This is how you become the top news story in India overnight.
Last week, Mumbai-based comedian Tanmay Bhat posted a Snapchat video on his Facebook that went viral in India. It was shared over a thousand times and set off a national debate about feminism and equality.
“If you believe that men and women should have equal rights, that’s it. That’s what makes you a feminist. That's it. There’s nothing else,” he said in the video.
Bhat is the founder of a mega-popular YouTube-based comedy troupe called All India Bakchod. BuzzFeed News spoke to the group last summer while they were in the middle of a legal battle. The group had been accused of breaking obscenity laws and formally charged with offending religious sentiments after organizing India's first celebrity roast.
Unfortunately for Bhat, the feminism controversy brought more attention to his Snapchat videos. A few days later, he decided to share a Snapchat face-swap Story titled "Sachin vs Lata Civil War," which sparked even more controversy.
The video was a Captain America: Civil War parody, where Bhat swapped faces as renowned Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar and legendary Indian playback singer Lata Mangeshkar. The face-swapped celebrities argue with each other in a curse-filled back and forth. At one point Bhat's Tendulkar says that Mangeshkar looks "5,000 years old." In response, Bhat as Mangeshkar raises his middle finger to the camera.
"I obviously love Lata and Sachin, just having some fun," Bhat wrote in the caption of the video.
Last Thursday, Candace Payne walked out of a Kohl's department store and joyfully unboxed a talking Chewbacca mask while streaming it on Facebook Live. More than 150 million views later, Payne is a star.
The Texas mother of two spent the past week visiting Good Morning America, Lucasfilm's San Francisco campus, and Facebook headquarters. And she's racked up more than 700,000 Facebook followers in the process.
"My world is officially the weirdest thing in the entire galaxy," Payne said in a subsequent Facebook Live stream this week.
During Payne's visit to Facebook, she spent a few minutes talking with BuzzFeed News about her viral success and the source of her contagious joy (the full interview is posted above). "When you really know who you are, you don’t have to impress anybody. Not even yourself. You can laugh at yourself and it’s okay. It really is," she said.
Asked why she chose Facebook over other live streaming platforms, Payne attributed it to the network.
"That other streaming service didn’t have as many friends as this one," she said, referring to the Twitter-owned Periscope. "Facebook already has built-in followers, and friends and family. So, when they came out with [live streaming], it was just a natural transition to say, ‘Well why won’t I use that? I mean, everybody that I know is already on there.’"
Asked if it juiced Payne's reach in any way, Facebook said her video wasn't treated any differently in its system.
"We think it really resonated with people because it was such a joyful, authentic, and funny live video," a Facebook spokesperson said. "It was like discovering a breath of fresh air right in News Feed, and it was really hard not to laugh out loud along with Candace."
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The couple has disappeared from the French, German, Italian, Turkish, and Japanese versions of a Mother’s Day video the iPhone-maker published.
To celebrate Mother’s Day, Apple published a special video on its official YouTube channels as "a tribute to all mothers through the eyes of iPhone users worldwide."
Anil Sabharwal, vice president of Photos at Google.
Stephen Lam for BuzzFeed News
Almost one year ago, Google launched a new photo management application — Google Photos — for both the iPhone and Android. It's been a hit. Last week, at its Google I/O developer conference, the company said the app has already amassed 200 million users. "I think it makes us one of the fastest growing consumer products in history," said Anil Sabharwal, who runs Google Photos. And in an interview with BuzzFeed News looking back on the past year, Sabharwal suggested ways Google Photos might continue to change and evolve.
Smarter Storage
One of the app's main purposes is to help people back up all of their photos. Whether you're using iOS or Android, every single picture you take on your phone is automatically backed up to Google's servers. And Google Photos does this with an eye toward eliminating duplicates. It automatically deletes photos you've already backed up to free up space on your device. And it's deleted a lot of photos.
"In the year since we’ve launched, we’ve freed up 13.7 petabytes of storage on people’s phones," Sabharwal told BuzzFeed News. "For a lot of our users this was incredibly valuable because they were running out of space on their devices."
Sabharwal said many of the people using this Google Photos feature live in developing markets, and own phones that don't have a lot of storage space to begin with. And so he pointed to a future in which Google might use artificial intelligence to determine whether a photo needs to be backed up at all before it's deleted. “How can [people] free up space even when they have not backed up?" Sabharwal said. "You can imagine us doing things like deleting blurry photos or deleting duplicates."
Google Assistant
Another core feature of Google Photos is Google Assistant (which is now making its way throughout Google). Assistant will do things like automatically categorize photos into themed groupings — it will automatically find and group all your photos of beaches, for example. It also will group people together using face matching, and, because you tag those people by name, it then lets you do things like search "John at the beach" and find all your photos of, well, John at the beach. Google Photos can even use those groupings — say you take a bunch of photos at a specific beach on a specific weekend — to automatically generate albums and movies and collages and GIFs.
Google refers to these auto-generated moments as "creations." According to Sabharwal, the company has made 1.6 billion of them in the past year and has big plans to do more. "I think there’s a really great opportunity to mix the machine learning and creations together," he said. "One [creation] we love is the concept of 'rediscover this day' — where we present to our users meaningful moments on a particular date in previous years. Rather than 'here’s what happened a year ago,' it's here’s a set of photos from the last time you were with these people, or the last time you were at this restaurant."
Sabharwal also said Photos might become smarter about the albums and movies it creates by giving them a stronger perspective and point of view. It might, for example, automatically select a wedding shot in which you and your partner are looking at each other for the hero shot in an anniversary album.
Smarter Sharing
Another of the three key pillars of Google Photos — along with storage and organization — is sharing. The feature is designed so that anyone you share photos with can, in a single click, automatically add those photos to their own libraries. People can form shared albums with multiple contributors. Photos can easily be exported to other apps and services, like Facebook or Gmail. But Sabharwal told BuzzFeed News there are improvements yet to be done here as well, specifically around person-to-person proximity sharing.
"Twenty-five million photos a week are shared by Bluetooth," Sabharwal said. "There are a lot of bandwidth-sensitive markets. If you and I are standing next to each other and I've got a great photo and you want that photo, why would I spend data — which is a significant fraction of my disposable income — to send it?"
"If you think of that as a glimpse into where we’re going, you can see us investing in that experience to make it easier and better," he continued. "How do we make proximity sharing easier? How do we help you to remember to share? How do we make it so every time I take a photo of my daughter, it’s shared with my wife?"
Sabharwal pointed to Nearby, a new project designed to help people share and communicate when in near proximity, also announced at Google I/O, as one possible solution for that.
“Rather than sharing to an app or a destination," Sabharwal said, "we’re thinking about how we’re sharing with people. That's the idea we're building on.”
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Following questions raised about his role in a secret, years-long anti-Gawker Media campaign, Sean Parker denied being the person who encouraged tech billionaire and PayPal founder Peter Thiel to secretly finance a series of lawsuits against the company, including one brought by Hulk Hogan that resulted in a $140 million judgement.
Parker and Thiel were both involved early on in Facebook. Parker is the company's former president, and Thiel, its first investor, still sits on its board. Parker and Thiel subsequently worked together at Thiel's Founder's Fund, where Parker was a managing partner.
Parker's name came up following a New York Times story published on Wednesday, in which Thiel admitted to being the person who had financed the Hogan suit. Thiel said he was motivated by a 2007 story that outed him as being gay, as well as a series of articles about his friends. He also told the Times that one friend, in particular, urged him to take action.
Mr. Thiel said that he had decided several years ago to set his plan in motion. “I didn’t really want to do anything,” he said. “I thought it would do more harm to me than good. One of my friends convinced me that if I didn’t do something, nobody would.”
In response to the revelation, Gawker founder and CEO Nick Denton wrote an open letter to Thiel on Thursday. In it, he suggests that Parker may have been one of the friends Thiel refers to that was a subject of Gawker's stories. And later, among a series of "pointed and immediate" questions, Denton asks "Is Sean Parker the friend you mentioned that persuaded you to pursue this campaign?" But Parker says it wasn't him.
"I didn't know he was doing this until very recently, so I'm not the person Nick Denton was talking about," Parker told BuzzFeed News in a text message. Previously, a Parker representative told Fusion that he had played no role in the litigation against Gawker.
So it seems at least one of Denton's questions has been answered. That just leaves nine more to go.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is now perhaps the most powerful man in publishing, will be forced next month to decide the fate of a board member who engineered a decade-long secret campaign against a media company.
Zuckerberg, who controls the majority of Facebook's stockholder voting power, will have his own up-or-down vote at the company’s June 20th stockholder meeting on Peter Thiel, who is listed as being up for reelection on Facebook's preliminary proxy statement. Thiel, an early Facebook investor and key player in its early power struggles, confirmed this week that he financed lawsuits against Gawker media as "deterrence" after the company reported that he is gay.
The stakes are high for Zuckerberg because of the power he has accreted in digital publishing, an industry in which Gawker is both a lightning rod and a pioneer. Gawker is, in fact, a Facebook partner, and one of many participants in its Instant Articles program. Facebook is the world’s most important filter of information and increasingly the driving force in the way people get their news. Yet so far Zuckerberg has remained silent on his board member’s actions. BuzzFeed News’ requests for an interview were turned down along with those of many other media organizations.
Whether or not Zuckerberg is forced to address the Thiel situation at the 11 a.m. stockholder meeting at the Sofitel San Francisco Bay in Redwood City, his thumbs up, or down, vote will be the most forceful statement he can make about his board member — a man who some argue is setting a chilling precedent for media companies who publish stories not to the liking of powerful billionaires.
Will Facebook, a company dependent on publishers for the content that fuels its News Feed, stand by a board member seeking the destruction of one of those very publishers?
Facebook is used by more than 1 billion people every day, but as it has moved from personal content toward what the company refers to as "public content," it has moved huge audiences to publishers — and become responsible for a significant share of many publishers’ traffic. Its influence is so vast that many such publishers (including BuzzFeed) have agreed to host their articles directly on Facebook's servers via the Instant Articles product. That outsized influence on how people all across the world are informed is why a major firestorm ensued after curators of its Trending column were accused of bias. After that episode, Zuckerberg said the company had a trust problem with conservatives it needed to address. His vote on Thiel will send another message about how he sees publishers.
Contributing: William Alden
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Univision is not among the bidders to buy Gawker, sources familiar with the deal told BuzzFeed News. Earlier today, the New York Post reported that Gawker founder Nick Denton was looking to sell after the media company was ordered to pay $140 million in damages to Hulk Hogan for posting portions of sex tape.
The Post reported that one party had expressed interest in buying Gawker with a deal worth $50 million to $70 million and that Univision was one possible bidder. One source told BuzzFeed that Univision is actively pursuing how to expand its portfolio, but under recent conditions will not be bidding to buy Gawker, although the source did not rule out a bid in the future. Another source close to the Univision side said that the only negotiations were over a Spanish-language version of verticals like Gizmodo and Lifehacker. Univision has previously worked on Spanish-language sites for Variety and Atlantic City Labs.
Yesterday, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who sits on the board of Facebook and once served as CEO of PayPal, admitted that he has been financing lawsuits against Gawker with the hopes of crippling the media company. Thiel told Dealbook that he had paid about $10 million to finance claims from the wrestler, whose real name is Terry Gene Bollea. Dealbook spelled out the billionaire Libertarian's secretive legal machinations, but did not include comment on Thiel's pledge as a delegate for Donald Trump.
In April, Bloomberg reported that Univision was aiming for an IPO in the second half of the year that could raise as much as $1 billion. Before the verdict in the Hogan trial, Denton sold a minority stake in the company to Columbus Nova Technology Partners. According to the Post, Columbus purchased a minority stake in Gawker for $100 million, however Politico says the amount was "far less."
Disclosure: Nitasha Tiku is a former Gawker employee.
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Sarah Jessica Parker's Instagram is a treasure trove. And last night she Instagrammed something so revealing, that we need to discuss here. Here is the photo that was shared:
Thor Halvorssen, center, during a press conference at the War Memorial of Korea in Seoul.
Jung Yeon-je / AFP / Getty Images
Billionaire investor Peter Thiel has at least one civil society ally defending his financing of lawsuits against Gawker Media: the founder of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, which has received at least $900,000 in funding from Thiel.
"Peter Thiel is a free man in a free society, and he has every right to engage in third party litigation financing if he wants to," Human Rights Foundation founder Thor Halvorssen told BuzzFeed News. “If he thinks that Gawker should be hauled into court and sued for what he believes is wrongdoing, and he is willing to finance the effort, that’s between Peter Thiel and whoever is prosecuting the lawsuit. There appears to be nothing illegal in Thiel's conduct."
Halvorssen was speaking by phone from the sidelines of the Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual gathering of activists, dissidents and journalists that is put on by his foundation. He described Thiel as a "visionary, an innovator, and a person of principle."
Thiel's ideas have influenced the Venezuelan-Norwegian activist in ways beyond the political or ideological. In a 2013 profile, Halvorssen told BuzzFeed News that he got the idea to cryogenically freeze his body after death from the Facebook board member.
Forbes and the New York Times reported Tuesday that Thiel has helped fund a lawsuit against Gawker by Terry Bollea — aka Hulk Hogan — stemming from the site's publication of an excerpt of a sex tape featuring the wrestler.
Hogan won a $140 million judgment in the suit, which a Florida Circuit Court judge recently upheld. Gawker is appealing. "We trust the appeals court will correct the outsized Florida jury verdict and reaffirm the law that protects a free and critical press, which is more embattled and important than ever," Gawker said in a statement Wednesday.
Thiel says advocates for a free press should not fear his approach to funding lawsuits. “I refuse to believe that journalism means massive privacy violations,” he told the New York Times in an interview published Wednesday night. “I think much more highly of journalists than that. It’s precisely because I respect journalists that I do not believe they are endangered by fighting back against Gawker.”
Joel Simon, the executive director of The Committee to Protect Journalists, which has also received funding from Thiel, put out a statement Wednesday saying that while the organization supports people's rights to pursue defamation claims, "we do not support efforts to abuse the process by seeking to punish or bankrupt particular media outlets." Thiel has not donated to CPJ or HRF since 2013 and 2014 respectively.
Halvorssen, who spoke to BuzzFeed News before Thiel's Times interview was published, acknowledged that "defamation lawsuits are often used to silence journalists engaged in whistleblowing and uncovering malfeasance and political corruption," but argued that in Gawker's case, "this does not seem to be one such lawsuit."
Gawker has the "right to publish what they wish," Halvorssen said, and in return "they might be held accountable in a court of law."
In an interview with The Street in 2011, Thiel said he supported the Human Rights Foundation and the Oslo Freedom Forum "because their focus on dissidents engages the intellectual debate as well as the moral cause."
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Until he lost an eye, April 15 was a good day for Joseph Cavins.
The 63-year-old Orange, California, family therapist saw a full slate of clients. It was two days before tax day, so he caught up on records from his practice. After work, he hung out with some friends. And he wound his day down in the usual way: by playing a game of solitaire on his computer while he enjoyed a few drags off one of his e-cigarettes, which he had been using nearly every day for two years.
At around 10:30 p.m., as Cavins turned his head toward a nearby bookcase, he heard a “very loud bang” and felt as if he had been struck in the face by a hockey stick. A fire smoldered on his desk. He held his hands to his face and discovered that “there was a lot of blood and fluid coming out.” He began to scream: “No! No!” He couldn’t see out of his left eye.
Cavins smothered the fire and woke his wife. At the hospital, doctors found that the explosion had caused extensive damage to his eyeball: Several cuts had pierced his iris and cornea, and they went all the way to the socket. The doctors recommended a surgical “evisceration”: the removal of the eye. Sitting in the emergency room, Cavins began to process what had happened: His vaporizer, the device he had bought as a “nice, clean way to get nicotine,” had exploded into his face.
He wasn’t alone. Across the country, defective e-cigarettes — the nicotine delivery machines that have taken over every strip mall and sidewalk, seemingly overnight — are creating hundreds of victims like Cavins, people whose lives are suddenly and horrifyingly changed when their devices blow up. They are people like Thomas Boes, whose vape exploded while he was driving outside San Diego and struck him with such force that two of the three teeth he lost lodged in his upper palate; Kenneth Barbero, whose exploding device ripped a hole in his tongue; and Marcus Forzani, a 17-year-old whose left leg was charred from his calf to his thigh after a vape battery exploded in his pocket. An unpublished FDA analysis found 66 reports of e-cigarette overheating, fires, and explosions in 2015 and the first month of 2016, a number the agency calls “an underestimate of actual events.”
Until very recently a totally unregulated $3.7 billion industry, e-cigarettes are widely expected to surpass traditional tobacco products in sales within the next decade. Responding to intense — if tempered — consumer demand and unencumbered by rules, hundreds of small distributors have over the past five years rushed devices, mostly imported from China, to market. Thousands of small stores have cropped up to sell them. According to a 2015 CDC survey, nearly 13% of Americans had tried an e-cigarette in their lifetime and there are more than 9 million adults who use e-cigs regularly; those numbers have almost surely gone up since.
The industry has grown so rapidly in part by claiming health benefits over traditional cigarette smoking, namely that it is safer to inhale the vapor produced by heating a nicotine solution than it is to inhale the 7,000 chemicals dispensed by a paper cigarette. Indeed, most of the concern and debate over e-cigarettes has focused on the relative merit of those claims.
Joseph Cavins
Gregory L. Bentley
Much less of the public debate has focused on the devices themselves, which have demonstrably maimed dozens, and probably maimed hundreds, including Cavins, Boes, and Barbero. Recently, though, personal injury lawyers across the country have started to take notice.
“The batteries are exploding due to an unclean manufacturing process at dirty, unsanitary facilities in China,” said Gregory Bentley, a California lawyer who represents 62 people who have been injured by exploding e-cigarettes. “That’s as a result of people trying to rush these products to the marketplace.” Because it’s nearly impossible to sue a Chinese manufacturer, Bentley and other plaintiffs' attorneys have focused on the American distributors and sellers who make money off of the devices. Bentley’s firm, Shernoff Bidart Echeverria Bentley, was the first to reach a verdict against a seller of e-cigarettes, in October of last year.
Bentley is correct that the direct cause of these explosions is an overheated lithium ion battery, but the science behind the trigger for these so-called thermal events is still something of a mystery. The first problem, and one reason lithium ion failures in e-cigs may be more dangerous than in, say, computers, is their shape. According to a 2014 report by the U.S. Fire Administration, the cylindrical design of e-cigs makes them particularly dangerous in the event of overheating: “As a result of the battery and container failure, one or the other, or both, can be propelled across the room like a bullet or small rocket.” That’s why, in both Cavins’ and Boes’ cases, the explosion turned the devices into projectiles.
But what causes the failure in the first place? According to Venkat Viswanathan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon who studies lithium ion batteries, extremely low failure rates — somewhere between one in a million and one in a billion — make it difficult to determine.
“That’s the challenge of large numbers. It’s hard to prove,” said Viswanathan. “We would have to test a million cells and see what is going on. The only way to find out is to put a million products in the hands of consumers.”
Which is, more or less, what’s going on in the market today. That’s where Glen Stevick, a mechanical engineer and failure analyst at Berkeley Engineering and Research (BEAR), comes in: He’s the Sherlock Holmes of lithium ion batteries, running postmortems on explosions like the one that partially blinded Joseph Cavins. BEAR has investigated more than two dozen such cases. According to Stevick, the real problem is that many of the e-cigarettes on the market today lack the electronics, both in the devices themselves and in the chargers, to prevent both dangerously high-voltage charging and equally dangerous low-voltage discharge. Each of these states — too high and too low — can ultimately lead to short-circuiting, overheating, and, ultimately, explosion.
Better preventative measures would likely stop hot batteries from ever getting to the point where a thermal event reaches “runway.” These include circuits that regulate charging; a stiff, hollow core on the inside of the battery that sloughs off extra energy; and a switch that causes the battery to lose conductivity at certain levels of heat. Of course, those preventative measures cost money. The e-cig business in America has been defined by its prolificacy: A 2014 report found that there were 466 brands of e-cigarettes on the market, a number that was increasing by an average of 10.5 brands a month. Many of these companies are small and have to skimp on quality to compete with larger manufacturers.
“Some companies get really good batteries at a cheap price,” said Viswanathan. “Smaller-scale device makers don’t have the same luxury. They have to lean on low-quality suppliers.”
Thomas Boes
Gregory L. Bentley
"The FDA has taken a good first step, but it’s clearly not enough."
Earlier this month, the FDA announced a long-awaited set of rules that extended its authority to all tobacco products, including e-cigarettes. Crucially, the new federal rules include not just the tobacco solution, but components and parts as well. These rules will require e-cigarette makers to submit premarket tobacco applications to the agency, a process that the FDA estimates costs “in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars.” According to Michael Felberbaum, an FDA press officer, the agency recommends that the applications include information about under- or over-voltage lockout protections.
“The FDA has taken a good first step, but it’s clearly not enough,” said Bentley, Cavins’ lawyer. “I believe the industry needs to put testing protocols and manufacturing guidelines in place for chargers. And to what extent they will get in and look at the factories? That’s the most important process.”
While American regulators won’t be setting foot inside Chinese factories anytime soon, the new rules may nevertheless indirectly put a stop to the creation of substandard batteries. By forcing smaller companies, which won’t be able to bear the costs of approval and higher-quality components, out of the nascent space, the FDA may eliminate cheaper batteries from the market. In other words, twin financial pressures — litigation on one end and regulation on the other — may ultimately end the problem of exploding e-cigs and make the batteries inside as safe as those in laptops and automobiles. While some have called the regulations “a gift to Big Tobacco,” which will be able to bear easily the costs of premarket approval, standardizing safer batteries would be an indisputable upside of industry consolidation.
“We’re making cars with 8,000 cell batteries and they’re safe,” said Viswanathan. “In most cases e-cigarettes have one cell.”
In the meantime, there will continue to be fires and explosions, at least until a two-year FDA grace period for e-cig companies runs its course. That means likely hundreds more Americans dealing with the aftermath of life-changing injuries. That means hundreds more people like Joseph Cavins — who has quit nicotine products — who will continue to serve as a reminder that unregulated product crazes come with consequences. “I’m not coping as well as I would have liked,” Cavins said of losing his eye. “But I’ve given myself permission to do the best I can.”
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Founder & CEO at Postmates Bastian Lehmann during TechCrunch Disrupt London 2015.
John Phillips / Getty Images
Lots of people seem to be having the same problem with the on-demand delivery service Postmates.
After placing an order, the company quotes an estimate for what it will cost. But after the goods are delivered, people say they end up getting charged way more than they originally agreed to:
People mostly associate Postmates, which is valued at half a billion dollars, with restaurant takeout, but the company has a lot of partnerships, including 7-Eleven and Walgreens, that allow customers to get pretty much anything delivered. While the convenience is a bonus people are willing to pay for, the frustration over being charged more than you expected to pay is a major turn-off:
Postmates acknowledged the problem to BuzzFeed News, saying it's caused by out-of-date prices for the thousands of restaurants its delivery team picks up from. "We show the price estimate, based on the menu that's in our system," wrote Postmates spokesperson April Conyers in an email, "but there may be some discrepancy."
In some cases, when there's more at play than changing menu prices, Postmates ends up giving a refund to customers — for example, when Postmates failed to inform customers that a restaurant would be charging a special fee because of the app:
Postmates offers delivery from many restaurants, some of which — unlike the partner vendors that Postmates works closely with — don’t even realize they’re on the platform at all. This can cause problems with food quality and supply, as well as kitchen timing.
Restaurants that don't want to be available for Postmates delivery can request to be permanently removed, Postmates said; others, like San Francisco's popular Blue Barn, charge a fee. "Last year we delivered from 100,000 merchants," said Conyers. "You can imagine, things come up."
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Billionaire investor Peter Thiel has helped fund Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker Media, Forbes reported on Tuesday, citing unnamed sources familiar with the case.
Thiel, who sits on the board of Facebook, did not respond to requests for comment. Hogan was recently awarded $140 million by a Florida jury hearing his long-running lawsuit against Gawker, which was filed after the company published excerpts of a leaked sex tape featuring the former pro wrestler.
Charles Harder, Hogan's lawyer, did not respond to requests for comment. "I do not discuss the finances of my clients," he told the New York Times.
Gawker is appealing the verdict, whose damages could be financially ruinous for the company if they are upheld. Founder Nick Denton told Forbes that Thiel's name has been mentioned, among other Silicon Valley figures, in rumors of possible outside supporters of Hogan's case.
Thiel and Gawker have a history: In the comments to a 2007 Gawker article headlined "Peter Thiel is totally gay, people," Denton wrote he had previously been warned of "destruction that would rain down on me" if he reported on Thiel's sexual orientation.
"The only thing that's strange about Thiel's sexuality: why on earth was he so paranoid about its discovery for so long?" Denton wrote.
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When it launched via an epically popular Kickstarter four years ago, Pebble became the first must-have smartwatch — at least inasmuch as such a thing exists. But in ensuing years, others have eclipsed it. So now it's trying to get back in the game with a pair of watches that can track heart rate — a first for the company. It is also gearing up to release its first non-watch gadget: a small, wireless-enabled, cube-shaped accessory that lets people on the move easily access watch features without carrying their phones (like runners who want to listen to music).
Pebble is getting ready to launch these devices at a time when the wearables market is otherwise consolidating. Other independent startups, like Misfit, Withings, and Runkeeper, have been snapped up by companies in the apparel and tech worlds, while wealthy tech giants like Apple and Google are now pushing their own smartwatches. Pebble also laid off about 45 people earlier this year, reducing its head count to 125. To date, it has sold only 1.8 million Pebbles and is not yet profitable.
Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky said the layoffs were intended to let Pebble’s staff focus on creating the devices that customers most want. “We look at making a great watch first, and adding smart functionality on top of that,” he told BuzzFeed News. “We’re not looking to bring everything your phone does directly to the wrist.”
Pebble decided to double down on health tracking in the wake of the Pebble Health app, which, among other things, creates exercise and sleep goals for individuals based on their previous activity data, instead of setting a generic goal of 10,000 steps. Six months after it was released late last year, it’s the second-most-used feature, Migicovsky said. “We had a feeling it would click, but we had no idea.”
Some of Pebble’s existing watches — the Pebble Classic, Time, and Time Steel — will eventually be phased out and replaced by the Pebble 2 ($129, $99 on Kickstarter) and the Pebble Time 2 ($199, $169 on Kickstarter), which will be available in September and November, respectively.
The Time 2’s screen will be larger and in color, rather than black and white, but both devices will share the same functionalities. That includes microphones, water resistance, and weeklong battery life. They also come with new software that aims to simplify watch navigation. For example, they will draw on your GPS location when you summon an Uber, and automatically plug in the person you most often text when you compose a message on your wrist. (These suggestions are editable.)
Both new watches will also come with heart rate sensors on the back, which will record your resting heart rate every 10 minutes. For now, Pebble doesn’t plan to crunch this particular data set into personalized insights, but will use it initially to learn more about highly active exercise periods and come up with better calories-burned goals, Migicovsky said.
It's the Pebble Core ($70), available in January 2017, that marks Pebble’s biggest departure. Described by Migicovsky as a “tiny computer that lives on your keychain,” it’s a cube-shaped accessory that comes with GPS, 3G and Wi-Fi capability, memory, and Bluetooth. Able to clip onto a shirt collar or waistband, it’s meant for runners who want to leave their phones at home. They can download a Spotify playlist onto the Core, plug in their headphones, and listen to the songs — much like with an iPod Shuffle. The Core lasts for about 10 hours on a charge, and it comes with two big buttons, which people could program to do things like call an Uber or make an emergency call.
All these products can be backed on Kickstarter starting today. Pebble has come a long way from its first campaign, and it has almost $26 million in outside funding. So why turn to crowdfunding yet again? It makes people feel involved from the get-go, Migicovsky says, and creates a publicity push that has worked — so far. Last year, a Kickstarter for the Pebble Time handily surpassed the initial goal of $500,000 and raised a whopping $20 million. Now Pebble is hoping to once again capture some of that homegrown magic.
“We built an amazing community by being open and transparent and by sharing our products with people who can appreciate them,” Migicovsky said.
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Twitter is making a series of product tweaks that will allow you to cram more characters into a tweet, and finally ditch the “.@” syntax when you want to start a tweet with someone’s username.
Within the next few months, the company will stop counting links, photos, polls, quote tweets and GIFs towards its 140 character limit. It will also stop counting “@names” towards the limit and allow you to mention up to 50 people in a tweet. The announcement confirms a Bloomberg report, which revealed the details last week.
Twitter isn’t stopping there. It’s also going to show “New tweets” (meaning: non-replies) starting with a username to all your followers, so you won’t have to use the infamous “.@” anymore. And it’s adding the retweet button to your own tweets, so you can blast them out again if you’d like.
“What we're really looking to do now is to refine the core service and to take all the things that people love about the platform and really make it more intuitive,” Twitter CMO Leslie Berland told BuzzFeed News in an interview.
Tweets have long displayed more than 140 characters, thanks to cards, videos and images. But these changes are still significant, expanding the amount of typing you can do within a tweet itself and further eroding the information density of the platform.
Twitter
That said, the changes aren’t anywhere close to the 10,000 character limit the company experimented with under the code name “Beyond 140.” Asked if Twitter is continuing to explore that, Berland replied: “We're going to continue to explore a ton of different options, which we have in the past. And we've taken all the feedback and the insights from people who use the platform, which is really what led us to the changes today, and we will continue to explore things.”
The openness to the 10,000 character tweet limit, and even the changes being announced today, don't exactly square of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey who, speaking of the 140 character limit, said “It’s staying,” back in March. “It’s a good constraint for us,” Dorsey told the “Today” show at the time. “It allows for of-the-moment brevity.”
When news of the current round changes first broke last week, the Twitter’s user base celebrated, a rare occurrence for the platform’s notoriously change-averse population.
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As Austin begins its third week without Uber or Lyft, aspiring ride-hail rivals are getting serious about picking up where the two companies left off. For them, the driver fingerprinting requirement that caused Uber and Lyft to flee Austin has created an unprecedented market opportunity — a city in which both drivers and passengers have been abandoned by ride-hail services on which they had come to rely.
Austin is in a ride-hail vacuum, and there are plenty of startups jockeying to fill it; whichever grabs the biggest chunk of the market now stands the best chance of surviving when Uber and Lyft inevitably return.
Austin isn’t the first city that Uber and Lyft have abandoned in a collaborative anti-regulatory tantrum. The same thing happened in San Antonio in April 2015.
But, as Austin Council Member Ellen Troxclair wrote in an op-ed on Friday, within less than a year Uber and Lyft had returned. No new companies entered the ride-hail market during the nine months of Uber and Lyft’s absence from San Antonio, although GetMe and Bid My Ride are both now active there. The city ultimately backed off of its mandatory fingerprinting stance, allowing riders to opt-in instead. If the city of Austin were amenable to a similar deal, Troxclair argued, Uber and Lyft could be back on the streets “quickly and easily.”
(Uber was the first to strike a deal with San Antonio and will be the first to re-evaluate the agreement post-pilot in July, following a series of “ride-hail roundtables” being held by the city government.)
Neither Uber nor Lyft have not announced any plans to return Austin, and both companies declined to comment for this story. The news that Austin was looking to assist competitors — small business loans ranging from around $35,000 to $800,000 are being made available to local transportation network companies — did, however, strike a chord with at least one Lyft investor:
As the ride-hail duopoly continues to duke it out with the city, passengers have been left with no choice but to experiment with alternatives, of which there is no shortage. On Monday, Ride Austin — a new nonprofit ride-hail app backed by local tech leaders — became the latest to join the fray.
Most of the would-be Ubers in Austin see themselves as a more ethical, more local, more fair alternative to the incumbents, and Ride Austin is no exception.
“People feel like [Uber and Lyft] lost an election they dumped $10 million into, and took their ball and went home, leaving everybody high and dry,” Ride Austin community engagement director Joe Deshotel told BuzzFeed News. “We’re building something community-based. I think people are going to support that.”
Local tech companies like Trilogy and Crossover have had their dev teams working around the clock building the Ride Austin app, according to Deshotel; they see the project as “the Austin tech community's answer” to the argument that booting Uber and Lyft was proof that the city “can’t be innovative.”
“We've already interviewed a couple hundred drivers. They feel abandoned,” Deshotel said. “They’re not that enthusiastic about [Uber and Lyft] coming back. And that’s been our experience with riders as well.”
Ride Austin may enjoy the backing of the local industry, but their drivers won’t be road-ready until June. In fact, the only company that currently has drivers on the road is GetMe. But some Austinites with whom BuzzFeed News spoke found the app buggy, and there are more than a few reviews on Google Play and the iTunes App Store from users complaining of long wait times and crashes.
But Kimber Modern Boutique Hotel manager Cassie Bills said out-of-towners have quickly adjusted to the new reality, and are using GetMe without a problem. “I think it's going to work itself out pretty quickly,” she said. “There's plenty of options now.” The drivers seem happy to be earning more than they were from Uber, she said, and city residents weren’t too sad to see them go.
It's worth noting that, while Uber and Lyft bailed over fingerprinting regulation, the bill itself is basically toothless and, according to the Austin Statesman, GetMe has accordingly made no moves to comply.
Other ride-hail opportunists include Fasten, which is currently enjoying some success in Boston, Fare, which promises to put drivers on the road in Austin this week, Wingz, which is now operating a web-based beta, Arcade City, a DIY-style Facebook page with over 24,000 members, and Dryvrs. These companies have until May to fully comply with the mandatory fingerprinting law, but many are already using services like IdentoGo to onboard drivers.
Dryvrs, formerly Blaxi, originally launched in L.A. as a designated-driver-on-demand app. CEO Evan Stafford attended the University of Texas in Austin; he founded the company after a friend died in a drunk-driving accident. After Uber and Lyft pulled out, and concerns about a spike in drunk driving were raised, Stafford said friends of his on the city council reached out about bringing Dryvrs to Austin. “They’re fast-tracking our permit to start operating,” Stafford told BuzzFeed News.
Because Dryvrs has partnerships with local bars and an endorsement from Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Stafford said on Thursday that he wasn’t concerned about Uber’s possible return. And he claims to have the market research to back that up — of 1,300 people surveyed, 38% said “if Uber and Lyft came back, they would never use it again.” And over half said they would be open to using price-comparable options like Dryvrs.
Dryvrs is the only alternative ride-hail option explicitly focused on drunk driving, but it’s not the only one trying to capitalize on Uber and Lyft’s bad reputation. Fasten, for example, emphasizes the need to treat drivers better and offers a much lower commission — a $.99 flat rate versus Uber’s 25% — plus, no surge.
Alternatives to Uber and Lyft tend to be popular in conversation, but less so in practice. Conventional wisdom says, in the U.S. at least, the network effect already achieved by the twin pillars of the ride-hail industry will make it impossible for any up-and-coming competitors to gain an edge. Uber and Lyft’s withdrawal from Austin has briefly upended that, and these up-and-comers are racing to see if that sliver of an opening will be enough to change the game.
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The social network launched an investigation into its trending news section after allegations that conservative stories were suppressed.
a Facebook employee walks past a sign at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on March 15, 2013.
Jeff Chiu / AP
Facebook said Monday it will make changes to its Trending Topics section after allegations surfaced that it suppressed conservative content.
Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch announced the changes Monday in a statement, and a letter to Sen. John Thune. According to Stretch, the changes will include improvements to both training, terminology, and practices.
Earlier this month, former members of Facebook's news curation team toldGizmodo they were ordered to manipulate the site's powerful "trending" section. One staffer described suppressing conservative stories on topics including Mitt Romney and Rand Paul, and others said they were ordered to inject stories into the section even if those stories weren't actually trending.
The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation demanded answers in the wake of the allegations. Thune, chairman of the committee, said any attempt by "a neutral and inclusive social media platform to censor or manipulate political discussion is an abuse of trust and inconsistent with the values of an open Internet."
In his statement Monday, Stretch said Facebook would no longer use a list of external websites to "identify, validate or assess the importance of particular topics." The company is also removing the ability to assign an "importance level" based a topic's prominence on top news sites.
While the social network reiterated it had not found any evidence of political bias in its trending section, it acknowledged it was possible.
"We could not fully exclude the possibility of isolated improper actions or unintentional bias in the implementation of our guidelines or policies," Stretch wrote.
The company is updating the terminology used in guidelines for curation staffers as well, Stretch said, and will provide training emphasizing "that content decisions may not be made on the basis of politics or ideology."
The letter also describes the investigation into the allegations, stating that both current and former members of the curation team "confirmed that they are not aware of any ideological bias in the review process." Facebook also reviewed data and found no evidence of "systematic" political bias. The letter addresses specific allegations that surfaced during the controversy, pointing to instances when content related to or by conservative figures such as Glenn Beck and Matt Drudge appeared in the trending section.
"The only clear trend revealed by the analysis was that moderate topics — that is, those that are popular across the political spectrum — are approved and boosted at a higher rate than liberal or conservative topics," Stretch said.
A "specific reviewer" might have taken "isolated actions with an improper motive," Stretch added, but if the company learns of an instance in which political bias was a factor, "we will take prompt remedial actions."
After years of resisting calls from consumers for a feature that would allow them to book rides ahead of time, Lyft is reversing course. On Monday, the ride-hail service said it is testing a scheduled ride feature that will allow passengers to arrange for transportation up to 24 hours in advance.
Scheduled rides will debut in San Francisco this summer as an experimental feature. Lyft is still figuring out how things like surge pricing will effect rides booked in advance. "Part of the test is to determine how all of that will work," a Lyft spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. "We're looking at all the possible scenarios to see what the best experience for passengers and drivers will be."
For Lyft drivers, rides won't come in as they are scheduled. Instead, they appear in the app as normal rides, "with a little bit advanced notice."
At launch, the feature will only be available to Lyft employees in San Francisco. Once it's been tested, the plan is to roll it out to customers in other locations.
The addition of scheduled rides has obvious benefits. While on-demand services are convenient, they can sometimes be unreliable when it comes to getting to the airport on time. If there's no driver in your area when you open up the app, you'll just have to wait. Scheduled rides could eliminate this kind of irregularity.
Adding scheduled rides is one of several ongoing steps in Lyft's efforts to compete with ride-hailing giant Uber. In March, the company launched a Carpool feature that also relies on customers scheduling rides in advance, albeit for a much more specific use case — getting to and from work with people heading in the same direction.
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SAN FRANCISCO — The exact location of ISIS supporters in several European cities were allegedly found Saturday, when photographs published by those in support of the group were used by internet sleuths to track them down.
As rumors spread that an ISIS-affiliated media group would be releasing a recording from the top leadership on Saturday, thousands of ISIS supporters, also known as fanboys, took to social media sites to try and create a buzz about the release.
Among the tweets and uploads to Telegram, a messaging app with many ISIS channels, were dozens of photographs showing the fanboys holding pieces of papers with messages scribbled on them in support of ISIS, from countries around the world, including Germany, France, and England.
Their photos were supposed to instill fear by showing that the group had supporters in major European cities. Instead, the photos were used to geolocate the fanboys, and give tips to local law enforcement officials on how to find them.
Eliot Higgins, one of the founders of Bellingcat, a website devoted to civic data journalism, was the first to ask his followers to help him geolocate the photos.
"We're currently looking at a small number of photos, but we're working through them one by one to keep people focused," Higgins wrote BuzzFeed News in an email. "Hopefully law enforcement will take notice, especially as the one in Paris appears to have been taken from a private home."
Higgins tweeted that he believed that with the help of several other people, he had traced one ISIS fanboy to an exact location.
A reader in London then helped identify a second location he believed a note was posted from:
Using his Twitter account, Higgins is still working through the visual clues offered in other photos posted by the ISIS supporters. Using CCTV footage, and other cameras, Higgins hopes local police may be able to track down the persons who posted the messages in support of ISIS.
One intelligence official, who spoke to BuzzFeed News earlier this year about the ways in which ISIS uses the internet, noted if law enforcement are able to get their hands on the raw photo uploads, they could often see photo's metadata, which includes specific details on where the photo was taken and a time stamp.
"The more they use these programs the greater the chance someone slips up and uses them incorrectly and exposes themselves,” one U.S. military intelligence official told BuzzFeed News during a briefing in D.C. He spoke to BuzzFeed on the condition that he not be named as he wasn’t authorized to speak to press. “In a way, it’s best for us when they increase their presence online as much as possible. The more they do online, the more of a digital footprint we have to follow.”
Those who follow ISIS closely on the internet, meanwhile, couldn't help celebrating that ISIS fanboys had made the mistake:
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The tech world is awash with talk of artificial intelligence. The seemingly out-of-nowhere magical force is now powering everything from image recognition to virtual assistant chatbots; it’s on the lips of every tech executive within 10 feet of a microphone. Not surprisingly, AI was front and center last week at Google’s I/O conference, a massive gathering of some 7,000 developers and media all looking to Google for a peek at the future. Google CEO Sundar Pichai did little to temper that blue-sky enthusiasm, ending the closing AI portion of his keynote with a line that felt cribbed straight from a Star Trek script: “Things previously thought to be impossible may in fact be possible.”
AI is becoming an increasingly more important feature in our daily lives, yet one of the more fascinating aspects of its rise is how poorly we understand what it actually is. If AI is truly going change the world, it’s fair to first ask for its definition. And what better place to find it than Google I/O?
At least that seemed a reasonable expectation, until a first round of answers to the question “How would you define AI?” Here’s a sampling:
“I would definitely interview someone else.”
“I’m not sure. I haven’t done anything with AI.”
“No thanks. Sorry. Good luck.”
“I’m actually on a call.”
“I don’t know anything about it.”
“It’s machine learning.”
“I don’t know. I’ll pass.”
“I work at Yahoo….”
Not everyone found themselves at such a loss. Dan Cernoch, Ticketmaster’s head of abuse prevention, described true AI as a computer replicating the functionality of a human brain. “We’re a long way away from that,” he said. A lot of what people are calling AI, Cernoch argued, is a lesser thing called "machine learning." Indeed, he explained, many use AI as an umbrella term with machine learning lumped underneath. More on that in a bit.
Another attendee put it this way: “[AI is] where machines start becoming more intelligent than what they are programmed for.” Instead of simply spitting back information humans have fed it, AI can actually reason on its own. “It’s being able to understand things, versus being told,” he said.
Understanding that the definition of AI wasn't going to be found, we searched out Google senior research scientist Greg Corrado for an expert opinion. “Artificial intelligence is the art and science of making machines intelligent,” Corrado explained. But that was too broad a definition, so he quickly refocused on machine learning (sorry, Mr. Cernoch), which he described as the biggest growth area in AI. “Rather than directly trying to program computers to be clever, we program computers to learn,” Corrado said.
The best way to explain machine learning, an abstract concept, is via concrete examples; Corrado began with image recognition. You can teach a computer to recognize images of certain things by feeding it lots of images in which those things are identified. Feed a computer lots of images of cats, for example, and the computer can learn how to recognize new images of cats.
The computer does this through something called a neural network, which Corrado said is designed to mirror the human brain. According to Corrado, the brain's billions of neurons all make tiny decisions based on small amounts of information, but working together they can perform advanced thinking tasks. “Intelligence is something that emerges out of the concerted action of these billions of individual neurons,” he explained.
Artificial intelligence has neurons too. “Instead of individual cells that are not that bright, we have individual mathematical functions that are not very bright,” Corrado said, describing the artificial neural network. “We build these functions on top of each other and they learn to do tasks all together. They learn to coordinate.”
Moving back to the image recognition example, Corrado explained that these artificial neurons will individually scan tiny patches of pixels in an image and make some judgment about them. “Is it all white stuff? Is it all dark stuff? Is there an edge? Which way is the edge pointing? That kind of very low-level image analysis,” he said. A large number of artificial neurons can scan an image and pass their conclusions to another set of neurons, which in turn make their own decisions based on the data they’re being fed. Eventually, after many layers of this, a neural network can determine whether it’s looking at a face, or a car or a truck.
Machine learning works relatively well for image recognition. It also works for things like language translation, where it uses a similar approach to extrapolate words from analyzed bits of sound. When it has the words figured out, it can run them through a translation program. “It’s looking for signals in that audio stream to try to guess, ‘What letter should I output in order to transcribe this?’” Corrado said.
Asked how machine learning works for things like booking a movie ticket — a task Google’s AI-powered Google Assistant performed during CEO Sundar Pichai’s keynote — Corrado explained that parts of that task were not done by AI. “When you build a whole product, there are all kinds of subsystems and it’s definitely not the case that machine learning does every little sub-piece,” he said. “For example, when you go and you look up movie times at local movie theaters, you want a direct, perfect retrieval of that information. You can write a program that does it correctly, and there’s no need to try to learn how to do it in some soft, squishy way. Machine learning is really best to fill in these kind of missing pieces where there’s some intuitive step.” AI, Corrado said, is better suited to understanding the language we use to ask for those tickets.
Further questions remained, but Corrado couldn’t stay a minute longer. Google’s AI-powered products weren’t going to build themselves, after all. At least not yet.
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Team Palantir participates in the Tug-a-Rope competition during the Founder Institute's Silicon Valley Sports League event on July 13, 2013
C Flanigan / Getty Images
Palantir Technologies, one of Silicon Valley’s most highly valued startups, plans to purchase up to $225 million of its own common stock that is owned by current and former employees, in a move that could provide some relief to employees growing anxious over the prospect of turning their shares into cash.
The so-called “liquidity event” will be held at a price of $7.40 per share, Palantir said in a memo to staff that was obtained by BuzzFeed News. Employees — whose compensation is weighted heavily toward stock options — were invited to sell up to 12.5% of their equity, or $500,000 worth, whichever is lower.
The $7.40 price offered for common stock is significantly above the level that several mutual fund investors are currently valuing preferred shares of Palantir — shares that are typically valued higher than common stock. As of March 31, at least three funds — managed or co-managed by Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, and Transamerica — valued Palantir preferred shares at $5.92 each, 48% below the price in a financing round last year.
One fund, managed by Valic, a division of AIG, is valuing its preferred shares at just $3.79, a 67% discount to last year’s valuation. The valuation data was collected by research firm Morningstar.
Representatives of the funds did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
If you have information or tips, you can contact this reporter over an encrypted chat service such as Telegram, Signal, or WhatsApp, at 310-617-1302. You can also send an encrypted email to will.alden@buzzfeed.com, using the PGP key found here.
It could not be determined whether Palantir plans to sell the common shares to outside investors after buying them from employees. That is what the company planned to do after a similar liquidity event last year, according to an internal email at the time.
A Palantir spokesperson, Lisa Gordon, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The 12-year old data analysis company based in Palo Alto, California, was valued at $20 billion by investors in the 2015 financing round, making it the third most highly valued American tech startup, behind only Uber and Airbnb.
The latest liquidity event is part of a broader effort by Palantir to address unease among its staff. More than 100 employees, including several top managers, left the company this year through mid-April, BuzzFeed News reported earlier this month. On April 22, CEO Alex Karp announced a sweeping 20% pay raise for all employees who had worked there for at least 18 months and canceled annual performance reviews, which he suggested weren’t working, BuzzFeed News reported.
In a response to the article, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale wrote that while many staff work at the company for “mission-driven” reasons, “the financial equation matters a lot 12 years into any company.”
“Salaries have gone up dramatically in our space in the last five years,” wrote Lonsdale, who is now a venture capitalist. “But despite recommendations from senior folks who also asked me about it last year, Palantir never moved its lower salary cap until last month.”
(Lonsdale also described the BuzzFeed News article as “self-congratulatory and negative which is to be expected in the low-paid clickbait environment.")
Before the pay raise, Palantir had capped salaries at levels far below what top engineers can command in Silicon Valley. It made up for this by paying employees largely in stock options, making them sensitive to the perception that the company might not live up to its ambitious valuation.
As Palantir has aged – while avoiding going public – many former employees have grown restless while waiting to cash out. A number have turned to outside brokers in the opaque secondary market, where deals can take months to get done and prices are inconsistent.
Karp addressed this sentiment in his April 22 memo, saying he understood “the need for liquidity” and would aim to hold a liquidity event in the subsequent four weeks.
The terms of the latest liquidity event have changed from last year, Palantir said in the Friday memo. In April 2015, it bought common shares at $6.13 a share and limited employees’ participation to either 10% of their equity or $425,000, whichever was lower.
Last year, Palantir purchased just $50 million of stock from employees, meaning the total planned purchase is 4.5 times higher this time around. The memo said employees have until 9 p.m. on June 17 to decide on their participation in the offer.
Palantir also told staff it may introduce policies that discourage share sales done outside of its official channels. Among possible changes to be incorporated into future offers, the company memo said, is “limiting the eligibility and/or participation of individuals who have sold shares outside of Palantir liquidity events.”
If you have information or tips, you can contact this reporter over an encrypted chat service such as Telegram, Signal, or WhatsApp, at 310-617-1302. You can also send an encrypted email to will.alden@buzzfeed.com, using the PGP key found here.
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Today, Google convened 7,000 developers and journalists at a popular outdoor concert venue in Silicon Valley and gave a two-hour state of the union on the future of arguably the most powerful and ambitious company in the world. In front of a packed crowd and tens of thousands watching via live stream, the company brought its best and brightest minds on stage and unveiled to the world that Google is playing catch-up with a slew of products and services we’ve already seen before from other companies.
There’s Google Assistant, a conversational AI chat and search bot (Facebook’s M/Microsoft’s bot projects/Apple’s Siri/Viv/literally everyone has a bot these days); Google Home, a voice-powered home entertainment and task hub (Amazon’s dreadfully popular and beloved Echo); Allo and Duo, two mobile messaging and mobile video apps (Facebook’s Messenger goliath with nearly 1 billion users); and Daydream, Google’s Android-powered virtual reality platform, headset, and multimedia content hub (Oculus).
That’s a lot of familiar innovation! But make no mistake, Google, led by its fresh-faced, immaculately tailored blue jacket–wearing CEO, Sundar Pichai, didn’t tiptoe around the stage today. Quite the opposite, Google’s 2016 I/O keynote address was confident, enthusiastic, and more than just a little impressive. The message: Sure, you’ve seen it all before, but not like this.
Google I/O — now over a decade old — is a stage where executives parachute out of planes to demo new hardware, where virtual reality is delivered in simple cardboard boxes. It's an event at which Google often reveals its loftiest projects, like bringing wireless internet and smartphones to the developing world with the help of — among other things — huge balloons. This year, though, when Apple and Facebook have devoted large chunks of their keynotes to selling themselves as benevolent world leaders, Google struck a different, far more practical tone.
Google Home.
Via Google
With Google Assistant, for example, Pichai said the company is aiming to build each user “their own individual Google.” He described Assistant as an “ambient” experience that will become “the context of our daily lives." That's a good way to understand what Google showed us today. Allo and Duo are deeply intuitive and contextually intelligent bits of software designed to make communication with friends, family, and co-workers easier and more personable. Daydream is, first and foremost, an immersive entertainment experience, centered around a reimagined 360-degree YouTube and app store for games and other content nuggets from places like the New York Times, CNN, Netflix, and the NBA. It’s VR for the phone but also the family room. Home, while it looks and is like Echo, is a connected home hub: a smart layer of connective Google tissue that extends the Google digital ecosystem into your physical world — perhaps the logical conclusion in a "Google as the context of your daily life" five-year plan.
Still, on the surface, this is not what we'd call world-changing innovation. But it might be life-changing in the "daily life" sense of the word — if you're a middle- to upper-class consumer in the developed world.
A look at Google's VR platform, Daydream.
Via Google
Looked at one way, today’s I/O keynote was both a tacit admission and a reminder of Google's technological and data dominance. A few really cool nuggets (Android Instant Apps) aside, Google’s reveals suggest that the company has clearly fallen a bit behind in a number of key categories, like social, messaging (remember when every single human used Gchat?!), practical assistive AI, in-home, and non-cardboard-box-based virtual reality. Recall that at Facebook’s developers conference last month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off a suite of already launched products and services that were comprehensive and fully realized enough that he felt emboldened to share the company’s 10-year plan (however vague).
By contrast, Pichai and Google today showed us things we've already seen, albeit things now Google-powered. And most of what was unveiled won’t be available for weeks, if not months. Last year, I watched, mouth slightly agape, from a seat in San Francisco’s Moscone Center as the search behemoth unveiled Google Now on Tap’s contextual search — it was a showstopper. Fifty-two weeks later, Google executives trotted out the same features with similar levels of exuberance as if to say, "OK, yeah, this is really happening now!"
But Google didn’t seem to care, and for good reason. Because to dismiss today's I/O keynote as too practical or too boring is to dismiss a company that arguably has more access to more deeply personal information than any entity on the planet. In this sense, Google’s catch-up cycle is undergirded by a much bigger truth: Every product and service that Google cribbed from or cloned today is made or broken by the company's ability to evolve and improve them by harvesting and analyzing our data. And few companies have more experience harvesting the data of their users than Google.
With huge audiences and hordes of hyper-scrutinizing media outlets on hand, big tech’s keynotes are meticulously planned, tightly scripted affairs. And Google is no exception, which is probably why the company saved its most important monologue for last.
Google Assistant.
Via Google
As the midday temperature climbed inside the amphitheater, Pichai returned to the stage to deliver a reminder of sorts in the form of a story about a move by Google’s DeepMind AI program AlphaGo in the second game of a March tournament in South Korea. At move 37, AlphaGo executed an unfathomable, unprecedented move in the complex game and beat one of the world’s best players in a truly unexpected fashion. “It wasn’t just an intuitive move, but a very creative one,” Pichai told the crowd in a hushed voice as he paced the stage. “We normally don’t associate computers with making creative choices, so to us this represents a significant achievement in AI.” Pichai concluded with trademarked optimism: “Things previously thought to be impossible may, in fact, be possible," he said.
Pichai went on to suggest the possibility of similar breakthroughs in climate change, education, robotics, and health care, but his point served as a direct and final reminder of Google's real prowess. While it might trail Amazon in manufacturing little voice-activated AI pods, Google has been hard at work gobbling up information for about 17 years. And, more recently, it’s been directing significant resources toward the development of deep neural networks and machine learning technologies (you may have dozed off during the part of the keynote where Google revealed that the data centers supporting a lot of its machine learning applications are running Google-designed chips that basically fast-forward their performance about seven years into the future; that's another example of just how far ahead the company really is).
In this light, Pichai’s closing anecdote was sort of like the world’s most subtle mic drop. Read between the lines and it might look a bit like this: Our machine learning is so good, it's GODLIKE. We have essentially engineered CREATIVITY in machines!
Among the big tech companies, this kind of hubris is borderline ridiculous — again, a lot of what Google showed us today isn't yet available — but somehow the future Google is describing with it is believable. So, yes, Google is playing catch-up, and no, Google doesn’t care — not when things previously thought to be impossible may, in fact, be possible.
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It’s the dead of winter in Stockholm and I’m sitting in a very small room inside the very inaptly named Calm Body Modification clinic. A few feet away sits the syringe that will, soon enough, plunge into the fat between my thumb and forefinger and deposit a glass-encased microchip roughly the size of an engorged grain of rice.
“You freaking out a little?” asks Calm’s proprietor, a heavily tattooed man named Chai, as he runs an alcohol-soaked cotton swab across my hand. “It’s all right. You’re getting a microchip implanted inside your body. It’d be weird if you weren’t freaking out a little bit.” Of Course It Fucking Hurts!, his T-shirt admonishes in bold type.
Chai and the writer at Calm Body Modification in Stockholm.
Anne Helen Petersen / BuzzFeed News
My choice to get microchipped was not ceremonial. It was neither a transhumanist statement nor the fulfillment of a childhood dream born of afternoons reading science fiction. I was here in Stockholm, a city that’s supposedly left cash behind, to see out the extreme conclusion of a monthlong experiment to live without cash, physical credit cards, and, eventually, later in the month, state-backed currency altogether, in a bid to see for myself what the future of money — as is currently being written by Silicon Valley — might look like.
Charlie Warzel / BuzzFeed News
Some of most powerful corporations in the world — Apple, Facebook, and Google; the Goliaths, the big guys, the companies that make the safest bets and rarely lose — are pouring resources and muscle into the payments industry, historically a complicated, low-margin business. Meanwhile, companies like Uber and Airbnb have been forced to become payments giants themselves, helping to facilitate and process millions of transactions (and millions of dollars) each day. A recent report from the auditor KPMG revealed that global investment in fintech — financial technology, that is — totaled $19.1 billion in 2015, a 106% jump compared to 2014; venture capital investment alone nearly quintupled between 2012 and last year. In 2014, Americans spent more than $3.68 billion using tap-to-pay tech, according to eMarketer. In 2015, that number was $8.71 billion, and in 2019, it’s projected to hit $210.45 billion. As Apple CEO Tim Cook told (warned?) a crowd in the U.K. last November, “Your kids will not know what money is.”
To hear Silicon Valley tell it, the broken-in leather wallet is on life support. I wanted to pull the plug. Which is how, ultimately, I found myself in this sterile Swedish backroom staring down a syringe the size of a pipe cleaner. I was here because I wanted to see the future of money. But really, I just wanted to pay for some shit with a microchip in my hand.
The first thing you’ll notice if you ever decide to surrender your wallet is how damn many apps you’ll need in order to replace it. You’ll need a mobile credit card replacement — Apple Pay or Android Pay — for starters, but you’ll also need person-to-person payment apps like Venmo, PayPal, and Square Cash. Then don’t forget the lesser-knowns: Dwolla, Tilt, Tab, LevelUp, SEQR, Popmoney, P2P Payments, and Flint. Then you might as well embrace the cryptocurrency of the future, bitcoin, by downloading Circle, Breadwallet, Coinbase, Fold, Gliph, Xapo, and Blockchain. You’ll also want to cover your bases with individual retailer payment apps like Starbucks, Walmart, USPS Mobile, Exxon Speedpass, and Shell Motorist, to name but a few. Plus public and regular transit apps — Septa in Philadelphia, NJ Transit in New Jersey, Zipcar, Uber, Lyft. And because you have to eat and drink, Seamless, Drizly, Foodler, Saucey, Waitress, Munchery, and Sprig. The future is fractured.
This isn’t lost on Bryan Yeager, a senior analyst who covers payments for eMarketer. “This kind of piecemeal fragmentation is probably one of the biggest inhibitors out there,” he said. “I’ll be honest: It’s very confusing, not just to me, but to most customers. And it really erodes the value proposition that mobile payments are simpler.”
Venmo screenshot.
Charlie Warzel / BuzzFeed News
On a frigid January afternoon in Midtown Manhattan, just hours into my experiment, I found myself at 2 Bros., a red-tiled, fluorescent-lit pizza shop that operates with an aversion to frills. As I made my way past a row of stainless steel ovens, I watched the patrons in front of me grab their glistening slices while wordlessly forking over mangled bills, as has been our country’s custom for a century and a half. When my turn came to order, I croaked what was already my least-favorite phrase: "Do you, um, take Apple Pay?" The man behind the counter blinked four times before (wisely) declaring me a lost cause and moving to the next person in line.
This kind of bewildered rejection was fairly common. A change may be coming for money, but not everyone’s on board yet, and Yaeger's entirely correct that the "simple" value proposition hasn't entirely come to pass. Paying with the wave of a phone, I found, pushes you toward extremes; to submit to the will of one of the major mobile wallets is to choose between big-box retailers and chain restaurants and small, niche luxury stores. The only business in my Brooklyn neighborhood that took Apple Pay or Android Pay was a cafe where a large iced coffee runs upwards of $5; globally, most of the businesses that have signed on as Apple Pay partners are large national chains like Jamba Juice, Pep Boys, Best Buy, and Macy’s.
Partially for this reason, the primary way most Americans are currently experiencing the great fintech boom isn’t through Apple or Android Pay at all, but through proprietary payment apps from chains such as Target, Walmart, and Starbucks — as of last October, an astonishing 1 in 5 of all Starbucks transactions in the U.S. were done through the company’s mobile app. It wouldn’t be all that hard to live a fully functional — if possibly boring — cash-free consumer life by tapping and swiping the proprietary apps of our nation’s biggest stores.
If that doesn’t feel revolutionary or particularly futuristic, it’s because it’s not really meant to. But the future of mobile retail is assuredly dystopian. Just ask Andy O’Dell, who works for Clutch, a marketing company that helps with consumer loyalty programs and deals with these kinds of mobile purchasing apps. “Apple Pay and the Starbucks payment app have nothing to do with actual payments,” he told me. “The power of payments and the future of these programs is in the data they generate.”
"The power of payments is in the data they generate.”
Imagine this future: Every day you go to Starbucks before work because it’s right near your house. You use the app, and to ensure your reliable patronage, Starbucks coughs up a loyalty reward, giving you a free cup of coffee every 15 visits. Great deal, you say! O’Dell disagrees. According to him, Starbucks is just hurting its margins by giving you something you’d already be buying. The real trick, he argued, is changing your behavior. He offers a new scenario where this time, instead of a free coffee every 15 visits, you get a free danish — which you try and then realize it goes great with coffee. So you start buying a danish once a week, then maybe twice a week, until it starts to feel like it was your idea all along.
In that case, O’Dell said, Starbucks has "changed my behavior and captured more share of my wallet, and they've also given me more of what I want."
"That's terrifying," I told him.
"But that’s the brave new world, man," he shot back. "Moving payments from plastic swipes to digital taps is going to change how companies influence your behavior. That's what you're asking, right? Well, that's how we're doing it."
In this sense, the payments rush is, in no small part, a data rush. Creating a wallet that’s just a digital version of the one you keep in your pocket is not the endgame. But figuring out where you shop, when you shop, and exactly what products you have an affinity for, and then bundling all that information in digestible chunks to inform the marketers of the world? Being able to, as O’Dell puts it, “drive you to the outcome they want you to have like a rat in a maze by understanding, down to your personality, who you are”? That’s disruption worth investing in.
Jared Harrell / BuzzFeed News (2)
For all its complexity and bureaucracy and importance, money, at its core, is really just information. When FDR weaned the United States off the gold standard in 1933, cash, no longer backed by physical gold, became an abstraction. Today, that abstraction is pushed to new extremes: Not only does 92% of the money in the world exist as a series of ones and zeroes, but now it’s being transferred from place to place by any number of digital intermediaries looking to take a cut.
That process is complicated, but the key issue is trust. Money, argues David Wolman in The End of Money, is not much more than “a belief in a shared purpose, or at least a shared hallucination.” This faith in the “particular religion” of cash has been at the center of standardized currencies since Kublai Khan, and the loss of that faith has been associated with every major economic catastrophe in history. But trust — especially when it comes to new forms of currency — takes time to build.
The first two weeks of my experiment, most people balked when I offered an alternative means of payment. “I’m a little worried this might not go through in time,” one server at a German beer hall told me when I asked if I could Venmo her for my bill. A waiter at a different establishment scoffed when I tried to pay him or the restaurant via PayPal, suggesting his manager would think he was getting ripped off.
Yaeger sees this as standard for a nascent technology. “I kind of equate now to where things were 10 to 12 years ago with e-commerce,” he told me. “The concept of putting credit cards on a screen was new. Retailers and normal people were concerned about that. So innovative companies like PayPal and Amazon built that trust up over a decade while others slowly moved in.”
There are, of course, legitimate reasons not to trust these new forms of payment. Anyone who’s been mugged or lost a wallet knows cash is far from perfect, but this constellation of new digital payment products introduces a whole new category and scale of ways to get robbed, hacked, scammed, and screwed. Venmo — the social payment service that’s now transferring over $1 billion per month — may, in some ways, be the truest glimpse at a mobile payment future, but it’s not exactly entirely secure. Smartphones can be as easily lost and stolen as wallets, but they’re also eminently breakable, orders of magnitude more expensive, and obsolete after two or three years. And the payment-apps landscape is still such that living cashlessly in 2016 means entering your credit card information or routing number into dozens of stand-alone apps, some of which look as if they’ve been built overnight by a high school computer science class.
At the barbershop.
Charlie Warzel / BuzzFeed News
All this risk and all this friction, in the service of...what, exactly? “Plastic works really well,” Randy Reddig, an entrepreneur who was a part of Square’s founding team, told me, taking a shot at what he called “mobile wallet hysteria.” “I have a wallet right now in my pocket, and it’s great. It can feel like this is something that nobody is asking for. It’s solutioneering: Take something that exists just fine in the meatspace world and make it digital and somehow we’re all supposed to believe it’s better.”
To Reddig, the true future of payments is revealing itself inside many of Silicon Valley’s biggest new companies. Airbnb, he said, has one of the most sophisticated payments infrastructures of any company in the world, handling deposits and disbursements in hundreds of markets, many with different currencies. “All the innovation around payments is a means to an end — table stakes,” he said. “Uber has one of, if not the most used mobile payments methods in the world, and it was absolutely crucial — they had to do it to create the experience and service they wanted. Payment technology created certainty for riders and drivers that they’d get paid — it facilitated trust.”
Much as the true value of a retailer’s mobile payment app is in the metadata it gobbles up, the real power of digital payments lies in the largely invisible infrastructure that undergirds them. Fintech companies like Square aren’t exactly sexy, but they allow small businesses and individual merchants to process transactions without prohibitively expensive equipment or the fees that legacy credit companies charge.
"Millennials don't trust banks, but they trust Apple and Google."
“It’s about financial inclusion and serving real, normal people,” Reddig said. "There is a lot of opportunity to build very profitable businesses that operate better than incumbents in transparency, great design, great user experience. Millennials don't trust banks, but they trust Apple and Google."
This is already happening, just outside the U.S. If fintech’s true believers think it’ll fundamentally change the way we live, the developing world is where their vision is revealing itself most clearly. In Kenya, for example, the payment messaging service M-Pesa has attracted over 13 million monthly active users (out of a population of 44.3 million). As of last May, roughly 42% of Kenya’s GDP was transacted via M-Pesa, all without tying Kenyans to expensive, cumbersome bank accounts.
But more than that, M-Pesa has effectively invented a new form of credit that’s based on a history of reliable transactions from phone to phone, rather than through a bank. In a world where 2.5 billion people don’t have bank accounts, systems like M-Pesa are set to leapfrog Western banking the same way much of the developing world skipped the desktop and went straight to the smartphone for its computing needs. In reinventing money transfers, M-Pesa and its ilk offer more than a new way to pay — they are opportunity engines, offering the ability to build credit in a world that previously shut them out. And in the process, there are billions to be made in transfer fees.
By my third week, the cashless, frictionless future I’d hoped to live began to feel glitchy, burdensome, and alienating. I had to meticulously plan my every move hours or even days in advance — a haircut required me to convince my barber to start using Venmo, going out for a meal meant lining up a dining companion willing to submit to confused stares and drawn-out check-settling processes.
One January afternoon, I found myself trying to persuade a prodigiously bearded, flannel-shirt-wearing barista named Michael to allow me to pay him personally via Square Cash for a coffee, which he would then pay the register for. After a confession that this was all for a story from me and a pity laugh from him, Michael reached for his phone, but not before he locked eyes with me. “I’m only doing this because I want you to write about how much this sucks for us,” he said. He went on to talk about a popular coffee app called Cups, which allows customers to order and pay all inside the phone. “It’s like, now everyone who comes in is a robot — they just stare at their phone and wait to have their name called. Nobody even looks at us,” he said.
Michael, barista.
Charlie Warzel / BuzzFeed News
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