tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64738612024-02-19T20:32:10.613-05:00SEO Blog • Organic SEO Blog Search Marketing NewsSEO Blog. Organic SEO Blog. Search Marketing News. SEO Done Right examines search engine optimization, the most effective form of internet marketing. Breaking SEO news and emerging developments at Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Leading Organic SEO Consultants Peak Positions debunk the many myths, hype, and spin related to SEO and search marketing.Jack Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14870238434783717632noreply@blogger.comBlogger1446125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-87038802032337340252016-05-27T13:08:00.001-04:002016-05-27T13:08:32.126-04:00Yahoo Security Spending For Ceo Marissa Mayer Rose As She Faced Threats<span style="color: #999999;">Original Story: siliconbeat.com</span><br />
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Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer faced “credible” threats in 2015 that caused the company to drastically boost its spending on security for her and her family.<br /><br />The Sunnyvale company spent $544,061 for security for Mayer last year, according to recent company filings, including one Monday. That compares with $26,891 in 2014.<br /><br />Mayer, who’s been under fire from shareholders over the direction of one of Silicon Valley’s iconic companies, in 2015 “faced specific security threats that we believed were credible,” the company said in its filings, without specifying the threats.<br /><br />Calling Mayer an embattled CEO might be understating it a bit; analysts, investors and the media have scrutinized her every move since the former Google executive took the helm of Yahoo in 2012 — after other CEOs before her failed to bring back the company’s mojo amid the rise of mobile, Google, Facebook and Yahoo’s own missteps.<br /><br />The company said in the filing that it provides security services for Mayer and her immediate family (she has a husband and three kids) in addition to the business-related security services it pays for, “and that the reported amount of security expense is especially reasonable in light of the fact that Ms. Mayer does not ask the Company to reimburse her private aircraft costs for business travel.”<br /><br />A Yahoo spokeswoman told SiliconBeat the company would have no additional comment.<br /><br />This latest figure comes on the heels of other reports based on recent Yahoo filings, including how much Mayer made last year ($36 million, a 15 percent decline from the previous year), and how much she might make if the company is sold and she is fired. Under pressure from activist shareholders who recently grabbed seats on the board, the company is considering bids now, which are reportedly coming in lower than expected.<br /><br />Back to the security costs: The amount Yahoo spent wasn’t unusual or outrageous compared with what other tech companies have spent on security for their top executives. For example, Pat May wrote last month about how much Facebook and Twitter shelled out in 2015 for security for Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and Jack Dorsey: $4.3 million, $1.2 million and $68,500, respectively. According to a filing, Apple spent $209,151 last year on security for CEO Tim Cook.Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-22634758431204240812016-03-03T10:21:00.002-05:002016-03-03T10:21:17.532-05:00GOOGLE CAR HITS BUS, FIRST TIME AT FAULT<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: usatoday.com</span><br />
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SAN FRANCISCO - After more than a million miles of autonomous driving over the past six years, Google's self-driving car had never been at fault in the 17 accidents the company reported to the California Department of Motor Vehicles. A <a href="http://www.harolddee.com/bedford-speeding-traffic-ticket-lawyer-attorney-bedford-ny.html" target="_blank">Bedford traffic ticket lawyer</a> is following this story closely.<br />
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Until now.<br />
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According to a report to the DMV, on February 14 a self-driving Lexus SUV owned by parent company Alphabet was testing on the streets of Mountain View, Calif., when it struck a bus while traveling at 2 mph. The incident was the result of road conditions that were compromised by sand bags placed in a lane, which caused the Lexus to moved into the left lane. The municipal bus was approaching in that lane at 15 mph.<br />
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The Google car anticipated that the bus would slow down, while the bus driver believed the Google car would retreat from its effort to merge. There were no injuries, and the accident resulted in damage to the left front fender and some sensors.<br />
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In all its previous accidents, the majority were the result of human drivers rear-ending the Google cars at slow speeds, typically at intersections where it anticipated the Google car would move ahead. An <a href="http://www.buchananfirm.com/ann-arbor-car-accident-lawyer-attorney-ann-arbor-mi.html" target="_blank">Ann Arbor car accident lawyer</a> is reviewing the details of this case.<br />
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On Tuesday, Google is due to release its monthly report on its ongoing autonomous car program. But in a statement issued Monday, Google both acknowledged that its computer-driven vehicle made the wrong decision, but also stressed that the incident reflects that kinds of guesswork that goes on between human drivers.<br />
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"This is a classic example of the negotiation that’s a normal part of driving — we’re all trying to predict each other’s movements," the statement read. "In this case, we clearly bear some responsibility, because if our car hadn’t moved there wouldn’t have been a collision. That said, our test driver believed the bus was going to slow or stop to allow us to merge into the traffic, and that there would be sufficient space to do that."<br />
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It added: "Unfortunately, all these assumptions led us to the same spot in the lane at the same time. This type of misunderstanding happens between human drivers on the road every day."<br />
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Although a growing number of technology and automakers are making fast progress on the road to semi- and fully autonomous cars, only Google is targeting a vehicle that ultimately would not feature a steering wheel or pedals. Google's self-driving car tests are always conducted with legally mandated safety drivers. Sometimes they take over control of the test vehicles - which by law must feature a wheels and pedals - but did not in this particular accident. A <a href="http://www.harolddee.com/fishkill-speeding-traffic-ticket-lawyer-attorney-fishkill-ny.html" target="_blank">Fishkill traffic ticket attorney</a> has experience representing clients in traffic and speeding ticket cases.<br />
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Google car leaders have taken exception of late to a proposal by the California DMV to mandate that all self-driving cars have steering wheels and pedals. Google has long maintained that computers linked to sophisticated on-board radar, lasers and cameras will ultimately lead to a reduction in the number of road accidents and deaths. Human error is augmented these days by the prevalence of smartphone-created incidents of distracted driving.Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-33426376128009443782016-02-26T11:02:00.001-05:002016-02-26T11:02:05.278-05:00YAHOO INVESTOR PRESSURE TO SELL CORE BUSINESS GROWS<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: marketwatch.com</span><br />
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Another activist investor is pressuring Yahoo Inc. to move faster to sell its core business, amid growing concerns on Wall Street of a disconnect between Chief Executive Marissa Mayer and the company’s board over a potential sale. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/los-angeles-ca-finance-lawyer/greenberg-glusker-los-angeles-california-ca.html" target="_blank">Los Angeles finance lawyer</a> is following this story closely.<br />
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On Tuesday, Canyon Capital Advisors, a Los Angeles-based hedge fund, wrote a letter to Yahoo’s YHOO, +0.80% board about its concerns. According to a copy of the letter obtained by MarketWatch, the hedge fund wrote “that the process is not moving as quickly as it should and that Company management does not fully support the Board’s direction in this regard.”<br />
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The letter follows Yahoo’s statement on Friday that the board had formed a special committee to explore strategic options, while it still continues to consider a spin-off of its nearly $40 billion stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. BABA, +1.88% That statement, combined with Mayer’s comments on Yahoo’s fourth quarter conference call, seemed to confirm that the board is at odds and operating separately of Mayer as it looks to possibly sell its core Internet business.<br />
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Canyon also noted in its letter that “Recent news reports indicate that, while there have been numerous expressions of interest, lack of engagements on the part of the Company has been a source of frustration to potential buyers.” Canyon added that while it hoped these reports are inaccurate and that there are always complexities to any sale process, “delay at this stage is unwarranted for any reason (including in an effort to defend against a threatened proxy battle).” <a href="http://esopplus.com/" target="_blank">Business exit planning</a> is important to provide adequately for key partners financial needs.<br />
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In addition, Canyon advised that Yahoo “should not make any acquisitions, regardless of size and no matter how far the valuations of digital media assets fall,” a statement likely seeking to prevent Yahoo from buying any more startups as some private company valuations have tumbled.<br />
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A Yahoo spokeswoman did not respond immediately to a request for comment.<br />
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Canyon, according to FactSet Research, had a 2.5% stake in Yahoo as of Dec. 31 and the company is among its top 20 holdings. Canyon joins Starboard Value LP, another activist fund, which has been pressuring Yahoo to sell its core business. In a letter sent to the company in January, Starboard called for a change in leadership, a restructuring of the board and a new strategy.<br />
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With a growing chorus of vocal activist investors, Yahoo could be heading for a proxy battle to shake up its board of directors this spring. Bob Peck, an analyst with SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, wrote in a note last week that shareholders are required to deliver a written notice to Yahoo between Feb. 25 and March 26 if they want to nominate any potential directors to Yahoo’s board. “At this time, we think activist shareholders are likely to engage the Board and/or management in trying to negotiate a settlement,” Peck wrote last Thursday. “If it does not work out, we think the shareholders will likely wait until the latter part of the window to announce their nominations.” A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/boston-ma-mergers-and-acquisitions-lawyer/rudolph-friedmann-llp-boston-massachusetts-ma.html" target="_blank">Boston M&A attorney</a> is reviewing the details of this case.<br />
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So investors will now wait to see what happens, now that Yahoo has hired investment bankers and activist investors are clearly gearing up for a proxy battle. It’s going to be a tough spring for Yahoo. Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-66164452050824942642016-02-19T09:23:00.000-05:002016-02-19T09:23:03.838-05:00YAHOO CUTS DIGITAL MAGAZINES, CLOSES BURBANK, CALIF., OFFICE<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: wsj.com</span><br />
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The retrenching of Yahoo Inc. is under way.<br />
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The Internet company on Wednesday said it plans to close seven of its digital magazines, including sites dedicated to articles about food, travel, parenting and health, and lay off a portion of its workforce of journalists who worked on them. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/sacramento-ca-corporate-lawyer/wilke-fleury-hoffelt-gould-birney-llp-sacramento-california-ca.html" target="_blank">Sacramento corporate lawyer</a> is following this story closely.<br />
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Yahoo also told employees in Burbank, Calif., that it plans to close the office there and relocate them to its nearby facility in Playa Vista, a person familiar with the matter said.<br />
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The cuts are part of Chief Executive Marissa Mayer’s plan to lower costs by eliminating 15% of Yahoo’s staff, closing offices and shuttering business units. Making Yahoo smaller and more profitable could help Ms. Mayer buy time with investors, some of whom have called for new management and a sale of the company. A <a href="http://www.peakpositions.com/top-google-seo-for-google-search.html" target="_blank">Google SEO Company</a> offers exclusive organic search engine optimization techniques that secure top keyword positions in the organic search engine results.<br />
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Yahoo earlier this month said for the first time under Ms. Mayer that it would entertain a possible sale of its Web properties.<br />
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Yahoo declined to say how many employees were affected by the latest cuts from its online media business. Further layoffs are expected in the coming weeks from other areas of the company, people familiar with the matter said.<br />
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The CEO announced on an earnings call last month her plans to close offices in Dubai, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Madrid and Milan this year. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/san-francisco-ca-mergers-and-acquisitions-lawyer/buchman-provine-brothers-smith-llp-san-francisco-california-ca.html" target="_blank">San Francisco M&A attorney</a> represents clients in acquisitions, mergers, and divestitures.<br />
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As of 2013, Yahoo said about 400 people worked in the Burbank office in various departments, according to its website. All workers not affected by the magazine cuts this week were asked to report to Playa Vista, more than an hour drive from Burbank.<br />
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Last month, Yahoo let go at least five managers who were working on Brightroll, the video ad service it acquired in 2014, according to a person familiar with the matter.<br />
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Ms. Mayer launched several of the digital magazines in early 2014, part of a broader effort to get advertisers to pay higher prices for ads targeting Web users with specific interests, such as cars and tech gadgets. She hired star journalists such as David Pogue, a former New York Times technology columnist, and Katie Couric, who left her role as special correspondent for ABC News to become Yahoo’s global anchor.<br />
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Mr. Pogue and Ms. Couric were unaffected by the cuts, Yahoo said.<br />
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Among the journalists cut this week was Dan Tynan, the editor in chief of Yahoo Tech, who addressed his colleagues in a memo on Wednesday. Yahoo is keeping the technology vertical.<br />
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“I am sure that bigger and better things await all of us,” Mr. Tynan wrote in the memo, which was first published on Politico and confirmed by The Wall Street Journal. “As for Yahoo, I am sure it will continue to be Yahoo, for better or worse.”<br />
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Ms. Mayer has lowered head count to 10,700 employees in the most recent quarter, down from the company’s peak of about 14,000 before she started in 2012. The CEO cut 1,800 employees in the first nine months of last year, mostly workers in offices outside the U.S., including China, India and Canada.<br />
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Yahoo’s stock rose 9 cents to $29.37 on Wednesday. The shares have remained relatively flat since Ms. Mayer announced Yahoo would cut jobs and mull its strategic options, but they are down 34% in the past 12 months. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/los-angeles-ca-securities-lawyer/greenberg-glusker-los-angeles-california-ca.html" target="_blank">Los Angeles securities lawyer</a> is reviewing the details of this story.Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-13071912210064755662016-01-25T12:38:00.000-05:002016-01-25T12:38:10.768-05:00HOW LARRY PAGE’S OBSESSIONS BECAME GOOGLE’S BUSINESS<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: nytimes.com</span><br />
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Three years ago, Charles Chase, an engineer who manages Lockheed Martin’s nuclear fusion program, was sitting on a white leather couch at Google’s Solve for X conference when a man he had never met knelt down to talk to him. An <a href="http://tegoh.com/ann-arbor-cisco-meraki-wireless-networking-it-services-consulting-company-ann-arbor-mi.html" target="_blank">Ann Arbor IT Services company</a> is following this story closely.<br />
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They spent 20 minutes discussing how much time, money and technology separated humanity from a sustainable fusion reaction — that is, how to produce clean energy by mimicking the sun’s power — before Mr. Chase thought to ask the man his name.<br />
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“I’m Larry Page,” the man said. He realized he had been talking to Google’s billionaire co-founder and chief executive.<br />
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“He didn’t have any sort of pretension like he shouldn’t be talking to me or ‘Don’t you know who you’re talking to?’” Mr. Chase said. “We just talked.”<br />
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Larry Page is not a typical chief executive, and in many of the most visible ways, he is not a C.E.O. at all. Corporate leaders tend to spend a good deal of time talking at investor conferences or introducing new products on auditorium stages. Mr. Page, who is 42, has not been on an earnings call since 2013, and the best way to find him at Google I/O — an annual gathering where the company unveils new products — is to ignore the main stage and follow the scrum of fans and autograph seekers who mob him in the moments he steps outside closed doors. A <a href="http://tegoh.com/cuyahoga-county-cisco-meraki-wireless-networking-it-services-consulting-company-cuyahoga-county-oh.html" target="_blank">Cuyahoga County IT Services company</a> delivers wireless network installations that help manufacturing plants and industrial facilities do more with less.<br />
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But just because he has faded from public view does not mean he is a recluse. He is a regular at robotics conferences and intellectual gatherings like TED. Scientists say he is a good bet to attend Google’s various academic gatherings, like Solve for X and Sci Foo Camp, where he can be found having casual conversations about technology or giving advice to entrepreneurs.<br />
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Mr. Page is hardly the first Silicon Valley chief with a case of intellectual wanderlust, but unlike most of his peers, he has invested far beyond his company’s core business and in many ways has made it a reflection of his personal fascinations.<br />
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He intends to push even further with Alphabet, a holding company that separates Google’s various cash-rich advertising businesses from the list of speculative projects like self-driving cars that capture the imagination but do not make much money. Alphabet companies and investments span disciplines from biotechnology to energy generation to space travel to artificial intelligence to urban planning. <a href="http://www.peakpositions.com/top-google-seo-for-google-search.html" target="_blank">Google SEO Company</a> has a diverse knowledge base of marketing and advertising that provides a unique perspective on the search engine marketing industry.<br />
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Investors will get a good look at the scope of those ambitions on Feb. 1, when the company, in its fourth-quarter earnings report, will disclose for the first time the costs and income of the collection of projects outside of Google’s core business.<br />
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As chief executive of Alphabet, Mr. Page is tasked with figuring how to spin Google’s billions in advertising profits into new companies and industries. When he announced the reorganization last summer, he said that he and Sergey Brin, Google’s other founder, would do this by finding new people and technologies to invest in, while at the same time slimming down Google — now called Google Inc., a subsidiary of Alphabet — so their leaders would have more autonomy.<br />
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“In general, our model is to have a strong C.E.O. who runs each business, with Sergey and me in service to them as needed,” Mr. Page wrote in a letter to investors. He said that he and Mr. Brin would be responsible for picking those chief executives, monitoring their progress and determining their pay. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/boston-ma-labor-and-employment-lawyer/rudolph-friedmann-llp-boston-massachusetts-ma.html" target="_blank">Boston employment lawyer</a> provides professional legal counsel and extensive experience in many aspects of labor and employment law.<br />
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Google’s day-to-day management was left to Sundar Pichai, the company’s new chief executive. His job will not be about preventing cancer or launching rocket ships, but to keep Google’s advertising machine humming, to keep innovating in emerging areas like machine learning and virtual reality — all while steering the company through a thicket of regulatory troubles that could drag on for years.<br />
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Mr. Page’s new role is part talent scout and part technology visionary. He still has to find the chief executives of many of the other Alphabet businesses.<br />
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And he has said on several occasions that he spends a good deal of time researching new technologies, focusing on what kind of financial or logistic hurdles stand in the way of them being invented or carried out.<br />
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His presence at technology events, while just a sliver of his time, is indicative of a giant idea-scouting mission that has in some sense been going on for years but is now Mr. Page’s main job.<br />
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In the investor letter, he put it this way: “Sergey and I are seriously in the business of starting new things.”<br />
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<b>An Interest in Cool Things</b><br />
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Mr. Page has always had a wide range of interests. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he worked on solar cars, music synthesizers and once proposed that the school build a tram through campus. He arrived at Stanford’s computer science doctorate program in 1995, and had a list of initial research ideas, including self-driving cars and using the web’s many hyperlinks to improve Internet search. His thesis adviser, Terry Winograd, steered him toward search. A <a href="http://www.costanzasalm.com/south-west-tampa-fl-luxury-custom-new-home-builder-south-west-tampa-florida.html" target="_blank">custom home builder in Tampa FL</a> provides one-stop shopping for the design and construction of your new home.<br />
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“Even before he came to Stanford he was interested in cool technical things that could be done,” Mr. Winograd said. “What makes something interesting for him is a big technical challenge. It’s not so much where it’s headed but what the ride is like.”<br />
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Inside Google, Mr. Page is known for asking a lot of questions about how people do their jobs and challenging their assumptions about why things are as they are. In an interview at the Fortune Global Forum last year, Mr. Page said he enjoyed talking to people who ran the company’s data centers.<br />
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“I ask them, like, ‘How does the transformer work?’ ‘How does the power come in?’ ‘What do we pay for that?’” he said. “And I’m thinking about it kind of both as an entrepreneur and as a business person. And I’m thinking ‘What are those opportunities?’”<br />
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Another question he likes to ask: “Why can’t this be bigger?”<br />
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Mr. Page declined multiple requests for comment, and many of the people who spoke about him requested anonymity because they were not supposed to talk about internal company matters.<br />
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Many former Google employees who have worked directly with Mr. Page said his managerial modus operandi was to take new technologies or product ideas and generalize them to as many areas as possible. Why can’t Google Now, Google’s predictive search tool, be used to predict everything about a person’s life? Why create a portal to shop for insurance when you can create a portal to shop for every product in the world?<br />
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But corporate success means corporate sprawl, and recently Google has seen a number of engineers and others leave for younger rivals like Facebook and start-ups like Uber. Mr. Page has made personal appeals to some of them, and, at least in a few recent cases, has said he is worried that the company has become a difficult place for entrepreneurs, according to people who have met with him.<br />
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Part of Mr. Page’s pitch included emphasizing how dedicated he was to “moonshots” like interplanetary travel, or offering employees time and money to pursue new projects of their own. By breaking Google into Alphabet, Mr. Page is hoping to make it a more welcoming home for employees to build new businesses, as well as for potential acquisition targets.<br />
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It will also rid his office of the kind of dull-but-necessary annoyances of running a major corporation. Several recently departed Google staff members said that as chief executive of Google, Mr. Page had found himself in the middle of various turf wars, like how to integrate Google Plus, the company’s struggling social media effort, with other products like YouTube, or where to put Google Now, which resided in the Android team but was moved to the search group. An <a href="http://www.primerus.com/albany-ny-labor-and-employment-lawyer/iseman-cunningham-riester-hyde-llp.html" target="_blank">Albany employment lawyer </a>focuses on a wide range of employment law matters.<br />
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Such disputes are a big reason Mr. Page had been shedding managerial duties and delegating the bulk of his product oversight to Mr. Pichai, these people said. In a 2014 memo to the company announcing Mr. Pichai’s promotion to product chief, Mr. Page said the move would allow him to “focus on the bigger picture” at Google and have more time to get the company’s next generation of big bets off the ground.<br />
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People who have worked with Mr. Page say that he tries to guard his calendar, avoiding back-to-back meetings and leaving time to read, research and see new technologies that interest him.<br />
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Given that he is worth in the neighborhood of $40 billion and created the world’s most famous website, Mr. Page has the tendency to attract a crowd when he attends technology events. At last year’s Darpa Robotics Challenge, he was trailed closely by a handler who at times acted as a buffer between Mr. Page and would-be cellphone photographers. That commotion could annoy anyone, but it is particularly troubling for Mr. Page, who, because of damaged vocal cords, speaks just above a whisper and sometimes uses a microphone in small meetings.<br />
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At home in Palo Alto, Mr. Page tries to have the most normal life possible, driving his children to school or taking his family to local street fairs, according to people who know him or have seen him at such events.<br />
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And at Google, even events that are decidedly not normal aspire to a kind of casualness. Take the Camp, an exclusive and secretive event that Google holds at a resort in Sicily and where invitees have included Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, and Tory Burch, the fashion designer.<br />
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One attendee, who asked to remain anonymous because guests were not supposed to discuss the gathering, recalls being surprised by how much time Mr. Page spent with his children.<br />
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In public remarks, Mr. Page has said how important his father, Carl V. Page, a computer science professor at Michigan State University who died in 1996, was to his choice of career.<br />
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“My dad was really interested in technology,” Mr. Page said at Google I/O in 2013, the last time he took the stage at the event. “He actually drove me and my family all the way across the country to go to a robotics conference. And then we got there and he thought it was so important that his young son go to the conference, one of the few times I’ve seen him really argue with someone to get in someone underage successfully into the conference, and that was me.”<br />
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People who work with Mr. Page or have spoken with him at conferences say he tries his best to blend in, and, for the most part, the smaller groups of handpicked attendees at Google’s academic and science gatherings, tend to treat him like a peer.<br />
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The scope of his curiosity was apparent at Sci Foo Camp, an annual invitation-only conference that is sponsored by Google, O’Reilly Media and Digital Science.<br />
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The largely unstructured “unconference” begins when each of its attendees — an eclectic batch of astronomers, psychologists, physicists and others — write something that interests them on a small card and then paste it to a communal wall. Those notes become the basis for breakout talks on topics like scientific ethics or artificial intelligence.<br />
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The last conference was held during a weekend in June on Google’s Mountain View, Calif., campus, and Mr. Page was there for most of it. He did not host or give a speech, but mingled and went to talks, just like everyone else. That impressed investors and computer scientists who did not expect to see so much of him, but researchers who had come from outside Silicon Valley barely noticed.<br />
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“I have a vague memory that some founder type person was walking through the crowd,” said Josh Peek, an assistant astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.<br />
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Another benefit of these gatherings for the reserved Mr. Page is that they are mostly closed to the news media.<br />
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<b>A Forward Thinker</b><br />
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When Mr. Page does talk in public, he tends to focus on optimistic pronouncements about the future and Google’s desire to help humanity. Asked about current issues, like how mobile apps are challenging the web or how ad blockers are affecting Google’s business, he tends to dismiss it with something like, “People have been talking about that for a long time.”<br />
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Lately, he has talked more about his belief that for-profit companies can be a force for social good and change. During a 2014 interview with Charlie Rose, Mr. Page said that instead of a nonprofit or philanthropic organization, he would rather leave his money to an entrepreneur like Mr. Musk.<br />
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Of course, for every statement Mr. Page makes about Alphabet’s technocorporate benevolence, you can find many competitors and privacy advocates holding their noses in disgust. Technology companies like Yelp have accused the company of acting like a brutal monopolist that is using the dominance of its search engine to steer consumers toward Google services, even if that means giving the customers inferior information.<br />
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Financially speaking, Mr. Page is leaving his chief executive job at Google at a time when things could not be better. The company’s revenue continues to grow about 20 percent a year, an impressive figure for any business, but particularly so for one that is on pace to generate approximately $60 billion this year.<br />
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In fact, the company’s main business issue seems to be that it is doing too well. Google is facing antitrust charges in Europe, along with investigations in Europe and the United States. Those issues are now mostly Mr. Pichai’s to worry about, as Mr. Page is out looking for the next big thing.<br />
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It is hard to imagine how even the most ambitious person could hope to revolutionize so many industries. And Mr. Page, no matter how smart, cannot possibly be an expert in every area Alphabet wants to touch.<br />
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His method is not overly technical. Instead, he tends to focus on how to make a sizable business out of whatever problem this or that technology might solve. Leslie Dewan, a nuclear engineer who founded a company that is trying to generate cheap electricity from nuclear waste, also had a brief conversation with Mr. Page at the Solve For X conference.<br />
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She said he questioned her on things like modular manufacturing and how to find the right employees.<br />
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“He doesn’t have a nuclear background, but he knew the right questions to ask,” said Dr. Dewan, chief executive of Transatomic Power. “‘Have you thought about approaching the manufacturing in this way?’ ‘Have you thought about the vertical integration of the company in this way?’ ‘Have you thought about training the work force this way?’ They weren’t nuclear physics questions, but they were extremely thoughtful ways to think about how we could structure the business.”<br />
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Dr. Dewan said Mr. Page even gave her an idea for a new market opportunity that she had not thought of. Asked to be more specific, she refused. The idea was too good to share.Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-48415388844037663672016-01-25T11:40:00.003-05:002016-01-25T11:40:38.458-05:00YAHOO REPORTEDLY REJECTED 'SEVERAL' OFFERS TO BUY ITS CORE BUSINESS<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: businessinsider.com</span><br />
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Yahoo is reported to have rejected "several" offers to take over its core internet business, Reuters reported on Thursday.<br />
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It said the potential buyers included a private-equity firm, citing three anonymous sources.<br />
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The report added that Yahoo will most likely announce its next strategic steps only after its earnings, which is scheduled for February 2.<br />
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One of the sources told Reuters that Yahoo will present its future plan during the earnings call in order to "gauge shareholder reaction." A <a href="http://www.peakpositions.com/top-google-seo-for-google-search.html" target="_blank">Google SEO Company</a> provides consulting services and expert search engine optimization guidance for leading companies.<br />
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The last time Yahoo rebuffed offers to buy its core business was in December, before the board meeting in which the company decided not to spin off its Alibaba assets, the report said. Yahoo never launched a formal sales process.<br />
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In December, Yahoo reversed its plan to spin off its holdings in Asian assets, announcing that it would explore a spin-off of its core business instead. Yahoo's chairman, Maynard Webb, said it's not looking to sell the core business, although he indicated that the company would listen to offers. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/philadelphia-pa-finance-lawyer/earp-cohn-pc-philadelphia-pennsylvania-pa.html" target="_blank">Philadelphia finance lawyer</a> is reviewing the details of this case.<br />
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That prompted activist investor Starboard to send a letter to Yahoo's board, demanding a sale of its core business and a complete overhaul of management.<br />
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Yahoo's growth has stalled in recent years, and investors are increasingly growing impatient with Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's performance. Excluding Yahoo's stake in its Asian assets, investors are essentially giving zero value to Yahoo's core business, which include its online content and advertising units.<br />
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According to Business Insider's Biz Carson, Yahoo is preparing to cut 10% or more of its workforce this month, as the company preps for a major organizational shake-up. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/poughkeepsie-ny-labor-and-employment-lawyer/iseman-cunningham-riester-hyde-llp-poughkeepsie-new-york-ny.html" target="_blank">Poughkeepsie employment lawyer</a> has experience defending clients in employment related matters.<br />
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Yahoo declined to comment on this story.Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-22786276935839985292016-01-25T11:29:00.000-05:002016-01-25T11:29:00.453-05:00GOOGLE PAID APPLE $1 BILLION TO KEEP SEARCH BAR ON IPHONE<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: bloomberg.com</span><br />
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Google Inc. is paying Apple Inc. a hefty fee to keep its search bar on the iPhone.<br />
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Apple received $1 billion from its rival in 2014, according to a transcript of court proceedings from Oracle Corp.’s copyright lawsuit against Google. The search engine giant has an agreement with Apple that gives the iPhone maker a percentage of the revenue Google generates through the Apple device, an attorney for Oracle said at a Jan. 14 hearing in federal court. <a href="http://www.peakpositions.com/top-google-seo-for-google-search.html" target="_blank">Google SEO Company</a> offers organic search engine optimization techniques that secure and maintain premium keyword positions in the organic search results.<br />
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Rumors about how much Google pays Apple to be on the iPhone have circulated for years, but the companies have never publicly disclosed it. Kristin Huguet, a spokeswoman for Apple, and Google spokesman Aaron Stein both declined to comment on the information disclosed in court.<br />
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The revenue-sharing agreement reveals the lengths Google must go to keep people using its search tool on mobile devices. It also shows how Apple benefits financially from Google’s advertising-based business model that Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has criticized as an intrusion of privacy. An <a href="http://tegoh.com/ann-arbor-cisco-meraki-wireless-networking-it-services-consulting-company-ann-arbor-mi.html" target="_blank">Ann Arbor IT services company</a> is the industry leader in firewalls, switches, and wireless cloud managed IT services.<br />
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Oracle has been fighting Google since 2010 over claims that the search engine company used its Java software without paying for it to develop Android. The showdown has returned to U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco after a pit stop at the U.S. Supreme Court, where Google lost a bid to derail the case. The damages Oracle now seeks may exceed $1 billion since it expanded its claims to cover newer Android versions.<br />
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<b>34 Percent</b><br />
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Annette Hurst, the Oracle attorney who disclosed details of the Google-Apple agreement at last week’s court hearing, said a Google witness questioned during pretrial information said that “at one point in time the revenue share was 34 percent.” It wasn’t clear from the transcript whether that percentage is the amount of revenue kept by Google or paid to Apple. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/los-angeles-ca-finance-lawyer/greenberg-glusker-los-angeles-california-ca.html" target="_blank">Las Vegas finance lawyer</a> is following this story closely.<br />
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An attorney for Google objected to the information being disclosed and attempted to have the judge strike the mention of 34 percent from the record.<br />
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“That percentage just stated, that should be sealed,” lawyer Robert Van Nest said, according to the transcript. “We are talking hypotheticals here. That’s not a publicly known number.”<br />
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The magistrate judge presiding over the hearing later refused Google’s request to block the sensitive information in the transcript from public review. Google then asked Alsup to seal and redact the transcript, saying the disclosure could severely affect its ability to negotiate similar agreements with other companies. Apple joined Google’s request in a separate filing.<br />
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<b>‘Highly Sensitive’</b><br />
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“The specific financial terms of Google’s agreement with Apple are highly sensitive to both Google and Apple,” Google said in its Jan. 20 filing. “Both Apple and Google have always treated this information as extremely confidential.” A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/denver-co-business-lawyer/timmins-llc-denver-colorado-co.html" target="_blank">Denver corporate lawyer</a> is reviewing the details of this case.<br />
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The transcript vanished without a trace from electronic court records at about 3 p.m. Pacific standard time with no indication that the court ruled on Google’s request to seal it.<br />
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The case is Oracle America Inc. v. Google Inc., 10-cv-03561, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-14223116810075024402016-01-14T14:20:00.002-05:002016-01-14T14:20:47.849-05:00HOW SNAPCHAT IS TARGETING THE OVER-35 CROWD<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: latimes.com</span><br />
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A yellow billboard. No text. Just a small, faceless ghost at the center.<br />
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For months, people have encountered this sight along roads nationwide, leaving those not in the know curious or confused.<br />
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In Los Angeles, you might've caught it heading toward Los Angeles International Airport on Century Boulevard. Is it unfinished? Some Halloween prank?<br />
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Turn to a kid, and no doubt, you'll get filled in: It's the logo for Snapchat, the smartphone app that teens and young adults use to share millions of photos and videos each day. An <a href="http://tegoh.com/ann-arbor-cisco-meraki-wireless-networking-it-services-consulting-company-ann-arbor-mi.html" target="_blank">Ann Arbor IT services company</a> delivers hands-on, results oriented technology solutions.<br />
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Snapchat's explanation for the mysterious billboards is as vague as the ads: "Fun and awareness."<br />
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The awareness part might be crucial to the growth prospects for Snapchat, based in Venice. The kids already know Snapchat. Young adults, too: Six in 10 people ages 13 to 35 in the U.S. use Snapchat.<br />
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It's nowhere close to popular among the over-35 crowd. But there are signs that's changing. The raw numbers are small so far, but Snapchat use among older adults is growing fast.<br />
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Over the last year in the U.S., Snapchat added 25-to-34-year-old users (103%) and older-than-35 users (84%) faster than 18-to-24-year-old users (56%), according to measurement firm Comscore. Snapchat's own data now peg 12% of its nearly 50 million daily users in the U.S. as 35 to 54.<br />
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The growth is led by parents and siblings looking to stay in touch with younger family members, experts said. Snapchat investor Jeremy Liew also noted at a fall conference that he's seen pickup among parents of Snapchat users. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/jacksonville-fl-corporate-lawyer/saalfield-shad-stokes-stoudemire-stone-pa-jacksonville-florida-fl.html" target="_blank">Jacksonville corporate lawyer</a> provides professional legal counsel and extensive experience in many aspects of corporate law.<br />
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"Almost everyone I talk to, it's their niece that shows them Snapchat," said Kevin Del Rosario, associate director of social at the consulting firm Huge Inc. "Then they start seeing how it works."<br />
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Older consumers have higher incomes, attractive to advertisers, said Enrique Velasco-Castillo, senior analyst at research firm Analysys Mason. Ads are integral to Snapchat's revenue strategy, a work in progress. Though one of the world's most highly valued start-ups, it's far from earning profits.<br />
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Still, technology trends are in Snapchat's favor, as apps become more of a time suck. People in the U.S. spent about 37 hours a month on their smartphones in 2014, up more than 14 hours from two years earlier, according to Nielsen. Which group spent the most time? People aged 35 to 44, at more than 43 hours a month. Change the dynamics of your enterprise by incorporating <a href="http://www.peakpositions.com/" target="_blank">organic SEO</a> services.<br />
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They're engaging more with the most popular apps, especially ones that provide "entertainment." Snapchat fits the description. Velasco-Castillo said Snapchat is more visual, "spontaneous, candid and — most importantly — immediate" than other chat options.<br />
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Whether the billboards in Seattle, Oakland and Tampa, Fla., and dozens of other cities deserve credit for spurring downloads among older people isn't clear, but Snapchat's decision to market itself underscores ambitions to become a household name. Just before New Year's Eve, Snapchat also stuck a huge poker-chip-shaped banner on the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas.<br />
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"If they want to compete at the highest levels with Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, they can't just appeal to a younger crowd," said Brian Blau, a consumer technology analyst at research firm Gartner. "That younger crowd carries a lot of purchasing power — it's a great demographic. But that limits Snapchat, if that's all they ever are."<br />
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The billboards started New Year's Eve 2014 in Times Square. A drab old-school billboard in a sea of digital signs looked cool, and Snapchat executives decided to do more.<br />
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Snapchat declined to explain why it made the billboards mysterious. Marketing experts call it clever: If people passing by in a car know about Snapchat, chances are they could offer a better sales pitch than a roadside tag line. The oddity of the billboard got so many people talking in Pennsylvania that a media outlet in Harrisburg wrote a story explaining Snapchat, resulting in the article being shared hundreds of times across social media.<br />
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Jason Morgan, who tracks billboards for Dailybillboardblog.com, said data about visitors to his website showed people searched Google for "yellow ghost billboard" as the ads appeared in their cities.<br />
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Elsewhere, National Basketball Assn. teams put Snapchat's ghost logo around their arenas to encourage fans to follow official accounts. People have changed their Twitter profile picture to a version of the ghost logo that when scanned on Snapchat links to that person's Snapchat user page.<br />
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Going mainstream increases the risk of teenagers seeking something fresher. But Facebook has managed to erect a huge business despite similar concerns. An <a href="http://www.primerus.com/augusta-ga-business-lawyer/hull-barrett-pc-augusta-georgia-ga.html" target="_blank">Augusta business lawyer</a> is following this story closely.<br />
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Facebook's status as the most important app for U.S. teenagers has fallen to 15% from about 50% three years ago, according to Piper Jaffray survey data. (Snapchat recently reached 19%, up from 13% early last year.) But revenue continues to climb because it has become a staple for about 3 in 4 U.S. adults with Internet access; even 64% of people age 50 to 65 use it, according to Pew Research Center.<br />
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To be sure, Facebook initially was aimed at college students, an older crowd. Snapchat is available only on mobile devices and emerged at high schools first, meaning over-35 audience growth should be tougher for 4-year-old Snapchat, Blau said.<br />
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"Facebook was the destination you had to be to connect with people online," he said. "I clicked 'find my friends' on Snapchat, and I didn't find a single one."<br />
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But older adopters exist, like Denise Cortes, 43. The freelance artist and writer in Riverside has six children, including three teenagers who downloaded Snapchat two years ago. She swore off the app as a "kid's thing" until last spring.<br />
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Her son gave her a tutorial, and now it's her top app. Fifty of her friends have Snapchat. Even her husband just got it, to keep tabs on her.<br />
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Cortes likes that she can share photos or videos of her messy house or her unadorned self on Snapchat because the messages disappear and her network is small. The reduced pressure to look your best — compared to on Facebook and Instagram — also drew teens to Snapchat.<br />
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"With Snapchat, all bets are off," Cortes said.<br />
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But feeling closer to family tops all Snapchat perks, she said. Her brother's seconds-long video posts on Snapchat from Manhattan reveal what he's wearing and the tone of his voice. She can hear his feet crunching fall leaves.<br />
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"That's a connection I can't get from Facebook," she said.<br />
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Cortes watches over her children too; she doesn't condone nudity or drug references, for example.<br />
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She's considering how Snapchat can help her business because she relies on getting her name known to garner more work. Even if self-promotion doesn't work, she's not about to quit: It's just too fun, she says.<br />
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Snapchat hasn't said whether it would tweak features to better cater to people in their 30s and older. Analysts doubt Snapchat would shed its confusing user interface, which leaves many features known to only power users. But more tools could arrive for varied age groups. A <a href="http://tegoh.com/cuyahoga-county-cisco-meraki-wireless-networking-it-services-consulting-company-cuyahoga-county-oh.html" target="_blank">Cuyahoga County IT services company</a> delivers Cisco Meraki wireless networking solutions that help your business meet the growing demands of today's global marketplace.<br />
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For instance, Snapchat promotes feeds from about 15 media companies, including CNN and ESPN. But it could do more to bring in publications with topics geared toward older workers. A partnership launched last week with the Wall Street Journal is one opportunity.<br />
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Others say they'd like to see more Live Stories, themed videos on Snapchat showing, for example, New Year's Eve celebrations. Older consumers could prefer topics where posts mostly come from people their own age.<br />
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Business reasons also are fueling other types of interest in Snapchat. New York magazine reported that Wall Street bankers like Snapchat's self-destructing chat feature. University admissions officers have used it as a recruiting tool. Marketers, of course, are trying it.<br />
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Jeremy Simon of the marketing agency Attention Global said he had trouble convincing marketing chiefs to download Snapchat a year ago. But in the last few months, client usage of Snapchat soared.Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-17338314149783122002016-01-13T16:44:00.000-05:002016-01-14T12:04:27.164-05:00YAHOO’S BRAIN DRAIN SHOWS A LOSS OF FAITH INSIDE THE COMPANY<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: nytimes.com</span><br />
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SAN FRANCISCO — Marissa Mayer, the glamorous, geeky Google executive hired to turn around Yahoo in 2012, used to inspire hope in Yahoo’s work force just by visiting the cafeteria for ice cream and mingling.<br />
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Now, morale has sunk so low that some employees refer to Ms. Mayer, Yahoo’s chief executive, as “Evita” — an allusion to Eva Peron, the former first lady of Argentina whose outsize ego and climb to power and wealth were chronicled in the musical of that name.<br />
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Ms. Mayer is about to make herself even less popular with Yahoo’s nearly 11,000 employees. Faced with the failure of her efforts to reignite growth at the 22-year-old Silicon Valley company, she is now turning to the opposite strategy: cutting. As some investors press Yahoo to fire her, Ms. Mayer is crafting a last-ditch plan to streamline the company — including significant layoffs — that is expected to be announced before month’s end. A <a href="http://www.cronemcevoy.com/memphis-employee-rights-lawyer-memphis-tn.html" target="_blank">Memphis employee rights lawyer</a> is reviewing the details of this story.<br />
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While many Yahoo workers are keeping their heads down, just doing their jobs, others have lost faith in Ms. Mayer’s leadership, according to conversations with more than 15 current and former employees from all levels of the company, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of continuing ties to Yahoo and its strict policy against leaks.<br />
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More than a third of the company’s work force has left in the last year, say people familiar with the data. Worried about the brain drain, Ms. Mayer has been approving hefty retention packages — in some cases, millions of dollars — to persuade people to reject job offers from other companies. But those bonuses have had the side effect of creating resentment among other Yahoo employees who have stayed loyal and not sought jobs elsewhere.<br />
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Only 34 percent of employees believe that Yahoo’s prospects are improving, according to surveys conducted by Glassdoor, a firm that collects data on jobs and employers. That compares with 61 percent who are optimistic at Twitter, another troubled tech company, and 77 percent who see a bright future at Google, Ms. Mayer’s former employer. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/boston-ma-labor-and-employment-lawyer/rudolph-friedmann-llp-boston-massachusetts-ma.html" target="_blank">Boston employment lawyer</a> is following this story closely.<br />
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“Basically, it shows employees losing faith in Marissa Mayer and Yahoo,” said Scott Dobroski, a spokesman for Glassdoor who analyzed the data.<br />
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Yahoo declined to comment on employee morale but said that turnover is normal at Silicon Valley companies. While thousands of people have left, many others have been hired, offsetting some of the losses. “We’re still hiring, and our application numbers are strong,” Yahoo said in a statement.<br />
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One Yahoo employee who was interviewed said she was praying to be laid off so she could collect a severance payment and move on with her life. Others said they were actively looking for their next jobs — a task made more difficult because of the taint of failure that potential employers sometimes associate with anyone at the struggling company.<br />
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“Brands are important out here for employers,” said Nick Parham, a career coach in San Francisco who has had several Yahoo clients. “They are going to look harder at people from Facebook and Salesforce, companies that have winning strategies.”<br />
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Employees’ faith in Ms. Mayer began crumbling in earnest in August 2014, when Yahoo embarked on a series of stealth layoffs, current and former insiders said. For months, managers called in a handful of employees each week and fired them. No one knew who would be next, and the constant fear paralyzed the company, according to people who watched the process. A <a href="http://www.cronemcevoy.com/memphis-unlawful-wrongful-termination-lawyer.html" target="_blank">Memphis wrongful termination lawyer</a> is following this story closely.<br />
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Last March, Ms. Mayer told the staff at an all-hands meeting that the bloodletting was finally over. Shortly thereafter, she changed her mind and demanded more cuts. All told, about 1,100 people lost their jobs in the layoffs.<br />
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Contributing to the employees’ disenchantment were Ms. Mayer’s protracted deliberations over a corporate reorganization last year that led to the departure of several key lieutenants and broke up the much-ballyhooed mobile team, prompting many mobile engineers to seek other jobs.<br />
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Hanging over everything has been the uncertainty about the company’s plan to spin off its $26 billion stake in Alibaba, which was announced a year ago but was abandoned last month by the company’s board of directors because of tax concerns. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/los-angeles-ca-finance-lawyer/greenberg-glusker-los-angeles-california-ca.html" target="_blank">Los Angeles finance lawyer</a> represents clients in asset sales, debt and equity finance claims, and in financial restructuring cases.<br />
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For all of Yahoo’s problems, many of its employees still have a deep affection for the company, whose products were the gateway to the Internet for a generation of web users and still remain popular, with more than 1 billion monthly visitors.<br />
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“We all want to make as much impact as we can and leverage Yahoo’s existing strengths,” said Austin Shoemaker, who now manages Yahoo’s instant-messaging efforts after his start-up, Cooliris, was acquired by Yahoo in 2014.<br />
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The company has long struggled to overcome two big challenges: the industrywide drop in display advertising that has traditionally been its primary revenue source and the distraction inherent in trying to excel at many different things, from news and fantasy sports to web searches and email.<br />
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Jeff Bonforte, Yahoo’s senior vice president for communications products, said that Ms. Mayer had always told people that it would take three to five years for the company’s turnaround efforts to show results.<br />
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“It would be nice to give Yahoo one thing to magically save the company overnight,” Mr. Bonforte said in an interview last month, adding that the idea was unrealistic. Ms. Mayer has invested in technology, he said, “to give Yahoo a chance to be incredibly integral to this next phase of where the Internet is going.”<br />
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Mr. Bonforte’s team, for example, has spent much of the last two years rebuilding Yahoo’s email and instant-messaging services from the ground up, focusing on features such as better searches in email and the ability to unsend or delete an instant message at any time. While those reworked products garnered a modest reception from users, he said the technology was now in place for faster innovation. <a href="http://www.peakpositions.com/search-engine-marketing-company.html" target="_blank">Organic Search Marketing</a> brings exposure to your website and leads to increased page views per website visitor, more time spent on your site by users, and higher conversion rates especially with phone calls and email inquiries.<br />
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He said that Ms. Mayer was the best boss he had ever had, but acknowledged some truth in the common criticism that she was tightfisted with praise and sometimes displayed a harshness that could be demoralizing.<br />
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“Marissa is the type of boss that makes you feel like you’re disappointing her at all times, so I always feel like I’m on the verge of being fired,” said Mr. Bonforte, who is widely respected for both his talent and his irreverence. “It’s never, ‘Way to go, Jeff!’ ”<br />
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Mr. Bonforte said he was proud of Yahoo and his team and had no plans to leave. But other top executives have recently departed for other opportunities, including Kathy Savitt, the architect of the video strategy that Ms. Mayer has now dropped, and Jackie Reses, who led the company’s acquisitions and managed its relationship with Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce company in which Yahoo holds a 15 percent stake.<br />
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The latest loss was Prashant Fuloria, whose company, Flurry, was sold to Yahoo in 2014. Ms. Mayer put him in charge of Yahoo’s critical advertising technology last January, but he quit in December to work on start-up ideas. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/memphis-tn-employment-lawyer/spicer-rudstrom-pllc-memphis-tennessee-tn.html" target="_blank">Memphis employment lawyer</a> is following this story closely.<br />
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Ms. Mayer has put on a brave face despite all the turmoil.<br />
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At Yahoo’s annual holiday party, a Roaring Twenties-themed affair held Dec. 4 at Pier 48 in San Francisco, she sat in a chair — visibly pregnant with twin daughters who were born the next week — and posed for photos with employees. “She was kind of like Santa Claus,” said one fan who waited in line for a picture.<br />
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Just before the party, Ms. Mayer and the company’s other directors decided to stop pursuing the original Alibaba spinoff plan and instead slim down and spin off Yahoo’s core business.<br />
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Now, everyone is waiting for details of that plan, which Ms. Mayer has promised to outline by the time the company reports its fourth-quarter financial results this month.<br />
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That is unlikely to soothe the unrest at Yahoo, however, since activist investors like the Starboard Value hedge fund are pushing for new management, a new board and a new strategy, including a possible sale of Yahoo’s operating businesses. A <a href="http://tegoh.com/cincinnati-cisco-meraki-wireless-networking-it-services-consulting-company-cincinnati-oh.html" target="_blank">Cincinnati IT services company</a> provides wireless network design, planning, implementation, IT system management, and networking equipment.<br />
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Mr. Bonforte said those outside forces were beyond his control.<br />
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“That’s the problem with a turnaround,” he said. “The world gets to decide, ‘Time’s up.’ ”Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-55490703186445517372016-01-13T15:48:00.000-05:002016-01-14T11:07:22.739-05:00MARISSA MAYER GIVES BIRTH TO TWIN GIRLS<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: money.cnn.com</span><br />
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On Wednesday, Marissa Mayer announced a new plan for the future of Yahoo. On Thursday, she gave gave birth to identical twin girls.<br />
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The Yahoo CEO tweeted that she, the twins and her husband, Zachary Bogue, are "doing great."<br />
On her Tumblr blog, Mayer said the twins were born early Thursday morning. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/phoenix-az-corporate-lawyer/burch-cracchiolo-pa-phoenix-arizona-az.html" target="_blank">Phoenix corporate lawyer</a> provides professional legal counsel and extensive experience in many aspects of corporate law.<br />
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"Thanks to everyone for all of the support and well wishes throughout my pregnancy," she posted.<br />
She did not yet reveal the twins' names.<br />
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Zack and I are excited to announce that our identical twin girls were born early this morning. Our whole family is doing great! @zackbogue<br />
— marissamayer (@marissamayer) December 10, 2015<br />
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A Yahoo spokeswoman said in a statement the Mayer-Bogue family is "beyond thrilled."<br />
"We couldn't be happier for them!" she said.<br />
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Mayer and Bogue also have a son, Macallister, who is 3 years old. Mayer revealed that she was pregnant with Macallister on the day she accepted the Yahoo (YHOO, Tech30) job in July 2012.<br />
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The Yahoo CEO was criticized by maternity leave advocates for returning to work quickly after giving birth to her son. Mayer had a nursery installed close to her desk so she could work and help to take care of her child without going back and forth from her office. A <a href="http://www.cronemcevoy.com/memphis-employment-lawyer-memphis-tn.html" target="_blank">Memphis employment lawyer</a> is reviewing the details of this story.<br />
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When Mayer announced in August that she was expecting twins, she said she planned on taking a similar tactic.<br />
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"Since my pregnancy has been healthy and uncomplicated and since this is a unique time in Yahoo's transformation, I plan to approach the pregnancy and delivery as I did with my son three years ago, taking limited time away and working throughout," Mayer said in a Tumblr post.<br />
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Mayer stuck to that promise, appearing on a conference call with investors and on CNBC Wednesday morning to discuss Yahoo's plans to keep the company's lucrative Alibaba stake and spin off its core Internet business into a new company. An <a href="http://tegoh.com/ann-arbor-cisco-meraki-wireless-networking-it-services-consulting-company-ann-arbor-mi.html" target="_blank">Ann Arbor IT services company</a> provides networking solutions that help your business meet the growing demands of today's global marketplace.<br />
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CNBC anchor David Faber offered Mayer well-wishes, which she thanked him for. She said during the interview that she was expecting the twins to arrive "later this month."<br />
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"There's always a lot to do on both the homefront and the workfront," Mayer said.<br />
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Mayer's twins were born just two weeks after Facebook (FB, Tech30) CEO Mark Zuckerberg's wife Priscilla Chan gave birth to the couple's first child -- a daughter named Maxima.Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-86714482830388736272016-01-08T12:44:00.001-05:002016-01-08T12:44:11.516-05:00YOUTUBE LAUNCHES SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE FOR $9.99 A MONTH<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: latimes.com</span><br />
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Next Wednesday, YouTube will begin selling $9.99-a-month subscriptions that will allow U.S. customers to watch almost everything without ads, to download videos for viewing offline and to keep content playing on a smartphone or tablet even when using a different app.<br />
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But those widely requested features aren't all that subscribers will get. The service, called YouTube Red, offers access to highly produced original shows and movies that can't be found anywhere else. Google Play streaming music will be included too. <a href="http://www.peakpositions.com/" target="_blank">Search engine optimization</a> provides exposure for your business.<br />
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YouTube Red is intended to turn the enormously popular Google-owned company into a profit maker, not a money loser.<br />
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Ad revenue isn't enough to meet the enormous expenses of serving billions of videos every day — even when most videos are supplied by users for free. YouTube could generate nearly $950 million annually in new revenue if just 5% of U.S. users signed up for the subscription, UBS analysts estimate. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/west-orange-nj-finance-lawyer/mandelbaum-salsburg-west-orange-new-jersey-nj.html" target="_blank">Roseland finance lawyer</a> provides professional legal counsel and extensive experience in corporate finance.<br />
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Red marks the beginning of "a long journey," according to YouTube.<br />
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Matthew Glotzbach, the company's vice president of product management, said, "By no means would we expect to jump to tens or hundreds of millions of paying users overnight," but there should be "strong demand" from the start.<br />
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Financial analysts who follow Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, say YouTube could become a major profit engine. But rivals, including Facebook, Snapchat and Vimeo, are threatening its potential by stealing away both video makers and viewing time.<br />
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Growth of YouTube's net ad revenue in the U.S. is expected to slow rapidly over the next three years, the market research company EMarketer said in August. According to EMarketer's calculations, worldwide net revenue will be $4.3 billion in 2015, up 41% from last year.<br />
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Yet to be determined is how the subscription model will affect an expanding generation of YouTube stars, many of whom began by filming videos in their bedrooms and elsewhere, cracking jokes, dancing and talking to the camera about everything from fashion to video games. They uploaded the videos to YouTube, attracting advertising sponsors, and, in a few cases, becoming millionaires in the process.<br />
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YouTube often places several ads on the same page as a video, and attracting millions of viewers has meant steady, growing income for video makers, who get 55% of ad revenue.<br />
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It's unclear how the commercial-free subscription will affect ad income, though YouTube Chief Business Officer Robert Kyncl said the "vast majority" of YouTube's subscription revenue will go to the YouTube Red content creators. Certainly, some creators will lose out on money from heavy viewers who might encounter lots of ads or be willing to pay more than $10 a month for a subscription. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/valrico-tampa-brandon-area-fl-business-lawyer/bivins-hemenway-p-a-valrico-tampa-brandon-area-florida-fl.html" target="_blank">Tampa business lawyer</a> is following this story closely.<br />
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With Red, YouTube also plans to create a new, subscriber-only slate of original shows and movies for its most popular (and potentially popular) video stars. The selected creators will be gambling that slicker content will broaden their viewership and fatten their paychecks.<br />
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"Bigger productions cost a lot more money," said Joey Graceffa, a YouTube star who has amassed more than 5.2 million subscribers on his channel. "There's no way you'll be able to make your money back just by posting it online. YouTube Red is an opportunity where we as creators get to make higher quality content for our audience."<br />
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Graceffa's untitled reality murder mystery series is one of a handful of new exclusive productions being offered on YouTube Red. The new content, which will begin rolling out in January, will also include highly produced content from YouTubers Lilly Singh, The Fine Bros, PewDiePie and others.<br />
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At a Wednesday news conference held at the San Bruno's company 41,000-square-foot video production facility in Playa Vista, Kyncl emphasized that YouTube and YouTube Red have the ability to showcase a wide variety of content. For more information on the power of Organic SEO, <a href="https://plus.google.com/100789070728001068586/posts/ZHp29mWwioF" target="_blank">click here</a>.<br />
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"We realized what we should be doing is we should be amplifying and funding efforts of these incredibly talented people," Kyncl told reporters. "We have a built-in talent system, which doesn't exist on any other services."<br />
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For that reason, YouTube considers its approach different from Netflix's reliance on traditional actors, and analysts say it could be the video service of choice for younger millennials and teenagers.<br />
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Alan Wolk, senior analyst at media consulting firm the Diffusion Group, said the "big if" will be whether kids can persuade their parents to pay.<br />
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"There's going to be millions of conversations about why do you need a subscription? Why can't you just deal with a few ads?" he said.Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-15002199847785575912016-01-06T09:34:00.001-05:002016-01-06T09:34:20.222-05:00 LIFELOCK TO PAY $100M TO SETTLE CHARGES IT DIDN'T ABIDE BY COURT ORDER<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: nbcnews.com</span><br />
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WASHINGTON -- LifeLock is paying $100 million to settle charges by federal regulators that it failed to take adequate measures to protect customers' personal data under a court order.<br />
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The Federal Trade Commission announced the settlement Thursday with the provider of identity-theft protection. The agency says it's the largest settlement it has won in this type of enforcement case. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/minneapolis-mn-class-actions-lawyer/robert-p-christensen-pa-minneapolis-minnesota-mn.html">Minneapolis class action lawyer</a> is following this story closely.<br />
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The 2010 order by a federal court required LifeLock Inc. to secure customers' data, such as credit card and Social Security numbers, and to avoid false advertising claims. The order resulted from an action brought by the FTC and attorneys general in 35 states, alleging that LifeLock used false claims to promote its services. The company paid $12 million in that settlement, which went mostly to customer refunds, and agreed to make changes to its business practices.<br />
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The FTC said that LifeLock violated the order by failing to maintain "a comprehensive information-security program" and to avoid deceptive advertising.<br />
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LifeLock is based in Tempe, Arizona. Company co-founder and CEO Todd Davis used to put his own Social Security number on business cards and company trucks to advertise LifeLock's services.<br />
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LifeLock noted Thursday that it neither confirms nor denies the government's allegations under terms of the new settlement. Once it is approved by the court, the settlement will help bring to a close the FTC case as well as a class-action lawsuit, the company said. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/newark-nj-class-action-lawyer/lesnevich-marzano-lesnevich-llc-newark-new-jersey-nj.html">Newark class action attorney</a> is reviewing the details of this case.<br />
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"The allegations raised by the FTC are related to advertisements that we no longer run and policies that are no longer in place," LifeLock said in a statement. "The settlement does not require us to change any of our current products or practices. Furthermore, there is no evidence that LifeLock has ever had any of its customers' data stolen, and the FTC did not allege otherwise."<br />
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In the latest action, the FTC alleged that LifeLock violated the 2010 order in 2012-14. For example, the company falsely advertised that it would send alerts to customers "as soon as" it saw signs of possible identity theft, the agency said.<br />
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Of the $100 million LifeLock is paying consumers, $68 million may be used to reimburse consumers for fees paid to LifeLock under the class-action suit. The remaining $32 million will go to the FTC and also could be used to reimburse customers as ordered by any of the state attorneys general who participated in the action. An <a href="http://khlawfirm.com/html/atlanta-class-actions-litigation-attorney-lawyer-atlanta-georgia.html">Atlanta class action lawyer</a> provides legal counsel in many types of class action suits.<br />
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LifeLock's shares fell 30 cents, or 2.1 percent, to end at $13.99 in trading Thursday.Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-70288347605920616112016-01-06T09:22:00.001-05:002016-01-06T09:22:56.374-05:00HOW A MAN STALKED HIS EX-WIFE USING A POPULAR IDENTITY THEFT PROTECTION SERVICE<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: boingboing.net</span><br />
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Suzanna Quintan's ex-husband bought a Lifelock account in her name, which let him monitor virtually everything she did in realtime, and then the company stonewalled and refused to help her shut down his access and figure out what he'd learned about her using it. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/detroit-mi-consumer-lawyer/mckeen-associates-pc-detroit-michigan-mi.html">Detroit consumer lawyer</a> represents clients in fraudulent credit transactions, hazardous or deceptively advertised products, and in fraudulent sales practices.<br />
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Lifelock's customer service reps tortured Quintan with contradictory messages, telling her she could, then couldn't, get access to her data. Then they told her it had been destroyed. Then that it would be available, but only to law enforcement. And when she got the cops involved, they stonewalled some more.<br />
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It wasn't until the Arizona Republic threatened to embarrass them in print that they gave her any help.<br />
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It's no wonder that Lifelock is on Consumer Reports' "Naughty list" for 2015 -- again.<br />
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Quintana's records show LifeLock allowed her ex-husband to track her new and existing accounts, credit score, credit reports, financial activity and public records. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/grand-rapids-mi-consumer-lawyer/buchanan-buchanan-plc-grand-rapids-michigan-mi.html">Grand Rapids consumer attorney</a> is reviewing the details of this case.<br />
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Through LifeLock's fraud-detection system, Quintana's ex-husband also would have had control over her financial activity and been asked to review each transaction or initiate a fraud investigation.<br />
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"They didn't listen to me. It's almost like they didn't believe me," Quintana said. "They did not want to admit what they'd done. Since they are an identity-protection company, it was not in their best interest to admit my identity wasn't protected. They tried to shift the blame to me." A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/charleston-sc-consumer-lawyer/rosen-hagood-llc-charleston-south-carolina-sc.html">Charleston consumer lawyer</a> is following this story closely.<br />
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A LifeLock executive on Nov. 9 said the company was conducting a comprehensive review of procedures to ensure better protection for spouses and to work with law enforcement in a timely and effective manner.Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-86192769829779459262015-12-14T09:52:00.001-05:002015-12-14T09:52:38.596-05:00APPLE COMPUTERS AND GADGETS INCREASINGLY TARGETED BY MALWARE<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: siliconbeat.com</span><br />
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Apple’s iPhone and Mac, long touted for their security, aren’t nearly as safe to use as they once were, new research suggests.<br />
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Record amounts of malware targeted and infected Apple computers and smartphones this year, security researchers say. And next year is likely to be even worse. An <a href="http://www.primerus.com/evans-ga-internet-lawyer/hull-barrett-pc-evans-georgia-ga.html" target="_blank">Evans internet lawyer </a>represents clients in cyber-crimes, content licensing matters, and identity theft cases.<br />
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“Apple remains a relatively safe platform but Apple users can no longer be complacent about security,” Dick O’Brien, a researcher with security firm Symantec, told BBC News.<br />
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In 2014, between 10,000 and 70,000 Macs were hit with malware each month, according to Symantec. That was a small fraction of the amount of malware targeting and infected computers running Microsoft Windows. But in the first nine months of this year, the total Apple computers infected by malicious or unwanted applications was seven times higher than all of last year. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/melbourne-fl-internet-lawyer/widerman-malek-melbourne-florida-fl.html" target="_blank">Melbourne internet lawyer</a> has experience representing clients in cases of fraud, piracy, an unauthorized computer access.<br />
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Apple’s mobile devices, which generally can only get applications via Apple’s app store, are relatively safer. Some 96 percent of all mobile malware is targeted at devices running Google’s Android operating system, according to FireWire, another security firm.<br />
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But malware writers are increasingly targeting Apple’s iPhones and iPads. Symantec has identified seven new security threats aimed at those devices. And earlier this year, applications infected with a particular piece of malware — including the popular WeChat messaging app — were listed in the App Store. Apple quickly removed them, but not before they were downloaded by numerous customers. For more information on the power of Organic SEO, <a href="https://plus.google.com/100789070728001068586/posts/ZHp29mWwioF" target="_blank">click here</a>.<br />
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Malware authors are increasingly “finding ways into Apple’s walled garden, and that will ramp up next year,” Bryce Boland, chief technology officer at FireEye.Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-5080701995990282322015-12-11T15:37:00.001-05:002015-12-11T15:37:20.564-05:00MARISSA MAYER OF YAHOO ANNOUNCES BIRTH OF TWIN DAUGHTERS<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: nytimes.com</span><br />
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Just hours after Marissa Mayer announced a plan to spin off Yahoo’s core Internet business, the chief executive gave birth to identical twin daughters.<br />
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“Zack and I are excited to announce that our identical twin girls were born early this morning,” Ms. Mayer said on Twitter on Thursday, referring to her husband, Zachary Bogue. “Our whole family is doing great!” She didn’t disclose any further details.<br />
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Congratulatory tweets poured in from well-wishers, including Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, where Ms. Mayer used to work; Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft; Ellen Pao, the former interim chief executive of Reddit; and Frank Quattrone, a prominent investment banker.<br />
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Ms. Mayer had revealed her pregnancy in September, at a time when scrutiny of Yahoo was increasing. She came aboard Yahoo in 2012 from Google to turn around the struggling Internet company, but it remains well behind Alphabet’s Google and Facebook in online advertising and other areas. For more information on the power of Organic SEO, <a href="https://plus.google.com/100789070728001068586/posts/ZHp29mWwioF" target="_blank">click here</a>.<br />
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Yahoo has recently been considering what to do with the valuable 15 percent stake it owns in Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce company. It had earlier proposed a tax-free spinoff of the shares, but the plan ran into a setback this year when the Internal Revenue Service said it would crack down on such transactions. That prompted Starboard Value, a hedge fund, to pressure Ms. Mayer to sell off Yahoo’s core business instead. Yahoo’s board met last week to consider its options.<br />
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On Wednesday, the board announced that Yahoo would pursue a spinoff of its core Internet business, leaving the Alibaba stock in the old company. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/boston-ma-mergers-and-acquisitions-lawyer/rudolph-friedmann-llp-boston-massachusetts-ma.html" target="_blank">Boston M&A lawyer</a> represents clients in contract matters and in business transactions. In an interview on Wednesday, Ms. Mayer said she agreed with the new plan because the old plan “was causing a certain amount of market uncertainty.”<br />
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Ms. Mayer and Mr. Bogue also have a three-year-old son, Macallister.<br />
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Ms. Mayer, who has hired several people to help her care for her children both at home and when she is traveling, has said she plans to take a “limited time away” for maternity leave and will be “working throughout.”<br />
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Yahoo, offers up to eight weeks of paid leave for any Yahoo employee who has a new child, including birth, adoption, foster child placement or surrogacy. Birth mothers can get an additional eight weeks of additional paid leave. An <a href="http://www.primerus.com/albany-ny-labor-and-employment-lawyer/iseman-cunningham-riester-hyde-llp.html" target="_blank">Albany employment lawyer</a> is following this story closely.Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-49530584119819420302015-11-12T10:51:00.001-05:002015-11-12T10:51:24.043-05:00OPINION: MARISSA MAYER MOVES CLOSER TO YAHOO ENDGAME<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: marketwatch.com</span><br />
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A story in Re/code not only makes it appear that Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer’s effort to turn around Yahoo has failed, but also that she doesn’t know how to manage people.<br />
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According to this article by Kara Swisher, published Monday, Yahoo Inc. YHOO, +0.67% has hired consultant McKinsey & Co. to help Mayer and her executive team decide which units should get increased investment and which should be closed or sold. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/boston-ma-investment-lawyer/rudolph-friedmann-llp-boston-massachusetts-ma.html" target="_blank">Boston investment lawyer</a> is following this story closely.<br />
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Yahoo declined to comment for this article, and a spokesperson for McKinsey said the firm’s policy was “not to talk about or comment on our client work.”<br />
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Mayer was hired as Yahoo CEO, and joined the company’s board of directors, on July 17, 2012. She had previously worked at Google (now a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. GOOG, -0.27% ) as vice president of product search. Mayer is the fourth CEO of Yahoo in eight years.<br />
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“It’s a bad sign that almost four years into a turnaround, you are hiring McKinsey to advise you on how to do a turnaround,” said Eric Jackson, a managing director at New York-based Ader Investment Management. Last month Jackson published an article calling for the ouster of Mayer. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/los-angeles-ca-finance-lawyer/greenberg-glusker-los-angeles-california-ca.html" target="_blank">Los Angeles finance lawyer</a> has experience representing clients in asset sales, debt and equity finance claims and in financial restructuring cases.<br />
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In an interview Monday, Jackson said hiring the consultant “doesn’t inspire confidence that she knows what she is doing,” adding that “typically consultants are hired by many companies as a way of passing the buck to someone else if things don’t work out.”<br />
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Then again, according to a transcript provided by FactSet of Yahoo’s third-quarter 2014 earnings call, which took place on Oct. 21, 2014, Yahoo CFO Kenneth Goldman said the company had “engaged a top-tier management-consulting firm to help us achieve cost and structural efficiencies via benchmarking and implementing best practices.”<br />
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<b>Not a ‘people person’?</b><br />
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The other major revelation in the Re/code article was that Mayer, “over the last month,” had asked high-level Yahoo executives to make commitments to stay with the company for at least three years.<br />
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Mayer said during Yahoo’s earnings conference call Oct. 20, according to a transcript provided by FactSet: “The design and changes in Yahoo’s leadership team are the result of careful planning to achieve the necessary skills, passion and the ability to execute growth in our business.” A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/sacramento-ca-employment-lawyer/wilke-fleury-hoffelt-gould-birney-llp-sacramento-california-ca.html" target="_blank">Sacramento employment lawyer</a> is reviewing the details of this story.<br />
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The timing of Mayer’s comment on the executive departures, along with Re/code’s report, throws Mayer’s skills as a personnel manager into question.<br />
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“If your boss comes to you and asks that, what are you going to say? No? People are going to be compelled to say ‘yes’ wether they want to say or not,” Jackson said.<br />
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He questioned why Mayer felt she needed the pledge. During the conference call, “she made it sound as though she had to make various moves to remove people and bring in others, and yet, when you hear that ... before some of those people left she asked for a pledge, it suggests a very different story than what she is telling publicly,” he said.<br />
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“All in all, it suggests a CEO who doesn’t know what the strategic vision is that she is following, and that she doesn’t have the support of the senior team around her.”<br />
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Ouch.<br />
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<b>Being fair about Yahoo’s investments</b><br />
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The bulk of Yahoo’s value to investors is the company’s investment in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. BABA, +0.13% and the company’s 35% stake in Yahoo Japan. Those investments were made long before Mayer took over Yahoo’s helm.<br />
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Yahoo valued its Alibaba investment at $22.6 billion as of Sept. 30, down 43% from its value of $39.9 billion a year earlier. But Jackson pointed out that bashing Yahoo for the timing of its spin-off of a unit holding the Alibaba stake was unfair, “since they were under a lockup agreement with Alibaba for a year after Alibaba. They couldn’t have sold it until September of this year, after it had already gone down.” <a href="http://www.peakpositions.com/top-google-seo-for-google-search.html" target="_blank">Google SEO</a> programs are cost-effective and powerful.<br />
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Investors’ decision on whether to hold Yahoo’s shares now, according to Jackson, are based on how you value the Alibaba stake.<br />
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“Some people think you have to tax it fully; some people think it will not be taxed,” he said.<br />
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It remains to be seen if the Internal Revenue Service will consider the spin-off of the Alibaba stake a tax-free event.<br />
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<b>The value of Yahoo’s core business</b><br />
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According to FactSet, Yahoo’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) for the past 12 months totaled $642 million. That’s down from $1.42 billion during the 12-month period through June 2012 before Mayer became Yahoo’s CEO in July 2012.<br />
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That may seem like an unfair comparison, because Yahoo has increased its spending as Mayer has attempted to turn its long-term performance around. But after more than three years, and heading into another reorganization, investors have a right to wonder where those efforts might lead.<br />
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Jackson said that if the Alibaba and Yahoo Japan sakes are “stripped away,” the value of “the part of Yahoo Mayer has control over, is, essentially, zero.”<br />
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Considering how popular Yahoo’s website is, and the value of services like Yahoo Finance, it’s possible that the company is not being valued properly. After the Alibaba spin-off is completed, investors will need to reevaluate Yahoo’s stock.Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-17692058621607265352015-11-05T13:35:00.001-05:002015-11-05T13:35:44.892-05:00EXPEDIA TO BUY HOMEAWAY FOR $3.9B<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: usatoday.com</span><br />
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SAN FRANCISCO - Expedia is deepening its travel-company bench with a $3.9 billion purchase of vacation rental site HomeAway.<br />
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Bellevue, Wash-based Expedia announced the deal Wednesday, which adds the Austin, Texas, company to a portfolio that also includes booking sites Orbitz and Travelocity. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/los-angeles-ca-mergers-and-acquisitions-lawyer/greenberg-glusker-los-angeles-california-ca.html">Los Angeles M&A lawyer</a> assists clients in leveraged buyouts, company reorganizations, and mergers and acquisitions.<br />
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“We have long had our eyes on the fast growing $100 billion alternative accommodations space and have been building on our partnership with HomeAway, a global leader in vacation rentals, for two years,” Dara Khosrowshahi, Expedia's CEO, said in a release. “Bringing HomeAway into the Expedia family and adding its leading brands to our portfolio of the most trusted brands in travel is a logical next step.”<br />
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HomeAway's stock (AWAY) was up 22% in after hours trading on the news, while Expedia shares were down at the close 1.63% to $134.17. HomeAway's brands include HomeAway, VRBO (Vacation Rental By Owner) and similar sites overseas. All told, the company says it represents 1 million paid listings in 190 countries. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/los-angeles-ca-finance-lawyer/greenberg-glusker-los-angeles-california-ca.html">Los Angeles finance attorney</a> is reviewing the details of this story.<br />
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The deal comes on the same day that short-term accommodations giant Airbnb won a significant victory in San Francisco, where voters shot down a measure that would put greater restrictions on those seeking to rent out rooms or entire properties. Airbnb argued that its service helps homeowners stay in their residences by providing extra income through rentals, while opponents - who were outspent eight to one by Airbnb - countered that Airbnb rentals cut into already scarce housing options.<br />
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While Airbnb typically offers short-term rentals and HomeAway often targets travelers looking for one-week or longer stays, buying HomeAway instantly allows Expedia to expand its options for consumers beyond hotels.<br />
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"We're eager to benefit from Expedia's distribution, technology and expertise, which will allow us to provide an even better product and service experience for our owners, property managers and travelers," said HomeAway CEO Brian Sharples in a statement. "In this way, I believe our combination with Expedia will turbocharge our growth and industry leadership for many years to come." A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/los-angeles-ca-real-estate-lawyer/greenberg-glusker-los-angeles-california-ca.html">Los Angeles real estate lawyer</a> is following this story closely.<br />
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The transaction, a combination of cash and stock, amounts to $38.31 per share based on Expedia's stock price at the end of day on Nov. 3.<br />
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It’s the latest acquisition for Expedia, the number one digital travel provider, which purchased Orbitz Worldwide for roughly $1.6 billion earlier this year. In January, it bought Travelocity for $280 million. Hotels.com, and Hotwire are some of the other sites that fall under Expedia's umbrella.<br />
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Expedia chief financial officer Mark Okerstrom said during the investors call that "this acquisition is a bit different,'' from the other deals forged this year. "Specifically we anticipate that HomeAway will continue to be run relatively autonomously out of Austin.''<br />
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HomeAway, which sees $15 billion in bookings from its vacation rental listings, expects its online transactions to grow significantly because of its tie-up with Expedia. "Maybe about a fourth to third of revenue is through (the) online booking channel,'' Sharples said in a call with investors on Wednesday. But in the next two to three years, "we hope to have most of our transactions running through.''<br />
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Sharples added that “this is a place where everyone's going to have to be. . . It’s just too big for people who are in this business to ignore.’’<br />
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The HomeAway deal is expected to become final during the first three months of next year.Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-42034975010755169702015-11-02T11:53:00.002-05:002015-11-02T11:53:08.830-05:00SMARTPHONES REACHING SATURATION AMONG MILLENNIALS<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: usatoday.com</span><br />
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SAN FRANCISCO — If it seems like every young person you see has a smartphone in their hand, you’re not far from wrong.<br />
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Smartphone ownership is reaching saturation levels among people in their 20s, a survey out Thursday found. As more and more people are remaining connected to the internet, it's important to focus on <a href="http://www.peakpositions.com/top-google-seo-for-google-search.html" target="_blank">Google SEO</a> services to reach your target audience.<br />
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A whopping 86% of people aged 18 to 29 have a smart phone, the survey by the Pew Research Center found.<br />
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That compares with 83% of those ages 30 to 49.<br />
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All told, 68% of adults have a smartphone.<br />
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The only group more likely to have a smartphone than Millennials was people living in households earning $75,000 or more annually, Pew found. There, 87% had them.<br />
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Overall, cellphone ownership has become the norm. A stunning 92% of U.S. adults own a mobile phone of some sort. That’s up from 64% just 11 years ago. <a href="http://www.peakpositions.com/search-engine-marketing-company.html" target="_blank">Organic SEO</a> allows your company to secure top keyword placements as an endorsement of your company, products, and services.<br />
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Americans seem to be folding many of the things they once did on task-specific devices into their smartphones — and ditching the other device.<br />
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In 2014, 32% of adults had an e-reader. That number has fallen to 19%.<br />
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In 2010, about 75% of people aged 18 to 29 owned an MP3 player. Today, just 51% do.<br />
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“We don’t ask people why they do not use a particular device, but these data suggest how the rise of smartphones has been a major story in the universe of connected gadgetry,” said Lee Rainie, director of Internet research at the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. “These changes in device ownership are all taking place in a world where smartphones are transforming into all-purpose devices that perform many of the same functions of specialized technology, such as music players, e-book readers or even gaming devices.”<br />
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Computers are what's not hot, the survey found.<br />
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Ownership of desktop and laptop computers has stalled out at 73% of adults, Pew found. That's about where things were 11 years ago and slightly down from the 80% who owned them in 2012. <a href="http://www.peakpositions.com/top-google-seo-for-google-search.html" target="_blank">Google SEO</a> services are cost-effective and powerful.<br />
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Tablet computers are still popular but seem to be plateauing out at lower rates of adoption. Currently, 45% of U.S. adults say they own a tablet computer, up from just 4% five years ago.<br />
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The poll is based on telephone interviews conducted March 17 through April 12 among a national sample of 1,907 U.S. adults 18 years of age or older.Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-14013273310631903932015-10-06T15:32:00.001-04:002015-10-06T15:32:29.504-04:00ABANDONED IT PROJECTS COST DUTCH GOVERNMENT UP TO €5 BILLION A YEAR<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: amsterdamherald.com</span><br />
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More than a third of major IT projects in the Netherlands never see the light of day, costing the government up to €5 billion a year, according to a highly critical report by a Parliamentary inquiry.<br />
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A commission headed by Liberal (VVD) MP Ton Elias, called for an independent regulator to be set up so that IT specialists can monitor the progress of large-scale projects. An <a href="http://www.primerus.com/amsterdam-nl-information-communications-technology-lawyer/russell-advocaten-bv-amsterdam-the-netherlands-nl.html">Amsterdam IT lawyer</a> is reviewing the details of this case.<br />
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Projects often failed because those commissioning them lacked the technological knowledge, said Elias. “Things go wrong on every level and at every stage.<br />
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“It is one great unsightly mass, with no clear objectives, direction or cost control.” He noted that the lost money “could have been spent on healthcare or defence”.<br />
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Elias’s panel looked at a range of IT projects, including the OV chipcard used to pay for public transport and the A73 motorway tunnels. An <a href="http://www.primerus.com/amsterdam-nl-environmental-lawyer/russell-advocaten-bv-amsterdam-the-netherlands-nl.html">Amsterdam IT attorney</a> is following this story closely.<br />
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It found that 36 per cent of large projects – those with a budget of €7.5 million or more – were aborted before they were put into service. More than half (57%) either went over time or over budget, or did not meet expectations. Just 7% were judged to be successful.<br />
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Elias also said Parliament was failing in its duty to oversee projects funded by the public purse.<br />
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He said lack of interest and expertise by MPs meant they were not scrutinising the process properly. “Moreover, the provision of information to Parliament by the cabinet is frequently insufficient,” he said.<br />
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The commission’s work was hampered by problems obtaining the relevant information from ministers, according to Elias, who urged MPs to be more stringent. “Parliament needs to use its powers and take its scrutiny role seriously.”<br />
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The commission recommended that all projects costing more than €5 million be scrutinised by the Office for IT Testing (Bureau ICT Toetsing), which would measure their progress against 10 basic standards.<br />
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“The experts would act as a gatekeeper for IT projects. In addition it would drive it into the heads of IT departments that things could, and should, be done differently,” Elias said.Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-4964156864760969942015-10-05T10:54:00.001-04:002015-10-05T10:54:38.514-04:00EXPERIAN DATA BREACH HITS MORE THAN 15M T-MOBILE CUSTOMERS, APPLICANTS<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: cnbc.com</span><br />
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Global information services group Experian announced Thursday that one of its business units had been hacked. The breach occurred on a server that contained data on behalf of one of its clients, T-Mobile.<br />
The data includes personal information for a combination of about 15 million customers and applicants in the U.S. who at one point may have applied for T-Mobile service. The company said that the incident did not impact its own consumer credit database.<br />
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The data also included applicants requiring a credit check for service or device financing from Sept. 1, 2013 through Sept. 16, 2015, Experian North America said in a statement.<br />
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The ADRs of Ireland-headquartered Experian closed Thursday up nearly 1.7 percent to $16.38, while shares of T-Mobile were down more than 1 percent in extended trading.<br />
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In a letter to consumers, T-Mobile CEO John Legere said the following:<br />
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"Obviously I am incredibly angry about this data breach and we will institute a thorough review of our relationship with Experian, but right now my top concern and first focus is assisting any and all consumers affected. I take our customer and prospective customer privacy VERY seriously. This is no small issue for us. I do want to assure our customers that neither T-Mobile's systems nor network were part of this intrusion and this did not involve any payment card numbers or bank account information."<br />
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Legere also said that any customers concerned that they may have been impacted can sign up for two years of free credit monitoring and identity resolution services at Experian's "Protect My ID" program.<br />
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Experian said it took immediate action upon finding the breach: it secured the server, initiated a comprehensive investigation and notified U.S. and international law enforcement.<br />
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The data stolen included names, dates of birth, addresses and Social Security numbers. No payment card or banking information was acquired, the company said.<br />
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"We take privacy very seriously and we understand that this news is both stressful and frustrating. We sincerely apologize for the concern and stress that this event may cause," said Craig Boundy, CEO of Experian North America. "That is why we're taking steps to provide protection and support to those affected by this incident and will continue to coordinate with law enforcement during its investigation."Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-69263737089929840662015-10-01T10:02:00.000-04:002015-10-01T10:02:55.812-04:0011 LOOPHOLES THE WORLD'S BIGGEST CORPORATIONS USE TO SKIRT THE RULE OF LAW<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: mic.com</span><br />
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For all its majesty, the law is imperfect, and, if you're willing to pay a room full of corporate lawyers seven-figure salaries, they're likely to come up with all kinds of clever (and legal) ways of circumventing the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. Such corporate loopholes have allowed multi-billion dollar corporations to do things like circumvent campaign finance law, stiff the IRS and get generous tax subsidies for criminal malfeasance. Here are 11 of the worst legal loopholes corporations have come up with:<br />
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1. Tax havens and transfer pricing<br />
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Multinational corporations don't have to pay taxes on overseas profits; that is, until they transfer those profits back home. This would make sense, if it weren't for a practice known as "transfer pricing," where a multinational corporation can transfer the profits of a U.S. subsidiary to a subsidiary in, say, the Cayman Islands. There the money sits, allowing corporations to defer taxes on those profits indefinitely. By its own accounting, the U.S. government loses $10 billion to this loophole every year. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/binghamton-ny-patents-lawyer/coughlin-gerhart-llp-binghamton-new-york-ny.html" target="_blank">Binghamton patents lawyer</a> is following this story closely.<br />
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2. Antitrust loopholes<br />
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Ordinarily, when one big company acquires another, they have to notify the Department of Justice, which decides if the merger violates anti-monopoly regulations. However, companies can avoid those regulations if the company they buy a company that is both foreign and itself owns less than $70 million in U.S. assets. When Google bought Israel-based Waze for over $1 billion last June, which was considered to be Google's real competition in the development of mapping software, many cried foul. But according to existing law, the Justice Department couldn't touch them.<br />
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3. Punitive damages deduction<br />
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When an ordinary person gets a speeding ticket, they don't get to write that off as a tax deduction at the end of the year. But when corporations are found criminally liable and hit with punitive damages, they get to claim those damages as a "necessary and ordinary" business expense. For example, Exxon's $1.1 billion fine for the Valdez oil spill ended up costing the company less than half that figure, after taxes. Essentially, taxpayers were left picking up the rest of the tab. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/fresno-ca-patents-lawyer/coleman-horowitt-llp-fresno-california-ca.html" target="_blank">Fresno patents lawyer</a> is experienced in the effective resolution of patents lawsuits as related to inventions and their inventors.<br />
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4. Patent injunctions<br />
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Patent injunctions are corporations' favorite tools for bullying and intimidating rising competitors. Ideally, when a patent-holding corporation believes another company's product is violating their copyrights, they can ask a judge for an injunction, essentially blocking the violator from selling the infringing product. However, because injunctions were so easy to get, in many cases corporations were using the mere threat of one to force smaller companies into shelving their products or paying them exorbitant fees, even when only a weak claim of copyright infringement could be made. When the Supreme Court rewrote the rules to make injunctions harder to get, many thought the loophole was closed, but when government closes a door, corporate lawyers open a window. Instead of going through the courts, corporations are now going through the U.S. International Trade Commission.<br />
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5. Volcker Rule: Government debt exception<br />
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The long-awaited Volcker Rule, a provision in the Dodd-Frank bill that aims to finally get commercial banks out of the risky trading business, was meant to finally clamp down on the kind of financial practices that led to the recession — that was the idea anyway. Now that it's been watered down by lobbyists, big banks will have plenty of loopholes to access. The biggest loophole seems to be the exemption allowing banks to buy government debt. Although there's no danger when banks buy relatively low-risk treasury bonds, they are free to bet your money on Detroit and Puerto Rican debt, which, you know, isn't so secure. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/warsaw-pl-patents-lawyer/elzanowski-cherka-wasowski-warsaw-poland-pl.html" target="_blank">Warsaw patents lawyer</a> is reviewing the details of this case.<br />
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6. Volcker Rule: foreign bank exemption<br />
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One of the financial sector's loudest arguments against the Volcker Rule was that the restriction against proprietary trading reduced U.S. banks' competitiveness vis-à-vis foreign banks, which face no such restrictions. Thanks to their lobbying, they've won an exception. Banks under the Volcker Rule can do all of the risky trading they want, so long as it's through their "foreign banking entities." Because, you know, financial crises are always local anyway.<br />
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7. Carried interest<br />
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Some hedge fund managers and corporate CEOs manage pay to drastically lower taxes on their income by calling it something else: carried interest. Carried interest, which refers to the return over a predetermined profit, allows these executive to claim their compensation as capital gains and not income. Capital gains are taxed lower to encourage investment and stimulate economic growth. However, for corporate executives who are compensated mainly through stock options and carried interest, it's a loophole that lets them pay half of what they' d otherwise owe to the IRS.<br />
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8. Unlimited and anonymous campaign donations<br />
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Most people are familiar with why super PACs are bad, namely their complete abrogation of any limits on campaign donations. For a brief moment, there was a silver lining: super PACs would be required to reveal their donors. If one extremely wealthy individual or corporation tried to outright buy an election, at the very least the public would know. That is, until corporations started exploiting a loophole that allowed them to funnel their donations through 501(c)4, "social welfare" organizations that are not required to make their donors public. Now, when you look at a super PACs donor list, all you see are other non-profits. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/zurich-zh-intellectual-property-lawyer/mme-partners-zurich-zurich-zh.html" target="_blank">Zurich patents lawyer</a> advises clients in the commercialization and utilization of intellectual property rights.<br />
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9. Last-in, first-out accounting<br />
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Lifo is a pretty standard accounting practice that lets companies track the value of their inventory by what the last piece of product sold for, sparing them the need of tracking changing values over multiple quarters when tax time comes. Conceivably, it is an important tool for small businesses across the country, but when Exxon Mobil uses it, it's nothing more than legalized tax evasion. Basically, Exxon Mobile can spend a year selling $20 gas for $50 but still claim a $10 profit per transaction, so long as the price of oil at some point gets to $40 by the end of the year, saving them billion in tax liabilities.<br />
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10. Agribusiness<br />
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During the early 20th century, a slew of federal agricultural policies were instituted to insure small farmers from changing weather and preserve a dependable food supply for the American people. Almost a century later, many of those policies are still in place, except the beneficiaries no longer small farmers, but big agribusiness, which receives 75% of the subsidies. Over the past decade, subsidies have cost the American taxpayer over $168 billion.<br />
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11. Corporate Lobbying<br />
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After the Jack Abramoff scandal, lobbying reform was passed that made it impossible for a lobbyist to buy a lawmaker so much as a sandwich. At least, that was the idea. A series of loopholes have meant that nothing has even slowed down the practice of flying congressmen to Brazil in return for a few favors. Now, instead of paying for the trips directly, lobbyists and corporations set up 501(c)(3)s to do the work for them. As recently as 2011, the International Conservative Caucus Foundation spent $100,000 sending four congressmen and their families on an African safari, finding time along the way to tour a Volkswagen factory (an ICCF donor).<br />
<br />Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-38789347599295829702015-10-01T09:41:00.002-04:002015-10-01T09:41:28.864-04:00GOOGLE UNVEILS EVERYTHING APPLE LAUNCHED, ONLY CHEAPER<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: marketwatch.com</span><br />
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Apple: iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus. Refreshed Apple TV. Enterprise-focused iPad Pro.<br />
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Google: Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P. Refreshed Chromecast. Enterprise-focused Pixel C tablet.<br />
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Those lineups show the similarities between the new products Google Inc. GOOG, -0.01% GOOGL, +0.00% announced Tuesday and those Apple Inc. AAPL, -1.05% announced earlier this month. The big difference between the two companies’ new offerings is price, with Google undercutting Apple across the board.<br />
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<b>Smartphones</b><br />
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Google introduced two new Android smartphones, the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P, at a product event on Tuesday. Both phones — manufactured by LG and Huawei, respectively — will be sold as unlocked devices, meaning they can be purchased directly through Google’s digital store or at partner bricks-and-mortar retailers and used with a wide variety of carriers. They will also be compatible with Project Fi, Google’s new WiFi program, part of a trend among Google, Apple and others to take over parts of the wireless business previously reserved for carriers. <a href="http://www.peakpositions.com/top-google-seo-for-google-search.html" target="_blank">Google SEO</a> deliver top organic keyword rankings in all of the major search engines.<br />
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The 5.2-inch Nexus 5X will retail for $379 and up, while the 5.7-inch Nexus 6P will start at $429. Both devices will come equipped with fingerprint technology similar to Apple’s TouchID, though the sensor is on the back of its phones, and will operate on Android’s upcoming Marshmallow operating system.<br />
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Apple’s AAPL, -1.05% 4.7-inch iPhone 6s and 5.5-inch iPhone 6s Plus, unveiled at Apple’s product event earlier this month, can also be purchased as unlocked phones directly through Apple for $549 and $649, respectively. Apple also is offering a monthly pricing plan that allows consumers to upgrade every time a new iPhone hits the market.<br />
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Also Read: Apple breaks another iPhone record, but China was included this time<br />
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Google is sweetening the deal by offering a $50 credit for use at the Google Play app store and a free three-month trial subscription to Google Play Music. Apple also offered a free three-month trial for Apple Music.<br />
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<b>Enterprise tablet</b><br />
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Tablets for the workplace are all the rage this year. Google on Tuesday launched its answer to the iPad Pro and Microsoft Inc.’s Surface Pro with a new tablet called Pixel C that will start at $499, versus $799 for the iPad Pro. Pixel C will also come with a detachable keyboard, which can be purchased separately for $149; Apple’s keyboard costs $169. Microsoft’s MSFT, +0.75% Surface Pro 3 starts at $699 and offers a $129.99 keyboard.<br />
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Unlike both tablets from Apple and Microsoft, Google is not marketing the Pixel C with a stylus.<br />
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<b>Video streaming</b><br />
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Google launched its second-generation Chromecast device that will retail for $35. It will receive support for Showtime content immediately, and Sling TV and Spotify will join within a few weeks. The device already supports Netflix NFLX, -0.14% , Google Play Movies, HBO Now, Hulu, Pandora P, -0.07% and many other streaming services. Google also launched a $35 Chromecast Audio device with a plug-in that can turn a user’s existing speaker into a conduit for music streaming.<br />
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Earlier this month, Apple unveiled its fourth-generation Apple TV, which comes with a remote control, Siri compatibility, and content from similar streaming services for $149, though Apple’s TV streaming device does not natively support Apple Music’s rival streaming services.<br />
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The only place where Google is not trying to undercut Apple by price is music streaming. Both Apple and Google offer music streaming services for $9.99 a month. Google unveiled a six-person family plan on Tuesday that will cost $14.99 a month, matching the price of Apple’s six-person family plan launched earlier this month.<br />
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Shares of Google rose ahead of its product event but declined slightly after it kicked off, ultimately closing down 0.3% at $622.61. Apple’s stock declined throughout the day, with the fall accelerating after the Google event, and shares ultimately closed down 3% at $109.06.Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-1219869837536152242015-09-24T10:09:00.000-04:002015-09-24T10:09:17.718-04:00MICROSOFT FORMS NEW PARTNERSHIPS IN CHINA<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: wsj.com</span><br />
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Microsoft Corp. unveiled new partnerships with politically connected Chinese companies in an effort to open doors to more sensitive and official business in the vast China technology market.<br />
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The deals—which include a tie-up with a state-owned Chinese military-technology consortium—were disclosed on Wednesday, the same day Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella joined other U.S. business leaders in meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Seattle. They come as Microsoft seeks to make inroads into the world’s second-largest economy, a market that has been challenging for the company amid cybersecurity and antitrust challenges. Mr. Xi toured Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., campus with Mr. Nadella on Wednesday. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/denver-co-antitrust-and-trade-regulation-lawyer/timmins-llc-denver-colorado-co.html" target="_blank">Denver antitrust attorney</a> is following this story closely.<br />
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Microsoft said its Chinese cloud partner 21Vianet Group Inc.—which operates Microsoft’s cloud services in the country—is setting up a joint venture with an arm of state-backed chip-maker Tsinghua Unigroup Ltd. that will sell cloud services to Chinese state-owned enterprises. Microsoft will provide technical training and support to the joint venture, Microsoft said in a news release on its China website. An <a href="http://khlawfirm.com/html/atlanta-strategic-alliances-and-joint-ventures-litigation-attorney-lawyer-atlanta-georgia.html" target="_blank">Atlanta joint venture lawyer</a> is reviewing the details of this case.<br />
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Microsoft also struck a deal with state-owned China Electronics Technology Group Corp. to explore ways to configure, deploy and maintain a “localized” version of Windows 10 for clients in Chinese government organs and state-owned enterprises operating critical infrastructure. The Chinese consortium, known as CETC, provides technology for Chinese military and civilian use, including major communications and electronic equipment and key components.<br />
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The companies didn’t disclose financial terms.<br />
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Western technology firms have forged partnerships with Chinese companies in response to challenges in the Chinese market that worsened with allegations by former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that the U.S. government used U.S. tech firms’ products to conduct widespread spying. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/shanghai-cn-international-trade-lawyer/hengtai-law-offices-shanghai-china-cn.html" target="_blank">Shanghai international trade lawyer</a> provides high-quality legal services for clients' international trade needs.<br />
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Microsoft in particular has had problems with the massive but complicated market. A Chinese state agency last year said it was probing the way it distributes software. Microsoft has said it is cooperating. Also last year, China’s Central Government Procurement Center banned government agencies from purchasing computers loaded with Microsoft’s Windows 8 software.<br />
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Also on Wednesday, Microsoft struck a deal with Chinese search giant Baidu Inc. to make Baidu.com the default search engine and home page for Web surfers in China who are using Microsoft’s Edge browser.<br />
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There are already hundreds of millions of PCs running Windows, but because of widespread piracy, Microsoft has traditionally had difficulties extracting revenue from many of these users. The Baidu deal is designed to help Microsoft capture more users for its new Windows 10 software. In exchange for the search placement, Baidu will make it easier for its own customers to update to Microsoft’s new operating system. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/mexico-city-mx-intellectual-property-lawyer/cacheaux-cavazos-newton-mexico-city-mexico-mx.html" target="_blank">Mexico City intellectual property lawyer</a> assists clients with intellectual property and technology issues.<br />
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Internet users who search for Windows 10 on the China search engine will be greeted with a large banner advertisement on the top of their screens, which will then take users to a special Windows 10 download site, Baidu said.<br />
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Microsoft says it isn’t giving up on its own search engine, Bing, in China. But with a negligible market share in the country, it makes sense for the company to play down Bing to promote its more popular Windows software, said Danny Sullivan, founding editor of website Search Engine Land.<br />
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“If Google can’t win the search market in China, then Microsoft can’t,” Mr. Sullivan said. “But there’s a lot to gain by pushing the Windows adoption.”<br />
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With the deal, Baidu will fortify its grip on Web search in China. More than 92% of Internet users in China have used Baidu for search, according to the China Internet Network Information Center. Google, with 27%, is ranked fourth in the country by number of people who have used it, while Microsoft’s Bing is used by less than 2%.Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-14116497428957550272015-09-21T10:24:00.002-04:002015-09-21T10:24:29.277-04:00GOOGLE IS SUING A ROBOCALLER THAT TARGETED ADWORDS CUSTOMERS<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: theverge.com</span><br />
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If you answer a phone call and hear a recording claiming to be Google, the odds are good that you're being scammed. That's the message of a new Google Business post and a new lawsuit from the company, targeting a company that used robocalling to target businesses using Google Adwords. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/san-diego-ca-unfair-competition-lawyer/ferris-britton-a-professional-corporation-san-diego-california-ca.html" target="_blank">San Diego unfair competition lawyer</a> is following this story closely.<br />
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According to the complaint, a company called Local Lighthouse Corp. made telemarketing calls to Adwords customers, using misappropriated logos and other methods to represent themselves as agents of Google. Once they gained a target's trust, they attempted to milk them for $100 fees in exchange for Search benefits like "front page domination." Based on those claims, the lawsuit alleges trademark infringement, false advertising, and unfair competition. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/west-orange-nj-trademarks-lawyer/mandelbaum-salsburg-west-orange-new-jersey-nj.html" target="_blank">Roseland trademark lawyer</a> is reviewing the details of this case.<br />
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Google says such scams are routine, but the company is usually unable to prosecute because scammers are too successful in hiding their tracks. In this case, the accused party is a California search engine optimization company, making it significantly easier for Google to take action. Still, the company reminded users that it rarely contacts Adwords users over the phone, and never does so through pre-recorded calls. Anyone receiving such a call should contact both Google and the Federal Trade Commission to lodge a complaint.Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6473861.post-22120432878133959222015-09-16T14:46:00.001-04:002015-09-16T14:46:43.320-04:00TWITTER HIT WITH SUIT CLAIMING IT SNOOPS ON DIRECT MESSAGES<span style="color: #666666;">Original Story: wsj.com</span><br />
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Twitter Inc.’s direct messages may not be as private as it claims, according to a lawsuit filed against the company on Monday.<br />
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A lawsuit seeking class action status alleges that Twitter “surreptitiously eavesdrops on its users’ private direct message communications. As soon as a user sends a direct message, Twitter intercepts, reads and, at times, even alters the message.” A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/charleston-sc-class-actions-lawyer/rosen-hagood-llc-charleston-south-carolina-sc.html" target="_blank">Charleston class action lawyer</a> is reviewing the details of this case.<br />
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The lawsuit takes particular issue with the hyperlinks sent within the private-chat function. The plaintiff claims that, for example, when a hyperlink to a New York Times story is sent via direct message, Twitter goes in and replaces the link with its own link-shortening tool, www.t.co, before it reaches the intended recipient, which it then masks by displaying the original New York Times link. Link shorteners are commonly used on Twitter to make the most of a tweet’s 140-character limit, though Twitter removed the character constraint on direct messages last month.<br />
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“Twitter’s algorithms will read through the Direct Message, identify the hyperlink, and replace it with its own custom link, thereby sending the person clicking on the link to Twitter’s analytics servers before passing them on to the original linked-to website,” claims the suit.<br />
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The lawsuit, filed in a San Francisco federal court, alleges that Twitter is doing this to benefit its advertising business. By using its own link shortening tool, Twitter can better track and show publishers how much Twitter drives traffic back to their site. A <a href="http://www.primerus.com/minneapolis-mn-class-actions-lawyer/robert-p-christensen-pa-minneapolis-minnesota-mn.html" target="_blank">Minneapolis class action lawyer</a> is following this story closely.<br />
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According to the lawsuit, this interference represents a violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and California’s privacy law.<br />
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“We believe these claims are meritless and we intend to fight them,” said a Twitter spokesman.<br />
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The lawsuit was filed by law firm Edelson PC and brought by Wilford Raney, a resident of Texas, seeking to represent two classes: U.S. Twitter users who have sent direct messages and U.S. Twitter users who have received direct messages. And it wants as much as $100 a day for each user whose privacy was violated.<br />
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“When you have a privacy policy and the company is not being clear or transparent about what they’re doing, the reason is usually because economic gain is really their focus,” said Jay Edelson, managing partner at the Chicago-based firm Edelson PC that is representing Mr. Raney.<br />
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Mr. Edelson said that its internal forensic experts were able to piece together how and why Twitter replaced the hyperlinks with its own URL shortener. But it has yet to come across evidence that Twitter was actually able to charge higher advertising rates thanks to the traffic data gleaned from intercepting hyperlinks sent through direct messages. “That’s obviously going to be a focal point of the litigation,” he said, adding “we feel confident that we understand why they’re doing it.” Mr. Edelson said a lot of people have been contacting the firm with questions since the lawsuit was filed this week.Blog Depothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310878002526034822noreply@blogger.com