Investors are not happy with GoPro’s first earnings report

The numbers: Not so good. GoPro’s loss widened to $19.8 million in the second quarter, compared to a loss of $5.8 million a year prior. Still, the company beat analyst expectations when certain items are excluded. Revenue was $244.6 million for the quarter, up 38% from a year ago. The stock fell about 9% in after-hours trading.

The takeaway: GoPro is expanding its media presence, including an app for Microsoft’s Xbox consoles that launched last quarter. It said Americans using the Xbox app spent an average of “just under 30 minutes” watching videos of extreme sports and other adventures filmed with GoPro cameras. The company also highlighted the launch of its Pinterest channel and increases in YouTube views. Still, GoPro generates nearly all of its revenue from hardware sales. Its media efforts just help drive camera sales.

What’s interesting: This is the company’s first earnings report as a public company. Investors on the earnings call joked that they were disappointed by the lack of a GoPro video element to the webcast, but after-hours trading revealed investor disappointment with the debut. Executives on the call emphasized their focus on creating an all-around user experience to drive future GoPro sales: The company spent $34.7 million on research and development last quarter, more than double the same quarter last year. Looking forward, it will also be interesting to see the growth in different areas of the world. All of its markets are growing. Though Asia accounts for the smallest portion of revenue, at 12%, revenue there almost doubled, $29.1 million last quarter.

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Investors are not happy with GoPro’s first earnings report

Now that it’s conquered recruiters, LinkedIn is going after salespeople

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The numbers: Revenue jumped 47% to $534 million from $364 million in the second quarter last year. The net loss was $1 million, down from a $3.7 million profit in the same period a year earlier after a busy quarter in which the company acquired two companies. LinkedIn’s shares are up more than 8% in after hours trading.

The takeaway: The company continues to work on improving its talent solutions service, a tool for recruiters that, for a hefty fee, sorts and filters the site to find job candidates. The tool is LinkedIn’s cash cow, accounting for 60% of its revenue. No wonder then that it’s rolling out a similar product for salespeople. “Just as the launch of our flagship Recruiter product transformed the way talent professionals recruit, we expect Sales Navigator will similarly transform the effectiveness of sales professionals,” CEO Jeff Weiner said on the company’s earning call.

What’s interesting: The company is excited about China, where Linkedin recently launched a version of its site. On the company’s earnings call, CEO Jeff Weiner said that China was the fastest growing major market in terms of new members. 

Now that it’s conquered recruiters, LinkedIn is going after salespeople

Asia is about to kick global growth up a notch

If there is one thing equity markets excel at, it’s sniffing out government stimulus.

And across Asia a recent stock market surge suggests investors think governments there are ready make a pronounced push to keep growth going. Shares in China, Hong Kong, Japan and K0rea have all logged major gains over the past few months.

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In China, equity markets reflect rising expectations that the government will keep doing what it needs to prop up growth. Likewise, South Korea’s government is hoping to push its economy into a higher gear, after a somewhat soft reading for second-quarter GDP. In Japan, a run of bad numbers—including a sharp drop in industrial production—have been shrugged off by the stock market. Investors seem to be focusing the positive earnings results from exporters amid Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ongoing  efforts—known as Abenomics—to reinvigorate growth.

The takeaway? A semi-coordinated stimulus push out of Asia, particularly China, could provide a welcome boost for the global economy, which is already benefitting from steadily improving US labor market and the fact that Europe’s economy, while still growing quite slowly, is no longer contracting outright.

 

 

 

Asia is about to kick global growth up a notch

How many of Twitter’s active users are actually human?

Twitter’s user growth isn’t as strong as it seems.

Investors have decided, for better or worse, that the best measure of Twitter’s potential is how many users it adds every three months. The stock jumped more than 20% after the company reported it had 271 million monthly active users (MAUs) at the end of June, an increase of 6.3% from the previous quarter and more than most analysts were expecting.

The report offered a different narrative from that of skeptics who thought user growth had stalled. But, really, it depends on how you define “user.” Here are some examples of what passes for an active user on Twitter.

Brands

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Included among Twitter’s active users are plenty of accounts representing brands and other non-humans, from Coca-Cola to the United Nations to the lonely sink in Quartz’s newsroom.

On one hand, it makes perfect sense to include these accounts as active users: The rogue news outlet and the cat with more than a million followers are an important part of what makes Twitter so great. You enjoy following Quartz, don’t you? And many of these accounts have real-life humans behind them. Is a brand any less of a Twitter user?

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Brand banter

Well, in some crucial respects, yes. If MAUs are used to judge Twitter’s growth—how broadly the company has spread to people across the globe—then accounts representing brands and other non-humans seem beside the point. And they are nearly irrelevant to advertisers, who are generally interested in reaching people, not other brands. Most importantly, including brand accounts among MAUs leads to lots of double-counting of actual people. (I actively tweet from four accounts myself.)

It’s impossible to say what portion of Twitter’s active users aren’t human, and in fairness to Twitter, estimating that would be very difficult. But a glance at most Twitter feeds suggests it’s a large portion, indeed. That makes it fallacious to compare Twitter’s MAUs to Facebook, which only allows human accounts, though some animals slip in. On Facebook, brands must use “pages,” which aren’t considered separate users.

Bots

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A related issue is automated accounts. Buried in Twitter’s quarterly earnings reports, the company discloses what percentage of its MAUs “used applications that have the capability to automatically contact our servers for regular updates.” Translation: how many active accounts access Twitter outside of the official website and mobile apps, using Twitter’s API.

That includes lots of accounts that read or send tweets with apps Twitter doesn’t own. Those are legitimate accounts, probably more active than a typical user. But this category also includes accounts that are totally automated. These accounts can be very useful—sending alerts of earthquakes, new articles, the top of the hour, or anonymous Wikipedia edits—but they can hardly be considered human. They are bots.

When Twitter was preparing to go public last year, 7% of its active users used the API. The company also said (p. 49) it expected that percentage to “decline over time, particularly as usage of our mobile applications increases.”

But actually, the portion of Twitter’s MAUs using the API has doubled, to 14%. That segment of users is growing much faster than MAUs that don’t use Twitter’s API. Those now represent 37.9 million active accounts, up 148% in the past year.

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If you remove these API accounts from Twitter’s results, which isn’t entirely fair, last quarter’s MAU growth was only 3.9% over the previous quarter, instead of 6.3%.

Again, using Twitter’s API doesn’t necessarily make an account a bot. And bots are totally different from spam, which Twitter estimates to represent under 5% of its accounts. But the explosion in this category of user should raise eyebrows, particularly after Twitter predicted the opposite would happen.

It stands to reason that the enormous growth in these types of accounts isn’t coming from humans integrating their accounts with other services, especially as Twitter has clamped down on third-party apps using its API. For what it’s worth, RBC analyst Mark Mahaney disagrees with me. In a note after Twitter’s quarterly earnings this week, he wrote:

Our interpretation is that this implies that a growing number of users are using apps to refresh/access with Twitter content. These Users are making more of an effort to engage with Twitter. That’s actually a good thing.

BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield interpreted the data less charitably (registration required). Even if these accounts are humans, he wrote, “Off-Twitter activity is important to understand as those MAUs are not currently being monetized.” That is, advertising sold by Twitter, which is growing strongly, doesn’t reach accounts using the API—for instance, on Flipboard or Tweetbot. That’s the chief reason Twitter started restricting usage of its API in the first place.

So how many people are out there?

Ultimately, it’s not possible to estimate how many of Twitter’s monthly active users are actually human. But it’s fewer than 271 million, and there’s reason to suspect that recent growth has included lots of accounts that don’t have a pulse.

One lesson here is that MAUs aren’t a good way to measure Twitter. The company has stared arguing that it should be judged by how many people encounter tweets on the rest of the web and even television, and it may start reporting data along those lines. It also has an existing metric—timeline views—that serves as a better measure of actual use of Twitter by humans. That figure is up 15% over the past year, compared to 24% growth in MAUs.

Even better would be if Twitter disclosed how much time people spend with the service. Facebook recently disclosed that its average user in the US spends 40 minutes a day there. That’s a mind-blowing statistic against which all other companies that sell advertising should be measured.

*  *  *

The photo above, from Twitter’s new headquarters, is by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid and used under a Creative Commons license.

How many of Twitter’s active users are actually human?

Facebook is creating a parallel internet in emerging markets

In September 2012, Quartz published a prescient piece titled “Facebook’s plan to find its next billion users: convince them the internet and Facebook are the same.” The article argued that Facebook Zero, a way to access the social network without paying for data, would give Facebook “the chance to become the world’s homepage.”

Today, Facebook is making good on that idea. The company’s non-profit arm promoting internet adoption in poorer parts of the world announced today that a new app (imaginatively called the internet.org app) that will give free access to a host of online services, including Facebook, Google search, and Wikipedia, as well as “useful health, employment and local information services.”

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For now, the service is available only to users of the Airtel mobile network in Zambia—that’s some 3.5 million people. It is not exactly a plan to take over the world. More likely, it is a pilot program to test what this means for Facebook and for the carrier. This will not work everywhere. Chile, for instance, has outlawed zero-rated services on the basis that they violate net neutrality. There are legitimate worries that such services can undermine privacy and threaten free speech.

Yet in the past couple of years, Facebook has been remarkably successful in bringing its service, via Facebook Zero, to large swaths of the world. Emerging markets already make up six of the top seven countries on the social network, and it is only a matter of time before one of them—India—replaces the US as the country with the most users on the network.

The company’s free data plan has been widely copied; all the big web firms now offer a similar product. Indeed, free Facebook access is a a regular feature of new, cheap smartphones, whether they come from ailing (or dead) giants or indigenous makers. All of which was great for Facebook (if less so for mobile operators), but didn’t yet come close to convincing people that the internet and Facebook are the same.

Facebook’s latest move is a clear signal of the company’s intentions: The social network has long since ceased to see itself as only a social network. Instead, Facebook wants to become the next AOL or Google, sitting between users and the rest of the web. And just because it’s beginning that quest in poor countries doesn’t mean its efforts won’t move beyond there. Yesterday, the US carrier Sprint announced that it would offer Facebook-only data packages for $12 a month on its Virgin Mobile service. That is a practice that started on the other side of the world.

Facebook is creating a parallel internet in emerging markets

Why do kids’ clothes need to be gender-specific, anyway?

Feminists and parents are praising US clothing company Lands’ End for launching science-themed t-shirts for girls. The shirts were a direct response—and a very quick one—to a mother who posted a letter on Lands’ End’s Facebook page when her nine-year-old daughter was disappointed to discover that t-shirts with the solar system, sharks, and dinosaurs were limited to the boys’ section of the catalog.

This mom was right to write that letter, and kudos (and t-shirt sales) to Lands’ End for responding with action. But my initial reaction upon learning about the fuss was: Why not just get your daughter a boys’ t-shirt? And more importantly, why do kids’ clothes need to be gender-specific anyway? Don’t get me wrong, I find little girls in eyelet dresses adorable, but do we really need to tell our nine-year olds that a certain section of a catalog or store—or color, style, or tee-shirt graphic—is not for them?

If we want the next generation to know that their gender doesn’t (or shouldn’t) limit their interests, strengths, talents, and potential, why not start with one of their earliest—and most fun—forms of expressing their identities? I’m so glad that nine-year old girl can go back to school in a Saturn-sequined t-shirt, if that’s what she was hoping for. But I hope if she wanted a black, glow-in-dark T-Rex-emblazoned version, that would have been cool too.

Rather than categorizing (and therefore limiting) the offerings to boys and girls, companies like Lands’ End should consider categorizing their kids clothes as just that: kids.

Why do kids’ clothes need to be gender-specific, anyway?

France’s “Steve Jobs” and T-Mobile’s John Legere could be a match made in mobile heaven

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Illiad’s Xaver Niel and T-Mobile’s John Legere.Reuters/Jacky Naegelen, Steve Marcus

This post has been updated.

The Wall Street Journal is out with a big scoop this afternoon, reporting that the French telecommunications firm Illiad made an offer for the wireless carrier T-Mobile US “less than a week ago.”

T-Mobile, of course is also being sized up by SoftBank, the Japanese owners of its rival carrier, Sprint. Although details of that widely rumored deal are already out there, things have gone deafeningly quiet in recent weeks. Regulators have also signaled they are opposed to any transaction that would reduce competition in America’s wireless industry. Which could, if the Journal’s report is to be believed, offer Illiad a way in.

Illiad was founded by French entrepreneur Xavier Niel, who the Financial Times (paywall) once described as the “Steve Jobs” of France. The FT noted that former French President Nicolas Sarkozy referred to Niel as “the peep-show man” because the entrepreneur had built some of his fortune on sex chat sites on the Minitel, France’s early internet-like service, as well as sex shops.

More recently, Niel has become a co-owner of the French newspaper Le Monde. But more importantly, Illiad has been driving a price war in the French wireless industry that’s not terribly dissimilar to what T-Mobile and its unorthodox CEO John Legere have been doing in the US.

In theory, this could make for a great partnership.

Update at 12:51 pm: Illiad has confirmed the Journal’s report in a statement on its website, saying it has offered $15 billion in cash for 56.6% of T-Mobile US, at $33 per share (and that remaining shareholders could also benefit from cost savings). According to reports last month, Sprint/Softbank were prepared to pay about $40 a share for the entire company.

France’s “Steve Jobs” and T-Mobile’s John Legere could be a match made in mobile heaven

Bet you didn’t notice this tiny but revealing Facebook design change

Facebook just made a barely perceptible change to its website. The notification icon at the top of its navigation bar is an image of a small globe, which used to show North and South America, no matter where you logged in from. Americans (and people looking at the iPhone app) still get that view, but now users in Asia, Africa, and Europe see an icon of the Eastern Hemisphere (as first noticed by Tech in Asia).

Here’s how mine looks in Berlin:

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And here’s my colleague Adam Epstein’s in New York:

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A Facebook spokeswoman told me that the change was made very recently: “I suspect overnight.” (Two years ago, a design blog posted a similar geographically aware icon, but Facebook says the change was just now made worldwide.)

It’s only a few pixels, so why does it matter? Here’s one idea: The new icon, the one I see from Europe, is basically a map of the countries where Facebook is seeing huge user growth, and the company hopes to see revenue growth there too. Facebook just signed its first advertising deal with an agency in India. But, Medianama reports, “while India is the largest market for Facebook outside the United States, the company seems to be struggling with monetization in the country.”

Getting Facebook users in India and elsewhere to feel a little more home in the site’s interface is a big ambition, even if it only involves a tiny bit of screen space.

Bet you didn’t notice this tiny but revealing Facebook design change

A new tool tells companies when they’re about to lose their best people

Forget the traditional job hunt. “People are now increasingly being found for jobs, versus having to find their next job,” said Jon Bischke, CEO and co-founder of recruiting platform Entelo, which focuses on tech careers and highly skilled workers.

To serve this end, the company just launched a tool that uses predictive analytics and an algorithm to identify which workers have the right skills as well as “a higher propensity to leave” their current job.

The company made headlines in April when it announced a new paid search tool that would identify job candidates who are women or people of color by pulling data from individuals’ online profiles. At the time, the company said it was 95% accurate—and would help its 130 corporate clients make more diverse hires.

The new tool, which has been in the works since the company was established in 2011, “narrows the lens, narrows the filter” for recruiters and companies seeking in-demand engineers or experienced sales staff among others, Bischke told Quartz. The application is used in tandem with Entelo’s search engine and database of more than 25 million workers (mostly in the US) in highly skilled jobs such as data scientists and high-level sales people that are difficult to land.

Candidates flagged by the tool are six times more likely to leave their job within 120 days than their peers, according to the company. The algorithm is based on more than 70 variables, partly inspired by what recruiters look for when approaching potential candidates, but also include layoff notices or changes at the candidate’s current employer that might lead to turnover. It also measures how long employees have been at their current job, and changes in their social media profiles. Entelo uses a web crawler that searches public posts, comments, and tweets, and collects them into data files for professionals. Workers tend to become more active on social media and in professional communities just before they start a job search, Bischke noted. When testing the tool, about one-third of the people Entelo predicted would leave their jobs actually did.

But it might not matter.

“To a good recruiter there is no difference between passive and active candidates,” said Jeff Zinser, principal of Right Recruiting, who has worked in hiring for 25 years. “It all depends on the job you put in front of them… I have seen out of work people have no interest in a specific job and happily employed people very interested in the same job.”

Zinser is skeptical that Entelo can make a formula to predict reliably all candidates’ perspectives. There are “too many variables to break down into an algorithm,” he told Quartz.

The tool could potentially be used by employers to determine if current staff is getting restless and eager to change employers. But Bischke concedes that people that the tool surfaces may be exhibiting characteristics that fit the criteria but really have no intention to leave.

The best way to find out is still probably to talk over lunch or drinks—and so far no one has created an app for that.

Follow Vickie on Twitter @WorkingKind. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

A new tool tells companies when they’re about to lose their best people

What official rankings don’t tell you about where to go to university

Educational rankings are big business in the US. Attracting talent and maintaining prestige depends largely on where an American university falls in official tallies. Rankings are also a cash cow for the companies that produce them like US News and the recently-acquired Princeton Review.

That kind of dependence breeds misconduct. Prominent schools like Tulane’s Freeman School of Business in New Orleans and Emory University in Atlanta have been known to inflate their admissions test scores (like the GMAT and SAT) to try and boost their rankings. More recently, the alleged wrongdoing by the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Bloch School of Management has been spotlighted in a new series of investigations by the Kansas City Star.

The investigation found “inaccuracies and mischaracterizations of fact” in data that the school provided to the Princeton Review, which rated the school’s entrepreneurship program highly. It also discovered conflicts of interest between UMKC and researchers in a paper published in the Journal of Product Innovation Management. The paper named the school above top-ranking business schools like Harvard, MIT and Stanford for innovation management research, based on the number of papers published by various schools and researchers in certain journals in the field. (The research is still touted on the school’s website.)

The journal (and school) didn’t disclose that the two Chinese researchers who wrote the paper were previously colleagues of Michael Song, a professor who had joined UMKC from a part-time gig at a Chinese university. At the time of publication, authors PianPian Yang and Lei Tao were visiting scholars at UMCK. They shared an office with Song, came to the school at his invitation and consulted with him on the paper before it was published.

The investigation, conducted by two independent business journal editors and Retractionwatch.com, uncovered a number of quirks in the paper’s methodology that boosted Song and UMKC’s rankings. (Song ranked as the number one scholar in the field.) The time horizon of the dataset aligned with the years when Song published most of his research, and the researchers limited the journals included in the data set to Song and UMKC’s benefit.

Instead of crediting the university a researcher worked at when a paper was published, as is common practice, the study credited the entire output of an author to wherever he was currently employed, another boost to UMKC.

Here’s the ranking that appeared in the paper:

1. University of Missouri-Kansas City

2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

3. Michigan State University

4. INSEAD (an international business school)

5. Harvard University

6. University of Pennsylvania

7. Northeastern University

8. Texas A&M University

9. Stanford University

10. Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands

Here’s the ranking that would have resulted from prioritizing business schools by where the research took place, rather than to a researcher’s current employer:

1. Michigan State University

2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

3. University of Michigan

4. University of Pennsylvania

5. Harvard University

6. Delft University of Technology

7. INSEAD

8. Northeastern University

9. University of Texas at Austin

10. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Carnegie Mellon

Among the misleading data UMKC provided to the Princeton Review was its claim in 2012 that 100% of the students in the school’s entrepreneurship program went on to start a business after graduating. That percentage was gleaned from a survey conducted by the school of students enrolled in a one year certificate program that included a requirement that they start a business.

In a response to the Star, UMKC said the relationships revealed in the investigation don’t invalidate the study’s findings, and that the misunderstanding was caused by a disgruntled professor who raised a red flag about the paper after Song passed up recommending him for a promotion. The university also denied that it engaged in a “pattern of exaggeration” to boost its rankings.

The situation is a healthy reminder that even well-respected ranking organizations can suffer from self-reported and unaudited information from the schools they rank.

What official rankings don’t tell you about where to go to university

This Japanese doctor hung up his lab coat and founded a medical animation startup

The seeds for Hirofumi Seo’s future medical technology startup were planted when he was only 14 years old, courtesy of a television show aired by Japanese national broadcaster NHK. That program, The Universe Within III: The Human Genome, aired in 1999 and featured 3D computer graphics to illustrate life at a cellular level.

“It wasn’t the typical drama or something purely for entertainment,” Seo says. “It was science.”

Around the same time, Seo was already active in his junior high school computer programming club, studying CGI. He particularly enjoyed generating his own graphics through C-language programming, without using any software. He remained involved in computer clubs up until graduating from high school. When it came time to choose a university major, Seo was torn over his two passions: making computer graphics and science.

“I wanted to make a bridge between the two, but I had to decide what field of science to study,” he says. “I landed on medicine – not to become a great doctor, but to study real medical applications.”

Seo entered the prestigious Tokyo University Faculty of Medicine and filled all of the open slots in his schedule with professional CGI software classes. During his freshman year, he discovered a US-based company called Hybrid Medical Animation that was producing the kind of scientific animation that he dreamed of someday creating. Seo had found his calling – but he was then faced with the harsh reality that such companies were almost all located in North America.

First voyage abroad

For most Todai (the short way of saying Tokyo University) med students, year five means a hands on, three-month-long medical clerkship at the university hospital. A few opt to go overseas to Harvard or other top-tier international universities with established partner programs. Seo, however, had his heart set on Johns Hopkins and its century-old Department of Art as Applied to Medicine. There was just one problem – Hopkins had never accepted a short-term exchange student before.

Seo got to work, filling out applications and translating all of his work – which amounted to more than 1GB – into English. After pleading his case to the department chairs at both Hopkins and Todai, he was given the go ahead. Not only was it a first for Hopkins, but it would become Seo’s first trip outside of Japan.

There he met two fellow exchange students, one from South Korea and one from China, who also ended up at Hopkins due to a lack of homegrown medical animation outlets in their own countries. Seo realized that, in order to fill that void, he’d have to start his own company back home.

Going beyond animation

After adding M.D. to the end of his name, Seo exchanged scrubs and a lab coat for a dress shirt and slacks. He founded Sciement – a combination of science and entertainment – in May 2012. At its inception, the company was focused on creating easy-to-comprehend 3D animations. Seo explains his motivation:

I’m not the typical medical animator or illustrator, because most of them haven’t worked as medical doctors and interacted with patients. There are sick people, children who want to know about their disease, but can’t understand medical terminology. There’s no good content for them, and it may be a big challenge, but I want to solve these problems by using my unique experience as a doctor turned entrepreneur.

Now, Sciement also creates medical legal animations which can be used during criminal trials to visually explain trauma inflicted on a victim – i.e. the internal effects of being stabbed in the chest. Such visual aids can have a big impact on the prosecution, often more than verbal testimony by a medical examiner and crime scene photos.

Seo’s main role is acting as an “architect” that connects clients with designers and programmers.

“Many content creators don’t understand science or don’t want to study the science behind a project. I act as a director, supervising their work and making sure the science is sound without being too hard to grasp for the average viewer.”

The startup has attracted more than 10 clients so far, including pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and RIKEN – Japan’s largest scientific research institute.

Sciement, which Seo initially bootstrapped with his own savings, has raised approximately JPY 10 million (US$98,000) from private investors. When asked if he is interested in attracting venture capital, Seo says that he’s more keen to find “mentors” than additional investors, as he hasn’t solidified the company’s business model.

Like the bronchi in our lungs, Seo hopes to eventually branch out beyond animation. He’s interested in designing medical software that uses big data collected from a multitude of patients to create digital models of certain diseases and disorders – cardiac abnormalities, for example. A digital model would be extremely useful when actual human specimens are facing a shortage. He also wants to utilize an increasingly popular technology – 3D printers – to create scale models of internal organs, via CT scans of a patient.

“I don’t want our work to just look cool,” he adds. “I want it to be medically accurate.”

See: Here are the top 3 startups from Innovation Weekend Tokyo

This Japanese doctor hung up his lab coat and founded a medical animation startup

What privacy settings tell you about the profound differences between Google and Apple

When you install an app on an Android smartphone or tablet, it asks for access to data such as your location or address book. If you say no, you can’t install the app. Not surprisingly, this puts some people off:

These are the permissions my bank’s Android app is asking for. Are they crazy? Am I crazy? http://t.co/Yj2zKrT8DP—
Tim Bray (@timbray) August 21, 2013

Apple handles things differently. On its mobile operating system, iOS, apps don’t ask permission when they’re installed. Instead, iOS takes some permissions as a given—internet access for instance—but for more sensitive data, such as your photos or location, the app has to ask for access when you use it. That more closely relates the decision to grant access to the reason for asking for it.

That there should be a difference between Android and iOS, which between them control 96.3% of the smartphone market, isn’t surprising. They have different overarching philosophies: Android is free for any smartphone maker to use while iOS is for iPhones only. Developers can freely upload their apps to the Google Play Store while Apple has tight gatekeeping. Android is easily customized; iOS is not.

But both Apple and Google are making big changes to the nuts and bolts of how permissions work, and they’re moving in opposite directions: While Apple is making it harder for apps to get access to your data, Google is making it easier. Most users may not notice; compared to the design, functionality, choice of apps, and price, privacy often comes last in people’s decisions about which phone to use. But these little-noticed details will have a profound impact on how widely your data are shared with other companies.

A growing chasm

Last month, Google simplified the way apps ask for access on Android. Where before an app might specify, for instance, whether it needed to send text messages from your phone or only to read them, now the system just says the app needs access to SMS. Easy. But that also means giving up lots more permissions—particularly to free apps, which generally demand much more access:

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The goal, a Google spokesperson says, is to make Android’s system “more useful as well as making the permissions easier to understand.”And users still have some degree of control: They can turn off automatic updates. But few people will know about or make the effort to do that.

By contrast, Apple’s forthcoming iOS 8 operating system will require app-makers to be much more careful about what data they request. They will have to explain to users why they need permissions. The operating system will remind users that such permissions have been granted. Some will be narrowed: It will be possible, for instance, to gain access on a one-time basis, or only to parts of the data (e.g., a single contact instead of the whole address book.)

In another privacy-conscious move, Apple is introducing a way to cloak the true identify of a phone from Wi-Fi networks that may be sniffing around for tracking purposes. That follows a long line of other such moves. Luis Abreu, an app designer who watched 17 hours of talks at Apple’s developer conference to identify all the security and privacy changes, makes the point well:

Applications must have a very good reason to access Location and make that clear to the user through the provided purpose description text or they will be rejected by the App Store team.

Different paths to the same destination

Why such differing approaches to permissions, when the ultimate goal of both companies is to give users as big a choice as possible of apps that are well made and easy to use?

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One way to look at it is to consider Google as an underdog fighting back. Though Android is the operating system of four out of every five smartphones in the world and now has more apps in its store than iOS (most of them free; see chart above), serious app makers still build a version for iOS before they build one for Android. That’s because iOS is where the money is. So making life easier for developers is crucial for Google, while Apple can afford to tighten its ship.

But there is more going on. Android’s changes follow a predictable Google pattern. The company wants to simplify the experience for users while trying to obtain more data from them. An update to Google’s Gmail app on iOS 7 earlier this year, for instance, was advertised as fetching email in the background. But it also signed in users to various Google apps, ensuring that the company could track user movements across their products. In 2012, Google simplified its privacy practices by combining 60 disparate policies into an overarching one. That certainly makes it easier for users, who now only have to read one incomprehensible piece of text. But it also allowed Google to mine data across services. And so on.

“Android recognized that a lot of users didn’t update the apps because there were new permissions and they were getting stuck in the update section. And this is a way for apps to be able to update themselves regularly and work properly,” says Oliver Amar, CEO of MyPermissions, an app that allows users to see what permissions the apps installed on their phones use.  “I don’t think there’s any malice in it. They’re just making sure developers have the ability to update when they want to.”

Apple on the other hand is less reliant on user data. It needs the stuff as much as any other company operating online today—but to improve its services, not as the basis of its business, which relies on selling hardware, not mining data to sell ads.

But the fact that Apple is giving users more control of their data doesn’t necessarily mean it cares more about their privacy than Google. Abreu suggests it is probably because Apple is aiming at the enterprise market and at children, both of which require much tighter controls, either by law or practice.

And nor is there much evidence that most users particularly care. There are roughly 1.5 billion smartphone users in the world today. Fewer than 10 million of them have downloaded MyPermissions.

What privacy settings tell you about the profound differences between Google and Apple

Quartz Daily Brief—Americas edition—Samsung down, Sony up, Banco Espirito wipeout, DC baby boom

What to watch for today

John Kerry finds a friendlier crowd in India. The US secretary of state is on a three-day trip that he hopes will go better than his disastrous visit to the Middle East. The fifth annual India-US Strategic Dialogue will be a chance to build relations with prime minister Narendra Modi’s new government.

West Africa tries to get a grip on the Ebola outbreak. Liberia is putting non-essential government workers on 30-day compulsory leave, and may quarantine some communities and shut down schools. Airports worldwide are on alert for signs of the virus.

Tesla’s progress report. The electric-car maker targeted 35,000 deliveries this year, and its second-quarter earnings offer a glimpse into its progress. Investors will be hoping for news on the company’s anticipated $5 billion “gigafactory” plant for making batteries, which could be as big a business as its cars.

Update from the oilfields. ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips both report earnings, following positive results from Royal Dutch Shell (see below) and BP.

While you were sleeping

Samsung had its worst results in two years… Second-quarter operating profit fell 24.6%, in line with the company’s guidance, but it also warned that the second half of the year “will remain a challenge” as its smartphones are squeezed by intense global competition.

…While Sony’s was surprisingly upbeat. The consumer electronics company’s latest quarterly earnings were 26.8 billion yen ($261 million), up from 3.1 billion yen the same period last year. It recently warned investors that it expects to post a full-year net loss—an outlook that remains unchanged.

A record-setting loss in Lisbon. Banco Espirito Santo reported a mammoth €3.6 billion ($4.8 billion) first-half loss, wiping out its capital buffer and forcing a scramble to raise funds. Loans to cash-strapped companies controlled by the Espirito Santo family—some apparently without proper authorization—were largely to blame.

Bad news and good news in the euro zone. Preliminary data from Eurostat showed July inflation was only 0.4%, down from 0.5% in June, in a serious setback for the European Central Bank’s struggle against the threat of deflation. But the euro zone jobless rate edged down to 11.5% in June from 11.6% in May.

Yum said the latest China food scandal is hurting business. The owner of KFC and Pizza Hut said the furor over expired meat has had a “significant, negative” impact on sales, and could have a material effect on its earnings. Shares in the company fell more than 6% in after-hours trading.

Target hired a PepsiCo exec as its CEO. The beleaguered big-box retailer picked Brian Cornell (paywall), previously head of Pepsi’s US foods division, to lead Target as it tries to win back trust after a credit card security breach.

Royal Dutch Shell promised to do even better next time. The oil and gas supermajor reported $5.1 billion in earnings (paywall), up from $2.4 billion in the same period last year, but said its performance was hampered by its struggling US shale gas business.

China was told to grow more slowly. The International Monetary Fund recommended GDP growth of 6.5-7% in 2015. China’s target is 7.5%, but to achieve it Beijing is relying on unsustainable government investment.

Quartz obsession interlude

Roya Wolverson on why business travelers should think twice about booking with Airbnb. “Airbnb bookings aren’t always the bargain they appear to be. That’s partly because business travelers are more likely to need an entire apartment for work privacy, not just someone’s spare room. A US city-by-city study by the web data company Priceonomics found that while renting a private room on Airbnb is about half as expensive on average than staying in a hotel, renting an entire apartment is less of a bargain, with a cost savings of just over 20%.” Read more here.

Matters of debate

The new privilege is denouncing one’s privilege. It’s a go-to move for elitists in an anti-elitist age.

Singapore’s surveillance state is a big data lab. But can it create a harmonious society?

Europe’s museums are too popular. Crowds are forcing institutions to choose between accessibility and art preservation (paywall).

The end of the big-box era is nigh. Customers are edging away from Target and Walmart and turning to the web and smaller boutiques.

Nintendo’s empire is doomed. Smartphones and tablets pose an existential threat to the console videogame business.

Surprising discoveries

Camel milk could be the next superfood. As long as a dangerous respiratory disease doesn’t spoil its image.

Red Robin has America’s most unhealthy meal. Its “Monster” double burger, milkshake, and bottomless fries rack up 3,450 calories.

There are geysers on one of Saturn’s moons. The jets on Enceladus suggest deep oceans of water that could potentially harbor life.

Washington, DC is having a baby boomlet. The government shutdown nine months ago gave federal employees a lot of spare time.

A blood test could predict your risk of suicide. It picks up a genetic mutation in how the brain deals with stress.

Our best wishes for a productive day. Please send any news, comments, Saturnian geyser photos, and Monster burgers to hi@qz.com. You can follow us on Twitter here for updates throughout the day.

Sign up for the Quartz Daily Brief here, tailored for morning delivery in Asia, Europe & Africa, and the Americas.

Quartz Daily Brief—Americas edition—Samsung down, Sony up, Banco Espirito wipeout, DC baby boom

In just 2 weeks, WeChat users book 5,000 Singapore cab rides on EasyTaxi

Just over two weeks ago, cab-booking app EasyTaxi started taking orders within the WeChat messaging app. How’s that working out so far? Joon Chan, EasyTaxi’s regional manager and director for Southeast Asia, tells Tech in Asia that 5,000 rides have so far been taken by people who booked in WeChat.

Joon describes the WeChat tie-up as a “fantastic partnership.” It’s only available in Singapore at the moment ahead of rolling out across EasyTaxi’s other markets in Asia. To use it, a WeChat user must first search for the EasyTaxi ‘official account’ in the messaging app (called ‘EasyTaxiSGP’). Then after logging in to your EasyTaxi account, you can snag a ride inside WeChat in exactly the same way you would from within EasyTaxi’s own app.

It’s WeChat’s first push into ecommerce and mobile services in a market other than its native China. For a sense of scale, WeChat users booked over 100,000 taxi rides in nine days in China (connected to the Didi Dache taxi-booking app, which only operates in China) when that started in January this year.

See: WeChat grows to 396 million active users

Joon affirms that, as promised on launch day, an online payment system for the WeChat-booked taxi rides is still being worked on by Tencent (HKG:0700), the maker of the app. He adds that Tencent and EasyTaxi are both marketing the tie-up in a sign of how keen they are to work together.

EasyTaxi’s main rival in Singapore and across Southeast Asia is GrabTaxi.

In just 2 weeks, WeChat users book 5,000 Singapore cab rides on EasyTaxi

The unsung hero of Hawaii’s economy is its recession-proof film and TV industry

Jack Shephard’s words at the end of season three of LOST (warning: spoilers) were not just ominous in the show’s context—they were also strangely prescient of Hawaii’s film and television industry. More and more movies and TV shows are going back to the state to film among its incredible beaches, mountains, and jungles. And these productions are huge job creators.

The Hawaiian film and TV industry saw an 84.9% increase in the number of jobs it created from 2001-2011, much greater than the 13.8% increase for Hawaii’s creative sector as a whole, which also includes marketing, music, radio broadcasting, etc.

Much of its success is due to the hit TV show LOST, which became a monstrous cultural phenomenon soon after its 2004 pilot and sent droves of tourists to the island of Oahu to visit the show’s many set locations. But Hawaii was home to major film and TV productions long before that—Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jurassic Park filmed there in 1980 and 1992, respectively.

The industry’s largest growth happened during the time that LOST was filming there (2004-2010). The show’s mysterious island became an important “character” over the course of the series, and was featured prominently. Part of what made Hawaii so attractive to LOST and other productions is its versatility. LOST managed to convincingly transform the island of Oahu into South Korea, Australia, England, Russia, and Iraq, among other locales.

In 2006, the state introduced an enticing 20-25% tax credit for production costs, provided that the film or TV show receiving the credit make financial contributions to the Hawaiian education system or workforce. (LOST was filmed entirely with a local film crew.) And in 2010, the Hawaii 5-0 remake came to town, replacing LOST as another popular, long-running TV show that filmed exclusively in the state. That same year, both Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Tropic Thunder filmed in Hawaii.

Even during the recession, Hawaii’s film and TV industry grew. While Hawaii lost a net 0.7% of its jobs from 2007-2011, the film and TV industry grew 7.6% over the same period. Not only was it largely recession-proof, but it performed far better than the national average of the same industry. With all that growth, Hawaii’s creative sector generated $3.8 billion in economic activity in 2011, good for 6% of state GDP that year.

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Hawaii Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism

The unsung hero of Hawaii’s economy is its recession-proof film and TV industry

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