'The Onion' Might Be Looking To Sell | ||
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Popular satirical news website 'The Onion" has hired a financial adviser for a possible sale, according to Bloomberg. They're apparently working with investment bank GCA Savvian. Bloomberg reached out to Steve Hannah, "The Onion's" chief executive officer who wouldn't comment on the situation. As Bloomberg notes, "The Onion" was founded as a magazine by students from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1988. Eventually they moved to digital-only, and their satirical news content is spread across several websites and YouTube channels. A fund manager, David Schafer, bought the company in 2003.
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The Patriots Just Screwed Up Royally On Twitter After Getting Their One Millionth Follower | ||
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Football's New England Patriots just reached 1 million followers on Twitter. That's the good news. The bad news is that what they did right after is going viral for all the wrong reasons. After reaching the mark they posted this tweet, according to Deadspin.
The Patriots have deleted the tweet since, this timely screenshot comes courtesy of Deadspin who was quick enough to snap it. Here's what happened - the Patriots said they would create custom avatar jerseys for anybody who retweets this tweet (now corrected), according to Deadspin. This was an early and unfortunate result. The Patriots apologized on Twitter later on: Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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It's A Race Against Time To Get Philae's Most Important Comet-Science Experiment Done | ||
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When the European Space Agency got word from their comet lander that it had bounced its way into a dark corner of the comet, they knew it meant a race against the clock. Timing is an issue now because the lander's limited battery life — the scientists must now use the battery sparingly to conduct their scientific experiments. These tests could ultimately tell us if comets like this one carried the key molecules that culminated the conditions for life on Earth. The lander has a limited battery life — about 60 hours — but also solar panels that can generate power. The probe, however, bounced a few times upon landing, ended up moving away from its target touchdown point where there was plenty of sunlight and into a shady area that seems to be under a cliff. Right now, it only gets 1.5 hours of sun every 12 hours. That shady area has cut down the probe's potential for power, and severely limiting the amount of work it can get done on the comet.
Therefore, scientists are moving fast to make sure they get the data they've worked for more than ten years to obtain, way back when ESA first launched the Rosetta spacecraft in 2004. The latest instrument Philae is using is a type of hammering device, shown below, that will penetrate the comet's surface and extract samples to analyze the comet's chemical make up. Despite landing on its side, most of Philae's instruments are working and transmitting data to Earth, including the six cameras on board that are taking beautiful images — the first images ever taken on the surface of a comet. It is perhaps the most important instrument on board Philae: The MUlti-PUrpose Sensors for Surface and Sub-Surface Science instrument, called MUPUS for short. MUPUS is equipped with a hammer, that will nail a device that resembles an ice pick into the comet. Once it's penetrated the surface, the device will collect samples of the comet's surface. Here's it's hammering action during lab testing:
They're calling the event "ThePinPrick."
The scientists are hoping for a couple of major discoveries from Philae's analysis. "The really big result will be if Rosetta's landing probe... detects 'chiral amino acids'," John Plane, a professor at the University of Leeds in London, said in a statement released by the university. Chiral amino acids are a special type of molecule that, as far as we know right now, only exists in biological systems on Earth. If Philae discovered the presence of these amino acids on a comet, it could be a smoking gun for the origins of life on Earth. Another big question scientists are asking is whether comets were responsible for water on Earth. "Comet impacts are thought to have been one of the principal means by which water was delivered to the early Earth, around 3.6 billion years ago, possibly contributing half the water in our oceans," Stanley Cowley, who studies comets at the University of Leicester, told The Daily Galaxy. Stay tuned for more information about MUPUS and the rest of Philae instruments for the Google Hangout ESA is hosting Friday morning at 8:00 am EST. CHECK OUT: The Philae Lander Bounced Off The Surface Of The Comet And Is Now Stuck Under A Cliff READ MORE: 'We Do Not Fully Understand What Has Happened' On The Comet Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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It's unclear how long Philae will last under the shadowy conditions that will, in all probability, become its permanent resting place for months to come.
Scientists have already unleashed MUPUS, and are planning to hammer 2/3 of the ice pick's length into the surface.
If the MUPUS drilling and sample collection is successful, other instruments on board, like The COmetary SAmpling and Composition Experiment (COSAC), will then analyze the samples. Chicago Bears' Player Challenges Lions Fan To A Fight For $25K | ||
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Brandon Marshall got into a Twitter war on Thursday with a Detroit Lions fan, which ended in him offering the fan $25,000 to fight him, according to ESPN Chicago. It started when a Lions fan reminded the Bears star receiver about his comment about a year ago referring to the Lions as the "little brother" of the Chicago Bears. ESPN recounts: "Marshall responded by challenging the fan to step into the ring with him for $5,000, later posting on Twitter that if he lost, he'd give up another $10,000. But if Marshall won, the fan would have to serve 100 hours at an orphanage, the receiver said. The Lions fan later upped the ante, saying that if Marshall made the bet $25,000, the two could fight in Detroit." Here Marshall quotes the fan's response and adds a comment of his own:
Hours later, Marshall realized he was getting a ton of media attention for this and tweeted the following: The Bears are having a rough season. Their 3-6 record puts them in last place in the NFC North. And Marshall has been plagued by nagging injuries and inconsistency all year.
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One Of The Hottest Video Games Has Some Hilarious Glitches | ||
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The latest game in Ubisoft's flagship "Assassin's Creed" series, "Assassin's Creed Unity," was released this week. And so far, it's been anything but smooth sailing. Right away players reported a bunch of glitches which almost made the game unplayable. The worst part is that a lot of these errors came even after Ubisoft issued a huge 1 GB patch on day 1. The situation is a shame, because the imagery in the game, which is set in Paris during the Revolution, is absolutely stunning if it worked properly. Ubisoft has since promise to release even more patches to fix a lot of the issues, according to GameSpot. But until that happens, players have taken to social media to post some of the horrors they're seeing in the game And some of them are unbelievably hilarious. Check out some of the glitches below (very minor spoilers):
This is what Arno's father is supposed to look like.
Something went terribly wrong here.
That's supposed to be Elise, Arno's adoptive sister. Yikes.
This seems like a terrible way to die:
Even young Arno is missing his face in this scene.
This isn't the first time a game has included some hilarious glitches, of course. Just last month, players found some hilarious surprises when they tried to scan their faces in "NBA 2K15." (Via Game Informer) SEE ALSO: Nintendo Is Making One Huge Mistake Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Startup CEO Whines That A New Dad Employee Won't Work Late | ||
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As we've previously reported, many tech workers, particularly software developers, are under intense pressure to work insane hours. The myth is, they should be so passionate about their jobs that working is the only thing they want to do. This myth doesn't happen to be true. People that work all the time aren't better, more productive or even more passionate workers. Research shows that productivity typically declines after 40 hours a week. A Stanford student research project specifically found that overworked coders working 60-hour weeks produced less high-quality code than refreshed people working 40-hour weeks. Nevertheless, the pressure exists, particularly in the startup world where money is tight, deadlines loom and the all-nighter culture rules. But there may be a glimmer that a backlash against this myth is starting to happen. A startup CEO got slammed on Quora when he posted a question complaining that his employee, a new dad, insisted on leaving the office between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. I manage a young startup company in the valley. My only employee is great but he is also a new father. Which means leaving work between 6 and 7 pm. I understand him but it's hard for a startup that the commitment lasts for work hours only. What would you do as a CEO? By today, there were 65 answers or so essentially telling the guy something like this, "Ok, so you are upset that he is not working at the stereotypical, and completely inaccurate, 80-100 hours per week. Are you only getting 50-60? Seriously? I find that I get the maximum amount of work done at around 50 hours per week. It falls off sharply after that point." Or this, "Too many companies think it is natural for developers to work late hours." Or this: "The new father neglects his kid(s) to work until midnight? Are you going to post a question about your employee not staying around until 1 am or 2 am next?" The CEO was so universally trounced by his attitude, that he eventually updated the question to clarify: "The problem is not that the guy is leaving early per se ... the question I have is more with the rigidity of the time even when something more urgent is needed." In other words, the new dad was absolutely insisting that his evenings would be spent with his baby, and not doing "urgent" work when the boss called. The boss was looking for ideas on how to cope. To that, the people had this simple advice: "If you want a night shift hire somebody else to cover that." The responses are a good sign that work life balance may soon arrive more broadly in in the tech industry, maybe even at startups. But, sadly, the question also means it hasn't really arrived for everyone. SEE ALSO: The Stress Of Being A Computer Programmer Is Literally Driving Many Of Them Crazy Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Aaron Levie On Box's Unusual IPO Process, Burn Rate, And The ‘Race To The Top’ | ||
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Box’s 29-year old CEO Aaron Levie has been the driving force behind its success. His idea to turn ordinary file sharing software into a business collaboration platform has made Box an enterprise solution that companies and their employees generally love. Currently, 99% of the Fortune 500 companies use Box in one way or another, with over 20 million users worldwide. But when Box filed for an IPO back in March, its S-1 raised a lot of eyebrows because of Box's high spending rate and massive losses — the company's sales and marketing expenses outweighed its revenue. Box has delayed its IPO until possibly early next year, opting to raise additional capital from the private market in July instead. We caught up with Levie on Wednesday to talk about Box’s IPO process, storage business, and its high spending. Here’s what he had to say on:
Here’s a lightly edited transcript of the interview: Business Insider: Do you have any regrets over the timing of your S-1 filing? Would you have filed a little later? Aaron Levie: We probably would have changed a couple different variables on some of the timing. We ended up filing literally a week before a fairly significant market correction. If you had known that were coming, I think by definition you wouldn’t file. But beyond that, what’s funny is that people forget that to get to this point, we’ve been building the company for nearly 10 years. This is a very small bit of turbulence relative to all of the complexity you deal with building a company. It’s a fairly incremental thing that you work through. BI: But if you keep delaying the IPO, doesn’t it usually mean there’s financial distress or a drop in investor interest? AL: There’s no question that our process has been extremely unusual. I agree with that. But when you kind of look at the numbers and the growth and all of the things that we’re executing as a business, we think that reflects a very different kind of picture from what you might otherwise be perceiving. BI: Then what should we pay more attention to? AL: Across every industry, every size of business, we’re only seeing an increase in the adoption of our platform. It you look at all the customers that we’re now working with: in healthcare, Stanford Healthcare, MD Anderson; in the media, Dreamworks, Disney, and Fox; in retail, Barneys, Gap, and Nieman Marcus. So in every major industry, we’re seeing pretty significant traction with some of the world’s best and leading brands. And we’re also working with General Electric, Toyota, and Eli Lilly. BI: In a recent interview, you mentioned Wall Street is still trying to figure out how to value SaaS companies. What exactly did you mean by it? AL: The biggest difference is merely the fact that in the SaaS business, you get recurring revenue from your customer. So you might spend one thing to acquire a customer and get a certain amount of revenue the first year. But the general idea is you could continue to get revenue from that customer over time. And so in the most aggressive investment periods of your growth, it might look like you’re spending more to acquire the customer than you’re getting from them, but that’s simply because you’re looking at only in the snapshot of the year you acquired the customer. The whole power of this subscription revenue model is that you have a lifetime value of a customer that is very different than the initial annual revenue from the customer and the cost to acquire that customer. So for us, for instance, we have an 80% gross margin and it just happens to be that we spend on sales and marketing upfront to acquire the customer who ultimately becomes profitable on a per customer basis after the year that we acquire them. BI: But there have been successful SaaS IPOs, like Salesforce and Workday, and Wall Street should be used to SaaS business models by now. Why do you think there’s still this “misunderstanding”? AL: I think there’s a significant part of Wall Street that fully understands it. You’re broadly characterizing Wall Street as misunderstanding this. The nature of my comment was really just that these models are still evolving, and every business has a unique investment methodology and unique investment threshold. When Salesforce took over the CRM market, there were basically one or two incumbents, and those incumbents were not the largest companies in the technology industry. The incumbent to Salesforce was this company called Siebel. And so, the scale of competing with an incumbent when your incumbent is still only a mid-size company, it requires a different kind of level of investment to compete with them. In our business, our incumbents are IBM, EMC, Microsoft, and so the scale of the competition is far greater, which means we have to have a significant level of investment in our product or technology or sales and marketing to be able to actually go out into the market, and build a viable product and company that customers like GE, Eli Lilly, or Toyota would be able to work with. So in our case, our investing pattern happens to be a little different upfront, but the benefit is that the scale of the opportunity is fairly enormous. We are going after a market where tens of billions of dollars are spent every single year in the legacy technology, and we’re trying to transform that by moving that to the cloud. BI: You also said Box’s investments were “the highest relative to the revenue scale.” AL: It’s all on a relative basis. So we will continue to spend and you’ll see growth in all of our investments. But the key distinction is that “relative to our revenue scale” it was at the highest last year. BI: So that doesn’t mean you have plans to cut spending? AL: We haven’t cut any spending. No company who’s really shooting for a very large mission will likely be cutting spending on a broad sense. You’re always kind of reallocating your spend, so the things that Google spends on this year is very different from an allocation standpoint than what Google spent on 10 years ago. Same with Salesforce or Workday or any of these companies. So you probably won’t see a point where we’re done investing, it’s just relative to the scale of our revenue, you will see more revenue now over time grow faster than the growth of our spending. BI: There was a huge debate on startups burning too much cash recently. What’s your take on that? AL: I think that’s something incredibly context specific. So it’s almost literally impossible to generalize a concept of how much money should a startup spend to grow its business. All you could do is generalize the principle and the principle should be, if you have a large market, with a very viable product, and a viable go-to-market strategy, and there are ways of increasing your market share and generating long term profits from customers, you should find ways of investing and growing your business. And some companies who have high burn rates fit in to that category. There are companies that are going after $50 billion, $100 billion, $500 billion markets, and they’re investing aggressively to make sure they win in those markets. And unfortunately what tends to happen in the Valley is as soon as you have a lot of those, you occasionally will have investors become a little bit sloppy and entrepreneurs get a little bit sloppy where if they’re not in that situation they might do similar investments, but their criteria and parameters might not be the same. So they might not have a large market, they might not have a viable product and in those cases, you absolutely don’t want to overspend. You don’t want to over-burn. You ultimately need to find and make sure you have a viable business model and a viable product. So you can’t generalize the advice to the entrepreneur except for find which category you’re in, and what is the kind of moment and time you’re in, and then make the investment decision and determination based on the availability and potential of your company in your market. BI: What’s your plan on growing your paid customer base? AL: It’s our job to continue to add more and more value on top of our platform. I read that Business Insider article last week about this idea of “race to zero” and “race to bottom.” I would actually say the reverse is ultimately how we think of our business, which is, we see ourselves really in a “race to the top.” And what we mean by that is, we are in a race to constantly adding more and more value on top of storage, on top of computing, to deliver more capabilities, more kind of industry-unique experiences, greater depth of our platform functionality to the industries that we’re going after. So it’s all about going into the top 8 to 10 industries and finding where are companies reimagining their business, where are they going digital, where are they transforming their business model, and how does Box act as a platform that could accelerate that push into the future. BI: Can you give us some examples? AL: We bought a company a month ago called MedXT. And they do medical images in the cloud. That’s an example of continuing to add value far above just the kind of storage and compute layer of our architecture and infrastructure. It’s really about changing how do customers use their data and how can they transform their business with their content and their information. Another example is Stanford Healthcare. They are literally transforming their hospital. The healthcare industry is going from a world where you paid only for the service that was rendered at the point of a transaction. You fast forward to today, we have mobile devices, wearables, new sensors, and products like Uber, which have changed the way we think about interacting with the real world. All of these things impact the way we think about the healthcare industry. And so a healthcare institution like Stanford has to dramatically transform the way that they’re going to deliver healthcare to their customers and their patients. To do that, they need to have telemedicine, they need on-demand medical experiences, they need the ability to reach out to patients when they’re not in their hospital. So all of that is going to be enabled by IT, content management and collaboration, and by these new user experiences around data - and Box is the backbone for a number of those experiences. We’re not going to be the only technology vendor that helps them transform, but we’ll be one of the platforms that dramatically changes how they’re delivering healthcare to their patients. BI: So you knew from the early years that the storage component was not going to be the main differentiator. AL: It’s a requirement that we do storage really, really well because we have to keep your data really safe and protected. So storage is really important. But the thing that we knew was the cost of storage was going to decline rapidly so you would have to differentiate somewhere other than just being able to store other people’s data. So that was what we knew ultimately would matter the most. And so starting from about 8 years ago, the value proposition was far more about what can you do with your information, rather than can you merely store it. BI: But it seems like a lot of people still just think of Box as a storage business. AL: I mean, why do people forget every time Twitter does an earnings report that they have a billion people retweeting anywhere on the internet, and it’s an incredibly important platform for the future of communication? People forget things. But we don’t think it’s everybody’s job to understand how our platform works. We think it’s our responsibility to deliver incredible value to our customers, but if people confuse us with being in the storage business or whatever, that’s a cost of just the fact that there are just so many companies out there, there’s so much going on on the internet. If you come to one of our presentations, you would absolutely leave fully understanding our strategy. BI: You’ve always said you’ve dreamed of running a big company. What’s it like in reality? AL: We’re still a startup. In the startup phase of my dreams, this is roughly what I’ve imagined. So you get to deal with just a tremendous amount of just things being thrown at you every single day. The most thrilling part of being at a startup in the industry at the time we’re in right now is how fast things change, but yet, how much you get to participate in that change. There’s a new device you can go build for, there’s a new technology that you can go leverage, there’s a new open source project that you can pull under your technology stack. Just the amount of ways that you can take advantage of how much change is going on is unprecedented in the history of technology and certainly in the history of the world. BI: Even with having your ownership stake down to roughly 4%? AL: That’s less ideal. But it’s necessary. The way we’ve invested in the company and the way that we had to grow our business. We’ve raised over $500 million in capital and I think that that is an investment decision we’ve made explicitly because we wanted to build the leading transformational company in this category. And we didn’t see any other way that we could make those kinds of investments and get to that kind of scale without that level of capital in the business. BI: Do you talk to Mark Cuban at all? He said he would combust if he had to deal with your level of spending. AL: I think combust out of happiness (laughs). We do email each other occasionally, but we don’t kind of go golfing or anything like that. Let me just clear one thing up. Mark has always been helpful and been close to the company in some way, or at least available to the company. And I have complete respect for him, we have a difference of opinion about how we’ve invested, and how we grow, but he is entirely entitled to that opinion and we remain pretty strong acquaintances and previous partners. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Box has been one of the hottest enterprise tech startups for some time now. Since its founding in 2005, Box has raised over $564 million and is now valued at roughly $2.4 billion. REPORT: US Spy Program Uses Airplanes To Collect American Cell Phone Data | ||
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The US Department of Justice has been using airplanes to collect Americans' cell phone data, reports The Wall Street Journal's Devlin Barrett. The surveillance program, which is run by the US Marshals Service under the DOJ, has reportedly been in effect since 2007. Officials have been using portable cell towers, known as "dirtboxes," on small planes to collect identity and location information on cell phone users. Those Cessna aircrafts fly from at least five airports near major cities, effectively allowing them to surveil most Americans. It's unclear how often the Marshals Service has been going on these surveillance missions, but the Wall Street Journal's sources said they happen "on a regular basis." The DOJ refused to confirm or deny the Journal's report, citing concerns over revealing US surveillance practices to those who might want to evade them. Cellphones are constantly in communication with nearby cell towers. The boxes used by the program allow planes to pose as the nearest cell phone tower, which prompts cell phones under surveillance to disclose their location and identity information, even if a legitimate tower is closer than the plane overhead. The dirtboxes also have the ability to interrupt calls, though officials have reportedly tried to mitigate the harmful consequences of that function. Using this practice, US officials can essentially locate somebody down to the room they're in. The Journal's sources say that once the Marshals Service has located their target, the system "lets go" of other users' data, though it's not clear what happens to that data. SEE ALSO: Here's The US Spy Plane And The Drone That Will Likely Be Used To Spy On ISIS Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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The Video Games That Atari Buried In A Landfill Are For Sale On eBay | ||
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Legend had it that Atari was so embarrassed by the failure, it went to the New Mexico desert and buried the unsold cartridges there, hopefully erasing the failure from everyone's mind. But nobody knew for certain that the cartridges were there until in April, Microsoft went to the site and dug them out. Millions of cartridges were unearthed, and the legend was put to rest. Now those cartridges are available on eBay. The city of Alamogordo, New Mexico, is auctioning them off, and if you hurry, you can snag a copy of one of Atari's biggest embarrassments for around $100, all the way up to more than $800. SEE ALSO: Nintendo is making one huge mistake Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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"E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial" came out in 1983 for the Atari 2600, and was a total flop. This Is What A Comet Sounds Like | ||
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On Wednesday, the people of earth landed the very first space probe on a comet. This is the first step towards all sorts of plans we have for comets, such as one day mining them for minerals and water. The particular people involved were from the European Space Agency. The probe is known as the Philae lander and we gave the comet the lovely name 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It turns out, the comet speaks, or sings, as the scientists discovered. That's probably a generous term for it. Human ears can't actually hear its noises. Sounds come from "oscillations in the magnetic field in the comet’s environment," as the Rosetta’s Plasma Consortium (RPC) describes it. Such oscillations emit sound in the 40-50 millihertz range, which the RPC explains is "far below human hearing, which typically picks up sound between 20 Hz and 20 kHz." But the RPC was able to capture these sounds and, with the help of German composer Manuel Senfft, they became a song, uploaded to Soundcloud for all to hear. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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The Science Behind Why Facebook Is So Addictive | ||
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There are about 7 billion people on Earth. Over 864 million of them check Facebook every day. That's an awful lot of daily habits, and it's part of the reason Facebook is worth some $200 billion. So why is the social network so addictive? Nir Eyal, a multiple-time entrepreneur and Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer, has written a book that answers that high-stakes question. We recently spoke to him, and he had this to say about why Facebook is so addictive: What Facebook wants to create an association with is every time you're bored, every time you have a few minutes. We know that, psychologically speaking, boredom is painful. Whenever you're feeling bored, whenever you have a few extra minutes, this is a salve for that itch. As its title promises, "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products" reveals the psychological processes that occur when our favorite products become integrated into our daily routines. We talked with Eyal about why habits are so crucial to doing effective business, why branding is unnecessary, and how Facebook became a part of our everyday lives. Here's an edited transcript of our interview. BUSINESS INSIDER: At the start of the book you write that "companies find that their economic value is a function of the strength of the habits they create." Why do you make this claim? NIR EYAL: The cold truth is that the best products don't always win. Many times it's the products that have the ability to keep users coming back and using them without conscious thought and using them out of habit, are the ones that keep us coming back. Let's say Google. Google is one of these products that I think is incredibly habit-forming, and it's the kind of product that shows this characteristic of something that we use with little or no conscious thought. You don't even consider whether there's a better search engine out there for people who are habituated to Google, and the evidence is in head-to-head comparisons, when you strip out the branding, people can't tell the difference between Bing and Google. It's a 50/50 split. And yet Google dominates the market with something around 87% of the market share. So these habits because a huge competitive advantage, and one of those advantages is that they keep competition out. BI: What's the difference between habit-forming products and something like brand loyalty? NE: Don Draper-style advertising is really only available to the biggest brands out there. It's only commodity goods that use those kind of messages because they have to differentiate goods that are really hard to differentiate between — Shell gasoline versus Exxon, Coke versus Pepsi, Sprint versus TMobile, it's all the same thing! The only way they can really differentiate is through brand. But you don't see many commercials for the greatest tech companies in the last five to 10 years because they're creating these associations not through brand impressions, but through experiences — and experiences form habits. BI: Let's use a case study. More than 864 million people use Facebook every day, and a full 30% of Americans get all of their news on Facebook. How has Facebook become a habit for so many people? NE: I think the main hook is pretty simple. What Facebook wants to create an association with is every time you're bored, every time you have a few minutes. We know that, psychologically speaking, boredom is painful. Whenever you're feeling bored, whenever you have a few extra minutes, this is a salve for that itch.
Eventually you don't need those, because we just start checking those out of habit, but at the beginning we just get triggers from those. The action is as simple as opening the app. I can alleviate my boredom, I can scratch that itch, just by scrolling through my newsfeed. What photos do people post? What are the comments going to say? How many likes do people get? It's a slot machine with lots of variability of what I might find. BI: How does the product keep you coming back? NE: Through investment. Investment comes every time I like something or add a friend. And by loading the next trigger. I'm loading the next trigger because when I send someone a message on Facebook, or I like something, or I comment on something, guess what Facebook gets to do? They get to send me an external trigger, bringing me back, saying so and so replied to something that you were involved with. And you did it! You prompted that message; it's not Facebook spamming you. You posted a photo and someone liked it, come see it. Loading the next trigger is when they send you this external notification that you prompted and now you're passing through the hook once again, continuing through the same basic cycle. Forever and ever. SEE ALSO: How To Form A Habit That Sticks Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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The internal trigger is boredom, and the external trigger are these notifications — e SOURCE: Here's The 'Dirty Little Secret' Of Microsoft's Cloud Business (MSFT) | ||
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There's a huge change going on in the tech industry that will create a whole new crop of winners and losers: cloud computing. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently declared that Microsoft was already in with the winners. "We absolutely caught the trend ... it's no longer up for debate, whether we get the cloud," he said. One reason he gave to back up his claim: Microsoft's cloud business is on track to be a $4.5 billion business. But sources tell Business Insider that this $4.5 billion number isn't as straightforward as it seems. The Dirty SecretThe $4-billion-mark is a major milestone for cloud computing companies. Pure cloud company Salesforce.com just hit over $4 billion in revenues in its last fiscal year and expects to hit $5.3 billion at the end of its current fiscal year. It took it 15 years and a major acquisition, marketing automation company Exact Target. Cloud market leader Amazon is aon track to generate over $4 billion in revenue this year, too. Amazon doesn't release its cloud revenues, but its "other" segment, which includes its cloud Amazon Web Services, had $1.4 billion in revenues, most of which come from AWS. But our sources say that Microsoft is getting to that number by giving away cloud services for free or at a steep discount as part of bigger enterprise contracts, even to customers who aren't yet using those cloud services.
In other words, when an enterprise signs a new contract to buy software like Windows, Microsoft's database and Microsoft Office, the salesperson may toss in free (or almost free) access to Microsoft's cloud Azure (which includes a cloud version of the database) and Microsoft's online version of Office, Office 365. Microsoft then assigns a percentage of that contract as cloud revenue. It's a little like giving you a free toaster when you sign up for a checking account, then claiming toaster sales are going crazy. Giving It Away For FreeCynthia Farren has seen this sort of contract negotiation tactic happen first hand. Farren is a consultant who makes her living helping enterprise navigate Microsoft's complex software licensing agreements. (In geek speak, she's a "software asset management consultant." Software license agreements from companies like IBM, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft are so tricky and expensive there's a whole industry of consultants that helps companies negotiate them.)
She adds: "I have also heard some Microsoft sales folks go so far as to boast that all of the EAs [enterprise agreements] they manage have some cloud services on them but have also explained that not all of them have implemented those services yet." To decode that a little: she's saying that some Microsoft salespeople claim that all of their customers have access to Microsoft's cloud, even when they aren't using it yet. The Tactic is WorkingThere's a brilliance to this: Build it and they will come. If it costs the enterprise nothing to have access to Azure or Office 365, they'll try it out, and hopefully like it enough to pay full price during the next contract negotiation. "In all fairness, I have seen an increase in the number of customers actually moving to Office 365, Azure, and Dynamics Online," Farren says. Microsoft has used similar tactics in the past, such as including licenses to less-popular server products in a bundle with licenses to products that had higher demand. Eventually, companies would come around and start using the products they've already partly paid for. On the other hand, Farren says she's "jaded" when she hears Microsoft report the number of cloud users or its revenue numbers. "What I would really like to know is how many of their total number of users have ever been activated. I’d really like to see a more transparent way of reporting the numbers (such as active users, etc)," she says. Not The Whole BattleWhile getting existing Microsoft customers to try Microsoft’s cloud is huge, it’s not the whole battle. Microsoft also needs to win over new customers.
The other danger to the plan is profit margins. For the next few years, and maybe decades, Microsoft will have to invest billions into its cloud infrastructure to support cloud customers and engage in a price war with Amazon and Google. Unlike before, Microsoft can't just hand over the software to the customer and be done with it. “You have to remember that in the past Microsoft has had gross margins in the 90% range for Office and Windows. There is no way to sustain that type of monopoly pricing in cloud when competing against Amazon and Google," our source says. Microsoft won't need ridiculously high margins if it captures a growing slice of the growing cloud computing pie. It will make money aplenty from that. The cloud computing is going nuts right now, growing at around 30% a year and is expected to generate $121 billion next year, predicts market research firm Markets and Markets, And Now For The Good NewsProfit margins will eventually be sorted out for Microsoft, and all the cloud vendors. Even if enterprises pay less for each service, over time they'll be buying a lot of cloud services, including some premium high-margin services.
"Under Nadella’s mandate, commercial product development teams are focused on driving innovation into the cloud versions of its properties first (on-premises [software] second). And its sales engines are all rewarded for pushing as much cloud into each enterprise license agreement as possible," Forrester says. Forrester boldly predicts that, "Microsoft will make more profit from cloud than from [traditional] on-premises [software]." And it thinks this will happen in 2015. But, as our sources point out, first Microsoft needs to get companies to pay for these cloud services, not just try them out for free. When contacted, Microsoft had no comment on this story. SEE ALSO: The 50 Most Powerful People In Enterprise Tech In 2014 SEE ALSO: Something Called 'The Race To Zero' Is Scaring A Lot Of Tech Companies Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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As one former Microsoft employee told Business Insider, "What Microsoft is doing is claiming a certain percentage of their Enterprise Agreements — these are renewals of their big licensing agreements — as cloud revenue. They bundle the 'rights' to use Azure or Office 365 as part of their overall agreement. The dirty secret is that very few customers are actually taking Microsoft up on using Azure in any meaningful way."
"Since early in the days of Microsoft’s venture into cloud computing we have often heard of and seen examples of cloud services getting added to customer’s Enterprise Agreements at heavily discounted rates or an overall discount making the addition of the cloud services have a net zero dollar impact on the agreement," Farren tells Business Insider.
“Most of the hot new companies don't use Microsoft,” the former employee tells us. “These are the most important companies for growth of the cloud. Amazon and Google dominate share in these new high growth companies.”
Fancy new features that you can only get from the cloud versions of Microsoft software will convince more companies to try Microsoft’s cloud, according to a new This Messaging App Will Force You To Be Brutally Honest | ||
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The beauty of texting is that you can rework what you want to say. If you type out a sentence and notice a mistake, it's easy to fix it before you send it out. Even better, if you need to compose yourself before sending out the message at all, there's time. You don't have to hit send until your text is perfect. Some messaging apps, such as BBM, let you unsend a message after you send it. And iMessages shows your companion a set of ellipses, letting him or her know that a thought is incoming. But a new Android app called Beam Messenger takes the notion of "real time" to a whole new level. Your companion sees your message as you're typing it. Letter by letter. Typo by typo. Thought by thought.
Buzzfeed calls it "terrifyingly transparent." Others agree. "There's an appeal to non-transparency when it comes to our communications," writes The Atlantic's Megan Garber. "Humans tend to be indecisive and deliberate in pretty much equal measure; messages that don't send until you actually send them suit this tendency." And although that might be true, there's something refreshing about an app that forces you to be honest. Or at least forces you to be on your best behavior. No more crafting the perfect sentence in the middle of an argument. No more hiding the fact that you're a terrible speller. In a world where, as Garber points out, texting is more popular than making calls, having a real-time way to send texts that's truly real time is a nice change of pace. If only to know what's hiding behind the other side of the ellipses. You can download Beam Messenger on Google Play here. According to Beam Messenger's website, it's coming soon for iOS. SEE ALSO: Here's Why The Time Is Always Set To 9:41 In Apple Ads Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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CHART OF THE DAY: People Are Getting More Optimistic About Airbnb | ||
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The Information, a technology publication founded by former Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Lessin, recently released its first monthly survey about its subscribers, called “Subscriber Viewpoint.” Subscribers to The information include some of the biggest entrepreneurs, executives, policymakers, and investors in Silicon Valley, including billionaire investor Marc Andreessen. Based on data from The Information’s first survey, which was charted for us by BI Intelligence, the only private company readers are optimistic about, in terms of long-term potential, is Airbnb, the company that lets you rent apartments and homes from strangers for vacations, business trips, and the like. Subscribers are less optimistic about almost every other major private tech company — especially Square, Jack Dorsey’s payment processing startup. This drop in optimism might have to do with Apple Pay, Apple’s mobile payment service introduced in October, which could eventually threaten Square’s core business.
SEE ALSO: CHART OF THE DAY: Alibaba’s Financial Services Arm Is Absolutely Massive In China Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Samsung Is Reportedly Dropping Tens Of Millions On A New Mobile Video Service (SSNLF) | ||
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Samsung is spending tens of millions to create original short videos for mobile devices, The Information's Jessica Lessin reports. The project, codenamed "Volt," could also include music, not unlike Apple's Beats Music service. Samsung may decide to make money from the service by charging users for monthly access. Having exclusive mobile video could help Samsung revitalize its smartphone business. where revenues have gone down sharply after peaking last year:
Making an original content push is never easy for hardware companies like Samsung and Apple, but the challenge is particularly pronounced on mobile devices, where users are depending on cellular networks of varying quality. Mobile video is also generally shorter than traditional web content, so don't expect Samsung to take a stab at recreating "Orange Is The New Black" or "Community." Samsung has reportedly been meeting with Hollywood media agencies, though. SEE ALSO: 11 Things Samsung's New Phone Can Do That The iPhone Can't Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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This Company Wants To Revolutionize The Way Men Buy Dress Shoes | ||
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Lane Gerson and Ariel Nelson started their shoe company, Jack Erwin, when they saw how difficult it was to find a quality men's dress shoe at a reasonable price point. "It's only in the thousand-plus range that brands feel confident enough to go with a classic style," Nelson told Business Insider. "Everything else tends to be overstylized." To solve the problem, Gerson and Nelson found a way to make a high-quality, classic shoe that won't go out of style or break the bank. From a classic penny loafer to a wingtip oxford, the goal is to create staple shoes for less than $100 each. Jack Erwin shoes are manufactured in Spain with leather that comes from Italy and France. They sell 15 different styles in three collections, all priced between $95 and $220 and available for purchase online. "Men are starting to care more about fashion and wanting to make a statement," Gerson said. "It's becoming less intimidating." Jack Erwin has caught the attention of some tech investors since opening for business in 2012 — in September, they closed a $9-million Series B funding round led by Brown Shoe Company, with contributions by CrossLink Capital, Shasta Ventures, and FundersGuild. And now Gerson and Nelson are taking it a step further, opening a brick-and-mortar Fitting Room in New York City's Tribeca neighborhood. Customers can walk into the store, try on some of Jack Erwin's styles, and then place an order to be delivered within a few days. "I think you learn a lot online, but you learn a lot in person. You can see people's real-time reactions to your product," Gerson said. "And people buy differently online." At the Fitting Room, samples of each Jack Erwin style are lined up on counters.
Customers are paired with a sales representative, who helps them pick out a style and size. They're encouraged to take a seat on couches in the middle of the room. "We wanted it to be a real communal experience," Gerson said.
The Fitting Room doesn't keep an inventory, instead only storing enough pairs for customers to try in each size. "We think people will actually like walking out of here without a bag," Gerson said. Sizes are located in drawers below the display, though they're disguised to look like marble.
The representative takes care of the customer from start to finish, eventually placing orders on iPads and arranging for the shoes to be shipped to the customer's home.
The Fitting Room was completed in an extraordinarily short amount of time. The space was purchased just six weeks ago and was still a construction site five days before opening. But this is an extremely dedicated team — Gerson and Nelson even live in Jack Erwin's SoHo office, just a few blocks away from the new Fitting Room.
Jack Erwin has always been about maintaining quality, and the Fitting Room is a good way for them to demonstrate that. "It's all about showcasing the construction," Nelson said. Nelson showed us some of the brand's most popular styles. Black shoes tend to be more popular than brown, though he points out that many customers choose to buy both.
Boots have also been popular as cold weather approaches. The Fitting Room officially opens Thursday, but curious neighbors have been peering into the windows and trying to come inside even days before the launch. "We'll take that as a good sign," Nelson said.
SEE ALSO: Check Out The Google Campus Restaurant Where Waiters Serve Employees Gourmet Indian Food Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Reddit CEO Resigns Because Of A Disagreement About A New Office | ||
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Reddit CEO Yishan Wong resigned from Reddit after a disagreement about a new office, company adviser Sam Altman wrote in a blog post. The disagreement had to do with the location and the amount of money to spend on a lease. Wong decided to leave after Reddit's board didn't approve his plan, Altman writes. Ellen Pao, Reddit's business exec, will be stepping up as interim CEO, and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian will return to a full-time executive chairman position. Before Reddit, Pao was a partner at Kleiner Perkins; she sued the company and her colleagues for alleged sexual harassment in 2012 in a well-publicized case that started a conversation about sexism in Silicon Valley. In October, after Reddit raised $50 million in new funding, employees had to either relocate to the company's San Francisco office or leave, The New York Times reports. Wong recently wrote an extremely frank response to a former employee holding a Reddit AMA about his termination from the company, which reportedly made some current employees uncomfortable. Here's Altman's complete post:
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Fancy, Which Was Rumored To Be In $1 Billion Acquisition Talks, Just Laid Off A Bunch Of People | ||
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Joe Einhorn's e-commerce shop Fancy, which was rumored to be in ~$1 billion acquisition talks with eBay in September, has laid off an estimated one-third of its staff, multiple sources tell Business Insider. A few layoffs were scattered throughout the summer, two sources say, with the largest round occurring on or about September 30. There, 10-15 staffers across different departments were handed paperwork by the company's lawyer, Andrew Tuch. COO Michael Silverman only said a sentence or two, then dismissed the group. "Just fired 16 employees in one day with no warning and no explanation," an anonymous reviewer wrote on Glassdoor in October. A number of Glassdoor reviewers allege that the company has a tendency to fire employees just before their stock options vest. Two former Fancy employees estimate that one-third of the company was cut that day, scaling a team of 45 US employees last year down to about 15 or 20 now. Another person who confirmed the layoffs thinks the one-third estimate is too high and estimates the the company had about 80 employees world-wide during its prime. Two executives have departed in recent months: Creative Director Jake Frey and General Merchandising Director Lee Assoulin. One source says the layoffs struck shortly after a board meeting. Roles cut include buyers, sales processors and business development. The reason for the layoffs vary depending on whom you ask. Those who are disgruntled feel the company spent too much cash and is in desperate need of a lifeboat. "If I had to speculate, [the layoffs occurred] because Fancy isn't making enough money to support the business and pay salaries, and the investment money from last year (about $60 million) is pretty much all gone," one person says. A SEC filing spotted by AllThingsD's Jason Del Rey showed that executives from Fancy took about $20 million off the table during the company's last fundraise. A source familiar with the company's thinking admits that the filing looked bad, but says the money was distributed among a dozen early supporters of the company. "That money was distributed between 10-12 people who were part of the beginning fundraising," this person says. "It wasn't getting anyone super rich." This person says the company is currently raising a new round, but wasn't sure of the valuation. In September, Bloomberg reported that Fancy was in talks to get acquired by eBay for ~ $1 billion. One former staffer guessed layoffs might have had something to do with that. While Fancy did meet with eBay's Marketplaces Business Unit President, Devin Wenig, a source familiar with the talks says no buyout price was ever discussed and was skeptical acquisition talks with eBay had ever occurred. This person says it was a typical business meeting, similar to one Fancy had with Twitter, which resulted in a Twitter Commerce partnership. Fancy recently pivoted its business from being a first-party merchant (storing inventory and shipping it to customers) to a third party merchant, where other businesses promote, sell and ship their own items to Fancy's users. "What they were doing with first-party buying was — well, it was working in that it was making revenue and blah, blah, blah — but it wasn’t getting the full social shopping experience, where a user could look at whatever they wanted and get it in the same day," a source familiar with the company's thinking says. "When things started getting slow, Fancy had to pivot and make this third-party storefront. It’s an incredible tool. Imagine going on Shopify and buying everyone on there all in one place." The pivot, this person says, is what forced the company to downsize. "It is clear as day what was happening with Fancy," says the source. "We went from first party to third party merchants, so there was a group of people in charge of that. Fancy tried to repurpose as many of those people into other roles as possible but at the end of the day, it’s a startup and when it pivots it pivots...[Layoffs are] always unfortunate but at the end of the day, Fancy is a startup that is still young and agile." Fancy COO Michael Silverman and CEO Joe Einhorn did not return requests for comment. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Here's How To Remove The Personal Data Hidden Within Your Photos | ||
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You might not realize it, but your photos contain a ton of hidden details. Buried within a photo's code can be something called "Exif" data. Exif data keeps a record of your data, such as the date and time you took a photo, your camera's model and serial number, your camera's settings, and even the GPS location where you took the photo. These details can be handy for photographers who don't want to manually record these kind of details in case they need to recreate a shot, but for those concerned about privacy, it's best just to remove the data before uploading. Luckily, there are already plenty of social networks that automatically remove Exif data when you upload a photo. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all strip your photos of Exif data, but other sites like Tumblr, Flickr, Google+, and Dropbox don't. Here's how to remove it yourself. If you're using Windows:
...and then you're free to select the details you'd like to keep or get rid of. There's no fast and simple way to remove Exif data on a Mac, but ImageOptim and Image MetaData Stripper are two free options that will do the trick. Android users should consider trying EZ UnEXIF Free, Exif Eraser, or Instant EXIF Remover, according to Reddit. If you're using an iPhone or iPad, both Exif Wizard and TrashExif will get the job done. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Twitter Is Junk, Says S&P (TWTR) | ||
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Twitter shares are down more than 5% in afternoon trade on Thursday, giving up almost all of their gains from yesterday, after the company received a "junk" rating from credit agency S&P. S&P gave Twitter a 'BB-' corporate credit rating and said the company's outlook is stable. Any rating from S&P under 'BBB-' is considered "speculative grade," otherwise known in the bond world as "junk." Thursday's tumble in Twitter comes after the stock gained more than 7% on Wednesday after the company held an analyst day, at which the company' CFO made what Business Insider's Jay Yarow called a "wild" revenue projection, among other things. In its rating, S&P analyst Andy Liu said, "The unsolicited 'BB-' corporate credit rating incorporates our assumption of healthy growth in monthly active users and revenues, the possibility of positive discretionary cash flow in 2016, and ongoing minimal debt leverage." S&P added that Twitter is investing very aggressively in growth. Depending on the level of business reinvestment, Twitter may not generate positive discretionary cash flow until 2016. S&P's rating on Thursday was a "unsolicited" rating, meaning it was initiated by S&P and may be based only on publicly available information and may not have included cooperation from the company. Here's the full release from S&P:
CHICAGO (Standard & Poor's) Nov. 13, 2014--Standard & Poor's Ratings Services said today that it assigned its unsolicited 'BB-' corporate credit rating to San Francisco-based social networking company Twitter Inc. The outlook is stable. At the same time, we assigned our unsolicited 'BB-' issue-level rating and unsolicited '3' recovery rating to the company's $1.8 billion convertible notes, which comprise $900 million 0.25% convertible notes due 2019 and $900 million 1% convertible notes due 2021. The '3' recovery rating indicates our expectation for meaningful recovery (50%-70%) of principal for debtholders in the event of a payment default.
Twitter will use proceeds from debt issuance for general corporate purposes, including acquisitions and operating needs. As of Sept. 30, 2014, the company had about $3.6 billion in cash and cash equivalents and short-term investments. The $3.6 billion included net proceeds from the convertible notes offering.
"The unsolicited 'BB-' corporate credit rating incorporates our assumption of healthy growth in monthly active users and revenues, the possibility of positive discretionary cash flow in 2016, and ongoing minimal debt leverage," said Standard & Poor's credit analyst Andy Liu. The company is investing very aggressively in growth. Depending on the level of business reinvestment, Twitter may not generate positive discretionary cash flow until 2016.
"The stable outlook reflects our expectation that Twitter will continue to experience very strong growth and not encounter a significant increase in competitive pressure," said Mr. Liu. We expect the company to experience very high growth over the next two to three years as it expands internationally and grows revenue as well as to maintain meaningful cash balances to offset negative discretionary cash flow and offset volatility. We do not expect it to pursue shareholder return activities such as share buybacks and dividends.
We could raise the rating if Twitter broadens its revenue sources through international expansion and new product launches, maintains its market position, continues to improve its profitability, and achieves positive and
We could lower the rating if Twitter is unable to achieve positive discretionary cash flow and if there is a marked deceleration in revenue growth or if revenue actually contracts. This could indicate that the business model may be facing significant risks, which could cause us to revise our "fair" business risk profile assessment. A sizable acquisition that significantly depletes the company's cash balances could also result in a downgrade.
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Here Are 15 Hi-Tech Timepieces You'll Actually Want On Your Wrist | ||
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The Apple Watch has something left to be desired. It's bright and bulky, and looks like a bad Star Trek prop. Insider Picks has put together a list 15 wearable tech pieces that you'll actually want on your wrist. We know, it sounds unbelievable — but take a look. You may be surprised to see what's actually out there.
The Misfit is an activity and sleep monitor that emits a "halo of lights" showing your daily activity progress. It tracks running, walking, cycling, and swimming up to 50 meters deep. (Yup, it's waterproof, too.) Plus the battery lasts really long, so you don't need to worry about that. Oh and, did we mention that it looks like a nice watch?
The Fitbit is a minimalist's dream — the wristband is small, sleek, and sophisticated. It tracks the number of steps you take, how many floors you've climbed, how far you've traveled, the calories burned, and how long you've been active during the day. Plus it comes with caller ID. Done. The Withings Plus 02 is an activity, sleep, and heart rate tracker that connects with both iPhones and Android. It tracks your steps, running, elevation, distance traveled, and how many calories you've burned. Style-wise, it has that "hey, I miss the 90's" thing going on. And if you're feeling particularly bold, it comes in light blue, as well.
Garmin Fenix 2 Performance Bundle $449.99| Amazon Prime If you're a skier, you may want to check out this high-end machine. The Garmin Fenix 2 comes with all the basic fitness training, swimming and running trackers, but it also comes with a "ski mode." The ski mode measures your 3D distance, time, vertical drop, total runs, and tracks your history of runs. Oh and we almost forgot: there's a GPS navigator in this thing, too.
Samsung Gear 2 Smartwatch $299.99 $279.95| Amazon Prime The Samsung lets you receive instant notifications, comes with a fitness motivator, and has a built in camera — in case you needed to snap a photo while getting your sweat on. The biggest downside of this one is that it's only compatible with Samsung phones like the Galaxy S5.
If you're not really a watch person, and are looking for the barely-there fitness tracker, then this one's for you. Plus, the Jawbone Wristband is loaded with punches: it tracks your steps, exercise, hours and quality of sleep, and calorie and nutrient intake. And you can also set an alarm and receive vibrating messages.
Samsung Gear Fit $199 $123.99| Amazon Prime The Samsung Gear Fit is dust- and water- resistant, and it's pretty light and un-flashy. It comes with personalized fitness motivator that senses your heart rate and then gives you real-time coaching. Plus you can even reject phone calls with messages straight from the wristband — which will certainly come in handy as you're working out.
Sony Smartband SWR30 (black and white) $169.99 | Amazon You make calls straight from this "smartband," and you can also see and open messages that you're getting on your phone. Plus, it's waterproof.
A different Sony Smartband — but this one comes without a screen. Instead, when you get a message it simply vibrates. Like the previous model, it's also waterproof and connects over bluetooth.
LG G Watch R W110 $379.99| Amazon You'd never guess that this is wearable tech, would you? This amazing looking piece connects with Android TM 4.3 or higher, and gives you notifications about missed calls, messages, upcoming meetings, events, and even local weather forecasts. Plus, it's also water- and dust-proof.
Another sleek option that looks like a regular, stylish watch. The strap is genuine leather, and the face is made of stainless steel — so you don't need to trade in style for functionality. This gadget responds to your voice, acts as an activity tracker, and tracks steps and calories. The only downside is that it only hooks up with Android 4.3 or higher.
COOKOO Smart Bluetooth Connected Watch $129.99 $119.87 | Amazon Prime Surprisingly, this one is compatible with both Android 4.3 and 4.4, as well as with iOS 6 and 7. You can connect to several Facebook features including check-in and location tagging. And on top of that, you can remotely trigger your phone's camera.
This Sony smart watch is a regular, stand-alone watch that comes can access Facebook, Twitter, sports apps, a music player, messages, calls, and calendar via its Bluetooth function. It's a little on the bulky side, however.
This new smartwatch is powered by Android Wear and gets you your notifications and responds to voice commands. On the fitness end, it has light sensors, an accelerometer, and a GPS built in. Plus, it's waterproof.
And the crème de la crème: the Withings Activité $450 | Withings Now this — this is a watch. And what's more, it's Swiss made. This smartwatch tracks your steps (it hooks up to your smartphone), monitors your sleep patterns, can log your swimming workouts, has an 8-month battery, and way more. And, of course, it's a beautiful piece even without all of the extra tech elements (it comes in black, too). Pre-order it now.
Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Here's The Insane Way Tesla Recruited Early Employees | ||
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Back then, everybody thought that electric cars were golf carts, clown cars, or some environmentally friendly combination of both. Such was the case with Malcolm Smith, a Bay Area product design manager who would become one of Tesla's first 20 employees. In summer 2004, he got a call from Eberhard, who was Tesla's CEO long before Elon Musk took over. "I can't tell you what we're doing," Eberhard said, "but why don't you come check out this car I have." So Smith showed up at Eberhard's tiny office in Menlo Park, California. Eberhard and his cofounder, Tarpenning, walked Smith through a sketch of their business plan for a new kind of automaker. They wanted to build a high-performance electric car — one with lower emissions than a Prius and faster acceleration than a Ferrari. Smith was skeptical. But he was also curious. From what Eberhard and Tarpenning told him, Tesla would not need to reinvent the wheel to make their electric sports car. They would just need to combine a bunch of existing technologies, something nobody had bothered to do. "Well," Eberhard told him, "let's go for a ride."
Eberhard drove them out to Sand Hill Road, the Palo Alto street where Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and other massive venture capital firms are headquartered. All the while, the car was quiet — the rumble of a gasoline engine was notably absent. Eberhard slowed the car down to 10 mph. "Try and touch the dashboard," he told Smith. Smith reached out. Eberhard stomped on the accelerator. Smith's hand never made it to the dash. The tzero — a hobby car built by AC Propulsion — could jet from zero to 60 mph in under four seconds. G forces threw Smith into his seat. His whole perception of what an electric car could do changed in an instant. "I get it," Smith thought. "This isn't a nice little science experiment." The tzero was a highly technical, remarkably powerful vehicle. Unlike gas-powered cars, electric vehicles have 100% torque from the outset. Smith needed little more convincing, and he would soon become one of Tesla's earliest employees. Eberhard, for his part, would repeatedly face skeptical looks when he told potential recruits that he was starting an electric car company. And he would continue to perform the same circus act he did with Smith, asking them to adjust the stereo or touch the dashboard and then throwing them deep into their seats — giving them a direct experience of the power hidden inside electric cars. "It definitely had a circus act component to it," Smith recalled to Business Insider. This story is part of "The Making Of Tesla: Invention, Betrayal, And The Birth Of The Roadster," a Business Insider longform feature. SEE ALSO: The Making Of Tesla: Invention, Betrayal, And The Birth Of The Roadster Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Tesla Motors 
They got into this tiny yellow car with a quizzical decal on the side: tzero, as in the symbol that mathematicians use to denote the beginning of time within a system. YouTube’s Demographics Are Making It A Major Rival For TV Ad Dollars | ||
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YouTube's reach among millennials is huge. The site attracts more adults aged 18 to 34 than any single cable TV network, according to Nielsen. It was also rated by millennials as the top place to watch content, ahead of digital and TV properties like Facebook and ESPN. The reach and enthusiasm of YouTube's young audience is making it a particularly attractive platform for brands, which are looking to the site as both a branding tool and a direct-response driver. In a new report from BI Intelligence, we unpack data from over a dozen sources to understand how social media demographics are still shifting, including the migration of young users to video- and visual-based social networks like YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest. Access The Full Report And Its 20 Charts By Signing Up For A Risk-Free Trial >> Here are a few of the key takeaways on YouTube's unique selling points from the BI Intelligence report:
The report is full of charts (over 20 charts) and data that can be downloaded and put to use. In full, the report:
For full access to all BI Intelligence reports, briefs, and downloadable charts on the digital media industry and social media audience data and demographics, sign up for a risk-free trial. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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YouTube Superstar Michelle Phan Shares Her Tips For Building A Social Media Brand | ||
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But getting to the top was no easy task. Phan told Re/code that she was once rejected from a job at a Lancome makeup counter because she had no sales experience, and she and her family lived on food stamps for a period of time. Phan recently released a book called "Make Up: Your Life Guide to Beauty, Style and Success — Online and Off." In it, she tells the story of how she turned makeup tutorials into a full-blown media empire. Her book also offers some advice for establishing a solid social media presence. 1. Choose a platform.Phan says it's a good idea to continue using the platforms you already use to communicate with friends and family, then develop a presence on the platforms that are most frequented by your target audience. If you're starting a blog, text-heavy formats like Twitter are a good place to start, while photographers should go for a medium that prioritizes visual content, like Instagram. "Don't feel you need to go with the most popular platform," she writes. "Pick the one that has the strongest community that will support your vision." 2. Claim your name, and keep it consistent.It's important to create a profile on a platform that's just starting to become more popular. "Social media is an ever-changing world," Phan writes. "You want to be ready if a certain platform becomes red-hot, and you don't want someone else taking your company name as his or her handle. That does happen!" Make sure you have the same name across all of the platforms you use — it's essential for defining your brand. 3. Create content that's new and fresh.Interesting, diverse content is the most important part of amassing a follower base. Pick a topic and become an expert at it. "You need interesting content that entertains or informs — preferably both," she writes. "You want people to look forward to your posts and come back for more. People want to follow you. They want to hear your words and see your vision." | ||
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With more than 7 YouTube million subscribers, her own L'Oreal line, and a growing e-commerce beauty startup, hair-and-makeup guru Michelle Phan is one of the most successful YouTubers ever. 
After Dropcam Sold For $555 Million To Google, Its Employees Are Miserable And They Blame Tony Fadell (GOOG) | ||
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Since the Wi-Fi camera company Dropcam sold to Google's Nest for $555 million in June, its employees have been struggling with the transition, particularly because of the leadership of Nest CEO and former Apple employee Tony Fadell, according to Connie Loizos of StrictlyVC. Some of that frustration gets vented through Glassdoor, the career reviews site, where Fadell has a 46% approval rate from current and former employees. "They are killing everything that was special about working at Dropcam," one reviewer says of the Nest team, while another writes that the company "is about to die a slow painful death at the hands of Nest." One of the biggest complaints about the acquisition seems to be that Fadell has installed a much more hierarchical culture than the one "Dropfam" is used to. Employees told Loizos that almost every decision had to go through Fadell or Nest cofounder Matt Rogers, which leads to a bureaucratic mess of meetings all day. "Anyone at the director level or up spends their entire day in meetings, many of them duplicative meetings about the same subject, over and over to the point where a lot of people have complained," one employee says. Other employees reportedly think Dropcam never should have sold to Nest in the first place. Dropcam investor Mark Siegel agrees, telling Loizos that the company, which is reportedly growing its revenue eight times as fast as Nest, was on a "terrific ramp," and could have been built into a successful independent company. "It just felt like we'd been chopped off at the knees," one employee told Loizos. "Projects are canceled, team is splintered, and the mojo is gone," another wrote on Glassdoor about life post-acquisition. "Everything revolves around the CEO," a Nest employee writes. "It's a dangerous mix of cult of personality and Stockholm syndrome. Comments like 'He's the next Steve Jobs' are not uncommon, while people proudly say things like 'I'm used to Tony screaming at me.' Everyone dreads meetings with Tony because he will flip if he doesn't like what he sees. Somehow that's perceived as good leadership." Before founding Nest, Fadell was a senior manager at the notoriously hierarchical Apple. Read the rest of Loizos' piece here. Business Insider reached out to Nest for comment. SEE ALSO: Here's The Joke A Bunch Of Googlers Are Telling About CEO Larry Page Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Germany skirts recession with 0.1percent growth in Q3 | ||
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Frankfurt (AFP) - Germany, Europe's biggest economy, narrowly escaped a new recession with minimal growth of 0.1 percent in the the third quarter, official data showed on Friday. German gross domestic product expanded by 0.1 percent in the period from July to September, after shrinking by 0.1 percent in the preceding three months, the federal statistics office said in a flash estimate. Originally, the contraction in the second quarter had been reported as 0.2 percent. Recession is technically defined as two consecutive quarters of falling GDP. The data are good news for the wider eurozone, especially after the region's second-biggest economy, France, notched up better-than-expected growth of 0.3 percent in the third quarter, separate data in Paris showed. In Germany's case, positive impulses came primarily from private households, which ramped up their spending strongly, Destatis said. In addition, foreign trade also provided a support for the economy, with exports rising more strongly than imports, the statement said. On the negative side, investment declined, particularly in equipment, but construction investment also declined marginally. A detailed breakdown of the different GDP components will be published on November 25. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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10 Things You Need To Know Before European Markets Open | ||
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Good morning! Here are the big news stories having an impact ahead of markets opening in London and Paris. French GDP Came In Slightly Better Than Expected. Europe's second biggest economy registered a 0.3% expansion in the third quarter, a slightly higher figure than analysts thought. Germany Has Avoided Recession By A Hair. The German economy grew by 0.1% in the third quarter. That's as weak as growth gets. Twitter Got Junked. Twitter shares fell more than 5% in afternoon trade on Thursday, giving up almost all of their gains from Wednesday, after the company received a "junk" rating from credit agency S&P. RBS Is Exiting The US Mortgage Business. Royal Bank of Scotland Plc's securities unit will now exit its US mortgage trading business after originally planning to shrink it by two-thirds. US Retail Sales Are Coming. That's the biggest data release from the US today, at 1.30 p.m. GMT. Analysts are expecting a 0.2% boost for October, after an unexpected 0.3% fall in September. Airbus Recorded A Boost In Profit. Airbus Group reported a 12 percent rise in nine-month underlying operating profit on Friday led by its planemaking and helicopter divisions, and reaffirmed its profit forecasts for the year. European GDP And Inflation Are Coming. At 10 a.m. GMT, we'll get numbers for the eurozone's GDP and inflation for Q3 and October respectively. Economists are expecting a 0.4% reading for inflation and just a 0.1% rise in GDP. Asian Markets Are Up. Japan's Nikkei climbed again, closing up 0.56%. Hong Kong's Hang Seng is also currently up 0.13% just ahead of the close. David Cameron Is Warning Of More Sanctions On Russia. Russia could face further sanctions if it does not commit to resolving the conflict in Ukraine, British Prime Minister David Cameron said Friday, as he called Moscow's actions "unacceptable". Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Australia hits back at FIFA over 2022 World Cup graft claims | ||
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Sydney (AFP) - Football Federation Australia hit back on Friday at a FIFA report that alleged taxpayer money went to buy votes during its bid for the 2022 World Cup, insisting it conducted a clean bid campaign. Australia's top football body rejected assertions of impropriety in canvassing support for its failed bid by FIFA's Ethics Committee and said it had been "disappointed" by the process. A FIFA investigation into Qatar's successful bid for the 2022 World Cup cleared the host of any wrongdoing, but accused Australia of breaking ethics rules, trying to buy votes and then attempting a cover-up. FFA chairman Frank Lowy said his organisation ran a competitive bid in-line with the rules, which was monitored throughout by the federal government and other independent bodies. "FFA did its best to run a competitive and compliant bid and to do it wherever possible hand-in-hand with the Australian government," Lowy said in a statement, adding that UNICEF and FIFA were "also involved wherever possible". "The financial management of the bid funds were routinely reported to government and reviewed by independent external auditors. "I made it clear to all involved in our bid that we would run a clean campaign and I stressed this objective at every opportunity," he said. Australia spent almost Aus$46 million ($40 million) on its attempt to host the event but received just one vote. FIFA's report found Australia's team had tried to divert government funds intended for development projects in Africa "towards initiatives in countries with ties to FIFA executive committee members with the intention to advance its bid". FFA was also accused of making "certain payments" to the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF). - 'Disappointed' by bidding process - "The Australia 2022 bid team appears to have reached the conclusion to provide financial support under the title '(football) development projects' preferably in some areas home to FIFA executive committee members," a summary of the report said. "The FFA was well aware of the ramifications such a pattern of conduct might imply." Lowy said Australia had funded the football development programmes as it had been encouraged by FIFA to demonstrate Australia's commitment to the game, especially in developing regions. The FFA was also seeking further information from FIFA's ethics committee over claims Australia had used taxpayer money to buy votes during the bidding process, he added. "It's clear that this led us to be misled in particular relating to a payment made to CONCACAF, which was later revealed to have been misappropriated," he said. "In hindsight, there are many things we might have done differently and we remain disappointed by our experience of the World Cup bidding process." The long-awaited probe into the race for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups was thrown into turmoil on Thursday when its own investigator complained that a summary misrepresented his conclusions. Football's world governing body had earlier cleared Qatar and Russia of corruption and ruled out a re-vote for the tournaments despite widespread allegations of wrongdoing. The FFA chief said the Australian bid had cooperated fully with the inquiry run by former US federal prosecutor Michael Garcia and "provided transparency" into the bidding process. A summary of his report was released this week, but Garcia rejected it as "incomplete and erroneous" and said he planned to appeal. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Germany Just Avoided Recession By A Hair | ||
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The German economy grew by 0.1% in the third quarter. That's as weak as growth gets. The first report for the previous quarter showed a 0.2% drop in output from Q1. Another quarter of contraction would have meant that Germany was officially in a recession. The fact that the country is hovering just barely in growth territory is pretty terrible news for the European economy. Since 2008, Germany has been the continent's star peformer, showcasing a mild crash, low employment, and decent growth. That period might now be over. We saw French GDP for Q3 already Friday morning: it came in at just 0.3%, a little higher than analysts expected but still pretty weak. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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French GDP Beats Expectations With A 0.3% Jump In Q3 | ||
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French GDP numbers just out show GDP rose 0.3% in the third quarter of the year. That's more than the 0.2% predicted by analysts. French business surveys have been dismal, but it looks like the economy is seeing extremely weak growth rather than recession. But it's not all (very modest) good news: French output was revised down for the second quarter, from flat to -0.1%. We've also had German GDP Friday morning, which came in at just 0.1%, very narrowly avoiding recession. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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White House intruder review reveals string of blunders | ||
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Washington (AFP) - An internal review of the security lapses that allowed an intruder to scale a fence and enter the White House has revealed a string of Secret Service blunders, reports said. The New York Times cited a Department of Homeland Security review which said "performance, organizational and technical" failures had allowed Iraq war veteran Omar Gonzalez to evade security and make his way into the building in September. The review said 42-year-old Gonzalez, who was carrying a knife during the incident, could have been stopped by a Secret Service officer who was supposed to be stationed on the North Lawn with an attack dog. However, at the time Gonzalez scaled the fence and bolted across the lawn, the officer in question was sitting in his van making a personal call on his cellphone. The review also found that radio communications between the officers did not work properly leaving some officers unsure of what was going on, or even unaware an alarm had been sounded. The intrusion was the most serious incident in a string of security lapses involving President Barack Obama, which ultimately led to the resignation of Secret Service director Julia Pierson in October. Obama and his family had left the White House shortly before the intrusion took place. The review found authorities had also failed to properly investigate Gonzalez after he had come to the attention of law enforcement months earlier, The Times reported. Gonzalez was arrested on gun charges in Virginia in July before being stopped again outside the White House a month later while carrying a hatchet. He was not arrested on that occasion. The review revealed that Gonzalez was spotted by officers patrolling the street outside the White House climbing over a section of fencing missing an ornamental spike. They ordered him to stop and drew their firearms but elected not to shoot because they did not believe he was armed. Gonzalez ignored their commands and kept on going. Another officer stationed near the outer front door of the White House also decided not to use lethal force when confronted by Gonzalez because he did not believe he was armed. Again his commands to stop were ignored. The officer did not follow Gonzalez into the building because he believed the door was locked and that the intruder was cornered, the review said. But the door was open, allowing Gonzalez to burst through knocking over a female agent there. Gonzalez entered the East Room of the White House before exiting and charging down a hallway. He was eventually apprehended by two agents who had just finished their shifts. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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More Russia sanctions if Ukraine not resolved: Cameron | ||
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Canberra (AFP) - Russia could face further sanctions if it does not commit to resolving the conflict in Ukraine, British Prime Minister David Cameron said Friday, as he called Moscow's actions "unacceptable". Cameron, who was in Canberra to address Australia's parliament, said existing sanctions imposed by the West were having an impact on Russia's economy. The West's relations with the Kremlin have become more tense since the downing of Flight MH17 over territory controlled by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine in July, killing 298 passengers and crew. "Russian action in Ukraine is unacceptable," Cameron told reporters before heading to the G20 leaders summit in Brisbane where he will rub shoulders with Russian President Vladimir Putin. "If Russia takes a positive approach towards Ukraine's freedom and responsibility, we could see those sanctions removed. "If Russia continues to make matters worse, we could see those sanctions increase. It's as simple as that." European nations, the United States and Australia are among countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia for what they see as Moscow's desire to redraw modern Europe's borders. Russia Thursday refuted the West's claims that it has been sending fresh military hardware into eastern Ukraine, which could fuel a return to all-out conflict. Pro-Russian rebels have been fighting Ukrainian forces since April in a war which has claimed more than 4,000 lives and driven hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said the Kremlin's increasing military assertiveness -- including the appearance of four Russian navy ships off his country's north coast ahead of the G20 -- was "part of a regrettable pattern". "Whether it's the bullying of Ukraine, whether it's the increasing Russian military aircraft flying into the airspace of Japan, European countries, whether it's the naval task group which is now in the south Pacific, Russia is being much more assertive now than it has been for a very long time," Abbott said in a joint press conference with Cameron. "Interestingly, Russia's economy is declining even as Russia's assertiveness is increasing. "Russia would be so much more attractive if it was aspiring to be a superpower for peace and freedom and prosperity... instead of trying to recreate the lost glories of tsarism or the old Soviet Union." Putin is set to arrive in Brisbane later Friday, with Abbott's latest remarks coming after a highly anticipated exchange between the two leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Beijing earlier this week. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tuesday the European Union was not planning new sanctions against Russia over the recent spike in violence in Ukraine. Merkel reiterated that EU member states were considering adding pro-Russian separatists to existing sanction lists imposed on Moscow, but added that "beyond that, further economic sanctions are not planned at the moment."
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Obama to push Myanmar reforms in Suu Kyi talks | ||
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Yangon (AFP) - US President Barack Obama arrived in Yangon on Friday to hold talks with Myanmar's democracy champion Aung San Suu Kyi, as the nation turns towards next year's elections with uncertainty over the direction of reforms. Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) party is widely expected to sweep polls in late 2015, but its figurehead is banned from the presidency by a constitutional clause. Obama landed in Yangon, the country's commercial hub, fresh from talks after the East Asia Summit in capital Naypyidaw with his Myanmar counterpart Thein Sein, who has overseen reforms since 2011. After discussions late Thursday, Obama emerged with a message of hope for the once-cloistered nation that balanced out earlier warnings on the risks of "backsliding" on the transition. "The democratic process in Myanmar is real," Obama said. "We recognise change is hard and you do not always move in a straight line but I'm optimistic." During his two-night trip the US leader has also raised alarm over the direction of reforms, citing the cramping of freedom of expression, ongoing conflicts and the treatment of Myanmar's minority groups -- especially the Muslim Rohingya.
- Stalled reforms -
Obama was due to tour the British colonial-era secretariat building in downtown Yangon where Suu Kyi's father, independence hero General Aung San, was gunned down by political rivals in 1947. The two Nobel laureates are expected to hold talks at Suu Kyi's lakeside family home later Friday morning, where she spent years under house arrest by the generals for her freedom struggle until her release in 2010. Her street, which also houses the US Embassy, was sealed off Friday with dozens of Myanmar police at each end as well as a scrum of reporters and cameramen and some NLD members. It is a reprise of their landmark meeting in 2012, when Obama received a fanfare welcome from thrilled locals a year after Thein Sein began to open the country. Most political prisoners have been released and elections have seen Suu Kyi become a lawmaker, while foreign investors have arrived in lockstep with the rollback of most sanctions. But the atmosphere has slowly soured with many observers saying reforms have stalled. Suu Kyi cautioned against US "over-optimism" ahead of Obama's visit, with even her star power earned as the torch-bearer of democracy during the dark junta years having waned in the eyes of some. For his part Obama has been battered domestically with poor approval numbers compounded by a thumping defeat for his Democrats in last week's mid-term elections. He has invested a large amount of political capital in Myanmar's transition from military rule and hopes his second visit will chivvy along the process as elections edge closer. His visit has coincided with the start of a debate on constitutional reform, in particular over the clauses effectively blocking a presidential bid by Suu Kyi and reserving 25 percent of seats for the military. While Obama is cautiously optimistic on the long game for impoverished Myanmar, many ordinary people are not as easily convinced. "I wondered when Obama first came, whether things will be better," 52-year-old street stall holder Minny Oo Aung told AFP in Yangon, where security is high, with clusters of police about every hundred metres. "But there has been no improvement in our society or economy." Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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In Ebola-hit SLeone, dignity in death protects the living | ||
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Freetown (AFP) - Sierra Leone's Ebola burial boys wrap the highly-infectious body and present it to the family for dignified last goodbyes before it is taken gently away. Removal of the dead is a necessarily traumatic experience for those left behind, but the process is a far cry from the way things used to be done. In the panicked early days of the outbreak, when the only consideration was sanitation, teams of what looked to shellshocked relatives like space men would come to pick up the dead. Armed with disinfectant hoses that looked like weapons, they would bag the body without ceremony, driving off before the relatives could ask where they were going. In recent weeks the emphasis has shifted and "dignity" is as much the mantra as "safety" in a country where locals are deeply reluctant to give up their dead. Traditional funeral rites involving washing bodies are particularly important in the culture of Muslim-majority Sierra Leone. But Ebola spreads through contact with infected bodily fluids and the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that these practises are responsible for 20 percent of new infections. In rural areas and even in Freetown, local authorities estimate that the figure might be as high as 60 percent. Keen to persuade families to give up their dead, but aware of their fear of cold, clinical Ebola burials, the WHO issued guidelines on "Safe and Dignified Burial" last week, backed for the first time by Muslim and Christian leaders.
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It is early morning in Freetown and the Red Cross has been called to remove a number of bodies in the Wellington neighbourhood, where cases are on the rise, operations director Thomas Abu tells AFP. Relatives line the potholed road leading up to the first house, and men with grave expressions take the team to one of the victims, a 43-year-old-woman who has just died. Mustapha Rogers -- whose nebulous job title is "beneficiary communicator" -- stops his co-workers and approaches the relatives on his own. "I'm in charge of relations with the families," he explains, before painstakingly setting out the process of removing the dead. He satisfies himself that no one has touched the victim in the two weeks before death or washed her since, explaining that men fully equipped with biohazard gear will be the only people allowed anywhere near. The body will be placed in white tarpaulin, deemed less sinister than the black plastic they used to use. If the victim is Muslim, the team will wrap the body in white cloth, in a nod to Islamic tradition which is valued enormously by grieving relatives. The body is wrapped and disinfected out of sight and only then presented to the family, who are invited to accompany the Red Cross to the cemetery to make a note of the burial plot. "If he is a Christian, a pastor is called. If he's Muslim, an imam," Rogers tells AFP. As he explains the protocol, the burial experts approach clutching their biohazard suits, which they put on in full view of the family. The idea is that relatives are not suddenly confronted by the intimidating and sinister approach of the "spacemen". "This shows them that this is about human beings," says Abu, the operations director.
- Seventy bodies -
Rogers takes a telephone number and notes down how many relatives are present, the beginnings of a survey of nearest and dearest that will come in handy for quarantine purposes should the victim test positive for Ebola. Meanwhile a woman approaches, telling him she rang 117, the emergency hotline, and asking if he has come to pick up her sick relative. A brother of the dead woman flies suddenly into a rage, shouting that he also rang 117, and the ambulance refused to take his sister because her name didn't match the information the paramedics had. "They have no mercy. This lady suffered terribly and nobody could help her. We just watched her suffering and now she is dead," he wails. The 10 Red Cross burial teams -- each with 10 members -- are the only workers picking up bodies in Freetown. All day, every day, they race around the capital collecting the dead. Nearly 70 bodies will be buried by the charity in the late afternoon at King Tom Cemetery, a repurposed military graveyard. In the absence of clear information to the contrary, all will be treated as Ebola victims. Rage having given way to grief, the brother, now dressed in a suit, plants a shrub on the grave of his sister and takes a picture of the plot number so that, at least, he will know how to find her.
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South Africa decide to bowl in 1st ODI at Perth | ||
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Perth (Australia) (AFP) - Australia survived an early scare to make a solid start after South Africa won the toss and put them into bat in their opening one-dayer at the WACA Ground on Friday. Opener Aaron Finch was given out leg before wicket to Proteas paceman Dale Steyn for just one. However, the decision was subsequently overturned by the third umpire. And with David Warner looking confident on 29 off 30 balls, the home side reached 48 for no loss in the ninth over. Finch was on 12 from 22 balls. It is the first game of a five-match series, with Australia winning the preceding Twenty20 series between the countries 2-1. The home side left out all-rounder Steve Smith, naming him 12th man. South Africa named Rilee Rossouw to carry the drinks.
Teams: Australia – Michael Clarke (C), David Warner, Aaron Finch, Shane Watson, Michael Clarke, George Bailey, Mitchell Marsh, Glenn Maxwell, Matthew Wade, Mitchell Johnson, Nathan Coulter-Nile, Josh Hazlewood. South Africa – AB de Villiers (c), Quinton de Kock, Hashim Amla, Faf du Plessis, Farhaan Behardien, David Miller, Ryan McLaren, Vernon Philander, Dale Steyn, Morne Morkel, Imran Tahir. Umpires: Simon Fry (AUS), Nigel Llong (ENG) TV Umpire: Brent Bowden (NZL) Match referee: Javagal Srinath (IND) Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Brazil oil giant Petrobras delays 3Q results over graft probe | ||
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Sao Paulo (AFP) - Scandal-tainted Brazilian oil giant Petrobras said it was delaying release of its third-quarter results because of ongoing corruption investigations involving the company. "Petrobras will not be releasing its accounts for the third trimester of 2014...," a statement said. Preliminary results would be released on December 12 but no date for definitive figures was given. "Petrobras is going through a unique moment in its history due to investigations regarding allegations of conspiracy, embezzlement and corruption amongst others," the statement said. According to former Petrobras official Paulo Roberto, the company funneled millions of dollars in payments to politicians and members of the ruling Workers Party between 2004 and 2012. "Because of the time needed to investigate the ongoing allegations and evaluate the need to improve internal controls, the company is not able to release results for the third quarter," the company said. Petrobras announced a 20 percent fall in net profits in the second quarter despite an increase in sales and production of oil and gas. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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100-cap Rooney faces England legacy questions | ||
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London (AFP) - Wayne Rooney will make his 100th England appearance on Saturday when Roy Hodgson's side attempt to extend their 100 percent record in Euro 2016 qualifying at home to Slovenia. The Manchester United striker, 29, will lead the team out at Wembley Stadium accompanied by his two young sons, Kai and Klay, as he becomes the ninth England player to take his number of caps into three figures. Rooney is on course to break former goalkeeper Peter Shilton's 125-cap appearance record and is also only six goals short of Bobby Charlton's England scoring record of 49 goals. But having failed to shine for England at a major tournament since making his breakthrough at Euro 2004, he accepts he still has to prove himself worthy of comparison with World Cup winners such as Charlton. "To get 100 caps for England, there's not many players who have done it," Rooney writes in the programme for Saturday's match. "It would be a great achievement. I'll be proud to join that club and it is something that myself and my family would be honoured by. "But I could sit here saying I've got 200 caps and 100 goals for my country, but the ultimate is to win a trophy and that's what we all want to do. "That's why we play football, to win. That's the target and hopefully sometime soon we can achieve that." He adds: "Obviously I'm not going to be as big a legend as Sir Bobby Charlton -- he's won the World Cup with England -- so to eclipse that I'd have to win the World Cup, which would be a massive achievement." - Milestone for Cesar - After their group-phase exit at the World Cup, England have taken control of Group E by winning their first three games without conceding a goal and will be looking to record a record-equalling sixth clean sheet. With Liverpool striker Daniel Sturridge still sidelined by a calf problem, Arsenal forward Danny Welbeck is expected to hold on to his place up front alongside former United colleague Rooney. Raheem Sterling is in line for a recall at the tip of Hodgson's midfield diamond, having contentiously started last month's 1-0 win in Estonia on the bench after reportedly complaining of fatigue. Arsenal winger Theo Walcott and 20-year-old Everton playmaker Ross Barkley are both back in the squad after spells on the sidelines, while West Bromwich Albion striker Saido Berahino will hope to win his first cap. Michael Carrick and Andros Townsend have been forced to withdraw from the squad due to injury, but both players were more likely to have featured in England's friendly with Scotland in Glasgow on Tuesday anyway. Rooney's Slovenia counterpart, visiting captain Bostjan Cesar, will also be celebrating a milestone as he stands to win his 81st cap, which will see him surpass Zlatko Zahovic as his country's most-capped player. The Chievo centre-back was injured by a tackle from Rooney when Slovenia last visited Wembley, in September 2009, and the 32-year-old says that he has not forgotten the incident. "My memories aren't the nicest. It wasn't nice, what he did," said Cesar. "But I'm not interested in Rooney; I'm interested in the match and our desire to avenge our two defeats against England." After a 1-0 loss in Estonia in their opening game, Srecko Katanec's side won 1-0 at home to Switzerland and then recorded a 2-0 victory away to Lithuania, leaving them in second place in the group. Talented Salzburg forward Kevin Kampl is a doubt due to injury, but 35-year-old striker Milivoje Novakovic is fit to lead the line and will look to add to his three goals in qualifying to date. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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'The Onion' Might Be Looking To Sell | ||
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Popular satirical news website 'The Onion" has hired a financial adviser for a possible sale, according to Bloomberg. They're apparently working with investment bank GCA Savvian. Bloomberg reached out to Steve Hannah, "The Onion's" chief executive officer who wouldn't comment on the situation. As Bloomberg notes, "The Onion" was founded as a magazine by students from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1988. Eventually they moved to digital-only, and their satirical news content is spread across several websites and YouTube channels. A fund manager, David Schafer, bought the company in 2003.
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The Patriots Just Screwed Up Royally On Twitter After Getting Their One Millionth Follower | ||
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Football's New England Patriots just reached 1 million followers on Twitter. That's the good news. The bad news is that what they did right after is going viral for all the wrong reasons. After reaching the mark they posted this tweet, according to Deadspin.
The Patriots have deleted the tweet since, this timely screenshot comes courtesy of Deadspin who was quick enough to snap it. Here's what happened - the Patriots said they would create custom avatar jerseys for anybody who retweets this tweet (now corrected), according to Deadspin. This was an early and unfortunate result. The Patriots apologized on Twitter later on: Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Scientists Have Incredible Hopes For What They Can Find On This Comet — But They're Running Out Of Time | ||
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When the European Space Agency got word from their comet lander that it had bounced its way into a dark corner of the comet, they knew it meant a race against the clock. Timing is an issue now because of the lander's limited battery life — the scientists must now use the battery sparingly to conduct their scientific experiments. These tests could ultimately tell us if comets like this one carried the key molecules that culminated in the conditions for life on Earth. The lander has a limited battery life — about 60 hours — but also solar panels that can generate power. The probe, however, bounced a few times upon landing, ended up moving away from its target touchdown point where there was plenty of sunlight and into a shady area that seems to be under a cliff. Right now, it only gets 1.5 hours of sun every 12 hours. That shady area has cut down the probe's potential for power, and severely limited the amount of work it can get done on the comet.
Therefore, scientists are moving fast to make sure they get the data they've worked for more than ten years to obtain, way back when ESA first launched the Rosetta spacecraft in 2004. The latest instrument Philae is using is a type of hammering device, shown below, that will penetrate the comet's surface and extract samples to analyze the comet's chemical make up. Despite landing on its side, most of Philae's instruments are working and transmitting data to Earth, including the six cameras on board that are taking beautiful images — the first images ever taken on the surface of a comet. It is perhaps the most important instrument on board Philae: The MUlti-PUrpose Sensors for Surface and Sub-Surface Science instrument, called MUPUS for short. MUPUS is equipped with a hammer, that will nail a device that resembles an ice pick into the comet. Once it's penetrated the surface, the device will collect samples of the comet's surface. Here's it's hammering action during lab testing:
They're calling the event "ThePinPrick."
The scientists are hoping for a couple of major discoveries from Philae's analysis. "The really big result will be if Rosetta's landing probe... detects 'chiral amino acids'," John Plane, a professor at the University of Leeds in London, said in a statement released by the university. Chiral amino acids are a special type of molecule that, as far as we know right now, only exists in biological systems on Earth. If Philae discovered the presence of these amino acids on a comet, it could be a smoking gun for the origins of life on Earth. Another big question scientists are asking is whether comets were responsible for water on Earth. "Comet impacts are thought to have been one of the principal means by which water was delivered to the early Earth, around 3.6 billion years ago, possibly contributing half the water in our oceans," Stanley Cowley, who studies comets at the University of Leicester, told The Daily Galaxy. Stay tuned for more information about MUPUS and the rest of Philae instruments for the Google Hangout ESA is hosting Friday morning at 8:00 am EST. CHECK OUT: The Philae Lander Bounced Off The Surface Of The Comet And Is Now Stuck Under A Cliff READ MORE: 'We Do Not Fully Understand What Has Happened' On The Comet Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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'The Osbournes' Is Back | ||
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VH1 is bringing back what certainly must be one of the most famous reality shows of all time, "The Osbournes," according to The Hollywood Reporter. The series featuring Ozzy, Sharon, Jack, and Kelly Osbourne is being revived by VH1. Sharon Osbourne has said the show will most likely come back for six or eight episodes. "The Osbournes" went off the air a decade ago, so it's a good bet that things have changed significantly in the family. As the Hollywood Reporter notes, the series got an Emmy in 2002 and in its first year it was cited as the most-viewed series ever on MTV at that time. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Britain to seize jihadists' passports, stop them returning home | ||
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Brisbane (Australia) (AFP) - Prime Minister David Cameron on Friday outlined plans to seize passports from radicalised Britons and stop them returning from fighting overseas, while proposing landing bans on airlines that fail to comply with London's no-fly lists. "We will shortly be introducing our own new Counter-Terrorism Bill in the UK. New powers for police at ports to seize passports, to stop suspects travelling and to stop British nationals returning to the UK unless they do so on our terms," he said in Australia's parliament. "New rules to prevent airlines that don't comply with our no-fly lists or security screening measures from landing in the UK." Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Burkina army, civil groups agree transition pact | ||
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Ouagadougou (AFP) - Burkina Faso's army reached an agreement with opposition parties, civil groups and religious leaders for a transition to civilian rule, almost two weeks after the ouster of president Blaise Compaore. The different factions "unanimously voted" in favour of a transition charter, said Henry Ye, president of the commission representing the main power players in the west African country. Under the deal, an interim civilian president will be chosen by a special electoral college, delegates at the talks said. The president will appoint a prime minister, either a civilian or a military figure, who will head a 25-member transitional government. A civilian will also head a 90-seat parliament, known as the National Transitional Council. News of the deal was greeted with applause and a rendition of the national anthem by those taking part in talks, an AFP journalist observed. The agreement was immediately backed by some of the country's politicians and leading civil society activists. Ablasse Ouedraogo, a former social affairs minister, said the future of Burkina Faso had been "protected" and said the deal would open up new opportunities for the young. Adama Kanazoe, a young politician who heads up the opposition Youth Alliance for the Defence of the Independence of the Republic, said the agreement was a sign of the country's "great maturity". "They have succeeded where many thought they would fail," said Kanazoe, who also described the day as "extraordinary" and "historical". Barkissa Konate, a civil activist, spoke of her "pride" of being "a young Burkinabe". "The revolution is on. Now we have a real democracy," she said. Compaore was forced to quit on October 31, after mass protests against his bid to extend his 27-year rule by changing the constitution. The army installed Lieutenant-Colonel Isaac Zida, the 49-year-old second-in-command of the presidential guard, as the new leader of the landlocked former French colony of some 17 million people. But the military has faced mounting international pressure to transfer power to an interim government. The African Union on November 3 pressed the Burkinabe army to return power to civilians within two weeks or face sanctions. That deadline passes next week. "We have made a number of concessions taking into account the interests of Burkina," Zida told AFP earlier Thursday. According to a draft of the transition blueprint, no members of the interim regime would be allowed to stand in the next elections, scheduled for November 2015. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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US spies on mobile phones from the sky | ||
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San Francisco (AFP) - US justice officials are scooping up mobile phone data from unwitting Americans as part of a sophisticated airborne surveillance program designed to catch criminals, the Wall Street Journal reported. Small aircraft deployed by the US Marshals Service from at least five major airports have been taking to the skies with "dirtbox" equipment designed to mimic signals from cell towers, according to the Journal. That in turn tricks mobile phones into revealing unique identifying numbers and general locations, according to the report. The name "dirtbox" was said to be derived from an acronym of Digital Recovery Technology Inc., the Boeing subsidiary that makes the device. The range of aircraft in the program covers most of the US population, the Journal reported, citing unnamed sources familiar with the operation. Details of flights were not given, but they were said to take place regularly with each outing potentially gathering data from tens of thousands of mobile phones. The Journal reported that the US Justice Department declined to comment for the story other than to say that its agencies comply with the law when it comes to surveillance. Mobile phones are programmed to connect with the closest signal tower, but trust signals from towers or imposters when it comes to making decisions, hackers have demonstrated. Boxes in planes could automatically assure mobile phones they are the optimal signal tower, then accept identifying information from handsets seeking connections. Fake cell towers could then pass connections onto real signal towers, remaining as a conduit with the ability to tune into or block digital transmissions. Hackers refer to such tactics as "man-in-the-middle attacks." The Journal quoted American Civil Liberties Union chief technologist Christopher Soghoian as calling the program "dragnet surveillance" that is "inexcusable." The program is reportedly in place to reveal locations of mobile phones associated with criminals or those suspected of crimes, but collect data about other handsets that connect, according to the Journal. After sifting through data collected, investigators could determine the location of a targeted mobile phone to within about three meters, the report indicated. Similar devices are used by US military and intelligence officials operating in other countries to locate terrorist suspects, according to the Journal. Trust in US authorities has already been shaken by revelations about a sweeping Internet surveillance program. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Chicago Bears' Player Challenges Lions Fan To A Fight For $25K | ||
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Brandon Marshall got into a Twitter war on Thursday with a Detroit Lions fan, which ended in him offering the fan $25,000 to fight him, according to ESPN Chicago. It started when a Lions fan reminded the Bears star receiver about his comment about a year ago referring to the Lions as the "little brother" of the Chicago Bears. ESPN recounts: "Marshall responded by challenging the fan to step into the ring with him for $5,000, later posting on Twitter that if he lost, he'd give up another $10,000. But if Marshall won, the fan would have to serve 100 hours at an orphanage, the receiver said. The Lions fan later upped the ante, saying that if Marshall made the bet $25,000, the two could fight in Detroit." Here Marshall quotes the fan's response and adds a comment of his own:
Hours later, Marshall realized he was getting a ton of media attention for this and tweeted the following: The Bears are having a rough season. Their 3-6 record puts them in last place in the NFC North. And Marshall has been plagued by nagging injuries and inconsistency all year.
Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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One Of The Hottest Video Games Has Some Hilarious Glitches | ||
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The latest game in Ubisoft's flagship "Assassin's Creed" series, "Assassin's Creed Unity," was released this week. And so far, it's been anything but smooth sailing. Right away players reported a bunch of glitches which almost made the game unplayable. The worst part is that a lot of these errors came even after Ubisoft issued a huge 1 GB patch on day 1. The situation is a shame, because the imagery in the game, which is set in Paris during the Revolution, is absolutely stunning if it worked properly. Ubisoft has since promise to release even more patches to fix a lot of the issues, according to GameSpot. But until that happens, players have taken to social media to post some of the horrors they're seeing in the game And some of them are unbelievably hilarious. Check out some of the glitches below (very minor spoilers):
This is what Arno's father is supposed to look like.
Something went terribly wrong here.
That's supposed to be Elise, Arno's adoptive sister. Yikes.
This seems like a terrible way to die:
Even young Arno is missing his face in this scene.
This isn't the first time a game has included some hilarious glitches, of course. Just last month, players found some hilarious surprises when they tried to scan their faces in "NBA 2K15." (Via Game Informer) SEE ALSO: Nintendo Is Making One Huge Mistake Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Startup CEO Whines That A New Dad Employee Won't Work Late | ||
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As we've previously reported, many tech workers, particularly software developers, are under intense pressure to work insane hours. The myth is, they should be so passionate about their jobs that working is the only thing they want to do. This myth doesn't happen to be true. People that work all the time aren't better, more productive or even more passionate workers. Research shows that productivity typically declines after 40 hours a week. A Stanford student research project specifically found that overworked coders working 60-hour weeks produced less high-quality code than refreshed people working 40-hour weeks. Nevertheless, the pressure exists, particularly in the startup world where money is tight, deadlines loom and the all-nighter culture rules. But there may be a glimmer that a backlash against this myth is starting to happen. A startup CEO got slammed on Quora when he posted a question complaining that his employee, a new dad, insisted on leaving the office between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. I manage a young startup company in the valley. My only employee is great but he is also a new father. Which means leaving work between 6 and 7 pm. I understand him but it's hard for a startup that the commitment lasts for work hours only. What would you do as a CEO? By today, there were 65 answers or so essentially telling the guy something like this, "Ok, so you are upset that he is not working at the stereotypical, and completely inaccurate, 80-100 hours per week. Are you only getting 50-60? Seriously? I find that I get the maximum amount of work done at around 50 hours per week. It falls off sharply after that point." Or this, "Too many companies think it is natural for developers to work late hours." Or this: "The new father neglects his kid(s) to work until midnight? Are you going to post a question about your employee not staying around until 1 am or 2 am next?" The CEO was so universally trounced by his attitude, that he eventually updated the question to clarify: "The problem is not that the guy is leaving early per se ... the question I have is more with the rigidity of the time even when something more urgent is needed." In other words, the new dad was absolutely insisting that his evenings would be spent with his baby, and not doing "urgent" work when the boss called. The boss was looking for ideas on how to cope. To that, the people had this simple advice: "If you want a night shift hire somebody else to cover that." The responses are a good sign that work life balance may soon arrive more broadly in in the tech industry, maybe even at startups. But, sadly, the question also means it hasn't really arrived for everyone. SEE ALSO: The Stress Of Being A Computer Programmer Is Literally Driving Many Of Them Crazy Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Aaron Levie On Box's Unusual IPO Process, Burn Rate, And The ‘Race To The Top’ | ||
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Box’s 29-year old CEO Aaron Levie has been the driving force behind its success. His idea to turn ordinary file sharing software into a business collaboration platform has made Box an enterprise solution that companies and their employees generally love. Currently, 99% of the Fortune 500 companies use Box in one way or another, with over 20 million users worldwide. But when Box filed for an IPO back in March, its S-1 raised a lot of eyebrows because of Box's high spending rate and massive losses — the company's sales and marketing expenses outweighed its revenue. Box has delayed its IPO until possibly early next year, opting to raise additional capital from the private market in July instead. We caught up with Levie on Wednesday to talk about Box’s IPO process, storage business, and its high spending. Here’s what he had to say on:
Here’s a lightly edited transcript of the interview: Business Insider: Do you have any regrets over the timing of your S-1 filing? Would you have filed a little later? Aaron Levie: We probably would have changed a couple different variables on some of the timing. We ended up filing literally a week before a fairly significant market correction. If you had known that were coming, I think by definition you wouldn’t file. But beyond that, what’s funny is that people forget that to get to this point, we’ve been building the company for nearly 10 years. This is a very small bit of turbulence relative to all of the complexity you deal with building a company. It’s a fairly incremental thing that you work through. BI: But if you keep delaying the IPO, doesn’t it usually mean there’s financial distress or a drop in investor interest? AL: There’s no question that our process has been extremely unusual. I agree with that. But when you kind of look at the numbers and the growth and all of the things that we’re executing as a business, we think that reflects a very different kind of picture from what you might otherwise be perceiving. BI: Then what should we pay more attention to? AL: Across every industry, every size of business, we’re only seeing an increase in the adoption of our platform. It you look at all the customers that we’re now working with: in healthcare, Stanford Healthcare, MD Anderson; in the media, Dreamworks, Disney, and Fox; in retail, Barneys, Gap, and Nieman Marcus. So in every major industry, we’re seeing pretty significant traction with some of the world’s best and leading brands. And we’re also working with General Electric, Toyota, and Eli Lilly. BI: In a recent interview, you mentioned Wall Street is still trying to figure out how to value SaaS companies. What exactly did you mean by it? AL: The biggest difference is merely the fact that in the SaaS business, you get recurring revenue from your customer. So you might spend one thing to acquire a customer and get a certain amount of revenue the first year. But the general idea is you could continue to get revenue from that customer over time. And so in the most aggressive investment periods of your growth, it might look like you’re spending more to acquire the customer than you’re getting from them, but that’s simply because you’re looking at only in the snapshot of the year you acquired the customer. The whole power of this subscription revenue model is that you have a lifetime value of a customer that is very different than the initial annual revenue from the customer and the cost to acquire that customer. So for us, for instance, we have an 80% gross margin and it just happens to be that we spend on sales and marketing upfront to acquire the customer who ultimately becomes profitable on a per customer basis after the year that we acquire them. BI: But there have been successful SaaS IPOs, like Salesforce and Workday, and Wall Street should be used to SaaS business models by now. Why do you think there’s still this “misunderstanding”? AL: I think there’s a significant part of Wall Street that fully understands it. You’re broadly characterizing Wall Street as misunderstanding this. The nature of my comment was really just that these models are still evolving, and every business has a unique investment methodology and unique investment threshold. When Salesforce took over the CRM market, there were basically one or two incumbents, and those incumbents were not the largest companies in the technology industry. The incumbent to Salesforce was this company called Siebel. And so, the scale of competing with an incumbent when your incumbent is still only a mid-size company, it requires a different kind of level of investment to compete with them. In our business, our incumbents are IBM, EMC, Microsoft, and so the scale of the competition is far greater, which means we have to have a significant level of investment in our product or technology or sales and marketing to be able to actually go out into the market, and build a viable product and company that customers like GE, Eli Lilly, or Toyota would be able to work with. So in our case, our investing pattern happens to be a little different upfront, but the benefit is that the scale of the opportunity is fairly enormous. We are going after a market where tens of billions of dollars are spent every single year in the legacy technology, and we’re trying to transform that by moving that to the cloud. BI: You also said Box’s investments were “the highest relative to the revenue scale.” AL: It’s all on a relative basis. So we will continue to spend and you’ll see growth in all of our investments. But the key distinction is that “relative to our revenue scale” it was at the highest last year. BI: So that doesn’t mean you have plans to cut spending? AL: We haven’t cut any spending. No company who’s really shooting for a very large mission will likely be cutting spending on a broad sense. You’re always kind of reallocating your spend, so the things that Google spends on this year is very different from an allocation standpoint than what Google spent on 10 years ago. Same with Salesforce or Workday or any of these companies. So you probably won’t see a point where we’re done investing, it’s just relative to the scale of our revenue, you will see more revenue now over time grow faster than the growth of our spending. BI: There was a huge debate on startups burning too much cash recently. What’s your take on that? AL: I think that’s something incredibly context specific. So it’s almost literally impossible to generalize a concept of how much money should a startup spend to grow its business. All you could do is generalize the principle and the principle should be, if you have a large market, with a very viable product, and a viable go-to-market strategy, and there are ways of increasing your market share and generating long term profits from customers, you should find ways of investing and growing your business. And some companies who have high burn rates fit in to that category. There are companies that are going after $50 billion, $100 billion, $500 billion markets, and they’re investing aggressively to make sure they win in those markets. And unfortunately what tends to happen in the Valley is as soon as you have a lot of those, you occasionally will have investors become a little bit sloppy and entrepreneurs get a little bit sloppy where if they’re not in that situation they might do similar investments, but their criteria and parameters might not be the same. So they might not have a large market, they might not have a viable product and in those cases, you absolutely don’t want to overspend. You don’t want to over-burn. You ultimately need to find and make sure you have a viable business model and a viable product. So you can’t generalize the advice to the entrepreneur except for find which category you’re in, and what is the kind of moment and time you’re in, and then make the investment decision and determination based on the availability and potential of your company in your market. BI: What’s your plan on growing your paid customer base? AL: It’s our job to continue to add more and more value on top of our platform. I read that Business Insider article last week about this idea of “race to zero” and “race to bottom.” I would actually say the reverse is ultimately how we think of our business, which is, we see ourselves really in a “race to the top.” And what we mean by that is, we are in a race to constantly adding more and more value on top of storage, on top of computing, to deliver more capabilities, more kind of industry-unique experiences, greater depth of our platform functionality to the industries that we’re going after. So it’s all about going into the top 8 to 10 industries and finding where are companies reimagining their business, where are they going digital, where are they transforming their business model, and how does Box act as a platform that could accelerate that push into the future. BI: Can you give us some examples? AL: We bought a company a month ago called MedXT. And they do medical images in the cloud. That’s an example of continuing to add value far above just the kind of storage and compute layer of our architecture and infrastructure. It’s really about changing how do customers use their data and how can they transform their business with their content and their information. Another example is Stanford Healthcare. They are literally transforming their hospital. The healthcare industry is going from a world where you paid only for the service that was rendered at the point of a transaction. You fast forward to today, we have mobile devices, wearables, new sensors, and products like Uber, which have changed the way we think about interacting with the real world. All of these things impact the way we think about the healthcare industry. And so a healthcare institution like Stanford has to dramatically transform the way that they’re going to deliver healthcare to their customers and their patients. To do that, they need to have telemedicine, they need on-demand medical experiences, they need the ability to reach out to patients when they’re not in their hospital. So all of that is going to be enabled by IT, content management and collaboration, and by these new user experiences around data - and Box is the backbone for a number of those experiences. We’re not going to be the only technology vendor that helps them transform, but we’ll be one of the platforms that dramatically changes how they’re delivering healthcare to their patients. BI: So you knew from the early years that the storage component was not going to be the main differentiator. AL: It’s a requirement that we do storage really, really well because we have to keep your data really safe and protected. So storage is really important. But the thing that we knew was the cost of storage was going to decline rapidly so you would have to differentiate somewhere other than just being able to store other people’s data. So that was what we knew ultimately would matter the most. And so starting from about 8 years ago, the value proposition was far more about what can you do with your information, rather than can you merely store it. BI: But it seems like a lot of people still just think of Box as a storage business. AL: I mean, why do people forget every time Twitter does an earnings report that they have a billion people retweeting anywhere on the internet, and it’s an incredibly important platform for the future of communication? People forget things. But we don’t think it’s everybody’s job to understand how our platform works. We think it’s our responsibility to deliver incredible value to our customers, but if people confuse us with being in the storage business or whatever, that’s a cost of just the fact that there are just so many companies out there, there’s so much going on on the internet. If you come to one of our presentations, you would absolutely leave fully understanding our strategy. BI: You’ve always said you’ve dreamed of running a big company. What’s it like in reality? AL: We’re still a startup. In the startup phase of my dreams, this is roughly what I’ve imagined. So you get to deal with just a tremendous amount of just things being thrown at you every single day. The most thrilling part of being at a startup in the industry at the time we’re in right now is how fast things change, but yet, how much you get to participate in that change. There’s a new device you can go build for, there’s a new technology that you can go leverage, there’s a new open source project that you can pull under your technology stack. Just the amount of ways that you can take advantage of how much change is going on is unprecedented in the history of technology and certainly in the history of the world. BI: Even with having your ownership stake down to roughly 4%? AL: That’s less ideal. But it’s necessary. The way we’ve invested in the company and the way that we had to grow our business. We’ve raised over $500 million in capital and I think that that is an investment decision we’ve made explicitly because we wanted to build the leading transformational company in this category. And we didn’t see any other way that we could make those kinds of investments and get to that kind of scale without that level of capital in the business. BI: Do you talk to Mark Cuban at all? He said he would combust if he had to deal with your level of spending. AL: I think combust out of happiness (laughs). We do email each other occasionally, but we don’t kind of go golfing or anything like that. Let me just clear one thing up. Mark has always been helpful and been close to the company in some way, or at least available to the company. And I have complete respect for him, we have a difference of opinion about how we’ve invested, and how we grow, but he is entirely entitled to that opinion and we remain pretty strong acquaintances and previous partners. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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REPORT: US Spy Program Uses Airplanes To Collect American Cell Phone Data | ||
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The US Department of Justice has been using airplanes to collect Americans' cell phone data, reports The Wall Street Journal's Devlin Barrett. The surveillance program, which is run by the US Marshals Service under the DOJ, has reportedly been in effect since 2007. Officials have been using portable cell towers, known as "dirtboxes," on small planes to collect identity and location information on cell phone users. Those Cessna aircrafts fly from at least five airports near major cities, effectively allowing them to surveil most Americans. It's unclear how often the Marshals Service has been going on these surveillance missions, but the Wall Street Journal's sources said they happen "on a regular basis." The DOJ refused to confirm or deny the Journal's report, citing concerns over revealing US surveillance practices to those who might want to evade them. Cellphones are constantly in communication with nearby cell towers. The boxes used by the program allow planes to pose as the nearest cell phone tower, which prompts cell phones under surveillance to disclose their location and identity information, even if a legitimate tower is closer than the plane overhead. The dirtboxes also have the ability to interrupt calls, though officials have reportedly tried to mitigate the harmful consequences of that function. Using this practice, US officials can essentially locate somebody down to the room they're in. The Journal's sources say that once the Marshals Service has located their target, the system "lets go" of other users' data, though it's not clear what happens to that data. SEE ALSO: Here's The US Spy Plane And The Drone That Will Likely Be Used To Spy On ISIS Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Internal Report Reveals How The Secret Service Let An Intruder Into The White House | ||
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The Secret Service team guarding the White House when an intruder broke in made a number of previously unreported mistakes, according to a new report in The New York Times. Notably, a key Secret Service agent was allegedly in his van on his personal cell phone instead of at his post when a man scaled the White House fence and entered the building, on Sept. 17. An Iraq veteran named Omar Gonzalez was later charged with the crime. Additionally, the unnamed agent did not have his radio earpiece in and did not have his second, required radio. The agent only saw the intruder after he had climbed over the fence. The Times' account of the incident was based on an executive summary of a report presented to members of Congress on Thursday. The report, which has not yet been made public, also found the Secret Service's alarm and radio systems failed to function properly, and other responding officers did not notice Gonzalez until he was beyond their reach. Ultimately, Gonzalez was able to enter the White House, run through the building's East Room, and open the door of the Green Room. His path took him past the staircase leading to the president's bedroom. That incident and other recent controversies led to the resignation of Secret Service Director Julia Pierson. SEE ALSO: This Is How Far An Intruder Made It Inside The White House Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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