Snap's all grown up, a typo took down part of the Internet, and a dashcam video put Uber's CEO in the doghouse again.
ICYMI, here are the top tech headlines of the week
Let’s start with Amazon, which does a lot more than just send out books and other products overnight in brown boxes. The company also is a mega behind-the-scenes Internet player, doing back-end work for tens of thousands of websites through its Amazon Web Services division.
In a nutshell, Amazon hosts lots of the content used on websites Americans visit every day, such as Netflix, Spotify, Buzzfeed, Pinterest, Expedia and others, helping them store photos, videos and other files, and enabling anyone to create a web business easily.
When a portion of Amazon’s cloud service division went down Tuesday, many of those sites suddenly had broken links and empty rectangles where data, videos and photos should have been. The culprit? A typo that resulted in a cascading set of problems in a key storage system.
No such issue at YouTube, whose website is hosted by Google. The video network, really popular with young people, later this year will launch YouTube TV, offering 40 channels of TV for $35 monthly, which YouTube notes is half the price of the average cable bill. That’s fine and dandy, but the service is targeted to millennial cord cutters who have proven they don’t want to spend money on TV, and many top networks are missing, like MTV, AMC, Comedy Central and CNN.
YouTube’s got quite the challenge.
--Snap's hot debut raised $3.4 billion and made its twentysomething co-founders filthy rich. Snap is the parent company that makes the red-hot Snapchat app, and co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy both sold 16 million shares, raking in $272 million. Their remaining stakes in the company are worth $5.2 billion.
Another hot start-up's leadership is having a much worse week. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick spent much of the prior week doing damage control after a female former engineer published an Internet-shaking blog post detailing sexual harassment that management swept under the rug.
This week, Kalanick ousted a recently hired exec after revelations the top engineer had faced, but not disclosed, an investigation into sexual harassment claims at his prior employer, which he denied
Midweek, Kalanick was caught on tape berating a driver for the ride-hailing app Uber. After it went public, Kalanick apologized to the driver and promised to get "leadership help." But the pain didn't stop there. On Friday, the New York Times published a report that Uber had used a program to thwart police; Uber admitted to the program, but not the purpose.
--In Barcelona, much of the wireless industry met for the Mobile World Congress, but the two biggest players weren’t there with new phones: Apple or Samsung. The big news was the re-emergence of names from the past with retro phones—Blackberry and Nokia—and lots of talk about the next big thing in wireless, 5G service. This is said to be even faster than home internet, and while there will be some tests here in limited fashion this year, 2019 is expected to be more realistic, with 5G going mainstream in 2022. So we wait….and wait.
Visitor check devices in the Vive HTC booth during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
Manu Fernandez, AP
--And finally, that huge Snap, Inc. IPO. The company went public, with shares pricing at $17 and closing at just under $25 on day one, up 44%, and then adding 11% the next day. Also investing--NBC Universal, which bought $500 million worth of shares. Snap, best known for the Snapchat app, which sends disappearing photos and videos, is now valued at $28 billion
THIS REPORT BY ME ( SURAJ)
No comments:
Post a Comment