Where tech companies’ money comes from

Tech companies face dilemma after conundrum after balancing act, and now the spotlight is on their funding sources.

There’s Saudi money. Russian money. And let’s not forget money from ads and fake news that add fuel to the raging fire of cultural, racial, political and religious divisions in the United States and elsewhere.

There are questions surrounding Russian investor Yuri Milner’s investments in Facebook and Twitter after a New York Times report that showed Kremlin-backed money was included in those investments. (Milner pushed back against the report, saying, “Just to be Russian, suddenly, is to be under suspicion.”)

In addition, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the billionaire tech investor who has holdings in Apple, Twitter and Lyft, has been arrested. News of what the Saudi government is calling a crackdown on corruption — dozens are being held — emerged last weekend.

“We need to talk about this money because, boy, is there a whole lot of it — and as the world’s moneyed dictators, oligarchs and other characters look for more places to park their billions, mountains more will be coming to Silicon Valley,” columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote in the New York Times.

During the recent Senate Intelligence Committee hearing about Russian ads and fake news, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-California, asked the general counsels of Facebook, Twitter and Google how much profit they made from Russian propaganda surrounding the 2016 elections. The companies

had no response.

There are plenty of other recent examples of tech companies profiting from hate and misinformation, from PayPal providing payment support to hate sites such as JihadWatch to Google continuing to cash in on ads on fake-news sites.

Where do the companies draw the line? Should they?

Also, what’s a principled tech user to do when it seems no tech company is conflict-free? The introspection and push for changes that seem necessary at this point isn’t limited to the tech companies — we use their products, too.

We’re coming to find out that “anything you use that’s financially free might have another cost to it,” said Ann Skeet, director of Leadership Ethics with the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, in a phone interview with SiliconBeat Tuesday.

“Companies respond to customers and markets,” Skeet added. Maybe that means “not using a site for a while until certain conditions are met.”

She said many of these tech companies began with, and still have, good intentions.

As they’ve grown and made money from various sources and users, some of whom do not share those good intentions, “they have to decide: Is that the business they want to stay in?” Skeet said.

— Levi Sumagaysay Double the size of your tweeting

When Twitter announced in September it was testing longer tweets, some users praised the change, while others feared the site would lose its sense of brevity.

Now the San Francisco tech firm officially is doubling the character limit of its tweets to 280 characters.

The change will apply to all languages except for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese because users can convey more information in those languages with fewer characters, Twitter said Tuesday.

Twitter’s 140-character tweets have been a part of the site since it launched in 2006, helping the company to set itself apart from other social networks.

Celebrities, athletes and even President Donald Trump use the site to share their thoughts with millions of people.

But Twitter said some of its 330 million users found the 140-character limit frustrating, prompting the tech firm to test longer tweets.

“People in the experiment told us that a higher character limit made them feel more satisfied with how they expressed themselves on Twitter, their ability to find good content, and Twitter overall,” wrote Aliza Rosen, Twitter’s product manager.

The tech firm doesn’t expect the longer tweets to impact the site’s sense of brevity.

Even with the extra characters, users who tested the change tried to keep their thoughts brief. Only 5 percent of tweets sent were longer than 140 characters and only 2 percent were more than 190 characters, Twitter said.

The company didn’t disclose how many users have been testing the longer tweets.

— Queenie Wong Can HomePod find a home in the home?

Virtual-assistance devices are popping up in homes at an astounding rate, new research indicates.

Between Amazon with its Echo and Google with its Home, 7 million more devices went into operation across the U.S. in just the third quarter of this year, Consumer Intelligence Research Partners reported Nov. 6. That pushed the number of virtual assistants installed in the country to 27 million, with about 20 million of them from Amazon and 7 million from Google.

“Only one year ago, the entire market consisted of 5 million Amazon Echo units,” CIRP partner Josh Lowitz said in a press release.

The devices contain virtual assistants — artificial intelligence-boosted software that can perform tasks for the user — called “Alexa” in Amazon’s and “Assistant” in Google’s. The companies are banking on growth of the socalled internet of things in U.S. residences, with virtual assistants eventually acting as voice-operated controllers for everything in a home.

Amazon still holds three-quarters of the market for the assistants, but in the past quarter Google gained by one percentage point, the CIRP report indicated.

“Given the blistering pace of new product introductions, and how each has kept up with the other in terms of features and pricing, we expect they will continue to split the market this way, at least until other manufacturers bring their new offerings to the marketplace,” Lowitz said.

Analysts and consumers are awaiting Apple’s entry, with the $350 HomePod device the iPhone maker said will become available in December.

“On the one hand, the market is very new and growing rapidly, so there should be room,” Lowitz said. “On the other hand, Amazon and Google have a huge head start in establishing their home automation operating platforms.”

Apple’s assistant will be more expensive than most offerings from its rivals. Amazon’s Echo devices range in price from $50 to $230. Google has a $50 Home Mini and a $129 Home, but also sells the Home Max, for $400.