Best Buy signed a definitive agreement to buy GreatCall for $800 million cash, said the retailer Wednesday. GreatCall provides connected-health and personal emergency response services to the elderly and has more than 900,000 paying subscribers, it said. It's “a large, growing market where technology can help in particular address the needs of aging consumers, their caregivers, payers and providers,” it said. The GreatCall buy will "augment" Best Buy's “growing business selling health- and wellness-related products,” it said.

Most U.S. manufacturers are stagnating in the initial stages of smart manufacturing technology adoption, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation reported Monday. Nearly 80 percent of small U.S. manufacturers “lack plans to implement Internet of Things applications over the next three years,” they said. U.S. manufacturers should leverage “smart, cyber-physical systems that combine model-based definitions, an end-to-end digital thread, modeling and simulation, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and seamless supply chain collaboration,” ITIF President Robert Atkinson and Vice President-Global Innovation Policy Stephen Ezell said with Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade Executive Director-Center for Global Industrial Strategies Inchul Kim and institute fellow Jaehan Cho.

Cyber criminals will steal more than 33 billion records in 2023, a 175 percent increase from the more than 12 billion records projected stolen for 2018, said Juniper Research in a new report. The projections are based on the amount companies plan to spend on cyber defense. According to the research, more than half the attacks in 2023 will take place in the U.S. Small business is projected to account for 13 percent of overall cybersecurity market in 2018, despite more than 99 percent of all companies being small businesses, the report said.

Launching the Disney-branded direct-to-consumer service late next year will be “the biggest priority of the company during calendar 2019,” said Disney CEO Bob Iger on a Tuesday earnings call. The “first priority” with the new service will be “reaching the core Disney fan, and we certainly have a number of different company touch points to do that,” he said. Though still in the “early days” of the launch of the ESPN+ direct-to-consumer service, “conversion rates from free trials to paid subscriptions are strong and subscription growth is exceeding our expectations,” said Iger. Disney had “relatively modest expectations” going into the ESPN+ launch,” he said in Q&A when pressed for specific subscription numbers. “I'm not going to be specific on numbers. We're just not ready to get into that.” The company is “heartened by the fact that the conversion rates from free to pay have been quite strong and the trends that we're seeing in terms of churn are modest in nature in the sense that they're manageable,” he said. “We feel really good about how we are positioned and we'll continue to look opportunistically in terms of what rights will be available,” he said. “A lot of the rights in sports are already spoken for,” but there are still “opportunities to take some of the rights that we already own for the ESPN primary channels and move them along” to ESPN+, he said.

Without specifically naming Facebook or Google, Apple tried to distance itself from the online platforms Tuesday, telling House lawmakers “the customer is not our product.” Apple’s business model “does not depend on collecting vast amounts of personally identifiable information to enrich targeted profiles marketed to advertising,” Apple Director-Federal Government Affairs Timothy Powderly wrote House Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore. The letter was a response to a July 9 query (see 1807090037) to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Larry Page from Walden and Reps. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.; Gregg Harper, R-Miss.; and Bob Latta, R-Ohio. The lawmakers accused Apple of collecting “non-triggered” user audio from mobile devices without disclosing the practice to users, and Google of inappropriately scraping email data. “We believe privacy is a fundamental human right and purposely design our products and services to minimize our collection of customer data,” Powderly wrote. “When we do collect data, we're transparent about it and work to disassociate it from the user.”

Only 34.5 percent of nearly 500 professionals involved in general data protection regulation (GDPR) compliance efforts say their organizations can defensibly demonstrate compliance with the new data privacy rules today, according to a Deloitte online poll released Tuesday. One-third of respondents (32.7 percent) hope to be compliant within 2018, it said. And 11.7 percent plan to take a "wait and see" approach amid uncertainty over how EU regulators in various countries will enforce the new regulation. "That the GDPR effective date has come and gone and many are still scrambling to demonstrate a defensible position on GDPR compliance reflects the complexity and challenges as the world of privacy rapidly changes," said Rich Vestuto, a Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory managing director. The poll of more than 490 professionals involved in their organizations took place June 22. GDPR took effect May 25.

Democracy for America and RootsAction.org joined Freedom from Facebook, a campaign urging the FTC to break up Facebook’s “monopoly” (see 1805210051 and 1807090014). The Open Markets Institute, Public Citizen, Demand Progress, the Content Creators Coalition and the Communications Workers of America previously joined. “It’s absolutely critical that the FTC responds to the national Facebook privacy crisis by breaking up the company, recognizing its violation of its consent decree, and imposing strong privacy rules on the Facebook platform,” said Democracy for America Chairman Jim Dean Tuesday. The FTC didn’t comment.

The FTC announced a new model timing agreement for Bureau of Competition merger reviews, which dictates investigation milestone timelines. The model timing agreement means parties “agree not to close the proposed transaction until 60 to 90 calendar days following certification of substantial compliance with the Second Request [Request for Additional Information and Documentary Material] depending on the complexity of the competition issues raised by the deal,” Competition Chief Bruce Hoffman blogged Tuesday. The model also requires parties to “provide 30 calendar days’ notice before certifying substantial compliance with the Second Request, and 30 calendar days’ notice before consummating the proposed transaction,” Hoffman said.

U.S. cybersecurity defense isn't keeping pace with enemy capability, and to catch up the private sector must collaborate with the government by sharing data in real time, said Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in a commentary Monday for CNBC. DHS is promoting collaborative efforts through its new National Risk Management Center (see 1807310052). Nielsen described the center as an “initiative driven by industry needs and focused on fostering a better way to bring government and the private sector together to defend our nation's” critical infrastructure. “In an era when our digital enemies are crowd-sourcing attacks, we must crowd-source our response,” she said, arguing the U.S. is in crisis mode.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said private investment unleashed from regulation is the best way to promote broadband deployment. "The free market, not bureaucracy, should pick winners and losers," he said at the Resurgent conference in Austin. "In the absence of heavy-handed regulation, private-sector broadband providers invested over $1.5 trillion in networks over the course of 20 years." The FCC had rules "demanding that companies maintain their fading copper networks," he said. "Every dollar that a company spends propping up copper is a dollar that can’t be spent building a next-generation, IP-based network. We voted to get rid of these perverse rules, enabling investment in the networks of the past to be used on the networks of the future." He concluded, "Whenever a technological innovation creates uncertainty, some will always have the knee-jerk reaction to presume it’s bad. They’ll demand that we do whatever’s necessary to maintain the status quo. Strangle it with a study. Call for a commission. Bemoan those supposedly left behind. Stipulate absolute certainty. Regulate new services with the paradigms of old. But we should resist that temptation. 'Guilty until proven innocent' is not a recipe for innovation ... History tells us that it is not preemptive regulation, but permissionless innovation made possible by competitive free markets that best guarantees consumer welfare."