Davemichels

Dunkin' Donuts is under fire for tweeting a picture of an altered version of the Liverpool FC emblem, which replaces the club's "eternal flame" with milkshakes. The Kop Magazine spotted the blunder last night.

The coffee and doughnut retailer is one of Liverpool's official sponsors, but seemingly failed to recognise the importance of the football club's flame symbol on its crest: The two, pictured on each side of the central shield, signify the tragic loss of 96 fans who died in a crush at Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield in 1989.

In Dunkin' Donut's crest, the company also changed the football club name to "DD," replaced the Shankly Gates fencing with doughnuts and a cup of coffee, and swapped the club anthem "You'll Never Walk Alone" with "America Runs On Dunkin'." Many feel the move was in bad taste.

Here's a screengrab of the tweet:

Dunkin Donuts has since deleted the image from its Twitter feed and apologised for the mistake. In a statement provided to the Liverpool Echo, the company said:

We apologise for any insensitivity regarding our tweet supporting an LFC-themed promotion featuring the LFC Crest. As a proud partner of LFC, we did not intend any offence, particularly to the Club’s supporters. We have removed the tweet and halted the campaign immediately.

But not before lots of Liverpool fans and others commented on the situation. They called it "insensitive," among other things.

Liverpool and Dunkin' Donuts have been in business since January 2014. The club signed a multi-million pound deal with the doughnut giants that saw the company become the "official coffee, tea, and bakery provider," the Echo adds.

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Six years ago (almost to the day) I wrote an advisory about Tropo  in which I referred to the newly launched subsidiary as  “Voxeo’s Telco in Legoland.” I noted that “Voxeo is offering a free service to voice application developers to take advantage of a standard API and a growing range of ‘frameworks’ for the application community to build more voice and telephony applications in the cloud – what it refers to as ‘API-based’ applications.” Today, with the announcement of Tropo Connect, the group will further whet the developer community’s appetite for construct-your-own applications and services, and give end-users new types of agility by invoking or launching “InCall Apps.”

The whole “InCall” concept is a little hard to grasp, initially, because most telephone and voice application development starts “outside” the actual call. As Tropo’s CTO and co-founder Jose de Castro explained to me, “It’s not an ‘app first’ model. Instead it says take the call processing capabilities you have and put apps in it.” de Castro is referring to the fact that traditional “apps” live on a phone or on application servers that provide their instructions and programmatic logic to the call processing, voice processing and data processing resources. IVRs (Interactive Voice Response units), ACDs (Automated Call Directors) and Conference Bridges are the physical examples of these “engines,” but they are becoming artifacts of the pre-Internet days and have largely been replaced by software on generic servers.

Even if  applications reside in the same “cloud” or run on the same server, they do not traditionally run “inside” a call. That’s why the home screens on so many smart phones are emblazoned with dozens or scores of icons used to “launch” individual applications to carry on specific tasks.

To make the point, think of the benefits of launching apps while in the middle of a phone call. A simple example occurs whenever a Skype user adds another user to a conference call or when a contact center agent can receive a “whisper” prompt when engaged in a conversation with a customer or prospect. Use of the Tropo platform gives “developers,” be they the shadow IT department in a large enterprise or an independent entrepreneur just showing off, the agility to define new voice mash-ups – meaning InCall apps that span business applications, control of the Internet of Things or conversational control and communications in automobiles.

 

 

A hundred more deals worth $1 million or more than the same period last year.

Google is planning expansive new headquarters in Mountain View, California, according to a new report in the New York Times. It's due to be announced this week, and details on it are currently sparse. But it should be a "series of canopylike buildings," Conor Dougherty writes, and it will also include pedestrian and bike paths.

It's being designed by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, as well as Heatherwick Studio.

This is the current Google HQ in Mountain View, California.

It has around 20,000 local employees, according to the New York Times. Mountain View's entire population is only 80,000.

Heatherwick Studio is probably best known for designing the 2012 Olympic Cauldron.

The studio also designed the planned "Garden Bridge" across the River Thames in London.

Here's another of its designs — a "Leaning Hub" for a Singapore university.

This is Zeitz MOCAA. It's a converted grain silo in Cape Town, South Africa.

These are some houses designed by Bjarke Ingels:

This is Europa City — a far larger urban development project by the Danish architect.

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NOW WATCH: Jeff Bezos Slams Silly Google Perks Like Massages

John Lovallo, an analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, shook up Tesla bulls on Monday when he published a research note asking fundamental questions about the electric-car maker's prospects.

He also cut his price target to $65 from $70.

Tesla is trading at about $203 per share, a significant decline from its 2014 peak of $291, but a huge increase from the 2010 IPO price of $17.

For some time, Lovallo has been on the low end of analysts who cover Tesla. He's the biggest Tesla bear on Wall Street. Otherwise, opinion on the company is all over the place. Stifel Nicholas' James Albertine is the biggest bull, with a $400 price target. Other analysts are more cautious, with price targets in the ballpark of the stock's 2014 high. JP Morgan's Ryan Brinkman is the most cautious of the cautious set, with a target of $180.

Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas is something of an outlier, with a juicy $280 price target but a complex thesis about Tesla. He thinks that it will remain more of a niche carmaker, not a mass-market brand — and to that end, he's skeptical about Tesla's ambitious growth prospects.

Given that Tesla missed on earnings expectations for its fourth quarter and was unable to deliver 1,400 cars (out of a total of 35,000) in 2014, all eyes are now focused on whether the company can justify its still lofty stock price and $26 billion market cap.

That's why Lovallo's bearishness is important. He's predicting a nearly 70% decline in Tesla's stock price.

That's a massive collapse. Massive. Bottom line: Lovallo thinks Tesla is a lot of smoke and mirrors:

We believe Tesla has seemingly managed to offset a steady stream of negative news and weak financial results by issuing long-term targets that, in our view, are often quite difficult to fathom. We believe that baring a significant reset in investor expectations, this strategy is certain to lose its luster, particularly considering what we see as the long road of challenging financial results and cash burn that lie ahead.

Lovallo's bear case is part of a larger trend among Tesla's financial followers. Since the middle of last year, Tesla's story has changed from being a narrative about a booming stock to being a tale of a manufacturing company with a lot of ground to cross between where it is now and where it says its business will be in five or 10 years.

Lovallo hasn't had to trim his sails because, from his point of view, the good ship Tesla is sinking. Or heading for a huge iceberg. In any event, profoundly rough seas ahead, an unruly ocean of incinerated cash.

For the record, Tesla's share price hasn't been at Lovallo levels since mid-2013, about a year after the debut of the Model S sedan, when sales of the car were starting to look more vigorous than initially anticipated. Later that year, Motor Trend would name the Model S its Car of the Year.

So, in effect, Lovallo's argument is a grim time machine. His estimate is that Tesla's should be priced with a year and half of Model S production rolled back.

If that sounds weird, think about the stock price as a prediction of what Tesla will be worth if it can grow according to CEO Elon Musk's road map. Lovallo doesn't think it can. But all those promises from Musk & Co. have sustained Tesla's impressive climb in valuation. Take them away, and you're back to a company that produces one car at one factory and needs to spend, in Musk's own words, a "staggering" amount of money to get to the next stages of its world-changing development.

But here's the thing about Tesla: people have always been assessing the company's looming demise. I know because I was one of those people, back in 2008. Obviously, I was incredibly wrong. Tesla is still with us.

But when I was offering a premature Tesla eulogy, I also thought the company was serving up a fair amount of smoke-and-mirrors. No detail necessary, but when you follow Tesla for a while, you realize that the company is always crafting and recrafting its story. This is simply how it deals with the outside world.

For example, Lovallo calls out Tesla for its "latest effort to shift investor focus away from disappointing financial results" — stationary storage, using the company's battery technology. But I don't think Tesla is talking up stationary storage because it wants to tell investors to zig when they should be zagging.

Rather, I think Tesla is talking up stationary storage because the company is becoming a battery supplier, building a huge battery "Gigafactory" in the Nevada desert.

Stationary storage may not contribute much to Tesla's results, not right away, so in that sense Lovallo has a point. But this is just the way Tesla thinks — the way Musk thinks. If you intend to build a lot of electric cars, powered by batteries, you might as well develop a parallel battery business. Not to do so would be to leave money on the table.

During my days as a Tesla skeptic, the company wasn't even producing the Model S yet, was having some trouble fulfilling scheduled orders on the car it was then selling, the Roadster — but maintained that its electric drivetrain business was profitable.

The idea then was to use the drivetrain business to attract partners, which Tesla did with Daimler and Toyota. These partners took stakes in the company that helped it to survive its 2008-09 crisis, along with a loan from the Department of Energy.

I feel like I'm used to this kind of thing from Tesla, but only because I've been following its adventures since well before it became a huge Wall Street story. For me, Tesla has always been a startup carmaker with a somewhat flexible master narrative. And I don't mean that in a negative way. It's kept matters very, very interesting.

Wall Street is now getting a dose of storytelling as usual from Tesla now. And that's causing some analysts to serious question their commitment to the company.

SEE ALSO: Analyst: The bullish case for Tesla has been debunked

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HP is about three months into its plans to cleave itself into two huge tech companies and it's finally figured out how much this process will cost: about $2 billion.

HP will spend $1.3 billion of pre-tax separation costs in its current fiscal year (2015) and another $500 million in its next fiscal year (2016), said HP CFO Cathie Lesjak on its quarterly earnings conference call.

There's also approximately $750 million of foreign taxes to pay after it pockets about $200 million foreign tax credits, HP mentioned in the materials it published with its quarterly conference call.

"The scale of this separation is unprecedented in it's size and complexity," explained Lesjak.

Added CEO Whitman, "We are separating into two Fortune 50 companies. It's hard to imagine that there are two Fortune 50 companies embedded inside HP."

That means there's a whole bunch of one-time costs to pay: building out two individual IT systems, plus consulting fees, legal fees, real estate expenses and those foreign taxes thanks to HP's huge international presence.

And this doesn't include any layoffs that might come as part of the separation costs.  And they will come, Lesjak confirmed on Tuesday, although she didn't announce how many jobs will be cut.

HP reported middling earnings and gave weak guidance on Tuesday, sending its stock down more than 7% after hours.

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NOW WATCH: 14 things you didn't know your iPhone headphones could do

By Dave Michels
I do -- and it's a communications platform that centers around asynchronous messaging with intuitive capabilities for real-time communications.

This post is presented by Business Is Great Britain.

In an era where more and more corporations are pulling workers into the office, Stack Exchange stands out: The New York-based operator of a network of question-and-answer sites has more than a fifth of its employees working outside its offices.

Former advocates of telework like Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard have pulled back on the practice, citing an "all hands on deck" need to have employees at headquarters to more effectively collaborate on their corporate turnarounds. Perhaps companies in dire straits aren't suited for remote workers.

But for companies that have embraced a distributed workforce, the benefits are apparent: employees who are happier with their work-life balance, managers who can hire from a broader talent pool, and reduced operational costs.

Stack Exchange was born a remote company. Cofounders Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky created the company, originally known as Stack Overflow, at a time when they lived on opposite coasts. Nearly seven years later, Stack Exchange's network now holds more than 130 question-and-answer sites, covering a wide breadth of topics and attracting 68 million visitors a month, many of them developers. Most of its sites are technical in nature, but there are sites covering video production, biology, and even coffee.

The company has 213 employees. 22 percent working out of the office. Remote workers span 17 U.S. states and 9 other countries in Europe and Asia.

Employees get perks such as gym reimbursement, free health insurance, and stock options after a year—no matter where they are. And Stack Exchange makes sure that even if you're not in the next cubicle over from a coworker, it feels like you are.

"Google Hangouts are the lifeblood of our organization," said David Fullerton, Stack Exchange's vice president of engineering. "If you haven’t tried them for video chat, you’re living in the Stone Age. We have persistent Hangouts for every team available. We spin up one-off Hangouts for quick video chats. We use them for everything.

"When you get to the point where people in the office prefer Hangouts to talking in-person because it’s easier, you know you’re on to something."

On A "Mission From God" To Make Remote Work Easy

Five years ago, Atwood wrote up his belief that structuring the company around a remote workforce promoted global opportunities in terms of scope and quality of the work. Working alone would be unthinkable, while working in a central office limited a talent pool. The optimal choice, Atwood noted would be a distributed workforce—one where a programmer in Brazil could help a like-minded individual in New Jersey.

Even the obstacle of time zones could be overcome with the right technology and the right meeting structure. Atwood wrote that he and Spolsky wanted Stack Overflow to be populated by people like themselves who "bleed ones and zeroes."

Two years later, Fullerton added his own 12-point argument for why the company—already much larger—still believed in remote work. In it, he expanded on Atwood's article by noting that telework is not for every company or every employee:

There’s a tendency to think that working from home is all sunshine and rainbows and working in your PJs. You miss out on being around people (which wears even on introverts), doing fun stuff like playing Ping-Pong or having lunch together and (sometimes hardest of all) you lose a clear distinction between work and the rest of your life. Some people thrive when working from home, while others wither or just … drift. We’ve had people move both ways: remote people deciding to come in to the office, and people in the office deciding to go remote. The key, for us, is offering both and helping people decide which is best for them.

As the company's lead engineer, Fullerton acknowledges that to make the remote working environment work, there needs to be consistent factors in place such as high-speed Internet access, agreed-upon communication tools, and a willingness to break up tasks into manageable chunks. It also helps that Stack Exchange treats headquarters workers and remote workers similarly, giving them private offices rather than seating them in open bullpens, as many startups do.

"We don't require people to be at their desks all day long," Fullerton said. "All of our developers get a private office, essentially as if they're working from home. They can manage their own workloads as long as they meet their requirements."

Centers Of Gravity

Stack Exchange has three main offices in New York, Denver and London. The Denver and London offices are primarily staffed with sales and marketing employees. Most employees outside of North America—including France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Philippines, Russia, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom—report to managers based in the U.S., but regional offices embrace local quirks.

"It's great to have an office [in London] because it's a multicultural center," Fullerton said.

For Stack Exchange, the typical model of a remote salesforce and an in-house engineering department has been flipped on its head. Sales, marketing, and other management functions are centrally located in one of the three hub offices, while developers and engineers are free to live where they're most comfortable.

Remote workers are most often developers, designers, and community managers. (There are some regional sales reps who work remotely as well.)

Sweet Equipment

Home offices are set up with similar hardware and software configurations to maintain consistency. The workstations include some "pretty sweet equipment," Fullerton said, as well as high-speed Internet subscriptions, webcams, and comfy chairs. Stack Exchange reimburses employees for Internet access.

"We had one developer who decided to move from one apartment to another because the Internet connection in his first place was too slow," Fullerton said.

It helps that Stack Exchange began life as a distributed workforce, establishing cultural habits early. The key is enforcing online communication, making it irrelevant whether two employees are in the same office.

"There’s no halfsies in a distributed team," Fullerton said. "If even one person on the team is remote, every single person has to start communicating online. The focus of control and decision making must be outside of the office: no more dropping in to someone’s office to chat, no more rounding people up to make a decision. All of that has to be done online even if the remote person isn’t around. Otherwise you’ll slowly choke off the remote person from any real input on decisions."

That's why it may be a challenge for big companies that have wavered on remote work to embrace it the way Stack Exchange has. It isn't just a matter of setting up employees with webcams and high-speed Internet connections; it's a cultural commitment to doing business a certain way. It's a good test of whether you really bleed ones and zeroes.

Photos courtesy of Stack Exchange

As a set of APIs, the WebRTC standard has the power to transform how communications are delivered inside the application experience, assuming developers can find a way to easily access it. To address that issue, Digium today unfurled Respoke, a cloud platform designed to allow developers to access WebRTC API as a service.

On the other hand, since October 2014, when Apple launched Apple Pay, both Google Wallet and Softcard, which have failed to get much traction, seem to have concluded they need to move faster to counter Apple Pay.

Better check twice before firing off that email today: You could be sending it to the wrong person, thanks to a Gmail bug that is suggesting email addresses you rarely communicate with,…

Neil Patrick Harris wasn't the only one who made some Oscar predictions that turned out correct; Microsoft's Bing prediction engine correctly predicted all but four Oscar winners.

Bing correctly predicted 84 percent of the 87th Academy Awards, according to The Verge, including best supporting actor and actress, best actor, best actress, best director, and even best picture.

The winners it missed? Bing incorrectly predicted best original screenplay, best animated feature, best original score, and best film editing, though it had each of the actual winners as the second most-likely to win.

That's still pretty impressive, but it's actually slightly down from last year's Bing's predictions, where the search engine correctly guessed 21 of the 24 Oscar winners.

Bing's prediction engine, which has been making predictions ranging from World Cup winners to NFL game outcomes, is headed up by Microsoft researcher David Rothschild. Rothschild, who famously called all 50 states in the 2012 US election, shared the outcome of his ballot predictions via Twitter on Sunday night.

SEE ALSO: The 10 best keyboard apps for customizing your iPhone

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Two of the most important smartphone launches are happening on March 1 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

HTC and Samsung will both unveil their new flagship phones at two separate events. But, even though we're a few days away those announcements, neither company has done a very good job at hiding what they're going to show.

Samsung has been relentlessly teasing its new Galaxy S6, which sources tell Business Insider will be made of metal. There will be another version with a curved display. On Monday, T-Mobile posted a photo of the curved version on its website:

It's not a complete look, but it's more than enough to see where Samsung is going with its new Galaxy S6. The phone looks like a smaller version of the Galaxy Note Edge, which launched last fall:

In a teaser video Samsung posted Saturday, the company strongly hints that the phone will be made of metal. Samsung traditionally makes its best phones out of plastic, but now that there are phone makers like Xiaomi that make metal phones that cost a lot less than Samsung phones, the company likely felt pressure to start using premium materials this time.

Here's a leaked image (via Phone Arena) of what the other version (without the curved screen) of the Galaxy S6 will probably look like:

HTC hasn't been teasing its next phone as openly as Samsung has, but the device has already leaked several times. According to the leaks, the new version of the One will look very similar to last year's model. But it's safe to assume it'll have better specs like an improved camera and faster processor.

Take a look at the latest HTC One leak:

Business Insider will have full coverage of both phone launches on March 1. 

SEE ALSO: This is going to be Samsung's most important phone launch ever

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NOW WATCH: 14 things you didn't know your iPhone headphones could do

Amazon Prime customers will get access to a bunch of big Hollywood movies over the next couple of months via Prime Instant, thanks to an extended agreement between the e-commerce giant and…

Team communication service Slack has just launched a beta version of its Windows desktop client. The desktop version brings all the features of the Web-based service together in a standalone program. However, it’s still in beta and needs a bit more work before it’s ready for prime time. Slack’s Windows team welcomes feedback about bugs and how ‘native’ the experience is. You can let them know by clicking the ‘?’ icon in the upper right corner of the app and choosing “Send us a help request.” In the short amount of time I got with the app, I didn’t find…

This story continues at The Next Web

The “CAPTCHA” has infuriated web users for years: It's that login test that asks you to type in a hard-to-read sequence of letters or numbers in order to prove are not a robot. Get one letter wrong and you'll be denied access.

In a bid to ease that irritation, Google launched what it dubbed the “No Captcha ReCAPTCHA" in December, which it claims has the ability to verify a human user by looking at things like the behavior of their mouse movements and the way they type.

But device recognition company AdTruth believes it has found evidence Google’s CAPTCHA killer is collecting far more information than mouse coordinates alone, and that it could use the security tool to inform its advertising services too. The new tool isn't overtly labeled as a Google service, yet anyone clicking through it "consents" to be tracked by Google's cookies, AdTruth found. And while the service is intended to do only one thing — determine whether you are a human or not — it is also able to identify a lot more information about which specific human you are.

All of this is poorly disclosed to users, AdTruth believes.

Google declined to comment when reached by Business Insider.

The original CAPTCHA was designed to protect websites from spam and bots, but Google research found that artificial intelligence technology has now become so sophisticated it can solve even the most distorted of text at 99.8% accuracy.

That is why it created the “No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA” which simply asks users to click a check box, or complete another task, such as selecting all the cats in a selection of images, to confirm they are not a robot. Google says its risk assessment software uses behavioral cues, such as where users click, how long they linger over a checkbox, and their typing cadence, to work out whether they are human or not. Google created this video to explain how the process works, and you can try out a demo of No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA for yourself here .

No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA seems so easy and reliable that companies such as Snapchat, BuzzFeed, WordPress, and Humble Bundle immediately signed up to adopt it.

But according to research from AdTruth, seen by Business Insider, Google’s No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA appears to be collecting personally identifiable additional data beyond mere behavioral cues about their users, too.

Here's all the data No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA collects

AdTruth’s lead engineer Marcos Perona was skeptical of Google’s claim to look for “human behavior” to distinguish a real person from a bot and decided to investigate. He wanted to find out what Google actually “captures” from a machine with the No CAPTCHA to work out whether a user is a bot or not.

After taking a close look at the embedded code for the No CAPTCHA product, he found that the system used a re-purposed version of Google’s Botguard technology, which was originally intended for anti-spam and bot detection within Gmail. On top of that, No Captcha uses a level of encryption that hides what the mechanism is doing, by constantly changing the No CAPTCHA code and encryption keys, making it difficult for bot makers to crack (and it also has the by-product of making it difficult for researchers like Perona to uncover exactly how the No CAPTCHA works.)

But Perona and other anonymous programmers from information security backgrounds, believe they have decoded the new CAPTCHA system and the information it pulls from a browser when a user says they are not a robot. (AdTruth points out to Business Insider that it is not releasing any information that could help botmakers circumvent the No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA.)

According to Perona, Botguard first takes a look at whether you already have a Google cookie on the machine. The No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA then drops its own cookie from Google into your browser. It then takes a pixel-by-pixel fingerprint of the user’s browser window at that time, pulling information such as:

• Screen size and resolution, date, language and browser plug-ins (all Javascript objects)
• IP address
• CSS information from the page you are on
• A count of mouse and touch events

In addition, Google’s new CAPTCHA will also make use of any cookies that have been set by other Google properties — like Gmail, Search, Analytics, and so on — in the last six months. The belief is that humans use Google's services in certain "human" ways, whereas bots do not, and those patterns can be detected.

All of this personally identifiable information gets encrypted and sent back to Google.

The reCAPTCHA gives Google "a very high level of entropy when it comes to distinguishing an individual"

Perona told us: “The use of Google.com’s domain for the CAPTCHA is completely intentional, as that means Google can drop long-lived cookies in any device that comes into contact with the CAPTCHA, bypassing third-party cookie restrictions [like ad blockers] as long as the device has previously used any service hosted on Google.com.”

He added: “The mix of a fingerprint and first-party cookies is pervasive as Google can give a very high level of entropy when it comes to distinguishing an individual person.”

The way the new CAPTCHA works also seems to support this theory, as there appears to be at least three main CAPTCHA types, according to AdTruth’s research:

• If Google cookies are present, and your fingerprint is obtained, you will often see the checkbox that asks you to prove whether you are a human.
• If you delete all your Google cookies, the CAPTCHA will likely ask you to fill in a two-word CAPTCHA.
• If you are using a form of anti-fingerprinting plugin, Google will likely ask you to fill in a two-word CAPTCHA, regardless of your cookies.

The implication is that Google isn’t just looking to identify whether you’re a human with its No CAPTCHA, but potentially exactly which human you are. The combination of first-party cookies and a browser fingerprint can be tied back to an individual — and most individuals simply clicking "I'm not a robot" won't know this is happening behind the scenes.

AdTruth EMEA managing director James Collier told us: “This is a way for Google to indirectly link activity outside of Google’s properties – collected under the guise of security – to Google's knowledge of that individual, without providing the consumer an opt out for the security fingerprint. When they went to market with reCAPTCHA they spoke about humanity and transparency. But in reality, their intentions appear hidden, as was the case with the collection of location data for traffic maps. It’s a question of trust: Google have developed a digital ecosystem that relies on them without question, and as the stakes get higher, consumers and industry alike should wake up to the risk of relying on companies that don’t transparently handle clear conflicts of interests in relation to their data.”

The No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA privacy policy: "We also use the information to offer you tailored content"

Another red flag AdTruth noticed was the privacy policy that appears underneath the No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA. It’s the same global privacy policy Google uses universally across all its services.

And it’s also the same policy that refers to unique device identifiers and states: “We also use the information to offer you tailored content — like giving you more relevant search and ads.”

It potentially means Google could be using the data collected from what is meant to be security software (which, remember, is also placed on sites other than its own), to improve services beyond anti-spam security, like advertising.

Google combined 60 of its privacy policies into one in 2012. Indeed, in January this year, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office ordered Google to sign a formal undertaking to improve the information it provides to people about how it collects personal data in the UK. The ICO’s three-year investigation found Google was “too vague” when describing how it uses personal data gathered across its web services and products.

Business Insider contacted the ICO with AdTruth’s findings on Google’s No CAPTCHA product. The ICO provided us with this statement: “The Data Protection Act requires organizations to be clear and open about the way they are using people’s information. We are currently looking into the information you have provided to establish full details.”

Of course, the privacy concerns raised by No CAPTCHA are not limited to the UK or Europe; its products and services are used by hundreds of millions of users across the world.

No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA raises "some legitimate privacy concerns"

You’ll have noticed lots of “cans” and “coulds” in this story. It’s extremely hard to verify how often Google is collecting fingerprinting data and how or if the company is using it. But two prominent privacy researchers told Business Insider they found AdTruth’s preliminary conclusions “concerning.”

Jeremy Gillula, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told us: “It’s definitely concerning that Google is conflating the privacy policies of their security systems like reCAPTCHA with their other products. Many website relied on reCAPTCHA to prevent spam, and just because I want to post on one of those websites doesn’t mean I want it connected to Google’s profile on me.”

He adds that if Google were to commit to not using data collected via No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA for any purpose other than further developing No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA, this aspect wouldn’t be so bad.

But there would still be issues: “My bigger concern is that by over-identifying whether or not someone is a human by figuring out precisely which human they are, Google is contributing to the trend of making the web harder to use for people who value their privacy. In essence, Google is assuming you’re only human if you’re part of their system. If you choose not to use Google services, or if you choose to preserve your privacy, then you’re essentially classified as a second class citizen.”

Steven Murdoch, principal research fellow in the information security research group at University College London’s department of computer sciences, agreed that AdTruth’s research into the No CAPTCHA does raise “some legitimate privacy concerns.”

But he emphasized that it’s unlikely to be a conspiracy. Murdoch told us: “In terms of the way that the No CAPTCHA detector works, I think the reason it collects so much information is likely because the detection algorithm is machine-learning based rather than written by hand. Such systems are generally designed by collecting all information which might be of use then letting the machine learning system come up with an optimal decision.”

Google did not provide Business Insider with a statement but did point us towards the Google DoubleClick policy which explicitly prohibits the use of browser fingerprinting for ad targeting. However, this is a policy for Google's partners, not Google itself, although it probably suggests Google abides by these rules too.

There is no evidence Google is doing, or is planning to do, anything nefarious with the information the new No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA scans and collects — and it's unlikely Google ever would use the data scraped through the software for advertising purposes.

The software looks at engagement "before, during, and after" an interaction

However, as AdTruth's Collier pointed out, the key issue is a question of trust: Google's own marketing around the launch of the No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA is scant on details about the user data the software assesses, although the company did acknowledge in a blog post in 2013 that the software looks at engagement "before, during, and after" a CAPTCHA interaction.

Business Insider could only find one article, from Wired, in which it was explained that Google also examines cookies and IP addresses alongside mouse movements and typing behaviour (but nothing to do with a fingerprint) to determine whether that user "is the same friendly human Google remembers from elsewhere on the web."

Essentially, even if you are really interested in discovering more about the mechanics behind the No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA, it's extremely difficult to find an explanation on the web.

The No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA is an intelligent tool which will no doubt help cut through the deluge of spam and bots attacking sites across the web. But it may be in Google's interest to set out exactly — and more prominently — how that tool is so clever at telling the difference between bots and humans.

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Digital payment service Stripe has officially announced support for Bitcoin, allowing all merchants using its service to accept payments in the cryptocurrency. The company began testing Bitcoin integration last March with a private beta spanning 60 countries, and completed its trial in December. Stripe will charge 0.5 percent per transaction made with Bitcoin. Stripe Checkout users can add Bitcoin as a payment option with just a single new line of code. You can find instructions on enabling it on the company’s site. ➤ Stripe: Bitcoin

By Dave Michels
IT managers have mixed reactions to freemium services, but the benefits are proven.

Cisco seems intent these days on taking down Arista Networks, an upstart rival founded by a bunch of ex-Cisco execs. But there's another startup founded by a different bunch ex-Cisco people that could soon become a bigger threat.

On Thursday a startup called Cumulus Networks announced a huge partnership with HP.

HP has agreed to sell a product called a "data center network switch" that is based on Cumulus's software. These switches will not be made by HP. They will be produced by a Taiwanese contract manufacturer, Accton Technology.

It's a big deal because this partnership combines, in one fell swoop, all the things that are threatening Cisco: some of its most bitter competitors, and a new less-expensive way to build networks using open source software.

Cisco pretty much owns the computer network equipment market, with a good 60% market share on just about every type of equipment used to build networks. In the sub-category where Cumulus plays, network switches for huge data centers, Cisco is far and away the leader with about 67%, next to Arista Networks' 8%, according to Crehan Research.

Arista's star is rising. It just claimed Facebook as a customer, even though Facebook is also building its own new computer network hardware and sharing those designs with anyone that wants to copy them. A few months ago, Cisco sued Arista, and although that muddies the waters, Arista is expected to post extremely strong revenue growth on Thursday, up by 45%.

HP has no intention of letting either Cisco or Arista walk away with this hot up-and-coming market.

So it cozied up with Cumulus Networks, a startup founded by former Cisco engineering fellow JR Rivers in 2010. A Cisco Fellow is the highest technical achievement an Cisco engineer can earn. 

Rivers also worked on Nuova Systems, one of Cisco's legendary "spin-ins." That was the team that made Cisco's server product, which is selling well against HP's servers.

The switch involved in this agreement is not based on Facebook's newfangled computer networking designs. However all three of these companies — Cumulus, HP and Accton Technology — are heavily involved in Facebook's Open Compute Project, the umbrella organization under which a lot of new hardware is being designed. Both HP and Accton are contract manufacturers that produce all sorts of OCP hardware.

To top it off, Cumulus' software works with VMware's NSX software, a competitive product that is trying to make Cisco's gear obsolete.

Cisco isn't in immediate danger. Companies do not lightly jump ship from one network equipment vendor to another. HP has been trying to beat Cisco for years and it hasn't happened yet.

But Cisco is increasingly surrounded with new technologies, new partnerships among its rivals, and new startups, many of them founded by former Cisco bigwigs.

Cisco CEO John Chambers has an answer for rivals like Cumulus and Facebook. Last week during Cisco's quarterly earnings conference call, he vowed to "crush" them while "having fun" beating VMware.

SEE ALSO: At 27, this guy quit a $500,000 job at BlackBerry to launch a cool startup

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International customers of Dell have one more payment option when shopping for the company's newest products: Bitcoin. 

Michael Dell tweeted out earlier today the announcement that, instead of accepting payment in Bitcoin in only the United States, Dell will take virtual currency payments from customers in the UK and in Canada, as well. 

That, Dell says, makes his company the biggest to accept international Bitcoin payments.

In its announcement, Dell noted that the company's largest Bitcoin transaction to date was over $50,000 for its server system.

Thursday's announcement to increasingly accept Bitcoin comes as other US businesses are taking virtual currency payments — and, as Bitcoin's value has plummeted over the last 12 months. From a value of more than $1,000 more than a year ago, shares have fallen to the high $260s as of mid-afternoon trading today, according to website Coindesk. 

Just because Dell is taking payment in Bitcoin, it doesn't mean he's technically investing in the product. Other companies, including Overstock.com, that also accept virtual currency as payment often immediately swap it for cash, via exchanges like Coinbase, aimed at reducing exposure to a volatile investment product. 

Michael Dell teamed with private equity firm Silver Lake partners in early 2013 to buy out his eponymous tech company; even after a protracted battle with activist investor Carl Icahn, Dell succeeded with the buyout. Some of Icahn's complaints as he tried to wring more out of the investors were realized, it appeared, after Dell and Silver Lake reported a surprising 90 percent paper gain on the company one year after the deal completed. 

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People say that the modern smartphone can do everything.

Well, with the TaskOne iPhone Multi Tool case that's actually true because it turns your phone into a Swiss army knife.

The case comes with a 2.5" knife with serrations, a 1.8" saw blade, a bottle opener, three types of wrenches, pliers, a wire cutter, a wire stripper, and dual kick stands.

So the next time you need to fix a bike or cut your steak, you can just whip out your smartphone.

Note: currently available for iPhone 5 and 5S.

TaskOne iPhone Multi Tool Case: $90

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Trello, a popular service for managing projects and to-do lists amongst teams, today got a big update for iOS users. The company has launched a tweaked home screen design today that is cleaner, features more color and a nicer layout. On top of a fancy new design, Trello also added iOS sharing to the app, so you can use the share button inside other apps to send photos and other items straight to your Trello boards. It doesn’t stop there: the update also added a today widget so you can see your priorities without opening the app as well as iOS Handoff support so you can continue your…

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By Dave Michels
IT managers have mixed reactions to freemium services, but the benefits are proven.

Slack, the business communications app now worth $1.1 billion, turned one year old on Thursday.

In time for its first anniversary, Slack released its latest numbers, which are truly staggering. It’s adding $1 million in new contracts every 11 days, on top of the $12 million in annual recurring revenue from the past year. It has over 500,000 daily active users, a 33X increase in just 12 months.

Slack is certainly a special case. Some even call it the fastest growing business app ever.

But the way they’ve managed to build up that growth isn’t necessarily rocket science. In fact, it simply followed what many other business apps have been doing lately: thinking like a consumer app.

Amanda Linden, the head of design for task-management service Asana, shared some of her insights on how the gap between consumer and business apps has been narrowing. Most of her points apply directly to Slack’s playbook:

The best product and design wins, not the best sales and marketing: Traditional enterprise software is often sold through CIOs who pick what the entire organization is going to use without asking employees what they’d like to use. So it was important to have a sales and marketing team to sell the product to c-suite executives.

But today, with cloud services so easily available to anybody, employees often choose their own tools to get work done. That was certainly the case for Slack. In most cases, small teams within companies independently started using it, and slowly it took over the whole company. Its CEO Stewart Butterfield told us, “It’s been very much a bottoms-up adoption model.”

Make a product users love: Linden writes, “Your goal is a designer is to build an app so great that your users want to shout about it from the rooftops, and share it with all their teammates.” This would spur organic adoption and ultimately a more loyal user base.

Slack saw this organic growth early on when it spread purely on word-of-mouth. Butterfield told us Twitter made a huge difference, as more and more people started talking about it on their timelines. In fact, Slack has its own “Wall of Love” on Twitter where it pulls all the mentions it gets from users. “If it wasn’t for Twitter, I think it would have been much harder for us to grow as fast as we did,” Butterfield told us.

Make your product easy to onboard and customize: Linden says designers should make business apps so simple that they don't require outside training to start using. Also, they should be easily customizable, so people can use them their own way.

Slack has a simple, intuitive layout that any first-time user can learn how to use instantly. One of its biggest strengths is its integrations with hundreds of 3rd party apps, including Dropbox, GitHub, Google Drive, and New Relic. With a simple configuration, users can automatically pull information and activity from these apps into Slack.

Slack isn't the only company using this playbook — enterprise startups like Yammer, Box, and Asana itself have all done it. But Slack's rapid growth shows that it's played this tune particularly well.

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Government officials who want to read any emails sent and received by Americans more than six months ago can do so without a search warrant, Lindsay Wise of McClatchy reports. 

Emails older than 180 days are fair game to federal agents who can access your old documents using the administrative subpoena power given the government by a loophole in The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. 

The act, which restricts government access to electronic data and stored electronic communications, was passed before the internet went mainstream — that is, way before anyone had an email account. As a result, the law is outdated and does not protect the kind of consumer data people share, store, and use nowadays. 

“Some people think Congress did a pretty good job in 1986 seeing the future, but that was before the World Wide Web,” Susan Freiwald, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law and an expert in electronic surveillance law, told the New York Times in 2011. “The law can’t be expected to keep up without amendments.”

Incidentally, the law states that anything older than 6 months is considered "abandoned" by the user and accessible to government officials without a search warrant.

"The government is essentially using an arcane loophole to breach the privacy rights of Americans,” Rep. Kevin Yoder of Kansas told McClatchy. “They couldn’t kick down your door and seize the documents on your desk, but they could send a request to Google and ask for all the documents that are in your Gmail account.

McClatchy notes that "even deleted files still could be fair game as long as copies exist on a third-party server somewhere."

Americans have been wary of government surveillance ever since Edward Snowden outed the NSA for spying on citizens back in 2013. Riding on this wave of bipartisan and constituent support for digital privacy, Yoder introduced a bill earlier this month called the Email Privacy Act that most members of the House have already promised to back.

“I don’t know that any bill has as many co-sponsors, so it may be one of the fastest bills out of the gate in the new Congress,” Yoder said.

Check out the full report at McClatchy >

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The business communications app Slack has surely been a media darling over the past 12 months.

It’s got a great founding story and its CEO Stewart Butterfield is not afraid of making controversial comments.

But when it was given a $1.1 billion valuation last October, just 8 months after launching for the general public, there were some question marks surrounding its real value.

It’s probably still too early to gauge its true worth. But its latest numbers, released on Thursday in time for its first year anniversary, tell a story of growth never seen before.

Here’s the takeaway:

• It’s making real money: Slack says it’s now adding $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) every 11 days, on top of the $12 million in ARR it’s built up over the last year. ARR is the total revenue that is expected to repeat for the next 12 months, or as Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo puts it, “the gift that keeps giving.” Slack also says it has over 135,000 paid accounts now — all without any meaningful sales and marketing campaigns.
• Unprecedented user growth: Last February, Slack had about 15,000 daily users when its investor Marc Andreessen tweeted a graph that showed its hockey stick growth. Now, Slack claims to have over 500,000 daily active users, adding tens of thousands of new users each week. That’s over 33X growth in just 12 months.
• It’s part of everyday work: Slack users are actively using it for about 2 hours and 15 minutes and are connected to it for over 9 hours each weekday. They’re collectively sending 300 million messages every month, which amounted to 1.7 billion messages in the first year. There are currently over 60,000 teams actively using Slack, it says.
• It’s global: We don't have the exact break down, but Slack's reach is truly global. The top 10 cities for Slack are San Francisco, New York, Tokyo, London, Los Angeles, Toronto, Paris, Chicago, Seoul and Taipei. That’s 8 different countries across 3 continents. Top 5 countries are the US, the UK, Canada, Japan, and Germany.
• Users love its compatibility: One of Slack’s biggest strengths is its simple integration with 3rd party apps. Slack says it saw over 800,000 individual integrations with other apps like Google Drive, Twitter, GitHub, and Dropbox. More than 3 million messages were sent through these integrations each day, it says.

Here's a graph that shows its crazy growth:

And an infographic:

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For years, Cisco CEO John Chambers has said he's got a plan to counter the increasing competition in the company's bread-and-butter market of computer network equipment. And on Wednesday, he delivered the first proof that his plan is working.

That sent analysts into a bullish frenzy, with at least 12 of them upping their price targets for the stock.

The stock hit a 7-year high on Thursday, of $29.58, and is comfortably trading above $29, up by about 8%.

Chambers has been trying to convert Cisco from a one-trick pony — the biggest player in the  network equipment industry — to an all around IT company, similar to an HP and IBM. The company also sells computer servers (a product called UCS), security software, collaboration software, equipment for wireless networks. All of those areas saw growth last quarter.

Cisco also grew its bread-and-butter network equipment business (switches and routers), especially the Nexus 9000, which is Cisco's fastest most powerful router. If customers buy special software for it, called Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), they can use the switch to set up a "software-defined network," or SDN.

An SDN is a network that takes fancy features out of the hardware and puts them into software so network administrators can easily add network equipment or move it around. That's important for building a cloud computing data centers, a big trend.

A bunch of startups, as well as Cisco's partner-turned-rival VMware, sell SDN equipment and are trying to eat Cisco's lunch.

However, Cisco says it now has 1,700 customers for the Nexus 9000, more than triple the customers it had for that product two quarters ago, and 300 of them bought Cisco's special SDN software.

CEO John Chambers all but declared the war won, claiming his competitor's products were nothing more than a PowerPoint presentation. He told analysts on the quarterly conference call, 

We are pulling away from our competitors and leading in both the SDN thought leadership and customer implementations. The market has recognized the benefit of ACI as compared to PowerPoint concepts of aspirational competitors.

He also vowed to beat those SDN competitors, calling VMware out by name, and hinted that Cisco will "crush" Facebook-style networks. Facebook has been openly building its own SDN network, freely giving away the hardware specifications and software, and calling on others to join it.

Some analysts were really bullish about Cisco's future, like Alex Kurtz from Sterne Agee, who raised his target to $31.

Kurtz wrote in a research note:

Taking a longer-term view on the Cisco thesis, with strategic changes underway at IBM and HP we see new opportunities in the Storage market as UCS matures; Cisco appears in incrementally better shape to determine its longer-term growth rates along with lessening concerns on SDN impact as Nexus 9K/ACI continues to show solid adoption.

Others, however, were not so impressed. JP Morgan's Rod Hall reiterated an "underweight" rating on the stock, and a price target of $17, writing, "We continue to believe commoditization is coming."

In any case, investors are happy right now. Cisco said it expects to grow revenues 3% to 5% next quarter (in line with expectations), and non-GAAP earnings per share to be $0.51 to $0.53) also in-line with expectations).

Chambers also declared that the company's years of restructuring, culminating with a reorg last fall that affected 40% of its workforce and replaced 30% of its managers, was all-but-over.

Cisco has had four years of layoffs in a row. At the end of the last one, COO Gary Moore told employees that annual layoffs were not the best way to manage its workforce.

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Cisco CEO John Chambers just shared some surprising details about the huge reorganization the company underwent last fall, as first reported by Business Insider.

Talking to Wall Street analysts on the quarterly conference call, Chambers proudly revealed that the company had ditched over 30% of its managers and that the reorganization had affected 40% of its total employee base.

"It was our choice to move early and boldly, with incredible speed, to realign 40% of our employees to priority areas; to reorganize from product groups into integrated solutions teams; to replace more than 30% of our leaders. We are seeing the results in our relevancy with our customers and our operational excellence."

Cisco just reported a good quarter, with revenue and profits growing and beating analyst's expectations.

But that 30% number is interesting. When Cisco announced in August that it would be having another layoff, for the fourth year in a row, a leaked tape from an internal employee meeting surfaced. In it, COO Gary Moore said that the layoff the year before (fall of 2013), "took out 21% of VP-and-above population."

Before the next round of cuts, Cisco added back 29 VP-and-above managers mostly through acquisitions, he said. Moore warned that there would be "VPs-and-above" that would be part of the fall 2014 layoff, although he also said "we’re not as top heavy as we were" and promised that Cisco was not going to single out middle management for particularly heavy cuts.

Even so, looks like if you were a manager at Cisco in 2012, you had a pretty high chance of getting laid off or replaced.

Sources at the time told Business Insider that about 25,000 people were affected in the reorg, but that referred mostly to the engineering teams. Cisco employs around 75,000 people, so 40% means that closer to 30,000 were impacted.

Other units besides engineering were involved. For instance, Chambers also said that the company had reorganized the whole security business as well, across the globe, including giving it a separate sales force.

In addition to cutting 6,000 employees, Cisco hired and acquired about 6,000 employees, leaving its 75,000 employee headcount roughly the same.

Cisco badly needed to do this. Insiders told Business Insider that years of acquisitions, coupled with its focus on individual products, had created a company full of mini-fiefdoms. An employee affected by the layoffs even told us such a change was good for the company.

Chambers was extremely proud of the situation. "I'm not sure those outside Cisco can understand the magnitude of the changes implemented in the last year," he said. "Cisco has never, ever been better positioned."

That was a phrase he repeated many times during the call.

The company says the restructuring will cost a total of about $600 million in fiscal 2015.

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Hot off a good quarterly earnings report, where Cisco grew revenues by 7% and forecast 3 to 5% growth for next quarter (about what analysts were expecting), CEO John Chambers was absolutely ebullient.

• He declared his competitors all-but-vanquished, particularly upstarts like Facebook and VMware.
• He said no one needs to worry about Cisco's gross profit margins due to increased competition.
• He also indicated, again, that he's still no where near ready to retire. Chambers, 65, said he ran four miles that morning, doing it in his fastest time ever, and he lifted weights.

Crushing Facebook

An hour before Cisco's earnings, Facebook announced some big progress in its efforts to build a new kind of computer network, using products it developed for itself and is sharing with the world. It urged others to join it in building the same kind of network. Cisco is the dominant player in the network industry, so Facebook's efforts are a rebuff of Cisco's ways.

Facebook isn't alone. A number of startups, like Plexxi and Pluribus, are doing a similar things, using off-the-shelf components and open source software. They say their networks are less expensive and easier to manage than the traditional way (i.e., a Cisco network).

Cisco calls them "white label," "white box" or "merchant silicon-based switching," networks, which means they use computer processors bought from vendors, mainly Broadcom, instead of the custom-made chips like Cisco creates for its own wares.

Many analysts are concerned that these efforts will hurt Cisco, but Chambers pooh-poohed the idea.

"We’re seeing no unusual competition, from white label or white box, nor will we in the future," he declared.

Customers are opting to buy another round of Cisco's products, instead of these competitors, "simply because of security. In this environment, they aren't going to take risks," he said.

"This is where we're just going to crush the white label. There's got to be a security architecture approach. All it takes is one breach and you've done more damage to your brand as a company," he added.

That gives you a taste of how Cisco plans to position itself against this new crop of upstarts. Cisco is also a major vendor of computer security products, selling $416 million's worth last quarter.

Beating VMware and enjoying it

Chambers also said that his company is planning on wiping the floor with VMware, which is not a "white label" competitor, but is selling network software that competes with Cisco's products.

VMware, and its parent company EMC, are still some of Cisco's closest partners. They have a joint company together called VCE that sells a lot of Cisco's hardware, particularly its servers.

But, as we previously reported, their relationship changed when VMware bought a startup called Nicira in 2012 for $1.2 billion, snatching Nicira out of of Cisco's arms, and launching a new mission to take down Cisco.

"VMware is a competitor," Chambers said. "We're going to view them as a competitor and we will beat them and have fun doing it. I wish I was a better person, but I'm not."

He also mentioned, a few times, that Cisco now has partnerships with EMC's competitors like NetApp and, more recently, IBM.

No worries about profit margins

With competitors dispensed with, so should the ongoing worries that Cisco is going to forced into trimming its profits. The company has gross margins in the 60% range and that's not going to change in the foreseeable future, Chambers said.

That's because Cisco is ramping up in new, higher profit areas, like consulting and the Internet of Things, he says.

"I've never been more comfortable with any area of our business than our ability to maintain gross margins. It's a mix issue, he says. "I think our gross margins have been the most predictable part of our business."

He also declared: "I’ve never felt better about our business and future. We’re back."

SEE ALSO: Google shares its plan to nab 80% of Microsoft's Office business

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