Technology

IBM and the U.S. Department of EnergyOak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) todayunveiled Summit, the departmentnewest supercomputer. IBM claims that Summit is currently the world&most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer& with a peak performance of a whopping 200,000 trillion calculations per second. That performance should put it comfortably at the top of the Top 500 supercomputer ranking when the new list is published later this month. That would also mark the first time since 2012 that a U.S.-based supercomputer holds the top spot on that list.

Summit, which has been in the works for a few years now, features 4,608 compute servers with two 22-core IBM Power9 chips and six Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs each. In total, the system also features over 10 petabytes of memory. Given the presence of the Nvidia GPUs, itno surprise that the system is meant to be used for machine learning and deep learning applications, as well as the usual high performance computing workloads for research in energy and advanced materials that you would expect to happen at Oak Ridge.

IBM was the general contractor for Summit and the company collaborated with Nvidia, RedHat and InfiniBand networking specialists Mellanox on delivering the new machine.

IBM and the DoE launch the worldfastest supercomputer

Image credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory

&SummitAI-optimized hardware also gives researchers an incredible platform for analyzing massive datasets and creating intelligent software to accelerate the pace of discovery,& said Jeff Nichols, ORNL associate laboratory director for computing and computational sciences, in todayannouncement.

Summit is one of two of these next-generation supercomputers that IBM is building for the DEO. The second one is Sierra, which will be housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Sierra, which is also scheduled to go online this year, is less powerful at an expected 125 petaflops, but both systems are significantly more powerful than any other machine in the DoEarsenal right now.

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Airbnb creates $10M fund to cover cancelled reservations in Japan after regulatory shift

Airbnb has been one of the breakthrough stories in the wave of shared-economy startups that have emerged out of Silicon Valley, with a valuation of $30 billion for its travellers platform that lets people book private homes as accommodations, as well as other services. But even so, itnot immune to the force of regulation and the impact it can have on its business.

Airbnb has had to cancel a swathe of reservations in Japan, after a change in local laws required hosts to have specific licenses, but some have failed to get these ahead of the deadline set by regulators.

Itnot clear how many people or hosts have been impacted — the numbers are shifting as hosts receive their licenses — but Airbnb says that it has set up a fund of $10 million to cover any travellers who might get put out as a result of the rules. Some have estimated that as much as 80 percent of bookings have been impacted by the changes.

As Airbnb notes, the cancellations and its resulting moves are a result of changes to the country&sJapanese Hotels and Inns Act. Modified last year to include people using private homes for tourist accommodation for up to 180 days/year, those hosting now have to register and display a license number alongside their listings. The tourism authority (JTA) had set a deadline of June 15 to do this, and those who hadn&t received a license by June 1 had to cancel reservations booked before June 15, and Airbnb has extended this to cover the gap of other travellers so that they have time to make alternative arrangements:

&Any reservation scheduled for guest arrival between June 15 and June 19 at a listing in Japan that does not currently have a license has been cancelled,& Airbnb writes. &Going forward, unless the government reverses its position, we will automatically cancel and fully refund any reservations at listings in Japan that have not been licensed within 10 days of guest arrival.&

The $10 million fund, Airbnb said, willcover &additional expenses for guests who are scheduled to travel to Japan and have had their plans interrupted due to a cancellation.& Those whose reservations are cancelledon or after June 15 because of the license situation will get a full refund and a coupon worth &at least 100% of the booking value& to use on a future Airbnb trip. They will also receive a $100 coupon for an Airbnb Experience.

Those who are unable to find alternative Airbnb places to stay for their trip will be put in touch with a travel agency in Japan, JTB, to find alternatives.

For those who are impacted by this news, Airbnb will be sending you step-by-step instructions of what to do next, or you can find them here.

This is not the first time that Airbnb has had a stumble on the heels of regulatory changes. In Amsterdam, regulators are preparing to halve the number of nights a property can be let out to 30 nights per year starting in 2019, from 60 nights currently. Berlin and Barcelona have also tried to limit the platformgrowth with their own regulations.

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Sometimes you acquire a company for the assets and sometimes you do it for the talent. Today Workday announced it was buying Rallyteam, a San Francisco startup that helps companies keep talented employees by matching them with more challenging opportunities in-house.

The companies did not share the purchase price or the number of Rallyteam employees who would be joining Workday .

In this case, Workday appears to be acquiring the talent. It wants to take the Rallyteam team and incorporate it into the companyengineering unit to beef up its machine learning efforts, while taking advantage of the expertise it has built up over the years connecting employees with interesting internal projects.

&With Rallyteam, we gain incredible team members who created a talent mobility platform that uses machine learning to help companies better understand and optimize their workforces by matching a workerinterests, skills and connections with relevant jobs, projects, tasks and people,& WorkdayCristina Goldt wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition.

Rallyteam, which was founded in 2013, and launched at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in September 2014, helps employees find interesting internal projects that might otherwise get outsourced. &I knew there were opportunities that existed [internally] because as a manager, I was constantly outsourcing projects even though I knew there had to be people in the company that could solve this problem,& RallyteamHuan Ho told TechCrunchFrederic Lardinois at the launch. Rallyteam was a service designed to solve this issue.

[gallery ids="1055100,1053586,1053580,1053581"]

Last fall the company raised $8.6 million led by Norwest Ventures with participation from Storm Ventures, Cornerstone OnDemand and Wilson Sonsini.

Workday provides a SaaS platform for human resources and finance, so the Rallyteam approach fits nicely within the scope of the Workday business. This is the 10th acquisition for Workday and the second this year.

Workday acquires Rallyteam to fuel machine learning efforts

Chart: Crunchbase

Workday raised over $230 million before going public in 2012.

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Itthe end of an era for Yahoo Messenger, one of the first instant messaging apps on the market that introd. Today, Oath (which also owns TechCrunch) announced that it would be winding down the service on July 17 as it continues to experiment and consider how and if it can have a relevant place in the messaging landscape amid huge domination from Facebook and others in mobile apps.

&There currently isn&t a replacement product available for Yahoo Messenger,& the company writes. &We&re constantly experimenting with new services and apps, one of which is an invite-only group messaging app called Yahoo Squirrel (currently in beta).& Squirrel is a group messaging app Yahoo started testing last month. You can request access to the beta here.

Yahoo has not broken out active users of Messenger for some time, and theoretically anyone logged into any Yahoo property is logged into Messenger. Cumulatively over the last 20 years, hundreds of millions of people have used the service, the company said. The company says your Yahoo ID remains intact for other services like Mail and fantasy sports.

The company is not specific about its reasons for shutting down Messenger, but the writing has been on the wall for some time, given the dominance today of FacebookWhatsApp and Messenger, Snapchat, WeChat and a number of others.Notably, Oath also shut down AIM, AOLequivalent messaging app, in October.

&We know we have many loyal fans who have used Yahoo Messenger since its beginning as one of the first chat apps of its kind,& it notes. &As the communications landscape continues to change over, we&re focusing on building and introducing new, exciting communications tools that better fit consumer needs.&

Alongside that, the company, as a part of Oath, is now owned by Verizon, the telecoms behemoth. Ironically, itthe telcos of the world whose revenues have been cannibalised in part by over-the-top messaging services, although Yahoo Messengerdemise is far likely less related to that, considering that it is not one of the most popular services on the market today.

Yahoo says that you can download your chat history on Messenger for the next six months by going here. Files go to your computer or device — but not specifically to another messaging app.

Yahoo Messenger first made its debut as Yahoo Pager way back in 1998, at a time when instant messaging was the terrain of PCs, as an alternative to email and SMS on basic mobile devices. It was an early hit and popularised the idea of &over the top& messaging that was not tied to a specific service provider.

But like other services in that first generation of messaging, Messengerrole and functions were swiftly surpassed by faster and more functional mobile-based services, and specifically mobile messaging apps. Notably, WhatsApp was created by ex-Yahoo employees.

In the years since, Yahoo has had moderate (but far from blockbuster) success with Yahoo Messenger on mobile, which today ranks at 160 oniOSand 117 onAndroidin the social networking category, according toApp Annie. Other attempts atbuilding new messaging productshavebeen short-lived.

Oath, and its owner Verizon, are clearly in the midst of a big shift organizationally and strategically. The company today also announced that Lowell McAdam would be stepping down as CEO of Verizon, to be replaced by Hans Vestberg, the Ericsson ex-CEO who has up to now been VerizonCTO. Last week, Oath announced its latest leadership change, hiring Natalie Ravitz as its new communications head.

Italso gearing up for a big video and content overhaul later this year, which could also be one of the reasons behind todayMessenger news. Under new owner Verizon, Oath and its businesses are gradually shifting away from communications services to focus more on whatbeing whizzed around those networks.

More to come.

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Hello and welcome back toEquity, TechCrunchventure capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This time &round we had Connie and Alex on hand with Brian Ascher, a longtime partner with Venrock down in Palo Alto, Calif. It was a surprisingly busy week, so we had our work cut out for us. Without further ado:

  • GitHub! The biggest story in tech this week was right up our alley: Microsoft bought the venture-backed GitHub for $7.5 billion, bringing a massive portion of the developer world under its auspices. Whether developers wantpassports to Redmond remains up for debate, but from a corporate perspective, Microsoft move has largely been well-received. The transaction also provided a huge bump for GitHubinvestors, including a16z.
  • Domo! Another tech company is fighting to go public, but this time theredoubt it can pull it off. Domonumbers are the wrong side of rough, with the firm burning tectonic amounts of cash to grow quite modestly. If the firm manages to go public, and soon, it may struggle to stay alive.
  • Scooters! As per usual, therenew money flowing into the scooter niche. (Note: Domo is looking to tap thepublicmarkets at a time whenscootercompanies can raise $450 million in two rounds. Ouch.) We try to find out if Bird and Lime are worth the change, as well as why do they need so much cash. We also touched on the broadercrowded non-car, on-demand transit space.
  • Dataminr! Sticking to the mega-round theme, Dataminrhuge raise was perfectly timed for this episode, as our guestfirm has money in the company. Indeed, with $221 million more in its pocket, Dataminr — which makes sense of online chaos for its customers — has an epic bankroll from which to bet.

Herea fun question: What will Equity sound like when the market turns and we cover the slowing of venture and the compression of valuations instead of venture acceleration and towering new post-money figures All we know today is that the venture world is investing like that reality is far-off. We&ll see.

Hit play, and we&ll be right back.

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us onApple Podcasts,Overcast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.

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Hans Vestberg to take over as VerizonCEO in August

Verizon today announced CEO Lowell McAdam is stepping down from his post as August 1, 2018, seven years to the day he took the spot. He will stay on as Executive Chairman of the Board through the end of 2018 and as Non-Executive Chairman thereafter.

Hans Vestberg, Chief Technology Officer of Verizon as well as Executive Vice President and President of Global Networks (thata long title), will take over as the Chief Executive Officer of the telecom giant who also owns Oath and therefore TechCrunch.

McAdam has led Verizon as its CEO since August 2011 and became Chairman on January 2012. In addition to various mergers and acquisitions in the telecom industry, McAdam acquired AOL in 2015 and Yahoo in 2017 to form a digital media and advertising subsidiary.

Vestberg is relatively new at Verizon. He joined the company a year ago. He was previously the chief executive of Ericsson until he was ousted in July 2016 when he proved ineffective in turning the company around.

Vestberg spent most of his career working for Ericsson. From 1998 to the end of 2009, Vestberg has mostly been the Chief Financial Officer of various Ericsson divisions around the world. He was EricssonCEO from 2010 to 2016. For many years, Ericsson was a key player when it comes to telecommunications infrastructure and equipment. But the company had to face competition from Huawei and other infrastructure companies which led to disappointing performances.

He&ll have a different task at Verizon. Verizon is currently riding high as one of the top telecom companies in the United States but is eager to find new growth opportunities while transitioning to 5G networks. The fact that the CTO is taking over as CEO proves that Verizon cares a lot about 5G. The technology is going to be key to gain a competitive advantage against other telecom companies.

In pre-market trading, Verizon shares (NYSE:VZ) are currently trading down 1.06 percent to $48.48 compared to yesterdayclosing price.

Lowell McAdam published the following message:

V Team,

I have something I&d like to share with you. I&ve been with our company and its predecessors for 35 years, and your Chairman and CEO for the past seven. Today, marks the beginning of an important series of events for Verizon. We are announcing that Hans Vestberg will succeed me as the Chief Executive Officer on August 1st. I will serve as Executive Chairman of the Board through the end of the year, and then continue as Chairman of the Board in a non-Executive capacity starting in 2019.

This is an exciting period for Verizon, and I believe there is no better time for this transition than now. It is my pleasure to hand the reins over to Hans. Hans is a recognized executive in the telecommunications and technology industries, and since joining Verizon in early 2017 he has demonstrated his ability to innovate and execute. I know that he has the right expertise, experience and business acumen to lead us forward and build on our strategy. Importantly, Hans is an inspiring leader, with high energy and a passion for delivering on the core values that truly make Verizon the world leader it is today.

When I look back at the milestones throughout my career, the one that stands out most is Verizontransformation into a world-class technology company. Today, Verizon is one of the worldleading providers of communications, information and entertainment products and services to consumers, businesses and governmental agencies. Our goal has always been to improve lives through innovation. As I think about the power of 5G, I am convinced that this is a significant and pivotal time for Verizon and our entire industry & and now is the time to bring Verizon into its next chapter.

It has truly been a pleasure and a privilege to lead this great company. I am incredibly proud of what we have accomplished together. I look forward to continuing to play a part in its future as Executive Chairman of the Board, and I have tremendous confidence in where Verizon is headed with your support and Hansleadership.

Thank you for your dedication to Verizon. And never forget, therealways a higher gear.

Sincerely, Lowell

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