Davemichels

Google today announced that it will invest $13 billion in data centers and offices across the U.S. in 2019. That’s up from $9 billion in investments last year. Many of these investments will go to states like Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Texas, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Virginia, where Google plans new or expanded data centers. Though like most years, it’ll also continue to expand many of its existing offices in Seattle, Chicago and New York, as well as in its home state of California.

Given Google’s push for more cloud customers, it’s also interesting to see that the company continues to expand its data center presence across the country. Google will soon open its first data centers in Nevada, Nebraska, Ohio and Texas, for example, and it will expand its Oklahoma, South Carolina and Virginia data centers. Google clearly isn’t slowing down in its race to compete with AWS and Azure.

“These new investments will give us the capacity to hire tens of thousands of employees, and enable the creation of more than 10,000 new construction jobs in Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Texas, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Virginia,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai writes today. “With this new investment, Google will now have a home in 24 total states, including data centers in 13 communities. 2019 marks the second year in a row we’ll be growing faster outside of the Bay Area than in it.”

Given the current backlash against many tech companies and automation in general, it’s probably no surprise that Google wants to emphasize the number of jobs it is creating (and especially jobs in Middle America). The construction jobs are obviously temporary, though, and data centers don’t need a lot of employees to operate once they are up and running. Still, Google promises that this will give it the “capacity to hire tens of thousands of employees.”

• Google Cloud announced Tuesday that it will make Cloud Services Platform (CSP), its hybrid cloud offering, available as a beta for customers.
• Hybrid cloud is the model where companies keep some of their data on their own servers, and some in massive public cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. Microsoft, in particular, has been seen as the leader in hybrid cloud, though Amazon has dipped its toe in. 
• CSP started under former Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene, but company officials say that new CEO Thomas Kurian has embraced it as a way to reach larger enterprise customers. 
• Analysts say that this is a smart move from Google Cloud, reflecting the realities of modern IT.

Google Cloud announced Tuesday that it's releasing a beta of its hybrid cloud platform to customers — a major next step for a strategy that's over two years in the works, and that's embraced by new Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.

Hybrid cloud refers to the idea of running some software on your own servers, and some in massive so-called public clouds like Amazon's, Microsoft's, or Google's. This is a very attractive proposition for customers who can't or won't move all of their data into the public cloud, including those in regulated industries like health or finance.

Cloud Services Platform (CSP), which Google Cloud first announced last year, allows customers to build, run and manage their computing infrastructure in such a hybrid environment. Now, customers can actually start using it to run software and services that run across their own data centers and Google Cloud itself. 

It's not clear if Google Cloud is charging customers for the duration of this beta. We've reached out to the company for clarification and will update if we hear back.

Google's hybrid offering is software-based, and built on top of Kubernetes and Istio — very popular open source projects that were first created at Google. Since it's a software package, customers don't need to buy any hardware; just download it and install it on your own server to get started. Google says that you don't even need to move to the cloud right away to get benefits; it gives a strong foundation for modern software development on its own. 

"There's no need for a lengthy lift and shift," Eyal Manor, vice president of Google Cloud, told Business Insider. "They have the best modern technologies right now to build software. If the customer decides to move to the cloud in three years, it works the same way on the cloud and it works on-premises."

The competitive landscape

Google Cloud's most major competitors have already made moves into this hybrid world.

Microsoft, in particular, has long played up the integrations between its Windows Server products and its Microsoft Azure cloud as a major competitive strength, taking advantage of its long pre-existing customer relationships. Amazon, for its part, announced AWS Outposts last November, which will be generally available to customers in the second half of this year.

Manor says that Amazon's move into hybrid cloud did not influence Google Cloud in any way, as this strategy has been in the works for over two years. 

"We feel we are ahead of the market with a unique solution," Manor said. "[CSP is] unique because it's the only hybrid solution that's based on open source. It's the only modern hybrid cloud so it enables modern development."

Manor says that when Kurian joined as CEO in January, he "immediately embraced" this strategy as a way to reach larger enterprise customers. This announcement comes a day after Google Cloud announced it would acquire data migration startup Alooma.

Read more: The new CEO of Google Cloud explains the updated master plan for taking on Amazon Web Services

"Thomas has deep experience coming from the enterprise market in his prior life. He fit in very quickly," Manor said. "He is very focused on enterprise customers."

Targeting the largest enterprises

Manor says that Google Cloud has been working closely with enterprise customers to bring CSP to maturity. The team decided to work on a hybrid offering because, while the cloud is growing fast, most large companies still have plenty of software that's not so easy to just pick up and move from their on-premises (often called on-prem) servers.

Manor believes that the hybrid cloud will be here to stay for the next five to ten years, and Google is moving to accommodate after years of focusing solely on the public cloud. 

"Initially we were focused on the cloud. From meeting large enterprise customers, I've heard a few common themes," Manor said. "They have to stay on premise for a few more years. At the same time, they wanted to enjoy the latest cloud technologies. The second thing I heard from literally every CIO is, 'I need to accelerate. I need to be able to release software everyday. Hey Google, I need you to help me move faster.'"

Google Cloud does not have a planned date to announce for general availability, but Manor said it expects to announce it "very soon," as in, within weeks, rather than months.

"We feel the market is ready," Manor said. "The customers are much more knowledgeable about cloud services. Customers are very smart. They want the latest."

Analysts react

Google believes it can stand out by helping enterprises who want to modernize their apps, using artificial intelligence and cutting-edge open source tools like Kubernetes. 

And because CSP makes use of those open source foundations, it means that customers aren't necessarily locked in to using Google Cloud — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and most major cloud providers all have support for Kubernetes, meaning it won't necessarily be so hard for customers to move some or all of their software to other clouds. Perhaps counterintuitively, that could be a good thing for Google. 

"What delivers value is building better apps and workloads for the business," Maribel Lopez, founder and principal analyst of Lopez Research, told Business Insider.  "You as a cloud provider want to provide the hammers and nails for that. That's what Google is trying to do with their business cloud strategy."

Read more: Everything you need to know about Kubernetes, the Google-created open source software so popular even Microsoft and Amazon had to adopt it

In general, the analysts we spoke to see CSP as a well-aimed competitive shot at AWS and Microsoft, and reflects the growing maturity of Google Cloud's strategy. 

"Everybody seems to have gotten over this notion that was pretty much taken as gospel a few years ago, that everything is inevitably going to move to public clouds and there was nothing that's going to be left on-prem," Melanie Posey, research vice president and general manager for 451 Research, told Business Insider.

"What we're starting to see now is some kind of hybrid or multi-cloud environment is going to be how enterprise does things for the foreseeable future," she says. 

She also sees CSP as a way for Google Cloud to target more enterprise customers, and points out that both Kurian and his predecessor Diane Greene come from very traditional IT vendors — Kurian came to Google from Oracle, while Greene is best-known as the cofounder of VMware. 

"It's pretty telling that so far that the two CEOs of Google Cloud are really people who made their name and cut their name in the enterprise business," Posey said.  "That's one way Google Cloud is going to continue building in the future."

More than anything, Lopez says, it's a sign that while Amazon may be leading in the cloud wars, Google isn't taking it lying down.

"It's going to be an epic battle that will make 2019 and 2020 very interesting," Lopez said. "Even though we're 12 years into the cloud market, we are entering the next generation for the cloud market. You know how you turned around and suddenly everyone was using a mobile phone? This period right now is you turn around and everyone's going to be using cloud."

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June 15th, 2010. That was the first time that I, along with a majority of other tech bloggers and journalists, first got my hands on a Samsung Galaxy S. I’d love to say that there was a sense of a historical moment about the event, but in all honesty, the phone market was so diverse and dynamic at the time that it just felt like yet another intriguing pocket computer vying for our attention alongside the likes of the Toshiba TG01, HTC Evo 4G, and Nokia N8. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I want to look back on why Samsung’s phone grew into a global smartphone dynasty while all of the others faded away. I also want to also consider what Samsung needs to do with the Galaxy S10 to keep its winning streak going into the future.

The...

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• Lawmakers are increasingly building up their personal brands on social media, including Twitter, in order to advance their policy goals and political ambitions. 
• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the most-followed member of Congress by a large margin, boasting three million followers and counting. 
• Several other members of the Democratic House leadership team have one million followers or more, but their Republican counterparts seem to rely less on Twitter.
• Here's a breakdown of how many followers freshman and senior members of Congress from both parties have compared to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 

Lawmakers are increasingly building up their personal brands on social media, including Twitter, in order to advance their policy goals and political ambitions — but Democrats tweet more often and tend to have larger followings than their GOP colleagues. 

A report from DC-based analysis firm Quorum found that in 2018, Twitter was the most popular social media platforms for lawmakers of both parties and across all age groups, followed by Facebook and Instagram. 

Along with her innovative use of Instagram Live, freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York partially fueled her meteoric rise in politics by interacting with fans, "clapping back" at her detractors, and letting her personality shine on Twitter. 

She is also possibly the first-ever lawmaker to have her office eschew sending out traditional press releases to reporters, instead using Twitter to communicate her policy initiatives and respond to major news events. 

Read more: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she writes all her own tweets, and many of them 'never see the light of day'

Ocasio-Cortez is the most-followed member of the House by a large margin, boasting 3.1 million followers on her personal account, @AOC. She also has 124,000 on her official congressional account, which was only created last month.

She, along with fellow Democrat Jim Himes, recently hosted a Twitter workshop to educate their fellow members of Congress on "the most effective ways to engage constituents on Twitter and the importance of digital storytelling," USA Today reported.

The rest of the most-followed freshman Democrats are fellow young progressive women including Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — who Ocasio-Cortez considers part of her "squad." 

While they all heavily rely on Twitter as part of their social media and communications strategies, Omar  recently found herself in hot water after posting tweets critical of pro-Israel lobbying that were widely denounced as anti-Semitic. 

Read more: Jack Dorsey says Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is 'mastering' Twitter, but Elon Musk is his favourite tweeter

The second most-followed member of the House is Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, who has served in the chamber since 1987 and previously presided as speaker from 2007 to 2011. She's maintained a professional account since 2008 which now has 2.2 million followers. 

After Pelosi, the other most-followed senior Democrats are civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis of Georgia and Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, who have around one million followers each. Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters also boasts 982,000 followers.

Even though Twitter is the most popular social media platform among members of Congress, Democrats tweet at significantly higher rates than Republicans.

The Quorum report concluded that in 2018, Twitter accounts belonging to Democratic lawmakers posted 42% more tweets than those belonging to Republicans. 

The most-followed GOP representative is freshman Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas with 319,000 followers, which is around 10% of Ocasio-Cortez's total following.

Read more: Dan Crenshaw wants to make the GOP 'cool' again

Like Ocasio-Cortez, Crenshaw is a charismatic millennial member of Congress who is particularly adept at using Twitter to engage his supporters, including recently making a joke comparing the progressive Green New Deal legislation to the failed Fyre Festival. 

The second and third most-followed Republicans are Minority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana with 291,000 followers and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California with 236,000. 

"I think we both inherently understand how to reach people with wildly different views," Crenshaw told the Washington Examiner of the similarities between his and Ocasio-Cortez's social media strategies.  

"She's also much more combative. I try not to be as combative. That's about where the comparison ends," Crenshaw added.

SEE ALSO: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez replaces Nancy Pelosi as Republicans' new boogeyman for 2020

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Believe it or not, Samsung has done something many of us didn’t think was possible: it has made great software. Tomorrow, it will unveil a pile of new phones — the thoroughly leaked Galaxy S10 lineup — and all them should be running the new “One UI” software, which is built on top of Android 9 Pie.

I’ve been testing One UI on a Galaxy S9 for the past week or so and thus far I really like it. In some ways, I like it better than what Google itself is shipping on the Pixel 3. If it weren’t for the fact that I don’t yet trust Samsung to deliver major software updates quickly, I would be shouting about One UI from the rooftops. As it is, I just want to point out that it’s time for us to stop instinctively turning our noses up at Samsung’s...

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Companies have a "more complicated environment than they had five years ago when they began this journey to simplification," said CEO Chuck Robbins.

Microsoft’s Slack competitor, Microsoft Teams, has been down for hours today. Users are having issues connecting to the chat service, leaving many businesses falling back to email and the ancient form of face-to-face conversations to keep communication going. Microsoft acknowledged the outage two hours ago, but the company hasn’t been able to restore access for all Microsoft Teams users just yet.

Microsoft Teams has replaced Skype for Business as the main communications tool for Office 365 users, and the software giant has been continually tweaking it with updates since its original introduction back in 2017. This appears to be the first significant outage for Microsoft Teams, and it follows several connectivity problems for rival Slack...

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Leaders in the creation of immersive digital experiences, Logitech, recently announced the arrival of their new touch-control display. The innovative Logitech Tap is a simple endpoint solution that makes any collaboration room more natural to use and deploy. Tap is a component of the pre-configured room solutions available for major collaboration platform providers. With Tap, users can easily access everything from Google Hangouts Meet Rooms to Zoom Rooms and Microsoft Teams Rooms.

Like other components in the Logitech conferencing portfolio, Tap is built according to open standards. This allows for a broader range of integrations with room control functions, interactive whiteboards and more.

Transforming the Video Conferencing Market

According to Logitech, the new system will help to overcome tech challenges in meeting rooms, like managing the remote control and starting video calls. Logitech Room Solutions also simplify the use and deployment of video conferencing in any meeting room. Coupled with today’s leading collaboration software, companies can launch effective conferences better than ever before.

Logitech has spent years innovating in the video conferencing market with simple, effective and high-quality devices. Through the new Tap solution, Logitech is delivering a new level of meeting control. According to the VP and General Manager of Video Collaboration for Logitech, Scott Wharton, it’s a powerful step forward. As well as enabling one-touch video through a world-leading collaboration platform, Logitech Tap also overcomes the complexities involved with setting up the meeting room. Today’s companies can access a more affordable and premium solution for collaboration.

Overcoming the Issues with Legacy Control Systems

The meeting room control systems that have been available in the past weren’t perfect. Most handheld remotes were complicated, and AV controllers often required custom IT support. While generic tablets provided a cost-effective solution, they weren’t as reliable as they could be. According to an analyst at Recon Research, Ira Weinstein, Tap has given Logitech a way to enhance the meeting room UI problem head-on with a low-profile and enterprise-ready controller. The system works with any collaboration platform or compute solution, but it’s still cost effective for any budget.

As a crucial element in Logitech’s Room Solutions, Tap combines the utility of a meeting room control panel with the flexibility and affordability of a tablet. Through one-touch video calling, Logitech simplifies deployments and takes meeting room experiences to the next level. The system comes with an HDMI input for content sharing, 10.1-inch touchscreen, robust cable retention and more. There’s also a range of wall mounts available for flexible deployment too.

Logitech Tap was on display during the ISE 2019 Amsterdam event. The endpoint is expected to be globally available in the second quarter of 2019, either as part of a room system or as a stand-alone solution.

The latest figures from market analysts Canalys have quantified a trend that many of us might have sensed in 2018: the rise of the Chinese phone in Europe. The year saw huge flagship launch events in Paris hosted by Huawei and Oppo, accompanied by Xiaomi’s gradual expansion into more countries across the continent and OnePlus’ enduring popularity. Canalys says that 32 percent, or roughly one-third, of smartphone shipments in Europe in 2018 were from Chinese manufacturers, with Huawei taking the lion’s share of that with more than 23 percent of the overall market in the final months of the year.

Huawei has been the subject of open hostility from US intelligence agencies, and 2018 was a year when the company’s ambitions to...

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• Google is working on a new low-cost smartphone that would be less expensive than the $749 iPhone XR, according to a new report.
• It's said to be part of an effort to lure new users into Google's software and services ecosystem.
• The launch would come as Apple grapples with slowing iPhone sales. 

When Google launched its first Pixel phone in 2016, it was largely perceived as being the search giant's first premium-grade smartphone that put the company in direct competition with Apple's iPhones. Now, more than two years later, Google is reportedly planning to launch a lower-priced smartphone that's expected to be less expensive than Apple's own low-cost offering, the $749 iPhone XR, according to Nikkei Asian Review.

The cheaper smartphone is said to be part of an effort to entice more users into Google's ecosystem and leverage its software to expand its hardware lineup.  It's a sensible approach for Google given the fact that services like Google Maps, Google Search and Gmail are among the most popular apps used by smartphone owners. The phone will be aimed at budget-conscious consumers and those in emerging markets, while a new premium Pixel phone is also slated for this year, the report says. Google has not immediately responded to Business Insider's request for comment.

The report doesn’t share many details about the phone itself, including whether it will be branded as a Pixel phone or how it will differ from Google’s current and future Pixel phones. But if this low-cost phone does end up being a cheaper Pixel device, it will likely compete directly with Apple’s iPhone XR, which includes some features found on the pricier iPhone XS but not all of them. Like the iPhone XS, the iPhone XR is powered by Apple’s A12 bionic chip and includes its Face ID facial recognition system, but lacks the more premium model’s OLED display.

Google is also reportedly working on new smart speakers, wearables, and web cameras as part of its effort to expand its hardware lineup, which comes just after the search giant made a splashy appearance at the Consumer Electronics Showcase in January. The company heavily flaunted the Google Assistant during the annual tech conference, its rival to Amazon's Alexa that powers Google's smart speaker lineup and other third-party gadgets. 

Google is also said to have poached hundreds of hardware engineers and supply chain specialists from Apple over the last two years, further expanding the hardware talent it bolstered in 2017 when it acquired 2,000 engineers from rival Android smartphone maker HTC.  

The news comes amidst a slowdown in Apple's iPhone sales as owners are holding onto their iPhones for longer periods of time. Last month, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company's revenue  for the quarter that ended in December would be lower than expected largely due to disappointing iPhone sales in greater China. 

The report doesn't specify when Google plans to unveil this cheaper smartphone, but the company typically debuts its new Pixel smartphones in October, while Apple usually unveils its new iPhones in September. 

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When you think about Infrastructure as a Service, you typically pay for a virtual machine that resides in a multi-tenant environment. That means, it’s using a set of shared resources. For many companies that approach is fine, but when a customer wants more control, they may prefer a single tenant system where they control the entire set of hardware resources. This approach is also known as “bare metal” in the industry, and today AWS announced five new bare metal instances.

You end up paying more for this kind of service because you are getting more control over the processor, storage and other resources on your own dedicated underlying server. This is part of the range of products that all cloud vendors offer. You can have a vanilla virtual machine, with very little control over the hardware, or you can go with bare metal and get much finer grain control over the underlying hardware, something that companies require if they are going to move certain workloads to the cloud.

As AWS describes it in the blog post announcing these new instances, these are for highly specific use cases. “Bare metal instances allow EC2 customers to run applications that benefit from deep performance analysis tools, specialized workloads that require direct access to bare metal infrastructure, legacy workloads not supported in virtual environments, and licensing-restricted Tier 1 business critical applications,” the company explained.

The five new products, called m5.metal, m5d.metal, r5.metal, r5d.metal, and z1d.metal (catchy names there, Amazon) offer a variety of resources:

Chart courtesy of Amazon

These new offerings are available starting today as on-demand, reserved or spot instances, depending on your requirements.

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In November, on the day Amazon announced the winners of its contest for a second headquarters, I suggested that the company had fatally misunderstood the current relationship between tech giants and public opinion:

It’s hard not to feel today as if the company misread the room — overestimating the public’s appetite for a billion-dollar giveaway to one of the world’s biggest companies, and underestimating the public’s ability to raise hell on- and offline. Amazon may yet feel that pain, in the long run.

Today, the long run arrived. In a move that had been foreshadowed by an earlier report in the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, Amazon said today that it would abandon its plans for a New York regional office. Public sentiment had,...

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Slack has become a critical communications tool for many organizations. One of the things that has driven its rapid success has been the ability to connect to external enterprise apps inside of Slack, giving employees what is essentially a centralized work hub. This ability has led to some unintended consequences around formatting issues, which Slack addressed today with two new tools, Block Kit and Block Kit Builder.

Block Kit lets developers present dense content in a much more visually appealing way, while Block Kit Builder is a prototyping tool for building more attractive apps inside Slack. The idea is to provide a way to deliver content inside of Slack without having to do workarounds to make the content look good.

Before and after applying Block Kit. Screen: Slack

Bear Douglas, who is Slack’s director of developer of relations, says developers have been quite creative up until now when it comes to formatting, but the company has been working to simplify it. Today’s announcement is the culmination of that work.

“Block Kit makes it easier for people to quickly design a customized app in Slack. We’ve launched a no-code builder that will let people design the messages that they show inside Slack,” she explained.

She said that while this tool is really designed for people with some programming or Slack admin-level knowledge, the ultimate goal is to make it easy enough for non-technical end users to build apps in Slack, something that is on the road map. What enhancing these tools does, however, is show people just what is possible inside of Slack.

“When people see Block Kit in action, it is illuminating about what can be done, and it helps them understand that it doesn’t just need to be your communications center or [something that pings you] when your website blows up. You can actually get work done inside of Slack,” she said.

One other advantage of using Block Kit is that apps will display messages consistently, whether you are using the web or mobile. Prior to having these tools, workarounds might have looked fine on the web, but the spacing might have been off on mobile or vice versa. Block Kit lets you design consistent interfaces across platforms.

Among the tools Slack is offering, none is actually earth-shattering, but in total they provide users with the ability to format their content in a way that makes sense using common design elements like image containers, dividers and sections. They are also offering buttons, drop-down menus and a calendar picker.

Both of these tools are available starting today in the Block Kit hub.

Upskirting is now a criminal offense in England and Wales after campaigners lobbied for years for the UK government to outlaw the practice.

The new legislation means that individuals convicted of photographing or videoing underneath a person’s clothing without their knowledge for the purpose of sexual gratification or causing humiliation or distress face up to two years in prison. They may also be placed on the sex offenders registry. The law was approved by the UK’s House of Lords earlier this year, but it officially came into force today after the bill received royal assent.

Previously, upskirting could only be prosecuted as a crime against public decency or as voyeurism, but these laws...

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Google Fi is taking a big step into retail today, with Best Buy now selling SIM cards for the MVNO at over 500 of its stores. The Fi SIMs cost $9.99 each at purchase, but you’ll be credited $10 toward your service within a week of activation. Here’s the link where you can check to see if your nearest store is selling them yet.

For now, Best Buy is only selling the Talk and Text SIM cards. If you’re looking for data only — for a tablet, perhaps — you’ve still got to get that directly from Google Fi. But the move to Best Buy shelves is still a significant boost of exposure for Google Fi, which will now be located near other prepaid services and devices at Best Buy locations. Both new and existing Google Fi customers can purchase a SIM,...

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According to comments from a Google engineer on code in the Android Open Source Project, Google is working on a new “2019 Pixel.” Well, duh, of course Google is working on new smartphones for this year. But what’s interesting, as XDA Developers discovered over the weekend, is that the new handset should have better support for dual SIMs. That could mean that the Google Pixel 4 could work better on two different cellular carriers’ networks simultaneously instead of having just one enabled and the other disabled (and forcing you to choose which is which).

In fact, the dual-SIM functionality is in active “dogfooding” on the Google Pixel 3 right now, meaning that Google is already testing it internally on a phone you might be using today. We...

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• More people than ever before are interested in streaming live TV services like Hulu with Live TV and YouTube TV.
• UBS predicts these newer services from YouTube and Hulu will have more subscribers than similar internet-based options launched by traditional pay-TV providers like Sling TV (by Dish) and DirecTV Now by 2020.
• Though UBS sees the demand for these services increasing, it also sees fewer people who will "double up" by subscribing to both a streaming TV package and a cable or satellite one.

There is a power shift underway in the live TV streaming world, with bundles launched by Hulu and YouTube continuing to gain steam, even as the subscriber growth of similar packages launched by traditional pay-TV providers stall.

In a report distributed Monday, UBS analysts predicted that Hulu with Live TV and YouTube TV would continue to grow through 2020, while Dish's Sling TV would plateau and AT&T's DirecTV Now would falter.

The chart below shows how the analysts think the market will shake out over the next two years:

UBS based these projections partially on the strong consumer interest shown in Hulu and YouTube in a survey conducted in November.

55% of respondents to the UBS survey said they were interested in Hulu with Live TV, and 38% are considering YouTube TV.

Here are the full results:

AT&T stunned the industry last month by sharing that DirecTV Now had lost 267,000 subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2018. UBS expects that negative trend to continue in 2019 as promotional pricing expires for many subscribers.

"After aggressive promotional ramp, we expect DirecTV Now subscribers to decline in 2019 (consistent with 4Q18) given the recent price hike and customers coming off promotional pricing," the analysts wrote. "With AT&T's focus on achieving EBITDA stability in its Entertainment segment, we expect Watch TV (skinnier Streaming TV service) to be AT&T's primary promotional tool going forward."

Satellite TV packages are in a slow secular decline and these new streaming packages, like DirecTV Now and Sling TV, were supposed to pick up the slack. If they fail to sustain growth, it could have brutal consequences for companies like DirecTV and Dish. 

READ MORE: Netflix and HBO are fighting over the original TV crown, but the number of hours Netflix is putting out is overwhelming

While interest in streaming TV is rising, the UBS survey showed that fewer people were likely to "double up" on services — subscribing to both an internet TV service as well as a traditional cable or satellite one — "reversing an earlier dynamic where customers kept both as they tested new platforms," the analysts said.

"As streaming alternatives become mainstream and transmission quality continues to improve, we believe households with dual subscriptions will fall," the analysts wrote. "This is supported by survey results, which have shown a steady decrease in the percentage of respondents with Streaming and traditional pay TV subscriptions. Intent for cancelling dual subscriptions is also on the rise. Over 40% of respondents suggested they would cancel their pay TV subscription if they signed up for Streaming TV, up from 31% in the May 2018 survey."

SEE ALSO: 'High Flying Bird' is Netflix's first hit original movie of 2019, and it was shot on an iPhone

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Insect populations are collapsing worldwide and may vanish within a century, according to new research.

More than 40 percent of insects are at risk of extinction within the 21st century as a result of human pressures such as habitat loss, invasive species, pesticide pollution, and climate change, says the analysis published in Biological Conservation.

“Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades,” warned Francisco Sánchez-Bayo, an entomologist at the University of Sydney, and Kris Wyckhuys, an insect ecologist at the China Academy of Agricultural Sciences, who authored the new study. “The repercussions this will have for the planet’s ecosystems are catastrophic to say the least.”

As key species in global food webs, insects play a major role in natural ecosystems and agriculture, both of which humans rely on for food and survival. Without pollinators such as bees, ants, and butterflies, major cash crops will not be able to grow.

Insects are also crucial to the diets of many birds, fish, and mammals that humans eat. Losing them could reduce the world’s food supply, and cause other ecological ripple effects.

Scientists have been raising red flags about the downward spiral of insect populations for decades. Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys synthesized information from 73 of these previous reports about insect declines to estimate the rate at which insects are disappearing as a whole.

The team found that the world’s total insect biomass is decreasing at a rate of 2.5 percent per year—eight times the pace of decline for mammal, bird, and reptile populations. This trend suggests bugs could be virtually wiped out in 100 years, which should be “alarming,” the team said.

“We wanted to really wake people up,” Sánchez-Bayo told the Guardian. “It is a big concern.”

Insect populations started declining in the 20th century, and have been rapidly falling since the 1950s. The families suffering the biggest drops on land are Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths), Hymenoptera (including bees and ants), and Coleoptera (dung beetles). Aquatic species such as stoneflies, mayflies, and dragonflies are also experiencing serious losses.

The study lays the bulk of the blame on industrial agriculture, which has caused widespread habitat loss and has saturated wild and farmed environments with insect-killing pesticides.

“The main cause of the decline is agricultural intensification,” Sánchez-Bayo said. “That means the elimination of all trees and shrubs that normally surround the fields, so there are plain, bare fields that are treated with synthetic fertilisers and pesticides.”

Read More: Colony Collapse Disorder Is Spreading to Wild Bees

Invasive species and disease are also factors, as is climate change. Warming temperatures have caused devastating insect collapses in Puerto Rico, for instance, which lost 98 percent of its ground rainforest bugs in just 35 years.

Insects have been on Earth for more than 400 million years, and are a core food source for countless animals and even some plants—not to mention their central role in crop reproduction.

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As it celebrates its 10th anniversary this week, Okta, the $9 billion security and identity management company, has released its annual report of the fastest-growing work apps of the year.

This is the fifth year that Okta, which now has over 100 million users, has released this annual report. Okta provides identity and access management solutions — in other words, it helps companies manage who has access to which apps. By that token, it's in a pretty good position to track which apps are on the rise in the workplace. 

Okta CEO and co-founder Todd McKinnon says that the company has been able to track the rise of Slack, which went from zero to a fixture of the enterprise software space in only a few years. Now, Slack is listed on the report as one of the most popular apps of 2018.

"It's interesting to talk about and interesting for people think about their technology landscape," McKinnon told Business Insider. "We really started doing this report because customers were asking for it. A customer might say, 'We've grown really fast. What do other customers that are twice as big use?'"

In the past year, McKinnon has seen a greater emphasis on security-based work apps than in the past.

"People are using more security technologies," McKinnon told Business Insider. "Everyone's worried about making headlines and having employees get phishing attacks."

Read more: Okta soared 10% after blockbuster earnings, and a Wall Street analyst says the $7 billion company is becoming a real competitor to Microsoft

McKinnon says that compared to 10 years ago, people have lost trust in technology, thanks to an increasing number of privacy and security breaches in the news. That's why demand for security apps is on the rise. 

"In the last ten years, there's been more technical progress, mobile phones, all that," McKinnon said. "What's changed is that people trust technology less now. We want to bring trust back to technology. That's what we're trying to do."

Here are the 10 fastest-growing apps of 2018, according to Okta:

10. Teem

Teem, recently acquired by WeWork, helps companies manage meetings and book conference rooms. What's more, it can manage visitors and track workplace analytics about how workspaces are being used. 

9. RingCentral

$7.79 billion RingCentral is a phone, team messaging and video conferencing system. This all-in-one system can be used to help teams collaborate and to help companies communicate better with customers.

8. Freshservice

Freshservice is an IT service desk product from the company Freshworks. It can be used to manage IT incidents and provide support via email, a self-service portal, phone, chat, or in person.

• Smoke detected at a Wells Fargo facility on Thursday caused the shutdown of a data center that led to a large-scale outage, leaving customers without the use of their debit cards or access to online banking. 
• A Wells Fargo spokesperson did not comment on whether the incident was connected to its data center in Minnesota, where a fire suppression system was accidentally tripped early Thursday morning. 
• CNBC first reported the incident, but later said the fire department found no evidence of a fire. 
• This is not the first time the San Francisco-based bank has experienced a shutdown this sprawling. 

Smoke detected at one of Wells Fargo's main data center facilities caused a large-scale outage Thursday that left customers without access to online banking or working debit cards. The outage continued into Friday, the company said, though some of its ATM services have been restored and branches are operational.

Customers complained that direct deposit paychecks were not reflected in their account and representatives were overwhelmed with requests that caused 2-hour wait times. 

This is not the first time the San Francisco-based bank has seen a shutdown so sprawling — in fact, this is the second time customers experienced loss of access to banking services just this week. 

A Wells Fargo spokesperson declined to specify how many people have been impacted and which facility smoke was detected in, instead offered the following statement:

"The system issues were caused by an automatic power shutdown at one of Wells Fargo’s main data-center facilities, triggered by a smoke condition created by routine maintenance activities in the building. In response to the power shutdown, applications were systematically re-routed to back-up data centers throughout the day yesterday. By end-of-day, most critical systems had been recovered, and Wells Fargo continues to restore services across all business and operational areas. Wells Fargo continues to see high call volume and online and mobile traffic. Team members are aggressively working to resolve customer issues. Any Wells Fargo fees incurred as a result of these issues will be reversed."

CNBC reported Thursday that the fire department was deployed to a data center operated by Wells Fargo in Minnesota where a fire suppression system (typically ceiling water sprinklers) was accidentally tripped. Though, later, no evidence of a fire was found. Whether or not this is the incident that caused the outage is not known nor addressed in any of the press releases or statements Wells Fargo has made in the last 24 hours. 

In a tweet, Wells Fargo assured customers that the outage was not the result of "any cybersecurity event."

The bank then apologized to customers for any inconvenience caused by the system issues, and said it would reverse any Wells Fargo fees incurred. When customers will see accurate banking statements is also unknown. 

Wells Fargo will extend its branches' operating hours at all 5,500 locations one hour Friday and Saturday, according to a press release, to "address any concerns."

Some customers who have been unable to access their Wells Fargo accounts have threatened to find a new bank and took to social media to express frustration. Online banking features like credit card and mortgage balances are still unavailable, the company said in a statement Friday morning. 

Wells Fargo is the third-largest bank in America. 

The second outage in 7 days

Earlier this week, on Feb. 1, Wells Fargo took to Twitter to apologize to customers experiencing problems with its online banking and mobile app. The bank said it would research the issue, though did not explain what caused it. 

The latest outage has customers wondering: How can something as small as smoke in one isolated location cause a shutdown of banking services of a corporation that does business globally? 

CBS reports that last December, Wells Fargo blamed a computer glitch for an error affecting an estimated 545 customers who lost their homes. It then filed papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission, revealing it incorrectly denied 870 loan modification requests where over 60% of homeowners went into foreclosure.

But this sort of small incident is not an issue that has only impacted Wells Fargo. A similar outage at Bank of America happened in 2017, where customers were reportedly in the same situation thousands of Wells Fargo customers experienced Thursday — unable to access their accounts through the bank’s website or apps.

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NOW WATCH: Here's how to use Apple's time-saving app that will make your life easier

Amazon’s proposed 25,000-employee office in Queens, New York, may not go forward after all, according to a report from The Washington Post. Citing local opposition from activist groups and politicians, two sources tell the Post that the company is reexamining the deal and mulling over whether to move its planned second headquarters elsewhere. Amazon has not yet leased or purchased office space in the Long Island City area where it’s scheduled to expand upon an existing satellite office, which may make the matter a little easier.

Additionally, in Virginia, where Amazon announced its other 25,000-employee expansion in the Crystal City suburb in Arlington, legislators spent a mere nine minutes debating a $750 million incentive package...

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Microsoft killed off the Internet Explorer brand nearly four years ago, choosing Edge as its modern browser for Windows 10. Internet Explorer lived on as plumbing for Windows and for business compatibility, but Microsoft isn’t supporting it with new web standards – it’s legacy code. Chris Jackson, a cybersecurity expert in Microsoft’s Windows division, has now outlined what he calls the “perils of using Internet Explorer as your default browser.”

While most consumers are likely using Chrome, Firefox, or Edge, a number of businesses still rely on Internet Explorer for older web apps that haven’t been modernized. Microsoft has tried many different ways to push businesses to improve their older web apps, but IT admins have naturally taken...

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The concept of “zero rating”—or the process of an internet service provider exempting certain content from broadband usage caps—has been controversial for several years now. But a new study suggests that ISP claims that zero rating saves consumers money are largely nonsense, and countries where the practice is avoided see lower wireless data prices overall.

Comcast sends this on-screen popup to users who get close to eroding their usage allotments.

Many ISPs now implement caps on how much data customers can use in a month, charging you extra should you go over said limit. Data suggests these limits don’t serve any real purpose outside of charging captive customers more money, and as a deterrent for users who quit an ISP’s traditional TV services in favor of streaming video alternatives.

“My opinion is that caps make little technical sense, and I believe that the fundamental reason for capping is to prevent disruption of the television entertainment business model that feeds the TV screens in most households,” Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic.net, a small DSL provider based in Santa Rosa, California, said in 2016.

In more recent years, ISPs have been pushing the idea of zero rating, which involves exempting select content from these arbitrary limits. AT&T, for example, now routinely exempts its own streaming content from its usage caps, yet still penalizes users should they use a competitor like Netflix. Comcast engages in the same behavior on its cable broadband network.

The anticompetitive and free speech issues with letting ISPs determine which services get an unfair advantage on the network should be fairly obvious. But broadband providers have tried to downplay those concerns by claiming that zero rating saves consumers money, and should be seen as akin to a 1-800 number for data or the bandwidth equivalent of free shipping.

Consumers, who often don’t understand that broadband usage caps are bogus cash grabs in the first place, often buy into the argument that they’re getting something for free by being allowed to bypass them.

But a new multi-year study by the non-profit Epicenter.works challenges those assumptions. The study, which took a look at wireless data prices in 30 European Union nations, found that the cost of wireless data plans were notably more expensive in countries that allowed zero rating as opposed to those that have prohibited the practice.

In 2016, the European Union's Body of European Regulators of Electronic Communications (BEREC) passed net neutrality rules for all of the EU, but it’s up to each individual EU country to determine how best to enforce them. Some EU member countries have specifically prohibited zero rating, while others have allowed the practice.

According to the study, EU member countries absent of zero rating saw a double digit drop in the cost of wireless data service after one year, while EU countries that embraced the practice saw wireless data prices increase.

“The existence or introduction of zero-rating offers is associated with markets which exhibit price developments that are adverse to consumers,” the study found.

The reason: once ISPs begin zero rating some content, they often jack up the overall costs to access other content—in a bid to make their preferred content more attractive.

Groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have long complained that zero rating also distorts the market in favor of the internet’s wealthiest companies. ESPN could, for example, pay AT&T to exempt its own traffic from these arbitrary limits, harming smaller competitors, educational institutions, startups, or non profits that can’t afford to pay for preferred treatment.

The EFF specifically addressed such concerns ahead of AT&T’s $86 billion merger with HBO, predicting that the ISP would be likely to give its own content an unfair competitive advantage on its networks via zero rating, something that quickly came true on several fronts.

“Zero rating by wireless carriers has effectively become a tool for them to direct their user traffic under the guise of giving consumers a benefit,” EFF lawyer Ernesto Falcon told Motherboard in an email.

“This EU study reveals that it actually is a more covert way to raise prices and increase their profits with the added benefit of anti-competitive self dealing,” he added. “This is particularly problematic with low-income users, which tend to be people of color, because they can only afford wireless broadband services and forgo wireline connections where zero rating is not a predominant practice.”

While the FCC’s since-discarded 2015 net neutrality rules didn’t specifically ban zero rating, the rules did give the FCC leeway to act if zero rating was being implemented anti-competitively.

But the FCC acted too slowly. In late 2016 it warned both AT&T and Verizon the agency would likely be taking action against this practice, but those efforts were cut short by the election of Donald Trump and his subsequent appointment of current FCC boss Ajit Pai, who proceeded to kill net neutrality rules entirely at the behest of industry.

Pai has subsequently made it clear in statements he has no intent of policing usage caps or ISPs that use such limits anti-competitively, while parroting industry claims that zero rating is akin to “free data.”

“These free-data plans have proven to be popular among consumers, particularly low-income Americans, and have enhanced competition in the wireless marketplace,” Pai said. “Going forward, the FCC will not focus on denying Americans free data. Instead, we will concentrate on expanding broadband deployment and encouraging innovative service offerings.”

In the years since, competition has forced some wireless carriers to bring back unlimited data plans for those willing to pay more. But even under these plans ISPs often impose arbitrary restrictions. Verizon for example now throttles all video on its network, only allowing you to view content in full HD if users pay the company an additional toll. 4K video is banned entirely.

In the wake of the federal repeal of net neutrality rules, several states have passed their own net neutrality protections. California’s pending net neutrality rules only allow ISPs to zero rate content if an entire class of content is exempted from usage caps (say, video or games), but prohibits ISPs from giving specific companies (including their own) preferential treatment.

There’s a chance that a current lawsuit could restore the FCC’s 2015 net neutrality rules. If that doesn’t happen and Congress is required to craft a new law, activists believe that a ban on anti-competitive zero rating will be integral in preventing the wealthiest content companies from buying their way to an unfair advantage.

“It’s essential that when we restore net neutrality federally, that it includes a prohibition on the type of zero rating practices where an ISP is giving its own products and affiliated services preferential treatment if we want to promote affordability and an open wireless Internet market,” Falcon said.

• Twitter on Thursday disclosed it daily active user figures for the first time.
• At least nominally, the figures are 48% lower than Snapchat's
• But Twitter warned that its daily user numbers aren't comparable with those of other companies.
• The social networking company will stop releasing its number of monthly active users, a figure which has been declining.

Twitter may get a lot more attention in the media than Snapchat, but it has a lot fewer daily users, at least at first glance.

On Thursday, Donald Trump's favorite social network disclosed for the first time its average number of daily users — 126 million in the fourth quarter. That was up from about 124 million in the third quarter and from about 116 million in the fourth quarter of 2017, it said.

Twitter released the figures as part of its fourth-quarter earnings report. The company's results topped expectations, but its stock fell 10% on the news.

Read this: Twitter is sliding despite beating Wall Street expectations

By itself, the disclosure had to please investors, who have long clamored for Twitter to release its daily user count. Previously, the company disclosed only the percent by which DAUs changed on an annual basis. Shareholders also had to be somewhat encouraged that the number continues to grow.

Audience size is of course important to advertisers, who want to know how many people their marketing messages can potentially reach.

Twitter seems to have fewer users than Snapchat

However, when compared the daily active user numbers at other social networking companies, Twitter's user count looks pretty anemic.

Take Snapchat. Snap's app has been bashed for the decline of its user base over the last year. But it still had 186 million daily active users in the fourth quarter. That's about 48% larger than Twitter's.

And then there's Facebook. It had 1.5 billion daily users worldwide in the fourth quarter.

In a letter to shareholders, Twitter officials warned they shouldn't stack up its daily user figures next to those of other companies. Twitter's daily user count, which it calls monetizable daily active users (mDAU), includes only those customers to which it can show ads, because they log into its own website or apps, rather than accessing Twitter through a third-party service or app.

By contrast, Twitter officials said, competitors' user metrics often include eyeballs to which they can't show ads.

"We considered changing our disclosure to be comparable to other companies, but our goal was not to disclose the largest daily active user number we could," Twitter officials said in their letter. "We want to align our external stakeholders around one metric that reflects our goal of delivering value to people on Twitter every day and monetizing that usage."

Twitter will no longer report its monthly user numbers

But in giving something new to shareholders, Twitter also is taking something away. The company said it will no longer disclose its number of monthly active users after the first quarter of this year.

"MDAU will be the metric we use to show the size of our audience and engagement going forward," officials said in the letter.

While Twitter's daily user count has been edging upward, its monthly user base — which offers a broader look at how many people access the service on a regular, if not daily, basis — has been trending downward. In the fourth quarter, it had 321 monthly active users. That was down from 326 million in the third quarter and 330 million in the fourth quarter of 2017.

Twitter said the decline was due to in part to changes it made to comply with Europe's General Data Privacy Regulation and to its decision to reduce the number of notifications it sent by email to users.

SEE ALSO: Snap's stock jumped 22% Wednesday. Here's why investors are way too excited about its latest results.

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Facebook is adding new management tools and features for groups today, as the company increasingly tries to encourage meaningful conversations and sees tight-knit communities as one way to do that.

Group administrators will now be able to format their posts with larger text, block quotes, and bulleted lists. All groups will also now be able to use Facebook’s mentorship feature, which allows administrators to pair people up to work together on skill development or other support programs.

More groups are gaining the ability to offer subscriptions, too, letting them create separate content and conversations for dedicated members. That feature was introduced last June, but it’s still...

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Earlier this week, Slack announced that it has filed the paperwork to go public at some point later this year. The big question is, will the company exit into the public markets as expected, or will one of the technology giants swoop in at the last minute with buckets of cash and take them off the market?

Slack, which raised more than $1 billion on an other-worldly $7 billion valuation, is an interesting property. It has managed to grow and be successful while competing with some of the world’s largest tech companies — Microsoft, Cisco, Facebook, Google and Salesforce. Not coincidentally, these deep-pocketed companies could be the ones that come knock, knock, knocking at Slack’s door.

Slack has managed to hold its own against these giants by doing something in this space that hadn’t been done effectively before. It made it easy to plug in other services, effectively making Slack a work hub where you could spend your day because your work could get pushed to you there from other enterprise apps.

As I’ve discussed before, this centralized hub has been a dream of communications tools for most of the 21st century. It began with enterprise IM tools in the early 2000s, and progressed to Enterprise 2.0 tools in the 2007 time frame. That period culminated in 2012 when Microsoft bought Yammer for $1.2 billion, the only billion-dollar exit for that generation of tools.

I remember hearing complaints about Enterprise 2.0 tools. While they had utility, in many ways they were just one more thing employees had to check for information beyond email. The talk was these tools would replace email, but a decade later email’s still standing and that generation of tools has been absorbed.

In 2013, Slack came along, perhaps sensing that Enterprise 2.0 never really got mobile and the cloud, and it recreated the notion in a more modern guise. By taking all of that a step further and making the tool a kind of workplace hub, it has been tremendously successful, growing to 8 million daily users in roughly 4 years, around 3 million of which were the paying variety, at last count.

Slack’s growth numbers as of May 2018

All of this leads us back to the exit question. While the company has obviously filed for IPO paperwork, it might not be the way it ultimately exits. Just the other day CNBC’s Jay Yarrow posited this questions on Twitter:

Not sure where he pulled that number from, but if you figure 3x valuation, that could be the value for a company of this ilk. There would be symmetry in Microsoft buying Slack six years after it plucked Yammer off the market, and it would remove a major competitive piece from the board, while allowing Microsoft access to Slack’s growing customer base.

Nobody can see into the future, and maybe Slack does IPO and takes its turn as a public company, but it surely wouldn’t be a surprise if someone came along with an offer it couldn’t refuse, whatever that figure might be.

T-Mobile CEO John Legere, in a letter to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai yesterday, promised not to increase consumer plan prices for three years if the company’s proposed merger with Sprint is approved. Legere said the combined company will offer “the same or better” rates as either wireless carrier currently does today. T-Mobile and Sprint have said it will take around three years to fully combine their networks.

The merger is a $26 billion deal that would shrink the nation’s major wireless competition from four different providers to three, including AT&T and Verizon. The merger was proposed last April and is working its way through the government for review until regulatory authorities like the FCC and the Justice Department decide whether to...

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Google has shared its cloud revenue exactly once over the last several years. Silence tends to lead to speculation to fill the information vacuum. Luckily there are some analyst firms who try to fill the void, and it looks like Google’s cloud business is actually trending in the right direction, even if they aren’t willing to tell us an exact number.

When Google last reported its cloud revenue, last year about this time, they indicated they had earned $1 billion in revenue for the quarter, which included Google Cloud Platform and G Suite combined. Diane Greene, who was head of Google Cloud at the time, called it an “elite business.” but in reality it was pretty small potatoes compared to Microsoft’s and Amazon’s cloud numbers, which were pulling in $4-$5 billion a quarter between them at the time. Google was looking at a $4 billion run rate for the entire year.

Google apparently didn’t like the reaction it got from that disclosure so it stopped talking about cloud revenue. Yesterday when Google’s parent company, Alphabet, issued its quarterly earnings report, to nobody’s surprise, it failed to report cloud revenue yet again, at least not directly.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai gave some hints, but never revealed an exact number. Instead he talked in vague terms calling Google Cloud “a fast-growing multibillion-dollar business.” The only time he came close to talking about actual revenue was when he said, “Last year, we more than doubled both the number of Google Cloud Platform deals over $1 million as well as the number of multiyear contracts signed. We also ended the year with another milestone, passing 5 million paying customers for our cloud collaboration and productivity solution, G Suite.”

OK, it’s not an actual dollar figure, but it’s a sense that the company is actually moving the needle in the cloud business. A bit later in the call, CFO Ruth Porat threw in this cloud revenue nugget. “We are also seeing a really nice uptick in the number of deals that are greater than $100 million and really pleased with the success and penetration there. At this point, not updating further.” She is not updating further. Got it.

That brings us to a company that guessed for us, Canalys. While the firm didn’t share its methodology, it did come up with a figure of $2.2 billion for the quarter. Given that the company is closing larger deals and was at a billion last year, this figure feels like it’s probably in the right ballpark, but of course it’s not from the horse’s mouth, so we can’t know for certain. It’s worth noting that Canalys told TechCrunch that this is for GCP revenue only, and does not include G Suite, so that would suggest that it could be gaining some momentum.

Frankly, I’m a little baffled why Alphabet’s shareholders actually let the company get away with this complete lack of transparency. It seems like people would want to know exactly what they are making on that crucial part of the business, wouldn’t you? As a cloud market watcher, I know I would, and if the company is truly beginning to pick up steam, as Canalys data suggests, the lack of openness is even more surprising. Maybe next quarter.

Samsung is considering building a camera with optical zoom into an upcoming stylus, according to a patent first spotted by Patently Mobile. According to the patent, which was filed in February 2017 and granted yesterday, the stylus would be able to wirelessly send any images back to the phone or tablet, potentially making use of the Bluetooth support that was added with the Note 9’s S Pen stylus.

An S Pen with a built-in camera would offer a number of benefits. For one, space constraints in the main body of a phone normally mean an optical zoom is out of the question. But Samsung’s patent specifically mentions that the stylus’ camera includes an “optical zooming function.” Detaching the camera from the phone would also give you more...

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