News You might have missed: week of Sept. 15, 2017

Alphabet considering investing $1B in Lyft

Bloomberg revealed on Friday that Alphabet has been in talks with Lyft to invest about $1 billion. The investment may come from Google or CapitalG, Alphabet’s private-equity arm.

Via Bloomberg  

  • Recently, Lyft has been controlling spending which might have been seen as a signal of a long term inability to remain independent. Google, of course, has a strong interest in making sure that remains the case and this finds injection might just give that safety net. At least until Google changes its mind and actually acquires the company!
  • This might come as a surprise as Alphabet is also an Uber shareholder through its venture capital arm GV. But if we consider that Waymo – also an Alphabet property – is in a court battle with Uber over self-driving technology things get clearer. Also, Waymo and Lyft recently partnered to work together on testing autonomous vehicles hence the need for Lyft to remain independent.
  • More reasons might also be motivating this investment. The uncertainty around the new CEO and the public backlash that started with a simple # but developed into customers switching from Uber to Lyft, myself included.

A Few More Things We learned about Face ID

An iOS developer wrote an email to Craig Federighi to ask some questions about how Face ID works and in the reply he received we got a few more interesting details. Federighi said that Face ID will work with most sunglasses las long as they let through enough IR light so that Face ID can see your eyes even when the glasses appear to be opaque. The question moved then on to theft and what could be done to prevent Face ID to kick in if someone was trying to steal the iPhone X. Federighi explained that there are two things that can be done: first, avoid looking at the phone so it won’t unlock or press the buttons on either side to temporarily disable Face ID. Federighi was clearly on the roll so he also offered an explanation about the on stage demo fail which apparently happened because someone else picked up the phone before him temporarily disabling Face ID.

Via MacRumors

  • There has been talked about how much easier for authorities or a mugger it will be to force you to look at the iPhone X to unlock it. The reality is, however, that this is no different from forcing someone to put their finger onto Touch ID. The ability to temporarily disable Face ID is certainly a good step.
  • TechCrunch also said that at launch iPhone X will only support one face. While this seems obvious, I am sure others like me have their partner or kid finger registered on their device. For those users the only option now is to use the pin code to unlock.
  • Apple took a risk by taking Touch ID away as users were very happy with the experience and, like always, when you change something that it is not broken you need to make sure what you are replacing it with works perfectly. While some have suggested that giving options to users would be best I doubt that this is financially sustainable in the long run. I would expect Samsung to move away from finger print sensors once they add a depth sensing camera to the front of their devices especially given that adding it to the back of the device has not lent itself to the easiest of experiences.

Google hit by Class Action-lawsuit for compensating Women less than Men

Earlier in the day when the Lyft investment leaked, The Guardian reported that a class action lawsuit was filed on Thursday on behalf of all the women working at Google in California over the past four years. The complaint provided an account of gender discrimination and pay gap. The complaint comes from three plaintiffs provided the account of their own experience when it came to both pay and career opportunity.

Via The Guardian

  • This is not the first time that Google is accused of having a “pay gap.” Back in April the US Department of Labor accused Google of “extreme” pay discrimination and asked to be granted access to salary records. This complaint might provide valuable information to escalate that original lawsuit.
  • The complaint also follows an article from the New York Times that shared data obtained from an internal document showing that women on average were paid less than men in the same job levels. At the time, Google responded by saying that the data did not take into account the different technical expertise of the employees.
  • This also comes at the worst time considering all the publicity caused by the famous “Google memo” that ended in the firing of the engineer who penned it.
  • Of course the pay gap is not limited to Silicon Valley alone but at a time where tech giants are going out of their way to support STEM and women in tech the hypocrisy of it all is not lost on me.
  • I wrote before about women in business  and mine is one of the many female voices. While the fear of repercussions for speaking up against your employer remains high, there seems to be a newly found strength thanks to the women that have come forward.
  • I am sure many men and some women think we have come a long way and that looking at salaries in a fair way is difficult. To those I say two things: first, if we put as much effort in trying to look into the issue as we do trying to explain why things are the way they are, we would not have a problem. Second, have we really come a long way when I walk into Moscone Center for Mobile World Congress and the first thing I see is a group of “booth babes” dressed as if they were part of an escort service?

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Carolina Milanesi

Carolina is a Principal Analyst at Creative Strategies, Inc, a market intelligence and strategy consulting firm based in Silicon Valley and recognized as one of the premier sources of quantitative and qualitative research and insights in tech. At Creative Strategies, Carolina focuses on consumer tech across the board. From hardware to services, she analyzes today to help predict and shape tomorrow. In her prior role as Chief of Research at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, she drove thought leadership research by marrying her deep understanding of global market dynamics with the wealth of data coming from ComTech’s longitudinal studies on smartphones and tablets. Prior to her ComTech role, Carolina spent 14 years at Gartner, most recently as their Consumer Devices Research VP and Agenda Manager. In this role, she led the forecast and market share teams on smartphones, tablets, and PCs. She spent most of her time advising clients from VC firms, to technology providers, to traditional enterprise clients. Carolina is often quoted as an industry expert and commentator in publications such as The Financial Times, Bloomberg, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. She regularly appears on BBC, Bloomberg TV, Fox, NBC News and other networks. Her Twitter account was recently listed in the “101 accounts to follow to make Twitter more interesting” by Wired Italy.

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