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AP Source: Hurd accuser claimed inside info (AP) : Technet |
- AP Source: Hurd accuser claimed inside info (AP)
- Kinect Could Have Been Apple's, Report Says (PC World)
- iPhone Tests by Citigroup, Bank of America Threaten BlackBerry (PC World)
- Use Social Media to Tell Interactive Stories [INVITES] (Mashable)
- Amazon to Acquire Diapers.com for $540 Million [REPORT] (Mashable)
- How Not to Piss Off the Internet (PC World)
| AP Source: Hurd accuser claimed inside info (AP) Posted: 06 Nov 2010 01:09 AM PDT SAN FRANCISCO – A person familiar with the ouster of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s former CEO Mark Hurd tells The Associated Press that the woman who accused Hurd of sexual harassment also claimed that he told her about a major acquisition HP was about to make. The person requested anonymity because of not being authorized to discuss the allegations. The person said the deal in question was HP's $13.9 billion acquisition of Electronic Data Systems in 2008. Hurd's accuser, an HP contractor named Jodie Fisher, later appeared to recant her claim of disclosing information in a letter she sent Hurd when she and Hurd settled the matter for an undisclosed amount. The AP has reviewed that letter, in which Fisher said there were "many inaccuracies" in her original claim against Hurd. She said didn't believe that Hurd's behavior harmed HP. Fisher's lawyer, Gloria Allred, declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal reported on Fisher's allegations earlier Friday. It's generally illegal for an executive to disclose material and nonpublic information with an outside party without an agreement of confidentiality. Exceptions are made for relationships in which there might not be a formal arrangement but there is an expectation of confidentiality. HP has never publicly mentioned the allegation of disclosing the information against Hurd. The company, which is the world's biggest maker of personal computers and printers, said its board forced Hurd out over inaccurate expense reports connected to Hurd's dinners with Fisher. Hurd maintains that he never prepared his own expense reports and didn't intentionally try to keep Fisher's name off any reports. HP's board said it didn't find evidence of sexual harassment. Fisher's allegations led to Hurd's resignation Aug. 6. HP's board found no evidence of sexual harassment but wanted to disclose the allegations, which Hurd argued was unnecessary. Hurd and Fisher both say they didn't have a sexual relationship. Hurd's resignation stunned investors, who were largely pleased with Hurd's five-year stewardship of HP. He is now a co-president at business software maker Oracle Corp., which is run by his friend Larry Ellison. |
| Kinect Could Have Been Apple's, Report Says (PC World) Posted: 06 Nov 2010 10:45 AM PDT PrimeSense, the company behind Microsoft Kinect's camera, initially pitched its motion sensing technology to Apple, according to Leander Kahney of Cult of Mac. PrimeSense CEO Inon Beracha told Kahney that his company backed out of talks because Apple was, well, "a pain in the ass." At the time of the talks Apple "was the most natural place for the technology," Beracha says. It had just released the iPhone and its multitouch UI. PrimeSense was hoping to be the next step in UI innovation. Things went south after Apple asked Beracha "to sign a stack of crippling legal agreements and NDAs," Kahney reports. Beracha figured his company's tech was solid and wouldn't have trouble finding another buyer. The rest is history. In June 2009, Microsoft teased the Kinect, then known as "Project Natal" at E3 with the tagline "You are the controller." The peripheral launched this week and Microsoft expects to sell 5 million by the end of this quarter, according to Bloomberg. |
| iPhone Tests by Citigroup, Bank of America Threaten BlackBerry (PC World) Posted: 06 Nov 2010 10:40 AM PDT Stories this summer about BlackBerry losing its place in global market share to the iPhone, and then more to Android, marked a big shift in smartphone use. Sure, consumers and SMBs switched; BlackBerrys are more complex, more expensive and not nearly as cool. Even some whole industries started leaning iPhoneward. Prevalence in specific industries -- computer companies, or hospitals that adopt iPhones -- could have been exceptions. IT agendas within specific vertical markets are often idiosyncratic. In medicine agendas are often driven by physicians, who are a dangerous combination of technical adeptness and biochemical education -- meaning they're used to dealing with systems that make no obvious sense, are still largely mysterious, and are both used and described in completely unrealistic terms by their owners. This story that Citigroup and Bank of America are both testing iPhones and considering a switch from BlackBerrys may be the tipping point. When a nice, orderly, logical, regulated, engineer-thinkalike organizations like big banks start leaning away from BlackBerry and toward iPhone, it indicates a real corporate shift that marks one (BlackBerry) as the legacy, another as the current common denominator (iPhone) and everything else too dangerously close to the cutting edge. |
| Use Social Media to Tell Interactive Stories [INVITES] (Mashable) Posted: 06 Nov 2010 11:17 AM PDT This post is part of Mashable's Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Storify Quick Pitch: Pull content from social networks together to create a cohesive story with tweets, posts, photos and videos that maintain their original functionality. Genius Idea: You can find information about almost any topic on social media, but it's not necessarily easy to put that information together into a cohesive narrative. Storify looks to solve this problem by helping you curate stories from the social web. Users can search for content on social networks and create stories by dragging-and-dropping components onto a workspace without leaving Storify. When they're finished, they can either link to the story or embed it. All of the tweets, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, Flickr images, and other bits of information in the completed story maintain their links and functionality. You can retweet someone's tweet, for instance, the same way you would if you were viewing it on Twitter. The company launched its private beta at the end of September. During its first month since the launch, the tool has been used by bloggers, public relations professionals and media outlets. The Washington Post recently used Storify to compile political candidates' recession and concession tweets. Public relations professionals have used Storify to tell the story of a brand or report their social media efforts to their clients. Other people have used it to blog about everything from family trips to a riot. One man used it to tell the story of a poem he composed using submissions over social media. Having defined some promising potential uses for its product, the company's major uncertainty is the monetization factor. Storify is taking the "build a user base and monetize it later" approach, and at this point (admittedly only a month after product launch) it doesn't have any distinct plans for actually making money. Some possibilities include selling advertising that publishers insert in stories or adding premium features. While the "monetize later" approach has worked well for companies like Twitter and Tumblr, it's hard to maintain very long without funding -- which the company is still seeking (they have raised about $30,000 from angel investors). Bootstrapped status aside, we think Storify is on to something. Co-founder Burt Herman is a 12 year veteran of the Associated Press, and the storytelling aspect of Storify may be what ultimately sets it apart from the competition. Unlike similar social media curation tools like Curated.by and Keepstream, story creators that use Storify can add their own text to the stories. This could make it especially appealing to content providers who want to add analysis and context to social media stories. 250 Mashable readers can try the private beta version of Storify by using the invite code "Mashable."
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, jallfree
Sponsored by Microsoft BizSparkBizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today. |
| Amazon to Acquire Diapers.com for $540 Million [REPORT] (Mashable) Posted: 06 Nov 2010 11:38 AM PDT Amazon will soon announce that it has acquired Quidsi, the owners of e-commerce websites Diapers.com and Soap.com, for a whopping $540 million in cash. According to Fortune, Quidsi's co-founders, Marc Lore and Vinnie Bharara, have agreed to stick around and have signed multi-year contracts with Amazon. The company launched in 2005 with Diapers.com, while Soap.com launched earlier this year. The report also claims that Wal-Mart made an offer for the company as well. Quidsi specializes in quickly shipping commodity items to consumers efficiently. It utilizes scores of algorithms in order to optimize warehousing and shipping and to maximize margins. It also boasts about its customer service, which has helped the company become a top e-commerce destination. The Quidsi acquisition is Amazon's largest since it spent $900 million to acquire Zappos. There are definitely a lot of parallels between the two acquisitions. Zappos wasn't about the shoes, but about the culture, customer service and loyal customers. The Quidsi acquisition seems to be about its numbers-based approach and its loyal customer base. Quidsi has raised over $75 million in multiple funding rounds from Accel Partners, BEV Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, MentorTech Ventures and others.
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| How Not to Piss Off the Internet (PC World) Posted: 06 Nov 2010 05:33 AM PDT If you've checked out the blogosphere and/or mainstream media recently, you're probably aware of the Cooks Source scandal. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, here's a quick recap for you: Cooks Source magazine lifted a blogger's article from the Internet and, when an apology (and a donation to the Columbia School of Journalism) was requested by the offended blogger, an editor from the magazine responded that the blogger should be "grateful for the edit." Needless to say, this didn't sit too well with the Internet. In fact, the entire situation has blown up: anonymous web users have lambasted the Cooks Source Facebook page, set up fake Twitter accounts, redirected a domain name with the editor's name to a Wikipedia article on "Public Domain," and obtained a list of the magazine's advertisers (the magazine is free, but advertiser-supported) and distributors. One thing's for sure--if Cooks Source managing editor Judith Griggs was in any way uncertain about how internet mob justice worked before Thursday, she certainly knows now. The question is: how could this entire situation have been avoided? This is not the first time the Internet has risen up in (mostly well-intended, but often poorly executed) outrage, and it certainly won't be the last. So what's the best way to deal with an angry Internet mob on your tail? I went to the discussion section of the Cooks Source Facebook page (which has now been completely annexed by the mob) to ask, what could Ms. Griggs have done in order to avoid becoming an Encyclopædia Dramatica article? Here's how not to piss off the Internet: Don't Dig the Hole Any Deeper Griggs probably realizes, by now, that the first e-mail she sent was a mistake. It's unlikely that the Internet would have latched onto this story as it did, had the publicized e-mail not been so condescending and rude. But, okay, so people sometimes make mistakes. After the small foodie magazine rose to infamy, however, the following message appeared on their Facebook page: Hi Folks! Well, here I am with egg on my face! I did apologise to Monica via email, but aparently it wasnt enough for her. To all of you, thank you for your interest in Cooks Source and Again, to Monica, I am sorry - my bad! You did find a way to get your "pound of flesh..." we used to have 110 "friends," we now have 1,870... wow! ...Best to all, Judith I'm no expert (and we're not 100 percent sure this is a legitimate post from Griggs), but it's probably not a good idea to keep stirring things up with phrases like "apparently it wasn't enough for her." Keep Your Closet Skeleton-Free All of this talk of plagiarism and snatching copyrighted material from the web without permission immediately had intrepid Internet users backlogging Cooks Source issues and searching for other instances of intellectual property theft. And, well...apparently they've found quite a lot. "If this woman slipped up once, it can be forgiven. But if she has copied from all the websites that people say she has, [then] quite frankly I do not believe that she care's about getting people's forgiveness," writes Facebook user Johann Muller. Moral of the story: if it's a mistake, don't make it more than once. Take a Vacation After Gaudio's supporters found and dismantled the Cooks Source Facebook page with numerous comments, another Cooks Source Facebook page popped up with the message that the first page had been hacked. More Internet justice-fighters immediately tackled the new Facebook page. Perhaps just leaving the 'net and letting the scandal run its course would be the best plan of action for Griggs, writes Facebook user Oka Lokee: "I think the best she can do is take a vacation until this all blows over. Unfortunately, if the cat-dumping lady was any example, it's going to blow up more and it will take a while to run out of steam." Don't Respond As hard as it is to sleep when someone on the Internet is wrong...a good course of action is to not respond. Facebooker Brendan Kirkpatrick explains that responding to the hive-mind is a bad approach: "Most of these people have no genuine interest in the issue; they're just having fun making snarky comments. As for responding, when a dispute on the intertubes reaches this kind of frenzied hive-mind state, a dialog is no longer possible." Be Sincere and Apologize Perhaps all of this could have been avoided if Griggs had apologized the first time. Of course, now that the entire thing has blown out of proportion, an apology might seem like an option of the past. As Facebook user Shawn Drew puts it, "She just hasn't come off as a nice person. She had the opportunity to apologize and make a tax-deductible donation and she chose to write a snarky email." If All Else Fails . . . Change your name and try to find work in an isolated village without Internet access, in a country without an extradition treaty with the United States, suggests Facebook user Thom Ryng. Follow Sarah on Twitter (@geeklil) or at sarahpurewal.wordpress.com |
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