dWebServe Submit News Opinions Worldwide |
- dWeb.News Daily Round-Up From Daniel Webster dWeb Internet Cowboy
- Samsung’s OLED laptops have another key advantage over the competition
- Weekly Tech Awesomeness from Around the World
- Epic v. Apple trial reveals how Microsoft has never made money off Xbox hardware
- If you trade a lot of cryptocurrency, the IRS might be looking for you
- Massive Flare Seen Close to Our Solar System: What It Means for Chances of Alien Neighbors
- The Great Chicken Freak-Out of 2021 — Chicken Prices Go Through the Roof
- Expedia Group CEO says he’s ‘rooting for revenge travel’ as revenue sinks 44% in Q1
- Auth0 CEO Eugenio Pace on the $6.5 billion deal with Okta and his advice for entrepreneurs
- Early humans used fire to permanently change the landscape tens of thousands of years ago in Stone Age Africa
| dWeb.News Daily Round-Up From Daniel Webster dWeb Internet Cowboy Posted: 06 May 2021 05:44 PM PDT  HECK, YEAH: SpaceX Nails Landing of SN15 Video The Great Chicken Freak-Out of 2021 — Chicken Prices Go Through the Roof Wildfires are contaminating drinking water systems, and it's more widespread than people realize STOP THE STALKING: It's easier than it should be to stalk someone with an AirTag SHHHH: They're listening – inside the coming voice-profiling revolution COOL AG TECH: Why these successful software founders are planting seeds for new ag tech ventures EAT YOUR VEGGIES: One cup of leafy green vegetables a day lowers risk of heart disease AI consumes a lot of energy. Hackers could make it consume more. Massive Flare Seen Close to Our Solar System: What It Means for Chances of Alien Neighbors If you trade a lot of cryptocurrency, the IRS might be looking for you Apple just issued this urgent warning to iPhone users and you need to read it Weekly Tech Awesomeness from Around the World For These stories, plus more worldwide and technology news go to http://dWeb.News             |
| Samsung’s OLED laptops have another key advantage over the competition Posted: 06 May 2021 05:40 PM PDT  Samsung teased its new OLED screens for laptops early in January, revealing the components it will equip various notebooks with this year. It took Samsung a few extra months to launch the new Galaxy Book Pro laptops and 2-in-1s that come with built-in OLED screens. We've seen laptops with OLED screens before, but Samsung is looking to make this feature go mainstream. OLED displays can be an expensive upgrade, but a warranted one. They offer better performance than LED screens, whether they're used in TVs, smartphones, or laptops. But it's not just the screen performance that gets a significant boost from OLED tech. Samsung has another excellent reason for buyers to consider OLED laptops: Battery life. Today’s Top DealAmazon shoppers are obsessed with these Wi-Fi smart plugs – get them for just $3.57 each!Price: $14.27
The difference between OLED and LED is that the former do not consume energy to display black. We've seen comparisons that showed OLED displays can improve battery life on smartphones, especially if dark mode is employed. Samsung has performed a similar comparison between OLED and LCD laptops, finding that Samsung OLED laptops can save up to 25% more display energy when used in dark mode. Samsung tested its notebooks using the MobileMark 2018 test, finding that OLED laptops lasted 11 hours in dark mode compared to 9.9 hours in light mode. That's an extra hour of battery use, which could prove to be life-saving in specific scenarios where a charger isn't available. However, the pandemic still forces many people to work from home, so charging a laptop isn't a problem. Also, most modern laptops have decent battery life as it is, so using dark mode to stretch it out isn't a must-have feature. You would also have to use the laptop in dark mode at all times to benefit from the maximum power savings. But the fact that OLED screens can be more efficient than LCDs is still an excellent side effect. The main reasons to choose OLED screens over LED concern the image quality. OLED supports better brightness, better blacks, and better contrast ratio than LCD screens. Samsung does say in its announcement that more companies are implementing dark mode in their laptops, including key players in the industry — Apple, Microsoft, and Google: In addition to Samsung Electronics, which on Wednesday unveiled its new Galaxy Book Pro and Galaxy Book Pro 360 laptops that automatically turn on dark mode in Windows setting, global companies including Apple, Microsoft, Google and Adobe are rushing to implement dark mode in their products. This seems to imply that companies like Apple and Microsoft might use OLED screens in future notebooks, but Samsung doesn't go as far as to say that. Apple has been rumored to bring mini-LED and OLED screens to its laptops in the coming years. Interestingly enough, Samsung made no mention of battery life improvements related to dark mode use on OLED laptops in its Galaxy Book Pro announcement last week. Samsung also said that it will expand its OLED lineup for laptops to more than 10 products, supporting screen sizes from 13.3-inch to 16-inch. Today’s Top DealShoppers are swarming Amazon to get the Roomba 675 robot vacuum while it’s only $199!Price: $199.00 OLED displays can be an expensive upgrade, but a warranted one. They offer better performance than LED screens, whether they're used in TVs, smartphones, or laptops. But it's not just the screen performance that gets a significant boost from OLED tech. Samsung has another excellent reason for buyers to consider OLED laptops: Battery life. The difference between OLED and LED is that the former do not consume energy to display black. We've seen comparisons that showed OLED displays can improve battery life on smartphones, especially if dark mode is employed. Samsung has performed a similar comparison between OLED and LCD laptops, finding that Samsung OLED laptops can save up to 25% more display energy when used in dark mode. Samsung tested its notebooks using the MobileMark 2018 test, finding that OLED laptops lasted 11 hours in dark mode compared to 9.9 hours in light mode. That's an extra hour of battery use, which could prove to be life-saving in specific scenarios where a charger isn't available. However, the pandemic still forces many people to work from home, so charging a laptop isn't a problem. Also, most modern laptops have decent battery life as it is, so using dark mode to stretch it out isn't a must-have feature. You would also have to use the laptop in dark mode at all times to benefit from the maximum power savings. But the fact that OLED screens can be more efficient than LCDs is still an excellent side effect. The main reasons to choose OLED screens over LED concern the image quality. OLED supports better brightness, better blacks, and better contrast ratio than LCD screens. Samsung does say in its announcement that more companies are implementing dark mode in their laptops, including key players in the industry — Apple, Microsoft, and Google: Interestingly enough, Samsung made no mention of battery life improvements related to dark mode use on OLED laptops in its Galaxy Book Pro announcement last week. Samsung also said that it will expand its OLED lineup for laptops to more than 10 products, supporting screen sizes from 13.3-inch to 16-inch.Galaxy Book Pro, Galaxy Book Pro 360, OLED, Samsung       |
| Weekly Tech Awesomeness from Around the World Posted: 06 May 2021 05:05 PM PDT   ROBOTICSThe Robot Surgeon Will See You Now FUTUREThis Tech Was Science Fiction 20 Years Ago. Now It's Reality LONGEVITYHow Long Can We Live? 3D PRINTINGForget Digging for Fossils. This Museum Printed a Full T-Rex Skeleton Instead HEALTHOne Vaccine to Rule Them All TECHNOLOGYThese Materials Could Make Science Fiction a Reality DRONESWingcopter Debuts a Triple-Drop Drone to Create 'Logistical Highways in the Sky' SPACEThe Asteroid Impact Simulation Has Ended in Disaster       |
| Epic v. Apple trial reveals how Microsoft has never made money off Xbox hardware Posted: 06 May 2021 04:40 PM PDT  The Xbox One, left, with the Xbox Series X and S, right. Microsoft revealed in a court appearance this week that it does not, and has never, earned money on the per-unit sales for the Xbox. Each console is sold at a loss, and the profit from the project for Microsoft comes entirely from software sales. This was disclosed during a Microsoft executive's testimony in the Epic v. Apple bench trial, which began on Monday in Oakland, Calif. The trial is not televised, but the proceedings have been broadcast to the public via a teleconference call; that call, in turn, has been hosted and rebroadcast via several other platforms, such as Twitch and Discord. Epic is suing Apple over its rules for third-party apps on the iOS store, where Apple takes a cut of both game and in-game sales. Epic, the publisher of Fortnite, is accusing Apple of employing anticompetitive business practices, and hopes to force Apple to let developers use their own in-app payment methods for games sold on iOS. Microsoft's Lori Wright, vice president of business development for Gaming, Media & Entertainment, was called to the stand as an expert witness on Wednesday, to give testimony related to Microsoft's well-publicized attempts to work around Apple to get its Project xCloud service on the iOS store. Despite Xbox shortages, Microsoft reports $3.6B in Q3 gaming revenue, 232% growth in hardware salesMuch of the discussion in the Epic v. Apple trial has come down to the amount of sales revenue that a digital storefront owner should be entitled to collect. As part of that, Wright was asked how much the profit margin is on Xbox consoles. "We sell the consoles at a loss," Wright said. One of Epic Games' lawyers then asked, "Does Microsoft ever earn a profit on the sale of an Xbox console?" Wright said, "No." For people who follow the business side of the games industry, this may initially sound like old news. It's long been understood that Microsoft and Sony sell their video game consoles on a "razor and blades" model, where the company subsidizes its hardware and sells it at a loss in order to make the money back on software and services. (Nintendo, on the other hand, makes a slight profit on every Switch it sells.) Like a lot of the hard data in the video game industry, there's a certain amount of analyst speculation involved here. Neither Sony nor Microsoft are inclined to reveal their internal math, so we're left with tests like various third-party "tear-downs" that estimate each console's per-unit costs. As per those independent estimates, both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One were sold at a slight loss when you consider shipping and marketing costs. However, as a console ages, its components become cheaper, which would theoretically translate to a per-unit profit near the end of the console's life cycle. What's interesting about Wright's testimony, if you take it at face value, is that Microsoft has never gotten to that point. It's coming up on the Xbox's 20th anniversary in November, and in that time, every individual console that it's ever shipped was being sold at a loss. Microsoft has made up the difference via taking a 30% cut of revenue from developers who ship games for the Xbox. While it recently announced that it will reduce that cut to 12% for publishers who ship games for the Windows 10 store, the Xbox remains at a 70/30 split. That, in turn, explains a lot about Microsoft's recent moves to decouple the Xbox experience from the physical Xbox unit. While its gaming division is posting billions in quarterly revenue, its actual hardware seems to have traditionally been its weakest link. Wright's testimony is one of many small revelations that have kept the games industry glued to Epic v. Apple all week. One of the trial's side effects, as it pits two of the most influential and connected companies in the field against one another, is a slow drip of interesting pieces of information. Given how secretive the games industry traditionally is, various disclosures that were made for the sake of the trial have effectively amounted to a cavalcade of unplanned leaks. This has included what Epic has paid various third-party developers to secure their titles as weekly free downloads on the Epic Games Store; Epic's low-key battle with Sony to enable cross-platform play for Fortnite; and some of the "guest characters" that Epic may bring to Fortnite in the future, including Metroid's Samus Aran. Microsoft revealed in a court appearance this week that it does not, and has never, earned money on the per-unit sales for the Xbox. Each console is sold at a loss, and the profit from the project for Microsoft comes entirely from software sales. This was disclosed during a Microsoft executive's testimony in the Epic v. Apple bench trial, which began on Monday in Oakland, Calif. The trial is not televised, but the proceedings have been broadcast to the public via a teleconference call; that call, in turn, has been hosted and rebroadcast via several other platforms, such as Twitch… Read MoreApple, Games, Microsoft, epic, Xbox       |
| If you trade a lot of cryptocurrency, the IRS might be looking for you Posted: 06 May 2021 04:40 PM PDT  Cryptocurrency has been on an upward trajectory for years, but the pandemic really seemed to kick things into high gear for the virtual currency boom. Bitcoin recently eclipsed $60,000 for the first time, while Dogecoin is up more than 12,000% from where it was this time last year. There is more money in crypto than ever before, and so it should come as no surprise that the Internal Revenue Service wants its cut from those who are cashing in. This week, a federal court in the Northern District of California authorized the IRS to serve a John Doe summons on cryptocurrency exchange Kraken as it seeks information about "U.S. taxpayers who conducted at least the equivalent of $20,000 in transactions in cryptocurrency during the years 2016 to 2020." Today’s Top DealAmazon shoppers are obsessed with these Wi-Fi smart plugs – get them for just $3.57 each!Price: $14.27
"Gathering the information in the summons approved today is an important step to ensure cryptocurrency owners are following the tax laws," said the Justice Department Tax Division Acting Assistant Attorney General David A. Hubbert. "Those who transact with cryptocurrency must meet their tax obligations like any other taxpayer." "There is no excuse for taxpayers continuing to fail to report the income earned and taxes due from virtual currency transactions," added IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig. "This John Doe summons is part of our effort to uncover those who are trying to skirt reporting and avoid paying their fair share." The news release from Justice Department regarding the summons makes it clear that Kraken has not engaged in any wrongdoing when it comes to exchanging digital currency. The goal of the summons is just to find people that the IRS believes "may have failed to comply with internal revenue laws." As a result, Kraken will have to produce records identifying the taxpayers that may fall into this category as well as other documents related to crypto. If you have any questions about whether or not you should be paying taxes on your digital coins, the IRS has published a notice that you might want to take a look at. Here are some of the highlights: Q: How is virtual currency treated for federal tax purposes? A: For federal tax purposes, virtual currency is treated as property. General tax principles applicable to property transactions apply to transactions using virtual currency. Q: How is the fair market value of virtual currency determined? A: For U.S. tax purposes, transactions using virtual currency must be reported in U.S. dollars. Therefore, taxpayers will be required to determine the fair market value of virtual currency in U.S. dollars as of the date of payment or receipt. If a virtual currency is listed on an exchange and the exchange rate is established by market supply and demand, the fair market value of the virtual currency is determined by converting the virtual currency into U.S. dollars (or into another real currency which in turn can be converted into U.S. dollars) at the exchange rate, in a reasonable manner that is consistently applied. Q: Is a payment made using virtual currency subject to information reporting? A: A payment made using virtual currency is subject to information reporting to the same extent as any other payment made in property. For example, a person who in the course of a trade or business makes a payment of fixed and determinable income using virtual currency with a value of $600 or more to a U.S. non-exempt recipient in a taxable year is required to report the payment to the IRS and to the payee. Examples of payments of fixed and determinable income include rent, salaries, wages, premiums, annuities, and compensation. Today’s Top DealShoppers are swarming Amazon to get the Roomba 675 robot vacuum while it’s only $199!Price: $199.00 This week, a federal court in the Northern District of California authorized the IRS to serve a John Doe summons on cryptocurrency exchange Kraken as it seeks information about “U.S. taxpayers who conducted at least the equivalent of $20,000 in transactions in cryptocurrency during the years 2016 to 2020.” "Gathering the information in the summons approved today is an important step to ensure cryptocurrency owners are following the tax laws," said the Justice Department Tax Division Acting Assistant Attorney General David A. Hubbert. "Those who transact with cryptocurrency must meet their tax obligations like any other taxpayer." "There is no excuse for taxpayers continuing to fail to report the income earned and taxes due from virtual currency transactions," added IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig. "This John Doe summons is part of our effort to uncover those who are trying to skirt reporting and avoid paying their fair share." The news release from Justice Department regarding the summons makes it clear that Kraken has not engaged in any wrongdoing when it comes to exchanging digital currency. The goal of the summons is just to find people that the IRS believes "may have failed to comply with internal revenue laws." As a result, Kraken will have to produce records identifying the taxpayers that may fall into this category as well as other documents related to crypto. If you have any questions about whether or not you should be paying taxes on your digital coins, the IRS has published a notice that you might want to take a look at. Here are some of the highlights: A: For federal tax purposes, virtual currency is treated as property. General tax principles applicable to property transactions apply to transactions using virtual currency. Q: How is the fair market value of virtual currency determined? A: For U.S. tax purposes, transactions using virtual currency must be reported in U.S. dollars. Therefore, taxpayers will be required to determine the fair market value of virtual currency in U.S. dollars as of the date of payment or receipt. If a virtual currency is listed on an exchange and the exchange rate is established by market supply and demand, the fair market value of the virtual currency is determined by converting the virtual currency into U.S. dollars (or into another real currency which in turn can be converted into U.S. dollars) at the exchange rate, in a reasonable manner that is consistently applied. Q: Is a payment made using virtual currency subject to information reporting? A: A payment made using virtual currency is subject to information reporting to the same extent as any other payment made in property. For example, a person who in the course of a trade or business makes a payment of fixed and determinable income using virtual currency with a value of $600 or more to a U.S. non-exempt recipient in a taxable year is required to report the payment to the IRS and to the payee. Examples of payments of fixed and determinable income include rent, salaries, wages, premiums, annuities, and compensation.cryptocurrency, IRS       |
| Massive Flare Seen Close to Our Solar System: What It Means for Chances of Alien Neighbors Posted: 06 May 2021 04:37 PM PDT  By R. O. Parke Loyd The sun isn't the only star to produce stellar flares. On April 21, 2021, a team of astronomers published new research describing the brightest flare ever measured from Proxima Centauri in ultraviolet light. To learn about this extraordinary event, and what it might mean for any life on the planets orbiting Earth's closest neighboring star, The Conversation spoke with Parke Loyd, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University and co-author of the paper. Excerpts from the conversation are below and have been edited for length and clarity.  Why Were You Looking at Proxima Centauri?Proxima Centauri is the closest star to this solar system. A couple of years ago, a team discovered that there is a planet called Proxima b orbiting the star. It's just a little bit bigger than Earth, it's probably rocky, and it is in what is called the habitable zone, or the Goldilocks zone. This means that Proxima b is about the right distance from the star so that it could have liquid water on its surface. But this star system differs from the sun in a pretty key way. Proxima Centauri is a small star called a red dwarf—it's around 15 percent of the radius of our sun, and it's substantially cooler. So Proxima b, in order for it to be in that Goldilocks zone, actually is a lot closer to Proxima Centauri than Earth is to the sun. You might think that a smaller star would be a tamer star, but that's actually not the case at all—red dwarfs produce stellar flares a lot more frequently than the sun does. So Proxima b, the closest planet in another solar system with a chance for having life, is subject to space weather that is a lot more violent than the space weather in Earth's solar system. What Did You Find?In 2018, my colleague Meredith MacGregor discovered flashes of light coming from Proxima Centauri that looked very different from solar flares. She was using a telescope that detects light at millimeter wavelengths to monitor Proxima Centauri and saw a big of flash of light in this wavelength. Astronomers had never seen a stellar flare in millimeter wavelengths of light. My colleagues and I wanted to learn more about these unusual brightenings in the millimeter light coming from the star and see whether they were actually flares or some other phenomenon. We used nine telescopes on Earth, as well as a satellite observatory, to get the longest set of observations—about two days' worth—of Proxima Centauri with the most wavelength coverage that had ever been obtained. Immediately we discovered a really strong flare. The ultraviolet light of the star increased by over 10,000 times in just a fraction of a second. If humans could see ultraviolet light, it would be like being blinded by the flash of a camera. Proxima Centauri got bright really fast. This increase lasted for only a couple of seconds, and then there was a gradual decline. This discovery confirmed that indeed, these weird millimeter emissions are flares. What Does That Mean for Chances of Life on the Planet?Astronomers are actively exploring this question at the moment because it can kind of go in either direction. When you hear ultraviolet radiation, you're probably thinking about the fact that people wear sunscreen to try to protect ourselves from ultraviolet radiation here on Earth. Ultraviolet radiation can damage proteins and DNA in human cells, and this results in sunburns and can cause cancer. That would potentially be true for life on another planet as well. On the flip side, messing with the chemistry of biological molecules can have its advantages; it could help spark life on another planet. Even though it might be a more challenging environment for life to sustain itself, it might be a better environment for life to be generated to begin with. But the thing that astronomers and astrobiologists are most concerned about is that every time one of these huge flares occurs, it basically erodes away a bit of the atmosphere of any planets orbiting that star, including this potentially Earth-like planet. And if you don't have an atmosphere left on your planet, then you definitely have a pretty hostile environment to life; there would be huge amounts of radiation, massive temperature fluctuations, and little or no air to breathe. It's not that life would be impossible, but having the surface of a planet basically directly exposed to space would be an environment totally different than anything on Earth. Is There Any Atmosphere Left on Proxima B?That's anybody's guess at the moment. The fact that these flares are happening doesn't bode well for that atmosphere being intact, especially if they're associated with explosions of plasma like what happens on the sun. But that's why we're doing this work. We hope the folks who build models of planetary atmospheres can take what our team has learned about these flares and try to figure out the odds for an atmosphere being sustained on this planet. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Image Credit: Hubble/European Space Agency/WikimediaCommons, CC BY-SA R. O. PARKE LOYD I'm an astrophysicist currently working with Evgenya Shkolnik’s group at Arizona State University. I research planetary systems with stars smaller than the Sun, focusing on the space environment these stars provide to their planets. Yearly, I co-instruct a class called Wilderness Astronomy that I created with fellow astro-outdoorsperson Melodie Kao.       |
| The Great Chicken Freak-Out of 2021 — Chicken Prices Go Through the Roof Posted: 06 May 2021 04:16 PM PDT  By Daniel Webster Chickens don’t fly. Trust me on that one. When it’s time to flap and soar, they’ve got a problem. We have a chicken freak-out going on across the country, and we can’t blame the chickens, because they can’t fly. First, we had the Great Chicken Sandwich War, between Popeye’s and Chick-fil-A. The southerners’ hankering for chicken took the nation by storm. Second, we actually had a storm. The deep freeze in Texas and parts in the south wiped out a massive quantity of the popular non-flying birds. Add to these storms and wars, the great pandemic of 2020 hit. Stay at home orders sent chicken meal deliveries through the roof, especially for those with a burning desire for spicy chicken wings.  Complicate all of this with a dramatic increase in fuel prices, which makes the delivery of food products far more expensive. When all’s said and done, there’s a shortage of chicken and the prices are going so high, the non-flyers can’t soar to keep up. Have you bought a chicken wing lately? If you can find one, you probably can only afford one, not a full basket. The current chicken calamity is putting a strain especially on restaurants, who must raise their prices to provide for the mix of circumstances. "Demand for wings is really strong right now," Isaac Olvera, lead food and agricultural economist for the company ArrowStream, told North Jersey. ArrowStream specializes in the foodservice supply chain. Wholesale wings are currently about $3 per pound in the northeast, Olvera told northjersey.com. A year ago, prices hovered around $1.50 to $1.70 per pound. Chicken tenders are now $2.10 a pound, which is twice as expensive as they were last year. Breast meat is hitting a multi-year high at almost $2 a pound, according to Olvera. Chicken wing orders typically spike around Super Bowl and March Madness. Not this year, as previously. Restaurant owners are having to reportedly raise their prices 50 percent or more. All grocery and consumer goods are currently seeing a dramatic increase in price right now.       |
| Expedia Group CEO says he’s ‘rooting for revenge travel’ as revenue sinks 44% in Q1 Posted: 06 May 2021 03:41 PM PDT  Expedia Group CEO Peter Kern. (Expedia Group Photo) Expedia Group CEO Peter Kern said the travel industry remains a "study in contrasts" — citing a rebounding U.S. travel market and strong vacation rentals in beach and other outdoor destinations. But at the same time, Kern, speaking on the Seattle company's first quarter earnings call, pointed to rough patches in business travel, traditional lodging and international travel. And he specifically noted the worsening COVID-19 situation in India, where Expedia maintains a large presence. "As the dire situation in India reminds us, in some markets, things may get worse before they get better," he said. Such is life as the CEO of a publicly-traded online travel company. It's just hard to tell where the market is headed. The company's mixed message and reliance on all forms of travel hasn't dampened investor appetite for Expedia Group. Its stock is up 148% in the past year, and shares gained more than 6% in after hours trading after posting first quarter results. Some investors are betting that when travel comes back — it will return with a vengeance and companies like Expedia could be well positioned to benefit. That's the concept of "revenge travel," the idea that travelers who've been sidelined for the past year will travel and spend more once the virus is under control. "I am rooting for revenge travel, whatever that is," said Kern, in response to a question about the return to travel. "Whatever type of travel people want to do, we are happy to accommodate whether revenge or otherwise." Kern said people are staying at vacation destinations longer, and starting to spend more money as a result. "Revenge, or otherwise, places like Miami demonstrate that there is huge pent up demand to go to places where people can experience a relatively normal travel experience," said Kern. "And I don't know if you have been to Miami recently, but it is packed. Hotels are full. People are out everywhere. Restaurants are full. And their booking levels are well above two years ago." But with the uncertainty of COVID plaguing the travel industry, especially in some international destinations, it's far too early to say travel is back. Expedia, which now boasts a market value of $24 billion, reported revenue of $1.24 billion in the first quarter. That was down 44% compared to the same period last year. Lodging revenue decreased 41%. Expedia's cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments totaled $4.3 billion at the end of the first quarter, up from $3.4 billion at the end of 2020. The company's adjustable net loss grew to $294 million. Full earnings report here. Expedia's Vrbo division remains a bright spot, as travelers book lodging through the online vacation rental marketplace. Kern noted that Vrbo hosts make more money than Airbnb hosts, which he said is a great story and one they need to spend more money on to tell. But Kern was a bit reluctant to claim that travel habits — including a shift to services like Vrbo — have permanently changed as a result of COVID. Even still, he said that it's too early to tell whether the flexibility that comes with the work from home trend — which has sparked more demand for Vrbo — will stick long term. Here's more of his analysis: "We haven't seen a ton to suggest that things are changing, and as you have heard me say many times, I am loathe to extrapolate too much from this COVID period. But, for sure, there are a lot of new users of the Vrbo experience and in general I think the data suggests they are going back to it more frequently. But, again, we are in COVID…. Now, is that sustainable and will people go back to resorts and other things? I've said publicly that I believe, in general, that the trends of the past will continue. But one of the trends of the past was that people were getting more into the use case of vacation rentals, so I think we have accelerated and exposed more people to the product and that is a good long-term trend for that category … and it will make people consider vacation rental as part of their choices where maybe before they had not. But I don't think we are necessarily going to be seeing a huge shift that sustains itself long term, so much as maybe a reset at a higher level for vacation rentals and then growing off of that." Expedia's results come two days after the company announced that it plans to sell its corporate travel business Egencia to American Express Global Business Travel. In Thursday's conference call with analysts, Kern said that they've found a "great new home" for Egencia, and the sale will allow Expedia to focus and simplify and move with agility and speed into other core areas. Expedia Group CEO Peter Kern said the travel industry remains a "study in contrasts" — citing a rebounding U.S. travel market and strong vacation rentals in beach and other outdoor destinations. But at the same time, Kern, speaking on the Seattle company's first quarter earnings call, pointed to rough patches in business travel, traditional lodging and international travel. And he specifically noted the worsening COVID-19 situation in India, where Expedia maintains a large presence. "As the dire situation in India reminds us, in some markets, things may get worse before they get better," he said. Such is life as the… Read MoreTech, Expedia Group, Travel       |
| Auth0 CEO Eugenio Pace on the $6.5 billion deal with Okta and his advice for entrepreneurs Posted: 06 May 2021 02:40 PM PDT  Auth0 co-founders Matias Woloski (left) and Eugenio Pace. (Auth0 Photo) Okta's giant $6.5 billion acquisition of Seattle-area startup Auth0 officially closed on Monday. But for Eugenio Pace, the major milestone is just another marker — albeit a lucrative one — in the Auth0 journey. "The word 'exit' is often used when somebody sells a company," the Auth0 CEO and co-founder said this week. "That's not how I see it. There's still a lot to do. Our mission and purpose, the reason why we set up Auth0 to begin with — it's not done yet." We caught up with Pace to talk about the all-stock deal, which brings together two leaders in the identity authentication software sector and is one of the largest acquisitions ever of a Seattle tech company. Pace will continue heading up Auth0 as an independent business unit of publicly-traded Okta. Okta to pay $6.5B to acquire Seattle's Auth0; identity tech startup was valued at $1.9B last yearPace, a CEO of the Year finalist at the GeekWire Awards, spent 12 years at Microsoft before launching Auth0 with fellow Argentinian Matias Woloski in 2013. It was his second attempt at a startup — an earlier company he founded out of Argentina failed. Auth0 certainly worked out a little better. Read on for more from our conversation, which was edited for clarity and brevity. GeekWire: Thanks for chatting with us, Eugenio. The deal finally closed. Does it feel any different? Eugenio Pace: For the foreseeable future, everything pretty much stays the same. We still have our brand, our identity — our mission is not changing. This is about augmenting what we do independently, while operating as an entity with a much bigger scope. The deal has been a lot of work, and seeing this to completion, it's very fulfilling. It's a very positive milestone for the company. But a milestone is not a destination. It feels a little bit like starting again, as an entrepreneur and as a founder. GeekWire: Okta had been targeting Auth0 for several years. What made this the right time? Pace: When Okta CEO Todd McKinnon and I first had a conversation in 2013, we were a tiny company with a handful of employees and there were lots of things we hadn't figured out and that we didn't know. We were still figuring out the core principles of what made Auth0 successful. Fast forward eight years later, and we're on a path to being a public company — we were measuring that milestone in months, not years. We have demonstrated that we are solving something real, that product market fit exists, and we are able to execute and scale. So joining forces with Okta now was absolutely the right thing to do, versus earlier. Some of our earlier fundamental mistakes would have been embedded into the combined entity, and it would have put us in a more difficult situation. But now it's all about execution and scale, and bringing the future that we imagined to the present much faster than if we did it on our own. Auth0 CEO Eugenio Pace at the GeekWire Summit. (GeekWire Photo / Dan DeLong) GeekWire: Auth0 was valued at $1.9 billion in July. Your business has accelerated amid the pandemic. Some say you shouldn't have sold so soon. Why not keep waiting and sell later? Pace: First of all, it's a $6.5 billion deal. Our valuation was less than $2 billion six months ago. For someone who invested in our Series F round in July, this is a 3.5X increase in six months. I would call that a pretty good deal. And for our very early investors, this is more than a 200X return. Of course, people want more. But I don't feel bad in terms of representing the interests of our shareholders. It is also an all-stock deal. That was a little bit by design. The reason we're doing this is because of growth. We can grow faster, better, and do more in the world together with Okta, rather than being separate. My bet is the Okta stock that we're now a part of is going to grow much faster than separate stocks on their own. And because we hold Okta stock, we're able to get that upside. If this was a cash acquisition made by a big company, I would have some reservations. We're not cashing out. If we joined a much bigger organization, Auth0 would be a tiny piece of a much larger thing. Instead, we are roughly 20% of Okta. That's not an insignificant part of Okta. GeekWire: Salesforce Ventures led your last round. Were you getting interest from other potential acquirers? Pace: Okta is not the only company that showed interest over our lifetime. A company like ours, we've been very fortunate — we've grown and we've been successful in many dimensions. And so as you can imagine, there was a lot of interest, not just from companies, but also from investors, too. GeekWire: Okta and Auth0 both sell identity authentication software but come at it from different sides. Okta serves companies and their workforces, while Auth0 is focused on developers and end-users. Will it be difficult to merge these two together in one entity? Pace: The odds might not be in our favor if you look at the statistics of M&A in general. Many of those transactions don't end up well. The causes of those failures can be incompatibility in vision, in culture, in leadership — but those have not happened to us. We have more in common than that divides us — our values, our convictions for the future, etc. The common foundation is about a vision. We both believe that identity is an absolutely essential problem to be solved. It's not going to go away, and it's going to pretty much affect every company on the planet. We believe that an independent identity cloud is the right way to go for various reasons: security, privacy, etc. We also believe the challenges with identity are not going to get easier as the world becomes more digital. And we both are cloud-native companies born into the cloud revolution. That's what we have in common. But we also have things that are more complimentary with each other, and that's what makes the union more interesting. We sell to more international markets; Okta is a majority in the U.S. We are a remote-first company; Okta is a more traditional office-based company. We sell to developers; they sell to CIOs and technology groups in companies. Their product is more centered in workforce identity; we are more centered on the consumer. So even though we are in the same problem space, all of these elements make us not incompatible, but complimentary — we can fill in the gaps. Even from a product perspective, we can now cover a much larger set of use cases and we can give our customers more options. We can do more powerful things, which makes it really, really exciting. Eugenio Pace inside the company's offices. (Auth0 Photo) GeekWire: What advice do you have for founders and entrepreneurs that are just starting out, like you and Matias were in 2013? Pace: If you build a company for any specific outcome — like being acquired — that's putting the cart before the horse a little bit. You should build something with the outcome of solving a problem for somebody and with the purpose of having a purpose. The odds are so much against you for any of these specific outcomes. When you put all your bets on that, you're more likely to be disappointed. Instead, if you focus on the journey, then you never lose. Even if you survive only one year, your goal was a journey. It wasn't a Series A or Series B or Series C. It's about the process. And then it's all upside for you. GeekWire: And how would you describe that journey for you with Auth0? Pace: I never imagined being here. I never thought about this day. Every day, I lived a little bit like if it was my last day. It's living in the present, designing for a future, but also being mindful of the past as a stepping stone to what's coming, a learning opportunity. That's been more or less the recipe. In a weird way, if we had not made it even two, three years, it would still have been positive for me, because every day we learn something new, we did something for somebody else, we created value. We thought and we learned every day. And that's valuable in itself. Now, all of this has been wonderful, too — don't get me wrong. This has been awesome. But I think it's more like a philosophy. How do you see your journey? If you're obsessed with somebody else's journey, and you're trying to find shortcuts for yourself, you're missing the point. Everybody's experience is different. There's only one Auth0, and one journey of Auth0 that could have happened. The combination of context and timing and product and people — all of that happens only once. So if you try to live somebody else's life and not yours, then you're doomed to not make much out of it. Nothing replaces your own doing. You can read all the books, you can listen to my words, but nothing will replace you being an entrepreneur, actually doing it on your own. It's going to be unique. Okta's giant $6.5 billion acquisition of Seattle-area startup Auth0 officially closed on Monday. But for Eugenio Pace, the major milestone is just another marker — albeit a lucrative one — in the Auth0 journey. "The word 'exit' is often used when somebody sells a company," the Auth0 CEO and co-founder said this week. "That's not how I see it. There's still a lot to do. Our mission and purpose, the reason why we set up Auth0 to begin with — it's not done yet." We caught up with Pace to talk about the all-stock deal, which brings together two leaders… Read MoreStartups, acquisition, Auth0, Okta       |
| Posted: 06 May 2021 02:07 PM PDT  Today the shoreline of Lake Malawi is open, not forested the way it was before ancient humans started modifying the landscape. Jessica Thompson, CC BY-ND Fields of rust-colored soil, spindly cassava, small farms and villages dot the landscape. Dust and smoke blur the mountains visible beyond massive Lake Malawi. Here in tropical Africa, you can't escape the signs of human presence. How far back in time would you need to go in this place to discover an entirely natural environment? Our work has shown that it would be a very long time indeed – at least 85,000 years, eight times earlier than the world's first land transformations via agriculture. We are part of an interdisciplinary collaboration between archaeologists who study past human behavior, geochronologists who study the timing of landscape change and paleoenvironmental scientists who study ancient environments. By combining evidence from these research specialities, we have identified an instance in the very distant past of early humans bending environments to suit their needs. In doing so, they transformed the landscape around them in ways still visible today.
Digging for behavioral and environmental cluesThe dry season is the best time to do archaeological fieldwork here, and finding sites is easy. Most places we dig in these red soils, we find stone artifacts. They are evidence that someone sat and skillfully broke stones to create edges so sharp they can still draw blood. Many of these stone tools can be fit back together, reconstructing a single action by a single person, from tens of thousands of years ago.
So far we've recovered more than 45,000 stone artifacts here, buried many feet (1 to 7 meters) below the surface of the ground. The sites we are excavating date to a time ranging from about 315,000 to 30,000 years ago known as the Middle Stone Age. This was also a period in Africa when innovations in human behavior and creativity pop up frequently – and earlier than anywhere else in the world. How did these artifacts get buried? Why are there so many of them? And what were these ancient hunter-gatherers doing as they made them? To answer these questions, we needed to figure out more about what was happening in this place during their time.
For a clearer picture of the environments where these early humans lived, we turned to the fossil record preserved in layers of mud at the bottom of Lake Malawi. Over millennia, pollen blown into the water and tiny lake-dwelling organisms became trapped in layers of muck on the lake's floor. Members of our collaborative team extracted a 1,250-foot (380-meter) drill core of mud from a modified barge, then painstakingly tallied the microscopic fossils it contained, layer by layer. They then used them to reconstruct ancient environments across the entire basin.
Today, this region is characterized by bushy, fire-tolerant open woodlands that do not develop a thick and enclosed canopy. Forests that do develop these canopies harbor the richest diversity in vegetation; this ecosystem is now restricted to patches that occur at higher elevations. But these forests once stretched all the way to the lakeshore. Based on the fossil plant evidence present at various times in the drill cores, we could see that the area around Lake Malawi repeatedly alternated between wet times of forest expansion and dry periods of forest contraction. As the area underwent cycles of aridity, driven by natural climate change, the lake shrank at times to only 5% of its present volume. When lake levels eventually rose each time, forests encroached on the shoreline. This happened time and time again over the last 636,000 years. Harnessing fire to manage resourcesThe mud in the core also contains a record of fire history, in the form of tiny fragments of charcoal. Those little flecks told us that around 85,000 years ago, something strange happened around Lake Malawi. Charcoal production spiked, erosion increased and, for the first time in more than half a million years, rainfall did not bring forest recovery. At the same time this charcoal burst appears in the drill core record, our sites began to show up in the archaeological record – eventually becoming so numerous that they formed one continuous landscape littered with stone tools. Another drill core immediately offshore showed that as site numbers increased, more and more charcoal was washing into the lake. Early humans had begun to make their first permanent mark on the landscape.
Fire use is a technology that stretches back at least a million years. Using it in such a transformative way is human innovation at its most powerful. Modern hunter-gatherers use fire to warm themselves, cook food and socialize, but many also deploy it as an engineering tool. Based on the wide-scale and permanent transformation of vegetation into more fire-tolerant woodlands, we infer that this was what these ancient hunter-gatherers were doing. By converting the natural seasonal rhythm of wildfire into something more controlled, people can encourage specific areas of vegetation to grow at different stages. This so-called "pyrodiversity" establishes miniature habitat patches and diversifies opportunities for foraging, kind of like increasing product selection at a supermarket.
Just like today, changing any part of an ecosystem has consequences everywhere else. With the loss of closed forests in ancient Malawi, the vegetation became dominated by more open woodlands that are resilient to fire – but these did not contain the same species diversity. This combination of rainfall and reduced tree cover also increased opportunities for erosion, which spread sediments into a thick blanket known as an alluvial fan. It sealed away archaeological sites and created the landscape you can see here today. Human impacts can be sustainableAlthough the spread of farmers through Africa within the last few thousand years brought about more landscape and vegetation transformations, we have found that the legacy of human impacts was already in place tens of thousands of years before. This offers a chance to understand how such impacts can be sustained over very long timescales.
Most people associate human impacts with a time after the Industrial Revolution, but paleo-scientists have a deeper perspective. With it, researchers like us can see that wherever and whenever humans lived, we must abandon the idea of "pristine nature," untouched by any human imprint. However, we can also see how humans shaped their environments in sustainable ways over very long periods, causing ecosystem transformation without collapse. Seeing the long arc of human influence therefore gives us much to consider about not only our past, but also our future. By establishing long-term ecological patterns, conservation efforts related to fire control, species protection and human food security can be more targeted and effective. People living in the tropics, such as Malawi today, are especially vulnerable to the economic and social impacts of food insecurity brought about by climate change. By studying the deep past, we can establish connections between long-term human presence and the biodiversity that sustains it. With this knowledge, people can be better equipped to do what humans had already innovated nearly 100,000 years ago in Africa: manage the world around us. [The Conversation's newsletter explains what's going on with the coronavirus pandemic. Subscribe now.] Jessica Thompson has received funding for this research from the Australian Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, and National Geographic Society-Waitt Foundation. She is affiliated with Yale University and the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, Arizona State University, the Paleoanthropology Society, the Society of Africanist Archaeologists, and the Society for American Archaeology. David K. Wright has received funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, National Geographic Foundation, Nordforsk (Nordic Council of Ministers) fund and the National Research Foundation of Korea. He is affiliated with the University of Oslo and the State Key Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and is a member of the Society for American Archaeology and the Society of Africanist Archaeologists. Sarah Ivory receives funding from the US National Science Foundation and the Belmont Forum. Combining evidence from archaeology, geochronology and paleoenvironmental science, researchers identified how ancient humans by Lake Malawi were the first to substantially modify their environment.       |
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