The iPhone 6 Is Selling Like Crazy (AAPL) | ||
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After its first 30 days on the market, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are selling better than any other new iPhone model before it, according to surveys from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) and UBS. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus accounted for 90% of iPhone sales during that time, according to the survey, meaning practically everyone buying an iPhone got the latest and greatest model. That's up from 84% of buyers choosing the iPhone 5S or 5C during the first 30 days last year. UBS found that Chinese customers are very interested in the iPhone 6 and 19% of current Samsung phone owners plan to switch to iPhone. The iPhone 6 Plus appears to be slightly more popular in China too, with a little over half of respondents telling UBS they plan to buy one over the iPhone 6. Here's the latest on iPhone 6 demand in China from a UBS research note released Friday: Our recent UBS Evidence Lab study complements the backward-looking CIRP work in finding impressive iPhone 6 buying intentions. Over 40% of respondents were likely to buy an iPhone 6 in the next year with China surprisingly strong. There is clear share gain—19% of Samsung users look to switch to Apple for their next purchase. It also found a tilt toward the 6 Plus at over half of indicated purchases. CIRP data show the smaller iPhone 6 is selling more than the 6 Plus, which we expect to continue. But due to supply shortages, we don't know the underlying 6 Plus demand. The Evidence Lab study suggests the 6 Plus could exceed expectations, especially in Asia. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Congress Loves Taking Uber, And That's Great News For Uber's Plans For World Domination | ||
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Congressional campaign committees must file fundraising data and spending reports with the Federal Election Commission. Among the numbers in these reports is ground transportation spending data — how many rides are taken, and how much money is spent by a campaign committee on taxis, rental cars, and other services, including Uber. After some number-crunching, Hamilton Place Strategies unearthed a few key findings comparing Congressional transportation costs from the 2010, 2012, and the 2014 election cycles. (The firm decided just to focus on rides under $100 to omit significant group spending efforts. There's also no way to specify in what cities the rides were taken, or which members of Congress are especially Uber-friendly.) During the 2012 election cycle, there were only 100 Uber rides under $100 in Congressional campaign filings, while there were 2,800 taxi rides in the same period. By comparison, there were 2,800 Uber rides taken by members of Congress and their committees during the 2014 election cycle. As Hamilton Place Strategies notes, that's more than a 25X increase in volume.
In the 2010 election cycle, Uber, which was brand new at the time, represented 0% of the market share. But in the 2014 cycle, it represented 61% of total Congressional rides. Kise says the demand for car services has increased in the past four years, too — from the 2010 election to 2014, total Congressional rides increased 84%. Customers love Uber. You can summon a car with the touch of a button anywhere and any time you want to. But Uber has encountered resistance, too — local governments and taxi proponents say Uber is circumventing regulations as a transportation company. Uber's regulatory fights occur on the local level. While members of Congress may not have a say in Uber's regulation, Kise believes they could influence Uber's local regulation. “As members of Congress become early adopters and consumers, they may exert an influence on their local counterparts as these regulations are debated at the local level,” Kise writes. Earlier this year, Uber hired former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe to win the company's city-by-city regulatory battles. Uber operates in an astonishing 45 countries and over 200 cities currently. The company also has plans to keep expanding its operations globally. They're the only company of its kind to do so — Lyft, a rival ridesharing service, currently only operates in the United States, and a similar service called Hailo pulled out of North America and retreated to Europe recently. “Uber has undoubtedly caused disruption to the status quo of ride services,” Kise says in the study. "One thing is clear: members of Congress have embraced peer-to-peer car services for themselves. They are voting Uber with their rides." SEE ALSO: UBER DRIVERS SPEAK OUT: We're Making A Lot Less Money Than Uber Is Telling People Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Members of Congress and their staffers use Uber to travel more than any other form of ground transportation, according to 
Unsurprisingly, this has caused the number of non-Uber rides (taxis, black cars, etc.) taken by Congressional members and staffers to decrease. In 2014, there was a 33% drop from the 2012 cycle, with Congressional members and staffers taking just under 1,800 rides, according to Tom Kise, The World's Top Startup CEOs, Ranked! Employees Reveal What Their Leadership Is Really Like | ||
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If you're going to join a startup, you might as well join a rocket ship. And lately, there are a lot of billion-dollar startups to choose from. Which of these healthy startups have the strongest leadership? We examined CEO ratings on job site Glassdoor for companies with a $3 billion valuation or higher with multiple employee reviews. 12. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has a 58% approval rating. CEO: Travis Kalanick CEO rating: 58% Number of ratings: 254 What employees are saying: "TK [Travis Kalanick] might be our hardest worker. He's smart and principled and very candid at our weekly company-wide TK Q&A. It's great having a leader you really believe in." What it does: Founded in 2009, Uber is a mobile logistics company that connects its users with drivers of private vehicles under Uber’s contact. It offers different types of cars, from full-size luxury cars to smaller vehicles, and has a taxi-hailing service. Valuation: $18.2 billion; $1.5 billion raised from Benchmark, Menlo Ventures, Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, First Round Capital and others. 11. Jawbone's CEO Hosain Rahman has a 64% approval rating. CEO: Hosain Rahman CEO rating: 64% Number of ratings: 20 What employees are saying: "When things fail because of leadership, the teams get blamed, and the leaders get away with it. It's a dysfunctional place. Hosain has no idea of much of this because he's insulated by a level of people that are unable or refuse to give him the right information." What it does: Jawbone is a hardware and electronics maker that makes music and fitness gear. It was founded in 1999. Valuation: $3.3 billion. 10. Airbnb's CEO Brian Chesky has an 85% approval rating. CEO: Brian Chesky CEO rating: 85% Number of ratings: 74 What employees are saying: "Very smart people with huge egos and unfriendly, cliquey vibe. Young management cares a lot about PR and creating a glamorous company." What it does: Founded in 2008, Airbnb lets people rent homes from each other for short stays as an alternative to traditional hotels. Valuation: $10 billion; $794.8 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and others. See the rest of the story at Business Insider  | ||
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LEAKED: The Hottest Smartphone Company In China Might Have Another Phone Coming, And It Looks Gorgeous | ||
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The Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi just launched its new flagship smartphone in July, but it may have already started thinking about what's next. A photo that surfaced on the Chinese social network Weibo reportedly shows what the company's Mi5 phone will look like. The image, which has been making the rounds on various gadget blogs like GSM Arena, Phone Arena, and Trusted Reviews, supposedly came straight from Xiaomi's production line.
If the photo turns out to be accurate, we can expect Xiaomi's next phone to offer a gigantic screen. There are virtually no bezels along the side of the display, which gives the phone a slim and premium look. It appears to be significantly bigger than the Mi4, which received positive reviews from critics upon launch. Xiaomi is one of the buzziest smartphone makers out there today, even though it sells phones only in China and a few other markets. It recently just passed Samsung to become the No. 1 smartphone maker in China during the second quarter of this year, as the research firm Canalys reported. It's also the third-largest smartphone maker in the world in terms of global shipments, according to Bloomberg. That means Xiaomi falls right behind Samsung and Apple, and the company is also believed to be raising money at a $40 billion valuation. SEE ALSO: One Of The Biggest Smartphone Makers In China Just Released This Blatant iPhone 6 Clone Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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This Chart Reveals The Age Distribution At Every Major Social Network | ||
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Social networks continue to be popular with teenagers, but their largest group is actually a bit older. At some of the biggest social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, the largest share of the user base comes from internet users in their late 20s and early 30s, according to a new report from BI Intelligence. This changes when you look at relatively newer social networks, however.
Tumblr, in particular, is incredibly popular among teens and early 20-somethings, with almost 50% of its user base between the ages of 16 and 24. Interestingly enough, both Tumblr and Instagram also have the lowest share of older users, with less than 5% of their user base coming from internet users aged 55 to 64. Even though social networks are already incredibly popular with teens and millennials, social networks are still seeing user growth from these demographics. In the US, for example, 18- to 29-year-olds actually increased their adoption of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Google+, Pinterest, and Tumblr between the fall of 2013 and the spring of 2014. For full access to all BI Intelligence reports, briefs, and downloadable charts on the digital media industry, sign up for a two week trial. SEE ALSO: Mark Zuckerberg Reveals Why You Were Forced To Download Facebook's Separate Messenger App Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Social networks like Instagram, Tumblr, and YouTube attract a younger demographic, with the largest user base coming from internet users aged 16 to 24. Apple Responds To A Potentially Major Security Threat In iPhones (AAPL) | ||
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Earlier this week, mobile security firm FireEye discovered a major security threat within Apple devices called "Masque Attack." Masque Attack is essentially a security hole within Apple's iOS operating system that could potentially allow malicious parties to install duplicate versions of your apps without you knowing. While mimicking your original app, this malicious app could then monitor your data and steal your information. Apple has responded to concerns about Masque Attack in a statement to iMore, revealing that none of its users had been affected and that there were security measures in place to prevent such an attack from working. We designed OS X and iOS with built-in security safeguards to help protect customers and warn them before installing potentially malicious software. We're not aware of any customers that have actually been affected by this attack. We encourage customers to only download from trusted sources like the App Store and to pay attention to any warnings as they download apps. Enterprise users installing custom apps should install apps from their company's secure website. Basically, if you want to avoid any malicious apps from being downloaded, just stick to only downloading apps from the official App Store, or check out Apple's guide for installing apps outside of the App Store right here. SEE ALSO: Here's How To Remove The Personal Data Hidden Within Your Photos Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Google's Massive New Android Update Just Launched, And There May Already Be A Big Problem With It (GOOG) | ||
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Google's new Lollipop update hasn't even officially launched for most Android phones, but developers are already reporting an issue that prevents them from connecting to Wi-Fi networks. According to Google's forum for reporting bugs within Android, some developers are reporting that their devices running Android 5.0 won't connect to Wi-Fi networks. The thread started on Oct. 17 with the most recent post published on Nov. 13, as blog Phone Arena spotted. The developer that filed the original complaint says the Nexus 5 he or she had been using would save the Wi-Fi network after the password was entered, but would never actually connect to the network. More recent reports from Nov. 13 indicate the same problem has been occurring since mid-October. It seems like most developers experiencing this problem are using Lollipop on a Nexus 5 running the build LRX201. This is an official build from Google that reflects the final version of the software — it's not a developer preview edition. For what it's worth, the Nexus 6 Google sent us is running on a different build (LRX21I) and didn't have any issues with connecting to Wi-Fi networks. It's possible that this problem is exclusive to a specific version of Lollipop on the Nexus 5 that may not be completely up to date. SEE ALSO: Here Are All The Phones Confirmed To Get Google's Giant new Android Update Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Mark Zuckerberg Pays Tribute To His Wife On Facebook (FB) | ||
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Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to his own platform late Thursday night to give thanks to his wife Priscilla. Check it out:
Post by Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg is promoting Facebook’s new “thanks” videos, which you can make for a friend. It’s similar to Facebook’s “look back” videos promoted last year, which show off “your most celebrated moments over the years. Zuckerberg met Priscilla Chan in 2003 during his sophomore year at Harvard, at a party put on by his fraternity. Chan, the child of a Chinese-Vietnamese refugee, was born in Braintree, Mass. She moved in with Zuckerberg in 2010, and the couple married on May 19, 2012, in Zuckerberg’s backyard. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Facebook Is Gobbling Up YouTube's Audience (FB) | ||
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YouTube's dominance of the worldwide video market is under threat as Facebook continues to ramp up its charge to increase its share of the lucrative online video market. Facebook has really turned its attention to video in recent months: It began seeding autoplay videos into the News Feed in December, shortly followed by premium autoplay video ads; the company has increased its mentions of the importance of video in its quarterly earnings and investor calls; and it is reportedly actively trying to poach YouTube stars to create content made specifically for its platform. The results of energized video strategy are plain to see. Facebook's key metrics when it comes to video are on the up, while YouTube's are on the wane. For the last decade YouTube has had a virtual monopoly over online video views — "YouTube" is almost as much of a verb to video as "Google" is to search — but soon it could be in the middle of an existential crisis. This isn't just a niche specialist video app with the potential to carve off 5% or so of users, this is Facebook, which already has 1.35 billion monthly active users at its disposal to tempt away from YouTube when it comes to their video needs. Data provided to Business Insider from researchers at comScore shows how Facebook has been eating into Google's (read: YouTube's) market share when it comes to desktop video views in recent months.
Desktop video views on Facebook grew 38.5% year on year to 491 million in September 2014. Views across Google's sites were up 4.8% to 831 million. YouTube is still dominant, but Facebook is savagely nipping at its heels. Facebook isn't just challenging YouTube for its video crown, it's eating into the market share of other video sites like AOL, Yahoo, Vidible.tv and Vevo too. This is how the market looked in September 2013.
And this is how it looked in September 2014. The growth of Facebook in the video space has knocked out a small chunk of YouTube's audience and it has a taken a larger bite of the other video sites too.
ComScore data shows that YouTube marked a 9% decrease in viewers year on year to 150 million uniques in September. Some of that can be attributed to video audiences migrating to mobile, but that’s an industry-wide trend. Meanwhile, YouTube’s competitors marked year on year increases in video views in September: Facebook — +45% Yahoo — +32% AOL — +16% YouTube also trails far behind in the US when it comes to the reach of its video advertising.
The launch of the latest John Lewis Christmas advert — a landmark advertising event each year in the UK — last week provided another pertinent example that Facebook's video strategy is severely hurting YouTube. In the first 24 hours after launch, data provided to Business Insider from social and video marketing company Unruly, showed that Facebook had stolen 40% of the online audience for the video when previously there was none (as last year John Lewis only uploaded its video to YouTube.) Facebook's meteoric video rise could well be down to the fact that many videos on the social network start playing automatically (and are still counted as a view.) So it could be argued its video views are on the up because users have no control over when videos start playing, whereas YouTube users need to click a link or a play button before a view is registered. But in the John Lewis example, Facebook also dominated YouTube in terms of social media shares within the first 24 hours of the upload (76.9% of shares to YouTube's 23.1%.) Shares are a really important metric for marketers because they are a sign of endorsement, rather than just a sign that someone may have passively watched something without really paying attention. Facebook makes that easy to do within the platform itself, whereas you can't share a YouTube video within YouTube. YouTube may well be hoping the beta launch of its highly anticipated ad-free subscription music service will draw people back to the platform by giving users new ways to consume its content (such as the music player that runs in the background.) It also continues to make huge multi-million dollar investments in its original content makers and advertising pushes behind them to improve the perceptions consumers have of the brand as a platform for quality content. But in the background, Facebook is becoming a ever-growing threat to YouTube's video crown. SEE ALSO: Facebook Is Stealing A Huge Chunk Of YouTube’s Audience Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Taylor Swift Is The Apple Of Music (AAPL, TSLA, TWTR) | ||
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Here's this week's episode of the "Jay and Farhad Show." As usual, it's New York Times tech columnist Farhad Manjoo and myself running through some of the biggest stories in tech this week. We record this podcast on a weekly basis. You can subscribe to it in iTunes here. You should definitely subscribe. Here's an RSS link to the show. We use SoundCloud as a host, so you can listen to the show over there, too. This week we talk about Taylor Swift attacking Spotify, Twitter's analyst day, and my idea about Apple buying Tesla. We recorded this on Thursday, November 13, 2014. Enjoy! Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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McDonald's Created Broccoli That Tastes Like Bubble Gum (MCD) | ||
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McDonald's CEO Don Thompson spoke at an event hosted by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz on Thursday night, where a guest asked what the fast-food chain was doing to get kids to eat healthier. Thompson pointed out that McDonald's had redesigned their milk jugs and reduced their fry sizes. But McDonald's wackiest attempt at making their menu more nutritious was to design broccoli that tasted like bubble gum. If that sounds like it wouldn't taste good, it didn't. "It wasn't all that," said Thompson. The McDonald's CEO said kids were confused by the taste. The bubble gum flavored broccoli was a failure. Thompson defended McDonald's menu options. He claimed McDonald's sells the most salads of any American restaurant chain. At the same time, the fast-food CEO said parents have to make food choices for their kids themselves. "You can't ask a business to do things that you as a parent won't do yourself," he said. SEE ALSO: REVEALED: This Is Exactly How The McRib Is Made Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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10 Things In Tech You Need To Know Today (AMZN, AAPL, MSFT, GOOG, FB) | ||
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1. Amazon has finally reached a deal with publisher Hachette. The two companies have been involved in a pricing war. 2. The CEO of Reddit has resigned. It was down to a disagreement about where the office should be. 3. The US is spying on cell phones using planes. The small aircraft are deployed from at least five major airports. 4. Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi is investing in a video streaming company. The smartphone giant has been interested in video for a long time. 5. Luxury e-commerce site Fancy has laid off a third of its staff. There are 15 to 20 people left. SPONSORED BY Delta 6. Satirical news website The Onion may be up for sale. It was last purchased in 2003. 7. The FTC is asking Apple about health data collected by the Apple Watch. It wants reassurance that it's not going to be sold on. 8. Microsoft has fixed a 19-year-old bug in Windows. It has existed since Windows 95. 9. Dropcam employees are miserable after the company was sold to Google. It was acquired for $555 million in June. 10. Facebook has unveiled its updates Terms of Use. There are changes to location data, ads and cookies. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Good morning! Here's the tech news you need to know. '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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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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Coach Brutally Describes What Coaching The Sixers Is Like After 53-Point Loss | ||
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Philadelphia 76ers general manager Sam Hinkie is using a radical (though rational) tanking strategy that the NBA has never seen before. He has traded all his veterans for future assets, drafted guys who won't play a single minute this year, and generally torpedoed any hope of being good anytime soon for the promise of long-term success. It makes total sense, and it's going to be fascinating to see if it works. But this strategy inevitably leads to the type of embarrassments we saw on Thursday night, when the Sixers lost 123-70 to the Dallas Mavericks. They trailed 38-10 after the first quarter and 73-29 at halftime. It was a joke. After the game Brett Brown, the unfortunate Sixers head coach who has the impossible job of leading a team specifically constructed to lose games, described what it's like to coach a tanking team. He compared coaching this team over an 82-game season to a form of slow torture: "The good news is it's the NBA, you get another game tomorrow. The bad news is it doesn't go away. It's like water dripping on your forehead, and there's no place to hide." That's dark. Tanking might work out in the long term, but it's brutal right now. How do you motivate a team that knows it's not set up to win games? How do you go about the day-to-day business of teaching young players when you're getting blown out by 50 every night? No NBA team has ever done this. We've seen teams tank selectively here or there, but never so transparently and never for so many years in a row. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Meet 'Seal Team 6,' The Bad-Asses Who Killed Osama Bin Laden — And Whose Members Are Now Going Public | ||
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After last week's Fox News interview with Robert O'Neill, two of the members of SEAL Team 6 involved in the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden have gone public with their stories of what's already one of the most legendary US military operations in history. This public profile goes against decades of SEAL culture. Before O'Neill's interview and Matt Bissonnette's best-selling book partly about the raid, the SEALs — and Team 6 in particular — were known for being highly secretive. Officially, the team's name is classified and not available to the public. Technically, there is no Team 6. A Tier-One counter-terrorism force similar to the Army's elusive Delta group, Team 6's missions rarely become public. The Fox interview with O'Neill, who claims to have killed Bin Laden, is a major break with decades of SEAL protocol. But so is the government's entire handling of the Bin Laden raid, the details of which have been widely disseminated in the three years since. It shows how important the publicity about Bin Laden's killing is to the US that Team 6 was front-page news, or that a movie like "Zero Dark Thirty" was ever made — the latter thanks to a series of leaks by top defense and intelligence officials. The members of Team 6 are all "black" operatives. They exist outside military protocol, engaging in operations that are at the highest level of classification — and often outside the boundaries of international law. To maintain plausible deniability in case they are caught, records of black operations are rarely, if ever, kept.
The development of SEAL Team 6 was in direct response to the botched 1980 attempt to rescue the American hostages held in Iran. The failure of a US mission to extract the hostages illustrated the need for a dedicated counter-terrorist team capable of operating with the utmost secrecy. The Team was labeled 6 at the time to confuse Soviet intelligence about the number of SEAL teams in operation when the team was formed. There were only two others.
Team 6 poached the top operatives from other SEAL units and trained them even more intensely from there. Even among proven SEALs the attrition rate for Team 6 is reported to be nearly half. The CIA also recruits heavily from their numbers for their Special Operations Group. Team 6 is normally devoted to missions with maritime authority: ship rescues, or raids on oil rigs, naval bases or land bases accessible by water. O'Neill was also involved in the Mearsk Alabama raid in 2009, the daring hostage rescue at sea that was turned into the film "Captain Philips."
When a former Navy SEAL was called for a comment about this article all he could say was: "You know I'd love to help you man, but I can't say a word about Team 6. There is no Team 6." This report is originally by Robert Johnson SEE ALSO: The SEAL who says he shot Bin Laden responds to critics who say he's lying Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Meet The Philly Fed's 1926 Intramural Basketball Team (DIA, SPY, QQQ, TLT, IWM) | ||
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On November 16, 1914, the Philadelphia Fed opened for business. As part of its 100th anniversary celebration, the Philly Fed just tweeted a picture of its 1926 basketball team, the Federals. You can read more about how the Philly Fed is commemorating its centennial here. It isn't clear if the Federals were any good.
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America's Longshoremen Are Creating A Headache For Retailers | ||
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Until recently, it cost just $750 to ship a 20-foot container of goods from East Asia to the U.S. West coast. But that cost has been rising due a labor conflict between the 20,000 workers of the International Warehouse and Longshoreman’s Union and the Pacific Maritime Association’s 29 ports on the West Coast. A collective contract expired July 1, and workers have been engaging in a work slowdown since. The port of Tacoma, Washington, for example, is moving just 10 to 18 containers per hour, compared with a normal rate of 25 to 35, according to Credit Suisse. And the slowdown is spreading to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which handle 20 percent of the nation’s traffic. Retailers are less than thrilled at the prospect of shipping delays heading into Christmas. Some shipping companies are adding surcharges for delays of between 75 and 100 percent of the cost of delivery, and truckers at the Long Beach and L.A. ports are charging more as well. But somebody’s bad news can be somebody else’s good news as well: Credit Suisse says the troubles will offer a competitive advantage to importers that ship goods to East Coast ports or by air. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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The Most Iconic Photo Of World War II Is A Reminder Of How Deadly The Battle Of Iwo Jima Really Was | ||
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"Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima" — the black and white photo depicting five marines and a Navy corpsman planting a US flag after a bloody battle for the island — may be the Second World War's most iconic photo. Fifty years after its capture, the Associated Press wrote that it may be the world's most widely reproduced. A Twitter account dedicated to sharing historical photos recently shared the photograph along with the names and status of its subjects. Though the image is one of triumph, it was taken just days into a battle that would last more than a month. Half of the six soldiers depicted died — among 6,821 Americans — on the very same island they claimed as part of the US' island-hopping strategy of claiming the Pacific theater; Franklin Sousley, Michael Strank, and Harlon Block all left their lives in Iwo Jima. The longest-lived was John Bradley, the only non-Marine, who died in 1994. The AP photographer behind the image, Joe Rosenthal, died in 2006. He'd been too nearsighted for military service, but had an eye for a photograph that would earn him a Pulitzer Prize the year it was taken. It's worth noting that the tweeted photo contains an error. For a time it was thought that the soldier on the far right was Henry Hanson (he, too, would die on Iwo Jima). The sixth man was in fact Harlon Block. SEE ALSO: We spoke to 2 veterans who served in World War II as teenagers — and here's what they remember most Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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We Asked LL Cool J What He'd Do With $1 Million | ||
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Nearly 30 years since his debut album Radio, entertainer LL Cool J remains one of the most consistently successful multi-hyphenates in the industry. In 2009, he joined the cast of the CBS drama NCIS: Los Angeles, which is now in its fifth season. The show also runs in syndication on the USA Network, which provides the star with another substantial source of income. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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The iPhone 6 Is Selling Like Crazy (AAPL) | ||
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After its first 30 days on the market, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are selling better than any other new iPhone model before it, according to surveys from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) and UBS. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus accounted for 90% of iPhone sales during that time, according to the survey, meaning practically everyone buying an iPhone got the latest and greatest model. That's up from 84% of buyers choosing the iPhone 5S or 5C during the first 30 days last year. UBS found that Chinese customers are very interested in the iPhone 6 and 19% of current Samsung phone owners plan to switch to iPhone. The iPhone 6 Plus appears to be slightly more popular in China too, with a little over half of respondents telling UBS they plan to buy one over the iPhone 6. Here's the latest on iPhone 6 demand in China from a UBS research note released Friday: Our recent UBS Evidence Lab study complements the backward-looking CIRP work in finding impressive iPhone 6 buying intentions. Over 40% of respondents were likely to buy an iPhone 6 in the next year with China surprisingly strong. There is clear share gain—19% of Samsung users look to switch to Apple for their next purchase. It also found a tilt toward the 6 Plus at over half of indicated purchases. CIRP data show the smaller iPhone 6 is selling more than the 6 Plus, which we expect to continue. But due to supply shortages, we don't know the underlying 6 Plus demand. The Evidence Lab study suggests the 6 Plus could exceed expectations, especially in Asia. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Congress Loves Taking Uber, And That's Great News For Uber's Plans For World Domination | ||
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Congressional campaign committees must file fundraising data and spending reports with the Federal Election Commission. Among the numbers in these reports is ground transportation spending data — how many rides are taken, and how much money is spent by a campaign committee on taxis, rental cars, and other services, including Uber. After some number-crunching, Hamilton Place Strategies unearthed a few key findings comparing Congressional transportation costs from the 2010, 2012, and the 2014 election cycles. (The firm decided just to focus on rides under $100 to omit significant group spending efforts. There's also no way to specify in what cities the rides were taken, or which members of Congress are especially Uber-friendly.) During the 2012 election cycle, there were only 100 Uber rides under $100 in Congressional campaign filings, while there were 2,800 taxi rides in the same period. By comparison, there were 2,800 Uber rides taken by members of Congress and their committees during the 2014 election cycle. As Hamilton Place Strategies notes, that's more than a 25X increase in volume.
In the 2010 election cycle, Uber, which was brand new at the time, represented 0% of the market share. But in the 2014 cycle, it represented 61% of total Congressional rides. Kise says the demand for car services has increased in the past four years, too — from the 2010 election to 2014, total Congressional rides increased 84%. Customers love Uber. You can summon a car with the touch of a button anywhere and any time you want to. But Uber has encountered resistance, too — local governments and taxi proponents say Uber is circumventing regulations as a transportation company. Uber's regulatory fights occur on the local level. While members of Congress may not have a say in Uber's regulation, Kise believes they could influence Uber's local regulation. “As members of Congress become early adopters and consumers, they may exert an influence on their local counterparts as these regulations are debated at the local level,” Kise writes. Earlier this year, Uber hired former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe to win the company's city-by-city regulatory battles. Uber operates in an astonishing 45 countries and over 200 cities currently. The company also has plans to keep expanding its operations globally. They're the only company of its kind to do so — Lyft, a rival ridesharing service, currently only operates in the United States, and a similar service called Hailo pulled out of North America and retreated to Europe recently. “Uber has undoubtedly caused disruption to the status quo of ride services,” Kise says in the study. "One thing is clear: members of Congress have embraced peer-to-peer car services for themselves. They are voting Uber with their rides." SEE ALSO: UBER DRIVERS SPEAK OUT: We're Making A Lot Less Money Than Uber Is Telling People Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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The Iconic Mansion From 'The Godfather' Is On Sale For $2.9 Million | ||
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The Staten Island mansion made famous by the Corleone family in "The Godfather" is on sale for $2.9 million. The mansion was the location for several famous scenes in the 1972 film, like Connie Corleone's wedding and Don Corleone's famous "You ask me to do murder" scene. The house was originally built in 1930 for former Staten Island borough president Joseph Palma. The five-bedroom, four-bathroom house has been renovated with more modern furniture and brighter colors, and the backyard now sports a pool. There are custom moldings throughout the house, and the basement now boasts an English pub. Despite being gut renovated in 2012, the outside of the house still has the English Tudor style with a very green yard.
The backyard now has a pool. The 6,248-square-foot home sits on 24,000-square-foot grounds. See the rest of the story at Business Insider  | ||
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The Houston Texans' New Quarterback Has An Insane Throwing Arm | ||
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Ryan Mallett hasn't had much of a chance to prove himself in the NFL. After serving three years as Tom Brady's backup in New England, Mallett was traded to the Houston Texans, for whom he will make his first start Sunday against the Cleveland Browns. Mallett, who replaces Ryan Fitzpatrick at starter, has played in just five NFL games, usually wrapping up blowouts. He has thrown four passes for 17 yards and an interception. He is unproven, but he will get a chance to show what he can do in Week 11. The Texans can look forward to the chance to see Mallett's throwing arm, which was legendary when he was in high school. Tania Ganguli's ESPN profile on Mallett describes Mallett's long bombs in high school: In high school, [Mallett] threw the ball 88 yards at an Elite 11 camp. Many assumed the wind must have aided him. A few days later, throwing for a magazine story, he made it 86 yards. That time there was no doubt. [Boston Red Sox third basemen Will] Middlebrooks has seen him kneel at midfield and shoot the football through the uprights of the goalpost 60 yards away. That arm was part of what caused [Mallett's high school offensive coordinator] to invite Mallett to throw with the varsity team when he was in eighth grade. Mallett's arm got recognition in college, too, when ESPN's Sports Science did a segment on him, concluding his throws could reach speeds of 65 miles per hour. The Browns are aware of Mallett's arm and are already preparing. Head coach Mike Pettine said the Browns "know he has a great arm," adding that they are anticipating deep, downfield shots. Browns running back Ben Tate played for Mallett's Southeastern Conference rival Auburn in college and also noted the former Arkansas Razorback's throwing ability, saying: "He's got a strong arm. Very, very strong arm. He can sling that thing around." Browns quarterback Brian Hoyer, who spent a season as a backup in New England with Mallet, upped the praise even more. "Strongest arm I've ever seen, and I really do mean that," he said. The Texans have two highly talented wide receivers in Andre Johnson and DeAndre Hopkins and a top running back in Arian Foster. If Mallett can combine accuracy with his strength, the Texans offense may be able to put a lot of points on the board Sunday. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Credit Suisse Just Tweetstormed Its 2015 Outlook For The World | ||
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Credit Suisse has published its annual Global Outlook for 2015. The full report is currently only available to clients. But the firm highlighted some of its top forecasts in a series of tweets Friday. It sees healthy global economic growth, with GDP advancing 2.9%. "We expect average [US] real GDP growth of 3%," the firm tweeted. They characterized the US labor market recovery as "sustainable." It also foresees the first Fed interest rate hike around the middle of 2015. The Bank of England will follow suit with tighter monetary policy, but easing will continue in Europe and Japan. "Our base case is for strong returns in global equities and modestly negative returns in fixed income," the bank tweeted. Here's the entire tweetstorm: Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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The World's Top Startup CEOs, Ranked! Employees Reveal What Their Leaders Are Really Like | ||
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If you're going to join a startup, you might as well join a rocket ship. And lately, there are a lot of billion-dollar startups to choose from. Which of these healthy startups have the strongest leadership? We examined CEO ratings on job site Glassdoor for companies with a $3 billion valuation or higher with multiple employee reviews. 12. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has a 58% approval rating. CEO: Travis Kalanick CEO rating: 58% Number of ratings: 254 What employees are saying: "TK [Travis Kalanick] might be our hardest worker. He's smart and principled and very candid at our weekly company-wide TK Q&A. It's great having a leader you really believe in." What it does: Founded in 2009, Uber is a mobile logistics company that connects its users with drivers of private vehicles under Uber’s contact. It offers different types of cars, from full-size luxury cars to smaller vehicles, and has a taxi-hailing service. Valuation: $18.2 billion; $1.5 billion raised from Benchmark, Menlo Ventures, Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, First Round Capital and others. 11. Jawbone's CEO Hosain Rahman has a 64% approval rating. CEO: Hosain Rahman CEO rating: 64% Number of ratings: 20 What employees are saying: "When things fail because of leadership, the teams get blamed, and the leaders get away with it. It's a dysfunctional place. Hosain has no idea of much of this because he's insulated by a level of people that are unable or refuse to give him the right information." What it does: Jawbone is a hardware and electronics maker that makes music and fitness gear. It was founded in 1999. Valuation: $3.3 billion. 10. Airbnb's CEO Brian Chesky has an 85% approval rating. CEO: Brian Chesky CEO rating: 85% Number of ratings: 74 What employees are saying: "Very smart people with huge egos and unfriendly, cliquey vibe. Young management cares a lot about PR and creating a glamorous company." What it does: Founded in 2008, Airbnb lets people rent homes from each other for short stays as an alternative to traditional hotels. Valuation: $10 billion; $794.8 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and others. See the rest of the story at Business Insider  | ||
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Elizabeth Warren Doesn't Want Another Wall Streeter At The Treasury Department | ||
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Elizabeth Warren is going head-to-head with Antonio Weiss to become Treasury Undersecretary for Domestic Finance, POLITICO's Ben White reported. Obama nominated Weiss, who runs investment banking at Lazard, for the position. Warren spearheaded the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after the financial crisis and served as a special advisor to the Treasury Secretary. She said she doesn't want to see another Wall Street "titan" in government. "The power of a tight group of insiders can also echo through the government in subtle ways," Warren wrote in an op-ed back in April. Yesterday, Senate Democrat leader Harry Reid created a new leadership post for Warren, a champion of liberals, who some expect will run in the 2016 presidential elections. Those in favor of Weiss' nomination say he would be helpful in predicting market reactions to White House news. But a Warren advisor said most of Weiss' career has been overseas, advising international mergers and acquisitions, which hasn't prepared him for the domestic finance position. Warren's advisor told POLITICO: “She is a no on Antonio Weiss. She was a Treasury official herself, she cares a lot about who is in the domestic finance role. It oversees Dodd-Frank implementation and other core economic policy-making.” Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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HERTZ: We Actually Made $87 Million Less Than We Thought (HTZ) | ||
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In the last three years, Hertz made way less money than it originally thought. In a filing Friday morning, Hertz announced that it will restate three years worth of its earnings statements, reducing its GAAP net income by 18%, 14%, and 6% for its 2011, 2012, and 2013 fiscal years, respectively. On a dollar basis, the company's GAAP net income will be reduced by $32 million, $35 million, and $20 million for 2011, 2012, and 2013. So, the company made $87 million less than it previously said. Following the news, Hertz shares were down more than 8% in early trade on Friday. Year-to-date, the stock is down about 25%. Friday's restatement comes after the company said in August that it was withdrawing its financial guidance for 2014 and that it would conduct a review of its results for its 2011-2013 fiscal years. In its filing on Friday, Hertz said: Although the review and investigation are ongoing, the Audit Committee, in consultation with management, has concluded that the additional proposed adjustments arising out of the review are material to the Company’s 2012 and 2013 financial statements. Therefore, in addition to the 2011 financial statements, the 2012 and 2013 annual and quarterly financial statements must be restated and should no longer be relied upon. The Audit Committee has discussed this matter with PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, the independent registered public accounting firm for Hertz. In addition to the 2011 financial statements, as previously disclosed, the further requirement to restate the 2012 and 2013 financial statements will further lengthen the period for completion of the applicable accounting and audit activities. Hertz does not currently expect to complete the process and file updated financial statements before mid-2015, and there can be no assurance that the process will be completed at that time, or that no additional adjustments will be identified. Hertz added that, "The most material errors identified to date relate primarily to the capitalization and timing of depreciation for certain non-fleet assets, allowances for doubtful accounts in Brazil, allowances for uncollectible amounts with respect to renter obligations for damaged vehicles, restoration obligations at the end of facility leases and certain other items. The review and investigation of the financial records is ongoing." In a separate press released on Friday, Hertz announced a new $100 million cost reduction plan. In August, activist hedge fund manager Carl Icahn disclosed a more than 38 million share stake in the company and said in his filing with the SEC that he plans to have discussions with company management. It seems Icahn and Hertz will have a lot to talk about. SEE ALSO: GOLDMAN: Here Are The 15 Best Stocks For Fat Dividends And Huge Buybacks Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Memphis Grizzlies Player Pulls Off Insane Game-Winning Layup With .3 Seconds Left | ||
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The Memphis Grizzlies pulled off a stunning 111-110 win over the Sacramento Kings Thursday night. The Grizzlies were down by as much as 17 in the fourth quarter when they used a 16-1 run to get back into the game. They had to play the foul strategy down the stretch, forcing the Kings to hit their free throws, which paid off. Kings guard Ben McLemore missed two huge free throws with the Kings up 110-109. The Grizzlies secured the rebound with .3 seconds left, advanced the ball with a timeout, and had to hope for a miracle. Vince Carter lobbed it up toward the basket for Grizzlies guard Courtney Lee, who caught the ball in midair and reversed it in to win the game.
The shot didn't come without drama, however. The referees not only had to review that Lee got the shot off in time — it was a pretty long .3 seconds — but the Kings Ryan Hollins who was guarding the inbounds pass argued that he tipped the pass when Carter released it. If he did touch the ball when it was released, the clock should have started sooner, and Lee's shot never would have counted. The replay is close, and it does look like Carter's pass suddenly fell short once it got past Hollins.
Ultimately, the referees ruled that Hollins didn't touch the pass, and Lee's layup counted. Watch the entire play below: SEE ALSO: How Dirk Nowitzki Invented The Most Unguardable Shot In The NBA Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Germany Is Falling Into The Same Trap That Punished Japan's Economy For 25 Years | ||
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Three things have happened in the last 48 hours that tell you a lot about the state of the German economy: 1. Inflation and GDP figures were confirmed. Germany grew by 0.1% in the third quarter, with inflation of 0.8% in October. 2. German politicians have negotiated "schwarze null", the first balanced budget for the country since the 1960s. 3. Jens Weidmann, the president of Germany's Bundesbank, played down the idea of the European Central Bank buying sovereign bonds (usually described as quantitative easing). These are all microcosms of the problems facing Germany. Growth and inflation are at very low levels, politicians (and voters) are extremely reluctant to pursue fiscal stimulus, and Germany's monetary policy representatives are some of Europe's most hawkish. It's easy to see where this is going. A relatively ageing population, low inflation, low growth, and a political climate that doesn't really seem that unhappy with any of this is what precisely happened to Japan in its lost decade (or two). It's easy to get wrapped up in the fact that Japan saw deflation during this period. Germany might not see that, but inflation and real growth combined, known as nominal growth, looks set to be extremely low, just like it was for Japan. Chris Scicluna and Robert Kuenzel at Daiwa Capital Markets have some policies that might help fend off the German economy's slump. Here are Kuenzel and Scicluna's policy prescriptions:
If that list sounds familiar, that's because it's not unlike Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's three arrows, with some public investment thrown in. There's no monetary arm, because German monetary policy is controlled by the ECB (although Germany policymakers could stop arguing against easing). Sceptics could reasonably argue that both Japan and Germany have a problem that can't be solved by monetary or fiscal easing: that it's just the standard for an ageing, highly productive and advanced economy. But if the Japanese experience has taught us anything so far, it's that there's very little harm in trying. But it took 20 years for Japan to get Shinzo Abe and Haruhiko Kuroda as Japanese PM and Bank of Japan governor. Given the attitudes of many Germans, it might take just as long to get their own radicals. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Djokovic seals year-end tennis top spot, makes London semi-finals | ||
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London (AFP) - Novak Djokovic was at his imperious best on Friday as he sealed the year-end world number one spot and advanced to the semi-finals of the ATP Tour Finals with a 6-2, 6-2 thrashing of Tomas Berdych. Djokovic finishes on top of the rankings for the third time in four seasons and is only the seventh player to hold first place at the end of the calender year on at least three occasions. The Serb's third successive victory at the prestigious season-ending event at London's O2 Arena ensured he won Group A and will face Japan's Kei Nishikori in Saturday's semi-finals. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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'Systematic problems' threaten US nuclear force: Hagel | ||
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Washington (AFP) - The US nuclear force is plagued by low morale and mismanagement that could jeopardize its safety and effectiveness if the military fails to take corrective action, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Friday. Pentagon reviews of the nuclear mission, he said, "found evidence of systematic problems that if not addressed could undermine the safety, security and effectiveness of elements of the force in the future." Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Which External Factors Might Affect Your Investment Portfolio In The Long Term? | ||
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This video is sponsored by OppenheimerFunds.
When you're investing, you're hoping to avoid unexpected obstacles and find advantages in events you can't control. From the state of the economy to the aging of our population, various macroeconomic factors will end up affecting your portfolio. How should you plan for them? As part of our investment series with OppenheimerFunds, we polled Business Insider readers to see which macro-economic factors gave them the most pause. It turns out 29% think salaries aren't keeping pace with rising costs, and 2o% are worried that people are living longer and can't rely on social security as a safety net. OppenheimerFunds Senior Economist Brian Levitt explains that salaries are, in fact, somewhat on the rise; and while no near-term changes to social security are planned, this is an opportunity for us to take personal responsibility for our futures. We have options. Watch the video above to find out what they are.
More about OppenheimerFunds. Mutual funds are subject to market risk and volatility. Shares may gain or lose value. Carefully consider fund investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses. Visit oppenheimerfunds.com, call your advisor or 1.800.225.5677 (CALL-OPP) for a prospectus with this and other fund information. Read it carefully before investing. Oppenheimer funds are distributed by OppenheimerFunds Distributor, Inc. OppenheimerFunds Distributor, Inc. is not affiliated with Business Insider. OFDI engaged Business Insider to prepare this material. © 2014 OppenheimerFunds Distributor, Inc. All rights reserved. Find out more about Sponsor Posts. SEE ALSO: Here's Why Interest Rates Shouldn't Rise In The Long Run Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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13 Misconceptions 20-Somethings Have About Success | ||
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The 20s are a confusing and crucial decade for anyone pursuing a life of happiness and success. In fact, the goals you set for yourself when you were 20 are likely to be completely different from the ones you are hoping to achieve at age 30. And you very well could find the path you expected to lead you to success is nothing like the one you've taken. Here are 13 misconceptions people in their 20s have about success: 1. That their role models will be able to give them the right advice. Oftentimes we look to people we hope to emulate for words of wisdom on how to be successful like them, whether it's a boss at work or a leader elsewhere in our field. But for all of their success, these people aren't always the best people to look to. Energy mogul T. Boone Pickens says young people should instead ask themselves these three questions before accepting advice from someone: Is this person smart? Do they have a conflict of interest? Do they love me? 2. That doing what they're told will help them climb the ladder at work. Many young people leave the structured environment of college with the idea that they can be successful in the real world by following the directions given to them by their bosses, perhaps in the same manner that they passed tests in school after being told which readings to study. In a column for Forbes, Docstoc CEO Jason Nazar writes that the only way for people in their 20s to get ahead at work is by taking initiative and doing things that need to get done, even if those tasks haven't been explicitly assigned to them. "You'll never get ahead by waiting for someone to tell you what to do," he writes. "Saying 'nobody asked me to do this' is a guaranteed recipe for failure." 3. That they have any idea what will make them happy in the long term. In 2011, I landed my dream internship out of college covering the New York Mets for MLB.com, only to learn that being a professional sports writer was about the last thing in the world I wanted to do with my life. I'm not alone. As self-help writer Mark Manson — who previously worked in marketing for a car parts manufacturer and as a dating consultant — puts it: "Out of the dozens of people I've kept in touch with from high school and college (and by 'keep in touch' I really mean 'stalked on Facebook'), I can't think of more than a couple that have not changed jobs, careers, industry, families, sexual orientation, or who their favorite Power Ranger is at least once in their 20s." 4. That they'll know when they've made it. Though it's tempting to think of it this way, success isn't something tangible. It's not like you'll ever be a struggling artist waiting tables to pay rent one moment and a massive, internationally famous success the next. In a post on Quora, Wonwhee Kim writes that no matter how well you are doing, you will never feel successful unless you are hungry for more. "Thinking you've 'achieved' is a static worldview and stunts your growth," Kim says. "Come to terms with the fact that if you want to achieve, you can never stop trying." 5. That failure is not an option. Though many young people feel like they have the weight of the world on their shoulders, your 20s is actually the best time for you to experience failure. "Very few get through their 20s without some serious soul searching and questioning of fundamental beliefs and habits ... And I don't envy those who do," Quora user Arjuna Perkins writes. "This is the best time in your life to be making mistakes. It gets steadily less socially acceptable as you progress in age, so go crazy!" 6. That their talent will carry them to success. In school, many smart people coast by on brains alone. But things get much more competitive afterward, and people who want to be successful need to couple their abilities with hard work. "Unrefined raw materials (no matter how valuable) are simply wasted potential," Jason Nazar writes at Forbes. "There's no prize for talent, just results. Even the most seemingly gifted folks methodically and painfully worked their way to success." 7. That they need to be super-networkers to get ahead. It's important to know the right people, but not if those people think you're only buddying up to them so that they will advance your career. "Keep contacts, but be genuine," writes Quora user Dee Ty. "People will know if you are keeping in touch merely for professional favors — no one wants to be used. Cultivate a habit of genuine affection and other things will fall into place." 8. That having a good job will make them feel like an adult. "In your twenties you learn that you never really become an adult, just that people start expecting you to act like one," writes Quora user Hugh Powell. "So you start pretending to be grown up, even though you still feel like a scared little child." Keeping in touch with this inner scared child will make you more compassionate and forgiving of mistakes, whether they're your own screw-ups or someone else's. 9. That they will accomplish all of their goals. It's nice to set out an ambitious set of achievements you'd like to have under your belt by the time you turn 30, but it's not realistic to think you're going to accomplish all of them. "Spending the first two decades of our life in school conditions us to have an intense results-oriented focus about everything," Mark Manson writes. "You set out to do X, Y, or Z and either you accomplish them or you don't. If you do, you're great. If you don't, you fail." Things are a little more fluid in the real world. Manson writes that he had only accomplished about a third of the goals he set for himself by the time he was 30 — and he's actually really happy with that. "As I've grown, I've discovered that some of the life goals I set for myself were not things I actually wanted, and setting those goals taught me what was and was not important to me in my life," he writes. 10. That success can only be found in the workplace. It's easy to get caught up in the rat race, but a healthy life outside of work can be just as important and fulfilling as a promising career. Quora user Sandhya Abirami Rajan explains that several of her friends spent their 20s building extremely successful professional lives, but their intense focus on work strained relationships with family and friends along the way. "I decided that it was totally ok for me to be an average person with a 8-5 job but I should have an awesome family life," she writes. "So far, so good." 11. That quitting their job is a career-killer. Given the perilous nature of today's economy, many 20-somethings are told that leaving their jobs will cost them money in the long term. After all, the best time to look for a job is when you already have one. But an anonymous Quora user advocates taking more risks. "Move quickly when you get the sense that something isn't right in your career," the user writes. "In your 20s there is relatively little cost/risk to pulling up roots and relocating, or restarting your career in a different direction. Do this fearlessly and immediately." 12. That they need to wait for the right moment to succeed. Many people wait their whole lives to pull the trigger on a great business idea or to go into the field they really want to be in. For young people, this amounts to a lot of, "Well, once I save up enough money ..." and, "If I can just get this big promotion ..." Quora user Yann Girard says there's no time like the present. "If you wait until you have that perfect idea, or until you know who you really are or what you really want to do with your life, you will probably never start doing anything," he writes. "It's only by starting to create things that you will figure yourself out and find your true purpose in life." 13. That they will be successful in their 20s. Of course, there's no guarantee you will experience success any time during your 20s. And that's okay! Stan Lee, for example, created the Marvel Universe at age 40, and legendary comic Rodney Dangerfield didn't catch a break until he was 46. "Most intentional success is accomplished in a relatively short period of time, and rarely in your twenties," writes Quora user Keinosuke Johan Miyanaga. "New careers can be built in less than a decade, and business ventures maybe less than 5 years. Books or software can be written in months. New relationships can happen in an instant. If you are an artist or an actor, it may take many tries, but it only takes one big hit." SEE ALSO: 7 Hard Truths About Life That People Don't Like To Admit Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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These 6 All-Weather Supercars Can Handle Winter Weather | ||
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The New York area got its first threat of winter weather on Friday — falling temperatures and precipitation set the stage for the prospect of snow. Snow! Not such a joyful winter wonderland prospect, actually, after last year's traumatic season. But it did get us thinking about what happens when you combine hot cars and a cold climate. In the winter, the southern areas of the world are able to continue using their exotic cars without any worries about an influx of cold weather from mother nature. People in northern areas have it a little differently. While convertibles are roaming freely around Miami, cars in the North need to have their battery chargers hooked up, car covers put on — or have been stashed in winter storage. They will stay that way until at least all the snow has melted and the salt is cleared off of the roads, which means there will not be excitement on the highways and byways until at least March or April. But there has to be some way to keep a supercar on the road in these colder environments, doesn't there? Supercars are starting to bridge the gap to become usable everyday rides. Visibility has improved, reliability is better, and more manufacturers have started to incorporate all-wheel-drive systems into their sexiest rides. All-wheel-drive is the key factor. In slippery conditions, AWD will provide more confidence to a driver than a rear-wheel-drive car would. Of course, in true snowy conditions, all wheel drive is useless without dedicated snow tires. But on a damp, cold morning, having four driven wheels will inspire confidence in the driver. If you're in the market for a supercar but don't want to store it all winter, we've taken the time to choose some AWD rides that will work for you all year long. [An earlier version of this article was written by Travis Okulski.] If you want a classic, the Lamborghini LM002 is a fine choice. This is the first all wheel drive Lamborghini and was also powered by the Countach's awesome V12. If the LM002 is a little too rugged, perhaps a Porsche 911 Turbo is the right choice. With up to 530 horsepower in Turbo S guise, this thing is quick; it hits 60 mph in a shade over 3 seconds. The Audi RS6, which unfortunately is not available in America, may look like a standard station wagon, but it is anything but. This wagon is powered by a twin-turbo V10 engine good for 570 horsepower, so its powerful and practical. See the rest of the story at Business Insider  | ||
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Here's The Cheap Truth About The New Bone Broth Trend Everyone's Wasting Their Money On | ||
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Goop is into it. Quartz is into it. There’s an instagram hashtag. New York City has recently acquired a “take-out window for sippable broths.” A small coffee cup full of bone broth costs $4. Here’s the thing: all broth (save veggie broth) is made with bones. That’s how you make broth! Broth is also called stock (that was trendy for a few years leading up to 2014). This concept is roughly 20,000 years old. Basically as soon as humans figured out a way to keep boiling water encased in something fire-resistant while cooking, someone also figured out how to put a leftover animal carcass in that boiling water. And there bone broth began. This is one of the best examples I’ve seen recently of The Quaint Economy. The Quaint Economy, as a refresher, is the idea that you can create value by creating a good story about a product. More specifically, it’s usually a story that involves cozy nostalgia for a simpler time. a time before perfect reproductions and cheap commodities. Often, a time before flushing toilets (though artisanal outhouses have not yet become a trend, thank god). But back to the broth. Wise Choice Market, an online store, sells beef bone broth for $33.75 (you get 2 24 fl. oz. broth packets)*.
Here’s the story on the website: “Following traditional methods, the beef bones are cooked gently for 48 hours with organic onions, garlic, and celtic sea salt in filtered water. Organic apple cider vinegar is added to pull the vitamins and minerals from the bones into the stock. Finally, organic parsley is added for the extra minerals to finish the just-like-homemade beef stock properly.” At Walmart, you can get 3.25 oz of beef boullion cubes (makes 25 cups of broth) for $2. Perhaps a closer parallel is the Superior Touch Better Than Bouillon Organic Beef Base (8 oz, pack of 6) for $35 at Walmart. That’s the same number of ounces at roughly the same price as the bone broth. Except the Walmart product is concentrated, and actually makes 9.5 quarts of broth.
It’s hard to tell here what exactly the value is in the “bone broth” rebranding. Obviously using expensive, organic ingredients is going to make the final product more expensive. But how much is the cost of production and how much is a premium charged to be part of a trend story? (h/t Ben Walsh) * Wise Choice Market is a Canadian company with some services based in the US, so these might be Canadian dollar prices? But it seems like it's American dollars, since the shipping info assumes a US address. The exchange rate today is 1.14 CAD : 1 USD.SEE ALSO: The Quaint Economy: How A Good Story Makes A Successful Product Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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There’s a new food trend out: it’s called “bone broth.”
Boko Haram seizes Chibok, hometown of kidnapped schoolgirls | ||
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Kano (Nigeria) (AFP) - Boko Haram has seized the town of Chibok in Borno state, northeast Nigeria, from where 276 schoolgirls were kidnapped more than six months ago, a local pastor and a senator told AFP on Friday. "Chibok was taken by Boko Haram. They are in control," said Enoch Mark, a Christian pastor whose daughter and niece are among the 219 teenagers still being held. Mark and the senator for southern Borno, Ali Ndume, said the militants attacked at about 4:00 pm (1500 GMT) on Thursday, destroying communications masts and forcing residents to flee. Ndume said that he had received calls from fleeing residents saying the town "was now under their (Boko Haram) control". "There is no telephone service now in Chibok, which is why it took time before the reports reached me," he added. Boko Haram fighters stormed the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok on the evening of April 14 this year and forced students onto trucks in a mass abduction that caused global outrage. Fifty-seven managed to escape. The group's leader, Abubakar Shekau, claims to have carried through his promise to marry off the teenagers still being held and said that they had all converted to Islam. More than six months on, talks aimed at securing their release are at an impasse, despite government claims last month to have brokered a ceasefire deal with the militants and peace talks. Mark said the attack on the town appeared to come after Boko Haram overran the towns of Hong and Gombi in neighbouring Adamawa state following the group's ouster from the commercial hub of Mubi. "They came in and engaged soldiers and vigilantes in a gunfight," he added. "Some of us managed to escape. All the telecom towers in the town were destroyed during the attack with RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades). "No one can say what the situation is in the town in terms of destruction to property." Nigeria's government has been heavily criticised for its response to the mass abduction, its failure to free the girls as well as its apparent inability to protect its citizens. Last Monday, 58 boys were killed when a suspected Boko Haram suicide attacker detonated explosives at a school in Potiskum, Yobe state. abu-phz/bs/ec
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This Simple Action Could Help You Keep Your Job | ||
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Worried about keeping your job? Spend more time G-chatting with your coworkers. No, seriously. Though it might seem counterintuitive, using social media during work hours can actually help you keep your job — as long as you're still producing good work, of course. According to new research from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, "Employees who message colleagues about idle subjects like sports or meals were significantly more likely to keep their jobs during firm layoffs," Levo League reports. Lynn Wu, the study's author, peeked into the internal communications — email, calendar events, and instant messages — between consultants at a large IT firm, analyzing more than 8,000 messages sent over a two year span. From this, Wu found a positive correlation between social communication and job retention. Simply put, coworkers who frequently chatted about non-work topics were more likely to keep their jobs during a round of layoffs. Similarly, Wu also discovered a positive correlation between the generation of billable revenue and diversity of information. In other words, employees who discussed a wider variety of topics were more productive. Though Wu wasn't able to identify why these correlations exist, one thing was clear: social media has the power to improve both productivity and job security. So go ahead and chat about that new Thai restaurant or last night's episode of Scandal — as long as you're getting some work done, too. Want your business advice featured in Instant MBA? Submit your tips to tipoftheday@businessinsider.com. Be sure to include your name, your job title, and a photo of yourself in your email. SEE ALSO: Why Jennifer Lopez Thinks You Should Never Stay In A Job Out Of Fear Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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West Virginia U. Suspends Greek System After Freshman Left 'Gravely Ill' At Pledge Event | ||
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West Virginia University has suspended its Greek system after a freshman fraternity pledge was found at his chapter house not breathing and with no pulse, the university announced Thursday night. In a statement, WVU said it was suspending all social and pledging activities for fraternities and sororities following a "catastrophic medical emergency" that left one student "gravely ill." University police identified 18-year-old Nolan Burch — a pledge member of the WVU Kappa Sigma chapter — as the unresponsive student and wrote in a statement that he is currently in Intensive Care at a local hospital. Rumors of Burch's death appeared on social media websites on Thursday night. Student newspaper The Daily Athenaeum reports that Kappa Sigma had its "Big Brother" night on Wednesday, a fraternity ceremony where pledges are paired with an older member of the house who traditionally serves as their mentor. Big Brother nights are notorious for featuring an extensive amount of alcohol. The newspaper notes that Burch tweeted, "It's about to be a very eventful night to say the least" on Wednesday night, a few hours before he was found. However, Kappa Sigma's national organization said in a statement to Business Insider that the WVU chapter had been suspended since mid-October and had its charter revoked in connection to unrelated incidents. See Kappa Sigma national's full statement below: We are distraught and saddened by the news about West Virginia University student Nolan Burch. Kappa Sigma is still investigating the circumstances surrounding the event. This proves difficult, as the operations of this chapter have been suspended since mid-October, due to previous, unrelated violations of Kappa Sigma's Code of Conduct. Subsequently, the chapter and school were notified on Monday, November 10, prior to the event in question, that the group's charter had been withdrawn and its operations had been closed. While we investigate, the Fraternity is focused on working with the university to ensure that the proper support and counseling is available to the individual members of our former chapter. Kappa Sigma will not be able to have any further comment on this matter until all investigations are completed. Our thoughts and prayers are with the Burch family, the West Virginia University community and the young men of our former chapter as they cope with this tragedy. Here is the full WVU Police statement about Nolan Burch: At approximately 11:52 pm on November 12, 2014, Officers of the Morgantown Police Department responded to 200 Belmar Avenue for an unknown medical emergency. When the first officer arrived he found an individual performing Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) on an 18 year old male that was on the floor without any pulse or respiration. The officer continued to perform CPR until the arrival of Emergency Medical Personnel who took over life sustaining first aid. The victim was transported to Ruby Memorial Hospital and is currently in Intensive Care. The victim has been identified as Nolan Michael BURCH, 18 years of age of Buffalo New York. BURCH's family has been notified of the incident and is currently in the Morgantown area. 200 Belmar is the fraternity house for the Kappa Sigma Fraternity. Detectives of the Morgantown Police Department have been working with West Virginia University Police to identify and interview pledge and fraternity members of the Kappa Sigma Fraternity that may have been with the victim prior to his medical condition being reported to 911. Anyone with information regarding this incident is requested to contact the Morgantown Police Department Detective Unit at 304-284-7522. The Morgantown Police Department is committed to its goal of eliminating criminal activity in our city. Citizens are encouraged to become a "Partner in Policing", by reporting suspected criminal activity to Morgantown Police Department Switchboard at (304) 284-7522. If you need immediate Police attention or a crime is in progress call 911. Additionally, according to local news reports, WVU's Sigma Chi chapter was suspended last week after 19 of its members were involved in an underage drinking incident in a nearby neighborhood. "They were allegedly drunk, running through the neighborhood and disturbing the peace," MetroNews reports. Another report states that three students were arrested in connection to the Sigma Chi incident. WVU's Greek community is home to 28 fraternities and sororities, three Greek leadership councils, and over 2,000 students, according to the school's Greek website. WVU cited both the Kappa Sigma and Sigma Chi incidents in their statement announcing the suspension of the school's Greek life, reprinted below: Following emergency meetings today among West Virginia University officials, the Inter-Fraternity Council and Panhellenic Council, all campus fraternities and sororities have been placed on a moratorium that suspends all chapter social and pledging activities until further notice. The action comes on the heels of two recent incidents, the latest occurring today (Nov. 13) where a catastrophic medical emergency required a 9-1-1 response to a fraternity house. The other on Nov. 6 was a disturbance in South Park involving members of another fraternity. Both incidents are under investigation by both Morgantown and University Police. "First, our hearts, prayers and support go out to the student who is gravely ill and his family. Right now that is our utmost concern," said Dean of Students Corey Farris, Inter-Fraternity Council President Ansh Kumar and Panhellenic Council President Rachel Poe in a joint statement. Farris said Student Life officials have met with the family and are also offering counseling services for friends and loved ones. Staff at the Carruth Center are available by calling 304-293-4431. "The action to halt fraternity and sorority activities while these matters are being reviewed is being done with the well-being and safety of our students in mind. That is – and must always be – our foremost priority," Farris said. In addition to any criminal charges, WVU's Office of Student Conduct will review the matters to determine any violations of the student code. SEE ALSO: West Virginia University Suspends Greek System After Rumored Death Of Student Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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