Tech

SINGAPORE — India is a small contributor to Amazon’s total sales right now, but the country may become an important growth driver for the U.S. e-commerce giant, according to tech investor Gene Munster. Amazon scored a victory on Sunday when the company won an injunction from  an arbitrator in Singapore to temporarily halt a significant deal between two major Indian retailers: Future Retail and Reliance Industries. Future Retail, a subsidiary of Future Group, announced in August that it will be selling its businesses in retail, wholesale, and logistics to Reliance for $3.38 billion, including debt, Reuters reported. Amazon filed a legal suit against Future Retail, alleging that the Indian retailer breached contractual provisions it agreed to in a separate deal with the U.S. tech giant, according to the news agency. Reliance — owned by India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani — has been making headway into India’s vast e-commerce sector which is currently dominated by Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart. Amazon has a growing presence in India. The e-commerce giant has invested billions into the South Asian nation. “When you think about Amazon and their growth profile, (they) just had wicked growth in the last six months,” Munster, who is founder and managing partner at

Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Google Inc., speaks during a news conference in New Delhi, India, on Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2017. Anindito Mukheriee | Bloomberg | Getty Images Microsoft is forecasting a continued slowdown in its search ad revenue, which could spell bad news for Google parent-company Alphabet, which reports its earnings on Thursday.  Microsoft’s latest results beat across the board, but the company saw a 10% year-over-year drop in search advertising revenue, and reported continued decrease for its guidance for the next quarter, according to its first fiscal quarter earnings it released Tuesday. For the December quarter, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said “in search excluding TAC, we expect revenue to decline in the mid to high single digit range” during a call with Microsoft investors Tuesday. That suggests a decline of 7% to 9%. Google’s search engine is much more widely used than Microsoft’s Bing, but the companies have shown similar trends in search advertising revenues. Last quarter, Microsoft’s search advertising revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs, decreased 18% as customers spent less on ads. That was a precursor to Alphabet reporting its

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2013. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) Justin Sullivan | Getty Images Political advertisers say they’re having trouble with ads that were already approved before Facebook began its planned blackout period for new political ads leading up to the election.  Facebook announced last month that it would not accept new political ads the week before the Nov. 3 election, starting on Tuesday, Oct. 27. Advertisers were able to submit and run new ads until midnight Pacific Time on Monday, and are allowed to run those ads leading up to the election as long as they received at least one impression before the deadline. For instance, President Donald Trump’s campaign has pre-loaded ads saying that Trump was “still your president,” boasting about GDP figures that haven’t been released yet, and imploring people to “vote today” with graphics reading “Election Day is Today.” Facebook said it would be removing those “vote today” ads for being against policy. However, other advertisers are complaining about glitches in Facebook’s system. Several told CNBC they previously approved ads — either those that had run and gotten impressions

Steve Huffman CEO, Reddit, delivers remarks on ‘Redesigning Reddit’ during the third day of Web Summit in Altice Arena on November 08, 2017 in Lisbon, Portugal. Horacio Villalobos | Corbis | Getty Images Reddit said Tuesday it won’t lower pay for employees who choose to move out of high-cost cities following the coronavirus pandemic. That means employees will be compensated as if they live in places like San Francisco, where Reddit is headquartered, even if they move to a much cheaper locale. “To support employees to live where they want to and do their best work, we are eliminating geographic compensation zones in the US,” the company said in a blog post. “We believe this is the right balance of flexibility and support for employees, recognizing the varied tradeoffs people consider when deciding where to live.” The social media company will also allow employees to choose between working in person, remotely or a combination of both. Reddit said the new policy will exclude workers who have roles that need to be performed in person. “We are reimagining the future of our office space to support those team

The CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter released prepared remarks on Tuesday that warn against repealing Section 230, the statute that protects the social networks from liability for their users’ posts. The remarks were released in advance of Wednesday’s hearing with the Senate Commerce Committee. The CEOs have been called in front of the committee because lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are concerned about how each company moderates, or sometimes fails to moderate, content posted by users. The committee will examine Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a statute that has provided tech platforms immunity from legal liability for their users’ posts since the late 1990s. In recent years, as tech companies face more scrutiny over their content moderation practices and ad-driven business models, the law has attracted bipartisan criticism for its broad protections. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: Undermining Section 230 will leave only the largest tech companies Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey gestures while interacting with students at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi on November 12, 2018. Prakash Singh | AFP | Getty Images Twitter has

The semiconductor industry is experiencing historic consolidation, thanks to a wild rally in the stock market. In the past six weeks, two of the biggest three acquisitions ever in the chip industry have been announced, after AMD said on Tuesday that it’s buying Xilinx for $35 billion. Last month, Nvidia agreed to acquire Arm from SoftBank in a deal worth $40 billion. The only deal keeping those two from being the largest in history was Avago’s $37 billion purchase of Broadcom, which was announced in 2015. The company assumed the name Broadcom. Both Nvidia and AMD are taking advantage of run-ups in market value to bulk up in the data center, where cloud deployments and new workloads are driving hefty spending. Nvidia shares are up 162% in the past year, while AMD’s stock has climbed 141%. In the universe of large-cap tech companies, only software vendors Zoom and Shopify have performed better. AMD’s purchase of Xilinx is all stock, and Nvidia is paying mostly stock to SoftBank for Arm, along with some cash. “They both are using their stock appreciation to conduct M&A,” said Matthew Bryson, an analyst at Wedbush Securities who has the equivalent of

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, is pictured at Microsoft’s annual shareholder meeting in Bellevue, Washington on November 30, 2016. Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images Microsoft will announce its fiscal first-quarter earnings after market close on Tuesday. Here are the numbers to watch: Earnings: $1.54 per share, adjusted, as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv. Revenue: $35.72 billion as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv. That means analysts expect Microsoft’s revenue to be up 8% on an annualized basis, down from 13% growth in the prior quarter. Some of Microsoft’s fastest growth comes from its Azure public cloud, which companies can use to host websites and applications and competes with Amazon Web Services. Analysts expect Azure growth to slow slightly to about 44% from 47% in the previous quarter. Microsoft is also likely to give insight into the business impact from the Nov. 10 release of new Xbox consoles. This is the first quarter Microsoft will benefit from an accounting change that extended the useful life of its server equipment from three years to four years. That adjustment could lift Microsoft’s gross margin while some parts

Combination of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google. Reuters The CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter will face lawmakers once again on Wednesday — this time to defend the legal liability shield that underpins their business models. For Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai, it will be their second time testifying before Congress this year, following July’s antitrust hearing in the House. For Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, it will be the first of two sessions before Congress within the next month. The two agreed to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in November after Republican members voted to authorize subpoenas. Like the antitrust hearing, Wednesday’s Senate Commerce Committee testimony has the potential to be bruising for the tech companies because nearly every lawmaker has an interest in it. Republicans and Democrats on the committee have expressed shared concerns over the way tech companies moderate — or fail to moderate — content on their platforms without repercussions, misused users’ data and impacted local news organizations. “I think that there is more common ground than people realize,”

President Donald Trump holds a campaign rally at HoverTech International in Allentown, Pennsylvania, October 26, 2020. Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images Though Election Day is a week away, President Donald Trump’s campaign appears to have a victory ad ready to go on Facebook. A video in the ad shows the president’s face superimposed on a sun, with a voiceover pulled from various sources. “It’s morning in America. Donald J. Trump is still president of the United States,” the video says. Flowers rise from the ground and open to faces, who scream, “NOOOO!” as the smiling president, now also a hummingbird, flits around.  Trump Facebook ad. Facebook Ad Library Trump’s campaign, which also has ads that boast about a GDP figures that haven’t been released yet and others that implore people to “vote today” with graphics reading “Election Day is Today,” appear to be its way of working within Facebook’s rules for political advertising leading up to the election. The ads are visible in Facebook’s political ads library, a database of all political

A Starlink user terminal attached to the roof of a building. SpaceX SpaceX is expanding the beta test of its Starlink satellite internet service, reaching out via email on Monday to people who expressed interest in signing up for the service. Known as the “Better Than Nothing Beta” test, according to multiple screenshots of the email seen by CNBC, initial Starlink service is priced at $99 a month – plus a $499 upfront cost to order the Starlink Kit. That kit includes a user terminal to connect to the satellites, a mounting tripod and a wifi router. There is also now a Starlink app listed by SpaceX on the Google Play and Apple iOS app stores. “As you can tell from the title, we are trying to lower your initial expectations,” the emails said, signed Starlink Team. “Expect to see data speeds vary from 50Mb/s to 150Mb/s and latency from 20ms to 40ms over the next several months as we enhance the Starlink system. There will also be brief periods of no connectivity at all.” The emails, sent to an unspecified number of users, marks the launch