Partnership Announcement Quotes

Thompson announced that Yahoo was going to sue Facebook over patent infringement. The move deeply embarrassed both the engineers at Yahoo, who thought that kind of behavior was for trolls, and the media people at Yahoo who depended on traffic partnerships with Facebook to build audiences.

IBM jumped on this bandwagon last week, announcing with Apple a partnership to bring its enterprise expertise to iOS devices.

In August 2016, Ford announced plans to bring a Level 4 selfdriving car—without pedals or a steering wheel—to market by 2021. Other automakers have been working on similarly aggressive plans. Fiat Chrysler has partnered with Google’s Waymo to develop a fleet of self-driving hybrid minivans. GM, through its partnership with Lyft, has plans to bring Chevy Bolt robotaxis to the road as quickly as possible.

frustration has flared up over the Common Core initiative, involving the implementation of national reading and maths standards for primary and secondary school children. The Gates Foundation played a central role in bringing the standards to fruition. Spending over $233 million to back the standards, the foundation dispersed money liberally to both conservative and progressive interest groups. The two major teachers' unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, each received large donations, as did the US Chamber of Commerce. Gates himself suggested that a benefit of the standards is that they open avenues towards increasing digital learning. In 2014, Microsoft announced it was partnering with Pearson to load Pearson's Common Core classroom material onto Microsoft's Surface tablet. Previously, the iPad was the classroom frontrunner; the Pearson partnership helps to make Microsoft more competitive.

During NASA’s first fifty years the agency’s accomplishments were admired globally. Democratic and Republican leaders were generally bipartisan on the future of American spaceflight. The blueprint for the twenty-first century called for sustaining the International Space Station and its fifteen-nation partnership until at least 2020, and for building the space shuttle’s heavy-lift rocket and deep spacecraft successor to enable astronauts to fly beyond the friendly confines of low earth orbit for the first time since Apollo. That deep space ship would fly them again around the moon, then farther out to our solar system’s LaGrange points, and then deeper into space for rendezvous with asteroids and comets, learning how to deal with radiation and other deep space hazards before reaching for Mars or landings on Saturn’s moons. It was the clearest, most reasonable and best cost-achievable goal that NASA had been given since President John F. Kennedy’s historic decision to land astronauts on the lunar surface. Then Barack Obama was elected president. The promising new chief executive gave NASA short shrift, turning the agency’s future over to middle-level bureaucrats with no dreams or vision, bent on slashing existing human spaceflight plans that had their genesis in the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush White Houses. From the starting gate, Mr. Obama’s uncaring space team rolled the dice. First they set up a presidential commission designed to find without question we couldn’t afford the already-established spaceflight plans. Thirty to sixty thousand highly skilled jobs went on the chopping block with space towns coast to coast facing 12 percent unemployment. $9.4 billion already spent on heavy-lift rockets and deep space ships was unashamedly flushed down America’s toilet. The fifty-year dream of new frontiers was replaced with the shortsighted obligations of party politics. As 2011 dawned, NASA, one of America’s great science agencies, was effectively defunct. While Congress has so far prohibited the total cancellation of the space agency’s plans to once again fly astronauts beyond low earth orbit, Obama space operatives have systematically used bureaucratic tricks to slow roll them to a crawl. Congress holds the purse strings and spent most of 2010 saying, “Wait just a minute.” Thousands of highly skilled jobs across the economic spectrum have been lost while hundreds of billions in “stimulus” have been spent. As of this writing only Congress can stop the NASA killing. Florida’s senior U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, a former spaceflyer himself, is leading the fight to keep Obama space advisors from walking away from fifty years of national investment, from throwing the final spade of dirt on the memory of some of America’s most admired heroes. Congressional committees have heard from expert after expert that Mr. Obama’s proposal would be devastating. Placing America’s future in space in the hands of the Russians and inexperienced commercial operatives is foolhardy. Space legend John Glenn, a retired Democratic Senator from Ohio, told president Obama that “Retiring the space shuttles before the country has another space ship is folly. It could leave Americans stranded on the International Space Station with only a Russian spacecraft, if working, to get them off.” And Neil Armstrong testified before the Senate’s Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee that “With regard to President Obama’s 2010 plan, I have yet to find a person in NASA, the Defense Department, the Air Force, the National Academies, industry, or academia that had any knowledge of the plan prior to its announcement. Rumors abound that neither the NASA Administrator nor the President’s Science and Technology Advisor were knowledgeable about the plan. Lack of review normally guarantees that there will be overlooked requirements and unwelcome consequences. How could such a chain of events happen?

Though media outlets are increasingly on the lookout for good stories, there are still challenges to getting exposure. Tens of thousands of companies are clamoring for media coverage. Jason Kincaid, a former reporter at TechCrunch, told us that he got pitched over 50 times each day. What gets a reporter’s attention? Milestones: raising money, launching a new product, breaking a usage barrier, a PR stunt, big partnership or a special industry report. Each of these events is interesting and noteworthy enough to potentially generate some coverage. Jason advises bundling smaller announcements together into one big announcement whenever possible. Breaking a useage barrier is great. Releasing a new version is noteworthy. But releasing a new version and breaking a usage barrier in the process is even more compelling.

Two years later, the Israeli government announced that it had formalized a collaboration with Facebook’s Tel Aviv office, which—according to Palestinian activists who have regular contact with the company—has jurisdiction over both Israel and the Palestinian territories. They were thus replicating, in virtual space, the occupation of Palestinian land. In a statement about the partnership, Facebook said that “online extremism can only be tackled with a strong partnership between policymakers, civil society, academia and companies, and this is true in Israel and around the world.”27 Facebook’s actions, however, speak louder than its words. When it comes to Palestinian speech, it is only Israelis who have a real say—no matter whether the Israelis involved even believe that Palestinians should have rights. Ayelet Shaked, who served as Israeli justice minister at the time the agreement was formed and was directly involved in dealings with Facebook, has herself engaged in hate speech on the platform. Of Palestinian mothers, she once wrote: “They have to die and their houses should be demolished so that they cannot bear any more terrorists.”28 A paper published by the Haifa-based Palestinian digital rights group 7amleh documented the disparities in how hate speech from Israelis and Palestinians is treated, noting that “Facebook is the main source of violence and incitement online” stemming from Israel.29

Announcements of collaboration create a mirage of progress, without necessarily furthering the resolution of underlying issues,” wrote scholar Evelyn Douek in a 2020 piece critiquing what she’s dubbed “content cartels,” or multi-stakeholder partnerships involving more than one company and, typically, state partners.

In 2020 the EU announced partnerships worth US$91 million with Airbus, Israel Aerospace Industries, and Elbit to use their services to maintain an ongoing drone presence over the Mediterranean. Elbit’s Hermes drone and IAI’s Heron drone were used during Israel’s wars against Gaza since 2008.5 There’s growing competition in drone sales—Turkey’s TB2 can carry laser-guided bombs, be placed in a flatbed truck, and costs far less than Israeli or American drones, but Israeli models remain hugely popular.6 In 2017, Israeli drone manufacturers accounted for 60 percent of the global drone market in the previous three decades.

Jean-Louis and I had been partners in the search, and the French had come so close to finding Titanic that I wanted to make sure they shared the glory. On our way back to Woods Hole, we’d sent a small batch of photos to shore by helicopter, carried by one American and one French naval officer, to represent the partnership. I’d made a handshake deal that we’d wait to release our photos in the United States until theirs had arrived in Paris, so the announcement of our discovery could come in a simultaneous press release from both locations. Unfortunately, John Steele, my boss at Woods Hole, had buckled under pressure from U.S. news outlets and let them broadcast the images early. The French were outraged, and so was I.

All of a sudden, Tesla had the chance to buy a 5.3-million-square-foot plant in its backyard. Just one month after the last Toyota Corolla went off the manufacturing line in April 2010, Tesla and Toyota announced a partnership and transfer of the factory. Tesla agreed to pay $42 million for a large portion of the factory (once worth $1 billion), while Toyota invested $50 million in Tesla for a 2.5 percent stake in the company. Tesla had basically secured a factory, including the massive metal-stamping machines and other equipment, for free.fn8

My government has taken a special initiative for Africa, pledging $ 200 million in the form of credit line as part of the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) Scheme. My government has also announced a second scheme TEAM-9 initiative with a certain number of African countries with an outlay of $ 500 million. These initiatives aim at the long-term economic development of certain African countries.

Ask personally rather than rely on announcements—get the first date. Remember that you’re not looking for someone “to volunteer.” You’re looking for someone to commit as a volunteer for your cause. Develop strategic recruiting partnerships—build your network or a recruiting team. Don’t go it alone. Recruit short-term project teams. The more specific the time limit, the more people you’ll likely get to join you to help with a project. And short-term commitments might open the door to longer commitments. Assume that a “no” means “not now,” or “not this position.” Think of a “no” as an open door to listen carefully to the reasons behind the “no.” Develop roles and responsibilities or a position charter for each position. Don’t fill any position until you find the person who matches what you’re looking for.

There was one company—I think it was eMoneyMail—that shut down the company at a conference basically saying that the Internet is not a safe place to conduct transactions. They had 25 percent fraud. So for every $4.00 changing hands in the system, $1.00 was stolen. And it was all coming out of their pocket. They said, "We lost a ton of money," and they just quit. Then, people like Citibank and other large financial institutions that also competed with us that understood the fraud thing very well—they knew from many years of practice that this was going to become a big problem—didn't really approach it with the same happy abandon that we did. We started with this, "Fraud is going to kill us. What can we do to save ourselves?" They started from, "We have no fraud. How can we build this and not let any more fraud in?" Which is the wrong position to start because you are limiting your users, and new users learning about a new system really don't want to be restricted. Livingston: Why do you think they thought that way? Levchin: I think there's a very strong power of default where, to them, certain behavior to solve a particular problem is well understood. There are people that make careers out of risk management in big banks. They know that what you do is this and you don't do that. The other part, I think, is that a lot of them are public companies. We didn't go public until we had the fraud thing figured out. Somebody like Citibank or anyone with a substantial public visibility announcing that they are suddenly bleeding out $10 million a month in fraud would send serious shocks through the investor base. But I think, even if they did that, it's likely they wouldn't have been successful because—we had talked to a lot of them both as a potential acquirer and as partnership potential—none of them had actually ever gone to the sort of stuff that we did for our anti-fraud work. The default of how you do these things is very powerful, if you've been in the industry for a long time. So we were sort of beneficiaries of our naïveté. We thought, "We don't know how to do this; let's just invent it.