Data Sheet—U.S. and China Trade Relations Are Turning Into a Reality TV Show

“Be cool, it will all work out.”

Thus spake wrote the leader of the free world, on a service called Twitter (noun: “a series of short, high-pitched calls or sounds”), regarding the latest episode of our internationally broadcast reality television show otherwise known as U.S.-China trade relations.

Specifically, Donald Trump decided over the weekend that perhaps his Commerce Department shouldn’t have issued a death sentence against Chinese telecommunications company ZTE. The previously dimly-known company had improbably become the No. 4 smartphone seller in the United States. It ran afoul of U.S. restrictions on doing business with Iran, and the current administration in Washington prohibited U.S. companies from providing ZTE with components—effectively ending its ability to operate.

Once again the technology industry—and the world—finds itself on the other side of the looking glass. For all its development, business leaders in China know a single entity has the final say in all matters of importance, the Chinese Communist Party. Not true in the U.S., where the rule of law trumps the rule of women or men.

Now, a capricious president orders one thing one day, presumably fields a phone call from a powerful peer the next day, and changes national policy the one after that.

It is a cliché that businesses crave certainty and hate the opposite. Nothing is certain these days. The U.S. government, which once set the agenda for the global economy, rattles trade (and real) sabers one moment and capitulates without any tangible results the next.

How should CEOs plan in an environment like this? Their guesses are as good as anyone else’s.

NEWSWORTHY

I thought if you didn't have anything nice to say... Duke University MBA-holder Tim Cook returned to his alma mater and addressed graduates on Sunday. The Apple CEO tried to inspire the kids to “dare to think different” as he praised his late mentor Steve Jobs. Cook also took a veiled shot at rivals Facebook and Google: “We reject the excuse that getting the most out of technology means trading away your right to privacy.”

Maybe they deserved it. After it was discovered that researcher Aleksandr Kogan had used a trivia quiz app on Facebook to lift personal data from millions of users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledged to find and shut down any other potential leakers. On Monday, the company said it found a few more apps that might be misusing user data. Actually, 200, to be more precise.

Spot on. Ever more powerful supercomputers helped hurricane trackers set records for accuracy last year. The National Hurricane Center had the smallest average errors ever in its 12-hour, 24-hour, and two-, three-, four- and five-day tracking forecasts. The 155-mile average error in the five-day predictions matched the average two-day error in 1998.

Home cooking. Seattleites, New Yorkers, and Angelenos won't be able to order food delivered by struggling food delivery startup Munchery anymore. CEO James Beriker says the service is shuttering in Seattle, NYC, and LA and laying off 30% of its staff while redoubling on its efforts in San Francisco. "This reduction in scope will allow us to focus on continuing to execute on Munchery’s vision, achieve profitability on the near term, and build a long-term, sustainable business," Beriker wrote in a blog post on Friday.

I don't believe in coincidences. In a move perhaps not unrelated to President Trump's strange tweet about ZTE that Adam discussed above, the Chinese government is said suddenly to have restarted its review of the acquisition of Dutch chip maker NXP Semiconductors by U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm. The Ministry of Commerce is said to be speeding up the process, which was put on hold as trade tensions mounted, Bloomberg reports.

The moon and the stars. Speaking of Qualcomm, after two mediocre chipsets for smart watches, the company is pledging to wow the market with try number three coming this fall in devices running Google’s Wear OS. The new chips will allow smaller watches with longer battery life that will have an “ambient mode” to show attractive pictures even when the user has not raised their wrist, Wareable reports.

Easy read. The popular email encryption plug-ins PGP and S/MIME have critical security flaws that could allow hackers to read sensitive messages, warns researcher Sebastian Schinzel, a professor at the Münster University of Applied Sciences. “There are currently no reliable fixes for the vulnerability,” Schinzel tweeted Monday.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

The Big Short was Michael Lewis's book explaining how an investing bubble in the mortgage market exploded and nearly crashed the global economy. Longtime tech writer Doc Searls has been reading Lewis and thinks another bubble has been brewing among companies in the digital advertising market. And it may be about to pop thanks to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, he says. There will be winners and losers in the future ad ecosystem, he writes:

Pro tip #1: don’t bet against Google, except maybe in the short term, when sunrise will darken the whole adtech business.

Instead, bet against companies that stake their lives on tracking people, and doing that without the clear and explicit consent of the tracked. That’s most of the adtech “ecosystem” not called Google or Facebook.

Google can say it already has consent, and that it is also has legitimate interests in the personal data it harvests from us. Google can also live without the tracking. Most of its income comes from AdWords—its search advertising business—which is far more guided by what visitors are searching for than by whatever Google knows about those visitors. Google is also also highly trusted, as tech companies go. Its parent, Alphabet, is also increasingly diversified. Facebook, on the other hand, does stake its life on tracking people.

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BEFORE YOU GO

They're calling it a helicopter, but we know better. NASA's 2020 rover mission to Mars will include an autonomously piloted flying craft dubbed the Mars Helicopter. Sounds more like the first drone on Mars to me.