Tuesday's technology stories

Twitter hires new CFO
Twitter has hired Ned Segal as its new chief financial officer, the company said on Tuesday. Segal is replacing Anthony Noto, who was promoted to Twitter's operations chief in November following the departure of Adam Bain.
Resume: Prior to his new gig at Twitter, Segal was a senior vice president of finance at Intuit after a two-year stint as CFO of patent risk management company RPX. He began his career at Goldman Sachs in equity research and later in investment banking.
Payday: Segal's hiring comes after a long string of executive departures and changes at the social media company. According to a filing with the SEC, Segal stands to make a total of $800,000 in compensation in his first year (salary plus sign-on bonus), with an equity package that could total up to about $20 million.

Waymo's cars are learning to detect emergency vehicles
Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving car unit, is training its minivans in Arizona to respond to emergency vehicles like fire trucks and police cars, the company said on Monday. In partnership with the fire and police departments of Chadler, Ariz., Waymo's minivans have been observing and tracking emergency vehicles to gain data about their looks, sounds, and behaviors on the road.
Why it matters: This is an important part of teaching self-driving cars to obey the rules of the road as they prepare to eventually replace human drivers. The new breed of cars needs to know how to detect emergency vehicles and how to respond to them appropriately.

Amazon wants to compete with Best Buy's Geek Squad
Amazon is rolling out a service to compete with Best Buy's Geek Squad and help customers with their consumer electronics purchases, according to Recode. The service is currently available in seven markets, and Amazon charges $99 for installations. It's also providing consultations on how to use its Echo digital assistant.
Amazon already has a marketplace for other home services, so this isn't foreign territory for the company.
Stock hit: The news seems to have affected Best Buy's stock price, which is now down by about 6.4% to $54.15. The company's Geek Squad has been a signature service for Best Buy.

Microsoft will sell Office, Windows as a bundle
Microsoft announced plans on Monday to start offering Windows 10 and Office together in a single subscription service. Microsoft 365, as the service is known, will also include security and management tools and come in two flavors: one for large enterprises and the other for small-to-medium businesses.
Pricing TBD: The company didn't say how much it will charge for either version of the service.
Worth noting: Microsoft was once in big antitrust trouble for including a browser with Windows never mind selling Windows and Office together.
Why it matters: Microsoft has already been moving more of its products from one-time purchases to subscriptions and Microsoft 365 helps take this further.

Today's Twitter battle: Trump vs. Chelsea Clinton
On Twitter, President Trump hit back at Internet criticism of his daughter, Ivanka Trump, briefly taking his seat at the leaders' table at the G20 in Hamburg over the weekend. He first called it "very standard" — noting "Angela M agrees!" — before jumping into an attack on the Clintons and the media:
And, of course, Chelsea Clinton quickly responded to ask if Trump was "giving the country away":

Apple's ARKit has developers drooling
There was plenty of excitement when Apple announced its plans to build augmented reality support into the next version of iOS. And the enthusiasm has only grown as developers have started to play with ARKit and ponder what they can do."I don't think most people are realizing how much of a barrier Apple just ripped down," said Mapbox CEO Eric Gundersen. There are more than 100 million iPhones and iPads already capable of running iOS 11 and ARKit with nearly 200 million likely to be in use by the end of year. "They literally just made everybody's phone into AR experience."Gunderson sees Android phones likely to follow quickly: "You know Samsung and Google are not far behind on that."While iOS 11 remains in beta, consumers have started to get some early peeks at what developers are cooking up, thanks in part to a Twitter account dedicated to showcasing such efforts. Highlighted projects range from AR Tic-Tac-Toe to virtual measuring tapes to the ability to see items from a restaurant menu.Mapbox, meanwhile has been working on a couple demos of its own, including this Bay Area map on a table and this topographical map.ARKit may well be a prelude to a dedicated device like glasses, but just the possibilities on the iPhone seem pretty exciting.

Robo-cars will still require lots of human work
"Self-driving cars prove to be labour-intensive for humans: Building the road to autonomous vehicles requires a lot of costly manual input," by Financial Times' Tim Bradshaw in S.F. (subscription):
- "Most companies working on this technology employ hundreds or even thousands of people, often in offshore outsourcing centres in India or China, whose job it is to teach the robo-cars to recognise pedestrians, cyclists and other obstacles."
- "The workers do this by manually marking up or 'labelling' thousands of hours of video footage, often frame by frame, taken from prototype vehicles driving around testbeds such as Silicon Valley, Pittsburgh and Phoenix."
- "[H]umans will still be needed behind the scenes for many years to come, drawing boxes around trees and highlighting road signs, in order to keep these systems fresh."





