WebProNews

Tag: Business Insider

  • Gamblers Betting on F-150/Tesla Cybertruck Tug-of-War Rematch

    Gamblers Betting on F-150/Tesla Cybertruck Tug-of-War Rematch

    Tesla made headlines with its debut of the Cybertruck, a futuristic-looking electric pickup truck. Tesla is obviously taking aim at Ford and the rest of the pickup truck industry.

    The Cybertruck starts at $39,900 for a single RWD motor and 7,500 lbs towing capacity. The middle option offers dual-motor AWD and 10,000 lbs of towing starting at $49,900. The highest trim level starts at $69,900 and provides 14,000 lbs towing.

    As part of Tesla’s demonstration, they showed a video of the Cybertruck beating a Porsche 911 off the line and beating an F-150 in a tug-of-war. As Business Insider (BI) points out, four days later a Ford executive suggested in a tweet that the contest may not have been an apples-to-apples comparison. Even Neil deGrasse Tyson got in on the action, questioning the physics of the comparison.

    Elon Musk took the challenges to heart and promised to film a new test between the two trucks. It would appear that gambling site MyBookie is getting in on the action. At the time that BI wrote their article, odds were in favor of the F-150 winning the match at -120 vs the Cybertruck at +100. The odds have since shifted back in favor of the Cybertruck, now at -140 vs +120 for the F-150.

    With betting remaining open till December 4, it will be interesting to see if the Cybertruck remains the favorite, not to mention who will win the final contest.

  • Microsoft Building Team to Grow Azure Business and Compete With AWS

    Microsoft Building Team to Grow Azure Business and Compete With AWS

    Business Insider is reporting that Microsoft is building out a new team of technical trainers to help customers at all levels of proficiency.

    Microsoft and Amazon are locked in a bitter rivalry in the cloud computing business. While Amazon’s market share was three times that of Microsoft in 2018, Microsoft is making impressive headway. Most recently, the company beat out Amazon for a Pentagon contract with $10 billion.

    One area where Azure can continue to take market share away from AWS is by appealing to non-technical audiences. AWS is widely viewed as more complicated than Azure, with a much higher barrier-to-entry. If Microsoft can successfully appeal to non-technical users, including those just looking to migrate to the cloud, they will continue to chip away at AWS’ lead.

    The new team of trainers is a significant step toward that goal, as it will help Microsoft educate and train customers at every stage of their journey with Azure. This is especially important as the company appeals to non-developers, or casual developers, in addition to professionals. Microsoft’s ultimate goal appears to be enabling non-developers to take full advantage of the platform with minimal, or even no, coding required.

  • Investigation Into Google Expands to Include Android and Search

    Investigation Into Google Expands to Include Android and Search

    This has not been a good week for Google.

    First, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google has been collecting very detailed healthcare records of millions of Americans through its deal with Ascension, prompting severe backlash and a government inquiry. Then Google announces its plans to offer checking accounts, only to face backlash from individuals concerned about privacy ramifications, and predictions that Congress may try to thwart the company’s efforts.

    According to Business Insider, things are about to get much worse. An investigation by 48 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico into alleged anti-competitive behavior in Google’s advertising business is being expanded to include its Android operating system and search engine results.

    The investigation, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, could see Google face the same level of scrutiny it has in the EU, which ultimately led to $9.4 billion in fines. On the heels of EU Commissioner Margrethe Vestager’s comments questioning the value of breaking up big tech companies in favor of holding them to a higher standard, it appears the U.S. may be taking a similar approach.

    With Google expanding into new markets and industries, a widening inquiry is the last thing it needs.

  • Intuit CEO Thinks AI Will Help Humans, Not Replace Them

    Intuit CEO Thinks AI Will Help Humans, Not Replace Them

    Business Insider is reporting that Intuit’s CEO has a very different view of AI in the workplace from many other executives.

    Many executives, business leaders and experts fear AI will result in countless lost jobs as machines replace human workers. Intuit’s CEO, Sasan Goodarzi, doesn’t share those concerns, instead believing that AI is simply another transition, such as occurred when the Internet became popular.

    Goodarzi told Business Insider: “AI is going to automate a lot of what is done today, a lot of predictions that you have to make. AI can automate all of that, but then it actually elevates where people can provide value, it elevates where they can provide judgement.

    “History is our best teacher. When the internet was coming around there was lots of concern that because of the internet, because of commerce, because of what you could now do that would be elimination of a lot of jobs and in fact it’s created a lot of jobs.”

    This outlook on AI’s role informs the company’s approach to the emerging technology, using it to maximize available resources, including the human element.

    “Machine learning at the end of the day takes input and it makes a recommendation, and if something has to rely on one hundred percent accuracy, machine learning probably wouldn’t be good for that,” Goodarzi told Business Insider. He maintains that AI is “only as good as the data that it has and it’s only as good as how it gets trained.”

    For individuals worried about losing their jobs to AI and automation, Goodarzi’s comments are a welcome change of pace from the traditional outlook of many in the industry.

  • Jeff Bezos And Others Give Business Insider $12 Million

    Business Insider announced on Wednesday that it has raised a new $12 million round of funding from existing investors including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Others include IVP, RRE, and Gordon Crovitz.

    According to CEO Henry Blodget, Business Insider will use the money to create “more great digital journalism (including long-form narratives and investigations),” more photography, more video, more data and graphics, more design and product development, more technology (including faster speed and better personalization), more subscription services (deep news and analysis for industry professionals) and a UK-based Europe edition.

    “And, of course, we’ll also be buying a foosball table to go with our ping-pong table. And maybe a jet. (Kidding),” he writes. “You’ll see a lot of the site and service improvements over the course of this year and next.”

    The Wall Street Journal reports that the investment from Bezos is through his Bezos Expeditions firm, which has previously invested in Business Insider, as well as companies like Twitter, Uber, Airbnb, and Makerbot, to name a few.

    Last year, of course, Bezos bought The Washington Post.

    Business Insider has now raised a total of $30 million.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Business Insider Hit 15 Million Uniques In May, Praises Aggregation

    In the publishing world, it’s no secret that Business Insider has seen tremendous growth in recent years. Today, co-founder, CEO and Editor-In Chief Henry Blodget announced that the site had 15 million unique monthly visitors in May, and he largely attributes the site’s popularity to news aggregation.

    On Friday, we looked at Compete’s latest numbers for some of the web’s popular business and tech publications. As previously noted, Compete’s numbers are often lower than publishers’ internal analytics, and it had Business Insider at 2,681,606 uniques for the month of May (U.S. Only), compared to 2,239,178 for WebProNews. The 15 million Blodget announced today are presumably global. For perspective, in light of Compete’s data, WebProNews (based on our internal stats) was at 5.2 million for the month.

    It’s interesting to see what Blodget has to say about aggregation. In his post, he writes, “We occasionally hear other media organizations speak ill of aggregation, as though it’s some sort of a bad thing. This has always been mystifying to us. We assume this attitude arose from an era in which big media organizations were like hydrants in the desert–the only place to find news and information.”

    “In the past, publications like ours would have had to hire PR firms to send their articles around and beg other journalists to write about them. Now, thanks to the Internet, you all not only choose to read our posts with no prodding from us, you write about them, link to us, raise awareness of our brand and writers, and make it easy for more readers to find us. And we’re grateful for every mention and link!”

    He’s right. You don’t hear that too often from traditional media publications, some of which have historically been quite defensive about news aggregation.

    It was only a year ago we were reporting that Business insider had surpassed popular social media news site Mashable in Uniques (based on Compete data from that time). As you can see from the Compete list, Business Insider is in the upper tier of business sites, in terms of unique audience. It will be interesting to see if it jumps up further, on a list dominated by sites like CNET, Forbes.com, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and Businessweek.

  • Facebook IPO May Be The Most Important in History, Says Mark Cuban

    Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has a new op-ed published at Business Insider in which he declares the Facebook initial public offering (IPO) the most important IPO in history. He bases this on two different premises. One, that the huge popularity of the Facebook brand will lure retail investors back to Wall Street, meaning a large influx of new money into the market. Two, the high-frequency traders that play the market daily will destroy these new retail investors. From Cuban’s editorial:

    If lots of individual, retail investors do buy into Facebook and they make money at it, that could lead to individual retail investors coming back into the market. Something that individuals smartly have avoided for the last several years.

    Cuban may be right that retail investors were smart to avoid the market over the course of the recession. However, will individual investors really throw caution to the wind and put their money down on a tech company? Just over a decade since the first tech-bubble burst? Probably. And those that see the market as a full time job, the high frequency/algorithmic traders, as Cuban calls them, will take those retail investors for a ride. Said Cuban:

    They will feast on the unwashed, unsophisticated mass of retail buyers dashing into Facebook. They will pray that the stock skyrockets and stories of individuals making out like bandits are spread throughout the media. They will attack this stock like a pack of wolves.

    Though the Facebook IPO will certainly invigorate the stock market in the short-term, it remais to be seen what long-term effects it may have. Realistically, Facebook won’t singlehandedly reinvigorate the U.S. economy. What the IPO will do, for certain, is put Facebook on the same level as that other giant of internet advertising: Google. Silicon Valley, not Wall Street, will be the place to watch in the coming years.

    (via Business Insider)

  • Pinterest May Be a Flash in the Pan

    Pinterest May Be a Flash in the Pan

    Nicholas Carlson over at Business Insider is reporting on an interesting phenomenon involving Pinterest‘s popularity. It seems the number of Pinterest users has been falling since mid-March. Using information from AppData, a site that measures metrics for apps on different platforms, Business Insider is estimating the app has lost around 3 million monthly active users since March 1st.

    Carlson speculates that media coverage spurred a lot of users to try out the app who didn’t stick with it. He points out that Google trends shows searches for Pinterest growing at a pretty crazy rate since late last year. It’s hard to sustain that kind of explosive growth, and I suppose, as does Carlson, that a correction of sorts was inevitable. Take a look at the graph and interpret it for yourself:

    <a href=Pinterest Google trends over the last 12 months” />

    Interestingly, if you look closely at that graph, you can see that the numbers of searches for Pinterest began to fall at nearly the exact same time as mentions of Pinterest in news articles began to spike heavily. Could this be a case of Pinterest suddenly becoming too “mainstream?” Are Pinterest hipsters fleeing the app the way some Instagram users are? Will these two groups find each other and create a sharing-app paradise on some platform that none of us have heard of yet? Let me know what you think in the comments section below.

  • Mark Cuban Becomes Largest Holder of Vringo Stock and Shares Triple

    Mark Cuban purchased Vringo stock shortly after pushing Lamar Odom out of his life. Vringo is a Delaware corporation that was founded in 2006 by entrepreneur and venture capitalist Jonathan Medved and mobile software specialist David Goldfarb. The company provides software platforms for mobile social and mobile video services.

    According to data from FactSet Research Cuban now owns more than 1.03 million shares of stock making him the largest holder.

    Within hours of making the big deal, shares of the stock increased in value by 16% to $3.53. By the time the market closed “the stock had more than tripled since the start of the year.”

    His investment comes as a surprise because he told Business Insider in December of 2011 that, “Wall Street used to be a place where you can raise capital to grow businesses. That’s not the case anymore. Wall Street has become a platform for hackers.”

    Cuban went on to explain that algorithmic trading and high frequency trading has led investing in Wall Street to lose its purpose. He went on to say that, “Unless you are buying stock that pays you dividends — or it pays you some return in some way or another — it’s no different than buying a baseball card.”

  • Business Insider to Yahoo: Buy Us and Make Us the CEO

    Business Insider has announced an “offer” for Yahoo.

    CEO Henry Blodget has posted a bare-bones plan with more details promised for “when the time comes” for Yahoo to purchase Business Insider for $150 million then appoint BI acting CEO (he says “us” not “me”) of Yahoo so they can implement their “plan”.

    Publicity stunt? Perhaps. We’ll bite. Should Yahoo?

    @hblodget
    Henry Blodget    Announcing Our Offer For Yahoo! http://t.co/gZZbJSc 44 minutes ago via Business Insider · powered by @socialditto

    @hblodget
    Henry Blodget    Yahoo is a lot more than media RT @jeffjarvis: @hblodget we disagree about whether media’s necessarily a good business 25 minutes ago via TweetDeck · powered by @socialditto

    @hblodget
    Henry Blodget    @EpicureanDeal Nope. Wouldn’t be an advisory relationship. They’d have to buy us and give me line authority (No interest in “advising”) 23 minutes ago via TweetDeck · powered by @socialditto

    @hblodget
    Henry Blodget    @nancefinance Yes, happy to take stock. But didn’t want to limit their flexibility. 3 minutes ago via TweetDeck · powered by @socialditto

    “Given all the private-equity firms circling around Yahoo, we expect we would have little difficulty raising the $20 billion or so we would need to buy Yahoo outright,” Blodget writes. “But we’re busy, and that would take time and be messy. It would also involve paying several hundred million dollars to investment bankers and other “strategic advisors.” And there’s no reason for Yahoo to waste that kind of money.”

    He says BI’s plan will “unlock the value embedded in Yahoo’s clobbered stock, and it will restore compelling organic growth to Yahoo’s core business,” and that it doesn’t necessarily involve BI’s remaining CEO of Yahoo.

    “We live in New York, not California, and this is not a power grab,” he says. “The plan involves our hiring the right CEO, something Yahoo’s board has had a tough time doing over the past 11 years. We think there are only a handful of great candidates who have the combination of talents and experience necessary to succeed in this job. And part of our plan would be to quickly bring the best one of them on board). We’re not going to waste a lot of time putting a book together and hiring advisors to help pitch Yahoo’s board on our offer (we have our own business to run). But if Yahoo! would like to entertain our offer, we would be happy to discuss it.”

    Yahoo, as you may know just fired Carol Bartz as CEO and is looking for a new CEO while Timothy Morse fills in in the interim.

  • Business Insider Overtakes Mashable in U.S. Unique Visitors (Compete)

    Business Insider has overtaken Mashable in unique visitors according to Compete. It seemed noteworthy when competing blog Mashable overtook TechCrunch as the more popular tech blog, and now Business Insider (whose tech section is technically Silicon Alley Insider) appears to be doing even better than Mashable.

    Business Insider Overtakes Mashable

    Of course, there are plenty of factors that could be contributing here. For one, Business Insider is pushing out a ton of articles these days, and on a variety of topics. It’s not all tech, or even all business at this point. It’s pretty much become an all-purpose news source, leaving the name “Business Insider” a little misleading. That’s not to say they don’t cover business well, but visit the site, and you’ll find sections on Tech, Media, Sports, Lifestyle, Politics, Travel, Etc. The content will still often have a business angle, but not always.

    This kind of branching out into other content areas by previously niche publications has drawn some criticism. In fact, a TechCrunch writer recently blasted Mashable for this kind of thing (which I defended here). Interestingly enough, Business Insider has also been known to syndicate articles from other sources, including TechCrunch itself.

    Business Insider puts out a ton of content. They seem to be going for almost a Huffington Post-type thing. In terms of unique visitors, it seems to be playing out well for them so far.

    It’s worth noting that Compete’s data is all U.S. and has been subject to its own share of criticism. Last week, we ran a piece, in which Compete’s Damian Roskill, Managing Director of Marketing, compared Compete data and Google Analytics data to Apples and Oranges.