about an individual, based on the physical characteristics of an individual’s face,” which is operationally equivalent to facial recognition.

San Francisco banned the use of facial recognition by police and city government agencies a month ago, making it the first U.S. city to do so. The success of a similar ordinance from Somerville shows that there’s momentum in major U.S. cities behind the idea that we shouldn’t just regulate the use of facial recognition, but ban it entirely.

Kade Crockford, director of the technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts, said in a phone call that at the state level, the ACLU is advocating for a moratorium or pause of facial recognition technology, while at the local level, the ACLU is advocating for bans.

“At the municipal level, it’s different,” Crockford said. “State governments have the capacity to regulate, whereas local governments really don’t. They don’t have the ability, for example, to create new institutions that could oversee, with sufficient care and attention, the implementation of an oversight or accountability system to guard against civil rights and civil liberties abuses.”

There are currently 30 locations in Somerville that are outfitted with surveillance cameras, and these locations are mapped on Somerville’s city website.

According to Somerville's Executive Policy on Surveillance Technology, which has been in effect since October 2017, any use of surveillance in the city has to have public use and privacy policies, data sharing information, and yearly use reports. Similar ordinances have passed in nine other cities, and in Santa Clara County, CA.

Next month, Oakland, California will vote on an ordinance that could enact a similar facial recognition technology ban.

Today, I spent my afternoon in an amphitheater next to Tokyo Disneyland to watch Line’s annual conference. Line is one of the most prominent tech companies in Japan, with a chat app that virtually everyone here uses and which offers various adjacent services, from gaming to ride-hailing to personal finance.

Line’s international push didn’t really work out beyond high-profile stores selling merchandise of its cute mascot characters — another one just opened on Hollywood Blvd — and now the company is focusing on its core markets of Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Thailand. As you’ll see from today’s announcements, the advantage of that approach is that the services can be far more meaningful in their potential for actual real-world usage,...

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Apple’s iMessage-based Business Chat feature is getting a big expansion today through internet store provider Shopify, which is adding support for the feature through its existing Shopify Ping customer communication app, via Engadget.

For Shopify-based businesses already using services like Facebook Messenger for communicating with customers, it’s much not much more of a lift to add iMessage support. Support for the service means that they can add in a new avenue for interacting with people who might not be on Facebook, but who are still potential customers nonetheless.

And for customers, it’s another secure and safe way to get support from brands or have their questions answered about products before they...

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WhatsApp is testing the idea of letting its users share posts from their WhatsApp status with other apps. Starting today, users in WhatsApp’s beta program will start to see a new sharing option beneath their status, which can be used to post a status directly to their Facebook story or send it to another app like Instagram, Gmail, or Google Photos. WhatsApp Status is the service’s Instagram Stories-style feature that lets you post images, text, and videos on your profile that disappear after 24 hours.

Although there’s a direct link to share your status to Facebook, WhatsApp tells me that it’s not doing anything to link your accounts on the two services. Instead, it’s making use of the same iOS and Android data-sharing APIs as every other...

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• Intel is putting about 8,500 of its 90,000 patents on the auction block as it exits the 5G smartphone modem market.
• The chip giant surprised the tech world in April when it said it was abandoning the market for 5G smartphone chips, for lack of 
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Chip giant Intel is putting 8,500 of its patents on the auction block, as the tech powerhouse exits the 5G smartphone market.

The Santa Clara, California-based company told Business Insider it is looking to sell intellectual property assets related to 3G, 4G, and 5G cellular and wireless technologies. The company has nearly 90,000 patents worldwide, a spokesperson said. The patent auction was first reported by IAM media.

Intel is also looking for a buyer for its 5G smartphone modem business. The company stunned the tech world two months ago when it announced that it was abandoning the market for smartphone 5G modem chips. In a statement, new CEO Bob Swan said that "it has become apparent that there is no clear path to profitability and positive returns."

An Intel spokesman told Business Insider that the auction process, which is being supervised by the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, "is independent of Intel's evaluation of options for the smartphone modem business, which we announced last April. Intel would retain significant patent assets for cellular wireless and connected devices technologies."

Intel had reportedly discussed selling its smartphone modem chip business to Apple, according to the Wall Street Journal. A Intel spokesperson declined to comment, but said the company has "hired outside advisors to help us assess strategic options for our wireless 5G phone business. We have received significant interest in the business but have nothing more to say at this time."

Intel has said it will continue to focus its 5G wireless efforts on networking infrastructure. The company is making bigger bets on server chips that power data centers, although Intel has recently struggled with a slowdown in that market. The company recently reported flat revenue growth and a revenue target for 2019 that fell below Wall Street's expectations.

Got a tip about Intel or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at bpimentel@businessinsider.com, message him on Twitter @benpimentel. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

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NOW WATCH: The US women's national team dominates soccer, but here's why the US men's team sucks

Google is now beginning to roll out its location history auto-delete feature after announcing it back in May. The tool comes after an emphasis on user privacy this past developer conference season, where companies like Google and Apple both said they would begin rolling out tools to let customers have more control over what data they share with the companies or third-party apps.

One of the criticisms, however, was that much of the work was still reliant upon the user to set up. Location tracking and web / app activity history on Google, for example, is kept until users manually delete them by default (the company says this is to improve user experience, ad targeting, and search personalizations). With the new tool, you can now set your...

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On a hot May evening, two plain-clothed federal agents walked into a Nissan dealership just off the highway in Greenville, Texas, next to a Splash Kingdom waterpark. The agents wanted to apprehend a Ramon Hutchinson, who was wanted for failure to appear in court on a first-degree drug charge and who they suspected would be at the dealership.

A family of five was in the building, as well as several employees. The owner of the dealership agreed to let the men wait for Hutchinson.

The two men weren't really federal agents, however. They were Fidel Garcia and Gabriel Bernal, two bounty hunters illegally posing as law enforcement. Both worked for F.N.G. Security, a firm that had been given the contract to apprehend Hutchinson.

As Hutchinson stood near a desk in one of the dealership's glass walled offices, the two bounty hunters approached, handguns drawn. One of the hunters grabbed Hutchinson from behind, and attempted to restrain him. Hutchinson pulled a gun from his belt, but dropped it onto the desk, and reached to grab it. Others ran out of the office in a panic.

Twenty gunshots were fired in a span of six seconds, piercing walls and shattering windows. All three men were hit. A cellphone video of the shooting showed bystanders running from the scene, taking cover behind cars inside the dealership, and a woman screaming as the bullets stopped. When police arrived shortly after, all three men were dead.

But someone from afar was tracking the hunters.

In the hours after the shooting, someone with access to a controversial data system looked up the location, or "pinged," one of the bounty hunter's phones, pinpointing it to the Nissan dealership, according to data leaked to Motherboard from a company that sold real-time location data of AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint customers to bounty hunters.

And in the lead up to the incident on the day of the shootings, that same data access was used to repeatedly ping a phone with a Minnesota area code. Hutchinson was on the run from Minnesota, but Motherboard could not confirm who the phone belonged to or whether the pings were related to the shootings. That phone was pinged eight times on the day of the murder, but was also pinged several times days later.

It is unclear if any phone location data led the bounty hunters to Hutchinson. And naturally, data did not act as an impetus for the murders themselves—that was due to three violent and armed individuals fighting each other during an encounter. The story does, however, show that phone location data tracking services can be used by individuals who impersonate law enforcement, and shoot wildly around innocent civilians, putting them in danger.

On top of illegally posing as law enforcement, the F.N.G Security bounty hunters seemed to have approached the situation recklessly. They didn't wear bullet-proof vests which were found in their vehicle, Sergeant Adam Phillips, a Greenville Police Department spokesman, told reporters at the time of the shooting.

"For years, I've warned that protecting personal data isn't just about personal privacy, it's about personal safety," Senator Ron Wyden told Motherboard in a statement. "Location data is falling into the hands of people who are using it in ways that cause real danger to the public. Americans' safety is at risk from the shady middlemen and wireless carriers who let anyone with cash in hand track our phones. Americans should be outraged that FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has done nothing to hold the carriers responsible."

AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon sold their customers real-time location data to middleman companies called "location aggregators." These aggregators then provided access data to a wide range of other parties, including used car salesman, landlords, low level law enforcement without a warrant, and, as Motherboard revealed, bounty hunters.

In this Texas case, the data of the bounty hunter's phone first trickled down from a telecommunications company acquired by T-Mobile, according to a screenshot of the phone ping obtained by Motherboard. Then, the data moved through a location aggregator called LocationSmart. From there, LocationSmart sold that access to CerCareOne, a company that operated in secrecy, and which told its clients to not even reveal the company's existence.

CerCareOne had around 250 bounty hunter and bail bondsman clients for real-time location data, according to previously leaked CerCareOne documents. CerCareOne didn't only have access to cellphone tower location information, which can pinpoint a device to a range of a few blocks, but also precise assisted-GPS or A-GPS data, which is so accurate it can locate someone's position inside a building.

The screenshot of the CerCareOne system in action displays the phone's GPS coordinates as well as its approximate location on a Google Maps interface; the time of the geolocation attempt, and the phone number pinged. According to online records, the phone number belongs to F.N.G. Security, the firm the two bounty hunters worked for, and the coordinates put the phone just outside the Nissan dealership.

Do you know anything else about this case, or about another incident of location data abuse? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, OTR chat on jfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.

CerCareOne worked by giving users an account they could load with credit to then ping phones. The account used to locate the bounty hunter's phone was registered to a Dan Grable of Nova Technologies, according to another leaked document. Nova Technologies is a firm offering telecommunications services, such as phones for businesses and internet connectivity. Grable had an administrator level account for CerCareOne, another document shows.

The source who provided the CerCareOne documents believes Grable may not have been the only person to be using that account. Grable's account had been used to locate phones over 4,500 times across several years, according to a list of located phone numbers.

According to a copy of CerCareOne's terms and conditions obtained by Motherboard, customers were supposed to only connect to the service from up to two predetermined IP addresses. "The subscriber is aware of and agrees to supply to Cercareone.com a maximum of two (2) IP addresses from which access to Cercareone.com will be limited to further ensure privacy and limited access & attests that said IP addresses belong to the subscriber," the terms and conditions read.

Motherboard found at least two IP addresses used by Grable's account to connect to the CerCareOne service, which are included in the leaked documents, are associated with Nova Technologies domains. But other pings come from many more IP addresses around the world, including various internet service providers and locations in the United States, and servers in Israel and Lithuania, according to online records. In other words, the use was not being limited to only two IP addresses.

"I think he was reselling it," the source, who is intimately familiar with the phone pinging underground, said of Grable. "There's 110 pages, and he's pinging the same damn number all the time. I think that's going to be his number; a test number."

Grable did not respond to emailed requests for comment or voicemails.

"I've warned that protecting personal data isn't just about personal privacy, it's about personal safety."

Various parties have filed multiple lawsuits related to the shooting. The McIver family—the mother, father, and three children—have sued the Nissan dealership, F.N.G. Security and Investigations, and U.S. Fugitive Recovery and Extradition, the company that hired F.N.G. The lawsuit describes the bounty hunters as "incompetent and/or reckless."

"Had any of the Defendants informed the McIver family of Ramon Michael Hutchinson's presence or Defendant's intent to apprehend Ramon Michael Hutchinson, the McIver family would not have come to the dealership, or remained on the premises," a filing from the McIver lawsuit reads.

"If these recovery agents had lived, they would have lost their license and most likely would have done some federal time for impersonating a federal agent," Valerie McGilvrey, a skiptracer who has bought phone location data in the past, told Motherboard. A skiptracer is someone who finds out where people, often those who owe a debt or a fugitive, are located.

After Motherboard reported about the sale of real-time AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint phone location data to bounty hunters in January, each telecom said they were stopping the sale of such data to all third parties.

A T-Mobile spokesperson said they had nothing to add about the Texas shooting incident, but wrote in an email, "that as of February 8, 2019, T-Mobile terminated all service provider access to location data under the program and T-Mobile’s location based services contracts with the location aggregators officially ended on March 9."

The FCC, which is conducting an investigation into the sale of phone location data, did not respond to a request for comment. As Motherboard previously reported, multiple FCC Commissioners said the agency is withholding information from them about the status of that investigation.

“What I’m hearing, as described in this reporting, is concerning. This story continues a thread of troubling actions by a number of entities throughout the pay-to-track ecosystem. If true, this again points to the alarming public safety implications of making geolocation data available for purchase. It is long past time that the FCC complete any investigations and hold all wrongdoers accountable," FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said in a statement.

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement, "The facts surrounding the sale of real-time location data keep getting worse. For just a few hundred dollars, bounty hunters were able to access the location of wireless customers—with chilling results. Meanwhile, it has been more than a year since the first press reports emerged indicating that our wireless location data has been up for sale. But the FCC has done nothing more than suggest it has an investigation. What is the agency hiding? It’s time for the FCC to be upfront about just what is going on and hold those who violated the law responsible."

Fifth-generation wireless (5G) will be a good thing when it finally arrives at scale in a few years, in that faster, more reliable networks are always good. But at the same time, 5G's capabilities have been comically over-hyped by cellular carriers and network hardware vendors looking to sell more cell phones and network hardware. Cellular carriers appear to be in a race to to broadly misrepresent not only what 5G is capable of--but where and when it will actually be available to the public at large.

Verizon, who has scolded other companies for over-hyping the technology, has been one of the biggest culprits in over-hyping 5G. On any given day Verizon's executives and marketing efforts can be found claiming that 5G will revolutionize the planet, magically enabling the smart cities and smart cars of tomorrow. In recent months, the company's marketing has proclaimed that 5G will somehow result in massive evolutionary leaps in medical technology, its ads going so far as to suggest that surgeons will soon be more accurate:

If you look at the replies to that Tweet, the message isn't being received too well by the public. Most are curious why they'd trust any medical procedure to a cellular connection. And many more have wondered why anybody would put their life in the hands of a company recently busted throttling and upselling firefighters as they struggled to battle the biggest wildfire in California's history. That's not stopping Verizon, which has been running several video ads -- replete with sad music -- claiming that 5G will even revolutionize cancer treatment:

When you visit Verizon's website to learn more, you'll quickly find there's not much there in the way of evidence supporting Verizon's claims. Yes, faster, lower latency networks are good in general, but they alone won't magically create new, innovative technology. And much of the stuff Verizon is hyping (like smart cars) can run just as well on 4G networks. The generational bump from 4G to 5G is more of a natural evolution than a revolution, and while the public will benefit -- we're not talking about some world-shaking paradigm shift.

As for 5G's impact on medicine, when I spoke to an ER doctor last week about Verizon's claims, he noted that 5G isn't even likely to be widely used for hospital diagnostics or treatment, since the lion's share of that technology will use existing hospital gigabit WiFi and Ethernet connections:

"Christian Dameff, an ER doctor and cyber security researcher at the University of California, San Diego, told Motherboard that hospitals generally utilize WiFi or Ethernet connections that already deliver the gigabit speeds and low latency that Verizon is advertising for 5G networks.

“The use of mobile connectivity such as 4G is rare in medical devices or diagnostic equipment because hospitals have traditionally relied on local connections as the primary architecture for their vast networks,” Dameff said. “WiFi and Ethernet currently simplifies disparate system integration, scales better, and is the status quo over most of the healthcare industry in the United States."

5G might have some application in remote diagnostics and treatment, but there too the revolutionary impact will be far more modest than Verizon suggests. Dameff argued that if Verizon really wanted to cure cancer, it would take money spent on ads over-hyping 5G, and actually donate that to cancer research:

"I do not see any significant cancer breakthroughs being dependent on 5G,” Dameff said. “In my opinion, we should take the money spent on these well-produced commercials touting medical advantages of 5G and donate them to cancer research. That would help cancer patients more than 5G itself."

Ultimately Verizon's hype is a disservice to itself. By routinely overstating availability and capability, Verizon is associating 5G in the public's mind with bluster and bullshit. That may help sell Luddite politicians on Verizon's desired policy agendas in DC, but it won't help Verizon in terms of its longer-term goal: accelerating stalled smartphone sales and the purchase of more expensive data plans.

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• Oppo, a Chinese smartphone maker, revealed its new technology called "under screen camera" (USC) that lets a selfie camera hide underneath a display.
• The USC lets Oppo include a selfie camera on smartphones without using a notch design, like the iPhone XS and countless other Android devices, or a mechanized pop-up system like you'd find on the OnePlus 7 Pro and Asus Zenfone 6.
• The tech may come with compromises to selfie camera quality, but Oppo hopes its software-based solutions will address some of the quality issues. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Oppo — a small smartphone company compared to the likes of Apple or Samsung — revealed its new technology that lets selfie cameras hide beneath a smartphone's screen.

The technology, which Oppo showed off at the MWC Shanghai event, means that the smartphone can include an all-screen front surface without a notch or an alternative mechanical system to hide the selfie camera, like a pop-up selfie camera you'd find on the OnePlus 7 Pro, or the Asus Zenfone 6.

Oppo's "under screen camera" (USC) technology uses a custom material that's highly transparent to let light pass through to the lens, according to MacRumors. 

Oppo's technology hasn't been tested yet, so whether it comes with compromises to selfie camera quality is still unknown.

Oppo admitted that USC selfie camera might not match the quality of a traditional selfie camera, and it developed software-based solutions to deal with some of the issues a camera hidden under a display might face, like haze, glare, and color issues. 

So far, Oppo only announced the USC technology, not a smartphone that will actually come with an under screen selfie camera. The company plans to unveil a device with USC technology, but it's not exactly clear when.

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The Federal Communications Commission has granted Verizon permission to keep newly purchased phones locked to its network for a period of 60 days. As a result, the leading US carrier says it will soon do exactly that, claiming it’s meant to prevent fraud and identity theft. “After the 60 day period the phones will unlock automatically,” said Ronan Dunne, executive vice president at Verizon. “That means, fraudsters who order and steal phones — clearly with no intention of ever paying for them will have a much harder time.” Verizon plans to implement the 60-day lock “very soon.”

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• More than 10 cell service providers around the world have been hacked in an attack that compromises key information about customers of the affected providers, according to a report by security research firm Cybereason.
• Information includes call detail records, like who customers were talking to, what devices they were using, and customer locations.
• It's estimated that between 20 and 100 individuals are being targeted in the attack, which is likely aimed at high-profile individuals in government and military positions.  
• The affected cell service providers are based in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. There's no indication yet that US cell service providers have been compromised. 
• Cybereason suspects the attack originates from China and it also suspects state-sponsorship, which suggests the Chinese government might be behind the attack. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Since 2012, hackers have had access to customer call detail records — like their locations, who they were talking to, and what devices they were using — from more than 10 cell service providers around the world, according to a report from security research firm Cybereason, which we saw on TechCrunch and CNET.

Cybereason said with a "high level of certainty" that the hack was conducted from China, and is likely state-sponsored. The attacks are ongoing.

The attacks targeted cell service providers from various countries, including countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Cybereason's investigation is still ongoing, so it can't reveal which cell service providers and companies have been affected, but the location of some of the victimized companies appear strategic.

While the hack afforded the attackers access to any customer of the affected cell service provides, the number of targeted individuals ranges between 20 and 100, according to figures from TechCrunch and CNET. The attack was likely targeting high-profile individuals in government and military positions, one of the Cybereason report's authors, Mor Levi, said.

Content from phone calls and messages weren't obtained, but the type of information that was gathered is still invaluable to any entity that intends to spy. 

There's no indication so far that US cell service providers were affected by the attack, one of the Cybereason report's authors, Amit Serper, said. 

Cybereason's suspicion of a China-sponsored cyber attack comes amid tensions between the US and China. The investigation is especially relevant to the US ban of Chinese telecoms company, Huawei, from doing business with US companies. The ban is based on US concerns that Huawei has ties with the Chinese government, and its products could, as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said, "potentially undermine U.S. national security or foreign policy interests."

SEE ALSO: Everything you need to know about Huawei, the Chinese tech giant accused of spying that the US just banned from doing business in America

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By Sheila McGee-Smith
With this move, company signals it will no longer address contact center merely as a UC add-on.

5G deployment is a hot topic, especially as many countries race to build next-generation networks. The U.S. has banned Huawei from contributing to its network construction, but will that really set the U.S. back? Amid all of the hype surrounding 5G, Jack E. Gold, president and principal analyst at J.Gold Associates, joins Juliet to discuss potential fallout from the ban, and he predicts when enterprises may have the opportunity to finally utilize 5G's high speeds and low latency.

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• An IPO and direct listing structures could be combined so as to receive the best of both methods. But just because they could be, doesn't mean they will be.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

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• Nearly a third of senior executives at some of the world's top investment firms said cannabis was the industry with the highest growth potential this year, in a survey conducted on-site at the accounting firm EisnerAmper's 4th Annual Alternative Investment Summit. 
• Cannabis followed closely behind tech and was well ahead of healthcare. 
• Though investors are excited about cannabis, there are numerous roadblocks for funds that want to invest. 

Senior executives at the world's top investment firms are turning their attention to cannabis.

Nearly a third of senior executives polled in a recent survey by accounting firm EisnerAmper's said that cannabis is the industry that shows the greatest growth potential this year. 

Cannabis ranks a close second behind tech,  and well ahead of healthcare, the survey results showed. 

The survey polled 120 senior leaders in the private equity, hedge fund, venture capital, and institutional investor space. 

Read more: A New York private equity firm founded by JPMorgan and Guggenheim veterans is raising the largest-ever fund dedicated to the booming marijuana industry

As a subset of the survey, hedge funders were perhaps the most bullish on cannabis, with 37% responding that cannabis is the industry with the most growth potential this year. 

A blue-sky projection from the Bank of Montreal estimates that the total market for cannabis, including hemp, CBD, and both medicinal and consumer THC products, could reach $194 billion by 2025 if the US federally legalizes the plant. 

It's a huge jump for an industry that was, for all intents and purposes, illegal in most of the US as recently as 2012. And as investor sentiment around cannabis has gotten stronger, so has deal flow.

VCs poured $1.3 billion in 150 cannabis deals in the first half of 2019, up from just over $1 billion total for 2018, according to the data provider PitchBook. For comparison, VCs invested under $100 million in 49 cannabis deals just five years ago in 2014. 

A good chunk of this year's number came from cannabis vaporizer company Pax Labs which raised a whopping $420 million at a $1.7 billion valuation in April. The vape company is looking to go public next year, Business Insider previously reported. 

Cannabis buyout activity is increasing as well. Last year, private equity firms spent $474 million across 19 transactions, according to PitchBook, with this year already on pace to surpass 2018. 

Read more: Biotech, CBD drinks, and a hot vape company: Here's where all the top marijuana VCs are looking to write checks this year

Despite investor interest around the cannabis industry, severe roadblocks remain for mainstream investor participation.

For one, cannabis is not federally legal in the US. That means that bigger, institutionally-backed private equity or venture capital funds generally won't take the risk to invest in the sector — even in companies that don't actually sell or distribute THC — over fears of federal prosecution.

Many of the investors in these funds have clauses that don't allow cannabis investments. Those roadblocks, however, have given rise to a number of cannabis-specific funds that are able to take advantage of the lack of institutional players in the nascent sector. These funds, such as Tuatara Capital, are generally backed by high net worth individuals or family offices and are able to take on the risks that, say, pension funds can't.

Funds like Tuatara have grown in consort with the companies they back. Business Insider reported in February that Tuatara is raising $375 million for its second cannabis-focused fund, up from $93 million for its first fund in 2016.

Behind Tuatara, there's a growing ecosystem of smaller funds including Altitude Investment Management, Poseidon Asset Management, and Merida Capital, among others.

• Read more:
• Top venture investors say these 11 tech startups in the red-hot cannabis sector are set to blow up this year
• Top investors say these 11 buzzy, under-the-radar consumer cannabis startups are set to raise fresh rounds and blow up this year
• CBD companies were courted hard by a unit of US Bank — but they got ghosted despite having a 100% legal business
• Top cannabis investors reveal where they're placing bets, but say there's 'pain to come' in the crowded CBD space

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