MacKenzie Bezos giving ex-husband Jeff 75 percent of Amazon stock, voting control

In a tweet today, MacKenzie Bezos noted that her 26 year marriage to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has been formally dissolved. She added that she will be giving the executive all interest in the Bezos-owned Washington Post and privatized space company, Blue Origin.

The deal also finds MacKenzie giving her ex 75 percent of their joint Amazon stock, with Jeff also retaining voting control in her remaining 25, “to support his continued contributions with the teams of these incredible companies.”

pic.twitter.com/OJWn3OOLS6

— MacKenzie Bezos (@mackenziebezos) April 4, 2019

She explained that she is “grateful” at having finalized the dissolution process, adding that she is, “excited about my own plans. Grateful for the past as I look forward to what comes next.” MacKenzie Bezos is an accomplished writer, releasing her debut novel The Testing of Luther Albright in 2005. The book went on to win an American Book Award. 

It was Jeff who announced the couple’s pending divorce on Twitter three months prior, following a trial separation, noting that they would “continue our shared lives as friends.”

Amazon stock is presently trading at $1,813.02, making their combined stock worth $143 billion. MacKenzie’s share works out to around $35.6 billion, with Jeff’s at $107.4 billion.

 

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/04/mackenzie-bezos-giving-ex-husband-jeff-75-percent-of-amazon-stock-voting-control/

Amazon Alexa launches its first HIPAA-compliant medical skills

Alexa is moving into healthcare. Following a trial of Amazon’s smart speakers in patients’ rooms at Cedars-Sinai, the company this morning announced an invite-only program allowing select developers to create and launch HIPAA-compliant healthcare skills for Alexa. The skills allow consumers to ask the virtual assistant for help with things like booking an appointment, accessing hospital post-discharge instructions, checking on the status of a prescription delivery, and more.

Amazon says the program will only allow select covered entities and business associates subject to HIPAA (the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) to create these skills. Amazon itself provides the HIPAA-eligible environment for skill building, while the developers themselves are required to comply with the applicable laws.

This is a significant step for Amazon, as it means voice app developers who follow HIPAA guidelines can now create skills for Alexa.

This is an area Amazon has focused on for some time. According a report from last year by CNBC, Amazon was building out a healthcare team with Alexa in order to make the voice assistant useful in the healthcare industry. This included working through the complex HIPAA regulations that would be required to do so.

In addition, Amazon itself is venturing into healthcare alongside Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan Chase, who have together teamed up to take on rising healthcare costs for employees. Amazon last year acquired online pharmacy PillPack for under $1 billion. And the company’s AWS unit is expanding its HIPAA-compliant capabilities. This included the launch of Amazon Comprehend Medical, a machine learning tool that gathers information from things like doctor’s notes and patient health records.

Today, Amazon Alexa is providing its “HIPAA eligible environment” to voice app developers on an invite-only basis in the U.S., but says it expects to enable more developers to access this capability in the future.

Developers accepted into the program will be able to use the Alexa Skills Skit, which now supports skills that are able to transmit and receive protected health information.

This expansion to healthcare is likely to raise questions – as well it should. While it’s one thing to allow Alexa to turn on your lights or play some music, allowing our smart speakers and their voice assistants to access to medical information is a much further leap. Consumers will need to understand how Amazon is securing their data before they feel comfortable using health and medical skills.

Amazon tells us its applies several layers of security to all skill data, including encryption, access controls, and securely storing data in the Amazon cloud. HIPAA, meanwhile, includes other specific requirements, like identifying protected health information (PHI) and controlling and auditing access to PHI.

Amazon today is launching six skills that demonstrate the potential of healthcare-related skills. These come from healthcare providers, payors, pharmacy benefit managers, and digital health coaching companies.

One skill from Cigna, for example, allows eligible employees to manage their health improvement goals and earn wellness incentives; another from Livongo lets members ask Alexa for their last blood sugar reading; parents and caregivers can give their care teams updates at Boston Hospital’s ERAS (Enhanced Recovery After Surgery) program.

And others, from Express Scripts, Atrium Health, and Swedish Health Connect, offer updates on prescription delivery or allow for appointment making.

The healthcare skill publishers are excited about the ability to reach their customers through voice technology.

“Boston Children’s Hospital has long believed that voice technology has the potential to substantially improve the healthcare experience for both consumers and clinicians. We began this journey with one of the first Amazon Alexa skills from a hospital four years ago and are thrilled to participate in the initial launch of Amazon Alexa’s HIPAA-eligible service for developers,” said  John Brownstein, Chief Innovation Officer, Boston Children’s Hospital, in a statement.

“With our new Express Scripts skill, we are trying to make it easier for people to make better informed health care decisions. In particular, we believe voice technology, like Alexa, can make it easy for people stay on the right path by tracking the status of their mail order prescription, helping us further solve the costly and unhealthy problem of medication non-adherence,” said Mark Bini, Vice President of Innovation and Member Experience, Express Scripts.

Amazon launched a site for its new healthcare skills which offers a sign-up form for those who want to get “updates.” The form, however, also includes a place to describe the healthcare still use cases you have in mind – meaning Amazon is using this to vet the next round of developers to invite to the program.

 

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/04/amazon-alexa-launches-its-first-hipaa-compliant-medical-skills/

OpenClassrooms partners with Microsoft on a masters-level AI diploma

French startup OpenClassrooms is announcing a new partnership for a masters-level online program. Students who enroll in this program will access a fully online program about artificial intelligence. Eventually, future graduates will join companies — Microsoft will likely hire some of them.

If you aren’t familiar with OpenClassrooms, the company first started with basic massive open online course content for people willing to learn more about a particular topic. The startup then started offering full-fledged diplomas that require six months, a year or more.

OpenClassrooms is accredited to deliver official degrees in France — and the company plans to do the same in the U.S. and the U.K. It’s not 100 percent just you learning by yourself as you get to talk to a mentor every week to talk about your progress. And it’s been working quite well for the company.

An online path generally costs less than a traditional degree, and you’re more flexible when it comes to hours, days and semesters. The startups is so confident that it guarantees you’ll find a job within six months of graduation.

More recently, OpenClassrooms has been partnering with companies to offer apprenticeship programs. The idea is that you work for a company several days a week and study when you’re not working. It’s a win-win as some companies struggle to find the right candidates, some students want to start working right away and don’t want to pay for their studies. And OpenClassrooms gets paid by companies directly. Uber, Deliveroo, Capgemini, BNP Paribas and dozens of others participate in the apprenticeship program.

Microsoft will help OpenClassrooms design a new degree around data science, machine learning and all things artificial intelligence. The company will provide content and projects. OpenClassrooms will recruit 1,000 candidates in France, the U.K. and the U.S. as part of this program.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/04/openclassrooms-partners-with-microsoft-on-a-masters-level-ai-diploma/

The avocado principles

1. If you wait until you really want an avocado, the market won’t have any ripe ones. You need to buy them in advance.
2. If you eat an avocado that’s not quite ripe, you won’t enjoy it. AND, you won’t have a chance to enjoy it tomorrow, when it would have been perfect if you had only waited.
3. If you live your life based on instant gratification and little planning, you’ll either never have a good avocado or you’ll pay more than you should to someone else who planned ahead.
4. Buy more avocados than you think you need, because the hassles are always greater than the cost, so you might as well invest.
5. And since you have so many, share them when they’re ripe. What goes around comes around.

All of these truths lead to the real insight, the metaphor that’s just waiting to be lived in all ways: If you get ahead of the cycle, waiting until the first one is ripe and then always replenishing before you need one, you can live an entire life eating ripe avocados. On the other hand, if impatience and poor planning gets you behind the cycle, you’ll be just as likely to waste every one you ever eat.

Plant your tree before you need the shade.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/600329794/0/sethsblog~The-avocado-principles/

Amazon reportedly removes the most obvious promotions for its private brands from search results

If it feels like your Amazon search results have been overwhelmed with promotions for their private-label brands, like Amazon Basics, Mama Bear or Daily Ritual, that may be changing. As lawmakers pay more attention to the most powerful tech companies, Amazon has begun quietly removing some of the more obvious promotions, including banner ads, for its private-label products, reports CNBC, which spoke to Amazon sellers and consultants.

Amazon’s aggressive marketing of its own private brands, with ads that often appear in search results above listings for competing items from third-party sellers, have raised antitrust concerns. The company’s increasingly strong gripe on the U.S. retail market has been under scrutiny for years, but pressure intensified last month when Massachusetts senator and Democratic presidential primary candidate Elizabeth Warren announced that breaking up tech giants Amazon, Google and Facebook (and other companies with an annual global revenue above $25 billion that provide marketplace, exchange or third-party connectivity as “platform utilitilies”) in order to reduce their economic dominance will be a major part of her platform. This means that Amazon Marketplace and Basics would be split apart, and acquisitions including Whole Foods and Zappos would be spun out.

While there isn’t a banner ad, products from an Amazon private label brand, Daily Ritual, still dominate results for “black jersey tunic”

Amazon’s private brands quickly became a major threat to third-party sellers on its platform, increasing from about a dozen brands in 2016, when some of its products began taking the lead in key categories like batteries, speakers and baby wipes, to a current roster of more than 135 private label brands and 330 brands exclusive to Amazon, according to TJI Research.

While Amazon benefits from higher margins, cost-savings from a more efficient supply chain and new data, third-party sellers often suffer. For example, they may have to cut prices to stay competitive, and even lower prices may not be enough attract customers away from Amazon’s promotions for its own items, which show up in many search results.

Other recent measures Amazon has taken to ward off antitrust scrutiny include reportedly getting rid of its price parity requirement for third-party sellers, which meant they were not allowed to sell the same products on other sites for lower prices.

TechCrunch has contacted Amazon for comment.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/03/amazon-reportedly-removes-the-most-obvious-promotions-for-its-private-brands-from-search-results/

More right

There are at least seven realistic ways to get from my home near New York to a meeting in Washington DC. None of them are wrong. Each offers its own advantage in terms of resilience, speed, cost or hassle.

And so, we can’t choose based on this is right and those are wrong. The only useful construct is to consider our priorities and find the route with the best combination of trade offs.

Waiting for perfect is a never-ending game.

And the comfort of totally right vs. totally wrong is elusive.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/600292660/0/sethsblog~More-right/

Okta unveils $50M in-house venture capital fund

Identity management software provider Okta, which went public two years ago in what was one of the first pure-cloud subscription-based company IPOs, wants to fund the next generation of identity, security and privacy startups.

At its big customer conference Oktane, where the company has also announced a new level of identity protection at the server level, chief operating officer Frederic Kerrest (pictured above, right, with chief executive officer Todd McKinnon) will unveil a $50 million investment fund meant to back early-stage startups leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning and blockchain technology.

“We view this as a natural extension of what we are doing today,” Okta senior vice president Monty Gray told TechCrunch. Gray was hired last year to oversee corporate development, i.e. beef up Okta’s M&A strategy.

Gray and Kerrest tell TechCrunch that Okta Ventures will invest capital in existing Okta partners, as well as other companies in the burgeoning identity management ecosystem. The team managing the fund will look to Okta’s former backers, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and Greylock, for support in the deal sourcing process.

Okta to acquire workflow automation startup Azuqua for $52.5M

Okta Ventures will write checks sized between $250,000 and $2 million to eight to 10 early-stage businesses per year.

“It’s just a way of making sure we are aligning all our work and support with the right companies who have the right vision and values because there’s a lot of noise around identity, ML and AI,” Kerrest said. “It’s about formalizing the support strategy we’ve had for years and making sure people are clear of the fact we are helping these organizations build because it’s helpful to our customers.”

Okta Ventures’ first bet is Trusted Key, a blockchain-based digital identity platform that previously raised $3 million from Founders Co-Op. Okta’s investment in the startup, founded by former Microsoft, Oracle and Symantec executives, represents its expanding interest in the blockchain.

“Blockchain as a backdrop for identity is cutting edge if not bleeding edge,” Gray said.

Okta, founded in 2009, had raised precisely $231 million from Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock, Khosla Ventures, Floodgate and others prior to its exit. The company’s stock has fared well since its IPO, debuting at $17 per share in 2017 and climbing to more than $85 apiece with a market cap of $9.6 billion as of Tuesday closing.

Okta brings identity management to server level

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/03/okta-unveils-50m-in-house-venture-capital-fund/