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Google makes moving data to its cloud easier

Google Cloud today announced Transfer Service, a new service for enterprises that want to move their data from on-premise systems to the count. This new managed service is meant for large-scale transfers on the scale of billions of files and petabytes of data. It complements similar services from Google that allow you to ship data to its data centers via a hardware appliance and FedEx or to automate data transfers from SaaS applications to Google's BigQuery service.

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  Investors are making one big mistake while watching the Trump trade war

  Yahoo Finance
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  Target CEO: We are taking 'enormous' market share in cosmetics

  Yahoo Finance

Klarna CEO says 'maybe' of taking public Europe's most valuable fintech next year (but he's not ruling out another round, either)

Yesterday at TechCrunch Berlin, we sat down with Sebastian Siemiatkowski, the co-founder and CEO of Klarna, a 15-year-old company that's currently the most highly valued privately held fintech in Europe, following a $460 million investment that pegged the company's worth at $5.5 billion back in August. Klarna has also begun competing more aggressively in the U.S. -- as well as fending off a growing spate of competitors, from publicly traded AfterPay to Max Levchin's Affirm to Sezzle, a company in Minneapolis that seemingly appeared from out of the blue a few years ago. Of course, the toughest competition of all may come from Amazon and Google, which are increasingly embedding their payment systems -- Amazon Pay and and Google Pay -- into their own massive platforms.

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  IHOP's latest plan to win the breakfast war

  Yahoo Finance
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  Fed 'prepared to adjust' balance sheet to prevent repo market flare-up

  Yahoo Finance

Uber Freight to investors: 'There's a very clear path to profitability'

Uber Freight has succeeded in modernizing trucking, but traditional companies are quickly adjusting to the competition.

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  Apple’s maxed-out Mac Pro costs $50,000, we came up with better ways to spend that money

  Engadget
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  Stock Market Live Updates: Stocks closer higher after Fed leaves rates unchanged

  Yahoo Finance

'Disney Plus’ was Google’s top US trending search term in 2019

Google today released its annual "Year in Search" data that takes a look back at some of the most notable searches of 2019. Specifically, Google looked at the biggest trends -- meaning, search terms that saw the largest spikes in traffic over a sustained period in 2019 compared to 2018. In the U.S., Disney's new streaming service "Disney Plus" was the biggest search trend of 2019, followed by Cameron Boyce, Nipsey Hussle, Hurricane Dorian, Antonio Brown, Luke Perry, Avengers: Endgame, Game of Thrones, iPhone 11 and Jussie Smollet.

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  Baby Yoda might have 'briefly' been a contender for Time's 'Person of the Year': Editor

  Yahoo Finance
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  Why this Berkshire Hathaway shareholder isn't frustrated Warren Buffett won't spend nearly $130 billion in cash

  Yahoo Finance

Why this Berkshire Hathaway shareholder isn't frustrated Warren Buffett won't spend nearly $130 billion in cash

Long-time Berkshire Hathaway shareholder Bill Smead is just fine with Warren Buffett sitting on billions in cash. Here's why.

WeWork Sells Conductor Unit Back to the Founder

(Bloomberg) -- The embattled co-working company WeWork completed the first of what it hopes will be a series of asset sales by finding a buyer for Conductor, a unit that makes marketing software used by Visa Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.Seth Besmertnik, who co-founded Conductor before selling it to his college classmate Adam Neumann, will stay on as chief executive officer of the newly independent entity, the companies plan to announce Thursday. Besmertnik and other investors will contribute $15 million to fund operations and grant Conductor’s 250 or so employees majority ownership of the business through founder-class stock. Conductor and WeWork declined to disclose terms of the sale.For WeWork, selling off side businesses and turning attention back to co-working is a primary element of the turnaround plan set by the company’s new management. In October, SoftBank Group Corp. agreed to take a majority stake in WeWork, after a failed initial public offering put the company in danger of running out of money and cost Neumann the CEO job. SoftBank helped bring in new leaders, who are eliminating 2,400 jobs. WeWork is in talks to sell another business, Managed by Q, to a group of investors that includes the co-founder of that startup. And WeWork said Thursday that it’s shuttering a unit called Spacious that it acquired less than four months ago.Recent events have weighed heavily on morale inside WeWork. Conductor executives hope the new employee stock plan will raise spirits. In addition to holding a majority of stockholder votes, staff will be asked to elect a representative to the board. “This will ensure, in the long term, the company is always acting in the best interest of all the shareholders and that the employees have access to information about how we’re running the company,” Besmertnik said.Besmertnik helped start Conductor in 2010, eventually amassing more than 400 customers using its software to design marketing campaigns and optimize websites for search engines. Conductor had raised more than $60 million in venture funding, a laudable figure for a corporate software company but far from the more than $12 billion Neumann took in for WeWork.Investors had entrusted Neumann to build a global empire of office space for rent. WeWork’s valuation kept climbing, and Neumann seemed to be unstoppable. WeWork paid $126 million, not including performance bonuses, for Conductor last year. The deal would give Conductor cash to invest in research and development and double the size of that team. In return, Neumann gained a new channel of communication with Citigroup Inc., Salesforce.com Inc. and other Conductor customers right as WeWork was trying to recruit larger companies, which made up 25% of its membership at the time.The deal also reunited Besmertnik with Neumann, nearly two decades after they met as students at Baruch College in New York City. Both men dropped out to pursue business careers before returning later to earn degrees. Onstage at an industry conference a month after the acquisition, Besmertnik embraced Neumann, who greeted Conductor employees as family. “Welcome home,” Neumann said.Besmertnik said that while WeWork’s meltdown has been hard on the Conductor team, he’s grateful to have been a part of the company. Artie Minson, one of two men who replaced Neumann as CEO, praised Besmertnik in an emailed statement and said the divestiture is “a positive step forward for both WeWork and Conductor.” The buyout was partly financed by Besmertnik, along with Selina Eizik, the chief operating officer at Conductor, and Jason Finger, a founder of the Grubhub Inc.-owned food delivery app Seamless.Speaking from his New York office, which is lined with action figures and features a whiteboard covered in inspirational quotes (“The world is a reflection of you.”), Besmertnik said he’s focused on enforcing a strong company culture and a “people-first approach.” He hopes the new stock ownership program for employees sets an example for other businesses to follow, he said: “I’ve always felt the system wasn’t fair. If there happens to be a new CEO or a new board that doesn’t have the same willingness to fight for the people, employees stand to get the short end of the stick.”(Updates with Spacious closure in the third paragraph.)To contact the author of this story: Candy Cheng in San Francisco at ccheng86@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Milian at mmilian@bloomberg.net, Anne VanderMeyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

Garmin, Movado and Tesla highlighted as Zacks Bull and Bear of the Day

Garmin, Movado and Tesla highlighted as Zacks Bull and Bear of the Day

ETFs to Make the Most of Disney+ Growth Story

Given the huge success of Disney's streaming service, investors could tap the opportune moment with consumer ETFs having the largest exposure to this global media and entertainment company.

Facebook to Set Aside $130 Million for Content Oversight Board

(Bloomberg) -- Facebook Inc. has pledged $130 million over six years to pay for its proposed content oversight board, a Supreme Court-like group of outsiders that will help make some decisions about whether posts violate the company’s policies.Facebook first announced plans to create the board in November 2018, and some details about its structure and implementation have been released over the past year. The oversight board has been presented as a solution to complaints that Facebook is too powerful, and has too much control over what users can and cannot post. While the new board won’t write content policies for the company, it will be asked to interpret them and review instances when those decisions by Facebook’s content moderators are questioned.The money will be placed in a trust and used to fund the board’s operations and independent staff for the next six years, according to a Facebook blog post. The trust was created as a buffer between the oversight board and the company in an effort to uphold the independence of the members.It’s still unclear when this content oversight board will be fully functional. Facebook originally set a goal to pick the group’s 40 members by the end of the year, but now says that won’t happen until 2020.“We’ve decided to take additional time to consider the many candidates who continue to be put forward,” Facebook wrote in the post. Facebook also has not published any bylaws for the board, which will outline how the group operates. It’s expected that members won’t be required to work full time, although they will be paid.It’s unclear if the board will be up and running in time for the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Facebook has been heavily scrutinized ahead of the election given its role in propagating Russian disinformation four years ago. The company is already dealing with content issues for this election cycle, specifically a policy that it won’t fact-check posts from politicians, including ads. The policy has drawn ire from Democratic presidential candidates who are worried it will lead to the spread of fake news.To contact the reporter on this story: Kurt Wagner in San Francisco at kwagner71@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Andrew Pollack, Anne VanderMeyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

Stock Market News for Dec 12, 2019

Benchmarks ended a two-day losing streak on Wednesday after the Federal Reserve announced plans to hold interest rates steady.

Can Starbucks (SBUX) Replicate '19 Performance in 2020?

Starbucks (SBUX) continues to benefit from robust performance by the Americas and China-Asia-Pacific segments, store openings, enhanced customer experience and, digitalization.

Will Express Unit Weakness Mar FedEx's (FDX) Earnings in Q2?

Factors like the ongoing trade uncertainty and sluggish industrial production are likely to have hampered FedEx (FDX) Express performance in second-quarter fiscal 2020.