Palantir Technologies: Maybe Stealth Is Better for Specialized Services Companies?
August 24, 2020
I, like many other Palantir watchers, read “Leaked S-1 Screenshots Show Palantir Losing $579M in 2019.” My hunch is that this going public thing is not going to be the cake walk some envision. Palantir Technologies is a specialized services company. In my lingo, that means the firm’s principal technology was developed for and influenced directly by the needs of intelligence, law enforcement, and similar enforcement agencies. I am not going to dwell on some facts which informed Palantir observers should know; for example:
- The company was founded in 2003. That is just about 17 years ago. In that time, the technology for intel and LE professionals has advanced. Anyone who has been in the “enterprise software game” knows one thing: Keeping the 2003 Buick running is not getting easier, nor is it getting cheaper to keep that four-door sedan humming. What’s this mean? First, the built in costs for a 17 year old engineering structure are not likely to decrease. Second, massive investment is needed to keep pace with upstarts like Datawalk. Third, some of the new specialized services solutions are quite easy to use and very, very slick.
- Palantir has ingested about $2.6 billion from about three dozen, Type A, usually impatient, and generally attitude choked, entitled people. That’s a big price tag on a company losing about $600 million per year. Real estate should be less expensive in Denver, but the traffic? Yeah, about the same as Sillycon Valley.
- The number of customers for high end specialized software is small compared to the number of people who happily consume TikTok videos. That’s a big, big problem. The number of vendors selling more modern systems outnumbers the number of intel and LE entities able to purchase, training professionals, babysit, and then — in a crisis situation — actually use the Fancy Dan software.
But these are facts which I have written and lectured about, and I have not done much with Palantir’s approach to sales, its exciting interactions related to the i2 Analyst’s Notebook AND file format, and the changing economics for LE and intel agencies. Let me just say that this “downsizing” movement is not new and it is not going to make selling big ticket software easier. One former Swedish intel professional asked me for a recommendation for investigative software or what I call intelware. I told him, but the fellow said, “Nope, we’re going with a low cost Israeli solution. It’s good enough.” That’s a potential problem for specialized services firm with gigantic cash burning systems. Better is not going to be “good enough” to make the sale.
Let me hit my main point: Stealth. I have long been an advocate that specialized software companies avoid the public spotlight. There are many reasons. Going public is a very public action, and it exposes the financial weaknesses in a way which is ultimately either a home run or a strike out.
Consider Voyager Labs. What is this company? What does it do? Getting info is difficult. The firm is a vendor of specialized software, but it keeps a low profile or distracts with some wacky marketing play for (heaven forbid!) advertising companies. What about Nice? What’s it do? Customer experience. Yeah, CX. And there are hundreds of other companies in the specialized services business. Only a few have gone public, and these outfits are very skilled at making sure their businesses are positioned in a way that seems logical to those unfamiliar with some of the more interesting facets of their business. One example is Verint. Another is BAE Systems. Will Palantir emerge as a BAE Systems-type outfit with shares chugging along in a range that does not excite Robinhood investors? With the losses reported from a somewhat mysterious source, it’s hard to say. But on the surface, assuming the “leaked” financial data are accurate, it seem like a long shot.
The IPO, the investors and stakeholders hope, will get them some cash. Will the payoff be one of those pre-Rona 17X jobs? You will have to noodle that question as you ponder 17 years and losing half a billion a year. Just getting one’s money back might be a realistic scenario to ponder. On the other hand, there is the possibility of losing money. Not a happy thought. Stealth may be a better option for some specialized services firms.
Stephen E Arnold, August 24, 2020
Apple Learns: There Can Be Knock Ons from Zoomified Congressional Hearings
August 21, 2020
What happens when high school science club “on the fly”, “we can do what we want” decision making is revealed in Zoomified Congressional hearings? “News Publishers Join Epic Games in Asking Apple for Lower App Store Fees” is an example of the strong reaction to special deals. Now Apple’s partners want the same “deal” extended to the Bezos bulldozer. Here’s the key statement from an online news service:
publishers including the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNET parent company ViacomCBS, want that 30% fee dropped to 15%.
Thus, it seems Apple and Amazon worked out a deal different from the one imposed on lesser Apple partners.
Digital Content Next offers this observation in a letter to Apple’s management:
Sometime in 2017, Apple and Amazon, two giant platform companies, struck a deal where Amazon Prime Video would be available on Apple TV and Apple products would be available on Amazon. As part of the terms of that deal, Apple would reduce its fee for consumers who subscribed to Prime Video from 30% to 15%. For existing Prime Video subscribers, Apple agreed to completely waive its normal 15% fee. The cherry on top for Amazon was that they could use other payment systems outside of Apple.
Apple now has to fancy dance its way around what looks like a problem.
Apple wants to do what it wants. Don’t like the changes in our operating systems? Well, that’s Apple doing its thing. Don’t like the fees? Well, that’s the way we operate. Take it or leave it. Don’t like the deal we worked out with Amazon? Well, too bad.
Despite the love many have for the Apple ecosystem, the time has arrived for those with different views to grouse out loud.
So what? This looks like another example of situational decision making. A deal with the Bezos bulldozer may grind slowly around and start rolling back to the digital orchard.
To sum up: High school science club are now playing Fortnite in real life or IRL. Battle royale? Yep. Those Zoomified hearings make it clear that the democratic processes generate useful information and cause an action-reaction demonstration. The game, however, is not a digital fantasy.
Stephen E Arnold, August 21, 2020
Alphabet Spells Out Actions for YouTubers to Take
August 20, 2020
Coercion is interesting because it can take many forms. An online publication called Digital Journal published “Google Rallies YouTubers Against Australian News Payment Plan.” Let’s assume the information in the write up is accurate. The pivot point for the article is:
Google has urged YouTubers around the world to complain to Australian authorities as it ratchets up its campaign against a plan to force digital giants to pay for news content. Alongside pop-ups warning “the way Aussies use Google is at risk”, which began appearing for Australian Google users on Monday, the tech titan also urged YouTube creators worldwide to complain to the nation’s consumer watchdog.
The idea, viewed from a company’s point of view, seems to be that users can voice their concern about an Australian government decision. The company believes that email grousing will alter a government decision. The assumption is that protest equals an increased likelihood of change. Is this coercion? Let’s assume that encouraging consumer push back against a government is.
The action, viewed from a government’s point of view, may be that email supporting a US company’s desire to index content and provide it to whomever, is harming the information sector in a country.
The point of friction is that Alphabet Google is a company which operates as if it were a country. The only major difference is that Alphabet Google does not have its own military force, and it operates in a fascinating dimension in which its actions are important, maybe vital, to some government agencies and, therefore, its corporate actions are endorsed or somehow made more important in other spheres of activity.
DarkCyber is interested in monitoring these issues:
- How will YouTube data consumers and enablers of Google ad revenue react to their corporate-directed coercive role?
- How will the Australian government react to and then accommodate such coercion if it becomes significant?
- How will other countries — for example, France, Germany, and the UK — learn from the YouTube coercion initiative?
- How will Alphabet Google mutate its coercive tactics to make them more effective?
Of course, the Google letter referenced in the Digital Journal may be a hoax or a bit of adolescent humor. Who pays attention to a super bright person’s high school antics? These can be explained away or deflected with “Gee, I am sorry.”
The real issue is a collision of corporatism and government. The coercion angle, if the write up is accurate, draws attention to a gap between what’s good for the company and what’s good for a country.
The issue may be the responsibility of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, but the implications reach to other Australian government entities and to other countries as well. The US regulatory entities have allowed a handful of companies to dominate the digital environment. Coercion may the an upgrade to these monopolies’ toolkits.
But the whole matter may be high school humor, easily dismissed with “it’s a joke” and “we’re sorry. Really, really sorry.”
Stephen E Arnold, August 20, 2020
Quantexa: Awash in Cash
August 13, 2020
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread, crime has not stopped. Instead of illegal activities taking place in person, bad actors have moved their activities online. Cybersecurity experts discovered that the pandemic has also made bad actors more desperate and are willing to take more risks online. Inventiva explains with the rise of risky cyber crimes, cybersecurity companies are seeing huge investments such as: “Quantexa Raises $64.7M To Bring Big Data Intelligence To Risk Analysis And Investigations.”
Quantexa is a UK-based company that designed a Contextual Decision Intelligence. Machine learning platform that analyzes data points to track criminal activity and build better profiles of companies’ customer base. Quantexa recently raised $64.7 million in Series C fundraising. The funds will be used to develop further tools for cybersecurity and expand Quantexa into other continents.
Quantexa has done work for banks and other businesses in the financial industry. The company hopes the fundraising infusion will set them up with work in the government/public sector and insurance companies.
Quantexa founder and CEO Vishal Marria said he created the company, because he encountered many challenges with investigations while he was an Ernst & Young executive director. He noticed that when potential bad actors were investigated, only small pieces of information were used. Marria thought of a better way, so he designed AL algorithms and used big data to find the bigger picture:
“As an example, typically, an investigation needs to do significantly more than just track the activity of one individual or one shell company, and you need to seek out the most unlikely connections between a number of actions in order to build up an accurate picture. When you think about it, trying to identify, track, shut down and catch a large money launderer (a typical use case for Quantexa’s software) is a classic big data problem.”
This sector of cybersecurity continues to grow and similar companies to Quantexa are also fundraising with investors.
Pieces of information always point to a larger puzzle. It begs the question how bad actors were caught in the past.
Whitney Grace, August 13, 2020
Celebrity Net Worth: Misunderstanding the Google?
August 12, 2020
Navigate to this link to view the PDF of testimony from the founder of Celebrity Net Worth. Don’t you love it when Google hides urls? Try to find the document whose title appears in the next paragraph. Give up. It makes life so much easier for bad actors and people wondering “Where did that document come from?” and “Who puts this document online?” Helpful as ever. DarkCyber loves Google. Who needs to know provenance type information? Losers that’s who!
But I digress. Click here and read “Written Statement for the Record by Brian Warner for a hearing before The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law titled Online Platforms and Market Power, Part 2: Innovation and Entrepreneurship,” July 16, 2019.
The write up makes clear that Celebrity Net Worth misunderstood Google. Mr. Warner and others involved with Celebrity Net Worth believed one of the founders of Google who said in an S-1 document filed with the SEC in 2004:
“We want you to come to Google and quickly find what you want. Then we’re happy to send you to the other sites. In fact, that’s the point. The portal strategy tries to own all of the information … Most portals show their own content above content elsewhere on the web. We feel that’s a conflict of interest, analogous to taking money for search results … We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible. It’s a very different model.” — Larry Page, co-founder of Google
The write up documents how Google scraped content from Celebrity Net Worth and displayed it on search results pages. Usage of Celebrity Net Worth dropped “20 percent.” By 2016, Celebrity Net Worth was no longer at the top of a search for celebrity net worth. Traffic dropped another “50 percent.” By 2019, traffic to Celebrity Net Worth was 80 percent lower than in 2014.
The write up includes these data:
In June 2019, search engine analyst Rand Fishkin put together a report about Google using data from web analytics firm Jumpshot . The data show that today an estimated 48.96% of all Google searches end with the searcher NOT clicking through to a website. The same report estimates that 7% of all search clicks go to a paid ad result and 12% go to properties owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet. Moreover, those stats do not even show the full extent of the problem because the data largely relied upon desktop devices and could not track searches that took users to a Google-owned app like the YouTube or Google Maps.
These data are highly suggestive. However, Google has to generate revenue, and it — like many other information finding services — does what’s best for itself. This self-interest is explained in terms of “user experience,” not in terms of making money, increasing information control, and ensuring that clicks benefit Google.
The misunderstanding is that individuals with good idea assumed that Mother Google wanted to be supportive, be friends, and do what some people would assume to be appropriate.
How’s that working out? That’s why DarkCyber loves Google. Just take the information provided and don’t think. Cuba Libre does not exist if it is not on a Google Map. The Auto Channel car reviews don’t exist if not in the Google search results. And Foundem? Who the heck runs that site? DarkCyber absolutely loves Google but sometimes one must embrace a Swiss Cow?
Stephen E Arnold, August 12, 2020
Bitcoin ATMs
August 5, 2020
Last year I was in Prague and I wanted to see if Bitcoin automatic teller machines were still in operation. I located three in 2016, and I was curious. There were some ATMs I could locate, but the 2016 gizmos were gone. According to CoinATMRadar, there are several in Louisville, Kentucky. I thought about digital currency after I read “Bitcoin ATM Locations Reaching 9,000 Worldwide.” The write up reports:
There are currently 8,947 crypto currency ATMs and 211,239 non-ATM locations you can buy or sell crypto currencies at across 71 countries, according to crypto currency ATM tracking website Coinatmradar. In July, the number of crypto ATMs rose from 8,490 to 8,919, the site revealed Monday. While there were 544 new bitcoin ATMs, 115 machines were shut down during the month, leaving a net growth of 429 machines. The U.S. continues to lead in the number of bitcoin ATMs (BTMs). At the time of this writing, there are 6,879 machines in the U.S., most of which are located in Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta.
Several questions:
- If you had your taxes prepared by a CPA in the US, were you asked, “Do you have a digital currency account?”
- If you have a digital currency account, did you report the transactions per US tax regulations?
- Does possession of a digital currency account provide a signal about one’s honesty or dishonesty?
- What percentage of Bitcoin transactions are related to a criminal activity?
DarkCyber thinks that digital currency ATMs provides some helpful insight into the behaviors of their users.
Stephen E Arnold, August 5, 2020
Google: Buying Before Getting Regulated?
August 5, 2020
DarkCyber noted that Google is borrowing $10 billion. Yep, the Google. You can get some info in this article. The Google may be lined up to buy ADT, a home security outfit, and other acquisitions are likely to be in the works. Will the money be used to improve search and retrieval, invest in staff to reignite innovation, or wordsmithing.
DarkCyber noted that the online ad giant has spawned a new buzzword: Quantum AI. DarkCyber is not exactly sure what “quantum” means. DarkCyber is not exactly sure what “AI” or artificial intelligence means. That’s irrelevant.
According to “Google Scientist Hartmut Neven Coined the Term Quantum AI. This Year, He Achieved His Biggest Breakthrough Yet”:
The quantum project has posed new challenges, such as how to cool a processor to near absolute-zero temperatures using liquid helium. But Neven has always thrived on the edge. He was among the first to connect the AI revolution currently in full swing and quantum advances yet to come. “I’m guilty of having popularized the terms quantum machine learning and quantum AI,” he says. “Now there are whole sections of departments at universities that do quantum machine learning.”
Yep, Google’s ability to craft jargon and generate clicks has nosed ahead of relevance and organic innovation.
Amazon and Facebook are likely to be looking in their rearview mirrors to make sure Google’s headlights are still receding. Yep, Google is slowing down to gather up companies before the regulators put sleeping police on the information highway’s acquisition collectors.
Stephen E Arnold, August 5, 2020
Google Intern: Be Alone and Be Pushy. Charming Advice from a Digital Ms Manners
August 4, 2020
Working for the GOOG does not involve being “there.” Nor does working from the GOOG require getting paid anything or very much. What else does a Google intern have to do to be an apprentice?
“To Be a Google Intern in 2020” explains the Google’s blog that writing about being an intern is part of the deal. Thus, the explanation of working from home, over communicating, running a personal PR program, and demonstrating “initiative” are Google-certified ingredients.
The article explains how different Google interns experience interning. Among the highlights are:
- Friendliness. “Everyone is super friendly.”
- Video chat. “Sometimes a three minute video chat can be ore useful than… email.”
- Knowing “you.” According to an MBA intern, “Google really wants to get to know the full you.”
Are interns better than full time equivalents? Maybe. Since Alphabet Google has come in last in the financial horse race among Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, interns may be the next big cost reduction thing at the online ad company. An intern at the Google can earn the equivalent of $80,000 per year, according to Business Insider.
Stephen E Arnold, August 4, 2020
Spotify: Implementing the Hapsburg Hustle
August 3, 2020
I read “Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says Working Musicians May No Longer Be Able to Release Music Only Once Every Three to Four years.” I also read the comments in Hacker News related to this write up. The Fader article states:
Ek claimed that a “narrative fallacy” had been created and caused music fans to believe that Spotify doesn’t pay musicians enough for streams of their music. “Some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape,” Ek said, “where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough.”
Motivated by financial and psychological factors, the big M (Mozart) hit a fatal D minor in 1791. He was 35. DarkCyber’s view is that music MBAs want output.
Nothing new. Will Spotify Bach off? Unlikely. Content needed.
Stephen E Arnold, August 3, 2020
Disney and Face-Swapping: Real Actors Days Numbered
July 27, 2020
It took big bucks and a lot of time to insert virtual models of Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing into 2016’s Rogue One: a Star Wars Story, but Disney may soon pull off similar tricks much more easily. The Verge tells us, “Disney’s Deepfakes Are Getting Closer to a Big-Screen Debut.” The studio presented the technology at the recent Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2020 in London. The article shares Disney’s video illustrating the studio’s latest developments and contrasting them with earlier face-swapping technologies. It is well worth the investment of four minutes for anyone who is at all curious. Reporter James Vincent writes:
“The deepfakes you’ve probably seen to date may look impressive on your phone, but their flaws would be much more apparent on a larger screen. As an example, Disney’s researchers note that the maximum-resolution videos they could create from popular open-source deepfake model DeepFakeLab were just 256 x 256 pixels in size. By comparison, their model can produce video with a 1024 x 1024 resolution — a sizable increase. Apart from this, the functionality of Disney’s deepfake model is fairly conventional: it’s able to swap the appearances of two individuals while maintaining the target’s facial expressions. If you watch the video, though, note how technically constrained the output seems to be. It only produces deepfakes of well-lit individuals looking more or less straight at the camera. Challenging angles and lighting are still not on the agenda for this tech. As the researchers note, though, we are getting closer to creating deepfakes good enough for commercial projects.”
Left unmentioned are such projects’ darker possibilities—false video evidence of a crime, for example, or faked fodder for political scandal. Still, it is fascinating to watch this technology evolve. It is not surprising Disney’s financial motivations have gotten them this far.
Whitney Grace, July 27, 2020
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