A Picture’s Worth…

If you’re wondering what happened to your images on Facebook’s News Feed, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger….well, you and over a billion other people.

The Verge is reporting that Facebook is working to resolve the outage and “to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”

This once again proves the complexities and challenges of publishing multiple pieces of content from multiple sources into a single page. Welcome to the cloud-driven Web of 2019.

But let’s talk soccer. We witnessed yet another storied defeat by the U.S. women’s team last evening in the FIFA Women’s World Cup, beating England 2-1, in a game which missed play of wunderwoman Megan Rapinoe due to a hamstring injury.

Those women are awesome (give them a raise!).

On to the dealmaking…talk all over the place about a possible acquisition of cybersecurity firm Symantec by Broadcom, with Bloomberg reporting Broadcom is in advanced talks to buy them in a deal that could be reached “in weeks.”

From Bloomberg Intelligence:

Broadcom’s potential purchase of another asset with $4+ billion in software sales is likely its most ambitious deal yet – leaderless Symantec has been losing share, even in its core segments. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan will likely need to aggressively cut Symantec costs while keeping sales stable.

– Anand Srinivasan, technology analyst

And on to Chimerica…Mixed signals emanating from the Trump Administration on Huawei, with Reuters reporting a senior U.S. official telling the Commerce Department’s enforcement staff this week that China’s Huawei should still be treated as blacklisted only a few days after the President vowed to ease a ban on sales to the firm.

While Commerce tries to get its story straight, Nikkei Asian Review is reporting that there’s an electronics exodus from China underway:

Global consumer electronics makers HP, Dell, Microsoft and Amazon are all looking to shift substantial production capacity out of China, joining a growing exodus that threatens to undermine the country’s position as the world’s powerhouse for tech gadgets.

HP and Dell, the world’s No. 1 and No. 3 personal computer makers who together command around 40% of the global market, are planning to reallocate up to 30% of their notebook production out of China, several sources told the Nikkei Asian Review.

While this is just smart supply chain management and oversight by electronics firms, it’s a blow to China, which is the world’s largest producer of PCs and smartphones.

It could be a very good time to learn to speak Vietnamese!

Okay, over and out. For those of you in the U.S., Happy Independence Day. And if you’re in D.C. for the big celebration, you can be assured the tanks brought in are expected to be stationary.

But watch your feet, just in case.

Salesforce Acquires Tableau, Raytheon to Merge With United Technologies

M&A Thursday has segued into M&A Monday: Salesforce is buying data visualization firm Tableau for $15.7B in an all-stock deal.

This just a few days after Google announced it was buying analytics startup Looker for $2.6B.

Somebody’s going to need a good analytics visualization tool to analyze all of these sudden big analytics M&A deals!

Also in AI news, network analysis and cyberattack AI firm Vectra has raised a $100M Series E round led by TCV, which brings the company’s total raise to $220M, according to a report from SiliconANGLE.

UK-based Privatar, a data privacy software provider for the enterprise, raised a $40M Series B round led by Accel.

Spacemaker, AI for architects, urban planners, and property developers, raised $25M in a Series A co-led by Atomico and Northzone.

And Bloomberg is reporting that Apple is preparing to do an “acquihire” of self-driving startup Drive.ai. That company has raised about $77M and last valued in 2017 at $200M.

Lest you think those are large deals, let’s not forget the giant merger in the aerospace and defense industries announced over the weekend, the combination of United Technologies and Raytheon.

Raytheon and United Technologies’ aerospace businesses produce a whole slew of aircraft and defense technologies, including Pratt & Whitney engineers, Tomahawk missiles, and the F-35 fighter jet.

If approved, the merger would become one of the biggest deals of 2019, and would leave a company with an estimated $74B in expected sales for the year…and a landscape with a much smaller short list of defense contractors (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon are at the top of that list).

Looker, Scooter, Uber

It’s an M&A kind of Thursday.

First on the auction block: Looker, a data analytics startup that Google has purchased for $2.6B in cash. This is the company’s first major acquisition since ex-Oracler Thomas Kurian joined the team (and replaced Diane Greene).

The value prop, as surmised by CNBC: 

The purchase of Looker will add a new analytics tool for Google Cloud’s customers. Google said the technology will help its customers analyze their data in a consistent way across different sources and help Google provide industry-specific analytics for its targeted verticals. Google said in its press release that it already shared over 350 customers through an existing partnership, including BuzzFeed, Yahoo and Hearst.

Bird is in talks to acquire scooter startup Scott, last valued at $71M. TechCrunch reports Bird scooping up Scoot would be the company’s first full acquisition. (And as an Austinite who frequents LadyBird Lake trail frequently, I’ll just say this: “Enough with the scooters, already.”)

And Step, a mobile-based banking service aimed at teenagers in the U.S., raised $22.5M in a round led by Stripe.

“Schools don’t teach kids about money,” CJ MacDonald, the CEO and co-founder, said in an interview. “We want to be their first bank accounts with spending cards, but we also want to teach financial literacy and responsibility. Banks don’t tailor to this, and we want to be a solution teaching the next generation of adults to be more responsible with money in the cashless era. It was easy with cash to go to the mall but now everyone is using their phone for Uber and more.”

And speaking of Uber, if UberX doesn’t quite cut it for you in terms of prestige, you’ll soon be able to take Uber Copter for an 8-minute helicopter ride between Lower Manhattan and JFK for roughly $200-225/person. 

Be sure to wave at all those folks parked on the Van Wyck!

Need a Lyft?

If you’re looking for a new iPad, Apple is offering up a couple of new options.

A new 10.5” iPad Air ($499), and a 7.9” iPad mini ($399), both with retina displays, the A12 Bionic chip, and support for the first-gen Apple pencil.

For those keeping score, that mini has the same screen size as the previous generation. 9to5Mac writes that the Air is “a halfway house between the $329 iPad and $799+ iPad Pro tiers.”

On the dealmaking and moneyraising fronts, there’s also news from this Monday.

Fidelity National Information Services Inc. said it has agreed to acuire Worldpay Inc for roughly $35 billion in cash and stock, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Why do we care?

This deal would build a global payments giant and back-end financial services business in a sector “under pressure to cut costs, develop new products and add customers.”

The combined FIS and Worldpay expects to generate $500 million in additional revenue and annual cost cuts of about $400 million through combining their one-stop shop services to process online and in-store payments and manage transactions in multiple currencies. The enlarged group, which expects to have annual revenue of about $12.3 billion, also will offer services to manage fraud and advanced data analytics, the companies said.

 FIS helps banks process credit-card transactions, service auto loans and handle back-office functions for money managers among a range of services that it offers. The company says its technology is used in managing transactions involving more than $9 trillion annually.

Finally, if you’re looking for a lift, ride-share company Lyft today disclosed it hopes to raise over $2 billion in its IPO, at an initial market cap that could top $19 billion. 

Lyft is expecting to offer 30.77 million shares valued at between $62 and $68 per share, and its IPO road-show is expected to kick off today.

Might be cheaper to ride a scooter.

Smarter Speakers…and Payments

Strategy Analytics has released sales figures for voice assistants in the first quarter of 2018, and has reported that Apple sold an estimated 600K HomePod speakers.

If that number is correct, then Apple would have captured just 6 percent of the global smart speaker market, well behind Amazon and Google, according to a report by MacRumors.

During the same time period, Amazon shipped an estimated 4 million Echo smart speakers, giving it a 43.6 percent market share, and Google 26.5 percent with 2.4 million sales.

And year-over-year, Amazon’s sales increased by two million, and Google’s by 2.1 million.

Meanwhile, back at the payment settlement ranch ​PayPal is looking to square its game against Square and Stripe by buying iZettle for $2.2 billion in an all-cash deal.

According to a report from TechCrunch, the deal is expected to settle in Q3 2018, and would be PayPal’s biggest-ever transaction.

iZettle currently has operations in 12 markets, including several in northern Europe and Mexico, as well as in the U.K.

The Sprint to T-Mobile

Can you hear that pin drop?

That’s the sound of two telecommunications giants attempting to become one.

Over the weekend, T-Mobile US Inc. agreed to acquire Sprint Corp. for $26.5 billion in stock, according to a report from Bloomberg.

This mashup would reduce the U.S. wireless industry to three major competitors from four, writes Bloomberg, which it said ensures “heavy scrutiny from regulators.”

T-Mobile CEO John Legere explained “We’re going to have an impact on America…We are going to drag the rest of the players kicking and screaming to the prize, which is American leadership in fifth-generation (5G) networks.”

Some details:

Operating as T-Mobile, the company would have about $74 billion in annual revenue and 70 million wireless subscribers. Verizon is the largest U.S. carrier with $88 billion in 2017 wireless revenue and 111 million subscribers, and AT&T would be No. 2 with $71 billion in wireless revenue and have 78 million regular subscribers.

Fascinating to see the “America First” spin geared towards both regulators and the Trump Administration (obviously to help them navigate and get the blessing of regulators).

Axios picks it up there:

• Executives stressed the deal would help America outpace China and others in 5G wireless development. “The combination of the 600 megahertz [in wireless spectrum] and other assets that we have are critical building blocks of what America needs to deploy to take its rightful place,” said T-Mobile CEO John Legere.
• Many in D.C. worry about China outpacing America in 5G development. Earlier this year, a now-departed senior official in the National Security Council circulated a planto nationalize a 5G network.
• The company’s project job growth in retail and customer service operations, with an emphasis on rural areas.

So, to recap: This deal helps us beat China to the 5G punch (National security!), is GREAT for consumers (even though there will now be one less player on the U.S. telecom chessboard), and it will create new jobs in rural ‘Merica.

IBM To Acquire Big Data Software Provider Vivisimo

IBM continues to romp and stomp its way through the Big Data space.

IBM announced its intent to acquire enterprise discovery software provider Vivisimo earlier today. Vivisimo has recently positioned itself as the "independent provider of enterprise search solutions" which helps "organizations unlock and optimize the true business value of all their information, regardless of application or source, in order to drive innovation, real-time decisions and actionable insight."

Today, it announced a definitive agreement to acquire Vivisimo, a leading provider of federated discovery and navigation software that helps organizations access and analyze big data across the enterprise.

Vivisimo is a privately held company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Financial terms were not disclosed.  Of course.

IBM estimates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day from a variety of sources including sensors, social media, and billions of mobile devices around the world, making it difficult for businesses to navigate and analyze it to improve competitiveness, efficiency, and profitability.

IDC estimates the market for big data technology and services will grow at an annual rate of nearly 40 percent to reach $16.9 billion by 2015

That’s where Vivisimo software comes into play. Vivisimo excels in capturing and delivering quality information across the broadest range of data sources, no matter what format it is, or where it resides.

It automates the discovery of data and helps employees navigate it with a single view across the enterprise, providing valuable insights that drive better decision-making for solving all operational challenges.

Today’s news accelerates IBM’s big data analytics initiatives with advanced federated capabilities allowing organizations to access, navigate, and analyze the full variety, velocity and volume of structured and unstructured data without having to move it.

The combination of IBM’s big data analytics capabilities with Vivisimo software will further IBM’s efforts to automate the flow of data into business analytics applications, helping clients better understand consumer behavior, manage customer churn and network performance, detect fraud in real-time, and perform data-intensive marketing campaigns.

“Businesses need a faster and more accurate way to discover and navigate big data for analysis” said John Kealey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivisimo. “As part of IBM, we can bring clients the quickest and most accurate access to information necessary to drive growth initiatives that increase customer satisfaction, streamline processes, and boost sales.”

Vivisimo brings over a decade of experience and innovation in data navigation and visualization technologies for both structured and unstructured data, making it easier for business users to get value from all of their data and content. Vivisimo’s ability to index and search data across multiple repositories is a distinguishing capability, applicable to all industries and clients.

Vivisimo has more than 140 customers in industries such as government, life sciences, manufacturing, electronics, consumer goods and financial services. Clients include Airbus, U.S. Air Force, Social Security Administration, Defense Intelligence Agency, U.S. Navy, Procter & Gamble, Bupa, and LexisNexis among others.

Upon the closing of the acquisition, approximately 120 Vivisimo employees will join IBM’s Software Group. IBM will incorporate Vivisimo technology into its big data platform.

Visit here for more information on IBM’s big data platform or here for more information on Vivisimo.

There’s some early coverage here from TechCrunch.

Skype In Or Out: The Most Expensive VOIP Call In History

So Microsoft’s buying Skype for $8.5 billion?

Man, time flies.  I remember when eBay bought Skype for, well, wasn’t it like $2.5B?

But, that was in the Jurassic era, pre-Facebook, whom, by the way, Om Malik pronounces the winner of Microsoft’s newfound acquisition.

His reasoning?  Facebook gets to keep Skype away from Google and gets access to the Skype assets through Microsoft’s deal.

But Nokia also benefits after Microsoft’s recent deal with them to put Windows Mobile 7 into Nokia smartphones as their OS of choice moving forward.

Of course, you also will now see Skype moving into the X-Box, Kinect, Sharepoint, Outlook…the list goes on.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb points out, though, that Mac Fanboys will likely continue to get the short end of the Skype stick, as “neglect of the Mac version has always been an issue.”

He points out that Skype for Mac has been “several versions behind the Windows version for years” and lags in features, and that it would be hard to imagine that changing with this deal.

Regardless, one would hope the folks in Redmond just don’t treat Skype like the red-headed stepchild it seemed to be at e-Bay.

Considering its Microsoft’s most expensive acquisition ever (aQuantive went for $6B in 2007), I would think they’d want to make the most of it, although keeping all that talent around will require some nice velvety handcuffs.

$8.5B, though — that’s got to be the single most expensive VOIP call in the history of the planet!