Davemichels

CIOs from Walgreens and Procter & Gamble discuss some of the current challenges and opportunities available in enterprise IT today.

Reuters / Kim Kyung-Hoon

Cisco Systems will invest $1 billion over two years to expand its cloud offerings, the company said on Monday, linking hundreds of data centers and cloud providers around the world in a network with more than 30 partners.

The network, called Intercloud, will help businesses process and manage data generated from billions of devices and applications around the world, Cisco said.

Businesses in the network aim to bridge the gap between public and private cloud computing and will share cloud infrastructure the same way mobile telecommunications companies have roaming agreements.

With partners including Deutsche Telekom, BT group and Equinix, Cisco said it will add 250 data centers in 50 countries to its cloud network.

Intercloud will also allow companies to direct data traffic through specific clouds and data centers. This will help international businesses deal with foreign regulations requiring companies to house data collected from its citizens in local data centers.

The company also hopes the offering will address security and reliability concerns that have prevented businesses from accessing the cloud through public Internet connections.

Its partnership with Equinix, a data center provider that offers interconnection solutions, will provide customers a protected access path to public cloud networks.

Telecom provider BT will use Cisco technology to interconnect public and private clouds into the Intercloud, allowing their customers to securely move workloads between BT data centers and different clouds.

Cisco is also offering a hybrid cloud bundle that will allow customers currently using a private cloud to tap into the network.

(Reporting by Marina Lopes; Editing by David Gregorio)

The screwups at Apple keep on coming.

The company whose "philosophy's always been to be the best, not the first," as CEO Tim Cook said recently, is going through a rare period in which it just looks accident-prone.

Apple's launch of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus has been dogged by these unfortunate incidents:

• Apple has pulled the update to iOS 8, the mobile operating system that disabled some phones from making calls.
• In addition, users found a ton of smaller bugs in iOS 8, like keyboards that suddenly disappear.
• "#Bendgate": People discovered that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus can get bent, and stay that way. None of its competitors do that. Apple is offering some people replacements.
• Some iPhone users got annoyed that Apple replaced the "camera roll" photo album on their iPhones with a "recently added" folder that is linked to iCloud, making it more difficult (or at least different) to delete photos permanently.
• Apple upset law enforcement officials by saying that "it's not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8." Cook added: "If the government laid a subpoena to get iMessages, we can’t provide it. It’s encrypted and we don’t have a key. And so it’s sort of, the door is closed." Police believe this may help criminals hide information.
• Apple's launch in China, a market it hopes will become one of its biggest, has been delayed by bureaucrats in that country, causing bizarre fights among Chinese immigrants outside Western stores.
• The launch of iPhone 6 was marred when the video livestream crashed and was replaced, bizarrely, by a fuzzy test card image and a Chinese voiceover for the first 25 minutes of the show.
• Prior to that, hackers released naked photos of 101 celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence they had found on iCloud — a hack performed because of the way Apple handles account retrieval.

Apple will roll on regardless, of course. These are the kinds of glitches that any big company goes through. iPhone 6 will probably turn out to be the biggest, most successful launch of Apple's history, producing a record influx of revenues. (We asked Apple for comment, but its spokespersons were silent at the time of writing.)

Some of Apple's problems are mere optics. The warrant issue — in which cops believe that Apple's new security will prevent them from solving murders and kidnappings — is mostly just a PR issue. In fact, it's likely that Apple will actually respond to warrants and cops still have a way in to your locked iPhone, so this whole idea that it's not technically feasible for Apple to respond to warrants is simplistic at best and misleading at worst.

Others go to Apple's core: To release an operating system update that prevents a phone from being used as a phone, and then to retract it, is a shocker. It's a basic, fundamental, product-use error that causes users needless headaches. Consumers will have to hook their phones up to their laptops and reinstall an older version of the system from a backup. That's asking a lot from non-tech consumers (like your parents). It's the kind of thing PC users used to curse Microsoft for, back in the days when that company used to ship bug-filled Windows updates.

And the fact that Find My iPhone was susceptible to the most basic hacking technique — repeatedly entering new passwords until you get it right — also seems careless.

Apple is the company in which everything "just works," the brand that prides itself on being thoughtful and careful and obsessed with details.

And its slip is showing.

We'll forget all about this in a month or two, of course.

In addition to roaring iPhone 6 sales, there is one other thing that indicates the Apple ship is basically heading the right way: Since the new product launch on Sept. 9, the stock is up nearly 4% to $101.75.

NOW WATCH: Inside The Giant iPhone 6 Plus

SEE ALSO: Apple's Manufacturing Costs Reveal The Profits It Will Make On iPhone 6

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The German firm DHL will begin using a fleet of drones to carry medicine to a small German island in the North Sea. The company says this is the first time a pilotless plane has been authorized to deliver goods in Europe, placing it one step ahead of multibillion-dollar tech giants like Amazon and Google, both of which have previously announced plans to test drones for delivery service. 

DHL began testing its "parcelcopters" last year, with the first trials taking place outside the company's office in Germany.

Here's a video of the first experiment:

But now, the unmanned aircraft has been modified to face the harsh conditions of the North Sea. The company has added a special waterproof compartment that contains the medicine to be delivered to residents of Juist.

During a one-month trial phase, expected to start Friday, a drone will fly to a field on Juist from the nearby coastal town of Norddeich. The roughly seven-mile flight to the island will take about 15 to 30 minutes as the drone hits speeds of up to 40 mph, Reuters said.

No cars are allowed on Juist, so once the drone arrives, bicycle couriers will deliver the medicine to residents of the island.

DHL worked with government agencies to establish restricted areas above the North Sea where only drones can fly, according to The Wall Street Journal. Flights will take place only when other crafts are not flying, and the drones will not be allowed to fly over any houses, either.

Amazon revealed its secret Prime Air drone delivery experiment last year, although it still has a long way to go before it actually starts delivering customer orders with drones.

Google has also announced a drone experiment, originating from the secretive Google X research project. Project Wing has been tested with a series of small deliveries in Australia, although like Amazon, Google has yet to actually put the service to use.

 If the test flights are successful, DHL said it could extend the medicine-delivery program until the end of October. It will also look into running more drone delivery routes to remote regions in the future. Unlike Amazon and Google, which have "outlined plans to potentially roll out their drone services across large areas," DHL will probably "not expand the trial across its global delivery network," The New York Times said. 

SEE ALSO: Commercial Drones Are Becoming A Reality, With Huge Impacts For Many Industries

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If you've ever listened to yourself speak in a voicemail or video, you've probably wondered aloud "is that what I really sound like?" The unfortunate truth is: yes, that's what you really sound like. Find out why your voice sounds so different from what you hear in your head.

Produced by Will Wei

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Each year, dozens of books detailing business strategies and profiling success stories are published, making it difficult to discern which ones are worth your time.

Luckily, an esteemed panel of judges for the annual Financial Times' and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award (previously Goldman Sachs was a partner) have released a short list of the six most influential books of the year.

The topics range from inequality to digital privacy, and the judges hope they will inspire creative thinking and help readers deepen their understanding of today's world, says Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times.

Panel members include Steve Coll, dean of the School of Journalism at Columbia University and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine; Steve Denning, chairman of General Atlantic, LLC; and Rik Kirkland, director of publishing for McKinsey & Company.

Here are the books that made the list:

"Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance"
By Julia Angwin
Times Books/Henry Holt

"The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies"
By Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
W. W. Norton Ltd

"Creativity, Inc. Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration"
By Ed Catmull
Bantam Press/Transworld Publishers (UK), Random House (US)

"Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch"
By Nick Davies
Chatto & Windus (UK), Faber & Faber (US)

"House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again"
By Atif Mian and Amir Sufi
University of Chicago Press

"Capital in the Twenty-First Century"
By Thomas Piketty
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press

The winning book will be announced on November 11. Previous winners have included Brad Stone's "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon" (2013); Steve Coll's "Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power" (2012); and Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo's "Poor Economics" (2011).

SEE ALSO: 14 Classic Business Books You Can Download For Under $5

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Virgin founder Richard Branson recently declared that the company's employees can take as many vacation days as they want, provided that "their absence will not in any way damage the business — or, for that matter, their careers!"

Branson said that he got the idea from Netflix. His daughter Holly forwarded him an article on how the video-streaming giant lets employees take as many days off as they need.

She suggested that it would be "a very Virgin thing" to do the same. 

With Branson's blessing, Virgin will now join an estimated 1% of American companies that offer unlimited vacation, a number that's stayed stable for a few years. 

Netflix, his inspiration, has had unlimited vacation policy since 2002. Company leaders realized that there was no California law requiring them to have a formal system, so founder Reed Hastings decided to "skip the accounting rigmarole" and handle vacation informally.

Soon after, salaried employees were told to take off as much time as they felt appropriate, sorting out the details with their bosses. 

The "unlimited" vacation policy has radiated out to other performance-oriented tech companies, like HubSpot, Quirky, Evernote — and, in the effort of full disclosure, Business Insider. 

But, while not having to deal with rigmarole sounds nice, unlimited vacay has its detractors. Critics say the policy may cause some employees to take less, not more, vacation time.

Arguments include:

• MIT Sloan professor Lotte Bailyn says people could suffer from "choice overload" when faced with unlimited vacation — the same thing that keeps you from choosing which toothpaste to buy when you're stranded in the dental care aisle. Without knowing a number to follow, they'll be overwhelmed by choice.

• Tech blogger Jacob Kaplan-Moss says that there's a "keep up with the Joneses" thing afoot, alleging that unlimited vacation can lead employees to feeling guilty if they take more time off than their peers, and thus "end up over-working because they don't know what's normal."

• Slate writer Matthew Yglesias says that the only companies that would dare "offer unlimited vacation do so because they're confident their employees won't choose to take much time off." These are tech companies, Yglesias says, where employees' job security is closely tied to performance. "If I started taking half the year off," he says, "my traffic would plummet and I'd have a problem with the bosses." 

The biggest problem might be that while Branson's declaration is full of enthusiasm, it lacks in precise prescriptions. 

"This sounds not well thought-out," MIT professor Bailyn said in an interview. "People take less time off because they feel they're not sure if this is really a commitment to them or that this is more a PR thing." 

The professor says employees may not know what to do with all that ambiguity. 

"Typically, without any guidelines or structures, people don't quite know what to make of this [policy]," she says. "They tend to fall back on expectations they have formed in previous terms."

The most progressive vacation policies, then, are those that get people to actually take vacation. 

Quirky, the consumer goods manufacturer, builds blocks of mandatory vacation into its yearly calendar. The whole company shuts down for the first week of May, August, and January — all slow points of the year. "Our thesis is centered around the fact that this will lead to better work, more beautiful products, and an emotionally balanced team," says Quirky founder Ben Kaufman. 

The beloved save-anything-app Evernote puts money where its vacationary mouth is. The Washington Post reports that the Silicon Valley company not only has the unlimited vacation policy, it gives employees a $1,000 stipend for taking the entire week off, thus putting some oomph into the feel-good policy.

Maybe that would be a "very Virgin" thing to do, too. 

NOW WATCH: Richard Branson Hates Public Speaking — Here's How He Gets Over It

 

SEE ALSO: How Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, And Other Self-Made Billionaires Got Their Big Break

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Over the course of two weeks, Katie Notopolous, a Buzzfeed reporter for Buzzfeed's tech vertical, FWD, used software called TeenSafe to monitor the iPhone activity of a 21-year-old sorority sister named Taylor Prewitt. 

She got permission from Prewitt. Prior to conducting this experiment, Notopolous had never met Prewitt.

"What story could I piece together about their life based just on a text message trail?" Notopolous wrote for Buzzfeed. "Would I actually be able to 'know' a person just from their phone?"

At the end of the experiment, Notopolous made a list of the things she learned about Prewitt just by monitoring her phone:

• Her dad’s a lawyer.
• She knows how to have a good time with her friends and was in a sorority.
• She’s definitely a 21-year-old American girl.
• She’s got a new boyfriend and it’s going well.
• She’s sweet, but a pushover.
• She’s open-minded with her boyfriend.
• She has a little brother in college who asks her to buy him beer occasionally.

Prewitt, essentially trusted Notopolous with the most personal parts of her life. She even let Notopolous snoop around her iCloud, which held months' worth of texts and data.

This is what Prewitt's TeenSafe dashboard looked like:

Notopolous writes,

After initially downloading about six months worth of texts and web history, I started poking through. I’d read through months of her conversations with one person, then move onto the next, which made for a sort of Rashomoneffect of piecing together what Taylor’s life is like.

But despite the piecemeal way I navigated her most intimate correspondence and data trail, there was no real detective work necessary, here. Taylor’s iCloud formed a clear and comprehensive portrait of Taylor’s life. While maybe not surprising, it was another reminder to me just how much information is sitting in the cloud under varying levels of security. Recent celebrity hacks have exposed a lot of personal photos to the general public, but the reality is there’s far more intimate data resting in the cloud, namely a near-complete snapshot of one’s life.

Notopolous learned about the inner workings of the 21-year-old's friendships, relationships, party habits, and certainly, private habits, just by watching her phone, rather than talking to Prewitt.

You can read the full post on Notopolous' experiment here.

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Netflix, Discovery Communications and other companies opposing Comcast’s $45 billion deal to acquire Time Warner Cable are doing so after they failed in “extortion” attempts to get special favors, Comcast told federal regulators Wednesday.

Comcast* made the accusations in response to comments filed over the summer by a variety of companies, including Dish Network, Netflix and Discovery, in opposition to the deal.

The cable giant’s latest salvo uses unusually strong language to attack its opponents, who are mostly upholding a long tradition of requesting that self-serving conditions be attached to a merger approval. It’s also ironic, given that Comcast, in an effort to win support for the deal, voluntarily agreed to a host of conditions for competitors just three years ago when it acquired NBCUniversal.

Comcast told regulators Wednesday that complaints from companies and other parties opposing the deal “are even more unfounded here because many of them are being made only because Comcast refused to grant various self-interested requests” made soon after the Time Warner Cable deal was announced. The requests “almost always [came] with an express or at least an implicit offer to support the transaction (or stand down, at minimum) if the requester’s demands were met,” Comcast said.

Among the requests, Comcast said, were free backbone interconnection, appeals to share Comcast advertising technology, wholesale arrangements, programming renewal date changes, renegotiated program carriage agreements and “many requests to agree to carry networks that do not even exist yet.”

“The significance of this extortion lies in not just the sheer audacity of some of the demands, but also the fact that each of the entities making the ‘ask’ has all but conceded that if its individual business interests are met, then it has no concern whatsoever about the state of the industry, supposed market power going forward, or harm to consumers, competitors, or new entrants.

Instead, many petitioners press nothing more than a host of individualized business interests and disputes — from the reasonableness of commercially negotiated agreements (e.g., Netflix, Cogent), to self-interested program carriage demands (e.g., Discovery, TheBlaze, Back9, RFD-TV, Veria Living, Herring Broadcasting, Weather Nation, etc.), to concerns over how enhanced competition might affect a particular firm (e.g., COMPTEL, Dish, RCN et al.), and to other issues that have no bearing on the license transfer applications (e.g., CenturyLink, Viamedia). Other petitioners raise industry-wide issues, such as open Internet policies, interconnection practices, and similar matters of general interest that are properly addressed (and largely being addressed) in other Commission proceedings (e.g., Netflix, Cogent, Dish).”

(Update: In a statement, Discovery dismissed Comcast’s complaints as a diversionary tactic. “We stand by our concerns that Comcast could use its enhanced leverage from the proposed merger to impose onerous terms that jeopardize the ability of independent programmers like Discovery to continue investing in a diverse portfolio of content and brands,” said David Leavy, a Discovery spokesman in a statement. “Comcast’s silence on the details of key issues like program discounts, and instead, its continued strategy of intimidating voices that are not fully supportive of its position, is troubling.”)

(Update: Netflix also denied Comcast’s extortion charges. “It is not extortion to demand that Comcast provide its own customers the broadband speeds they’ve paid for so they can enjoy Netflix. It is extortion when Comcast fails to provide its own customers the broadband speed they’ve paid for unless Netflix also pays a ransom,” the company said in a statement. “Netflix grudgingly paid to improve performance for our mutual customers, a precedent that remains damaging for consumers (who ultimately pay higher costs) and for other innovative businesses (that can be held over the barrel by Comcast to do the same).”)

Comcast singled out Netflix, in particular, for regulators who are currently reviewing the deal and have expressed concerns about the streaming video giant’s complaints.

Comcast accused Netflix (which has complained loudly about the cable giant  in recent months) of using “trumped-up economic theories” to “try to shift the costs for carrying its content onto the backs of others — a great business result for Netflix but one that would increase prices to consumers and disserve the public interest.”

After reaching a deal with Comcast to end subscribers’ buffering problems, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings told Comcast, “We found middle ground on our issues that worked well for both of us for the long term, and works great for consumers,” according to the cable giant.

Netflix’s subsequent opposition to Comcast’s deal and continued complaints about interconnection charges are clear “evidence that Netflix’s expedient change of heart reflects nothing more than a base attempt to gain additional commercial advantages over Comcast through a regulatory condition that is unjustified and would be anything but ‘great’ for consumers,” Comcast said.

Meanwhile, Discovery “demanded unwarranted business concessions from Comcast as a condition of Discovery’s non-opposition to the transaction,” Comcast said. “Such extortionate demands are patently improper.”

The complaints came after Comcast spent almost the first 12 pages of its filing praising (and quoting) nonprofit organizations, politicians and companies that are supporting its deal. At least some of those elected officials or groups have received financial contributions from Comcast in the past, as several news organizations and campaign finance watchdog groups have noted.

Update: Another company called out by Comcast in its filing, Veria Living, denied the cable giant’s assertions Wednesday. “All we have ever asked for is a level playing field for all programmers and a chance for all networks to get their messages to consumers,” said Eric Sherman, CEO of Veria Living, a health and wellness channel, in a statement. “For a giant like Comcast – which is about to control 28 of the nation’s top 30 markets – to accuse us of extortion is absurd.”

* Comcast owns NBCUniversal, which is a minority investor in Revere Digital, Re/code’s parent company.

Blackberry introduced its new Passport handset at a launch event on Wednesday. The device is truly unusual, with a square-shaped screen, a touch-sensitive hardware keyboard and an emphasis on security and…

Amazon is quietly staffing up its Silicon Valley-based hardware lab as it gears up to create and test new connected home gadgets.

Lab126, the Amazon division behind hardware products like the Kindle Fire, will bring its full-time payroll to at least 3,757 in the next five years, Reuters reports in an exclusive story.

With this plan, detailed in an obscure government document, CEO Jeff Bezos’ plan to focus on hardware is affirmed. This despite lagging Kindle Fire sales and investors’ criticism of Amazon’s constant spending on long term pie-in-the-sky projects.

See also: Amazon Gets Serious About Hardware With 6 New Tablets

Sources told Reuters that Amazon will be investing $55 million into Lab126’s activities in an effort to prepare smart home devices to compete against Google and Apple.

Google, Apple, and now Amazon are all racing to create the ultimate platform for the Internet of things. In an era when dishwashers, refrigerators, and security systems have the potential to become self aware, technology companies all want to get in on the next big market.

The mobile phone industry has taught us that the device that ends up on top won’t only support the company’s products, but third party applications as well. As Amazon doubles down on the Internet of Things, it will need to work out a product that not only centralizes all the connected home devices, but streamlines the process better than anyone else.

Photo of Jeff Bezos by Steve Jurveston

Along with his new title as CTO, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison's tremendous pay package is also trending down.

In fiscal 2014, the former CEO earned $67.3 million, mostly in stock options, according to forms filed with the SEC.

Specifics are: $1 in salary, $741,384 in "Non-Equity Incentive Plan Compensation," which most people would call a bonus, nearly $65 million in stock options, and over $1.5 million in perks.

That's quite a bit less from 2013, when he was paid $78.4 million, mostly in stock options. And far lower than the year before, $96.2 million.

When his 2013 pay was a revealed, activist investor group CtW Investments balked and lobbied the board to stop throwing so many stock options at him. Top proxy adviser firm Institutional Shareholder Services agreed with CtW and recommended that shareholders vote against Oracle pay packages.

Oracle's board argued back that Oracle is an unbelievably profitable company and Ellison was its kingpin. However, Ellison did try and appease them. He turn down his $1.2 million cash bonus for fiscal 2013.

Despite another pay cut, Ellison is not in danger of landing in the poor house. He's Oracle's biggest shareholder, with a 25% stake, owns vast holdings in real estate and other businesses, and is the world's fifth-richest person, worth about $49 billion, reports Forbes.

New co-CEOs Mark Hurd and Safra Catz also had a pay cut in 2014 to $37.7 million apiece. They were paid $44 million each in 2013, mostly in stock options.

The SEC forms included a bunch of fun details on perks for these top execs, too.

• For instance, Hurd and Catz have 401K accounts and as employees, are entitled to their 401K match. So Oracle kicked in $5,100 apiece to their respective 401Ks. (Even multi-millionaires need to save for retirement!)
• Ellison famously owns a collection of airplanes, set up in a cutely named company called A Wing and a Prayer. When Ellison travels on business in these planes he owns, Oracle picks up the tab. It paid A Wing and a Prayer $1.4 million last year. It's not unusual for executes to expense business airplane travel on their private jets to their companies, the way employees expense business car travel. Cisco CEO John Chambers, for instance, does the same with the jet he owns.
  
• Oracle does business transactions with other companies Ellison owns. So, like Walmart, he offers Oracle a low-price promise. If Oracle's board can find another company charging less for these services, Ellison will refund the difference.
• Oracle paid a non-refundable $300,000 to a Paramount Pictures for a product placement in a film produced by David Ellison Ellison's son, "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit." But the scene with the Oracle product was cut from the movie.
  

SEE ALSO: Oracle Billionaire Larry Ellison Is Down $1.8 Billion From A Symbolic Gesture

SEE ALSO: Bill Gates Is At Least $6 Billion Richer Than He Was Six Months Ago, But Not From Microsoft

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Sugar substitutes might be exacerbating metabolic disease. Artificial sweeteners have widely been seen as a way to combat obesity and diabetes, but according to a new study, the sugar substitutes could, in part, be contributing to the global epidemic of these conditions.     Sugar substitutes such as saccharin might aggravate these metabolic disorders by […]

Yahoo has new owners.

Or at least half new. 

Fifty percent of Yahoo shares have changed hands over the past four days.

Ironfire Capital fund manager Eric Jackson says that Yahoo's average ownership turnover over four days is closer to 8%.

Here are some theories as to what's going on:

Yahoo is probably buying a bunch of its own stock. Yahoo had a big stake in Alibaba, selling 121 million shares during its Friday IPO. Yahoo management promised that it would use half the after-tax proceeds to buy back Yahoo shares. That would account for ~$3 billion of the $20 billion changing hands.

People are probably selling Yahoo and buying Alibaba. For a long time, Yahoo stock was going up because owning it was just about the only way you could gain exposure to Alibaba. But now Alibaba is a public company. So people who owned Yahoo for Alibaba are probably now selling it and buying Alibaba.

Yahoo is a juicy acquisition target. It has a ton of cash and owns big chunks of two Asian companies: Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. If you add up the value of that cash and those stakes, the number is actually bigger than Yahoo's market cap. That means Yahoo's core business, which generates nearly $5 billion in revenues every year and nearly $1 billion in profit, is being valued at close to $0 by the market. It's likely that some arbitrage fund managers are buying into Yahoo, hoping some kind of transaction goes down.

Value investors believe that Yahoo is undervalued and want to bet on Marissa Mayer. It's possible that some value investors are looking at Yahoo's sum-of-the-parts valuation, seeing how little the market values the core, and buying Yahoo stock because they believe CEO Marissa Mayer will soon have the company growing again. Truthfully, all she has to do is get revenue growing again, and the market will probably apply the same multiples to Yahoo as it does to Microsoft and AOL — two other tech companies in turnaround. Right now, that would mean a boost in Yahoo's stock price. Maybe some people with money are betting that Mayer can clear a really low bar. 

Yahoo is a juicy acquisition target, part two. If one of the two companies that Yahoo owns big stakes of, Alibaba or Yahoo Japan, were to buy Yahoo, they would be able to realize the full value of Yahoo's stake in themselves without having to pay taxes on it. That's another reason arbitrage investors might be buying in.

Some activist could be building a stake. There is an argument to be made that Marissa Mayer is doing a poor job managing Yahoo. She could cut costs by slashing headcount. She could outsource its display business to Google. Maybe there is an activist out there who thinks the market would give Yahoo's core business a greater valuation if he or she could buy a bunch of Yahoo stock and force Mayer to make a few quick changes.

If anything really dramatic is happening, we'll know soon, because you can't buy more than 5% of a public company without disclosing it.

Nicholas Carlson is the author of Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! on sale Jan. 6, 2015.

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Brian Swichkow did the only thing you can do when a friend plays a well-thought out and possibly humiliating prank on you: He got even.

According to Adweek, Swichkow retaliated by using Facebook Custom Audience, paying a small price to Facebook: $1.70 to be exact. But it was worth it.

In a blog post, Swichkow, who has a marketing background and is the cofounder and CEO of CatalystMLM, says he preyed on the fact that his roommate, a professional sword swallower, ironically can't swallow pills without gagging. So Swichkow created an ad that read: "Trouble swallowing pills? Does it seem ironic that swallowing swords is easy and then small pills make you gag?"

He kicked off his plan by testing Facebook's Custom Audience waters. First, he tried targeting a sizeable audience pool of 10,000 people. Swichkow saw some of the highest click-through rates he'd ever seen, and then decided it was time to take the next step. 

Swichkow explains on his blog: 

I realized that stepping things up a notch was actually stepping them down a notch in this case and I asked how targeted I could make my audience. I said to myself, "What if I only had like five people in an audience? What if I only had one person in an audience? … I should test this … I should test this on my roommate.

With an audience of just one — his roommate, Roderick Russell — Swichkow planned his targeted ad campaigns. He opted to place the ads on the right rail of the web browser, instead of within the News Feed, to keep his anonymity throughout his revenge campaign.  

Swichkow took advantage of one of Facebook's major advertising flaws, at least from the user's perspective: Mainly, that users can't find out why they are being shown a specific ad, and what data, from whichever sources, was collected to show that particular ad. 

"I was going to target him with highly personalized messages that were focused on things Facebook truly shouldn’t know about his personal life – things that weren’t even online, let alone on Facebook," he writes. "The goal, to make him unbelievably paranoid."

Swichkow deceptively played with the campaign parameters, adjusting how often his roommate would see the ad so he would be constantly on-edge, searching and waiting for another pill swallowing ad to appear. As the campaign progressed, he included even more personal tidbits, that Facebook definitely shouldn't have known about him, adding to his roommate's paranoia.  

The saga continued for about three weeks. It ended when Swichkow slipped up, using information his roommate had only told him. At that point, Swichkow finally revealed himself, but only after making his roommate completely terrified to the point that he thought Facebook was actually bugging his phone lines and eavesdropping on his private conversations.

Read how Swichkow used Facebook's advertising tools to execute his plan here. 

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Ericsson revealed it's handling T-Mobile's new LTE network expansion into new spectrum, into rural areas and into the nooks and crannies of dense urban areas.

It's a sad, sad day for everyone who grew up in the 2000s. The iPod Classic, the most highly coveted MP3 player amongst your classmates, is no more. Apple quietly discontinued their 12-year-old iPod (it's come a long way) some time last week. TheWhich iPod Are You? page only shows the Shuffle, Nano, and iPod Touch. Sad.

The original white iPod brings back so many memories of swapping our Walkmen for a little stainless steel-backed, music-playing brick. Read on for all the things we'll miss about the iPod classic.

It was the first MP3 that could be used with just one hand

The iPod was the size of a deck of cards! Its 3/4-inch hardware seems gargantuan today, but, in 2001, being able to play, pause, and browse through your music with just your thumb was incredible. Nothing will ever replace the feeling of the first time you held an iPod.

It could fit a LOT of stuff—not just music

The iPod Classic used a hard disk drive, just like your old laptops, which is why you could hear whirring from the inside of the device. There were actual moving mechanical parts inside of the iPod Classic, unlike the fancier iPod Touch of today. The main advantage of this was a ton of storage.

Sure, back then it could only fit 1,000 songs. But the iPod Classic of 2013 was available in a 160 GB size, which could hold 40,000 songs. The new generation of iPods only offer up to 64 GBs.

And the original iPod wasn't just portable storage for music; you could use it as an external hard drive by dragging and dropping any type of file over the iPod icon on your desktop. Sigh, the good ol' days.

The silhouette ads were cool then and are still cool now

There were over 20 dancing silhouette ads featuring songs from your childhood like "Hey Mama" by the Black Eyed Peas and celebrities like Mary J. Blige, Eminem, Coldplay, and U2 (who, apparently, still exist!). It was an iconic campaign, solidifying the white MP3's place in product-design history.

The clickwheel was so satisfying

Click ... click ... click ... never has scrolling through playlists or playing Pong ever been so fun.

It had fitness features way before fitness features went mainstream

Apple's has been partnering with Nike for a long time. The iPod has included activity tracking and running data collection that could be synced with your Mac long beforewearable gadgets took over tech.

Watch Steve Jobs's original iPod announcement!

Ah, so much nostalgia.

More stories from PopSugarTech:

• The iPhone 4S Is Not iOS 8-Friendly
• Alibaba—The Massive Tech Giant You Never Heard Of
• A Simple Way To Find Out How Smartphone-Addicted You Are
• Your Next Favorite Video Game Might Just Be About Tampons
• Wait. How Is Larry Ellison 70 Years Old?
• Girl Nails It With Open Letter To Microsoft About Minecraft 

 

Yahoo investors have waited years for Alibaba's IPO, expecting the public value of the Chinese e-commerce giant's stock that Yahoo owns might send Yahoo's stock into the stratosphere.

Alas.

In the early hours following Alibaba's debut, Yahoo's stock was getting smashed. Some of the selling pressure may be from Yahoo owners who owned it as a way of gaining exposure to the private Alibaba — who are now dumping Yahoo stock and buying Alibaba's instead. Other traders may be shorting Yahoo to bet against Alibaba. And still others may have owned Yahoo just for the Alibaba pop and are now taking their winnings and going home.

Regardless, a sum-of-the-parts analysis suggests the market is now valuing Yahoo's actual business at less than zero.

Yahoo stock opened the day at $42.40 per share. It's currently down ~5% to $40.23 per share. This puts Yahoo's market capitalization at $40.01 billion.

Here's the math for figuring out the value of Yahoo's core:

• Start with Yahoo's $40 billion market cap.
• Subtract the $10.5 billion in cash that Yahoo will have after receiving the proceeds of its Alibaba stock sale and paying taxes on its gain (Yahoo won't have to pay these cash taxes for a while, so it will retain the cash for now).
  
• Subtract the value of Yahoo's 35% stake in Yahoo Japan. It's worth about $5 billion after taxes.
  
• Compute the value of the 401 million shares in Alibaba that Yahoo still owns, which is worth about $25 billion after taxes with Alibaba trading at $90 per share.

What you're left with is the value the market is attributing to Yahoo's core business: About -$500 million with Alibaba trading at $90.

Yahoo has about a billion shares outstanding. If each are going for $40, Yahoo's core business makes up less than $0 of that price — theoretically, -$.50 per share.

It's a shockingly low valuation for Yahoo's core business.

Yahoo still has almost a billion people coming to Yahoo.com and its other products and services each month. Over the past 12 months, it has sold enough ads against those eyeballs to generate $4.62 billion in revenue and $772 million in EBITDA.

Yahoo revenues aren't growing at the moment, and it's still behind in mobile, but the company is definitely worth more than zero. 

Here's why: If someone were to step in and buy Yahoo today, that buyer would be able to sell the company's stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, pay for the acquisition entirely, and start profiting from Yahoo's core business immediately.

The company is obviously now an attractive acquisition target. 

(I'm using Ironfire Capital's Eric Jackson's estimate for the taxes Yahoo would pay if it were to liquidate its Alibaba and Yahoo Japan holdings.)

NOW WATCH: The Right Way To Say 15 Brand Names You're Mispronouncing All The Time

 

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Most employers would be angry if they caught an employee sleeping on the job.

But not Ryan Holmes, the CEO of Hootsuite, a social media management dashboard.

In fact, he encourages it. 

Holmes says in a recent LinkedIn post that the Hootsuite offices have nap rooms and sleeping pods for its employees, because he believes getting enough sleep should be a priority, and that every employee should listen to their body when they need a rest.

"It's not worth depriving yourself of sleep for an extended period of time, no matter how pressing things may seem," he says.

In the tech world, pressures to stay innovative and competitive run high, making it incredibly tempting for executives and employees alike to skimp on sleep in favor of putting in extra hours. 

While there's nothing wrong with being dedicated to your work, Holmes points out that sleep deprivation comes with a slew of consequences, including increased risk for diabetes, depression, and obesity. "Lack of sleep has become so widespread that the CDC recently declared it a public epidemic," he reports.

However, Holmes notices several companies changing their ways in response to this epidemic. "Many of the same tech startups so notorious for workaholic culture are taking the lead in ensuring employees get adequate shut-eye," he says. 

Getting enough sleep is not only good for employees' health, but also helps prevent burnout. "A good metaphor is running a marathon versus a sprint," Holmes explains. "In your job, you can sprint from time to time, but long-term success depends on maintaining a marathoner’s steady gait."

Even a 10-minute nap can make a difference, Holmes says. Short power naps boost productivity and help employees focus.

Click here to read the full LinkedIn post.

Want your business advice featured in Instant MBA? Submit your tips to tipoftheday@businessinsider.com and be sure to include your name, your job title, and a photo of yourself in your email.

SEE ALSO: 6 Tactics For Powering Through A Workday On No Sleep

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There's a video going around that claims to know what women really want — manservants.

The jist is that hiring strippers to make a woman feel good isn't just cliche, it's plain uncomfortable.

So the video pivots from a woman disgusted by the male junk being thrust in her face to a team of handsome men, all dressed in tuxedos.

That's essentially what ManServants aims to provide: good looking men you can order around.

TechCrunch reporter Sarah Buhr spent some time with a Manservant named Fabio. Here's how she described it:

The men do things like serenade you with Disney songs, paint your toenails, take Instagrams of you and your friends, throw doves out when you arrive, fill up your glass of champagne, or act as a general bodyguard against pretend paparazzi. “Some women even want to be proposed to over and over in public,” says Wai Lin. Women have fantasies about the opposite gender just like men do. Though she also adds that men hire the men servants, too. A couple hired a whole flock of them to stand there and look pretty during a gay wedding a couple of weeks back.

ManServants can make $80 an hour or $300 a day to do things like “serve drinks, light cigarettes, take Instagram photos, and feed grapes.”

When might you need a ManServant? Anytime, really. ManServants gives a few examples on their website: bachelorette parties, girls night out, and a pool party needing a cabana boy, to name a few.

ManServants is expected to launch this fall. Check out their video:

SEE ALSO: This Man Demanded An iPhone 6 As Dowry For Marrying Off His Sister

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Qualcomm dominates the thin modem market and now Ericsson, like Broadcom before it, is pulling out. Around a third of the employees in that unit will be reallocated to radio network…

Larry Page's ambitions are huge and grow bigger every day.

Already, he has Google working on self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, robots, aging, and drones. At Google, they call these efforts moonshots.

The latest problem Page wants to solve: inefficient airports.

In an excellent report, The Information's Amir Efrati writes:

With friends and colleagues, Mr. Page has talked about his desire to build an airport that would be more efficient than existing ones. For example, his argument against the hyperloop train—a concept for transporting people from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 30 minutes—is that planes are just as efficient; it’s the airports that are the problem. (Other transportation experts have expressed similar views.) It’s not clear how Mr. Page would go about building such an airport.

Apparently, Page wants to build a model airport to show the world how it could be done better. Efrati says Page also wants to build a model city.
 

It's all part of an initiative called Google 2.0. Efrati reports that Page cleared out space on his floor of Google's headquarters a year ago and asked 100 employees to help him figure out what huge problems in the world Google could solve.

 

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A weird meme is developing around whether women should buy the iPhone 6 Plus. At 5.5 inches, maybe it is "too big" for them, a number of reviewers have said.

This is important: People don't just buy phones for the technical specs and product features, as tech bloggers tend to believe. They use them as fashion statements and lifestyle accessories, as much as communication devices.

So if women feel the iPhone 6 Plus isn't for them because they don't have hands or pockets big enough to hold the thing, it could theoretically retard sales.

"There are a couple of reasons why the Apple iPhone 6 Plus might also be too big for me to purchase," wrote Lauren Goode in Re/code. "It didn’t fit well in pockets. And it was too big to hold in my hand, or even wear on my arm, during fitness activities. This is key for me."

It was too big for her to take on a run or a workout also, she concluded.

"Women may not be so lucky with the new iPhones," wrote Abby Johnston on the feminist blog Bustle. Pockets on women's jeans are smaller than those in men's jeans, and the iPhone 6 Plus might not fit in women's. "There are two possible solutions here: Bigger pockets for jeans. Or smaller phones. What’ll it be, world?"

GottaBeMobile produced this video as a guide to which of Apple's phones will fit into which gender's pockets. Spoiler alert: Both the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are too big for many women's jeans. (And many women's jeans don't have either front or back pockets, so the "will it fit?" question is more crucial for women than men, who always have four pockets to choose from.)

CNET had an even more elaborate guide, in which readers are asked to print out pieces of paper to see if they will fit into your clothes.

Women could put their phones in a bag, of course, at least when they're not at the gym.

But InfoWorld complains that the iPhone 6 Plus is too big for some men, too! "One issue I have with phablets is pocket fit -- or the lack thereof in a standard men's shirt pocket. Technically, it fits, but not comfortably or securely," writes Galen Gruman.

At Business Insider, we've also heard that some women worry whether the phone will be so big it will fall out of a pocket and into the toilet.

If you're a back-pocket person, this is a real issue.

I've owned a 5.1 inch Samsung Galaxy S5 for a few months and more than once kind strangers in Starbucks have handed me my phone, which fell unnoticed out of my back pocket onto the floor.

The obvious solution? Keep your phone in your front pocket. But as GottaBeMobile points out, the new iPhone 6 Plus is so big it might prevent you from sitting down.

SEE ALSO: Steve Jobs Turned Out To Be Completely Wrong About The Key Reason People Like The iPhone

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Logitech is getting into the home automation space with an upgrade to its universal remote and a hub. The hardware is typical, but the app is impressive.

Owners of newer-generation Slingboxes can now cast live and recorded TV straight to any Chromecast, thanks to an update to the Slingplayer app. Check out our exclusive demo video.

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Networking giant Cisco Systems said today it will acquire Metacloud, a privately held startup focused on selling private cloud computing services to companies.

Cisco says Metacloud fits with its larger vision to build what it calls a “network of clouds.” It said in March it would spend $1 billion on an initiative it calls Intercloud. That plan calls for Cisco to deliver cloud services through a network of third parties rather than build a distinct service to compete with the likes of Amazon Web Services or IBM SoftLayer.

Financial terms of the Metacloud deal aren’t being disclosed, but the Pasadena, Calif.-based company had, according to Crunchbase, raised a combined $25 million in three funding rounds, the most recent of which was a $15 million B round led by Pelion Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank and UMC Capital. Other investors include AME Cloud Ventures, Canaan Partners and Storm Ventures.

Metacloud has two products, both of them based on OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system. One product runs in a company’s own data center — often referred to as “on premise.” The other was a hosted private cloud that it offered as a service.

Some companies are attracted to the idea of so-called private clouds because they offer flexibility similar to using a cloud service like AWS or SoftLayer, while allowing the customer to maintain control of data they may consider too sensitive to put in the hands of a third party. Numerous companies stepping into the cloud computing services business — which, aside from Cisco, include IBM and Hewlett-Packard — often argue in favor of a hybrid approach that combines privately-run cloud infrastructure with additional capacity from an outside service provider.

Cisco’s deal comes on top of last week’s acquisition by HP of Eucalyptus Systems. It’s another cloud software operation that helps companies manage the various cloud services they use — private and public. It also makes it easy to move computing jobs in and out of Amazon’s cloud.

It looks like Microsoft is going to finish up promised layoffs on Thursday as it continues to reshape its board of directors.

Strati 3D printed car Local Motors 3D printed a plastic car called the Strati in front of thousands of attendees at the International Manufacturing Technology Show in Chicago.     Local Motors took the chassis, seats, door panels, and thousands of other components, and 3D printed all those parts into just one piece. The first phase of the […]

Reuters / Yuya Shino

A federal appeals court on Tuesday threw out a jury order requiring Apple to pay VirnetX Holding Corp $368.2 million in damages for infringing four patents concerning technology for providing security over the Internet.

Shares of VirnetX plunged as much as 59.8 percent after the decision by the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington. The company and its lawyer did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Apple had appealed a November 2012 jury finding that it infringed VirnetX’s patents for virtual private network, or VPN, technology through the FaceTime feature on its iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad products, as well as on its Mac computers.

While agreeing that some patents were infringed, the appeals court said the verdict was tainted by incorrect jury instructions from the trial judge on how to calculate damages, and that the error was not harmless.

It also agreed with Apple that testimony from a VirnetX expert over how to determine potential royalties should have been excluded, saying it did not reflect the extent to which the patented features were a factor in product sales.

“The law requires patentees to apportion the royalty down to a reasonable estimate of the value of its claimed technology, or else establish that its patented technology drove demand for the entire product,” Chief Judge Sharon Prost wrote for a two-judge panel. A third judge resigned before the decision was issued.

The appeals court returned the case to the U.S. District Court in Tyler, Texas, for further proceedings.

VirnetX is based in Zephyr Cove, Nev. It was assigned the four patents at issue by Science Applications International in 2006, court papers show.

In May 2010, VirnetX won a $200 million settlement from Microsoft over the VPN technology.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In midday trading, VirnetX shares were down by almost 50 percent.

The case is Apple Inc v VirnetX Inc et al, U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 2013-1489.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Additional reporting by Dan Levine in San Francisco; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

Eva Hakansson and Bill Dube, a husband and wife from Denver, Colorado, have spent the bulk of their free time over the past five years tooling away in their two-car garage. Their labor of love, an electric motorcycle called the KillaJoule, is now an official record holder. 

In late August, Hakansson, a 33-year-old PhD candidate at the University of Denver, and Dube, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), took their backyard creation to the Bonneville Motorcycle Speed Trials in Utah. 

With Hakansson at the helm, the KillaJoule reached an incredible 241.901 mph on Utah's legendary Bonneville Salt Flats. In an instant, Hakansson became the fastest woman on a motorcycle in the world, and the KillaJoule became both the fastest electric motorcycle ever built and fastest motorcycle with a side car. The record setting-run beat the previous electric motorcycle land speed record by a whopping 25 mph. But Hakansson and Dube knew their creation could go even faster. So last week, they returned to the Bonneville and upped the ante even more by hitting a whopping 270.224 mph. "The computer model showed a possible maximum speed of ~270 mph," Hakansson wrote in her blog. "For the first time ever, practice agreed with theory. We were both pleasantly surprised. It doesn’t happen very often, for sure." The KillaJoule is truly an incredible machine. Power for the record -setting bike comes from a 500 horsepower EVO electric motor with juice stored in a series of lithium nano-phosphate battery cells from A123 Systems. Weighing in at 1540 pounds, including Hakasson, the KillaJoule is constructed with chrom-moly steel tubing wrapped in pre-painted aluminum body panels. Here's a detailed breakdown of Hakansson and Dube's design:

"The main purpose of the sleek, sexy motorcycle is to show that eco-friendly doesn’t mean slow and boring," says Hakansson. She's definitely spot on in her assessment: 240 mph is never boring. 

Take a look at the KillaJoule's record-setting 241 mph run:

SEE ALSO: A Spectacular Crash Could Boost Interest In Electric Car Racing

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