Over the past few weeks, there's been a lot of talk about Salesforce potentially getting acquired by one of the giant software providers, i.e. Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and even Google.

And on Friday, CNBC’s David Faber provided some more context by reporting talks have indeed taken place between Salesforce and Microsoft recently, although the talks appear to have fizzled due to a price discrepancy. Microsoft wanted to pay $55 billion, but Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff insisted on $70 billion, the report said.

It’s not hard to see why Microsoft may have wanted to acquire Salesforce, despite owning a direct competitor in Microsoft Dynamics. Both Salesforce and Dynamics offer so-called CRM products, business software that helps track and plan better sales, marketing, and customer service activities.

But Salesforce is the clear market leader, owning roughly 18% market share, according to Gartner’s latest worldwide CRM report. Microsoft lags behind with only 6.2% of the market. Salesforce is also seeing the highest revenue growth rate at 28.2%, almost 7 percentage points higher than Microsoft’s, Gartner says.

This all adds up to strong financials for Salesforce. In its most recent quarterly earnings report, Salesforce had $1.51 billion in sales, and a projected annualized revenue run rate of $6.52 billion, which would make it the fastest enterprise software firm to ever surpass the $6 billion annual run rate threshold. Although it’s barely profitable under normal accounting measures, Salesforce is in a strong cash position, and has deferred revenue approaching $10 billion, indicating a healthy business model.

But what really makes Salesforce an appealing takeover target may be its ability to attract customers across all market sizes. It’s not all too common to find an enterprise software company to be near-dominant in all three market segments - big enterprises, mid-size companies, and small businesses - and Salesforce appears to be doing exactly that, according to a recent report by software review site TrustRadius.

The report, based on roughly 500 reviews across 12 different CRM software products, shows Salesforce owning the enterprise market, comprised of companies with more than 1,000 employees. It has the highest user rating, and the highest evaluation frequency, surpassing both SAP and Microsoft Dynamics in the chart below.

Salesforce is also in the top right portion of the chart for mid-size companies. Microsoft Dynamics has high user ratings as well, but its evaluation frequency is far behind Salesforce’s.

In the small business segment, Salesforce dominates again with the highest user rating and most user review frequency. Microsoft Dynamics has a relatively high user rating here too, but its evaluation frequency again falls behind Salesforce.

Despite the positive reviews and popularity, Salesforce still had some deficiencies, according to the report. Some of the complaints included the need for a full-time administrator, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and the generally high cost of additional options. The criticisms also cited something that could have been solved had Salesforce's Microsoft buy-out occurred: “buggy” integration with Microsoft Outlook.

SEE ALSO: Salesforce stock approaches all-time high on strong earnings and guidance

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"Star Trek" has some crazy fans all over the world, but the headquarters of Chinese game development company NetDragon Websoft take that devotion to a whole new level.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the company invested roughly 600 million yuan (or $97 million) to construct an 853-foot-long building that looks just like the USS Enterprise from "Star Trek."

Video taken by a drone shows just how similar the building, located in the southeastern Chinese city of Changle, looks to the legendary starship. 

NetDragon's founder, Liu Dejian, is apparently a huge "Star Trek" fan. Dejian is also on the board for Chinese web company Baidu and graduated from the University of Kansas.

Before construction began in 2010, the company reached out to CBS for rights to model the building after the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-E.

"That was their first time dealing with issue like this and at first they thought that it was a joke," a spokesperson told the WSJ.

Construction was completed in May 2014.

You can check out more footage of the building here.

SEE ALSO: 11 crazy facts about Paul Allen's $200 million superyacht

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The rumors were true: Microsoft has confirmed that Cortana is coming to iOS and Android later this year. Most of the voice assistant's functionality will be available on Apple and Google's platforms, though users won't be able to launch apps or toggle settings as they can on Windows Phone.

For anyone with more than a passing interest in Microsoft's journey under CEO Satya Nadella, the move won't be a surprise. The Redmond firm has been busy focusing on getting its mobile apps available on all platforms (such as its flagship Office suite), and making Windows 10 work better across computers, smartphones, tablets and even game consoles. 

See also: Google Now’s Open API Plans Could Spell Trouble for Siri And Cortana

The new Cortana releases tie into a newly unveiled Phone Assistant app for Windows 10, which aims to make using the desktop software with iOS and Android devices easier. 

Cortana Grows Up And Moves Out

To take on Google Now and Apple's Siri, Microsoft has been focusing on Cortana as an integral part of the Windows 10 operating system (OS), due to arrive this summer. The company wants to offer ubiquitous access, so it plans on bringing the assistant to desktops, laptops, the Xbox One, Windows 10 Mobile devices and even competing platforms. 

Cortana on iOS and Android will recognize who you are, sync your notebooks across devices, and display notifications about reminders and updates. You'll be able to tap into its search capabilities and access anything that's available in the cloud (like results from your favorite sports team). 

See also: Microsoft's Edge Will Let You Scribble On The Web—And That's Awesome

Aside from the ability to launch specific apps or toggle device settings with your voice (something Apple and Google doesn't allow), the experience will be much the same as it is on Windows Phone.  

The Android Cortana app is scheduled for a late June release with the iOS version following "later this year." We still don't have an official release date for Windows 10—July is a good bet—but once it arrives, it should come with decent iOS and Android compatibility out of the box.

Talking Strategy

Bringing Cortana to competing platforms looks directly opposed to Apple's strategy. (Good luck trying to get your Android or Windows Phone device talking happily to a Mac.) But it's a common sense approach when you've got a sliver of the mobile phone market—some 3.8 percent in the US according to the latest figures.

So far, Windows 10 looks like Microsoft's best shot at gaining ground, as a growing number of people seem intrigued enough to at least try out the preview version. The company obviously wants to attract new users, while giving the initiated a reason to stay.

As Google Chrome proves, getting your software on your competitors' platforms can bring some benefits. Microsoft is likely crossing its fingers, hoping that embracing iOS and Android will draw users towards Windows. But tech maker beware: At the same time, the strategy could backfire, ensuring Windows is less vital to Microsoft's overall success. 

Images courtesy of Microsoft

Cisco just lost a key ruling in a closely watched patent infringement case that went all the way to the Supreme Court.

But that's not going to stop it from fighting, the company tells Business Insider.

Cisco is being sued by a company called Commil USA under some unusual circumstances.

Commil claims that Cisco's tech violates a patent involving how WiFi networks cover large areas, reports Ars Technica's Joe Mullin.

Cisco has already lost two trials to Commil. In the first, Cisco was ordered to pay $3.7 million, reports Mullin. But Commil was seeking $57 million and it asked for a new trial based on some questionable, allegedly anti-Semitic sentiments expressed by Cisco's lawyer during the trial.

For instance, during the trial, Cisco's lawyer talked about how Commil's owner probably didn't eat pork, and tried to invoke Jesus, telling jurors to "remember the most important trial in history, which we all read about as kids, in the Bible," reports Mullin.

The judge agreed with Commil, and ordered a new trial, which Cisco also lost. This time Cisco was told to pay $63.8 million.

Cisco appealed that verdict and won. So Commil appealed to the Supreme Court, and it was Cisco's defense that got the court's attention. Cisco argued a "good-faith belief that Commil’s patent was invalid."

In other words, Cisco argued, if Cisco thought the patent was invalid, it shouldn't be held liable for violating it.

The Supreme Court didn't buy it. On Tuesday it ruled: "A defendant’s belief regarding patent validity is not a defense to an induced infringement claim."

This ruling is going to disappoint a lot of big tech companies.

Commil is an Israeli patent-holding company does not produce any products, but simply uses its patents to seek licenses from other companies — these types of companies are sometimes referred to by the nasty term "patent troll."

Commil started life as a Bluetooth startup but folded and sold its assets, including its patents, to a lawyer, reports Israeli publication Globes. The lawyer used the patents to sue Cisco.

So-called "patent trolls" are a big problem for big tech companies. That's why a consortium of tech companies took an interest with this case and filed a brief in support of Cisco, including HP, Dell, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Red Hat and Oracle. They were hoping the "good faith" defense would fly as an easier way to defend against so-called trolls.

There is a little bit of good news for Cisco in all this: Although the Supreme Court wasn't buying the "good faith belief" defense, it didn't command Cisco to pay the big fine. It sent the case back to the appeals court.

A Cisco spokesperson tells us, "The federal circuit’s ruling vacating the jury verdict in this case still stands. Today's decision simply eliminates one of many strong defenses available to Cisco and we look forward to the retrial of the case."

SEE ALSO: Watch John Oliver make fun of patent trolls on 'Last Week Tonight'

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Starting at 5 p.m. ET on June 1, the bulk collection of American phone records by the National Security Agency will no longer be legally permitted, Spencer Ackerman of the Guardian reports.

That would mark the first time since October 2001 that US phone calls weren't collected en masse from America's three-largest telecommunications providers.

The Obama administration did not ask the FISA court, a secret court overseeing surveillance issues, for another 90-day extension of the order needed to continue the collection of domestic phone records. 

“We did not file an application for reauthorization,” an official from the Obama administration told the Guardian on Saturday morning. 

While the president has not asked to extend the program, Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, will reportedly continue to work to keep the program — and other elements of the Patriot Act — intact. 

The USA Freedom Act, which would ban bulk collection of data by the NSA but renew an expiring provision permitting the FBI to access business records and other American communications metadata, was approved by the House of Representatives earlier this week. The act, however, was defeated in the Senate on Saturday morning.

“This is a high-threat period,” McConnell (R-Kentucky) said after the Senate rejected the legislation and did not agree on an extension after June 1.

McConnell had attempted to get the Senate to pass a temporary extension of Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The section, known as the business-records provision, gave intelligence agencies authorization to seek communications data if “the records are relevant to an ongoing foreign intelligence investigation.”

An appeals court ruled earlier this month that most of the NSA’s surveillance and collections efforts were not permitted by Section 215. The court directly attributed revelations about the collection programs and its defeat in court to Edward Snowden, who released of hundreds of thousands of documents he gathered while working for a government contractor in 2012 and 2013.

McConnell, whose bill would continue all phone-records collection by the FBI and NSA, and the rest of the Senate will meet again on May 31. McConnell’s measure has support from members of the intelligence community. 

The Guardian said that the GOP leader would have to overcome the appeals court’s ruling, public dissatisfaction with government surveillance, and the procedural defeat of the surveillance programs in Congress in order to pass his bill. 

“The Senate is in gridlock, but the tides are shifting,” Michael W. Macleod-Ball, acting director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington legislative office, told The New York Times.

“For the first time, a majority of senators took a stand against simply rubber-stamping provisions of the Patriot Act that have been used to spy on Americans," he continued. "It’s disappointing that the Senate couldn’t coalesce around far-reaching reform, but in its absence the Senate should simply let the expiring provisions sunset.”

The Times notes that "the once-secret program, which began in October 2001 ... has never been the difference maker in thwarting any terrorist attack, according to testimony and government reports."

SEE ALSO: Snowden just scored a big victory

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Now that Mad Men is over, Christina Hendricks can devote more time to being in front of the camera with iPads. So long, typewriter co-stars

The actress stopped by Sesame Street to give her friend and fellow redhead Elmo a lesson on technology, explaining that a tablet is her preferred device for recording videos of herself playing ukulele.

More about Mad Men, Devices, Tv, Gadgets, and Watercooler

Before Google I/O starts next week, Yasmine Evjen already knows which parties she should go to and what happens at the coding labs. She even knows what's going to be stocked in the bathrooms, including no-crease hair ties, dry shampoo, and Tide-to-Go Pens. 

Evjen is a digital designer and developer in Phoenix, Arizona, but for the past month, she and hundreds of other women in tech have been chatting online in an invite-only Slack group.

This year at Google's I/O conference almost one in four attendees will be a woman. With that, comes a new set of logistics and a new community to build. 

In Slack, the popular workplace chatting app, the women attending Google I/O are discussing everything from what should be questions during an icebreaker to the latest Game of Thrones.

There are channels, which are basically topic chat rooms, for everything from Game of Thrones to android development to Latina women in tech.

There's even one called "Hair" for talking about hair styles and awesome colors. 

"Being a woman in tech can be isolating, which is why it's so important for us to band together and share our collective experiences, passions, and wisdom," said Siena Aguayo, a software engineer at Indiegogo, in an e-mail.

"I've been surprised by how many random topics have come up that connect us—and it's not just tech stuff, it's thing like Sailor Moon, Neko Atsume, Japanese food and culture (okay, so maybe a lot of us just really like Japan—I majored in Japanese so I'm no exception)."

The Slack channel is also a way for Google to connect to women. Natalie Villalobos, who heads up Google's Women Techmakers program, launched the Slack group a month before the conference so the attendees can talk to each other in a safe space ahead of time. No members of the media, even female, are allowed in the group, and it's limited only to I/O attendees.

"I go to conferences myself and sometimes you arrive and it can feel like a big airport. You don't know anyone, no one talks to each other. You have your own agenda, getting from point A to point B," Villalobos said. "I wanted to create a community and culture that provided more for these women going into I/O, so by the time they got to I/O they already felt like a community." 

Villalobos used the Slack channel to discuss logistics, down to what will be included in the women's bathrooms. She's also polled the group about what to include in an icebreaker game, and the women responded with coming up with their own icebreakers, like riddles or computational examples.

"I want Google I/O to feel like it was made for them," Villalobos said.

These are small details, but can make a difference to conference attendees, especially first-timers like Evjen and Aguayo who have a better understanding of what to expect.

"Going to I/O for the first time, I'm going by myself," Evjen said. "It relieves the stress of not knowing what's going to happen."

It's also about the networking opportunities. Evjen joined the Latina women in tech group and was immediately happy to hear that's not alone as a female, Latina mother in tech. 

Aguayo is a part of other women in tech groups like Hackbright Academy and the Android developer community, but she said this is the most active Slack community she is in by far.

"Perhaps it's the very real date of I/O that has put an impetus on people to connect with each other fast," Aguayo said. "I'm interested to see if the community continues after I/O is over—I imagine it has enough traction and momentum to do so."

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The latest exhibition by New York artist Richard Prince is raising ethical questions in the art world. The reason? He's selling canvases that feature other people's Instagram photos.

"New Portraits," first exhibited at the Gagosian Gallery in New York last year, features portraits of subjects that were not shot by Prince himself. Rather, they are screenshots of images other people have uploaded to Instagram. Prince has added his own comment below those already there, and printed the entire work on large canvasses. 

The artworks are now selling in New York this weekend for around $100,000 (£64,000) each, Gothamist reports.

One subject of the photos, DoeDeere, confirmed on Instagram that Prince did not seek permission before re-purposing one of her images. She posted on Instagram: "yes, my portrait is currently displayed at the Frieze Gallery in NYC. Yes, it's just a screenshot (not a painting). No, I did not give my permission and yes, the controversial artist Richard Prince put it up anyway."

She said the canvass featuring her portrait sold for $90,000 (£57,500).

For now, Prince has both fans and enemies. 

When "New Portraits" first exhibited last September, Jerry Saltz gushed in Vulture that "it's what [Prince] does in the comments field that is truly brilliant, and which adds layers on top of the disconcerting images. Here he is delving as deep as he ever has into privacy, copyright, and appropriation, twisting images so that they actually seem to undergo some sort of sick psychic-artistic transubstantiation where they no longer belong to the original makers."

Art Net's Paddy Johnson took a different view with an article titled: "Richard Prince Sucks."

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Two days ago, keen eyes on the Internet spotted a severely offensive flaw in Google Maps: If searchers typed a racist term, specifically “n***** king” and variants thereof, they were directed to the White House. Yesterday, Google issued a contrite statement saying it was fixing the issue, but it persisted. This afternoon, Google released a lengthier apology: “Certain offensive […]

Did the US exploit a vulnerability that made it possible to snoop on data traffic that was thought to be secure?

That’s been the question for the past 24 hours after news of the LogJam vulnerability became publicly known.

Now Edward Snowden has added his two cents on the issue. 

Put simply, LogJam is a vulnerability that rests in encrypted internet traffic. When someone accesses a website that is 'encrypted,' it was thought to mean that the data being transferred can only be seen by the sender and the recipient.

This new issue, which was announced yesterday, shows that it is possible for large-scale online operations to actually intercept this data without anyone noticing and even being able to alter it. So even so-called secure data isn't safe from external snooping thanks to this LogJam bug.

Even though the discovery is a big one — it shows that previous conceptions of internet security are actually false — many experts weren’t sure how likely it was that the vulnerability was exploited. 

Today Edward Snowden took part in a Reddit AMA and offered his own unique views.

A Redditor asked whether the exiled whistleblower believed that the NSA capitalized on this newly discovered vulnerability.

Snowden’s response:

So this attack was published just yesterday, I believe. I had a private talk recently with several of the best cryptographers and computer security researchers in the US at Princeton, including some of the authors of the paper. I've spoken with some of them in the wake of this publication, and the general consensus was that they would be amazed if the NSA was not doing this, and in fact a close reading of some of the previously published NSA documents on efforts against VPN connections implies a similar effort. All I can say is that I share their suspicions, but I simply do not know the answer one way or another. I don't want to mislead anybody by speculating.

Given that the attack you cite, which can just as easily be performed by any government from Belgium to China is a product of previous efforts by the US Government to weaken encryption standards, members of Congress should be writing letters to the Director of National Intelligence to find out why the NSA failed to close a vulnerability that left huge percentages of American (and international) internet traffic at risk.

Without so much as saying the US did know about LogJam, Snowden is incredulous about how the government couldn't know. LogJam's existence is predicated on lax encryption standards from the '90s. So while Snowden can't be sure, he is (at the very least) suspicious. 

We’ll likely never know the extent to which LogJam (or any other vulnerability) has been acted on by the government. But Snowden, who took this time on Reddit to urge people to work to stop the government’s data collection program, sees this as an indication of what is possible.

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A report published by Buzzfeed that implied Cisco was skirting economic sanctions against Russia when selling its technical equipment there has gotten the attention of Sen. John McCain.

McCain (R-AZ) chairs the Senate’s Armed Services Committee and has pressed for more U.S. action against Russia in response to its involvement in the Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea.

Buzzfeed's report, based on documents and insight from an anonymous source said to have knowledge of Cisco's Moscow operations, accused Cisco of changing sales records and booking deals under a false customer name after the sanctions began. In one case, Cisco allegedly sold equipment that wound up in the hands of the FSB, the successor to the KGB, but the records did not indicate FSB was the alleged buyer.

Although Cisco admitted that some names of customers were changed, it said those mistakes were innocent and has vehemently denied all charges that any of its sales violated sanctions.

McCain called the situation “disturbing” and said it “deserves further investigation," Buzzfeed reported in a follow-up article.

Interestingly, outgoing Cisco CEO John Chambers, also a Republican, knows McCain well. Chambers was a top supporter of McCain's 2008 presidential bid, donating over $1.3 million.

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NOW WATCH: Here's what happens when you get bitten by a black widow

Amazon's cloud business brings in $6 billion in revenue. Microsoft is aiming for $20 billion in annual cloud revenue by 2018. Google is probably close to $1 billion a year, and growing at a rate of 74%, according to Synergy Research.

In other words, the cloud computing market is booming.

And it's only supposed to go higher: A report released by analyst firm Gartner this week indicates that this year alone, spending on cloud computing infrastructure services — where servers and applications are hosted in far-off, hyper-efficient data centers — is going to go up another 32.8 percent to almost $16.5 billion. 

There's a consolidating effect at work, Gartner says. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google already make up the majority of the market between the three of them. Given how much it can cost to operate a data center, it's hard to compete with those kinds of deep pockets, Gartner says.

"Few providers have the financial resources to invest in being broadly competitive in the cloud IaaS market," said Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst Lydia Leong in a prepared statement.

So while plenty of customers the world over are turning to the cloud for cost savings and large-scale efficiency, lots of cloud providers are feeling the crunch and changing their business model, Gartner says. 

"We urge buyers to be extremely cautious when selecting providers; ask specific and detailed questions about the provider's roadmap for the service, and seek contractual commitments that do not permit the provider to modify substantially or to discontinue the offering without at least 12 months' notice," said Leong.

Rackspace Hosting, for instance, fared well in Gartner's annual "Magic Quadrant" ranking of technologically complete cloud platforms. But after a disappointing quarter, the company has been signaling that it may reorient its business towards providing support for clouds like Amazon's. 

Interestingly, a report released by Forrester Research today indicates that there might not be as much market crunch as Gartner thinks.

In addition to the three big guys mentioned above, Forrester believes VMware vCloud is a major player in the public cloud.

But the really shocking part of Forrester's differing opinion is that OpenStack — the free software that helps IT pros turn servers into the same kinds of elastic, scalable clouds as used by Google and Amazon — is going to become another "camp" that vendors are going to rally around, making it a major market player. 

OpenStack is "well suited for application development" and mature enough for most, Forrester finds, with customers like Disney, Time Warner Cable, and Wal-Mart proving that it's ready for prime time.

But OpenStack still faces some challenges, as Forrester admits: It can be too hard to use, too unreliable, and too hard to secure, Forrester says. 

Meanwhile, the OpenStack Foundation, which oversees development of the OpenStack software with the backing of giants like IBM, Cisco, VMware, and Red Hat, says that it's made usability and interoperability between vendors a major priority. If that works out, it would greatly increase OpenStack's street cred with enterprise customers. 

As Fierce IT DevOps notes from this week's OpenStack Summit, plenty of businesses are probably at least trying to use OpenStack, but very few outside of huge enterprises are finding success — yet.

The bottom line here is that Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are the kings of the mountain when it comes to cloud services, and the trend seems to show that their dominance is only going to increase.

But OpenStack's real strength is in providing the tools for even smaller vendors to build their clouds for very, very specific niches. It's unlikely that any one OpenStack vendor will take a significant chunk of the market away from the likes of Amazon. But collectively, OpenStack has the potential to be a significant thorn in their side. 

READ NEXT:  Urs Hölzle, Google's 8th employee and tech guru, explains why it can win the cloud war against Amazon and Microsoft

SEE ALSO: Microsoft just made an aggressive move against Google in the cloud wars

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NOW WATCH: Jeff Bezos Slams Silly Google Perks Like Massages

In June of 2014, JetBlue launched Mint, its very first premium class option. In the months since, it's become a popular choice for execs traveling between the two coasts. 

"If @JetBlue Mint flew into EWR it would be a 12. But just JFK, it's still a 10," one tech founder, ReDef CEO Jason Hirschhorn tweeted earlier in May.

"The best," Union Square Ventures partner Andy Weissman tweeted back. 

The executives seem to be happy with both the amenities and the price. JetBlue's service aims to be somewhere between first class and business class. But while first class tickets on other airlines can cost as much as $3,400 round trip from New York to Los Angeles, JetBlue Mint boasts prices that are half as much.

Mint's premium seats on transcontinental flights (New York - San Francisco and New York - Los Angeles) start at $599 one way, roughly $1200 round trip.

And while it's no SurfAir —a members-only private plane service that tech investors say is like Netflix for flying — the perks onboard Mint are enviable.

Lie-flat seats include a massage feature and a button that can adjust cushion firmness. You get access to more than 100 channels through DirecTV and SiriusXM, plus the plane's FlyFi broadband connection promises super-fast Internet speeds.

Each of the 16 Mint seats has at least two outlets. Four of the seats in Mint are actually suites, which have their own doors that can be closed for privacy.

The food on Mint is not your typical airline fare. The menu was curated by hip New York City restaurant Saxon + Parole, and it typically includes such inventive dishes as a corn custard and poached lobster, bison meatloaf, and herb roasted monkfish. 

 

There's beer from Brooklyn Brewery, freshly baked pastries from Mah-Ze-Dahr Bakery, and organic ice cream from Blue Marble. You can even enjoy coffee from Brooklyn Roasting Co., made with the first espresso machine specifically manufactured for an airline. 

A signature Mint cocktail is made with Grey Goose, and the wine selection includes several hard-to-find California varietals. JetBlue also happens to be the first airline to serve rosé.

Each Mint passenger gets a complimentary Birchbox, filled with samples of the latest grooming products for both men and women. 

With all of those perks, it should come as no surprise that Mint is catching on with startup founders and other players in the tech industry, many of whom travel between New York and San Francisco regularly. 

Some of them have been raving about it on Twitter.

JetBlue Mint will be expanding to new markets in November, when it will be available on flights from New York City to Aruba and Barbados.

SEE ALSO: This startup wants to solve a major problem facing business travelers

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Kim Dotcom is at it again — this time via his first televised interview in over a year. 

Unsurprisingly, his views were somewhat controversial.  

The outspoken MegaUpload founder, who is currently on house arrest in Auckland, New Zealand, told Bloomberg's Emily Chang his thoughts on American politics, the copyright system, and other topics. Here are a few gems from the interview.

Julian Assange will be Hillary Clinton's worst nightmare

Dotcom has predicted that 2016 will be a rough year for the newly-announced Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton. He tweeted last year that he would be "Hillary’s worst nightmare in 2016."

Now, Dotcom says Julian Assange will be the person bringing Hillary the pain.  "I’m aware of some things," he told Chang, adding that Assange has "access to information." When Chang pushed further into what sort of information the Wikileaks founder has on Clinton, Dotcom replied "I don’t know the specifics."

Why this Hillary hate? Dotcom said that "Hillary hates Julian" because she is an adversary of "internet freedom." 

He added that he loves both Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, calling the whistleblower "a hero." "He will be remembered in history as one of the greatest people of our time."

He is against "copyright extremism" 

Dotcom is currently at the center of one of the biggest copyright cases the US has ever seen. Police accuse him of enabling online piracy with his website MegaUpload, and he faced more charges including money laundering and racketeering. As such, the man has some very vehement thoughts on the state of copyright in the US.

"I believe in copyright, but I don’t believe in copyright extremism," he proclaimed, using Netflix as an example. As he sees it, it’s ridiculous that the US version of Netflix has access to more content that the New Zealand version.

"That is completely unfair," he said.

Chang asked how Dotcom can strike a balance between the idea of free content for everyone and giving artists their dues. "I don’t see starving artists. They are making a lot of money," he responded. 

Dotcom thinks movie companies missed a huge opportunity by not offering their content online. If Hollywood distributed content globally for a "fixed monthly fee," they "would probably have the biggest internet company on the planet."

Dotcom says that North Korea wasn't behind the Sony hack

Dotcom vehemently believes that North Korea wasn't behind the massive Sony hack. In his words, "I don’t believe that for a minute."

Instead, he thinks it was some "sophisticated group" or even perhaps a Sony insider with access to the servers that executed the huge breach. "It just doesn't make sense," the exiled man concluded.

The full interview airs tonight at 7:30PM. 

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Dish is the latest tech company that wants to become a wireless carrier. A confidential document obtained by Yahoo Finance reveals that the satellite TV provider plans to offer wireless voice, data, and video services.

The documents reveal that the company is looking to hire a chief marketing officer to help Dish enter the wireless carrier space, where it will directly compete with Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and now Google.

"We are preparing for something big," the document says, according to Yahoo Finance. "This is an incredibly exciting time in our history. We have reinvented ourselves in the past and we are preparing to do it again."

The document also specifically says that Dish is planning to compete with carriers, saying that the new CMO "will be an integral part of the team that changes entertainment forever as Dish enters the wireless business and becomes the only provider that can offer wireless, voice, video, and data."

Dish already has a big advantage in that it was awarded almost half of the spectrum licenses offered in a U.S. government auction earlier this year. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile also won some of the spectrum from the auction, but Dish is estimated to own $50 billion in spectrum, as Bloomberg reports.

Spectrum refers to the airwaves used to transmit data to and from your wireless devices. So, each time you watch Netflix or browse the internet on your phone, you're gobbling up some wireless spectrum.

Dish's ownership of this block of spectrum is particularly important because spectrum is in high demand. Eventually it's going to run out, and experts say we're breezing through it faster than ever now that we're using mobile devices for really data-intensive tasks, such as streaming video.

Dish CEO Charlie Ergen hinted that the company has plans to expand on its most recent earnings call, saying  "...it's not just wireless spectrum and video. It's going to be all kinds of other peripheral things that are going to come together." 

The wireless space is getting increasingly competitive, though. Last month Google unveiled its own wireless service called Project Fi,  which lets you only pay for the data you use unlike other carriers. If Dish wants to compete with heavyweights such as Verizon, AT&T, and others, it'll likely have to offer competitive advantages as well.

Although this is the first we're hearing of Dish's plans to offer wireless service, it's not the first time the company has expressed interest in it. About one year ago, Business Insider discovered an FCC filing which revealed that Dish Network was partnering with Artemis Network — a startup that's invented a new means of delivering wireless data that results in speeds that are said to be much faster than that of 4G LTE that also use less spectrum than today's traditional cell towers. It's called pCell, and it recently saw a limited launch in San Francisco. 

We've reached out to Dish for this story and will update this post accordingly when we hear back. 

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Also, Windows 10 will support ARM chips only for phones and small tablets, with Intel and AMD processors required for larger tablets and PCs.

Flexible work hours and the option of working from home can alleviate stress and lead to greater productivity.

More and more firms are starting to allow employees to telecommute, but there are a few front runners providing exceptionally flexible work arrangements.

To find the most flexible companies in America, we looked at Business Insider's latest list of the 50 best companies to work for in America, based on exclusive data from PayScale, which surveyed employees in the US who work at companies that appeared on the 2014 Fortune 500 list.

San Jose, California-based tech company Cisco Systems topped the list of the most flexible companies. It ranked seventh on our list of the 50 best companies to work for.

Payscale determined flexibility by evaluating the percentage of respondents who answered, "Yes, I telecommute 100% of the time," or "Yes, I telecommute most of the time," or "Yes, I telecommute some of the time," to the question, "Are you able to telecommute/work from home?" (Read the full methodology here.)

Here are the full standings:

SEE ALSO: The least stressful companies to work for in America

READ THE FULL LIST: The 50 best companies to work for in America

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There's a lake hidden in a corner of Inner Mongolia that few people have ever seen in person.

That's because this is no ordinary lake — it's a horrifying window into the dark side of the tech industry.

Reporter Tim Maughan traveled there with the Unknown Fields Division as part of a 3-week journey tracing the route that Chinese consumer goods take backwards from the stores where we pick them up to the raw resources that go into manufacturing them.

And what they found at the end of the route is disturbing: a gigantic lake full of radioactive, sulfur-smelling, toxic sludge.

"It feels like hell on Earth," Maughan wrote for BBC.

The tech boom

It's no coincidence that this lake exists in China. The country is home to the world's largest reserves of "rare Earth elements" (REE's) — one of the secrets behind it's explosive economic growth over the past few decades. The lake sits on the outer ring of the city of Baotou. Back in 1950 Baotou had under 100,000 people. The spike in worldwide demand for consumer tech goods has made people flock to the city. Now it has over 2.5 million.

Most of us are blissfully unaware of how dependent we are on REE's, but they have a nearly ubiquitous presence in consumer tech goods. Everything from the insides of cell phones to electric car motors are made of them. For example, the REE called cerium coats smartphone screens and neodymium is used in the magnets that go inside earphones and computer hard drives.

Despite their name, these minerals aren't so rare — you could probably find a few in your backyard right now. However, there are only a few places in the world that have a high enough concentration of REE's to make it worth mining for them.

Even where these minerals are abundant, mining them isn't easy, and it's incredibly destructive. The ground is dug up and the earth is flooded with chemicals to pull out the valuable parts. And all that waste has to go somewhere.

Hell on Earth

In 2009, over 90% of the world's REE's came from Baotou. However, China doesn't have the most of every single type of REE, Maughan pointed out. The country produces about 90% of the global economy's neodymium, but it has only about 30% of the world’s reserves. So to some degree, China may be profiting the most from REE's simply because it's willing to pay the heavy environmental price that comes from mining them.

And business is booming. The Industrial Minerals Company of Australia estimates that China will produce about 130,000 tonnes of REE's by 2016.

But for every ton of REE's mined, somewhere 340,000 to 420,000 cubic feet of waste gas made of dust, hydrofluoric acid, sulfur dioxide, and sulfuric acid is released. You also get about 2,600 cubic feet of acidic wastewater and 1 ton of radioactive waste, according to the Chinese Society of Rare Earths

The result is a constant stream of toxic sludge that feeds into a giant wasteland about 75 miles outside Batou:

You can get a sense of how huge the lake is from Google Maps:

Quantifying the environmental impact that this hell hole is having proved pretty much impossible for Maughan. Ironically a lot of the material mined here goes toward creating "green" tech like electric car motors and wind turbines, but REE factory workers clammed up every time Maughan asked about the environmental impact of the mining process itself. There doesn't seem to be any accessible research or data that tells us how all this waste is affecting the area either.

It's easy to villainize certain industry sectors (like petroleum, for example) for destroying the environment. But what happens when one of the worst-offending industries is the producer of something we can't live without? It's harder to condemn the tech industry because we desperately want the latest smartphone model or the next-fastest computer.

Demand for tech is only going to increase, and it's clear that we need a better strategy than simply dumping all the toxic byproducts in a lake of sludge.

Hopefully with all this tech we can come up with a more sophisticated solution.

SEE ALSO: Risky new technology means the next Gulf of Mexico oil spill could be much, much worse

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In the same way that saying you went to Stanford holds a certain caché in Silicon Valley, having the right venture capital firm invest in your startup is important, too. 

Entrepreneurs will sometimes accept 25% lower valuations if it means being associated with the right firm, according to Tad Friend, who profiled Marc Andreessen for the New Yorker. 

Stewart Butterfield, cofounder and CEO of the billion-dollar business messaging startup Slack, told Friend that he thinks signing on a name-brand firm — like Andreessen Horowitz — is crucial for companies. 

"It’s hard to overestimate how much the perception of the quality of the V.C. firm you’re with matters—the signal it sends to other V.C.s, to potential employees, to customers, to the tech press," Butterfield said. "It’s like where you went to college."

Butterfield definitely believes in the magic of perception: He told Fortune earlier this year that Slack gunned for a higher valuation since "one billion is better than $800 million because it’s the psychological threshold for potential customers, employees, and the press."

Last month, Slack raised $160 million at a hefty $2.8 billion valuation.

The cofounder and CEO of payments app Stripe echoed Stewart's thoughts.

Two big names — Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital — participated in Stripe's seed round of funding, which "was a signal that was not lost on the banks we wanted to work with" when the startup was ready for its Series A, Patrick Collison says.

Stripe ended up landing a $100 million valuation even though it hadn't launched yet. 

Read the rest of The New Yorker profile here. 

 

SEE ALSO: How a quirky 28-year-old plowed through $150 million and almost destroyed his startup

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By Canalys's count, the global PC market declined by 7 percent in 2015's first quarter.

California just entered its fourth year in drought. Experts say it's the worst the state has seen in 1,200 years. 

Dwindling reservoirs, shrinking lakes and dried up farm fields are everywhere — and as of yet the drought shows no sign of stopping. 

The state's snowpack, which typically provides about a third of the water for its farms and residents, remains at its lowest level in history. 

Reservoir banks that were once underwater at Millerton Lake on the San Joaquin River in Friant, a town just north of Fresno in California's Central Valley.

Reservoir banks that used to be underwater at Millerton Lake on top of the Friant Dam.

A field of dead almond trees in Coalinga in the Central Valley. Almonds use up an estimated 10% of the state's water budget.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Apple's iPhone 6 Plus represented 44 percent market share. Screen size was cited as the main reason for buying a particular phone by both 43 percent of all iOS buyers and 47 percent of Android buyers.

Fi has proposed a better way: not only “fairer” but also designed to encourage people to think about their usage, even when the direct “value” pitch is “pay only for what you use.”

By Zeus Kerravala
This video-centric startup continues pushing the envelope on team collaboration.

By Eric Krapf
The networking vendor is hoping UC provides SDN with the opening it needs to finally catch fire in the enterprise.

The General Court of the European Union court has ruled today that Skype’s name is too similar to Sky’s and could easily be confused. This means that Microsoft is now banned from registering a trademark for the Skype name and logo. According to a report on BBC, the judges noted that: Conceptually, the figurative element conveys no concept, except perhaps that of a cloud. [That] would further increase the likelihood of the element ‘Sky’ being recognised within the word element ‘Skype’, for clouds are to be found ‘in the sky’ and thus may readily be associated with the word ‘sky’.…

This story continues at The Next Web

In June 1997, tech magazine Wired published a legendary issue about Apple, and the problems facing the then-struggling Cupertino technology company.

Founder Steve Jobs had been kicked out years earlier (although he had just rejoined after Apple acquired his company NeXT), and Gil Amelio was at the helm. Microsoft was easily dominating the PC industry. The article was one of the best-read stories in tech at the time and came packaged in a cover that remains a classic. 

Wired's editorial staff gave 101 suggestions on how to "save Apple." Most of the ideas were prescient — running a great image campaign, developing a better app ecosystem, giving Steve Jobs "as much authority as he wants in new product development," and simplifying its PC product line, for example.

But some their other suggestions were dead wrong.

SUGGESTION #1: "Admit it. You're out of the hardware game. Outsource your hardware production, or scrap it entirely, to compete more directly with Microsoft without the liability of manufacturing boxes. "

REALITY: Apple went on to produce some of the most successful consumer electronics of all time. Its Macs, MacBooks, iPads and iPhones have sold hundreds of millions of units, and are a driving force for innovation in the industry.

SUGGESTION #2: "Straighten out the naming convention. Link model numbers to processor speed. When buying a 3400 laptop computer, what, exactly, are you getting? Unless you study the brochures, you don't know how it compares with its competition. On the other hand, Wintel talks explicitly about processor speed. It's a Pentium 200-MHz box."

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

The enterprise communication platform Slack recently became the fastest startup to reach a $2 billion valuation.

As CEO Stewart Butterfield told Business Insider in an interview, a bunch of forces came together to make it happen:

• an unprecedented ability to companies to scale revenue

• an incredibly hot investment environment

• the insane growth of Slack itself

"We've been crazily successful," Butterfield said. "Since we came back from the holidays, we doubled. That means that all the growth we had in 2014, we had again in a little over 3 months, and that's not usual. We had a fast rate of growth in the early days at small numbers, but it kept up. We've had over 5% week-on-week growth for the last 70 straight weeks — and that has just continued."

The financial information and technology provider PitchBook shared data with us about how Slack matches up with other Twitter, Pinterest, and other multi-billion-dollar startups:

Read the full interview here.

SEE ALSO: Slack's CEO reveals what it's like building the fastest $2 billion startup in history

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Goldman Sachs is jumping on the Bitcoin bandwagon.

The New York Times reports that Goldman "struck a partnership with a major Chinese investment firm, IDG Capital Partners, to lead a $50 million investment into Circle Internet Financial, a start-up that aims to use the technology underlying Bitcoin to improve consumer payments."

Indeed, the future of Bitcoin does seem to be the technology which allows people to make digital payments instantly anywhere in the world, rather than the currency itself.

Here's more from the Times: 

The founders of Circle are aiming to use Bitcoin to move into the burgeoning industry of peer-to-peer payments. The industry is currently led by companies like Venmo, a PayPal-owned application that allows friends to quickly send one another money rather than using a check or a bank transfer, which can take days to go through.

While Circle will, in the near future, offer much the same services as Venmo — including free, instant money transfers — the company hopes that Bitcoin will allow it to move money with same ease across international borders, something Venmo cannot do.

And as long as payments are instantly converted to and from fiat currency, there's very little exposure to Bitcoin's notorious volatility. 

SEE ALSO: Bitcoin is starting to march toward the mainstream

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By Dave Michels
Reliance on conferencing, already a big part of the day for knowledge workers, will only grow as the technology adapts for mobility and increased user friendliness.