Daily Archives: February 15, 2022

Last week three judges of the Federal Court of Australia looked at Facebook and came away unimpressed.

In critical legal proceedings, the social networks US parent company Meta had tried to claim that it was not actually carrying out business in the country - despite it being used by an estimated 70 per cent of Australians.

Australia may be a minor market for Facebook, but it has already been hit with regulation here.Credit:Shutterstock

Facebook made the claim in an attempt to argue it couldnt even be served with legal documents from Australia for alleged privacy breaches from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a shadowy political consultancy harvested Facebook data on millions of users to inform its strategies in 2014 and 2015.

According to the social media giant, its US-headquartered parent only conducted data processing services for Facebook Ireland Limited, which collects data from Australian citizens.

Which is all very convenient for Facebook, but not so much for the Australian Information Commissioner. The federal agency had brought the case alleging that 311,127 Australians had their personal data improperly disclosed in the saga, only to be met with Facebooks legal stonewall.

While their decision was only preliminary, allowing the case to proceed further, Justices Nye Perram, David Yates and Chief Justice James Allsop, took issue with Facebooks reasoning. Some of the companys claims, Justice Perram wrote, were divorced from reality.

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The business is not about the simple sale of goods whether tangible or intangible, Allsop wrote. It is about extracting value from information about people.

Its not just Facebook. Transportation company Uber and games powerhouse Valve, known for titles like Half-Life and the digital game store Steam, have both claimed in recent years that their entities werent operating in Australia when they faced legal trouble.

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Tech giants can claim theyre everywhere and nowhere, but its not smart - Sydney Morning Herald

Tech giants are poised to mop up more Dublin offices, boosting commercial rents in the city, a new report shows.

Social media businesses Linkedin and Tiktok took two of last years three biggest office leases in the capital, where many multi-nationals have their European HQs.

Letting agent HWBC says demand from overseas investors for Dublin offices, particularly technology companies, continues to be extremely strong.

The property business adds that it is aware of several active mandates from multi-nationals seeking space in the Republics capital for 2022.

It does not name prospective investors. Recent reports said Stripe, the payments company founded by Limerick brothers, John and Patrick Collinson, is seeking space for 2,000 workers in Dublin.

Others claimed Russian tech specialist, Yandex, was hunting for a base in the city.

HWBC s Dublin office report for the 2021 says foreign direct investors and tehnology businesses continue to dominate the market.

Iain Sayer, HWBC s investment director, said that such companies are once again likely to feature on this years list of top 10 office deals in the city.

Fears that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Developments agreement, diluting the Republics favourable tax regime, would hit this demand proved unfounded, notes the firm.

Its report points out that State development agency, IDA Ireland, lured record levels of new jobs and investment to the Republic in 2021.

HWBC argues that in some ways the new tax agreement could be viewed as a positive as it gives certainty.

Average rent stablised at 57.50 a square foot in Dublin during 2021, but the property firm predicts this will increase as demand aided by multi-national interest picks up through this year.

Easing restrictions and a gradual return to the office should support the recovery, assuming no new variants of concern emerge, says the report.

HWBC believes that incentives for tenants will remain part of any deals done, but it does not see rents retreating.

Businesses are also looking for buildings with low energy use, the firm cautions.

In addition, climate change policy is pushing landlords and institutional investors to replace older offices with newer buildings that emit less carbon.

Accountants KPMG took out the biggest lease in Dublin last year when they agreed to take 288,500 sq ft at Harcourt Square from listed developer, Hibernia Real Estate Investment Trust.

Chinese social media behemoth, Tiktok, was second with its deal to lease all of the 216,000 sq ft in the Sorting Office from builder Marlet.

Linkedins agreement to occupy 57,000 sq ft at One Park Place, Hatch Street, was number three.

HWBC said 2021 was a bumpy year, with tough Government Covid curbs hitting business in the opening months.

Overall, businesses agreed to lease 1.62 sq ft from landlords in Dublin last year, 26 per cent below the long-term average.

Deals in the final quarter, spurred by KPMG and Tiktok, accounted for 60 per cent of the years total.

Mr Sayer said the market had reached a turning point. The surge in demand in quarter four 2021 is continuing into 2022, which means it is unlikely that prime rents will fall any further, he added.

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Tech giants poised to take up more offices in Dublin - The Irish Times

The Qraft AI-Enhanced U.S. Large Cap Momentum ETF AMOM an exchange-traded fund driven by artificial intelligence has acquired new stakes in Alphabet Inc. GOOG GOOGL and Meta Platforms Inc. FB, while entirely divesting its holdings in Tesla Inc. TSLA, Adobe Inc. ADBE and Shopify Inc. SHOP.

What Happened: The ETFs latest portfolio after rebalancing in early February showed it has also entirely divested its holdings in Salesforce.com Inc. CRM and Qualcomm Inc. QCOM.

The fund, which has assets under management of $30.1 million, has a history of accurately predicting the price movements of Teslas shares.

The ETF now has Google parent Alphabet as its largest investment with an 8.5% weighting, followed by Meta Platforms with a weighting of 8.0% and graphics chip maker Nvidia Corp. NVDA with 6.9% weighting.

The other two stocks that now make up the top-five holdings in the AMOM portfolio are Home Depot Inc. HD and Costco Wholesale Corp. COST.

The ETF had Tesla, Nvidia, Home Depot, Adobe and Shopify as its five largest holdings in January.

Why It Matters: AMOM, a product of South Korea-based fintech group Qraft, tracks 50 large-cap U.S. stocks and reweighs its holdings each month.

The funds latest rebalancing shows that it is most bullish on Alphabet, Meta and Nvidia.

Alphabet reported better-than-expected results for the fourth quarter, helped by strong growth in advertising and Cloud business revenue. The tech giant also announced a 20-for-1 stock split.

Meta reported better-than-expected revenue for the fourth quarter, while earnings missed estimates amid stiff competition from short-video app TikTok. However, Meta is attempting to take on TikTok with Reels, a short-form video platform on its Instagram subsidiary.

Nvidia, which officially released its Omniverse metaverse platform in January, has recently abandoned the proposed acquisition of chip designer Arm Ltd. amid stiff opposition from regulators.

Read Next: 'Bringing Back The Magic': 4 Disney Analysts React To The Mouse's Q1 Beat

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This Robot-Run ETF Cut Tesla Stake In January And Initiated Positions In These 2 Tech Giants - Benzinga - Benzinga

But these concerns are largely tertiary to the disinformation question. Americans have become so focused on how tech companies handle voices we find distasteful, repugnant or dangerous. My sense is that this has happened because social media largely serves up a world of entertainment, news and sports. It also allows its users to believe that they are participating in activism by posting about everything from police brutality to the Oscars, especially when their sentiments are part of a groundswell of opinion. As a result, online outrage will almost always be about things that are consumed online, like Rogans podcast, actors and comedians who say something offensive and some supposedly salacious books that are being dubiously canceled by the online right.

The ecosystem is closed and, at this point, almost entirely self-referential. News media, entertainment and sports go in; outrage over news media, entertainment and sports comes out.

Within these parameters, does the fight over disinformation simply mark the limit of what we are willing to do in the name of change? Do we care deeply because we really believe that people are being led astray? Or are we just responding to whats in front of us and admitting that while our political imaginations might be limited, we at least can clean up our timelines? Disinformation is certainly a real concern, but it also allows us to pretend that all the countrys problems can be solved by better algorithms and terms of service.

The effects of this aphasia have bled out into other parts of our daily interactions. Big Disinfo now shapes how we think about our fellow citizens, especially those we think are in thrall to a magical Facebook post. After the 2020 election, the news was filled with stories about how minority communities, particularly Asian American and Latino ones, had been bombarded with foreign language disinformation campaigns.

This particular disinformation panic coincided with a shift in both of those demographics to the Republican Party, one that has mostly continued over the past two years. The implication was that these voters had somehow been tricked by right-wing messaging to abandon the Democratic Party or, at the very least, its ideals. A 2018 paper from the UCLA Civil Rights Project, for example, argued that Asian American voters who opposed affirmative action had fallen for misinformation. That idea implies that if we just shut down the sources of misinfo, everyone will suddenly line up to vote for progressive candidates. It is also a broken way to think about our neighbors and fellow citizens.

There may very well be some misinformation about race-based preferences in college admissions floating around somewhere on the internet, but its far more likely that Asian Americans, many of whom believe that elite colleges are discriminating against them, simply oppose racial preferences out of pure self-interest. In these instances, the charge of misinformation obscures more than it illuminates.

At the same time, its true that too many people believe dubious sources of information on the internet. In 2019 researchers at Stanford published a study about how well American high schoolers could discern online disinformation. Of the more than 3,000 students who were shown a grainy video claiming to show ballot stuffing in the 2016 Democratic primaries, 52 percent believed it showed strong evidence of voter fraud. (The video was shot in Russia.) The report also found that 96 percent of students did not consider why ties between a climate change website and the fossil fuel industry might lessen that websites credibility. When asked how they evaluated the credibility of a site, they focused on superficial markers of credibility: the sites aesthetics, its top-level domain or how it portrayed itself on the About page.

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Opinion | How to Fix Disinformation - The New York Times

Still, much of Web3s promise remains theoretical. When it comes to NFTs, some proponents argue that it will transform not only the way art is bought and sold, but also what art and artists we value and how artists are paid. NFTs create opportunities for new business models that didnt exist before, James Bowden and Edward Thomas Jones write in The Conversation. Artists can attach stipulations to an NFT that ensures they get some of the proceeds every time it gets resold, meaning they benefit if their work increases in value.

At the loftiest heights of Web3 discourse, the prospect of a decentralized internet is cast as a bulwark against authoritarianism. Conceptually, Web3 is innately more beneficial to Western liberal democracies, which value democracy and personal privacy, Anthony Vinci and Nadia Schadlow argue in The Washington Post. China and Russia have already set up mechanisms to spy on and control the existing Web2 infrastructure through firewalls, censorship and coercion of technology platforms. Web3 would make such authoritarian controls much more difficult.

If theres anything the social-media iteration of the internet made clear, Recodes Peter Kafka believes its that even the most exciting technology can bring unintended consequences. At first blush, Twitter seemed like a fun way to tell people what you had for lunch, and then for a moment like a tool that could help liberate oppressed populations, he writes, adding, This time around, we ought to be much more thoughtful about possible downsides.

One downside is that cryptocurrency is a useless, even dangerousspeculative investment, The Timess Binyamin Appelbaum argues. Unstable, cumbersome and expensive to use, cryptocurrency doesnt work as a replacement for government-backed currencies. What it does do, however, is incentivize market frenzies and use huge amounts of electricity more than the nation of Finland.

Some commentators, like Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of Signal, have also pointed out that Web3, for all its heady promises of democratization, isnt actually very decentralized: It still depends on centralized organizations to maintain servers, cryptocurrency wallets and websites where NFTs are stored.

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Opinion | Is the Web3 Gold Rush the Beginning of a New Internet or a Scam? - The New York Times

Tech stocks may have taken a pounding as the world comes out of the pandemic but new figures from WARC show that Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and, increasingly, Amazon, are tightening their hold on the global ad market.

The big three now account for almost half (46.1%) of all advertising spend, according to WARCs analysis of company reports. This is up substantially from 2019 pre-pandemic levels where they snaffled around a third (33.8%) of all ad spend.

Alphabet tops the list, accounting for more than a quarter (27.2%) of ad spend, up from one-fifth in 2019. Meta has risen to 14.9% while Amazon has doubled its share to 4.0%.

The three companies have also managed to grow their share of online advertising, despite their dominant size. Altogether, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon accounted for 71.2% of all online ad spend in 2021, up from 67.8% in 2019.

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Big three tech giants Alphabet, Meta and Amazon snaffle almost half global ad spend - More About Advertising

As many of you may probably know, big tech companies have been going through a lot of scrutiny in the past couple of years (or even a bit more), especially from EU antitrust regulations and US lawmakers. Now, AppleInsider reports that the European Union's Digital Services Act could be concluded by the end of June, and it will force tech giants such as Apple, Meta, Google to manage their behavior and how they react to content on their platforms. The Digital Services Act was introduced by the European Commission back in December 2020, and it has been discussed by European lawmakers as a way to make tech giants police the content published on their platforms more strictly. If the tech companies fail to comply with the law, they could be fined by the EU as much as 6% of their global turnover.Mor specifically, the Digital Services Act is focused on illegal and harmful content published on giant platforms, and it will require platform holders to take such posts and content down in a prompt manner. This includes a large area of online platforms such as online marketplaces, social networks, content-sharing platforms, digital stores like the App Store and Google Play, and many other online services. However, in order for the proposed legislation to become law, it has to reach a deal with EU member countries, which is usually a long process. But it could probably go quicker than that this time. EU lawmaker Christel Schaldemose is the one who is steering negotiations on that topic and stated that a deal could be made by the end of June.

Schaldemose also stated that in terms of the negotiations, lawmakers are keen to increase how much the owners of big online platforms have to accomplish in blocking harmful content. This includes banning the so-called dark patterns, and to regulate companies based on where they are registered.

For those of you who don't know, dark patterns are tricks that websites and apps use to make you do something you didn't mean to, like buying or signing up for something. In regards to such dark patterns, Schaldemose also stated that "We go into the business models of platforms. The Council is not so willing to go that far," which pretty much means there is some difference of opinions on the topic. "The Council wants the ban only for online marketplaces. Parliament wants a ban on all platforms.", she added.

That's not the only legislation that the European Parliament has been working on. Parallel with the Digital Services Act, the EU introduced the Digital Markets Act, aiming to increase competition and limit anti-competitive practices by the big tech companies.

Measures included in the Digital Markets Act include forcing Apple and Google to allow users to uninstall pre-installed apps on their devices, as well as forcing them to eliminate self-preferencing in search results. On top of that, these companies should provide more transparency over advertising metrics.

Back in late 2021, progress on both of these legislations, the DSA and the DMA slowed down. So far, the Digital Markets Act is behind the Digital Services Act in terms of negotiations.

The US has also been working on some proposals for legislation. Recently, a proposed bill that could make Apple allow sideloading on iPhones and iPads proceeded to be debated by the full Senate.

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EU deals on the Digital Services Act might get finalized by the end of June - PhoneArena

Feb 10 (Reuters) - Hong Kong's Hang Seng index finished higher on Thursday, led by tech shares, but gains were limited ahead of U.S. inflation data that is expected to provide more clues about the Federal Reserve's plans for interest rate hikes.

** At the close of trade, the Hang Seng index (.HSI) was up 94.36 points, or 0.38%, at 24,924.35, after falling 0.73% earlier. The Hang Seng China Enterprises index (.HSCE) rose 0.76% to 8,789.92.

** Alibaba (9988.HK) was the biggest contributor to the Hang Seng's rise, adding 2.86% on the day.

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** Alibaba led a rise in the tech index (.HSTECH) which gained 0.56% on the day. Meituan (3690.HK) rose 1.66% and JD.com Inc (9618.HK) added 1.28%.

** China's cyberspace watchdog said a symposium it held with Chinese tech giants including Alibaba last month had given the industry a "clearer understanding" of how to pursue future development. read more

** The property sector rose 1.63%, with China Evergrande Group (3333.HK) jumping 5.39%.

** The rise in Evergrande shares came after its chairman told an internal meeting on Sunday that the company needs to clear its debt by fully restoring construction and sales activities and not by selling off assets on the cheap. read more

** WuXi Biologics (Cayman) Inc (2269.HK) was the biggest loser on the Hang Seng, falling 5.36% amid ongoing investor concern about the addition of its units to a U.S. Department of Commerce "unverified list". read more

** China's main Shanghai Composite index (.SSEC) closed up 0.17% at 3,485.91 points, while the blue-chip CSI300 index (.CSI300) ended down 0.26%.

** Around the region, MSCI's Asia ex-Japan stock index (.MIAPJ0000PUS) was firmer by 0.74%, while Japan's Nikkei index (.N225) closed up 0.42%.

** The yuan was quoted at 6.3573 per U.S. dollar at 08:10 UTC, 0.08% firmer than the previous close of 6.3624.

Register

Reporting by Andrew Galbraith; Editing by Rashmi Aich

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Hong Kong shares rise on tech boost ahead of U.S. inflation data - Reuters

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We recently heard of a difficulty facing a CPO within the financial services field when he, newly placed in charge of creating a procurement team, found he couldnt recruit. The business had been spun off as an entity in its own right, and while the CPO had taken some of the leadership team with him, his challenge was to populate all the other roles across various locations. The difficulty lay in that despite this being a well-paid sector and an exciting opportunity for procurement professionals, he couldnt find the candidates to fill the roles.

In the age of the great resignation one would assume a huge talent pool out there ripe for the picking apparently not.

In actual fact, for the category managers, strategic sourcing professionals, digital procurement experts and so on, the recruitment industry is experiencing limited success and thats symptomatic of the whole market right now, says Andrew Daley of Edbury Daley international procurement and supply chain technology recruitment consultants.

To answer that question Daley goes back to 2020.

There was an enormous amount of uncertainty in all industries, he explains. On the procurement solutions side, hiring slowed as vendors couldnt foresee what would happen with revenues, and that impacted headcount decisions. For the consultancy world, that situation alleviated towards the end of that year, but the corporate world of procurement and supply teams continued to face unprecedented circumstances requiring all hands on deck to cope with the challenges of the employers. So hiring except when essential dropped off the agenda for quite some time.

While continuing to adapt to a situation of market ups and downs, the tri-part ecosystem of procurement tech, consulting and practitioner talent also experienced highs and lows. Then optimism set in about the impact the pandemic was having on digital procurement and towards the end of 2021 the hiring market boomed.

The need to address concerns across supply chains, the demand placed on procurement departments, the need to find better ways of doing things and the leap in the requirement for better visibility and data all put pressure on the skills market. It led organizations to require of practitioners skills they just didnt have, but had to acquire quickly. So the end of last year saw a remarkable spike in hiring, particularly from the tech vendors and early indications are that this will continue in 2022. However, the skills shortage will continue because the market cannot keep pace with the demand from every part of the procurement ecosystem.

This demand for new talent is born partly out of the growing power of technology, the importance of the supply chain to corporate agendas and the visibility that organizations require. This is exacerbated of course by the reduced mobility of labor owing to travel restrictions and greater risk awareness.

If you are trying to grow a procurement team in a highly competitive and sparsely populated market, according to Daley there are a few things you can do to improve your chances:

If you are a substantially sized organization, you probably already have an internal talent-attraction team. However, they too are stretched and typically they are generalist recruiters, not procurement recruitment specialists. Specialist recruiters will know everything there is to know about a narrowly defined sector, and they will know the best places to look for a digital procurement specialist.

Spend Matters new series analyzes the procurement service provider market and offers a Buyers Directory.

The traditional procurement priorities of stakeholder engagement, consultative sourcing and price are being superseded by many other factors, explains Daley. As organizations consider supplier relationships more, all the skills the CPO has long been talking about like risk, quality, innovation and collaboration are becoming a real demand.

On the vendor side, whether selling, implementing or account managing, they want people who are credible in front of a CPO. They want people with previous knowledge of working in that area, who understand the challenges, the opportunities and know the language.

The harsh reality of this market is that employers are being forced to be more flexible, because if theyve had an unfilled vacancy for six months they need a plan B. They need to think about what they are prepared to compromise on. That might be someone of lesser experience, or someone from a neighboring market like sales or finance, and train them to understand procurement.

So theres a general recognition that we need to think more laterally.

Daley sums up: In my opinion, for our sector the great resignation is a myth Ive seen no evidence of it at all, in fact, quite the opposite. We have never had to work harder to get procurement talent this is the most difficult candidate market Ive ever witnessed.

For more insight into what leaders can expect for their hiring plans for 2022, download the Edbury Daley Insider report for free:Procurement and Spend Management Insider

If you are tasked with creating a new procurement organization, Spend Matters 5-step TechMatch tool can help you identify needs and quickly generate a technology shortlist.

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Procurement recruitment Why is the tech talent pool so shallow? - Spend Matters

In today's ExchangeWire news digest: SoftBank are facing a third legal fight with the head of their Chinese joint venture, Allen Wu; the CMA will oversee the development of Google's Privacy Sandbox after legally binding commitments were agreed; and a non-profit organisation have filed a lawsuit against the President of Nigeria to publish the agreement which led to Twitter's reinstatement.

Japanese conglomerate SoftBank are facing a third legal conflict with the head of their Chinese joint venture, Allen Wu, disrupting their efforts to list Arm on the New York Stock Exchange. The case has been filed against Arm China by one of Wus shareholder companies, according to court documents seen by the Financial Times, in Wus latest effort to keep control over the business unit. This legal case is the third since 2020, when Arm Chinas board voted 7-1 to have Allen Wu removed. Wu, who refused, still retains control of the venture due to legal rights.

SoftBank hinted at an IPO last week after the announcement that the proposed Nvidia acquisition of Arm Holdings fell through due to growing unease from regulators. Under the USD$40bn (~29.5bn) agreement, Arm wouldve operated as a division of Nvidia out of their current headquarters in the United Kingdom, while SoftBank would retain a minority stake of under 10% in the computing firm.

Going public could, however, be put on hold due to their legal fights. Last month, it was disclosed that Arm was unable to verify Arm Chinas revenues as a result of the conflict. This lack of clarity and communication is unappealing to investors and could jeapordise their attempt at a successful IPO.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) will be babysitting Google over their Privacy Sandbox proposal after agreeing to the tech giantss commitments addressing anti-competitive concerns. In an announcement made on Friday (11 February), the British watchdog said that they are satisfied the new proposals will protect users privacy due to an in-depth investigation and extensive engagement with Google and market participants. The CMA and the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) will oversee the development stages following the investigation that opened in January last year.

The CMAs Chief Executive, Andrea Coscelli, commented, our intervention in this case demonstrates our commitment to protecting competition in digital markets and our global role in shaping the behaviour of world-leading tech firms. The commitments we have obtained from Google will promote competition, help to protect the ability of online publishers to raise money through advertising and safeguard users privacy. While this is an important step, we are under no illusions that our work is done. We now move into a new phase where we will keep a close eye on Google as it continues to develop these proposals.

Other commitments involve ensuring that ad tracking will protect competition, as well as an assurance that Google will not remove third-party cookies without the go-ahead from the CMA within a 60-day period. The commitments will be implemented globally.

In further news, Google Analytics have been accused of breaching European Union privacy laws in France after it was discovered that an unidentified local websites use of the web service was not compliant with GDPR, Article 44. According to reports, the website has been transferring personal information outside the bloc to locations without an equivalent user protection framework. A similar decision was found in Austria last month.

The Socio Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) have gone to the Nigerian High Court in order to force the government to publish the agreement with Twitter which led to the social media platforms reinstatement in Nigeria after a seven-month ban. The non-profit organisation have filed a lawsuit against the President of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, for failing to disclose the details of the deal due to concerns that freedom of expression will be compromised.

In a copy of the recent court filing, the SERAP argues, "publishing the agreement would enable Nigerians to scrutinise it, seek legal remedies as appropriate, and ensure that the conditions for lifting the suspension of Twitter are not used as pretexts to suppress legitimate discourse".

Twitter was given the green light back in January after their restoration was approved by Buhari. The ban was initially put in place after the social media giant removed a tweet from President Muhammadu Buhari addressing secessionists, on the basis that it was threatening. Via a section of the statement regarding the recent go-ahead, Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, director general of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) stated, Twitter has agreed to act with a respectful acknowledgement of Nigerian laws and the national culture and history on which such legislation has been built and work with the FGN and the broader industry to develop Code of Conduct in line with global best practices, applicable in almost all developed countries.

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SoftBank Face Third Conflict With Allen Wu; The CMA to Babysit Google's Privacy Sandbox - ExchangeWire