AMZN - Amazon.com, Inc.

Google-Ascension deal 'not a great reason' to reveal patient names: Expert

A deal between Google and one of the U.S.’s largest hospital networks is stoking privacy concerns.

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Netflix co-founder on why Disney+, others are ‘all in’ on streaming

Netflix's co-founder and first CEO explains why media companies have no choice but to go "all in" on the streaming wars as Disney+ officially launches.

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Trump Trade, Walmart & Nvidia Previews & Buy CASY Stock - Free Lunch

All eyes will be on President Trump Tuesday for U.S.-China trade war updates. Walmart, Nvidia, and others are set to report their quarterly earnings. And why Casey's General Stores (CASY) is a Zacks Rank 1 (Strong Buy) right now...

Disney Streaming Outages Mar Its First Day as Netflix Rival

(Bloomberg) -- Walt Disney Co.’s much-anticipated debut of its new streaming video service was marred by early technical glitches and crashes for some users, though it was still stirring excitement and buzz on social media and worked successfully for many subscribers.New “Star Wars” series “The Mandalorian” was trending on social media, and Twitter users were proclaiming their excitement at finally being able to sign up and watch Disney+ after months of well-orchestrated anticipation from the Disney marketing machine.But some users reported trouble getting the app to work as soon as they tried to log on in the early hours of Tuesday morning, when the East Coast of the U.S. and Canada was waking up. Problems reported on the @DisneyPlusHelp Twitter handle ranged from “service not available” to specific issues such as “The early seasons of The Simpsons are in the wrong aspect ratio.”Disney said consumer demand for the service had exceeded its highest expectations. “While we are pleased by this incredible response, we are aware of the current user issues and are working to swiftly resolve them,” a spokeswoman said in a statement, mirroring a tweet on the help-line account.The glitches ramped up from about a hundred reported outages to more than 7,000 within the span of an hour on DownDetector.com. They had dipped to about 3,750 as of 10:20 a.m. New York time.Disney is hardly the first media company to struggle with the technical side of streaming. In 2014, HBO’s streaming service crashed during the season premiere of “Game of Thrones.” Even technology giants like Amazon and YouTube have had problems, though their glitches happened while broadcasting live sports online, which is seen as more difficult than streaming on-demand TV shows and movies. Disney bought a controlling stake in BAMTech, a leader in streaming technology, to run the back end of its online services like Disney+.Streaming services often struggle when many people try to watch at the same time, said Dan Rayburn, the principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan, who writes for the website Streamingmediablog.com. “It’s hard because of the complexity of the workflow and doing it at scale,” Rayburn said.It’s not just streaming shows smoothly, he added, but also managing the back-end database, like whether a user had paid and setting up a profile.“If in the next two or three hours everything is cleared up, it’s not that big of a deal,” he said. “If this continues throughout the day, this is a real problem.”Crowded MarketIn its quest to turn a nearly century-old entertainment giant into a streaming leader, Disney is entering a market already crowded with heavy hitters, including Netflix Inc., Amazon.com and Apple Inc. And more rivals are diving in soon, such as AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. next year. The world’s largest entertainment company thinks it can seize the day with a product packed with the company’s best movies and TV shows, including “Star Wars,” Marvel and Pixar films, as well as its library of some 400 children’s movies.“I feel great about what we’ve done,” Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger told a roomful of reporters last week. “I love the app. It’s rich in content. It’s rich in brands. It’s rich in library.”Priced at $7 a month, Disney+ is a bet that the company can attract as many as 90 million subscribers worldwide in five years.It already has some key allies. Some 19 million Verizon Communications Inc. customers will be able to get the service free for the first year, thanks to a deal Disney cut with the carrier. Disney fan club members, meanwhile, got to prepay for a three-year subscription for less than $4 a month.“These are deals you just can’t beat,” said Kevin Mayer, who heads Disney’s direct-to-consumer division and has helped craft the streaming strategy.The company’s shares were up as much as 1.8% to $139.25 in New York trading Tuesday.Disney is looking to make the product accessible to as many people as possible. Customers will get to store their password in as many as 10 devices per family and watch four concurrent streams of movies or shows.The site is designed around five main “tiles,” named after the company’s key brands, including Marvel and the recently acquired National Geographic channel. Disney is spending $1 billion on new programming -- such as “The Mandalorian,” the first live-action “Star Wars” series -- in the first year alone. Disney+ also will offer the “Star Wars” movies in 4K-definition video for the first time.Unlike Netflix, which releases new seasons of programs all at once. Disney+ will put out one episode per week for its original shows. The programs will come out at midnight Pacific time on Fridays -- timing geared toward attracting a global audience, according to Ricky Strauss, Disney’s head of content and marketing for the product.A key part of Disney’s streaming strategy is bundling its services together. For $12.99, subscribers can get a package that includes Disney+, ESPN+ and the ad-supported version of Hulu. Those three services would cost about $18 a month if purchased individually.It’s all coming at great cost to the company. Mayer’s direct-to-consumer division saw its losses more than double to $740 million in the quarter that ended in September. The company doesn’t expect to make a profit on Disney+ for at least five years.But the marketing blitz for the new service seems to have paid off. UBS Group AG analyst John Hodulik surveyed more than 1,000 consumers in October and found some 86% had heard of Disney+. Nearly half were likely to subscribe.The company created its largest cross-promotional push ever, putting solicitations for the new service in Disney-owned hotels and its radio network. Disney also promoted the new service on ESPN’s “Monday Night Football.” Fans watched a preview of Disney+’s new “High School Musical” spinoff on ABC on Friday.“If you haven’t heard about Disney+ by Tuesday,” Strauss said last week. “I promise you will.”Among the new originals on the show is a live-action version of “Lady and the Tramp.” Normally a remake of a classic like that would get a big premiere, a theatrical run and advertising everywhere.In the streaming era, it gets dropped on a Tuesday morning. The question now is whether the Disney magic still comes through without the Hollywood glamour.Either way, Disney doesn’t have much of a choice, said David Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School.“Netflix has changed the nature of the game,” Yoffie said. “If they didn’t participate, they would be left behind.”\--With assistance from Brandon Kochkodin.To contact the reporters on this story: Christopher Palmeri in Los Angeles at cpalmeri1@bloomberg.net;Scott Moritz in New York at smoritz6@bloomberg.net;Gerry Smith in New York at gsmith233@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Nick Turner at nturner7@bloomberg.net, John J. Edwards IIIFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

Will E-Commerce Sales Drive Walmart's (WMT) Q3 Earnings?

Walmart's (WMT) e-commerce sales are likely to have grown in the third quarter of fiscal 2020. Online grocery has been a major driver.

TikTok Revamps Lobbying as Washington Targets Chinese Ownership

(Bloomberg) -- TikTok, the popular music-video app, is building up its fledgling lobbying operations to counter stepped-up pressure in Washington over its Chinese ownership and wage an escalating battle with Facebook Inc. for viewers.The company, which registered its first lobbyist in June, is seeking to add a U.S. policy chief, plans to further expand its internal policy staff and is reshuffling outside lobbyists, according to people familiar with its plans.The policy chief position is a new one and will help shape the company’s advocacy priorities and oversee its growing lobbying operations, said two people familiar with the moves.TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance Inc., also has hired Monument Advocacy, a public affairs and lobbying firm known for its expertise in technology policy, according to another person familiar with the matter. The person said TikTok is winding down its relationship with lobbyists at the law firm Covington & Burling LLP, which has close ties to Facebook.The relationship between Covington and Facebook was one reason for TikTok’s decision to break with the firm, the person said. Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan formerly co-chaired Covington’s data privacy and security practice. Facebook also hired Covington to help work on its anti-conservative bias report released in August. Covington’s Jon Kyl, a former Republican senator from Arizona, headed up that review.The lobbying push is part of TikTok’s effort to calm U.S. regulators and policy makers and try to persuade them that it’s really a U.S. company, said one of the people. Concerns are growing that TikTok could pose a national security threat because of its Chinese ownership and the risk that the government in Beijing could get access to the app’s growing troves of user data.Facebook has underscored Washington’s concerns about TikTok as it combats its own scrutiny from lawmakers and antitrust enforcers.Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg insinuated during an October speech at Georgetown University that protesters in Hong Kong use Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging platform “due to strong encryption and privacy protections,” whereas “mentions of these protests are censored, even in the U.S.” on TikTok.Monument Advocacy counts Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. as clients, but doesn’t work directly with Facebook, unlike other firms TikTok spoke with, the person said. Monument does represent an industry coalition on government surveillance that includes Facebook.TikTok, Monument and Facebook declined to comment. Covington didn’t respond to requests for comment. The lobbying changes haven’t yet been disclosed in public filings.ByteDance is expanding its operations aggressively across the U.S., hiring staff in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York. The app has logged more than 564 million installations this year and has been downloaded 1.45 billion times since launching, according to data from Sensor Tower, a San Francisco-based market intelligence firm that tracks the global app market.U.S. officials are reviewing whether ByteDance’s $1 billion purchase of social media startup Musical.ly two years ago to merge it with TikTok poses a national security risk, Bloomberg News has reported. That panel, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or Cfius, has toughened scrutiny of acquisitions of American companies under President Donald Trump and is paying closer attention to how deals can give foreign buyers access to data about U.S. citizens.“We have no higher priority than earning the trust of users and regulators in the U.S.,” a TikTok representative said in a statement earlier this month.Lawmakers had pushed for a review, saying that TikTok poses a potential counterintelligence threat. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York wrote a letter with Republican Tom Cotton of Arkansas to U.S. Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire. They expressed concerns about foreign interference in American elections and the security of user data on the app, in addition to national security fears.The company was also the focus of a hearing earlier this month during which one Republican senator blasted it as a threat to global data security.“All it takes is one knock on the door of their parent company, based in China, from a Communist Party official, for that data to be transferred to the Chinese government’s hands whenever they need it,” said Josh Hawley of Missouri, a frequent tech critic.TikTok has rejects the notion it’s controlled by the Chinese government or that U.S. user data is at risk.“We are not influenced by any foreign government, including the Chinese government,” the company wrote in a blog post last month. “TikTok does not operate in China, nor do we have any intention of doing so in the future.”ByteDance, which began lobbying this summer, registered its in-house lobbyist Eric Ebenstein in June and brought on Covington in July, paying it $110,000 during the third quarter, according to federal disclosures. The company spent a total of $120,000 on lobbying from July through September.TikTok also announced last month that it had tapped another top legal and lobbying firm -- K&L Gates LLP -- to advise it on policies around transparency and content moderation, though the firm won’t be lobbying.Former Representative Bart Gordon, a Tennessee Democrat who led the House Science and Technology Committee, is on the account, as is former Republican Representative Jeff Denham, who represented a district in California.\--With assistance from Kurt Wagner and Sarah Frier.To contact the reporters on this story: Ben Brody in Washington, D.C. at btenerellabr@bloomberg.net;Megan Wilson in Arlington at mwilson297@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net, Jillian Ward, John HarneyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

Buy Walmart Stock Ahead of Q3 Earnings with WMT Near New Highs?

Walmart stock is up over 13% in the last three months. Now, with the firm set to report its Q3 financial results before the opening bell Thursday, let's break down Walmart to see if investors should consider buying WMT shares...

Streaming Wars Commence as Disney+ Nears Debut

Disney (DIS) is set to debut its Disney+ streaming service on Tuesday, which will intensify the competition between streaming services.

Disney+, Netflix, Apple, HBO, & More: Who Will Win the Streaming TV War?

Associate Stock Strategist Ben Rains dives into some of Disney's recent quarterly results, before we look at Disney+ and discuss which company, from Netflix to Amazon might win the streaming TV war...

The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Roku, Netflix, Amazon, Disney and Apple

The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Roku, Netflix, Amazon, Disney and Apple

Bull of the Day: Chegg, Inc. (CHGG)

Bull of the Day: Chegg, Inc. (CHGG)

Amazon's $1.5 million political gambit backfires in Seattle City Council election

Seattle voters, in a rebuke to heavy corporate campaign spending by Amazon.com, have kept progressives firmly in control of their city council, reviving chances for a tax on big businesses that the tech giant helped fend off last year. Amazon poured a record $1.5 million (£1.17 million) into a Super PAC run by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce to back a slate of candidates in the Nov. 5 council elections viewed as pro-business, or at least more corporate friendly than the incumbent council majority. Amazon, the world's leading online retailer whose chief executive is billionaire entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, accounted for more than half of nearly $2.7 million raised by the Super PAC, a group allowed to accept unlimited sums from wealthy donors in support of their favourite candidates.

Apple Co-Founder Says Goldman’s Apple Card Algorithm Discriminates

(Bloomberg) -- Apple Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., two of the most recognizable companies in tech and finance, are caught up in a growing debate over whether lenders unintentionally discriminate when they use complex models to determine how Americans borrow money.On Saturday, Bloomberg reported that a Wall Street regulator had opened a probe into Goldman’s credit card practices after a viral tweet from a tech entrepreneur alleged that the Apple Card’s algorithms discriminated against his wife.Now another high-profile user of the Apple Card -- Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak -- is calling for the government to get involved, citing excessive corporate reliance on mysterious technology.“These sorts of unfairnesses bother me and go against the principle of truth. We don’t have transparency on how these companies set these things up and operate,” Wozniak said in an interview on Sunday. “Our government isn’t strong enough on the issues of regulation. Consumers can only be represented by the government because the big corporations only represent themselves.”Wozniak said he can borrow 10 times as much as his wife on their Apple Cards even though they share bank and other credit card accounts, and that other lenders treat them equally.“Algos obviously have flaws,” Wozniak said. “A huge number of people would say, ‘We love our technology but we are no longer in control.’ I think that’s the case.”Lenders have promoted the models because they’re supposed to level the playing field among different borrowers by removing human error and focusing only on data.Apple Card only offers individual accounts and it is possible for two family members to receive significantly different credit decisions, a Goldman spokesman said. “In all cases, we have not and will not make decisions based on factors like gender,” he said.The investigation was launched in response to a series of Twitter posts from David Heinemeier Hansson that railed against the Apple Card for giving him 20 times the credit limit that his wife got. The tweets, many of which contain profanity, immediately gained traction online -- and a response on Twitter from Wozniak.Hansson didn’t disclose any specific income-related information for the couple but said they filed joint tax returns and that his wife has a better credit score than he does. Wozniak said he and his wife also file joint returns and share credit card and bank accounts.“The department will be conducting an investigation to determine whether New York law was violated and ensure all consumers are treated equally regardless of sex,” said a spokesman for Linda Lacewell, the superintendent of the NY DFS. “Any algorithm that intentionally or not results in discriminatory treatment of women or any other protected class of people violates New York law.”It’s the second such action in recent weeks from the regulator, which opened a probe against health-care giant UnitedHealth Group Inc. after a study found an algorithm favored white patients over black patients.“New technologies cannot leave certain consumers behind or entrench discrimination,” Lacewell said in a statement on Sunday. She also solicited complaints from aggrieved consumers on Twitter.Traditional lenders are increasing their use of machines to decide who gets how much credit as part of a strategy to reduce costs and boost loan applications. Meanwhile, technology companies are moving in on the financial services industry’s turf, with businesses such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google threatening banks’ lucrative business lines by offering loans and payment options.Congressional ScrutinyThe algorithms have drawn scrutiny in Congress. In June, the House Financial Services Committee heard about examples of algorithmic decision-making where researchers have found instances of bias targeting specific groups even when there was no intent to discriminate.Some lawmakers already are demanding a federal response. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat and contender to challenge President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, told federal regulators in June that the government “will have to take action to ensure that anti-discrimination laws keep up with innovation.”For Goldman, its growing ambitions for Main Street are bringing increased scrutiny and a new set of challenges it hasn’t faced previously. The Apple Card is a joint venture between Apple and the New York-based bank, which is responsible for all the credit decisions on the card. It was rolled out earlier this year -- the tech giant markets it as “created by Apple, not a bank” -- and executives at both firms hailed it as the most successful launch ever.Hansson said Goldman isn’t treating inadvertent bias seriously.“As soon as this became a PR issue, they immediately bumped up her credit limit without asking for any additional documentation,” he said of his wife in an interview Saturday. “My belief isn’t there was some nefarious person wanting to discriminate. But that doesn’t matter. How do you know there isn’t an issue with the machine-learning algo when no one can explain how this decision was made?”To contact the reporters on this story: Shahien Nasiripour in New York at snasiripour1@bloomberg.net;Sridhar Natarajan in New York at snatarajan15@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael J. Moore at mmoore55@bloomberg.net, Josh Friedman, Matthew G. MillerFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

Fashion entrepreneur Rachel Zoe: This is the hardest time in fashion I’ve ever seen

While Rachel Zoe has been able to successfully leverage her name into a handful of businesses, she isn’t so optimistic about the fashion industry at large.