This One Feature Might Be The Best Reason To Use BlackBerry's Messaging App (BBRY) | ||
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BBM, BlackBerry's messaging app, updated on Friday and brought along with it a bevy of new features. Among them, though, is something everyone probably wishes they had: the ability to unsend a message. BlackBerry calls it "Message Retraction," which lets you remove a message from the chat both before the other person can see it, and even after the message has been read. BlackBerry does note, however, that this doesn't mean people can't take a screenshot of the conversation. So sender beware. That's not the only cool update. BBM now also has a Snapchat-esque feature, called "Timed Messages," which lets you set a time limit for your messages. There's also a new sticker picker, which lets you quickly send stickers to your friends; high-quality picture transfer; and "Discover Music," which lets you see what music your friends are listening to. According to BlackBerry, Timed Messages and Message Retraction will be free and unrestricted for the next three months. After that, the two features will be bundled together with other "premium" features, and will be offered as part of a BBM subscription. That makes sense for BlackBerry, which needs to find revenue somewhere other than smartphone sales, PC World notes. The company reported in September that there are 91 million active BBM users, which was up from 85 million the prior quarter. But there seems to be at least one person out there making sure that the company stays afloat. Kim Kardashian recently told Re/code's Kara Swisher that she's so addicted to BlackBerry, she buys one whenever she can because she's "afraid they'll go extinct." BBM is available for iOS, Android, and, of course, BlackBerry. The video below gives you a better idea of how Message Retraction works: Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Slack CEO Explains Why He Thinks His 8-Month-Old App Is Now Worth $1.1 Billion | ||
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Slack, an enterprise work collaboration app, is the latest one to join the club. It announced on Friday that it’s raising $120 million at a $1.1 billion valuation. It’s hard to imagine a company as young as Slack — it launched publicly in February — to be worth more than a billion dollars. But when you’re growing as fast as it is, especially in the enterprise space, anything is possible. When we asked Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield about it, he agreed his company’s numbers are still small in absolute terms. But the $1.1 billion valuation has more to do with the rapid growth it’s been seeing, and the fact that it hasn’t spent a dime in sales and marketing, he said. “We still have a long way to grow to justify the valuation,” Butterfield told Business Insider. “But it’s largely on the basis of the trajectory that we’re on, and most of all, because that’s just been happening organically.” According to Slack, more than 30,000 active teams send over 200 million messages each month. It has more than 73,000 paying customers, and it’s adding $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) every month. At that pace, Slack would surpass $10 million in ARR this year, and become the fastest-ever software-as-a-service (SaaS) company to do so. For comparison, Butterfield mentioned Workday, a publicly traded enterprise SaaS company that’s now worth $17.8 billion. Butterfield said it’s not an entirely fair comparison, since Slack and Workday are in different businesses, but it took Workday about three years and roughly $30 million in sales and marketing — while losing about $75 million in total — to get to $10 million in ARR. “We’ve established that people would pay for us. Slack is being valued based on its ability to make money rather than something more speculative,” Butterfield said. ARR is a commonly used metric among SaaS companies, who charge on a subscription basis. It’s a projection of its annual revenue, based on its total recurring monthly subscription contracts. That means ARR is not the annual revenue you actually recorded, but what you expect to get in the next 12 months, assuming the customer returns to use your service. Most SaaS companies have enough data to estimate the number of customers returning, and its retention rate usually gives a good idea of what to expect in the future. Butterfield didn’t disclose any of the actual figures, but did say, “retention is near perfect” at Slack. Butterfield said more new features, like threaded comments and email integration, as well as “favorites” using emojis, will be added in the coming months. But Butterfield agreed there's still a lot of work to do, and it will all start from sales and marketing. “To get to the kind of scale that we want, we’re definitely going to have to start investing in marketing,” he said. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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There’s been Larry Page Slams Silicon Valley, Says It's Not Chasing Big Enough Ideas (GOOG) | ||
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Google CEO Larry Page doesn't think enough investors in Silicon Valley are investing in real breakthrough technologies that could change the world. In an interview with The Financial Times' Richard Waters, Page estimates that only about 50 investors are putting their money in big, important ideas. "You can make an internet company with 10 people and it can have billions of users. It doesn’t take much capital and it makes a lot of money — a really, really lot of money — so it’s natural for everyone to focus on those kinds of things," he said. Page also said that the problem is that not enough people are ambitious enough. Breakthrough technologies aren't being held back by any big technical hurdles, but by not having enough people working on them. Google, for its part, just announced a new project to create magnetic nanoparticles that will search for disease inside your body. SEE ALSO: How Zappos CEO's Obsession With Raving Helped Him Create A Billion-Dollar Company Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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The Virgin Galactic Spaceship That Crashed Was Using A New Fuel Combination | ||
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The Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo that crashed in the Mojave Desert earlier today was using a new fuel combination that Virgin Galactic had never used during flight before. Virgin Galactic announced that they were switching from a rubber-based fuel to a plastic-based fuel last May after they successfully burned the fuel for about one minute. Right now, there is nothing that says the new fuel was the cause of the "in flight anomaly" that led to the crash. "Frankly, we had good performance from both of them, but as we look for the final range of test flights, we decided to go with the polyamide grain," Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides told NBC News in May. It was thought that this new, plastic-based fuel would provide a longer, more energetic burn and help the SpaceShipTow fly higher. The fuel was also expected to provide passenger with a smoother ride. According to CNN's Joel Glenn Brenner, the SpaceShipTwo rocket engine burned for about two seconds after ignition, then stopped, restarted, and exploded during the deadly crash on Oct 31. The reason for the explosion is still unclear. Two passengers were aboard SpaceShipTwo when it crashed. There was one fatality. SEE ALSO: One Dead, One Injured In Virgin Galactic Spacecraft Crash Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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This Isn't The First Catastrophic Failure Of A Virgin Galactic Craft That Has Killed Someone | ||
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One pilot died and another was seriously wounded in a tragic crash on Friday afternoon during a test flight of Virgin Galactic's pioneering space plane. The craft, called SpaceShipTwo, was designed to eventually take paying customers into the lower lip of space. This isn't the first time that tests of Richard Branson's craft has resulted in deaths. During initial pre-launch tests of SpaceShipTwo's rocket systems in Mojave, Calif. in 2007. Three people were killed and three were injured. All were employees of private company Scaled Composites. The blast happened when employees were testing the flow of pressurized nitrous oxide, the gas the rocket uses to create the oxygen burns that propel it forward. The spaceship was being tested on the ground. "What we do is inherently risky," the facility's manager, Stuart Witt, told The Guardian when the crash happened. "These are not the days we look forward to, but we deal with it." Scaled is managed by aerospace designer Burt Rutan, who also oversaw SpaceShipTwo's precursor, SpaceShipOne. SpaceShipOne was the first manned private rocket to reach space. While SpaceShipOne was funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, SpaceShipTwo is being developed with financing from Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson. Virgin Galactic one of a number of private US companies working on projects to take paying customers to space, but it is the first to test a manned mission there. The crash did not occur in space, however, but far below its final destination at an elevation lower than 50,000 feet (just below the outer edge of the atmosphere's first layer). The craft could not have been higher than 50,000 feet, or 10 miles, because that is the elevation at which it was released from the vehicle that carries it aloft, the WhiteKnightTwo. The issue seems to have arisen right after the craft was released, when it first fired its engines. Boeing, XCOR Aerospace, Sierra Nevada, and SpaceX are some of the other companies with craft in the space tourism pipeline. Since none have reached the phase of testing manned missions, none have yet resulted in fatal crashes. SEE ALSO: One Dead, One Injured In Virgin Galactic Spacecraft Crash DON'T MISS: Here's A Detailed Look At How The Virgin Galactic Spacecraft Works Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Why LinkedIn's Chris Saccheri Quit His Powerful Job To Be A Stay-At-Home Dad (LNKD) | ||
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Chris Saccheri had a great job running the web development team at LinkedIn. There was only one problem: He wanted to spend more time with his kids. "To be able to have breakfast with them. To walk them to school," he tells Business Insider. He was part of the founding LinkedIn team hired in 2002 before the company even had a name. He rose to director of web development, managing a team of 30. But three years ago, a few months after LinkedIn's huge IPO, he made the unusual choice to quit that high-powered job and become a stay-at-home dad. (His wife still works full time.) "I had been at LinkedIn almost nine years. When started, I was 26, single, living in a house with other singles, the perfect demographic to work a lot of hours at a startup," he tells us. "By the time I left, three years ago this month, I was 35, married, had two young children. I could see that they were growing up so fast and I was missing big chunks of it by being at work so much," he says. Saccheri knows that he was "very lucky" he could afford to leave his job. He didn't tell us what his stake was worth, but most of that founding team became millionaires with the IPO. If they still own that stock, it's worth a lot more today. That's obviously not a typical situation. The dirty little secret in the tech industry is that, while pay is high, there isn't much work/life balance. Long days at work are expected. You are also expected to be available nights and weekends, at least by email or chat. In the tech industry, there's an unwritten rule that says if you really love your job, you'll want to work as many hours as is humanly possible, maybe even more, as the presence of "nap rooms" attests. (Think about that: Why should an office have a nap room? For the times when employees want to, or need to, give up actual sleep to keep on working.) "It's ridiculous. I've been there. I slept under my desk. I didn't even sleep. I was there all night a few times at LinkedIn. But that was before I had kids," he says. Saccheri says that as a leader at LinkedIn, "I probably could have worked out something where I worked less time and spent more time with my kids. But I really liked the idea of going in 100% and being devoted to them. That seemed like a totally different challenge." He's now three years into his current job and plans to keep it for another five or so. He's got two kids, ages 6 and 4, and another baby due next month. He wants to stay home full time until the youngest is in school. His advice to others? "You don't have to quit your job," he says. "There are ways you can spend more time at home. You don't have to work 11 or 12 hours a day, really." Most people, even in demanding jobs, can manage to get home for at least one weeknight family dinner per week and/or at least one school day breakfast, he suggests. "You just have to remember that your family, your kids, those are forever relationships. This is time you just can't get back," he says. SEE ALSO: The Stress Of Being A Computer Programmer Is Literally Driving Many Of Them Crazy SEE ALSO: WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Look What Happened To LinkedIn's First Employees Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Amazon's Diversity Report Is Out, And It's Mostly White Dudes | ||
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Amazon joined a slew of other tech companies and released its diversity numbers and they paint a very homogeneous picture. More than 60% of Amazon's global workforce is male and 75% of its managers are male. A overwhelming majority of its managers are Caucasian:
Not that Amazon's alone. The workforces of Twitter, Yahoo, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Pinterest are all predominantly white as well. Interestingly, Amazon did not disclose the race or gender of its technical workers as most other companies have. The company says it has several Affinity Groups that help provide "critical inputs and insights about where the company should focus its diversity efforts." SEE ALSO: Amazon Exec: "We Didn't Get The Price Right" On The Fire Phone Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Illicit E-Commerce Sites Are Thriving On The Dark Net | ||
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The first ever e-commerce transaction, conducted by students from Stanford and MIT in the early 1970s, involved the sale of a small quantity of marijuana. For decades afterwards, the online drugs trade was severely constrained by the ability of law enforcement to track IP addresses and the means of payment. The trickle of transactions threatened to become a flood with the emergence a few years ago of Silk Road, a drug-dealing site on the “dark net”. These e-depths cannot be reached through a normal browser but only with anonymising software called Tor. Buyers and sellers transact there pseudonymously in bitcoin, a crypto-currency. Silk Road was shut last year with the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, the 29-year-old American whom investigators believe to be Dread Pirate Roberts, the site’s founder. Mr Ulbricht is due to stand trial in New York next January on charges that include computer hacking and money laundering. But law enforcers who predicted that Silk Road’s demise would mark the beginning of the end for online black-market bazaars were wrong. Instead, dozens of dark-net Amazons and eBays (also known as crypto-markets) have sprung up to fill the void. They are not only proving remarkably resilient but expanding their offerings and growing more sophisticated. The number of for-sale listings in the 18 crypto-markets tracked by the Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA), an advocacy group, grew from 41,000 to 66,000 between January and August. The largest market until August, Silk Road 2.0 (whose logo, like its predecessor’s, features an Arab trader on a camel), has since been overtaken by two upstarts, Agora and Evolution, whose combined listings have grown by 20%, to 36,000 in the past two months. Each of these three has more listings than the original Silk Road ever did (see chart). It is unclear whether listings are a good measure of sales, which the markets do not disclose. Vendors vary in size: the largest turn over several million dollars a month on a single site, the smallest a few hundred. They pay a fee to register and a commission per transaction, typically 3-6%. Buyers come from all over the world. Their purchases are sent by post—the vast majority appear to arrive undetected. Customer satisfaction is high. Illegal and prescription drugs are the largest product category. (Some sellers are crooked pharmacists.) Silk Road 2.0, whose operators are avowedly libertarian, focuses almost exclusively on weed, powders and pills. Agora, whose mascot is an armed bandit, sells weapons, too. These are marketed mostly to Europeans, who face strict gun-control laws. The fastest-growing of the big three, Evolution, is the least principled. Though, like the others, it bans child pornography, it hawks stolen credit-card, debit-card and medical information, guns and fake IDs and university diplomas. One-fifth of its listings are in its “Fraud” section or in “Guides and Tutorials”, which often explain how to commit crimes. Some see Evolution’s rapid growth as a worrying sign that cyber-criminals are looking to fuse their identity-theft operations with the “victimless” online drugs trade. (It is not, however, the most unsavoury corner of the dark net, where some make markets in contract killings.) For drug buyers, online markets offer several advantages. They are less physically dangerous than street trades. This goes for dealers, too: a recent study found that a third or more of sales on Silk Road were to “a new breed of retail drug dealer”, a transformation of the wholesale market that “should reduce violence, intimidation and territorialism.”
High ratings are sellers’ lifeblood. Reputation is crucial when clients know they cannot fall back on small-claims courts or arbitration. “It’s the ultimate irony: a den of thieves who don’t know each other but need to trust each other,” says a researcher with the DCA who requested anonymity for reasons of security. Dark-net Amazons and eBays (also known as crypto-markets) are not only proving remarkably resilient but expanding their offerings and growing more sophisticated. As drug sales move online, power is shifting to buyers. The big markets’ customer service and marketing strategies increasingly resemble those of legitimate retailers. They are quick to apologise for technical glitches. Two-for-one specials, loyalty discounts and promotional campaigns are common (on Smoke Weed Day, say). Other methods borrowed from the corporate world include mission statements, terms and conditions, and money-back guarantees. “It has become so prosaic it could be shoes,” says James Martin, author of “Drugs on the Dark Net”. Markets are also innovating to cut fraud. In the free-for-all in the months after Silk Road’s closure, thousands of buyers lost bitcoins that were supposedly held in escrow, either because markets were hacked or because their administrators ran off with the money. The emerging solution is “multi-signature” escrow, from where funds can be moved only with the approval of a least two of the three interested parties (buyer, seller and market). Some markets are trying to build a community of trusted buyers and sellers with invitation-only participation. Those whose customers had bitcoins stolen have begun to devise schemes to make them whole. Sites that specialise in stolen card data display their own brand of customer-friendliness. Some offer a service that allows buyers to verify purchased cards are still active, using compromised merchant accounts. The client’s balance is automatically refunded the value of cards that are declined. (Cards sell for anywhere from $10 to $100 each.) Others batch their cards for sale according to the location of the hacked retailer, says Brian Krebs, a cyber-security blogger. Buyers favour cards stolen from consumers who live nearby because banks often treat transactions as suspicious if they take place far from the legitimate cardholder’s home address. A site that has pioneered this segmentation is McDumpals. Its logo features a gun-toting Ronald McDonald and its motto is “I’m Swipin’ It”. Several factors make life hard for those looking to crack down on the dark net, including its technical complexity, the physical separation of buyers and sellers, and their mobility (vendors typically post on more than one market, allowing them to keep selling if a site goes offline). Tellingly, the only market forcibly closed since Silk Road was Utopia, which was shut by Dutch authorities soon after it opened in February. Some law enforcers want to target Tor, but even if that were technically possible it would cause “collateral damage”, points out Nicolas Christin of Carnegie Mellon University, because the software has worthy uses, such as to protect whistleblowers. Moreover, the deep web’s denizens will continue to adapt. Jamie Bartlett, author of “The Dark Net”, predicts: “The future of these markets is not centralised sites like Silk Road 2.0, but sites where…listings, messaging, payment and feedback are all separated, controlled by no central party”—and thus impossible to close. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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CHART OF THE DAY: Starbucks' Mobile App Is Going Gangbusters (SBUX) | ||
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Starbucks offered some interesting new data during the company's fourth quarter earnings call on Thursday. According to CEO Howard Schultz, the Starbucks app processed $1.17 billion in 2013, and the company has already processed nearly $1.4 billion in 2014 by the app alone; it's expected to reach $2 billion by the end of the year. Based on company data charted for us by BI Intelligence, Starbucks' mobile payment volume has leaped to $517 million from $302 million a year ago — a jump of more than 70% — with over 12 million current users of the mobile app. But those numbers should only increase now that Schultz plans on implementing a mobile ordering and payment system set to launch later next year. "Imagine the ability to create a standing order of Starbucks delivered hot to your desk daily," Schultz said. "That's our version of e-commerce on steroids."
SEE ALSO: CHART OF THE DAY: Cell Phone Bills Are Up 50% Since The iPhone Was Invented Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Trent Reznor Is Working On A Top Secret Apple Project (AAPL) | ||
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Trent Reznor is working on a top secret project with Apple, which he details in an interview with Billboard's Joe Levy. The Nine Inch Nails frontman was reportedly chief creative officer at Beats Music, the music arm of Beats Electronics, before Apple bought the company this year. Reznor told Billboard he thinks owning music is on the way out and streaming will become the norm soon. Here's what he said about his new role as an Apple employee: It's related to that. Beats was bought by Apple, and they expressed direct interest in me designing some products with them. I can't go into details, but I feel like I'm in a unique position where I could be of benefit to them. That does mean some compromises in terms of how much brain power goes toward music and creating. This is very creative work that's not directly making music, but it's around music. Apple's reputation for secrecy extends to its celebrity employees, too. That said, Reznor says he's "designing some products" for Apple, which sounds promising, though it's unclear if he's referring to hardware or software. Billboard asked Reznor if his new project had to do with music delivery, which he seemed to confirm: It's in that world. It's exciting to me, and I think it could have a big enough impact that it's worth the effort. I'm fully in it right now, and it's challenging, and it's unfamiliar and it's kind of everything I asked for — and the bad thing is it's everything I asked for. Whatever Reznor is working on, it will likely debut as part of iTunes, not Beats Music. The music-streaming service will become part of iTunes next year. SEE ALSO: Apple Reportedly Wants To Undercut Spotify By Making Beats Music Cheaper Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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I Raved On A Boat At 6 AM With The Craziest Crowd of New Yorkers In Startups, And It Was Amazing | ||
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I never thought I'd go to a wild dance party on a boat at 6 a.m., but now that I have once, I can't wait to do it again. I'm not into electronic music at all, but I was inspired by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, who has said that his experiences going to raves shaped his view on the world and ultimately helped him build his company into a billion-dollar business. Could I get the same "experiential epiphany" squishing into a room with a crowd of strangers to dance to music I don't even like? Daybreaker, a monthly, early-morning dance party that attracts techies and startup employees from all over New York, sounded like the perfect way to try to find out. Daybreaker was hosting a Halloween-themed extravaganza on a boat that started at 6 a.m. Business Insider colleague Melia Robinson and I decided to check it out and see what all the hype was about. Waking up at 5 a.m. was a struggle, but we successfully dragged ourselves out of bed and started "rave-ifying" ourselves with the requisite gemstones and glitter. It was still pitch-dark outside by the time Melia and I left at 5:30. Our taxi driver was incredulous when we told him what kind of event we were going to. The boat started loading from New York City's west side at 6 am, and we realized we were in the right place when we started spotting some crazy costumes. See the rest of the story at Business Insider  | ||
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A Facebook News Feed Experiment On 1.9 Million Users May Have Increased Voter Turnout In The 2012 Election | ||
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A new report from Mother Jones says a Facebook News Feed experiment could have had a serious impact on how people voted in the 2012 election. Facebook has previously come under fire for how it experiments with its News Feed, the stream of updates you see from your Facebook friends. This summer, it was revealed that Facebook conducted an experiment in 2012 that manipulated the emotions of its users. Writing for Mother Jones, Micah Sifry — one of the cofounders of the Personal Democracy Forum and the editor of techPresident.com — says that for the three months prior to Election Day 2012, Facebook experimented with the News Feeds of 1.9 million users. On Election Day, Facebook published a note that read: "Facebook is focused on ensuring that those who are eligible to vote know where they can cast their ballots and, if they wish, share the fact that they voted with their friends." The social network showed the random 1.9 million users in the experiment more news stories, a move one Facebook data scientist told Mother Jones "measurably increased civic engagement and voter turnout." Facebook data scientist Lada Adamic gave two public talks in 2012, Sifry reports. In the video, Adamic says that after changing the News Feeds of 1.9 million users and studying how they behaved, researchers noted a "statistically significant" increase regarding how much attention users paid to government news. The number who voted climbed from 64% to 67%, meaning a Facebook News Feed experiment positively affected voter turnout by 3%. Of course, those numbers should be taken with a grain of salt; users self-reported, so some people could have said they voted but didn't, or didn't say they voted but did. Users were not made aware of the experiment, Sifry writes. By agreeing to Facebook's Data Use Policy — which all users must do when they sign up for Facebook — you give Facebook permission to include you in psychological experiments like this. The experiment was used to help Facebook develop something it calls the "voter megaphone," according to Sifry. That's a tool that will remind more users to vote every year on Election Day by letting users share buttons on Facebook that say "I'm a Voter" or "I'm voting." If this experiment sounds familiar, that's because it's not the first time Facebook experimented with its features during election season. Before the 2010 elections, Facebook experimented on 61 million users, putting the "I'm Voting" button in different places on their News Feeds. Check out the full Mother Jones story here. We've reached out to Facebook for comment, and will update this story if we hear back. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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How Zappos CEO's Obsession With Raving Helped Him Create A Billion-Dollar Company | ||
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On the way to his very first rave ever, Tony Hsieh, 26 years old and not yet the CEO of e-commerce site Zappos, was already excited for the night to be over. He found electronic music annoying and didn't understand the appeal of packing into a space to dance to some repetitive beat without words. As he waited in the 20 minute line outside the gigantic empty warehouse, he secretly wondered how long he'd have to stay there. "What I experienced next changed my perspective forever," he writes in his book Delivering Happiness: A Path To Profits, Passion, And Purpose. The people packed into the enormous warehouse were dancing differently than anything he'd ever seen at in a nightclub. Instead of grinding against each other, the people all faced the DJ, who seemed to be channeling his energy to the pulsing crowd. "The entire room felt like one massive, united tribe of thousands of people," he writes. "I felt a sense of experiential epiphany. It swept through my entire being."
The throb of the electronic music, he realized, felt like a heartbeat and it was as if the existence of individual consciousness had been replaced by a group consciousness. "Everyone in the room had a shared purpose," he writes. "We were all contributors to the collective rave experience." Hsieh fell in love with that connectedness and raving became a big part of his life. Although he has said in interviews that, at 40, he no longer attends the all-night dance parties of his youth, his rave-obsession hugely influenced his views on management and happiness in general.
His entrepreneurial drive had cropped up much earlier though: He started a worm-farming business when he was nine, which flopped, and a button-making business in middle school through which he pulled in about $200 a month. He also created his own newsletter, selling it for $5 a copy and charging $20 for a full-page ad. In college at Harvard, he sold study guides to fellow classmates for $20 a pop. He and a friend from Harvard, Sanjay Madan, started adverting company LinkExchange after graduation. Hsieh originally had a job at Oracle, but had quit because he found the corporate environment boring. After LinkExchange's major exit to Microscoft, Hsieh invested $500,000 in a startup called ShoeSite. ShoeSite soon became Zappos and Hsieh eventually became its CEO. He moved its headquarters to Las Vegas in 2004 and the company became known for its almost-insane customer service and quirky company culture. In 2009, Amazon bought Zappos in a deal worth $1.2 billion. How did Hsieh's experience with raving help him turn Zappos into a billion-dollar company? Partially because of a psychological concept called "the hive switch." The idea, explored at length by Jonathan Haidt in "The Righteous Mind," is that humans are mostly self-serving, but can occasionally tap into a desire to cooperate and work together. Certain experiences can trigger that group-mentality, which Haidt calls that the hive switch because it mirrors how bees work together for the benefit of the hive. Hsieh found that his "hive switch" got turned on by raving. "It was a feeling of unity with the other people in the space, unity with the music and with one another," he told Playboy earlier this year.
Hsieh tries to evoke that sense of connectedness amongst Zapponians, the name given to Zappos employees. One of the companies "ten commandments" is to "build a positive team and family spirit."
He wants employees to bond over their quirks, have plenty of creative freedom, but bond together through parties, outings, and adventures (Zappos holds parades through its offices all the time). Like ravers all dance alone but move to the same beat, Zappos employees are appreciated for who they are and have their individual roles but work towards the greater goals of the company. In his book, Hsieh also defines what he sees as the four tenets of happiness: "perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (number and depth of your relationships, and vision/meaning (being part of something bigger than yourself)." That last piece of Hsieh's "happiness framework" connects back to what he learned while raving as well. "Everyone in the room had a shared purpose," he says of that first rave. "We were all contributors to the collective rave experience." We decided to see for ourselves... I Raved On A Boat At 6 AM With The Craziest Crowd Of New Yorkers In Startups And It Was Amazing
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At the time of that first rave, he had already made a fortune from selling his first startup, LinkExchange, to Microsoft for $265 million when he was only 24.
Hsieg tries to achieve that partially through fostering a 
A Month After Pandora’s CFO Was Hired, His Boss Quit — Then He Saved The Company (P) | ||
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For its first year and a half as a public company, internet radio provider Pandora struggled to get its revenues higher than its expenses. This chart from the first quarter of 2012 says it all:
On Feb. 4, 2013, Pandora hired a new chief financial officer to help with the problem. That CFO was Michael Herring. Here's Herring:
Herring's tenure got off to a shaky start. On March 7, 2013, the CEO who hired Herring, 10-year Pandora veteran Joe Kennedy, suddenly resigned. Fortunately for Herring, his original introduction to Pandora had come through board members who had worked with him in the past. So for the time being, his job was safe. But Herring knew the gig would go a way in a snap if he wasn't able to somehow fix Pandora's margin problems. Herring was confident he could do it. His plan was to attack the problem in the exact opposite way Pandora had be attacking it so far. Prior to Herring's arrival, Pandora management believed its biggest problem was the amount of money it had to pay out to musicians. Like any radio station, Pandora had to pay music copyright holders a small royalty every time their songs played on its stations. Over the years, that fee had, on the aggregate, risen pretty much in lockstep with Pandora's revenues. When Herring took over, Pandora was generating $22 for every thousand streams and paying $21 out in costs. Prior to Herring, Pandora management believed the best way to widen that $1 gap was to fight the music copyright holders over their fees, and potentially lower Pandora's costs. Pandora management spent a lot of time fighting the musicians for every penny. Herring believed this was a mistake. He believed Pandora's high costs could actually be an advantage — a moat to keep competitors out of its business. He thought most of all, Pandora needed to improve its monetization. Here's how he set about doing that:
With pricing established, Pandora removed its cap on free hours. Demand rose to meet new supply, and now generates $44 per thousand streams. Costs are now $22 per thousand. Nine months into Pandora's tenure, the company hired a permanent CEO, Brian McAndrews. Usually, new CEOs fire all the executives from their old regime and hire their own "people." Not McAndrews. Herring remains Pandora's CFO. Makes a lot of sense when you look at this chart:
SEE ALSO: Why people pay $5,000 to go to tech conferences Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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We Finally Know What HP's New Designer Smartwatch Will Look Like | ||
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HP and Michael Bastian have finally revealed more information about their forthcoming smartwatch, the Chronowing, and The Wall Street Journal got an early look at it. It'll go on sale Nov. 7. Bastian told the Journal that his watch is meant to be more of an accessory than a piece of technology. It's not quite as advanced as other wearables — it can't track your steps or allow you to make phone calls — but that's because it's meant to discreetly show your notifications at a glance. You'll control the watch using buttons along the side of the watch rather than a touchscreen, as we initially reported back in August. The Chronowing will be exclusively sold through Gilt.com, and it costs $349. There's also a limited edition with sapphire crystal and an alligator strap that will sell for $649. The battery is expected to last for seven days on a single charge, and you'll be able to switch up its watchfaces, control music playing on your phone, and view incoming texts. The Chronowing is one of few wearables that are trying to win over consumers by being marketed as a high-end luxury watch rather than a gadget. The MICA smart bracelet, a collaborative effort between Intel and Opening Ceremony, comes covered in gems and looks like a piece of jewelry. SEE ALSO: Fitbit's New Fitness Watch Can Show Your Calls And Track Your Location As You Run Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Here's What IBM CEO Ginni Rometty Is Doing To Turn The Company Around | ||
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Billionaire Mark Cuban, who slammed IBM last week, clearly isn't paying close-enough attention. Cuban said that "IBM is no longer a tech company ... they have no vision." But IBM CEO Ginni Rometty does have a vision – to dominate the next high-profit areas of computing – and she's already launched a huge number of creative ideas to get IBM there. Fresh New PartnersFor instance, this week alone she signed two big cloud computing deals. On Friday, IBM announced an agreement with huge Chinese internet provider Tencent to build a new cloud for Chinese businesses. Tencent provides Internet to 1 billion users. The companies are going to build a bunch of new apps hosted on that new cloud. IBM already has multiple cloud data centers in China. Rometty could have tried to go it alone to write apps and attract Chinese businesses. But by partnering with a big, local name, she greatly increased the company's chances to be a player in the world's fastest growing economy. IBM also signed a huge partnership deal with Twitter on Wednesday. Rometty worked directly with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo to make it happen, she said. IBM and Twitter will write new business apps, hosted on IBM's cloud, that make better use of Twitter data. These apps are not just about watching for mentions in a tweet or measuring sentiment. They will use tweets to analyze information in real time, so companies can make faster, better business decisions. Imagine an app for a pharma company that uses Twitter to track the flu, so it knows when to up production of antiviral medication, for instance. IBM will also train 10,000 consultants to write custom twitter-analysis apps for companies. The Twitter deal follows IBM's landmark deal with Apple to sell more iPads and iOS phones to enterprises by writing more custom mobile apps for them. The fruits of that will begin next month, with the first dozen apps available this quarter, being tested by the first 50 customers.
11 Months Of Creative ManeuversThose deals follow a whole bunch of other interesting, creative announcements under Rometty's reign. Since January IBM has: ... committed $1 billion to turn its mind-blowing natural language analytics engine Watson into a cloud service. Watson powers everything from new cancer treatments to a personalized shopper app (you can ask Watson if you should buy that shirt). ... launched a new cloud service called Bluemix, which lets developers write and host apps in the cloud. This competes with services from Microsoft, Google, Salesforce.com, and includes access to Watson. ... expanded its partnership with SAP where SAP will offer its software via IBM's cloud internationally, a major win over competitor Amazon. ... launched a new family of hardware with the new Power 8 chip. These systems are geared toward the cloud and can quickly crunch through massive amounts of data. IBM is also giving away the Power 8 designs as a free and open source project, so any company can take them, change them. (We'll see if any of this helps Power 8 become popular, but it is a creative approach.) ... spending $3 billion to invent new kinds of microchips, possibly ones that don't use silicon. These announcements are in addition to the typical things you'd expect Rometty to do: spending more than $1 billion to build more data centers globally, launching software to help companies build clouds in their own data centers, supporting cloud apps for the Internet of Things.
At A CrossroadsThere's no doubt that IBM is at a crossroads right now. IBM's revenues have shrunk 10 quarters in a row as companies shift from buying expensive hardware, software and consulting to renting it all, at lower costs, from service providers (AKA cloud computing). Earlier this month Rometty had to admit that IBM's years-long promise to create $20 earnings per share profit by 2015 was not going to happen. The stock had been riding high on her repeated promise that IBM was on target to meet this goal. It's since crashed about 10% to about $164.
But with declining revenues, IBM had to admit it wouldn't meet that goal. It hasn't, however, completely given up those tactics. The board this week said it will add another $5 billion to the share buyback program. That's in addition to the $1.4 billion it still has in the kitty to buy back shares. IBM has already spent $13.5 billion to repurchase stock in the first nine months of the year (more than double its net income), Reuters reports. Since 2000, IBM has spent $108 billion buying back shares. And that's why Cuban told CNBC last week that IBM has no vision. "What they've evolved into is a company that does [arbitrage] on acquisitions. It's stock buybacks. Who is IBM anymore?" The jury is still out as to if and when Rometty's efforts will turn the tide. But she's definitely working all the angles. SEE ALSO: IBM's CEO Has Admitted To A Big Failure – And This Could Be The Best Thing She's Done Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Rometty and the board had been twisting IBM into pretzels over that promise, borrowing billions of dollars to buy back shares, Here's What Richard Branson Told Us About Virgin Galactic Just Last Month | ||
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The Most Popular Last-Minute Halloween Make-Up Ideas, According To Pinterest | ||
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Struggling to decide what to be for Halloween tonight? These last-minute make-up ideas from Pinterest are all so bold that it won't really matter what you're wearing. Pinterest says there have been 176 million pins dedicated to Halloween so far this year, and that about 78% of Pinners plan to spend between $10 and $49 for their costumes this year. The average person spends $77.52. We got a list of the most popular make-up looks on Pinterest — here are our favorites. Sugar-skull make-up has been huge on Pinterest this year. Cat make-up is easy — then just add ears! Add some dots and lines and you're a comic book character. See the rest of the story at Business Insider  | ||
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THE PROGRAMMATIC ADVERTISING REPORT: Real-Time Bidding Is Taking Over The Digital Ad Market | ||
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A new report from BI Intelligence finds that real-time bidding (RTB), a key piece of the programmatic ecosystem, will account for over 33% of U.S. digital ad sales, or $18.2 billion in 2018, up from just $3.1 billion in 2013. Access The Full Report By Signing Up For A Free Trial Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:
The report is full of charts and data that can easily be downloaded and put to use.
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Automated ad buying and selling tools are increasingly driving digital ad sales in the U.S. That means less human-mediated, manual sales, and more opportunities for ad tech specialists to gain a share of ad spend. Nintendo Wants To Get Into The Healthcare Business With A Bedside Sleep Monitor | ||
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The company that brought us Mario and Donkey Kong wants to get into the healthcare business. During Nintendo's corporate management policy briefing Thursday, company president Satoru Iwata detailed a decade-long plan that intends to focus on improving people's quality of life (QOL). Coined "QOL," Iwata outlined Nintendo's first focus for their new business will be on health with a bedside sleep monitor. The health-related theme that Nintendo will first deal with in our QOL business is: Visualizing sleep and fatigue. Everyone needs to sleep, and all of us get tired. There is no argument that whether or not we have sound sleep or not significantly affects our health, and many of us recognize through our daily lives that accumulated fatigue makes it difficult to maintain good health. However, we tend to recognize these conditions in a subjective fashion. Fatigue and sleep are themes that are rather hard to visualize in more objective ways. At Nintendo, we believe that if we could visualize them, there would be great potential for many people regardless of age, gender, language or culture. Of course, there are currently several existing ways to measure our sleep status. However, even though there must potentially be significant demand to visualize sleep, there have not been any definitive products to date. We believe that this must be because devices launched so far have required consumers to make some kind of effort, which made it rather difficult to continue. The monitor will be called the QOL Sensor and will measure people's "sleep condition." Nintendo paired with manufacturer ResMed, a company that makes products to treat sleep and respiratory disorders, on the sensor. Iwata says Nintendo's goal was to make something you don't have to wear and don't have to operate or install to measure your health instantaneously. Here's a look at how it works:
"All you have to do is place the QOL Sensor on your bedside. Inside the QOL Sensor is a non-contact radio frequency sensor, which measures such things as the movements of your body, breathing and heartbeat, all without physically touching your body. This automatically gathered data will be transmitted to the QOL cloud servers, which will then analyze the data measured by the sensor and visually represent sleep and fatigue results." Iwata says depending on the results, people will receive recommendations which may include exercise or changing one's diet. The idea of QOL and the sleep monitor automatically make us think of the Wii Fit and Wii Fit Plus, Nintendo's journey into making exercise as fun and simple as playing a game, which has sold over 43 million units combined. Nintendo once tried something similar when it previewed a Wii Vitality Sensor at 2009's E3 that was expected to read a person's vitals through a fingertip pulse oximeter. That project was shelved in 2013 saying Iwata said they "could not get it to work as expected."
The company posted strong earnings earlier this week which Nintendo attributes in part to interest in the Wii U after the release of "Mario Kart 8" in May and E3 announcements in June. Nintendo should continue going strong through the rest of the year when the company releases anticipated game "Super Smash Bros." at the end of November. The title was released in Oct. on the company's portable Nintendo 3DS to extremely positive reviews. The QOL Sensor won't be available until 2016. SEE ALSO: The 11 hottest video games you can play right now Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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After Going Viral On Social Media, An Adorable Puppy Worth $2,500 Was Stolen In England | ||
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Green spent the equivalent of $2,500 on Misiu to surprise his girlfriend, Joanna Gluminska, only five weeks ago. One of Green's friends posted a picture of Misiu on Instagram shortly after Green adopted the 3-month-old pup. From there, someone posted the picture on Imgur, the image-hosting website associated with Reddit. "Someone on Imgur put a picture of him up, went to sleep, woke up, and Misiu had 2 million hits," Green told Business Insider. "We did a Google image search like they do on 'Catfish,' and found his picture on over 300 websites. Reddit had it as one of the most popular pictures that day. He was on BuzzFeed and he got 80,000 likes. He was on Virgin Radio and got 300,000 likes and he was seen by 30 [million] or 40 million people. This dog has become a celebrity overnight." Green told us he and his girlfriend have been alone in his family's house while his mother is out of town on vacation. On Wednesday, Green came home from work and noticed that Misiu wasn't scratching at the door like he normally would. When he walked into the kitchen, he noticed the back window was smashed in and the back door was open, and when he looked in his backyard, he noticed the fence was broken. Misiu was nowhere to be found. The burglars did not take Green's other dog, however. "I called the police and said, 'There's been a burglary, and I think someone's stolen my dog,'" he said. A police spokesperson confirmed the disappearance to ABC News: "A dog was inside the property at the time of the offense, and has gone missing” but also added, “It is not known if the dog has run off as the rear door was left open or if the dog has been stolen.” Green told us that Misiu, which means "little bear" in Polish, and some of his mother's jewelry were the only things the burglars took — no electronics or other valuables were taken. He says Misiu's popularity likely was the reason Green was burglarized. But it's unclear how a robber would have known where Misiu lives. "Misiu is loved by everyone, not just me. That's why I made a Facebook page for him," Green told us. "I couldn't believe how quickly his popularity spread, and to be honest with you, there's been a few people I'd say have been stalking him based on the messages they've been sending me on the Facebook page. I should have kept him to myself. I shouldn't have shared him with the world. Misiu's been with us for five weeks. He's like a baby." SEE ALSO: This Instagram User Is Going Viral Without Taking Any Of His Own Pictures Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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A designer You Won't Even Be Able To Handle How Intense This Mouse Is | ||
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What's better than 18 buttons on a gaming mouse? 19 buttons on a gaming mouse. That's how many Razer boasts on its new Naga Epic Chroma wireless gaming mouse, which is geared toward MMO players. In terms of hardware, its specs are pretty impressive: In addition to the 19 programmable buttons, the mouse has a 8,200DPI 4G laser sensor and 1,000Hz ultrapolling. That basically means it's super precise and there's virtually no lag. But the coolest part about the mouse is that you can program different lighting colors and patterns — 16.8 million combinations — to sync with your games and other Chroma devices, such as headsets and keyboards. The mouse isn't cheap; it'll cost around $130 when it's released next month. But that's a small price to play for MMO players, who rely on their quick reflexes to win matches. Winning an MMO game, such as "League of Legends," can bring in big bucks for its players. In fact a team of kids from Korea won $1 million for doing just that. There's even a "League of Legends" collector's edition of another Razer mouse, the Naga Hex. SEE ALSO: 7 of the coolest secrets in the game 'Destiny,' and how to find them Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Dear Business Insider Readers: How Do You Use Your Different Devices? | ||
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It's easy to forget that the iPhone was announced just seven years ago. Back then, nobody could predict how people would be using their devices the way they do today — swiping Tinder matches, ordering Uber taxis, and of course, reading Business Insider. That said, we're looking to find out more about how you use your different devices to read and share stories. Do you prefer reading articles on your smartphone or tablet? How active are you on Facebook and Twitter? Are you a fan of watching videos on your phone? Click here to take our survey. All we need is five minutes of your time. Thanks in advance for your candid answers. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Everything You Need To Know About Beacons, The Tech Big Retail Is Counting On To Drive Holiday Sales | ||
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There has been a lot of confusion about how beacons actually work, so as part of new research on beacons from BI Intelligence, we've put together a package of in-depth reports to help executives cut through the noise:
Our Beacons FAQ includes answers to some of the following questions: 1. What is a beacon? A beacon is a small wireless device that constantly broadcasts radio signals to nearby smartphones and tablets. Think of it as a lighthouse emitting light in regular intervals. Mobile apps can listen for that signal and, when they receive it, trigger a location-based action. 2. Why is Bluetooth low energy (BLE) important? BLE is the signal emitted by beacons, and it's important for two reasons. First, it transmits radio waves, which can penetrate physical barriers like walls. Second, BLE consumes only a fraction of the battery power that classic Bluetooth does. 3. Do beacons work with iPhones and Android phones? Yes, but they work differently. Only iOS 7 devices constantly scan for BLE and wake up relevant apps — even if they are closed — when they come within range of a beacon. iPhones and iPads can do this thanks to Apple's iBeacon protocol (more on that below). Android devices, on the other hand, do not have a beacon system of this type at the operating-system level. Android apps must therefore scan for BLE, meaning that for Android users to interact with beacons, they have to have the app running on their phone, at least in the background. Beacon scanning at the app level means there is more of a battery drain for Android users. 4. What is an iBeacon? Is it just an Apple beacon? Sort of. iBeacon is not an off-the-shelf beacon that retailers can buy and install in their stores (at least not yet). Apple has filed documents with the Federal Communications Commission, which suggest that the company wants to manufacture iBeacon hardware. Currently, iBeacon is a system built into the latest version of Apple's iOS 7 mobile operating system that lets iPhones and iPads constantly scan for nearby Bluetooth devices. When iBeacon identifies a beacon, it can wake up relevant apps on someone's phone, even when an app is closed and not running in the background. Additionally, iPads and iPhones can act as beacons; they can emit beacon signals to wake up apps on other iOS devices. 5. What does Apple’s iBeacon technology do? iBeacon lets iPhones and iPads constantly scan for nearby Bluetooth devices. When it identifies a Bluetooth device, like a beacon, it can wake up an app on someone's phone — even if the app is not running. Developers can make their apps responsive to iBeacon by using Apple's Core Location APIs (application programming interfaces) in iOS. 6. Do beacons beam data to phones? Beacons do send small bits of data, typically a unique identifier. This allows mobile apps to differentiate between beacons and perform an action when necessary (that is, a location-triggered notification). Think of it as the combination of a hyperaccurate GPS coordinate or an IP address. The identifier consists of three components: a UUID, which is specific to a beacon vendor; a "major," which is specific to a region, like a store location; and a "minor," which is specific to a subregion, like a department within a store. 7. If, as a retailer, I purchase beacons from a vendor, how do I know they'll work with my app? Developers have to include the unique identifier of a beacon in the code so their app will be able to recognize it. If an app doesn't know the identifier for a beacon, then it can't be on the lookout for its BLE signal. Most beacon vendors provide developer support to help users configure their apps. Other Questions We Answer In The Beacons Explainer:
For full access to all BI Intelligence's reports, daily briefs and downloadable charts on the e-commerce and payments industries, sign up for a free trial. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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During the upcoming holidays, retailers will be trying out a new technology that allows them to wake up apps and send offers and information to customer phones. Jony Ive Explains Why The Apple Watch Was Harder To Design Than The iPhone (AAPL) | ||
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Apple's senior vice president of design, Jony Ive, recently talked about the complications that came with designing the Apple Watch. "Even though Apple Watch does so many things, there are cultural, historical implications and expectations," Ive said, according to The Wall Street Journal. "That’s why it’s been such a difficult and humbling program." Speaking to the audience at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Ive explained that having to deal with people's expectations of what a wrist watch should be made the design process for the Apple Watch harder than the iPhone. "As soon as something is worn, we have expectations of choice," said Ive, before joking that "only in prison" do you see uniformity in what people wear. Ive also discussed how using the Apple Watch differs in the type of interaction when compared to something like the iPhone, noting that a device worn on the wrist is best used for "lightweight interactions" and "casual glancing." Ive's comments echoed what he said weeks earlier at Vanity Fair's New Establishment Summit, where he detailed the trial and error process with the Apple Watch that included starting with questions such as "what if" and "how do we do this?" Ive believes, however, that the wrist is the natural evolution of the clock, which evolved from being worn around the neck in the 17th century, to the pocket with pocket watches, and finally to the wrist. Apple's treatment of the Apple Watch as both a consumer tech product and a fashion accessory led to the Apple Watch be the most customizable Apple product to date, with two different screen sizes, six different custom metal alloys, and six styles of watch bands. The Apple Watch, which was announced on Sept. 9 alongside the iPhone 6, has yet to see a firm release date, but Apple has promised the device will debut in "early 2015" and start at $349. You can watch Jony Ive's interview at the Vanity Fair summit below. SEE ALSO: Find Out What Your Zip Code Says About You With This Creepily Accurate Website Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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The Second Languages Of Every Part Of The World In One Incredible Infographic | ||
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The website MoveHub.com is a resource for people looking to move abroad. They've released this eye-opening infographic that shows the second language of every region across the globe. Some are rather predictable, such as Canada's knowledge of French. But others are very telling about the histories of certain regions and how our global story has played out over hundreds of years. Take a look at what they've compiled:
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This One Feature Might Be The Best Reason To Use BlackBerry's Messaging App (BBRY) | ||
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BBM, BlackBerry's messaging app, updated on Friday and brought along with it a bevy of new features. Among them, though, is something everyone probably wishes they had: the ability to unsend a message. BlackBerry calls it "Message Retraction," which lets you remove a message from the chat both before the other person can see it, and even after the message has been read. BlackBerry does note, however, that this doesn't mean people can't take a screenshot of the conversation. So sender beware. That's not the only cool update. BBM now also has a Snapchat-esque feature, called "Timed Messages," which lets you set a time limit for your messages. There's also a new sticker picker, which lets you quickly send stickers to your friends; high-quality picture transfer; and "Discover Music," which lets you see what music your friends are listening to. According to BlackBerry, Timed Messages and Message Retraction will be free and unrestricted for the next three months. After that, the two features will be bundled together with other "premium" features, and will be offered as part of a BBM subscription. That makes sense for BlackBerry, which needs to find revenue somewhere other than smartphone sales, PC World notes. The company reported in September that there are 91 million active BBM users, which was up from 85 million the prior quarter. But there seems to be at least one person out there making sure that the company stays afloat. Kim Kardashian recently told Re/code's Kara Swisher that she's so addicted to BlackBerry, she buys one whenever she can because she's "afraid they'll go extinct." BBM is available for iOS, Android, and, of course, BlackBerry. The video below gives you a better idea of how Message Retraction works: Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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This Damning Book Offers Little Hope For The Future Of Afghanistan | ||
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That's just one of the many negative outlooks about the future of Afghanistan offered by Afghan civilians, police commanders, and US troops alike in the new book "Swimming with Warlords: A Dozen-Year Journey Across the Afghan War" by award-winning journalist Kevin Sites. The pessimistic quote comes from a police commander named Imam Muhammad whom Sites interviewed, as he travels back to Afghanistan for his fifth and final journey to retrace his steps when he first entered at the beginning of the US-led war against the Taliban in 2001. As Sites notes in his book, the commander's reference to "my people" is a bad sign, signifying a reliance on tribalism rather than a national identity — as Afghans — that continues to plague the war torn nation. To be fair, the country has accomplished much in the years since the Taliban's fall. Construction of schools, bridges, and dams have provided some semblance of infrastructure, and a growing art and skateboarding scene has emerged in Kabul. Meanwhile, women's rights have considerably improved, and the average Afghan has seen health care improvements that have dramatically increased life expectancy. But high levels of distrust toward the government among Afghans should yield no illusions as to the likely outcome when US troops leave. "Corruption, all kinds of corruption," former Northern Alliance Gen. Moammar Hassan told Sites. "The justice system in Afghanistan doesn't work. The people are frustrated. And this is why in the western and southern provinces they go to the Taliban for justice and the application of Sharia law."
While offering a sober look at the state of Afghanistan, the book yields interesting perspectives from not only the many subjects interviewed but also the world of Sites himself, a journalist who has been in-and-out of conflict zones for more than 28 years. As he tries to follow along the path that took him to Afghanistan more than a decade before, he brings the reader back to entries in his 2001 journal, which offers perspective, wonderful reporting — and at times — sheer terror. There is much to bolster the pessimistic argument toward Afghanistan's future these days. A new US government report shows record levels of opium production in the region, which is now a $3 billion industry with much of the profit going to the Taliban. And then there is the 2013 Vice documentary "This Is What Winning Looks Like," which showed that despite the best efforts of US forces, rampant corruption, military and police incompetence, and illiteracy still continue. It's not just Afghans who are worried about the Taliban possibly returning to power. Sites references a Jan. 2014 classified "National Intelligence Estimate" put together by all 16 US intelligence agencies, which predicts chaos will engulf the country if foreign military and financial aid dries up, with the Taliban likely seizing control by 2017. A favorite Taliban saying is that "the Americans have watches. We have the time." — Eric Margolis Still, there is an air of uncertainty that remains over Afghanistan — and Sites does not try to predict what will happen beyond 2014. It's worth remembering that before Afghanistan was ravaged by war, the country had paved roads, cars, schools, a modern, professional military, and a shared national identity. Could it happen once more? As Sites argues, there is some room for optimism: "So is all lost? My journeys tell me no. Hope both political and economic remains. Youth movements are forming, pushing back against both the government's corruption and the Taliban's extremism. Experts also say that Afghanistan could one day sustain itself with properly managed mineral and other natural resources. China, India, and other nations are already investing."
Whether Afghanistan blooms into the democracy hoped for by the US or turns to a Taliban dictatorship, Sites' book is a clear reminder of the inherent dangers of America's fiasco of "nation-building" in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, the U.S.-backed Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki destroyed the promise of democracy by pushing Sunnis out of the political process, paving the way for the rise of the Islamic State. With the final withdrawal of NATO forces approaching quickly, the next US president will want to avoid a similar outcome in Afghanistan. "One thing I do know is that while hope is mightily tested, often beaten, battered, and sometimes stolen, it never really dies in the hearts of most Afghans," Sites writes in his afterword. Sadly, much of Sites' book on the current state of Afghanistan yields little optimism toward the country's future. But only time will tell whether he's right about the survival of Afghan hope. You can check out Sites' book "Swimming With Warlords" at Amazon > Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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"If the central government doesn't stay together, I'll have to find a way to protect my people."
These Maps Reveal How Ethnic Groups Are Spread Across America | ||
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Take German-Americans, the country's largest ancestry group with 49 million members. While they make up more than 30% of the population in the Midwest, they account for less than 10% of the population in the Deep South and California. Irish-Americans are everywhere in the North East, but almost nowhere in the South West. Meanwhile, there are hardly any Mexican-Americans in New England. Maps of the largest ancestry and racial groups in America based on the American Community Survey can be found in a book called "Ancestry & Ethnicity in America." With permission from Grey House Publishing, we're posting them here. 49,840,035 Germans live mostly in the Midwest. From "Ancestry & Ethnicity in America" based on the American Community Survey (2006–2010 Five Year Estimate). Respondents could name more than one ancestry group or race. 35,751,251 Irish are strongest in the North East. From "Ancestry & Ethnicity in America" based on the American Community Survey (2006–2010 Five Year Estimate). Respondents could name more than one ancestry group or race. 31,798,258 Mexicans are strongest west of the Mississippi. From "Ancestry & Ethnicity in America" based on the American Community Survey (2006–2010 Five Year Estimate). Respondents could name more than one ancestry group or race. See the rest of the story at Business Insider  | ||
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The United States may be a melting pot, but many Slack CEO Explains Why He Thinks His 8-Month-Old App Is Now Worth $1.1 Billion | ||
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Slack, an enterprise work collaboration app, is the latest one to join the club. It announced on Friday that it’s raising $120 million at a $1.1 billion valuation. It’s hard to imagine a company as young as Slack — it launched publicly in February — to be worth more than a billion dollars. But when you’re growing as fast as it is, especially in the enterprise space, anything is possible. When we asked Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield about it, he agreed his company’s numbers are still small in absolute terms. But the $1.1 billion valuation has more to do with the rapid growth it’s been seeing, and the fact that it hasn’t spent a dime in sales and marketing, he said. “We still have a long way to grow to justify the valuation,” Butterfield told Business Insider. “But it’s largely on the basis of the trajectory that we’re on, and most of all, because that’s just been happening organically.” According to Slack, more than 30,000 active teams send over 200 million messages each month. It has more than 73,000 paying customers, and it’s adding $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) every month. At that pace, Slack would surpass $10 million in ARR this year, and become the fastest-ever software-as-a-service (SaaS) company to do so. For comparison, Butterfield mentioned Workday, a publicly traded enterprise SaaS company that’s now worth $17.8 billion. Butterfield said it’s not an entirely fair comparison, since Slack and Workday are in different businesses, but it took Workday about three years and roughly $30 million in sales and marketing — while losing about $75 million in total — to get to $10 million in ARR. “We’ve established that people would pay for us. Slack is being valued based on its ability to make money rather than something more speculative,” Butterfield said. ARR is a commonly used metric among SaaS companies, who charge on a subscription basis. It’s a projection of its annual revenue, based on its total recurring monthly subscription contracts. That means ARR is not the annual revenue you actually recorded, but what you expect to get in the next 12 months, assuming the customer returns to use your service. Most SaaS companies have enough data to estimate the number of customers returning, and its retention rate usually gives a good idea of what to expect in the future. Butterfield didn’t disclose any of the actual figures, but did say, “retention is near perfect” at Slack. Butterfield said more new features, like threaded comments and email integration, as well as “favorites” using emojis, will be added in the coming months. But Butterfield agreed there's still a lot of work to do, and it will all start from sales and marketing. “To get to the kind of scale that we want, we’re definitely going to have to start investing in marketing,” he said. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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World stocks rally after Japanese stimulus | ||
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New York (AFP) - Global stocks soared and US markets powered to fresh records Friday after the Bank of Japan surprised investors with a sharp increase to its stimulus operations. The policy switch, aimed at countering a slowdown in the Japanese economy, delivered a much-needed boost to equities from Asia to the Americas after a slow week marked by the US Federal Reserve's announcement of the end of its own huge quantitative easing program. "Just as the Fed takes away the punch bowl, the BoJ has turned up with a crate of sake," said Capital Spreads dealer Jonathan Sudaria, on the diverging monetary policies. In Japan, the Nikkei index added 4.8 percent to its highest level since November 2007. In Europe, London's benchmark FTSE 100 index closed 1.3 percent; French shares jumped 2.2 percent, and Frankfurt's Dax gained 2.3 percent. Big gains by the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 left prior records in the dust. The Dow leaped 1.1 percent to a new high of 17,390.52, surpassing the prior record by more than 100 points. The S&P 500 surged 1.2 percent to 2,018.05, almost seven points above its prior peak, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite rose 1.4 percent to its highest close since March 2000. The buying fury also spread to Latin America, with Brazil's Ibovespa index leaping 4.4 percent and Mexico's market gaining 1.0 percent. The spur to the global rally was the BoJ's announcement that it would add up to 20 trillion yen ($182 billion) to its current asset-buying scheme, bringing it to 80 trillion yen annually. "The Japanese economy is now at a critical moment in the process of getting out of deflation," BoJ chief Haruhiko Kuroda said. The bank would "not hesitate" to pull the trigger on more easing if necessary, he added. US shares had already been moving higher since mid-October helped by good third-quarter earnings reports, and more of those, especially from oil and technology companies, underpinned Friday's Wall Street rally. Analysts now expect the S&P 500 to report earnings gains of 7.43 percent for the quarter, up from the 5.52 percent gains projected two weeks ago, according to S&P Capital IQ. But analysts said the BoJ move was the biggest factor in US market gains.
- Easy money party still on -
"Obviously, the market is rallying on the back of enormous stimulus on the part of central bankers," said Alan Skrainka, chief investment officer at Cornerstone Wealth Management. "This latest move by Japan surpassed all expectations and risk assets are responding in a logical fashion." Aside from the BoJ move, Skrainka said the week's biggest news was the Fed's decision to keep benchmark interest rates low, even as it pulled the plug on quantitative easing. "What really jumps out is the idea that central bankers will not remove the punch bowl too quickly," he said. "We think because of the general economic weakness outside the US, the Federal Reserve will have to be lower for longer" with rates. The other big effect of both moves was to power the dollar higher against other major currencies. The dollar pushed to more than 112 yen, a level not seen since the end of 2007. It also traded to $1.2525 against the euro late Friday, after having broken through the $1.25 to $1.2491. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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We Finally Know The Identity Of The Mystery Woman In 'The Avengers' Sequel Trailer | ||
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When Marvel released "The Avengers: Age of Ultron" trailer, fans were left with a lot of questions about the anticipated sequel. The biggest mystery revolved around an unidentified actress spotted at the 37 second mark of the trailer. We finally know her identity!
She popped up again in a new clip that premiered earlier this week during ABC's "Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.," but once again, the actress's view was still obscured. Many were convinced she was Thor's girlfriend Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) because of her close proximity to the superhero in the first trailer.
Nope! Yahoo Movies confirmed with Disney the dark-haired mystery woman is indeed Korean actress Kim Soo-hyun who is also known as Claudia Kim. Kim has previously tweeted an image with "Avengers" director Joss Whedon which shows her name displayed on what appears to be the set of the film. Disney wouldn't say anything more on the character Soo-hyun is playing.
Reports have pegged Kim as someone working with Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) in either a doctor or scientist role. You can watch the latest trailer below. "Avengers: Age of Ultron" is in theaters May 1, 2015. SEE ALSO: Marvel had the best response to the "Avengers: Age of Ultron" trailer leak Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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How A Spooky Story Is Revitalizing A Sleepy New York Town | ||
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The tale of the Headless Horseman chasing the hapless Ichabod Crane has not only been adapted to a prime-time drama on Fox called "Sleepy Hollow," it's also helped revive a sleepy New York town. Although the story is fictional, Irving set his tale in a real village, which is today a short train ride north of New York City. The village was officially named North Tarrytown in 1883 and kept that moniker for over a century. But when General Motors left its Hudson River plant in 1996 for cheaper property elsewhere, North Tarrytown lost more than 4,000 jobs and its main source of tax revenue. To avoid letting their hometown fall into destitution, locals decided to think like marketers and voted to rebrand North Tarrytown as Sleepy Hollow.
The name change transformed the industrial town into a spooky destination and a beautiful fall attraction for New Yorkers. Irving's classic story looms over the entire village, and, with the help of the TV show, tourism has further picked up in the past couple years. "Everything is all about the Headless Horseman now," Sleepy Hollow village administrator Anthony Giaccio tells Business Insider. He points out that even when it was North Tarrytown, its high school was always known as Sleepy Hollow High with the Horsemen playing for its sports teams, but today you can find the Horseman chasing Ichabod on the village's ambulances, cop cars, and fire engines.
The Historic Hudson Valley organization transforms the historical landmark Philipsburg Manor into a haunted house that, yes, also features the horseman.
Giaccio tells us that the village, with a population of 10,000, has never hired a company to measure exactly how much revenue comes in during its peak season, which is from late September through early November, but he estimates that about 100,000 tourists come through during that time. There has been some opposition to the Sleepy Hollow brand since '96, Giaccio says — "North Tarrytown Forever" bumper stickers are a thing — but he attributes it more to a feeling of nostalgia than a hatred of tourists. He says the critics don't understand how the name has kept their town alive. Giaccio says that he's found that the village has really started to embrace the Sleepy Hollow brand since the TV show debuted in September 2013. It has featured shots of and references to the actual village, thanks to a tourism advertising deal the town secured with New York's state government. The Sleepy Hollow government even invited "Sleepy Hollow" cast members Orlando Jones and Lyndie Greenwood to kick off the Halloween season this year.
"We have a long way to go," Giaccio says, explaining that the village has only recently realized how embracing the Halloween spirit has brought a surge of energy and revenue to the village. They still need to figure out a way to lure tourists in during Halloween and convince them to return at other times of the year. "There's a lot of stuff that we really need to figure out how to do a better job at. But each and every year we get a little better," Giaccio says. SEE ALSO: How This Successful Halloween Company Has Used 'Shark Tank' Investor Mark Cuban's $2 Million Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," is making a comeback.
Tourists can visit the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where Irving is buried, and take photos with the Horseman himself.
And in between these attractions, tourists can grab an Ichabod Ale at a local pub — the beer may be from Michigan, but its name is too good to pass up.
The government also sent scouts out to America's No. 1 Halloween destination, Salem, Massachusetts, the site of the infamous Salem witch trials, to see how a town can brand itself to be associated with a season. The Cop Who Shot Michael Brown Is Unlikely To Face Federal Civil Rights Charges | ||
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Darren Wilson, the cop who shot unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Missouri in August, is unlikely to face civil rights charges for killing the teen, The Washington Post reports. The Justice Department reportedly doesn't have a strong enough case to charge Wilson and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he intended to violate Brown's constitutional rights, sources told the Post. The department has also been investigating the policing practices of the Ferguson Police Department. Attorney General Eric Holder has said "the need for wholesale change in that department is appropriate." Wilson reportedly told investigators that there was an altercation in his police vehicle before he shot Brown. Wilson said Brown was reaching for Wilson's gun. But other witnesses have told a different story, saying that Brown was shot when he had his hands up in the air in a sign of surrender. Wilson, who is white, shot Brown after stopping him and a friend for walking in the street. Protests broke out in Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb, after Brown was shot. Witness accounts saying that Brown had his hands up when Wilson shot him ignited accusations of racism. Read the full report in The Washington Post >SEE ALSO: Autopsy Report Reveals The Cop's Story About What Happened In Ferguson Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Flesh-And-Blood Financial Pros Can't Just Ignore The Robo-Advisor | ||
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FA Insights is a daily newsletter from Business Insider that delivers the top news and commentary for financial advisers. To Beat The Robots, You Must Join The Robots (Financial Advisor Magazine) Charles Schwab and Fidelity Investments unveiled "robo" advice programs that offer relatively inexpensive, algorithm-driven portfolio-management programs for investors. This follows several others including Ritholtz Wealth Management. Obviously, this has gotten traditional advisers nervous. The best way to "beat" the new crop of robo-advisers is to join them. Advisers at other firms should also start to offer online services to clients. For example, Merrill Lynch recently rolled out with Merrill Clear, a digital service that allows advisers to help clients plan for retirement. "Flesh-and-blood advisers who use digital tools have an advantage over algorithms because they can 'marry technology and human behavior,'" said Daniel Satchkov, the president of Rixtrema. The European Government's 'Shutdown' Isn't Going To End Well (Charles Schwab) The European Central Bank was basically shut down following the enactment of a more aggressive stimulus: two government-led plans including the ECB bond-buying program and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership were effectively ended. This is critical because these two plans were a large part of plan to save the eurozone. "A year ago the US shutdown ended with a bang, as it was resolved fairly quickly, clearing the way for a strong 2013 for US stocks and continued economic growth. However, we think the shutdown in Europe is more likely to end with a whimper, as Europe's economy and stocks continue to suffer at its own hands," writes Jeffrey Kleintop. Ultra-Wealthy Clients Have Global Needs (Financial Planning) Ultra-wealthy clients are living increasingly global lives, and so their finances must also be addressed in a global manner. "The world has become more global and clients have become more global. They expect to be able to work with the entire bank," says Chip Packard, the cohead of wealth management at Deutsche Asset and Wealth Management. Additionally, banks are increasingly attracting wealthy clients outside of the US, who also needed to be served locally. So as time goes on, banks and advisory firms will be addressing these changes in wealthy-clients preferences. UBS Wealth Management Is On Par With A Major Rival (The Wall Street Journal) "The UBS AG's Wealth Management Americas unit saw strong inflows, but poor market performance during the third quarter outpaced those gains," reports Michael Wursthorn. "Still profit rose at the wealth management group on higher operating income for the quarter." However, the productivity of advisers was up by 9% from last year, and up 1% since the second quarter. The US advisers had up to $1.08 million in average revenue. This puts UBS on the same playing field as its rival, Bank of America's Merrill Lynch brokerage group, according to Wursthorn. It's Not About Minimizing Risk, But Rather About Being Adequately Compensated For That Risk (Morningstar) "[I]nvestors need to understand that every investment comes with risk. There's no such thing as a risk-free investment, expecting maybe Treasury bonds. But certainly when it comes to stocks, every company involves risk, and it's a matter of understanding which risks are worth taking and which risks are being rewarded for," says Matt Coffina. It's also important to understand what "risk" means. It's not volatility that's important, but the fundamental risk to business. In other words, the things that can affect a company's intrinsic value negatively in the long run. There are 12 such risks: business-cycle risk, industry-cycle risk, technological-disruption risk, competition, regulatory risk, interest-rate risk, financial-market risk, commodity-price risk, currency risk, stewardship risk, event risk, and valuation risk. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Larry Page Slams Silicon Valley, Says It's Not Chasing Big Enough Ideas (GOOG) | ||
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Google CEO Larry Page doesn't think enough investors in Silicon Valley are investing in real breakthrough technologies that could change the world. In an interview with The Financial Times' Richard Waters, Page estimates that only about 50 investors are putting their money in big, important ideas. "You can make an internet company with 10 people and it can have billions of users. It doesn’t take much capital and it makes a lot of money — a really, really lot of money — so it’s natural for everyone to focus on those kinds of things," he said. Page also said that the problem is that not enough people are ambitious enough. Breakthrough technologies aren't being held back by any big technical hurdles, but by not having enough people working on them. Google, for its part, just announced a new project to create magnetic nanoparticles that will search for disease inside your body. SEE ALSO: How Zappos CEO's Obsession With Raving Helped Him Create A Billion-Dollar Company Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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The Virgin Galactic Spaceship That Crashed Was Using A New Fuel Combination | ||
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The Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo that crashed in the Mojave Desert earlier today was using a new fuel combination that Virgin Galactic had never used during flight before. Virgin Galactic announced that they were switching from a rubber-based fuel to a plastic-based fuel last May after they successfully burned the fuel for about one minute. Right now, there is nothing that says the new fuel was the cause of the "in flight anomaly" that led to the crash. "Frankly, we had good performance from both of them, but as we look for the final range of test flights, we decided to go with the polyamide grain," Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides told NBC News in May. It was thought that this new, plastic-based fuel would provide a longer, more energetic burn and help the SpaceShipTow fly higher. The fuel was also expected to provide passenger with a smoother ride. According to CNN's Joel Glenn Brenner, the SpaceShipTwo rocket engine burned for about two seconds after ignition, then stopped, restarted, and exploded during the deadly crash on Oct 31. The reason for the explosion is still unclear. Two passengers were aboard SpaceShipTwo when it crashed. There was one fatality. SEE ALSO: One Dead, One Injured In Virgin Galactic Spacecraft Crash Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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This Isn't The First Catastrophic Failure Of A Virgin Galactic Craft That Has Killed Someone | ||
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One pilot died and another was seriously wounded in a tragic crash on Friday afternoon during a test flight of Virgin Galactic's pioneering space plane. The craft, called SpaceShipTwo, was designed to eventually take paying customers into the lower lip of space. This isn't the first time that tests of Richard Branson's craft has resulted in deaths. During initial pre-launch tests of SpaceShipTwo's rocket systems in Mojave, Calif. in 2007. Three people were killed and three were injured. All were employees of private company Scaled Composites. The blast happened when employees were testing the flow of pressurized nitrous oxide, the gas the rocket uses to create the oxygen burns that propel it forward. The spaceship was being tested on the ground. "What we do is inherently risky," the facility's manager, Stuart Witt, told The Guardian when the crash happened. "These are not the days we look forward to, but we deal with it." Scaled is managed by aerospace designer Burt Rutan, who also oversaw SpaceShipTwo's precursor, SpaceShipOne. SpaceShipOne was the first manned private rocket to reach space. While SpaceShipOne was funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, SpaceShipTwo is being developed with financing from Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson. Virgin Galactic one of a number of private US companies working on projects to take paying customers to space, but it is the first to test a manned mission there. The crash did not occur in space, however, but far below its final destination at an elevation lower than 50,000 feet (just below the outer edge of the atmosphere's first layer). The craft could not have been higher than 50,000 feet, or 10 miles, because that is the elevation at which it was released from the vehicle that carries it aloft, the WhiteKnightTwo. The issue seems to have arisen right after the craft was released, when it first fired its engines. Boeing, XCOR Aerospace, Sierra Nevada, and SpaceX are some of the other companies with craft in the space tourism pipeline. Since none have reached the phase of testing manned missions, none have yet resulted in fatal crashes. SEE ALSO: One Dead, One Injured In Virgin Galactic Spacecraft Crash DON'T MISS: Here's A Detailed Look At How The Virgin Galactic Spacecraft Works Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Here's The Memo Jefferies' CEO Wrote Supporting The Banker Whose Divorce Stunned Wall Street | ||
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One story has dominated Wall Street this week — the sad divorce and custody battle between Jefferies global head of healthcare, Sage Kelly, and his ex-wife Christina. In an incredibly detailed deposition, Christina alleged that she and her ex-husband used drugs and engaged in extramarital sex. What's more, she said they routinely did so with business associates, naming the names of high-powered Jefferies staff. Kelly is now on a leave of absence. On Friday Jefferies CEO Richard Handler and Chairman Brian Friedman responded to all of this in a memo supporting his employees and condemning the media circus surrounding Kelly's private matter. As the week progressed, the media and some of our major competitors have piled on, using categorically denied allegations made by one individual as the basis to launch a judgment of everything Jefferies. While we would like to ignore the tabloids, the blogs and whoever is feeding them, we know they continue to scrounge around for more random tidbits to string together, and we just cannot sit by silently. We are proud that the one thing that has allowed Jefferies to persevere and, more often than not, prosper, is our attitude. Handler and Friedman said that they met with each of the individuals named in the deposition and maintained their belief that they represented the culture of the firm. They also said that the Jefferies healthcare team had volunteered to take drug tests. "The two of us can of course attest that all tests came back drug-free," they wrote. Their words for the rest of Wall Street weren't as warm. One reporter publicly confirmed that a CEO of a top 5 bank personally emailed him the lurid details of the lawsuit, and we also have heard directly from other reporters that they also are getting information and encouragement to pile on from some of our competitors. When Jefferies competes, we do it in the financial markets by trying our best to help our clients succeed, not by spreading baseless rumors and lies in order to damage our peers. We expect you will hear more lies about us and even hear from reporters who would like to dredge up old news because, at this point, there is absolutely nothing new to write about the unfortunate custody proceeding. We are aware that there is an ongoing campaign that includes calling former employees to get “dirt” to string together fabricated themes of “bad people” and a “broken culture.” Read the full memo below: To Our Clients and Friends: The two of us have worked at Jefferies for a combined 39 years. We have survived challenging times and direct assaults, but that is what happens when you are working with partners to build a business that will endure. We have always met challenges honestly and directly, and we will not stop or back down now. We are not devoid of issues or problems at Jefferies, and we believe even one example of bad behavior or the smallest of fines, lawsuits, or penalties is one too many. However, we would gladly put our track record of compliance and regulatory focus up against the record of any one of our major competitors. This past week has been beyond painful for us, as a child-custody case has led to groundless questions about the integrity of our firm. As you may have read, our partner who is in the middle of all this has taken a voluntary leave to focus on his personal life and the best interests of his two children. This is a terribly sad situation and our hearts go out to him and his family. As the week progressed, the media and some of our major competitors have piled on, using categorically denied allegations made by one individual as the basis to launch a judgment of everything Jefferies. While we would like to ignore the tabloids, the blogs and whoever is feeding them, we know they continue to scrounge around for more random tidbits to string together, and we just cannot sit by silently. We are proud that the one thing that has allowed Jefferies to persevere and, more often than not, prosper, is our attitude. Jefferies’ culture is based on integrity, putting our clients first, a truly entrepreneurial spirit, transparency, tenacity and humility. It is the driving force that enabled Jefferies to grow from a firm with $7 million of net income in 1990 to a firm that today has a $45 billion balance sheet, north of $3 billion in annual net revenues (with over half from Investment Banking), and a global full service platform with 3,850 employee-partners. Although if other companies found themselves in this unfortunate current predicament, they might step back and just send in the lawyers, we did something different, in keeping with who we are and the quality of the people who are our partners. The two of us sat down with each person named in the custody case documents and talked it all through. We then had similar discussions with other folks on our healthcare team and in other parts of our firm. We wanted to know what they all thought. We wanted to gauge for ourselves whether any of our own understanding of our culture was inaccurate. What we found was exactly what we expected – hard-working people doing their best for clients and for Jefferies. With that confirmation, we went to our partners in healthcare investment banking yesterday afternoon and said, “The two of us are going to go take a drug test, and do you want to join us?” Our Global Head of Investment Banking and the three other investment bankers mentioned in the custody-case papers as alleged serial drug abusers stood up and each said, “I do.” They were deeply offended by the allegations and were eager to have the opportunity to set the record straight. Every one of our other healthcare Managing Directors then volunteered to come with us. They were not even mentioned in any document, but they chose to do this to show solidarity with their partners and also prove that suggestions of rampant drug use are pure fabrication. The two of us can of course attest that all tests came back drug-free. Obviously, none of us anticipated the events of the last week or volunteering to take a drug test, so this was truly a random drug test. To be frank, we are embarrassed that we even have to discuss these matters, but this should put to rest the heart of the allegations about our firm. Sometimes truth does come in a jar. As for the “media,” we must carefully and respectfully question whether this past week was approached with objectivity and balance. One reporter publicly confirmed that a CEO of a top 5 bank personally emailed him the lurid details of the lawsuit, and we also have heard directly from other reporters that they also are getting information and encouragement to pile on from some of our competitors. When Jefferies competes, we do it in the financial markets by trying our best to help our clients succeed, not by spreading baseless rumors and lies in order to damage our peers. We expect you will hear more lies about us and even hear from reporters who would like to dredge up old news because, at this point, there is absolutely nothing new to write about the unfortunate custody proceeding. We are aware that there is an ongoing campaign that includes calling former employees to get “dirt” to string together fabricated themes of “bad people” and a “broken culture.” Nobody wants to hear from the hard-working Jefferies people who deliver for our clients every day across our firm, our thousands of satisfied and loyal clients, or the thousands of us at Jefferies who are proud of our firm and our culture. Good news does not sell newspapers, but you, our clients, know us and know how we do business. We believe our work for each of you, our results over time and our enviable regulatory record speak louder than any of this titillating nonsense. Honesty, Integrity, and Humility — we have tried to live by these guideposts and will continue to do so, regardless of what distorted old stories or made up new ones are slung at Jefferies. We will focus on doing the best job possible for the considerable business you have entrusted us with. In closing, let us extend our sincere apologies for the distraction of this past week. The two of us are available to meet or speak with any of you at any time. We look forward to getting back to what we do – putting our clients first, always. Respectfully,
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Why LinkedIn's Chris Saccheri Quit His Powerful Job To Be A Stay-At-Home Dad (LNKD) | ||
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Chris Saccheri had a great job running the web development team at LinkedIn. There was only one problem: He wanted to spend more time with his kids. "To be able to have breakfast with them. To walk them to school," he tells Business Insider. He was part of the founding LinkedIn team hired in 2002 before the company even had a name. He rose to director of web development, managing a team of 30. But three years ago, a few months after LinkedIn's huge IPO, he made the unusual choice to quit that high-powered job and become a stay-at-home dad. (His wife still works full time.) "I had been at LinkedIn almost nine years. When started, I was 26, single, living in a house with other singles, the perfect demographic to work a lot of hours at a startup," he tells us. "By the time I left, three years ago this month, I was 35, married, had two young children. I could see that they were growing up so fast and I was missing big chunks of it by being at work so much," he says. Saccheri knows that he was "very lucky" he could afford to leave his job. He didn't tell us what his stake was worth, but most of that founding team became millionaires with the IPO. If they still own that stock, it's worth a lot more today. That's obviously not a typical situation. The dirty little secret in the tech industry is that, while pay is high, there isn't much work/life balance. Long days at work are expected. You are also expected to be available nights and weekends, at least by email or chat. In the tech industry, there's an unwritten rule that says if you really love your job, you'll want to work as many hours as is humanly possible, maybe even more, as the presence of "nap rooms" attests. (Think about that: Why should an office have a nap room? For the times when employees want to, or need to, give up actual sleep to keep on working.) "It's ridiculous. I've been there. I slept under my desk. I didn't even sleep. I was there all night a few times at LinkedIn. But that was before I had kids," he says. Saccheri says that as a leader at LinkedIn, "I probably could have worked out something where I worked less time and spent more time with my kids. But I really liked the idea of going in 100% and being devoted to them. That seemed like a totally different challenge." He's now three years into his current job and plans to keep it for another five or so. He's got two kids, ages 6 and 4, and another baby due next month. He wants to stay home full time until the youngest is in school. His advice to others? "You don't have to quit your job," he says. "There are ways you can spend more time at home. You don't have to work 11 or 12 hours a day, really." Most people, even in demanding jobs, can manage to get home for at least one weeknight family dinner per week and/or at least one school day breakfast, he suggests. "You just have to remember that your family, your kids, those are forever relationships. This is time you just can't get back," he says. SEE ALSO: The Stress Of Being A Computer Programmer Is Literally Driving Many Of Them Crazy SEE ALSO: WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Look What Happened To LinkedIn's First Employees Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Amazon's Diversity Report Is Out, And It's Mostly White Dudes | ||
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Amazon joined a slew of other tech companies and released its diversity numbers and they paint a very homogeneous picture. More than 60% of Amazon's global workforce is male and 75% of its managers are male. A overwhelming majority of its managers are Caucasian:
Not that Amazon's alone. The workforces of Twitter, Yahoo, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Pinterest are all predominantly white as well. Interestingly, Amazon did not disclose the race or gender of its technical workers as most other companies have. The company says it has several Affinity Groups that help provide "critical inputs and insights about where the company should focus its diversity efforts." SEE ALSO: Amazon Exec: "We Didn't Get The Price Right" On The Fire Phone Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Illicit E-Commerce Sites Are Thriving On The Dark Net | ||
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The first ever e-commerce transaction, conducted by students from Stanford and MIT in the early 1970s, involved the sale of a small quantity of marijuana. For decades afterwards, the online drugs trade was severely constrained by the ability of law enforcement to track IP addresses and the means of payment. The trickle of transactions threatened to become a flood with the emergence a few years ago of Silk Road, a drug-dealing site on the “dark net”. These e-depths cannot be reached through a normal browser but only with anonymising software called Tor. Buyers and sellers transact there pseudonymously in bitcoin, a crypto-currency. Silk Road was shut last year with the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, the 29-year-old American whom investigators believe to be Dread Pirate Roberts, the site’s founder. Mr Ulbricht is due to stand trial in New York next January on charges that include computer hacking and money laundering. But law enforcers who predicted that Silk Road’s demise would mark the beginning of the end for online black-market bazaars were wrong. Instead, dozens of dark-net Amazons and eBays (also known as crypto-markets) have sprung up to fill the void. They are not only proving remarkably resilient but expanding their offerings and growing more sophisticated. The number of for-sale listings in the 18 crypto-markets tracked by the Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA), an advocacy group, grew from 41,000 to 66,000 between January and August. The largest market until August, Silk Road 2.0 (whose logo, like its predecessor’s, features an Arab trader on a camel), has since been overtaken by two upstarts, Agora and Evolution, whose combined listings have grown by 20%, to 36,000 in the past two months. Each of these three has more listings than the original Silk Road ever did (see chart). It is unclear whether listings are a good measure of sales, which the markets do not disclose. Vendors vary in size: the largest turn over several million dollars a month on a single site, the smallest a few hundred. They pay a fee to register and a commission per transaction, typically 3-6%. Buyers come from all over the world. Their purchases are sent by post—the vast majority appear to arrive undetected. Customer satisfaction is high. Illegal and prescription drugs are the largest product category. (Some sellers are crooked pharmacists.) Silk Road 2.0, whose operators are avowedly libertarian, focuses almost exclusively on weed, powders and pills. Agora, whose mascot is an armed bandit, sells weapons, too. These are marketed mostly to Europeans, who face strict gun-control laws. The fastest-growing of the big three, Evolution, is the least principled. Though, like the others, it bans child pornography, it hawks stolen credit-card, debit-card and medical information, guns and fake IDs and university diplomas. One-fifth of its listings are in its “Fraud” section or in “Guides and Tutorials”, which often explain how to commit crimes. Some see Evolution’s rapid growth as a worrying sign that cyber-criminals are looking to fuse their identity-theft operations with the “victimless” online drugs trade. (It is not, however, the most unsavoury corner of the dark net, where some make markets in contract killings.) For drug buyers, online markets offer several advantages. They are less physically dangerous than street trades. This goes for dealers, too: a recent study found that a third or more of sales on Silk Road were to “a new breed of retail drug dealer”, a transformation of the wholesale market that “should reduce violence, intimidation and territorialism.”
High ratings are sellers’ lifeblood. Reputation is crucial when clients know they cannot fall back on small-claims courts or arbitration. “It’s the ultimate irony: a den of thieves who don’t know each other but need to trust each other,” says a researcher with the DCA who requested anonymity for reasons of security. Dark-net Amazons and eBays (also known as crypto-markets) are not only proving remarkably resilient but expanding their offerings and growing more sophisticated. As drug sales move online, power is shifting to buyers. The big markets’ customer service and marketing strategies increasingly resemble those of legitimate retailers. They are quick to apologise for technical glitches. Two-for-one specials, loyalty discounts and promotional campaigns are common (on Smoke Weed Day, say). Other methods borrowed from the corporate world include mission statements, terms and conditions, and money-back guarantees. “It has become so prosaic it could be shoes,” says James Martin, author of “Drugs on the Dark Net”. Markets are also innovating to cut fraud. In the free-for-all in the months after Silk Road’s closure, thousands of buyers lost bitcoins that were supposedly held in escrow, either because markets were hacked or because their administrators ran off with the money. The emerging solution is “multi-signature” escrow, from where funds can be moved only with the approval of a least two of the three interested parties (buyer, seller and market). Some markets are trying to build a community of trusted buyers and sellers with invitation-only participation. Those whose customers had bitcoins stolen have begun to devise schemes to make them whole. Sites that specialise in stolen card data display their own brand of customer-friendliness. Some offer a service that allows buyers to verify purchased cards are still active, using compromised merchant accounts. The client’s balance is automatically refunded the value of cards that are declined. (Cards sell for anywhere from $10 to $100 each.) Others batch their cards for sale according to the location of the hacked retailer, says Brian Krebs, a cyber-security blogger. Buyers favour cards stolen from consumers who live nearby because banks often treat transactions as suspicious if they take place far from the legitimate cardholder’s home address. A site that has pioneered this segmentation is McDumpals. Its logo features a gun-toting Ronald McDonald and its motto is “I’m Swipin’ It”. Several factors make life hard for those looking to crack down on the dark net, including its technical complexity, the physical separation of buyers and sellers, and their mobility (vendors typically post on more than one market, allowing them to keep selling if a site goes offline). Tellingly, the only market forcibly closed since Silk Road was Utopia, which was shut by Dutch authorities soon after it opened in February. Some law enforcers want to target Tor, but even if that were technically possible it would cause “collateral damage”, points out Nicolas Christin of Carnegie Mellon University, because the software has worthy uses, such as to protect whistleblowers. Moreover, the deep web’s denizens will continue to adapt. Jamie Bartlett, author of “The Dark Net”, predicts: “The future of these markets is not centralised sites like Silk Road 2.0, but sites where…listings, messaging, payment and feedback are all separated, controlled by no central party”—and thus impossible to close. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Tour The Cemetery Where New York's History Is Buried | ||
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CHART OF THE DAY: Starbucks' Mobile App Is Going Gangbusters (SBUX) | ||
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Starbucks offered some interesting new data during the company's fourth quarter earnings call on Thursday. According to CEO Howard Schultz, the Starbucks app processed $1.17 billion in 2013, and the company has already processed nearly $1.4 billion in 2014 by the app alone; it's expected to reach $2 billion by the end of the year. Based on company data charted for us by BI Intelligence, Starbucks' mobile payment volume has leaped to $517 million from $302 million a year ago — a jump of more than 70% — with over 12 million current users of the mobile app. But those numbers should only increase now that Schultz plans on implementing a mobile ordering and payment system set to launch later next year. "Imagine the ability to create a standing order of Starbucks delivered hot to your desk daily," Schultz said. "That's our version of e-commerce on steroids."
SEE ALSO: CHART OF THE DAY: Cell Phone Bills Are Up 50% Since The iPhone Was Invented Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Peyton Manning Is Still Miles Ahead Of Tom Brady In Career Earnings | ||
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Peyton Manning and Tom Brady will face each other for the 16th time this weekend. But there is one area where Manning has already won, career earnings. By the end of this season, Manning will have made $229.7 million in his career and is the highest-paid player in NFL history. If he completes the final two years of his contract as is, Manning's earnings will grow to $267.7 million. Meanwhile, Brady is the second-highest-paid player of all time according to Spotrac.com, but he is still $75.0 million behind Manning who has played two more years and came out of college as a top draft pick. Brady still has three years left on his deal and if he completes that contract, his earnings will grow to $178.8 million.
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America May Have Just Lost One Of Its Top Counterterror Partners In Africa | ||
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After 27 years in power, Blaise Compaore, president of Burkina Faso, has been overthrown following a wave of popular protests. Faso joins Ukraine's Viktor Yanukovych — the Kremlin client tossed from the presidency during widespread protests in Kiev this past February — as the only other world leader ejected from office as the result of a popular uprising in 2014 (so far, at least). Compaore's ouster won't involve the US to the degree that Ukraine's turmoil has. But neither is the US totally without interests in the country — interests that could become jeopardized depending on how the post-Compaore period unfolds. Burkina Faso is home to a number of US national security assets, including a joint special operations air detachment that ran a classified aerial surveillance program called Creek Sand, first revealed by the Washington Post in 2012. Burkina Faso is one of the US's centers of operation in a part of the world that's become increasingly relevant to the fight against terrorism, a country wedged between Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb in Algeria and Niger, and Ansar al Dine in Mali. Compaore's Burkina Faso was important for a separate yet related reason: the conflict in neighboring Mali. It's easy to lose sight of this now, what with the country's current relative stability and a spate of other, fresher terrorism-related sagas over the past couple years. But the collapse of Mali after a coup in March of 2012 threatened to create a vast terrorist safe haven in west Africa and rapidly became one of the world's major security crises. Junior officers ousted the country's elected president in March of 2012, partly because of his failure to confront an intensifying Tuareg insurgency roiling the country's north. In the ensuing collapse of the Malian state, most of the northern half of the country was taken over by a constellation of hardcore jiihadist groups and Tuareg nationalists, some of them former mercenaries for recently ousted Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. By mid-2012, and with astonishing speed, Mali became an example of how an obscure and essentially local dispute over governance, ethnicity, and citizenship could mutate into the possible jihadist takeover of a sizable country not far from mainland Europe. The crisis seemed to have ended when the French military was deployed to northern Mali in January of 2013, sending the jihadists fleeing from the region's major cities and leaving the new government in Bamako to negotiate with the Tuaregs. But as Thomas Miles, an independent scholar and author of an upcoming book on Mali and Niger told Busines Insider, Compaore played a crucial mediating role in a situation that remains in flux, providing a safe haven for non-jihadist Tuareg groups while holding a certain amount of leverage over them. "This removes somebody who's abetting the conflict," Miles says, "but it also removes somebody who can control some of its actors." Lesley Anne Warner, a political and military analyst who focuses on Africa, told Business Insider that the Mali crisis helped turned Compaore's Burkina Faso into an important security partner for the US.
"After the 2012-13 crises in Mali, there were several countries in the region that suddenly became the primary frontline states for US counterterrorism operations in the region," she told Business Insider. "In Burkina Faso, the US started to build the capacity of the gendarmerie to provide border security along its common border with Mali in 2013." Compaore was well-positioned both politically and geographically to become a vital US ally in West Africa. It doesn't seem like the immediate transitional period will threaten American activities in the country: the military is supposed to shepherd Burkina Faso through a transitional period before handing off power to a civilian government. But as Miles explains, a more open political system could complicate US policy. Burkina Faso has an unusually active left-wing bloc by regional standards, thanks partly to the legacy of Thomas Sankara, the Burkinabe president sometimes referred to as West Africa's Che Guevara. Compaore was part of the plot that resulted in Sankara's ouster and execution in 1987. "Opposition to American basing could become a real card for the left, a really active left that has a lot of popular support, much more so than in other places in the region," says Miles. "We've seen the Sankara rhetoric in the protests even though it's not something that most of the actual power brokers share. But there's going to come a moment when those things come at loggerheads." US assets in the country aren't in an imminent danger of being thrown out. And the US could always redeploy its forces to neighboring Niger, whose government has also been broadly cooperative with American security efforts. But Burkina Faso's change in leadership already poses some major challenges. It could upset the ever-fragile and unresolved situation in Mali, where there have been deadly clashes between the French military and militant groups this week. And it could lead the US into conflict with a future government in Ouagadougou the character of which is currently unknowable — at least in the frantic 24 hours after nearly 30 years of US-friendly rule has come to an end. SEE ALSO: The US is leaving behind a dysfunctional and incompetent army in Afghanistan Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Take A Peek Inside The 'Most Haunted House In The Midwest,' If You Dare | ||
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On a rather unassuming street in the otherwise nice town of Alton, Illinois, there lies a sinister estate that was once called the "most haunted place in the Midwest." The McPike Mansion, a beautiful 16-room house sitting on 15 acres of overgrown land, has been vacant for more than 60 years, and maybe for good reason. Multiple ghastly figures, orbs, strange noises, and unexplained happenings have been documented over its almost 150 years of existence. Many believe that the ghost of former owners of the house and their servants still walk the grounds and inside the house's dilapidated halls. Photographer Todd Morgan got access to the house recently and shares the photos with us here. You can see more of his work on his Facebook. So, if you're feeling brave enough, take a tour of the McPike Mansion and get into the Halloween spirit. The McPike Mansion was built in 1869 for Henry Guest McPike, a business man and the one-time mayor of Alton. McPike was also a skilled horticulturist and during his time on the grounds, he perfected his own type of grape. The house was built in the Italianate-Victorian style and has 16 rooms. When it was new, it had ornate molding, carved banisters, and boasted 11 marble fireplaces. The McPike family lived in the house until 1936 and has sat vacant since the 1950's. See the rest of the story at Business Insider  | ||
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Trent Reznor Is Working On A Top Secret Apple Project (AAPL) | ||
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Trent Reznor is working on a top secret project with Apple, which he details in an interview with Billboard's Joe Levy. The Nine Inch Nails frontman was reportedly chief creative officer at Beats Music, the music arm of Beats Electronics, before Apple bought the company this year. Reznor told Billboard he thinks owning music is on the way out and streaming will become the norm soon. Here's what he said about his new role as an Apple employee: It's related to that. Beats was bought by Apple, and they expressed direct interest in me designing some products with them. I can't go into details, but I feel like I'm in a unique position where I could be of benefit to them. That does mean some compromises in terms of how much brain power goes toward music and creating. This is very creative work that's not directly making music, but it's around music. Apple's reputation for secrecy extends to its celebrity employees, too. That said, Reznor says he's "designing some products" for Apple, which sounds promising, though it's unclear if he's referring to hardware or software. Billboard asked Reznor if his new project had to do with music delivery, which he seemed to confirm: It's in that world. It's exciting to me, and I think it could have a big enough impact that it's worth the effort. I'm fully in it right now, and it's challenging, and it's unfamiliar and it's kind of everything I asked for — and the bad thing is it's everything I asked for. Whatever Reznor is working on, it will likely debut as part of iTunes, not Beats Music. The music-streaming service will become part of iTunes next year. SEE ALSO: Apple Reportedly Wants To Undercut Spotify By Making Beats Music Cheaper Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Young People And Old People Love Life, But As For The Middle-Aged... | ||
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Some interesting data from Pew Research on life satisfaction by age...
The scale of the chart is tight, so the broader conclusion is that we're all generally satisfied (but not thrilled) with our lives. But there's a clear pattern. 20 year olds are relatively upbeat. Then life gets worse until age 55. Then, by the time we're 80, we're pretty happy again. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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I Raved On A Boat At 6 AM With The Craziest Crowd of New Yorkers In Startups, And It Was Amazing | ||
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I never thought I'd go to a wild dance party on a boat at 6 a.m., but now that I have once, I can't wait to do it again. I'm not into electronic music at all, but I was inspired by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, who has said that his experiences going to raves shaped his view on the world and ultimately helped him build his company into a billion-dollar business. Could I get the same "experiential epiphany" squishing into a room with a crowd of strangers to dance to music I don't even like? Daybreaker, a monthly, early-morning dance party that attracts techies and startup employees from all over New York, sounded like the perfect way to try to find out. Daybreaker was hosting a Halloween-themed extravaganza on a boat that started at 6 a.m. Business Insider colleague Melia Robinson and I decided to check it out and see what all the hype was about. Waking up at 5 a.m. was a struggle, but we successfully dragged ourselves out of bed and started "rave-ifying" ourselves with the requisite gemstones and glitter. It was still pitch-dark outside by the time Melia and I left at 5:30. Our taxi driver was incredulous when we told him what kind of event we were going to. The boat started loading from New York City's west side at 6 am, and we realized we were in the right place when we started spotting some crazy costumes. See the rest of the story at Business Insider  | ||
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