Davemichels

Google announced today that its Project Fi wireless network, now rebranded to Google Fi, will be available for iPhones and the majority of Android devices. That’s supposed to open up a lot more phones to Google Fi’s unique features, such as flat rate data billing; unlimited international roaming; and the ability to switch between multiple networks, like T-Mobile, Sprint, and US Cellular, for better service. However, if you’re planning to use your iPhone on Fi, there are quite a few caveats to be aware of.

Though Fi SIMs have unofficially worked on non-Fi phones (including iPhones) before with some limited functionality, Google is now supporting iPhones directly. You can go through the Google Fi site here and check if your phone is...

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As you may have heard, the UK Parliament put on quite a show on Tuesday in what it claimed was an attempt to go after Facebook for its "fake news" problem. Of course, in the process, the hearings themselves created some fake news that undermined the entire point. To be clear, upfront, Facebook does have many issues that should be taken seriously. But this hearing did not get at those, and actually showed how, when political grandstanding is the focus, it's quite easy to create "fake news" in the process. Still, boy, was that hearing theatrical. It was apparently the first time since 1933 that the UK Parliament had representatives from other countries participate in a hearing, and so there were nine other countries present, including Canada, France, Belgium, Brazil, Ireland, Latvia, Argentina and Singapore. On top of that, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the bad decision of refusing to participate in the hearings, giving the Committee the opportunity for this classic photo op:

Facebook's VP of policy, Richard Allan appeared instead, and despite even him admitting that it didn't look great that Zuckerberg wasn't in attendance, he is actually someone who would probably be better positioned to answer actual substantive questions about Facebook's policies in these areas.

But that would only matter if the inquisitors were interested in discussing substantive policy matters. And it did not appear they did. They were there for the grandstanding, repeatedly blaming Facebook for reflecting back human nature and all its foibles. There were questions about what Facebook was doing to protect democracy -- which I don't think is actually Facebook's job (indeed, seems like that's the government's job, no?). But, of course, the main highlight of the show was the organizer of the hearing, MP Damian Collins, who you'll recall seized a bunch of documents, under questionable circumstances, from a US business exec who was visiting the UK.

The "documents" were supposed to be the star of the show, and Collins dropped the apparent big bombshell during the hearing: Facebook had, he claimed, actually been alerted to an attempt by Russian's to mess with the site all the way back in October of 2014. As summarized by Wired:

Collins cut right to the heart of the documents during the hearing. In October of 2014, he said, a Facebook engineer notified the company that entities with Russian IP addresses had been using a Pinterest API to pull out three billion data points a day from the Facebook friends API. Collins wanted to know what happened after that information was brought forward.

"Was that reported or was it kept, as so often seems to be the case, kept within the family?" he asked.

Ooooh. Intrigue.

Except... it was bullshit. Facebook revealed the redacted emails in question and it showed that while an engineer had initially raised concerns that it appeared that Russian IP addresses were using the Pinterest API access to get lots of data, further investigation showed that he was wrong. The initial email says that the person is seeing calls from "Russian IPs" and is having the Site Integrity team investigate, though it's quickly followed up with a note that "those might not have been Russian IPs after all, we are digging."

Then, on the very same day -- indeed, just a little over two hours after the initial alarm of Russian IPs -- the person emails that it was a false alarm.

If you can't see that, it says:

Ok, thinks are not as bad as they seemed, apologies for the trash. There was a series of unfortunate coincidences that made me think the worse.

1/ We verified that the endpoint has not been "leaked" and calls seem to be coming all from Pinterest servers.
2/ We verified that the volume of calls per day is actually around 6M successful and 40M failed due to invalid access.

In short, it wasn't 3 billion data points and it wasn't Russia. Also, it wasn't abuse of the system. And yet, the way Collins raised the issue, he suggested that Facebook was aware that Russians had abused the API to access 3 billion data points and then kept it secret. In other words, Collins' explanation of what happened was 100% incorrect and misleading. It was misinformation. Or, as some like to call it: fake news.

And while it will not be, this should be the lesson that the folks who held this hearing should learn: there are all sorts of ways to make incorrect claims. Some of them on purpose. Some of them by accident. Some of them because of confirmation bias of what you want to be true. And expecting Facebook to magically understand what is what... is insanity.

So, not that MP Damian Collins will respond to me (perhaps I should set up a dramatic photoshoot of an empty chair with his nameplate), but I'm wondering. Does he think Facebook should block all the stories reporting on his false claim about them supposedly "hiding" news of Russians abusing the API to extract 3 billion data points? Or would that, you know, be crazy?

• A court filing has revealed more details about how British lawmakers got their hands on sensitive Facebook documents last week.
• Ted Kramer, the founder of a software company suing Facebook, handed over papers after he "panicked" following a parliamentary order from MP Damian Collins.
• The court filing also reveals that Kramer was in contact with journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who exposed the Cambridge Analytica data breach, before he arrived in the UK.

The UK Parliament seized a cache of highly sensitive Facebook documents last week. Now, a court filing has revealed more details on how the lawmakers got their hands on the papers.

Damian Collins, chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, secured the documents from Ted Kramer, the founder of a software company called Six4Three, while Kramer was on business in the UK.

Six4Three is suing Facebook for killing its business — specifically, an app named Pikinis that surfaced images of people's Facebook friends in their swimwear — when it tightened up its privacy policies in 2015.

The documents, which could shed light on Facebook's approach to user privacy, are sealed under the order of a court in California. But UK parliamentary privilege means Collins could choose to publish them.

Six4Three offered a blow-by-blow account of how the papers were obtained by Collins in a filing to the San Mateo County Superior Court on Monday. The filing was obtained by Ars Technica and BuzzFeed.

Read more: How Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg could be humbled by a creepy bikini app

The filing, available here, confirmed a lot of what has already been reported. Namely, that Kramer was compelled to hand over the evidence on a visit to London last week. After initially refusing, he was escorted from his hotel to parliament, where he was told he could face a fine or imprisonment if he failed to produce the papers.

But the update also offered an intriguing insight into Kramer's movements.

In a meeting with Collins at the MP's Westminster office on 21 November, the filing says Kramer "panicked" after being told he could be punished for withholding evidence. Without telling his lawyers, he then handed over a bunch of documents that "seemed relevant." This was all done while one of Collins' staff was watching his screen.

Here's how it is described in the filing: 

"He opened his computer, took out a USB drive, and went onto the local Dropbox folder containing Six4Three’s documents. He searched that folder using keywords and found files whose titles appeared to relate to the anti-SLAPP [Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation] opposition papers that DCMS had ordered him to produce.

"Mr. Kramer did not expect to find the precise documents Mr. Collins had requested. Mr. Kramer had not previously attempted to open the folder where these documents were located, and did not previously know that he had access to them.

"Mr. Collins had two staff members present with him, one of whom was directly viewing Mr. Kramer’s screen. Mr. Kramer then transferred to the USB drive files he believed, based on the filenames, to be subject to Mr. Collins’ request. Mr. Collins watched Mr. Kramer as he did this, and Mr. Kramer turned the USB drive over to Mr. Collins immediately.

"Mr. Kramer does not recall the names of the files he transferred but he was looking for any files he could access with names that seemed relevant to the anti-SLAPP opposition papers, since that was the subject of the DCMS Orders."

The filing also reveals that Kramer was in contact with journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who exposed the Cambridge Analytica data breach, before arriving in the UK. They arranged to meet and he sent her a calendar invite with the address of his hotel.

During previous discussions between the pair, the filing says, Kramer told Cadwalladr that the Facebook documents were stored on Dropbox. Cadwalladr also told Kramer that she'd like to raise the case with Collins and the Six4Three founder agreed to speak to the lawmaker. 

There is no suggestion that Cadwalladr tipped off Collins about Kramer's business trip to the UK. The Observer reporter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

SEE ALSO: Facebook has a bruising week ahead as British lawmakers say there's a 'high level of public interest' in releasing a cache of seized legal documents

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NOW WATCH: Amazon wants to open 3,000 cashier-less grocery stores — and they'll have a major advantage over their competitors

• The keto diet is a low-carb routine that involves eating about 70% to 80% of daily calories from fat, and nearly zero from carb and sugar intake.
• Ideally, this primes the body for a fat-burning state called ketosis, wherein fat is burned as fuel.
• But it can be difficult to know whether you're in the fat-burning metabolic state. 
• A new breathalyzer test aims to help people figure out if they're doing the diet right.

For ages, dieters have had essentially one tool for measuring their success: the brutal bathroom scale.

Progress there is measured out in full pounds, and it can take weeks or months to know if a new eating plan is working.

For the increasingly popular low-carb, high-fat keto diet, there's another method: determining if your body is in the desired fat-burning keto state, called ketosis. A new breathalyzer, called the Keyto, could help.

Ketosis is the body's natural starvation mode, when people burn fat stores for fuel. But ketosis can also happen when we eat very few carbohydrates, which act as a quick-burning, sugary energy source. Starved for starchy foods like bread, pasta, and beans, the body reaches for fat to burn instead.

Some keto dieters use acid-measuring urine strips to figure out if they're in fat-burning mode, but the pee tests are inexact, and not always reliable. Other keto dieters pick up pricier diabetic blood testing machines, which are more accurate, but also more painful. 

Increasingly, people are discovering that you don't really need blood or urine to figure out if you've achieved a desired keto state. Instead, you can harness the body's natural reaction to going keto: bad breath.

Read More: A cancer researcher who's been on the keto diet for 6 years explains how he does it

One of the ketones a body produces in a state of ketosis is the chemical acetone. In addition to being a very popular nail polish remover ingredient, acetone is one of the basic byproducts that a body converting fat into fuel excretes in a state of ketosis.

Simply re-jigger an alcohol breathalyzer test, which typically measures for ethanol on the breath, into one that measures for acetone, and you can have instant keto diet feedback.

At least that's what San Francisco cardiologist Ethan Weiss, who's lost 20 pounds on the keto diet, recently told Business Insider. Weiss is behind the new Keyto breathalyzer. 

Weiss says the breathalyzer test produced some shocking results for him, and he wasn't even trying to go keto.

"I didn’t… try to lose weight or think about losing weight. I was just trying to see if I could get my breath score to go up. And after about a week or so, I'd lost five or eight pounds," Weiss said. "By the end of a month, I was buying new clothes." 

The new breath test isn't completely foolproof. It can give false readings after a person drinks alcohol (since most alcohol has a fair amount of sugar in it, keto dieters can't have too much to drink anyway.) Keyto certainly isn't the only keto breathalyzer on the market, either.

Weiss is confident that paired with the company's new app, his breath test will have the edge over competition. In addition to giving breath readings, the app includes meal planning ideas, and a library of about 10,000 foods so dieters can look up whether or not the food they're about to eat is keto-safe. 

But most importantly, it gives dieters feedback quickly and painlessly. For example, one morning after Weiss inadvertently ate breaded chicken for dinner, his breathalyzer score plummeted. Weiss quickly knew the chicken wasn't keto-safe. 

Devices aren't ready to try just yet, but should be available in early January to those who support the company's crowdfunding campaign, at $99 a pop.

In 2019, the Keyto team plans to start mass marketing the device on the company website at the steeper price point of $150. 

SEE ALSO: A cancer researcher who's been on the keto diet for 6 years explains how he does it

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NOW WATCH: This is why LeBron James is in such good shape

Google’s Project Fi mobile service will reportedly be boosted by a major expansion of compatible smartphones this week. Fi will add support for Samsung, OnePlus, and iPhones, according to Droid Life, which reported on a since-removed article at BGR. More handsets from existing Fi partners LG and Motorola will also gain Fi support. The iPhone experience is apparently “in beta,” which is a sign that users might run into bugs or be left without some of Fi’s features.

Project Fi is the Google-backed MVNO that combines network coverage from T-Mobile, Sprint, and US Cellular. The service is appealing for its straightforward pricing: unlimited calls and texts are $20 per month, and mobile data is $10 per gigabyte until you reach 6GB. (After...

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Google is taking an extra step toward making Bluetooth headsets and speakers easier to pair on Android. Now your Google account can remember Fast Pair-compatible headphones you’ve used and automatically transfer the connection to another phone.

Fast Pair isn’t a new Android feature: it originally launched in October of last year. However, adoption has been slow, even with JayBirds producing a few Fast Pair headsets. Today’s Google announcement also pledges more support from the likes of Anker and even Bose. Taking it a step further, Google is also bringing Fast Pair to Chromebooks next year with the same features.

Like before, turning on compatible Fast Pair headphones or speakers will automatically generate a pop-up on your Android...

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Reuters broke the news this weekend that Logitech was in talks to acquire headphone maker Plantronics for more than $2.2 billion, but it looks like the deal isn’t happening. Logitech tells TechCrunch that “while it had engaged in discussions with Plantronics about a potential transaction, it had terminated the negotiations.”

A $2.2 billion deal would have been Logitech’s biggest acquisition to date by far, although it wouldn’t necessarily have reflected a particularly high valuation of Plantronics’ consumer business. Earlier this year Plantronics itself bought out video-conferencing solutions maker Polycom for $2 billion, which had to have been the main factor in Logitech’s willingness to pay so much.

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• Google has started to roll out its artificial intelligence-powered reservation booking service, called Google Duplex, to some Pixel users.
• The feature debuted over the summer at Google's I/O conference, where it stunned the audience with its eerily human-sounding voice, including its usage of "um" and "ah."
• Critics first questioned the ethics of AI software making phone calls without first identifying itself to the person on the line, but Google Duplex did in fact identify itself, according to multiple businesses where Business Insider made reservations.
• The service is beneficial for those who are shy about placing phone calls, but it's just as simple (if not quicker) to make a reservation with OpenTable or Google Maps.

Google is bringing Pixel users one step closer to never having to make another phone call again thanks to a new voice-enabled tool that can schedule appointments and book dinner reservations for you.

Duplex, the newest artificial intelligence tool for Google Assistant, has started rolling out to Pixel phone owners, a Google spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider. The technology can perform actual phone calls for you in order to make you a haircut appointment, or book a restaurant reservation. 

Google debuted the technology back in May at its annual I/O conference, but never provided a clear timeline of when Duplex would be available for customer use. With the rollout, not all Pixel users will have access to the technology right away, but our device did have Duplex software enabled. 

Take a look at how you can use Google Duplex to make a reservation:

SEE ALSO: The 25 most valuable US startups that failed this year

To get started, all you have to do is ask your Google Assistant to make a restaurant reservation.

You only get three options off the bat that are (by default) near your location, so to get different results, you can ask more pointed questions — such as type of food, price range, or neighborhood.

When Google presented the technology earlier this year, it showed Duplex making a reservation at a salon. However, in our tests, we could only get the technology to work with restaurant reservations.

Once you've identified the restaurant you want to book, ask Google Assistant to make a reservation there in order to engage the Duplex feature.

Your Assistant will ask a series of questions: how many people the reservation is for, what time you want to book, and even if your reservation time is flexible in case the restaurant is booked up already.

For some restaurants, Duplex won't be able to make reservations. It could be because the restaurant doesn't take phone reservations, or the business has disabled the use of Duplex there for booking appointments. Google Assistant doesn't specify.

In 2008, Illinois passed a law that, a decade later, remains the toughest standard for biometric privacy in the nation. The Biometric Information Privacy Act imposes strict rules on how companies can collect sensitive information from a person’s body, requiring consent before obtaining data like fingerprints.

While other states have since passed similar laws, Illinois’ allows consumers to file lawsuits if they believe their rights have been violated under the law. This week, that led to the start of a major legal battle: the Illinois Supreme Court heard arguments on a challenge to the law that will decide when consumers can take action under the act.

The case centers on the mother of a...

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The UK Parliament used a rarely-used procedure to compel an app developer to seize a number of internal Facebook documents related to the company’s decision-making process preceding the Cambridge Analytica scandal, reports The Guardian. The documents reportedly contain “significant revelations” about the decisions that set the stage for the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The paper reports that MP Damian Collins, the chair of Parliament’s Culture, Media, and Sport Select Committee acted after Facebook officials have repeatedly refused to make Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg available to testify before the body regarding the scandal. At the end of October, UK regulators issued a £500,000 fine against the company, which has said that it will...

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China’s biggest app, WeChat, partnered with InterContinental to open a smart hotel in Shanghai that lets users book rooms, remotely check in, and use their phones as key cards — all without requiring human assistance. Once they’ve completed their reservation, travelers verify their identity at the hotel through facial recognition and collect their digital key card. Although the hotel is 88 feet underground, it’s connected enough to provide quick internet services, according to a press release it shared with The Verge.

WeChat and its parent company Tencent have been working on developing smart hotel experiences since 2014, but now it’s added facial recognition into the mix for faster identity checks. Traditionally, hotels in China require...

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• Facebook looks like it is preparing for war with Donald Trump.
• The firm has hired Kate Patchen, the chief of the Department of Justice's antitrust division in San Francisco.
• It follows Trump saying that his administration is "looking at" antitrust proceedings against Google, Amazon, and Facebook.
• Facebook is also hiring a lead counsel on competition matters in Washington.

Facebook has hired one of the top antitrust lawyers in Silicon Valley, in a sign that the company could be preparing for war with Donald Trump's administration.

Kate Patchen, the chief of the Department of Justice's antitrust division in San Francisco, has joined Facebook as director and associate general counsel of litigation.

Patchen updated her LinkedIn profile earlier this month with the news, which was first spotted by the Financial Times. Business Insider has contacted Patchen and Facebook for comment.

Patchen's hire comes in the same month in which US President Trump said his administration was "looking at" antitrust proceedings against tech giants Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

"You look at the European Union, they fined I guess it was Google, billions of dollars, and frankly I don't like that they're doing that because that's an American company," Trump told Axios. "I don't think it's good that they're doing that. But if anybody does that, it should be us doing it."

Read more: Facebook staff have voiced a 'huge upswell' of support for Sheryl Sandberg after she reportedly feared for her job

Patchen has worked at the Department of Justice for 14 years, during which time she has prosecuted a number of price-fixing cartel cases in the computer memory chip industry.

Her appointment is not the only sign that Facebook is beefing up its legal bench amid the threat of hostilities from the White House.

Facebook is also looking to hire a lead counsel on competition matters in Washington. In an ad on LinkedIn, it said the successful candidate will: "Manage investigations and inquiries related to antitrust matters and help develop the company’s legal position and strategy on competition matters throughout the world."

SEE ALSO: Trump says his administration is 'looking at' whether Amazon, Facebook and Google are violating antitrust laws

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NOW WATCH: The NFL is using this football helmet that morphs on impact to reduce head injuries

Pindrop’s efforts to bring its combination of voice biometrics and multiple authentication factors to the cloud-based contact center world has a powerful ally. Verizon Enterprise Solutions now offers new authentication and anti-fraud protection that employ both authentication and anti-fraud solutions from Pindrop. It is offered as a service to protect customers of its inbound VoIP contact center services.

Verizon calls the service a “first” because it is a unique combination of the telco’s VoIP-based infrastructure and Pindrop’s broad suite of continuous fraud detection. Collectively, they have the ability to fork a single leg of a call to multiple destinations on-the-fly. That means that Pindrop’s passive technologies for speaker authentication and verification can be used to detect possible fraudsters without interrupting a self-service call or a conversation with an agent.

Offering Fraud Prevention as a Service has a great value proposition. It can be deployed quickly and without the need for additional on-premises equipment. Plus, as Pindrop CEO and cofounder Vijay Balasubramaniyan likes to point out, it gives Verizon’s customers the ability to “identify a person’s voice, device and behavior” as part of their continuous authentication and fraud prevention strategies.

The post Verizon Now Offers Pindrop’s Anti-Fraud Services to Cloud Contact Center Customers appeared first on .

Last month, men in South Sudan engaged in a bidding war over a 17-year-old girl after they saw a post on Facebook advertising her for marriage. Just a few days after the post circulated online, she was purchased by a wealthy businessman to be his wife, according to Reuters.

It’s yet another example of how Facebook’s platform has been abused in developing countries in recent years. In Myanmar, over 700,000 members of the Rohingya community were forced to flee the country due to ethnic violence the UN has linked to racists posts spread on Facebook. Thousands more were killed. In Libya, Facebook has been used by rival militias to spread fake news and hate-filled messages which worked to multiply the violence in the country. Now, the...

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The FCC unveiled two proposals today to battle the scourge of phone spam, although at least one of those moves is likely to be controversial.

In its announcement, the agency said it plans to formally classify text messaging as an information service, a legal distinction it said will be key to battling spam text messages. The classification, the agency said, will allow phone carriers to continue to use blocking technology to stop spam messages from reaching phones.

But some consumer advocates have pushed for the FCC to instead classify messaging as a telecommunications service. Without that classification, groups like Public Knowledge have argued, phone companies will be able to...

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The Federal Communications Commission is looking to raise the minimum rural broadband speed standard to 25 Mbps, more than doubling the current requirement. In general, this would boost speeds in rural areas that receive broadband through government-subsidized programs.

Those government subsidies come from the FCC’s Connect America Fund (CAF). The program is paid for through phone bill fees which the Commission then dips into in order to pass funds onto carriers so they can build networks in less populated, rural areas around the country. This increased standard will only apply to networks that are built in the future, however, so the FCC will continue to use different incentives to get ISPs to increase the speeds of existing networks.

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Microsoft is bringing its Skype calling service to Amazon’s Alexa-enabled devices this week. Amazon’s Echo range will be able to access Skype’s basic calling, and hardware like the Echo Show will also include video calling support for Skype. This integration also lets Skype users call mobile and landlines using SkypeOut, and simply call contacts by saying “Alexa, call Tom on Skype” to activate a call.

The Skype and Alexa integration follows Microsoft’s increasingly close partnership with Amazon for Alexa, Cortana, and Xbox integration. The Xbox One now supports Alexa, and Amazon has launched its own Alexa Windows 10 app to bring the digital assistant to all PCs. Microsoft also just started selling Amazon’s Echo devices in its retail...

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DevOps is going from buzzword to serious business.

The term DevOps combines the words "development" and "operations," and it refers to the tools and practices that help engineers fix and deliver code faster and more frequently. Development teams large and small are turning to DevOps as a way to keep up with the increasing importance of software to modern business. 

In fact, according to LinkedIn, a DevOps engineer is the most in-demand job recruiters are looking to fill today. Companies are increasingly looking for the best DevOps tools to use, as well, and more businesses are launching DevOps teams to adopt those practices.

DevOps startups are also a gold mine for investors. Before, venture capitalists often said "pass" to startups aimed at software engineers. But now, investors have gone all in, throwing millions of dollars at startups like PagerDuty. The valuations for DevOps companies are multiplying as well.

And in case you're wondering, IT Central Station also reviewed the top 20 cybersecurity companies in the industry.

So which DevOps companies are the best, according to users? Here's a list of the top 18 DevOps companies, based on user reviews from IT Central Station.

Splunk

Market Cap: $14.33 billion

Rating: 4.4 / 5 stars

Product: Splunk

RankingScore: 87

Category: Log Management

Most Compared to: IBM QRadar (19%), LogRhythm NextGen Siem (13%), ArcSight (8%)

Splunk analyzes huge amounts of data to help IT and developer teams figure out exactly what's going on with their systems. It can make predictions about performance, and manage the system logs when a service goes down or something otherwise goes wrong. It's also used by business teams to analyze huge amounts of data and give insights into trends. 

Based in San Francisco, Splunk has more than 12,000 customers in over 110 countries.

Cisco's AppDynamics

Market Cap: $202.65 billion

Rating: 4.2 / 5 stars

Product: AppDynamics

RankingScore: 76

Category: Application Performance Management

Most Compared to: Dynatrace (25%), CA APM (11%), New Relic APM (10%)

AppDynamics can track application performance to make sure software is working correctly, as well as monitor how customers interact with an application. It also helps companies see their infrastructure's impact on application performance.

AppDynamics founder Jyoti Bansal sold his company to Cisco for $3.7 billion last year, right before AppDynamics was planning to go public — a move that was surprising some of its bankers. He spent four days without sleep struggling with the decision, but in the end, Cisco made an offer that was nearly twice what AppDynamics was pricing at its IPO. Bansal grew AppDynamics to a $1 billion company in under seven years.

Dynatrace

Market Cap: private

Rating: 4.4 / 5 stars

Product: Dynatrace

RankingScore: 92

Category: Application Performance Management

Most Compared to: AppDynamics (23%), New Relic APM (16%), CA APM (10%)

Dynatrace, a Massachusetts-based company, helps IT departments in medium and large businesses manage performance for a company's programs and systems. It monitors, manages and optimizes business-critical applications, which helps companies track and understand the performance of their software applications.

Microservices offer an approach to development where software can be broken into small, distinct components. In the context of an application, these components are abstracted by an API and offer a narrow subset of functionality. This allows each microservice to be designed, deployed and managed independently, while working together to perform the larger functions required by the application.

• Popular workplace messaging service Slack will go public this year in a multibillion-dollar IPO. It was last valued at $7.1 billion.
• Its chief technology officer and cofounder Cal Henderson has a stake  in the company that could be worth up to $470 million, making him an extremely wealthy man.
• The path to success and wealth wasn't always clear for Slack or Henderson, who was involved in two gaming startup failures and the disastrous sale of photo-site Flickr to Yahoo.
• Henderson said after the founders' experiences with Yahoo, Slack is committed to staying independent and says it has a strong chance against its key rival Microsoft because it's only focused on one product.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Slack's cofounder and chief technology officer, Cal Henderson, will be a much wealthier man when workspace chat company goes public later this year.

According to analysis by Business Insider's Julie Bort, Henderson holds almost 16.8 million shares in Slack. If the company goes for $28 a share, as it's reportedly doing on the private markets, that stake could be worth as much as $470 million.

Slack has revolutionised office communications with a lightweight, browser-based chat service that allows colleagues to talk and share files.

It wasn't the first to try and make office collaboration easier, but it quickly beat out Microsoft and Hipchat thanks to its whimsical graphics and millennial-friendly features like GIFs and emoji.

Read more: This tech CEO secretly sold his startup to Snap and spent 2 years building a product that could transform the firm's fortunes

Slack was last valued at $7.1 billion after raising millions in venture backing from SoftBank and others like Accel and General Atlantic. On the private market, its valuation has hit $17 billion.

It has 10 million daily active users and it thinks it can win over hundreds of millions more, talking about a "total addressable market" of 600 million knowledge workers. The company says it has 88,000 paid users.

Cal Henderson, despite being with Slack since the very beginning, didn't intend to end up here. Business Insider spoke to Henderson in October 2018.

Cal Henderson is a British programmer who keeps trying and failing to build gaming companies

When Henderson was living in London in the early 2000s, he came across a browser-based social game called "Game Neverending."

"It was a type of point-and-click type adventure," Henderson told Business Insider in an October interview. "It's not like you could win, it was an exploratory social gamespace."

The game was, Henderson, said "hard to explain, which is also the reason why it wasn't successful."

But he was fascinated by the casual, social nature of the game, which pre-dated massive online worlds like World of Warcraft and social media gaming like Zynga's FarmVille. He got in touch with the game's development team, headed up by president Stewart Butterfield, and harassed them to let him join.

Butterfield and the team were operating out of Vancouver and quickly running out of cash for developing Game Neverending. They came up with a plan: Build a secondary service that would generate the revenue to fund the game's development.

They recruited Henderson as chief software architect promising him that, eventually, he would get to work on Game Neverending's development. Despite not having met the team, Henderson agreed.

And so the photo site Flickr was born.

The original version of Flickr, Henderson said, was a real-time chatroom that let people share photos. "It was a lot more like Slack," he said. "And it didn't work. You had to be online at the same time as the other person wanting to use Flickr for it to make sense. It was fun to play with in the office, but in real life nobody used it."

At this point, Henderson still hadn't met any of the team. He did eventually meet them when the company gathered together in California to launch the first version of Flickr, which promptly failed.

But then came further iterations, and the team landed on the idea of hosting photos on web pages. Henderson moved to Vancouver with everyone else to work on the new version full-time and, in his words: "I just never went home."

It became clear that Flickr was where the money was at. Flickr began to grow quickly, and it was obvious that it was bigger than just a money-spinner for Game Neverending.

"Reluctantly we shut down development on the game and concentrated the company on Flickr," said Henderson.

Around a year after launch, Yahoo acquired Flickr for a reported $25 million. At the time, hardcore early users were unhappy about the change in ownership, although Henderson notes that Flickr only managed the massive growth in  its userbase after the sale.

Despite the purported benefits of going to a bigger company, like having the cash to grow more quickly, Henderson described the process as "hugely frustrating."

Although the company was originally bigger than the then-nascent Facebook and YouTube, and pre-dated Twitter, Flickr wasn't given sufficient resources to grow, as Henderson tells it. The company which had widely been described as the world's best photo-sharing service quickly stagnated.

Then, Henderson said: "Facebook took us over, YouTube on the video side, then eventually Instagram came around and won mobile for photos. So it was super frustrating."

The Flickr team tried to build a second game — and failed again

Three years after the Flickr acquisition, Butterfield and his cofounders resigned in spectacular fashion. Like Henderson, Butterfield was not flattering about Yahoo, describing it to journalist Mat Honan as "a terrible joke." He was right — Yahoo would slowly fall apart thanks to poor leadership and numerous bad decisions around acquisitions.

Freed from the confines of Yahoo, the Flickr gang would reunite to finally build their hit game. This time round, with a successful exit to Yahoo, there wouldn't be any issues with drumming up cash from investors. Butterfield's new company Tiny Speck raised more than $12 million from famed Silicon Valley investors Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, and began work on new game Glitch.

Glitch was a well-designed, Flash-based browser game with cute graphics and the ability to play collaboratively with other players.

"Really, it was trying to build those really old, online MUDs [multi-user dungeons], those mostly social spaces, and turn that into a browser-based social space game. That's what we tried to do with Glitch," Henderson said.

MUDs were multiplayer online games, usually text-based. They were popular from the early days of the internet through to the 2000s, but were superseded by graphics-based worlds like World of Warcraft. Fans loved them as much for their social interaction as the gameplay, although few MUDs ever made money.

"[Glitch] was a lot more graphical than those very early games," Henderson said.

Read more: Google once rejected this founder for a job — but then went on to acquire his first startup and partner with his 2nd

But: "It really didn't work out. We spent four years on it and after spending a whole bunch of investor money, we hadn't build a game that would ever become a viable business."

It was expensive to keep running the game, and Tiny Speck failed to find a buyer to fund its development costs. Flash turned out to have been a bad bet.

Failure to create a successful game was, Henderson said, a harrowing experience. Tiny Speck laid off staff, winding the game down, and telling its players that Glitch would no longer be available. There were around 50 people employed at Tiny Speck at the time, and a big proportion were game specialists. Most had to go.

At this point, Butterfield and co. realised they probably had to give up trying to build games.

"We knew we wanted to work together again and that we wanted to build something, but it wasn't going to be a game, because we'd really fucked that up after four years and our original vision," Henderson said. "I think the first time around, pre-Flickr, it felt like we failed because we had everything against us. It turns out the second time around we failed because… we're bad at making games. We had every possible advantage the second time around."

A little like Flickr and Game Neverending, Slack's chat service was likewise famously a side-product of Glitch.

When Tiny Speck shuttered Glitch in 2012, the company announced it would keep developing its "unique messaging technology."

Although Slack now feels like an overnight success, it took $1.2 billion in total investment and a further four years before the company really took off.

And Henderson has had to move from being a founding CTO to running a team of around 500 people. Given Slack isn't as big as Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, how does he retain talent?

"We're kind of in an interesting adolescence, because we're not a young small startup any more," Henderson said. "We're very established, especially in the Bay Area, we're more than 1,200 people. We're not public, so it's very different to joining a Google or Facebook where you know where they'll be in a year's time, and it's not early-stage risk."

That means selling people on the fact that Slack makes a meaningful difference to the way people work.

Slack has also achieved what appears to be impossible for everyone else in Silicon Valley: Diversity. Women make up 30% of Slack's technical roles and almost 50% of its leadership roles. Underrepresented minorities — excluding Asian — make up 11% of US leadership roles.

By comparison, women account for 25% of technical roles at Google, and only 26% of leadership roles. Underrepresented minorities make up 4.2% of leadership roles.

"There are four founders of the company, and we're all white dudes," said Henderson, referring to himself, Stewart Butterfield, Eric Costello, and Serguei Mourachov. "And if you're not intentional about diversity early on then it gets harder to dig yourself out of that hole. It's not just women in engineering, but people from all underrepresented minorities. We were aware we needed to address that very early."

Slack is determined not to sell out this time around

Henderson is adamant that Slack will stay independent after the team was burned by its experiences at Yahoo.

"We're very committed to remaining independent," he said.

Its main competition remains Microsoft, which acquired the AI startup behind a popular Slack chatbot. The Redmond giant also made a free version of its Slack rival Teams available, to try and persuade small businesses and freelancers onto the platform.

But, Henderson points out, Microsoft is one giant (and old) company trying to do lots of different things. Slack has the advantage of focusing on one service, and it can move more quickly.

"The Microsoft competition is really good for us," he said. "When we first started the company and built the product, we were eight people that had a belief that Slack would be useful… it was all very well for us to believe that as startup founders who have to drink their own Kool-Aid.

"It's very validating that [Microsoft] believe this is a software category which is going to exist in a decade, which is going to be very important."

He added: "We make exactly one product that we care about, the lifeblood of our company. We concentrate everything on it. We make one thing. The other advantage is that at the core of Slack is it's a collaboration hub for all the different bits of software you have in the workplace, and we are able to partner with all of those organisations, whether it's Microsoft or Google or SalesForce."

With two young children and a company with a bright future to run, Henderson doesn't have a lot of time for games, though he lists Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley among his current favourites. But he still keeps the fire of hope alive along with some other game enthusiasts at the firm.

"We have a channel inside Slack's Slack called 'Games we might finish,' where we talk about projects that we've started, and which are languishing," Henderson said. "I've been working on this game for about two years, which I've written some of the outline of, and which I've got really good ideas about, but I've not found the time to really do anything."

But, he concludes: "I'm definitely going to finish this one."

SEE ALSO: A Lime executive insisted it has 'the safest product' even though the company was recalling thousands of its scooters

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NOW WATCH: Here's what 'Game of Thrones' stars look like in real life

Today the internet is a quagmire of captial-c Content, made navigable by retweets, likes, and favorites; everything posted can be quantified by its corresponding reactions. Though in aggregate it may seem like noise, to people in the business of disinformation, there’s a valuable signal there to be picked apart and studied. Our activity on social platforms — those favorites and likes and retweets — are a form of metadata that can help manipulators and their bots appear human to the algorithms that police social networks. And that problem is about to get a lot worse: bots are starting to mimic your social media activity in order to look more human.

“For users and platforms alike, it is getting harder to discern ‘real’ users and authentic...

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• Google Cloud is getting a new boss in the form of Thomas Kurian, formerly of Oracle. 
• From his predecessor Diane Greene, Kurian will inherit a third-place position in the cloud wars with Amazon and Microsoft.
• Google Cloud is doing well on its own terms, signing some big customers and building its technology.
• But Google has big expectations for Google Cloud, and it's nowhere near its biggest rivals.

When Thomas Kurian, formerly of Oracle, takes over as CEO of Google Cloud in January, he's going to have his work cut out for him. 

Diane Greene, the outgoing CEO, was seen as the company's trump card in the ongoing cloud computing platform wars between Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Google Cloud encompasses G Suite, the company's productivity suite, and a major rival to Microsoft's Office 365, as well as the Google Cloud Platform, which lets customers rent supercomputing power from the Silicon Valley giant's own data centers. 

As a seasoned veteran of the enterprise software space, and the cofounder of tech giant VMware, Greene was supposed to help Google Cloud reach new, lucrative big-business customers customers — and, in so doing, reach its pie-in-the-sky goal of supplanting advertising as Google's biggest source of revenue by 2020.

That was the plan, anyway.

Google Cloud isn't where it could be

A little under three years later, though, Google Cloud is still not living up to expectations. Make no mistake, Greene led Google Cloud to some key wins: Target, Apple, and other big customers all signed on under her watch. Wall Street has lauded her strategy, with one analyst expecting Google Cloud to do $8 billion in revenue this year. 

At the same time, Google Cloud is still a distant third place to the market-leading Amazon Web Services and its chief rival, Microsoft Azure. Those same Wall Street analysts who say that Google Cloud is on the right track acknowledge that there's a tremendous gap between Google's cloud business and Microsoft's, let alone Amazon's. 

Amazon Web Services launched years before either of its main competitors, and has aggressively gobbled up the lion's share of the market since. Microsoft, for its part, has turned its existing relationships with enterprise customers into its greatest strength, as it slowly but surely transitions them to the cloud.

While Google Cloud is often seen as the furthest ahead in terms of pure technology, it doesn't have the business advantages of its rivals. This is where Greene was intended to help: Her pedigree in enterprise technology was intended to help Google Cloud close deals with deep-pocketed global-scale companies. 

That's worked, to a large extent — but Google ultimately has to share some of its biggest wins with its competitors. Apple, for example, uses both Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services to power its iCloud service. It's still a win for Google, to be sure, but it's not the kind of clean victory that shows inarguable dominance.

At the same time, Google has tried to make this so-called "multi-cloud" approach a cornerstone of its strategy, and when Google Cloud pulled out of contention for the Pentagon's $10 billion JEDI contract, it chided the Department of Defense for only wanting to bank on one cloud platform (which will probably be Amazon's). 

See also: Meet the 22-year Oracle veteran executive who's going to lead Google in the cloud wars against Amazon and Microsoft

And even years into the Greene years, Google Cloud had become known for poor customer service. Over the summer, Google Cloud infamously threatened to permanently and automatically shut down an energy management company's critical app unless the right forms were filed. The company vowed reform, but some damage was done to its brand.

Cloud is unlikely to replace advertising as Google's chief business any time soon, either.  Google generated some $22.6 billion in advertising revenue in the last quarter alone — almost four times what that analyst believes Google Cloud will bring in over the entire year. 

It won't be easy

At the same time, Google Cloud has some real opportunity ahead of it. Backed by the engineering might of Google, its cloud platform is seen by many developers as the most future-looking option out there.

Technologies like Kubernetes and Tensorflow were invented by Google for its own use, but have since become smash hits with developers in Silicon Valley and beyond. While the other platforms generally support these and other Google-born tools, Google Cloud has a reputation as being the first and best place to run them. Over the years, Google has underlined these advantages by aggressively adding new technologies and capabilities to its cloud.

Kurian himself seems to have a good handle on what real users actually want, too, judging by the reported circumstances of his departure from Oracle. He is said to have pushed hard against Oracle founder Larry Ellison to have the database giant support Amazon's and Microsoft's clouds, rather than focus solely on its own.

This would indicate that Kurian is of a mind to focus on the customer experience — to "meet the customer where they are," to borrow a Silicon Valley chestnut of wisdom. It's a similar mindset as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, whose embrace of rival technology has only improved the positioning of its overall cloud business. 

Still, it won't be easy for Kurian. 

"I’m not sure Thomas will be any better a fit than Diane was with the young, disruptive, and energized employees of Google," says Dave Bartoletti, VP and principal analyst with research firm Gartner. 

Kurian has the potential to bring his Oracle chops to bear at Google — but remember that Oracle, one of the most established enterprise companies in the world, is very different than Google, which still makes its money from search advertising. 

"If he can bring sales and strategic rigor to the enterprise selling motion, it will help Google penetrate the enterprise cloud market further," says Bartoletti. "But it’s going to be quite a culture clash from his days at Oracle."

SEE ALSO: Google just named a former Oracle exec as the head of its giant cloud business

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You'd be hard pressed to find a bigger enemy of consumer safeguards than the fine folks at AT&T. The company has a history of all manner of anti-competitive behavior, from making its bills harder to understand to help scammers rip off its customers, to routinely ripping off programs designed to help everyone from the hearing imparied to the poor. AT&T also of course played a starring role in killing both the FCC's 2010 and 2015 net neutrality rules, and pretty much all meaningful state and federal efforts to protect broadband and wireless user privacy.

Yet like clockwork, company executives like to pretend that despite this, they really love net neutrality, privacy, and healthy regulatory oversight. Case in point: AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson attended a conference this week where he once again proclaimed that AT&T really wants Congress to pass meaningful new net neutrality and privacy laws — something the press, as it loves to do, was quick to repeat entirely unskeptically without any necessary context:

"AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson joked Monday that Washington may not agree “on the freezing temperature of water,” but he called on a divided Congress to come together pass net neutrality and privacy legislation. The executive called for legislative clarity around the issue of broadband Internet access, saying certain basic principles should be codified into law."

Notice for a moment that the linked outlet in question doesn't bother to clarify to readers that we had meaningful net neutrality and broadband privacy rules at the FCC (passed after years of painstaking debate), and AT&T lobbyists worked tirelessly to kill both of them. AT&T also routinely battles any efforts to mandate more competition or broadband availability, to the point where they prevent efforts to even improve broadband availability maps. These are not problems AT&T wants fixed; rather important context when judging the merits of Stephenson's statements.

To be clear, AT&T doesn't want meaningful privacy or net neutrality legislation. It wants loophole filled placeholder laws on these subjects in name only; laws that pretend to address the problems on both of these fronts, but serve one key purpose: pre-empt tougher state or federal laws that might actually accomplish something. AT&T wants laws its lawyers write that don't actually fix the problems we all largely agree need fixing, especially the lack of broadband competition that helped create privacy and net neutrality violations in the first place.

That tech and policy reporters don't understand this (or understand it but for whatever reason don't share this fact with readers) is consistently frustrating.

Stephenson's schtick is always exhausting. But he outdid himself with some additional commentary at the conference, most notably this bit:

"I get fatigued every time the President changes, the head of the FCC changes, and regulations swing from left to right,” Stephenson said in remarks tonight at the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech D. Live conference in Laguna Beach."

Again, Stephenson's lobbyists are directly responsible for this hard shift "right" away from giving a damn about consumer protection. AT&T backed Trump and Ajit Pai to the point where it thought it was a good idea to pay a shady dudebro "fixer" $600,000 to covertly gain access to the President. And since the "swing" shifted in AT&T's favor it has received absolutely everything it asked for, from a full out assault on federal and state consumer protections, to an FCC that's often literally indistinguishable from AT&T's lobbying apparatus.

Again, the pretense being pushed by Stephenson here is that we can't rely on the partisan whims of the FCC and we should encode tough consumer protection into law via Congress. And in an ideal world, that's a sound argument. But this isn't an ideal world, and AT&T's arguments aren't made in good faith. It's a world in which AT&T throws money at politicians to ensure any real protections will never get passed. You can't pass meaningful privacy or net neutrality laws via Congress because companies like AT&T spend billions of dollars and countless man hours to prevent that from happening.

You can, however, throw campaign contributions at lawmakers eager to table "compromise legislation" that's usually nowhere near an actual compromise. Countless politicians (most notably Marsha Blackburn) love to table AT&T-crafted legislation and pretend it's a sincere attempt to solve complex technical problems, ignoring that said bills almost always have fewer teeth than a dottering grandpa and more holes than a ratty, knitted afghan.

AT&T's ideal net neutrality law would ban things ISPs never intended to do anyway (like the outright blocking of websites), while ignoring all the areas ISPs engage in creative anti-competitive behavior (like usage caps and zero rating or interconnection shenanigans). The same applies to privacy. AT&T wants a law that mandates ISPs do things they already do (like "clearly informing" users how they're being spied on via mouse print), but doesn't ban any of the bad things AT&T has been busted doing (like modifying packets to covertly track users, or charging users more money if they want to protect their own private data).

Meanwhile, at the same conference, Stephenson whined incessantly about how numerous state efforts to pass their own privacy and net neutrality laws were a "total disaster," hoping nobody is bright enough to realize that wouldn't be happening if Stephenson's lobbyists hadn't dismantled pretty modest federal guidelines.

There's nothing about Stephenson's arguments that are grounded in good faith, yet you'd have a hard time understanding that if you're a reader of news reports that are often more blind stenography than actual insight fueled by historical context.

Nvidia on Thursday reported disappointing third-quarter earnings, leading shares to slump as much as 18% early Friday.

The chipmaker said it earned $1.82 a share, falling short of the $1.92 that was expected by Wall Street according to Bloomberg data. Its bottom line came in at $3.18 billion, missing on the $3.24 billion that was expected. 

Looking ahead, the company expects its fourth-quarter revenue to be $2.7 billion, while analysts were expecting $3.4 billion.

The underwhelming financial results were largely due to an excess of mining GPUs for cryptocurrency. “Our near-term results reflect excess channel inventory post the crypto-currency boom, which will be corrected," CEO Jensen Huang said Thursday in the earnings release. Management in August warned that it's expecting "essentially no cryptocurrency" business moving forward.

Also at stake is a product transition which will unlikely ramp until next year. 

In August Nvidia unveiled its new graphics cards, which improve the gaming experience through features like real-time ray tracing. But those new features aren't yet available because games supporting the high-end graphics cards aren't out until 2019.

But nearly every Wall Street analyst is still bullish about the chip giant, saying it's time to buy the dip as the company has good fundamentals.

Here is what they are saying:

Goldman Sachs — 'Structural thesis unchanged but remove from Conviction List on increased near-term uncertainty'

Price target: $200

Rating: Buy

RBC Capital Markets — 'Crypto strikes again along with data center softness'

Price target: $260 (from $310)

Rating: Outperform

"Crypto strikes again along with data center softness," said Mitch Steves, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets.

JPMorgan — 'secular growth in datacenter and gaming still intact'

Price target: $200

Rating: Buy

A new video from YouTube channel JerryRigEverything shows that Apple’s latest iPad Pro can be bent and completely destroyed seemingly without much exertion. The tablet gave out quickly when host Zack Nelson performed his signature bend test, cracking down the middle near the microphone hole on the tablet’s left side and the Apple Pencil’s magnetic charging area on the right.

This YouTube video is not the only case of the new iPad Pros having less-than-ideal structural integrity. I’ve seen scattered forum reports of the tablets showing slight bends after just a day or two of usage or after being carried around in a backpack. A few people insist that their devices were a little bent out of the box.

With that said, the iPad Pro is a...

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• Google will replace Diane Greene as the CEO of its cloud business in January.
• Thomas Kurian, a former Oracle executive, will replace Greene as the head of Google Cloud.
• Greene has drawn criticism as Google has struggled to keep up with Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud-computing market.

Diane Greene is stepping down as the head of Google's cloud business.

The former Oracle executive Thomas Kurian will replace Greene as CEO of Google Cloud, she announced in a blog post on Friday. Kurian will join the company on November 26 and assume the leadership role in January, and Greene will continue to serve as CEO until then, she said.

Greene, who has been the CEO of Google Cloud since December 2015, said she hadn't planned to stay in the position this long. After stepping down, she plans to focus on mentoring and backing female entrepreneurs and education-technology projects.

"After an unbelievably stimulating and productive three years, it's time to turn to the passions I've long had around mentoring and education," she said in the post.

Even after stepping down as Google Cloud's CEO, Greene will remain on the board of Google's parent company, Alphabet, she said in the post. She's been a director of the company since 2012.

CNBC first reported the news.

Kurian was the president of product development at Oracle, where he headed up its cloud-computing effort. After a 22-year stint at Oracle, he resigned in September after clashing with Larry Ellison, the company's founder and executive chairman.

Read this: Oracle puts a guy from Microsoft in charge of cloud as the head of cloud resigns

In a statement, Kurian said he was looking forward to joining Google.

"I'm excited to join the fantastic Google Cloud team at this important and promising time," he said.

In his own short statement, Google CEO Sundar Pichai praised Greene's work on the company's cloud efforts.

"I have deep appreciation for everything Diane has done and I'm super happy that we'll continue to benefit from her wisdom as she continues serving on our board of directors," he said.

Greene, the founder and former CEO of VMware, has been under fire of late because Google Cloud has become a distant also-ran to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Azure in the cloud-computing market.

Here's Greene's blog post:

Hello All,

When I joined Google full-time to run Cloud in December 2015, I told my family and friends that it would be for two years. Now, after an unbelievably stimulating and productive three years, it’s time to turn to the passions I’ve long had around mentoring and education.

The mentoring will include investing in and helping female founder CEOs who have engineering or science backgrounds. I want to encourage every woman engineer and scientist to think in terms of building their own company someday. The world will be a better place with more female founder CEOs.

The work in education will especially be initiatives that combine technology with in-person teaching to make high-quality education that is low-cost, scalable and personalized. When bebop was purchased by Google, I committed all of my proceeds to philanthropy, it is high time to put that money to work!

Thomas Kurian, a respected technologist and executive, will be joining Google Cloud on November 26th and transitioning into the Google Cloud leadership role in early 2019. Sundar, Urs and I all interviewed Thomas, and I believe that he’ll do an amazing job helping to take Google Cloud to the next level. Thomas has 22 years of experience at Oracle; most recently he was President of Product Development.

I will continue as CEO through January, working with Thomas to ensure a smooth transition. I will remain a Director on the Alphabet board.

The Google Cloud team has accomplished amazing things over the last three years, and I’m proud to have been a part of this transformative work. We have moved Google Cloud from having only two significant customers and a collection of startups to having major Fortune 1000 enterprises betting their future on Google Cloud, something we should accept as a great compliment as well as a huge responsibility.

We’ve built a strong business together—set up by integrating sales, marketing, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Google Apps/G Suite into what is now called Google Cloud.

We established a training and professional services organization and partnering organizations. We revamped customer engineering and added a team of experts in the Office of the CTO. We also pioneered a way to help enterprises adopt AI through our Advanced Solutions Lab. We built out a full marketing organization that in just three years has received many recognitions including Cannes Lions awards. We set up our industry verticals org where we have achieved massive traction in health, financial services, retail, gaming and media, energy and manufacturing, and transportation. We set up the Cloud ML and the Cloud IoT groups. We acquired Apigee, Kaggle, qwiklabs and several great small startups. Our technology development has been recognized throughout the industry, and Google Cloud is differentiated in security, AI, open hybrid application modernization, G Suite, and many other areas. We are now recognized as a leader in 11 Gartner Magic Quadrants and Forrester Waves.

But here’s what I'm most proud of: the phenomenal team assembled and how we together have built out all of our functions for customer-facing enterprise readiness and engineering enterprise execution. When this journey started, some people would say that Google had great technology but they weren’t sure that customers would rely on Google as their enterprise partner. At our recent Google Cloud Next event in San Francisco, we had over 23,000 attendees, representing 10x growth from 2016. With nearly 300 customers speaking about how Google Cloud is helping to transform their businesses, no one was questioning our seriousness or our abilities.

The cloud space is early and there is an enormous opportunity ahead. I have loved working with everyone. I am especially grateful to all of our customers, partners, and employees for an amazing three years of getting to work with you.

—Diane

Now read:

• Oracle's head of cloud left after butting heads with Larry Ellison, source says
• Read the email the Oracle executive once rumored to be the next CEO emailed the company to announce his 'extended' leave of absence
• As expected, Google Cloud's head of AI will step aside and be replaced by Carnegie Mellon's Andrew Moore
• Google is looking for an ally in China to deliver its cloud services

SEE ALSO: Google cloud boss Diane Greene won't attend Saudi investment event, throwing a wrench into Google's plans to tap new revenue in the country

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NOW WATCH: Why autocorrect makes so many mistakes, according to the former Apple engineer who helped create it

The Google Pixel 3 and 3 XL offered a pretty great call screening feature at launch, which used Google Assistant to answer suspected spam calls and transcribe the conversation in real time. Now, the feature is coming to the Pixel 2 and 2 XL as part of this week’s Google Phone update, as spotted by Droid Life.

Spam calls have been on the rise, and companies, including carriers like T-Mobile, have been taking matters into their own hands to prevent potential spam calls from reaching the customer entirely. But for the calls that still get through, you can tap the “screen call” button. Google Assistant will then alert the caller that you’re using a screening service and that you’ll receive a copy of the conversation. From then, you can...

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Facebook has filed a patent that would make it easier to target whole families with ads by analyzing the photos they post. The application, filed on May 10th and published today, covers an algorithm that would identify elements of photographs — like faces or other details— and cross-reference them with other data to build a profile of an entire household. If Facebook chose to implement the system, it would supplement a family targeting program that launched last year.

Facebook can already analyze lots of information to tell who’s in the same household. According to Marketing Land, it checks the relationships people list on their profiles, whether people list the same last names or locations, and shared life events or event check-ins,...

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