Amazon has been in China for 14 years, but it hasn't been able to defeat homegrown rivals like JD.com and Alibaba. It is determined not to make the same mistakes in India.
The big picture: India has the world's fastest growing e-commerce market. To make sure it dominates, Amazon is over-investing there, but it's running into competition as U.S. rival Walmart does the same.
Major companies are bringing together new machine learning algorithms, better and cheaper sensors, and increased computing power in hopes of addressing growing global demand for food and agriculture's diminishing labor force.
The big picture:Alphabet's X and John Deere, startups and universities are looking to AI-based agriculture to address these problems. But farming presents hard problems for AI that, if solved, could ultimately help it be deployed in more structured places (think: homes).
Twitter advised that all users change their passwords Thursday after the social media site discovered it had stored them in a log in plain text rather than encrypted form.
According to a blog postfrom the company, there is no evidence that passwords were misused or stolen, and the advisory is out of caution. The announcement, at roughly 4 p.m. Eastern time, came just as the market closed. Twitter stock immediately dropped 2.5% in after hours trading, then recovered most of the loss.
Europe's goal with its strict new privacy regulations is to give consumers more control over their personal information, but some security and privacy experts worry the rules could put the squeeze on some kinds of businesses.
Why it matters: The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes strict penalties for improperly collecting or storing user's personal information. But the devil is in virtually every detail, from what actually constitutes personal information to how to define "collect" and "store" — and the resulting confusion could impact everything from criminal investigations to the blockchain industry.
NowThis, the millennial social video media outlet that's part of Group Nine Media, will announce today the launch of NowBreaking, a breaking news channel produced exclusively for Snapchat Discover.
Why it matters: It will be the first real-time breaking news channel launched on Snapchat Discover exclusively built for global breaking news updates — not general or feature news stories.
With a black eye and a sullied reputation, Big Tech may be entering an age of tapered profits, the victim of much-reduced public tolerance for the industry's free ride, say U.S. and European industry leaders, analysts and academics.
Why it matters: Google, Facebook, Amazon and other major platforms are symbols of U.S. tech prowess and are expected to be among the country's most vibrant engines of future economic growth and jobs. But the new public zeitgeist casts doubt on how they have achieved their heights, and senior leaders at some of the companies themselves are internally rethinking their business models.
Cambridge Analytica has announced it's closing operations Wednesday and has filed for bankruptcy in the wake of revelations that it misused Facebook data to build a system to predict and influence choices at election polls.
The details: The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the closure, said this comes as the company is losing clients and facing growing legal fees in the ongoing probe over the misuse of Facebook data. The company reportedly told employees to return their computers.
Quad9, a free internet switchboard that amplifies security, has grown to 27 million users after launching with 1 million just five months ago.
Why it matters: Quad9 is a global, secure domain name system (DNS) — the thing that turns text-based internet addresses (e.g. axios.com) into machine-readable internet addresses. It is designed to protect privacy and halt other online threats. The growth of Quad9 and the introduction of competitors like CloudFlare's 1.1.1.1 demonstrate a global interest in privacy and security.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to convince journalists Tuesday that the company is committed to boosting trusted news outlets and supporting journalism as a whole, but didn’t give much reassurance that individual outlets would recoup lost revenue or traffic.
The big picture: The tension is growing between Facebook and media as it controls a large portion of digital ads and is a primary news distributor, but doesn't help newsrooms recoup dwindling revenue. And recent News Feed algorithm changes resulted in a dramatic drop — an average of 20%, Zuckerberg says — of Facebook-generated traffic to media sites.
To address allegations of bias, Facebook is bringing in two outside advisors — one to conduct a legal audit of its impact on underrepresented communities and communities of color, and another to advise the company on potential bias against conservative voices.
Why it matters: The efforts are happening in response to allegations that the tech giant censors conservative voices and discriminates against minority groups. Facebook hopes the independent audit and formal advising partnership will show it takes these issues very seriously.
United Airlines will ban 25 pet breeds when it resumes transportation of pets in its airplane cargo holds next month, the carrier announced Tuesday.
Why it matters: This comes after the death of a dog in March when an attendant told an owner to to place the dog’s carrying case in an overhead luggage compartment during a 3.5-hour flight. The airlines said the restrictions are meant to improve the well-being of all pets. United had accounted for 18 of the 24 animals that died on a major U.S. carrier last year, per the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook is now working to rank news outlets by how trustworthy and informative they are. He also said news consumption will not be the primary focus of the social network, and there are no plans to pay publishers regular fees for their content.
Why it matters: Facebook is coming to terms with its responsibility to moderate content on its site, reduce fake news and prevent malicious manipulation of content in its news feed. Zuckerberg said he sees Facebook’s primary responsibilities in this realm to be boosting trustworthy news on the platform, supporting the institution of journalism broadly, and finding ways to boost quality video.
