Business, Spoken

On October 27, 2012, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote an email to his then-director of product development. For years, Facebook had allowed third-party apps to access data on their users’ unwitting friends, and Zuckerberg was considering whether giving away all that information was risky. In his email, he suggested it was not: “I’m generally skeptical that there is as much data leak strategic risk as you think,” he wrote at the time.

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The first five days or so of SXSW in Austin are always dedicated to the “interactive” portion of the festival. The city’s downtown streets swell with lanyard-laden “entrepreneurs” and “founders” wearing that familiar uniform of T-shirts screen-printed with their company’s clever logo, an outfit made professional by throwing a blazer over the ensemble.

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Last spring, Chris Cox, the chief product officer of Facebook, was promoted to also oversee Whatsapp, Messenger, and Instagram. It seemed, at the time, almost like succession planning. If Mark Zuckerberg were to ever leave the company, Cox, his longtime confidante, and a representative of the engineering and product side, would be set up to run it. But today Cox has announced that, after 13 years at the company, he’s leaving.

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5G is coming, and with it a massive boost in bandwidth that will feed artificial intelligence applications, enable the long fabled Internet of Things, and deliver more streaming video. Lots of streaming video. But all that extra bandwidth won't be much use if the average consumer can't afford a 5G connection, or if those connections are hobbled by restrictive bandwidth caps.

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A wave of antitrust interest is washing over Europe and much of the United States, and Spotify is riding its crest. The Swedish audio-streaming giant lodged a complaint against Apple with the European Commission on Wednesday, accusing the company of abusing its position as owner of the App Store to stifle competition.

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So, it finally happened. A leading American politician has said aloud what many have whispering: it’s time to break up Big Tech. Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren just fired the opening salvo and called for the federal government to take action: “Today’s big tech companies have too much power— too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy.

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The Bay Area is famed for nurturing speculative investments like flying cars, floating cities, and the notion that a ride hailing service can turn a profit. A new utopian investment opportunity arrived Monday: Shovel dollars into a San Francisco artificial intelligence lab cofounded by Elon Musk and you’ll receive a share of the profits when (or if) it figures out how to create machines smarter than humans.

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As soon as you visit a modern website, it starts feeding you reasons to leave. First by begging you to download its app from the app store, then with a dialog box urging you to sign up for a newsletter. Next will come a request to send you alerts, followed by either an onslaught of ads or a plea to turn your ad blocker off.

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Last week, presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) announced an ambitious plan to break up big tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon and block them from selling their own products on their platforms. Warren called out Facebook's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp and Google's acquisition of online advertising giant DoubleClick as examples of the deals she'd like to see reversed.

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It’s Thursday afternoon, and I’m on the eighth floor of a nondescript building in the Flatiron District, sitting across from Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley. He pulls out his phone to show me an unreleased, nameless game that he and his skunkworks-style team Foursquare Labs have been working on. Think “Candyland,” but instead of fantasy locations like Lollipop Woods, the game’s virtual board includes place categories associated with New York City neighborhoods.

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