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The online marketplace dates back to an e-commerce era involving dial-up modems. Its leaders hope the Apple Watch will help accelerate its transition to the new online shopping era.
eBay
How can an e-commerce company built in the desktop era get customers to buy things from their wrists? That's the challenge for RJ Pittman, eBay's head of product, who came to the auction and marketplace giant in late 2012 from Apple, where he worked on the company's e-commerce platforms.
Despite a history that dates back to dial-up modems and a business whose sales are still made primarily on desktop computers, eBay is "uniquely suited to jump into wearables," Pittman told BuzzFeed News in an interview. Because the Apple Watch will be tethered to iPhones, "several hundred million" people who have downloaded eBay's app will be Watch-enabled, "just with the app they have."
While the 46-year-old Pittman wouldn't say much about the specific functions of eBay's watch app, he did say that he hoped efforts to get on users' wrists would take the entire company further down the line of "ephemeral" and "frictionless" commerce. "We're thinking about breaking the barrier of websites, even apps and downloads, and transact commerce at the speed of thought."
A specific example Pittman gave of what his team of five to seven people are working on is notifications: When you are outbid on an eBay auction, "you might get a little vibration on your wrist and have an outbid notice," he said. "You don't have to do anything to look at it and turn it away, or you can tap to bid it up and in one tap you're in the game. It's a new level of frictionless engagement."
Pittman did say that when eBay's app for the Apple Watch is released ("it's coming this spring, call it a few weeks or so, right on the heels of the launch of the Watch"), the vibrating notifications "will be part of the experience."
RJ Pittman.
eBay
But, for now at least, the vast majority of eBay's activity will be on screens considerably larger than even the 42 millimeters the largest Apple Watch provides. Of the $83 billion transacted through eBay's marketplace in 2014, $28 billion (34%) came through phones, up from over $20 billion in 2013.
The Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba had 42% of its gross merchandise volume in China come from mobile in the last three months of this year — about 327 billion yuan (about $53 billion) worth, more than triple that of a year ago.
While eBay's scale is still massive — its $83 billion in general merchandise volume (all sales done on the marketplace, of which eBay takes a cut) in 2014 is comparable to Amazon's $74 billion in sales — its growth has slowed. eBay's chief financial officer Bob Swan said on a call with reporters to discuss the company's financial results that 2014 was a "year we're glad to have behind us," while its revenue from transactions on its marketplace grew only 1% in the fourth quarter of 2014, and 9% for the full year.
Sales at Amazon, by comparison, rose 20% in 2014, while at Etsy — a much smaller, much trendier entrant into the online marketplace business — sales rose 46% to $1.9 billion. And both competitors seem to have the wind at their backs, with Etsy approaching an IPO and Amazon on Tuesday announcing a new system that lets customers place orders by pressing buttons stuck on the walls of their kitchen pantries or laundry rooms.
Wearable computers like the Apple Watch will add to pressure on eBay to adapt to changing consumer habits, but Pittman also sees it as an opportunity to rethink the basics of the business. "What I love about this is that the 42mm screen real estate is a design constraint, it's driving something that I'm trying to do at eBay: simplify commerce," he said. "The watch forces you to your bare essentials, you don't get to build a web site or app in 42 millimeters. We get right down to the most important, most useful capabilities and put them in in a way that's only for one finger to tap."
There is, however, an intuitively designed and habit-forming mobile commerce product already under the eBay roof: Venmo, which eBay CEO John Donahoe recently said is "on fire." But Venmo is part of PayPal, which will soon be spun off from eBay into a new stand-alone company.
eBay overhauled its desktop design in late 2012, introducing more and bigger images — like Pinterest — along with enhanced personalization features, including curated collections that rotate daily. "What you'll see is a much deeper focus on design," eBay Marketplaces President David Wenig told AllThingsD after Pittman was hired. "We're placing a lot of emphasis on the user experiences, and so this feels like a natural evolution."
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The government had previously fought to withhold the information. More than half the schools on the list are for-profit.
The Education Department released today a list of the 556 colleges where it has stepped up oversight due to potentially serious financial and compliance issues. The department had previously kept secret the names of the schools on what it calls "heightened cash monitoring" status, saying it worried releasing the data could lead to "competitive injury" for the schools. More than half of the schools on the list released today are for-profit institutions.
The vast majority of universities, public, private and for-profit alike, are able to draw federal financial aid funding from the government at will, with limited federal oversight. But the Education Department's heightened cash monitoring status places restrictions on schools' access to that federal money.
In its strictest form, called "Heightened Cash Monitoring 2," the Education Department requires universities to carefully document their expenses before the schools can be reimbursed, which can severely limit cash flow. Sixty-nine of the schools on the department's list are now subject to the stricter levels of monitoring.
Schools can be subjected to increased oversight for a variety of reasons, said department Under Secretary Ted Mitchell in a press call. "It might be because we have serious concerns about an institution or its administrative capacity," Mitchell said, but could also be because of more minor compliance issues, such as late audits. Other reasons for monitoring include accreditation issues, poor financial health scores, and high default rates.
"Heightened Cash Monitoring is not necessarily a red flag to students and taxpayers, but it can serve as a caution light," Mitchell wrote in a blog post.
The schools in the department's list represent a wide variety of institutions, though more than half are for-profits like ITT Technical Institute, Everest College, and the Art Institutes. Many of the schools under the stricter HCM2 are beauty and other trade schools, but they also include yeshivas, the Joffrey Ballet School, and the University of Toronto.
Twenty-three schools on the department's list are under investigation because of "severe findings" in a program review. The department redacted the names of those schools, saying it was worried that revealing them would interfere in the investigations. While department data appears to show that the majority of schools under investigation are for-profit schools, several were private and public nonprofits.
The full list of schools is available here.
Jose Luis Magana / AP
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The retailer modified a media policy last week after it was accused of “silencing” employees, according to an internal email obtained by BuzzFeed News.
Obtained by BuzzFeed News
American Apparel is backtracking on a new media policy that forbade employees from speaking with members of the press, after the company was accused of "silencing" workers in a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board.
Chelsea Grayson, the company's general counsel, told a group of employees on March 25 that American Apparel staff "are free to express their views to the media as they wish, including discussing their views of American Apparel," according to an email obtained by BuzzFeed News. She said that American Apparel's previous policy, implemented in January, "was intended to address media inquiries seeking the Company's position and it was not our intent to suggest that employees are limited in expressing their own views and opinions to the media." She noted that requests for comment on behalf of the company should still be referred to her or American Apparel's external spokeswoman.
American Apparel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The clothing chain, which has long emphasized worker rights, came under some fire for the media policy, which was implemented by the company's new board of directors this year. It added an air of secrecy to a struggling company which is still reeling from the ouster of founder and ex-CEO Dov Charney in December and contending with an overhaul directed by New York hedge fund Standard General.
The January policy, excerpted below, prohibited employees from "making statements to, or otherwise having contact with, journalists and the media, insofar as it relates to American Apparel (including among other topics as to current and former employees and as to our business and operations)." It told employees to respond to requests from the media with "no comment," adding that any exceptions required written pre-approval from Grayson or new chief executive Paula Schneider.
Employees filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board earlier this month, claiming that the media policy was "silencing" workers and chilling their ability to act against unsatisfactory working conditions. While nondisclosure and non-disparagement agreements are common at corporations, the employees contended that the broadness of the new policy infringed on their right to "protected concerted activity."
"The company attempted to stifle employees' free speech and prevent the media from learning about the many unfair business practice and employment issues of the new regime," Keith Fink, the lawyer for American Apparel employees on the complaint, told BuzzFeed News. "After my firm filed the NLRB complaint, a 'clarification was issued' by the GC."
American Apparel's new management is working to redirect and reshape the provocative brand while keeping Charney and employees loyal to him at bay. Last week, the company reported sales slipped 4% to $609 million in 2014 and that it's thin on cash. It will likely face a slew of litigation tied to Charney's termination, the firing of other employees and lawsuits from shareholders.
It's also being probed by the Securities and Exchange Commission for its investigation and subsequent termination of Charney.
American Apparel / Via Facebook: AmericanApparel
To clarify the above-referenced topic: American Apparel employees are free to express their views to the media as they wish, including discussing their views of American Apparel. Free speech is a core value of our Company. However, if you are asked for the Company's position on an issue, or to speak on behalf of the Company, those inquiries should be referred to Liz Cohen at Weber Shandwick or to me for the Company's response. The earlier communication to managers and supervisors was intended to address media inquiries seeking the Company's position and it was not our intent to suggest that employees are limited in expressing their own views and opinions to the media. Please relay this clarification to any current Ameircan Apparel employee to whom you relayed the original communication.
The film’s estimated $54 million opening weekend is the best news for the embattled studio in years.
DreamWorks Animation
For the first time in six years, DreamWorks Animation has a real reason to celebrate at the box office. The studio's latest feature Home opened this weekend with an estimated $54 million, vastly exceeding expectations. It's the best domestic opening weekend for DWA since the company switched its distribution deal from Paramount to 20th Century Fox in 2013, and it's DWA's best debut ever for an original title since Monsters vs. Aliens was released in late March 2009 with a $59.3 million (or $66 million, when adjusted for ticket price inflation) opening weekend.
Matched with the $48.2 million the film has made in foreign markets, Home has already earned $102.2 million globally. Its "A" grade from audience polling firm CinemaScore promises strong word-of-mouth, and it has no serious family film competition until May.
The good news could not come at a more necessary time for DWA. The studio has been plagued with a series of box office disappointments and outright flops, including 2012's Rise of the Guardians, 2013's Turbo, and 2014's Mr. Peabody & Sherman and Penguins of Madagascar. It is part of a general downward trend for DWA's domestic opening weekends and especially for its total grosses since the astronomic heights of 2004's Shrek 2, as the studio aggressively pursued sequels and spin-offs while increasing its production schedule to as many as three films per year.
Note: Does not include films produced by Aardman Animations and released by DWA.
Adam B. Vary for BuzzFeed / Via boxofficemojo.com
Note: Does not include films produced by Aardman Animations and released by DWA.
Adam B. Vary for BuzzFeed / Via boxofficemojo.com
A major step forward for a growing movement.
The Debt Collective
A senior Education Department official will meet Tuesday with former students of the collapsed for-profit college chain Corinthian Colleges who are refusing to pay back their student loans.
The department has largely remained silent as the Corinthian "debt strike," which has expanded from 15 to 100 former students, gained steam. The strike is part of a broader effort to pressure the government into forgiving the debt of former students of the controversial college chain, which is in the process of shutting itself down in the wake of lawsuits and investigations. The strike has gained supporters in Washington and nationally, with several prominent legislators criticizing the Education Department for bailing out the struggling for-profit college operator last summer, but continuing to hold students on the hook for their loans.
Former Corinthian students said those loans were taken out because of aggressive and misleading sales practices by the by Everest — allegations backed up by a number of state-level investigations into bad behavior by the company.
Now, it appears some of those complaints will get a hearing. The Education Department will join a meeting between the group of debt strikers, who have swollen in number in the past weeks and now call themselves the Corinthian 100, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is waging a lawsuit against Corinthian for unfair lending practices.
The Corinthian 100 were organized by the Debt Collective, an activist group that is an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Debt Collective has said it hopes to use the Corinthian debt strike to spearhead a broader resistance to student debt nationwide.
The Debt Collective will also officially launch a legal strategy Tuesday, submitting hundreds of "defense to repayment" claims to the Education Department on behalf of former Corinthian students. The claims are based on a little-known and almost completely unused clause in department statute which says that borrowers "may assert as a defense against collection of your loan, that the school did something wrong or failed to do something that it should have done." The school's actions, the clause reads, must be so egregious that they would "give rise to a legal cause of action against the school under applicable state law."
A group of prominent legislators, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren, and two state attorneys general have written letters urging the Education Department to consider the validity of "defense to repayment" claims by former Corinthian students. Corinthian is being sued for illegal practices and predatory lending schemes by attorneys general in California, Massachusetts and Wisconsin and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and investigated by 11 more state attorneys general, the Education Department, and the Department of Justice.
The Debt Collective has built a form on its website to collect, and eventually distribute, defense to repayment claims by former students. A Debt Collective representative said the group planned to submit more than 300 such claims to the Education Department Tuesday.
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In a drab basement of the Yale admissions office, I sat before a manila folder. Inside were the mostly dull, occasionally wrong, sometimes informative papers that documented my admissions process.
Nilesyan / Getty Images
Early this year, I went to the basement of the admissions office at Yale University and sat down in front of a thin manila folder. It contained my own confidential admissions documents: my high school years distilled into numerical rankings, and notes from admissions officers on my intelligence and character.
By now, my files are likely completely erased. I was never meant to see them: they were visible through a quirk in a federal privacy law called the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act that was exposed by a group of Stanford students earlier this year. Once students at elite schools began requesting to view theirs en masse, Stanford and Yale quickly and quietly moved to destroy the records, making sure that, from now on, no students will ever get a glimpse at their own.
The "confidential admissions material" I found in the folder wasn't much. It consisted of printouts of electronic worksheets that two admissions officers, called "readers," had filled out about me based on my application. (Some people apparently get three readers; I don't know why.) There was a text box where they composed short essays about me (neither of them longer than two paragraphs), slots to fill out biographical information, and drop-down menus where the readers had graded different parts of my application and compiled an "academic index."
Those electronic worksheets were eventually sent to the final admissions committee, allowing them to quickly assess my personality, intelligence, and background without having to pore over the reams of essays, transcripts, and questionnaires I had sent via the Common App. They were the ones who ultimately decided whether or not to let me in.
Most of what I read was pretty nice. One of the two admissions officers called an essay I wrote "a bit cheesy for my tastes," which turned out to be a huge understatement; the essay was included in my files, and it was so dripping with schmaltz that I couldn't make it to the end. At one place, one of my readers must have confused me with somebody else, because she made a note in her text box about a summer job I didn't have; it was way cooler than the one I actually had, so I'm not complaining.
Even the numerical indexes the readers used to grade my application were extremely subjective. Admissions officers selected numbers to represent how much my teachers and interviewers liked me. But while the first admissions officer thought that my alumni interview translated into a "9," the highest score available, the other read the same document and gave me a more tepid "6." The first admissions officer thought my teachers' recommendations were both "8"s; the second gave them a "5" and a "6."
Both of the admissions officers took care to note, explicitly and unsubtly, exactly the spot I would fill at Yale if I were accepted: I would be a "high-impact writer on campus," as one phrased it it. This is not exactly a secret of college admissions. It's well-known that elite schools don't just take the top 5% of applicants; they assemble themselves a marginally diverse, interesting, and "well-rounded" class that also happens to have good grades and test scores. Like a lot of people, I pretty much knew this when I applied, and I shaped my application so that admissions officers could neatly box me up and sell me to the committee. Which is exactly what they did.
Yale practices what's called "need-blind" admissions, so there was no mention of my parents' income anywhere on the form. But the worksheets do their best to allow anybody reading to approximate a guess at what that income might be. A separate text box noted my parents' jobs and where they'd gone to college; a series of drop-down menus allowed admissions officers to note the percentage of students at my high school that were minorities and those that went on to a four-year college. There was a checkbox to note whether or not I lived in a low-income census tract. In addition to pursuing racial diversity, Yale says it makes a concerted effort to accept students from a variety of different geographical areas and from public schools, especially inner-city and rural ones, as well as low-income and first-generation college students. It would have been easy to tell if I fit into any of those categories.
As it happened, I did: I was a student at a large inner-city public school in Minneapolis. My high school was under-resourced, with high percentages of poor, minority, and immigrant students. It had a robust program for Native American students and a program to support teenage mothers.
But I am none of those things. I'm white and grew up middle class. Both of my parents graduated from college — from Princeton, to be exact. I attended a selective magnet program, a mostly-white bubble within my school.
And yet, there in my files, I found a note from my an admissions officer: "She'd be a good admit for us from the Minneapolis Public Schools." The other officer's essay about me was even more explicit: "I'm in her corner," she wrote, "and would like to take one from the Minneapolis Public Schools."
Yale, apparently, wanted — even needed — a student to represent not just my high school but my entire 35,000-student school district, which is just 33% white, where 65% of students fall under federal poverty measures, and where almost a third of students are English-language learners. The admissions officers knew, I think, that it would look unfortunate to overlook a public school system as large as Minneapolis.
So they picked me, the white daughter of two Ivy League graduates. I was one of just two students from the entire system to be accepted to Yale and Harvard; the other, a friend of mine, was also the white, middle-class daughter of two college grads. (Two years later, the next student to attend Yale from my inner-city high school was also a white, middle-class friend of mine. Both his parents have master's degrees.)
In January, when droves of Stanford students began requesting their own admissions files, the school sent out a mass email trying to discourage them. It linked to a column in Time by Joel Stein, who requested his handwritten files back in the 1990s and had what Stanford called a "deflating experience": Stein's admissions officers wrote "he could drive you crazy," said he was in "hormonal overdrive," and, most crushingly, called him "not especially funny."
The records I saw, likely because they were digital, were much more clinical and much less exciting. They also weren't particularly revelatory. In most ways, what I learned in the basement of Yale's admissions office is nothing I haven't known since I got my acceptance letter. I don't know, of course, what was said in the committee room, but it seems clear to me that I got into Yale partly because I was smart, and partly because I was lucky, and partly because I played The Game well. But I also got in partly because of where I came from, and that was kind of bullshit.
LINK: After Flood Of Requests, Elite Colleges Begin Destroying Admissions Records
LINK: Here’s How To See What College Admissions Officers Wrote About You
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Pepsi has overtaken Diet Coke to claim the No. 2 spot on the U.S. soft drink leaderboard. The shift comes as the soda industry shrinks and diet drinks plummet even faster than full-sugar ones.
Ted S. Warren / AP
Soda consumption has fallen every year for the last decade, and lately it has been diet sodas falling even faster than full-sugar ones. New numbers released today by Beverage Digest , an industry publication, show the carnage continued in 2014, with one notable change: Diet Coke has fallen so far that it is no longer the country's second most popular soda.
The No. 2 spot, which Diet Coke claimed in 2010, was taken by Pepsi-Cola. Coke held on to its long-running top spot, while among the top 10 carbonated soft drink (CSD) brands, only Fanta pulled off significant growth for the year.
Here are the numbers from Beverage Digest — note in particular the big drops for the two diet colas.
Beverage Digest
Across the whole carbonated soft drink business, volumes sold are now back to levels from the mid-1990s, Beverage Digest said, down by about 14% since their peak in 2004. Per capita soft drink consumption is at its lowest since around 1986.
But thanks to higher pricing, the industry managed to pull in more dollars than it did in 2013, and squeezing more money out of a declining market looks like the strategy going forward. "Multiple senior executives at the big beverage companies have recently indicated that they are focusing strongly on dollar growth, using such tactics as package downsizing with higher per/ounce pricing," Beverage Digest said.
But the real action in the industry is away from sodas altogether. While Pepsi-Cola took the No. 2 spot in carbonated soft drinks, the bigger trend played out in the broader market for liquid refreshment beverages (LRBs), as the industry calls them. Encompassing water, iced teas, juices, and sodas, the LRB market has a new No. 3 company chasing after Coca Cola and PepsiCo: Nestlé Waters, which overtook Dr Pepper Snapple.
Unions released an open letter criticizing the “abhorrent” policies at Emirates, Etihad Airways, and Qatar Airways, which include requiring female employees to get permission before marriage or pregnancy.
Noah Seelam / Getty Images
Flight attendants unions served up some harsh words for the U.S. Travel Association today, publishing an open letter saying the industry group's support for Persian Gulf airlines like Emirates, Etihad Airways, and Qatar Airways amounts to support of repressive policies toward women and the LGBT community.
The letter is another escalation of the "open skies" fight, in which major U.S. airlines and their allies have launched blistering attacks on their Middle Eastern rivals.
The Association of Flight Attendants and the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, together with the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, sent the scathing letter Thursday to the U.S. Travel Association's board of directors.
The letter says the Association's President and CEO Roger Dow "is standing up for companies that demand female employees obtain permission before getting married or pregnant. And he is defending companies that bar lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people from employment. In addition to gender and sexual orientation discrimination, the Gulf carriers have imposed archaic weight and appearance standards on their employees."
The letter goes on to state that these practices were long ago quashed by American carriers, which the unions believe are at a disadvantage due to open-skies agreements signed by the U.S. and host countries like the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, both of which are home to state-backed airlines that have emerged as the world's fastest-growing international carriers, gradually taking over the lucrative market for long-haul flights.
The U.S. has signed open-skies deals with more than 100 countries, but airline executives and lobbyists have focused their scorn on the Persian Gulf carriers, which American carriers say receive unfair levels of government assistance.
The U.S. Travel Association has voiced support for such agreements, and Dow, its CEO, dismissed today's letter.
"Casting about for ways to smear the Gulf carriers won't change the fact that Open Skies has been overwhelmingly beneficial for U.S. consumers, U.S. job creation and the U.S. economy," he said in a statement sent to BuzzFeed News. "If the Big Three airlines and their unions are ever able to present compelling arguments for breaking the agreements with those priorities in mind, we're all ears."
The union letter is the latest in a series of blows traded between U.S. and Gulf carriers. In February, Delta CEO Richard Anderson compared the Gulf carriers to 9/11 terrorists. And last week, Qatar Airways CEO Akbar al-Baker accused Delta of operating "crap" airplanes.
"The unfortunate thing is that because they are so inefficient they want to blame us— whilst we are very efficient — for their failures and drawbacks," al-Baker said at a conference in Qatar, according to an AFP report.
But while the U.S. Travel Association, and the Gulf carriers, dismiss criticism as sour grapes from declining legacy carriers, the unions insist their complaints on discrimatory policies go to the heart of the union movement's history in the airline industry.
"Our union beat back discriminatory practices long ago, so that anyone with the heart of a Flight Attendant can become one," Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants and one of the letter's authors, told BuzzFeed News. "If discrimination exists anywhere, it's a threat to us everywhere, and especially in this case where clearly the intent is to drive other airlines out of business through unfair competition."
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New data from the Federal Reserve shows that 39% of cell phone owners use the devices for banking services. And more than half of all mobile banking users have deposited checks using an app.
Rob Carr / Getty Images
The Federal Reserve and Wall Street agree: More and more people are using their phones to interact with their banks, especially to do more basic financial tasks. In a report released today, the Fed found a large jump in mobile banking usage from 2013: 39% of cell phone owners are now using a mobile banking app, up from 33% in 2013, and just over half of mobile bank users have deposited a check, up from 28% the year before.
There has also been a rise in mobile payments: 22% of mobile phone owners made a mobile payment in the last year, up from 17% in 2013. Of those payments, the biggest portion was from scanning QR codes or barcodes — some 31%, although that was down from 39% in 2013.
And banks expect these trends to increase. Not only have mobile payments gotten much more convenient in the last year thanks to release of Apple Pay, but every major bank signed up with the service. While precise usage numbers are not available and the largest retailers, like Target or Wal-Mart, have not signed up, Apple said last month that 700,000 retail locations accept Apple Pay. Apple CEO Tim Cook said in January that $2 out of every $3 in contactless payments on the Visa, MasterCard, and American Express networks went through Apple Pay.
These trends are attractive to banks as they look to cut costs. Chase, one of the largest retail banks in the country, said that 10% of all of its deposits happen on mobile phones. Chase said that mobile log-ins to online banking had grown 81% per year since 2010, while calls and transactions done through tellers had shrunk 3% over that period of time.
Also, Chase said, mobile deposits cost Chase 3 cents, while ATM deposits cost 8 cents and teller deposits cost 65 cents. Chase's active mobile users have grown to 19.1 million in 2014 from 15.6 million in 2013, while the number of mobile deposits has grown to about 45 million, a 25% year-over-year jump.
JPMorgan Chase / Via files.shareholder.com
Federal Reserve / Via federalreserve.gov
The interactive video app is gorgeous and fast. But is it enough to beat Meerkat’s head start?
There's a whistle and a vibration in my pocket, and I pull out my phone and it's John Hodgman. He's sitting in an airport, in a Delta Airlines lounge, nursing what appears to be a whiskey on ice. He wants to talk.
Rather: He wants to answer my questions. And your questions. Anybody's questions, really. Hodgman looks bored, but what he's doing is fascinating. He's filming himself and broadcasting it live on an app called Periscope. As people ask him questions or tell him to do things, he replies to them by writing on a napkin. It's incredibly compelling, this chance to command a celebrity.
Another whistle and it's David Blaine, doing close-up magic tricks in a bar. The audience is on the other end of his phone. Another whistle and it's a friend of mine, petting his cat. My phone whistles again and now it's the investor Chris Sacca jabbering about an upcoming TV appearance. It's boring, but I sit through to the end, hoping for news. There are whistles for a kid's lacrosse game. Whistles for a violinist who plays songs on request. Whistles for an astronaut who plays guitar. Every whistle is a Periscope notification — it means someone somewhere is doing something and they want you to see it.
There is already just about everything imaginable on Periscope, which has only now hit the iOS app store: fascinating, boring, amazing stuff. It aims to be a window on the world, but an interactive window that supports not just real-time live video, but also real-time conversations around those videos.
Fire up the app, launch the camera, and the app tweets out a message (if you want it to) that you have gone live. Simultaneously, a notification fires off — with that little look-at-me whistle — to everyone following you on Periscope. As they join in, they can comment on what you're doing. And because it has super-low lag time — or latency, to use the term of art — people watching can comment on your actions more or less as they happen. It means that people watching the video can change the course of what's happening. They can chime in with questions or comments, and all the while tap-tap-tap on the screen to send a stream of hearts to the broadcaster. Don't want comments? Fine, you can turn them off. If you choose, you can let the video live on Persicope's servers afterwards, where it will stay for 24 hours before disappearing forever. Or you can choose to let your video be purely ephemeral, living only in the moment and then gone forever. It is delightfully fun.
"We want you to see the world through other people's eyes," says 26-year-old Periscope founder (one of two) Kayvon Beykpour. "It's a two-way teleportation device, and interactive enough that viewers can affect the experience." Beykpour is charming and handsome and smiles a lot for a guy who probably isn't sleeping much. The consensus that you hear about him is that he's really nice — which is something you don't always associate with someone who has already sold two companies (his first was an education-related startup) before hitting 30.
"The magic moment in Periscope is when you realize you can affect what you're seeing," he argues. "This isn't live-streaming — it's teleportation."
Teleportation?! I mean, no wonder Twitter bought Periscope for the always impressive-sounding "undisclosed sum" (it was, according to widespread rumors, somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million). Worth every penny. It's completely fantastic.
What's more, it's a great fit for Twitter. Like Twitter, it is centered around right now. Both take advantage of the moment in public-facing ways that Facebook and Google do not. And also like Twitter, it lets you go back and catch up on what you've missed — at least for a day. It has the same asynchronous relationship aspects, where the following relationship doesn't have to be a two-way agreement. Which means that yes, it lets everyday dweebs like you and me ask questions of Genuine Famous People and get casual glimpses into their lives.
There's just one problem: Meerkat.
A notification fires and I swipe down and it is Jimmy Fallon, Meerkatting. Meerkat! The bane of Periscope, and Twitter too.
Like Periscope, Meerkat is a live-video app that lets people tweet that they've begun streaming. And as with Periscope, you can comment on people's videos as they play. Sure, there are a few hitches and caveats there. The lag time is noticeably longer in Meerkat. The video quality isn't as good. And when you make a comment on a Meerkat video, what you are actually doing is tweeting, which is a little bit of an odd interaction.
But come on, it's great, too! And what's more: It's already popular.
The app launched after Twitter had bought its prize, and quickly caught fire. It was the talk of South by Southwest, even as Twitter moved to cut it off from piggybacking on its network by taking away Meerkat's ability to import Twitter's social graph.
At SXSW there was a party at the Driskill Hotel, and there, in the front of the line, was a man in a yellow Meerkat shirt demanding to be let in, pointing at his shirt and explaining that he was the founder of Meerkat. His was the hot-shit app of South by and everyone knows it! Letting him in would clearly make any party cooler, or at least that was the implication.
"What a fucking asshole," says Ben Rubin, who is the actual founder of Meerkat and who most definitely was not the guy at the front of the line, when BuzzFeed News reaches him by telephone. And you can tell he really means it, because he won't even call out Twitter as assholes for slicing into his Achilles just before SXSW.
"I think they're very nice to us; the only thing that was weird for us was they gave us only two hours to let us know they were cutting off the graph," says Rubin. He claims he had no idea that Twitter had bought Periscope and that he was suddenly competing with a giant, publicly traded tech company instead of a few startup guys. "Nobody had a fucking clue that they had quietly bought this company. But other than this they were very nice."
Yet despite the cutoff, Meerkat was still the talk of SXSW. And reporters took to it instantly, especially tech and political reporters. The week after SXSW, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest even sat for an interview on Meerkat. And what's more, it just raised a bunch of money. But Twitter is counting on all that not being enough.
"They have about 2–3 weeks ahead of us, and I think in the grand scheme of things the better product will win," argues Twitter's Kevin Weil, the company's vice president of product. Since he took over running product, the company has released a flurry of changes and updates. Weil exudes calm certainty when pushed about Meerkat: "We have the better product."
Rubin, however, thinks that there is room enough for everyone.
"[Periscope] is a very slick product, and very beautiful," he says. "It's very different from what we do." Rubin points out that Meerkat lets people schedule streams (so, for example, you can schedule one for 6 p.m. when it is merely 5 p.m. and let the world know about it in advance), and, unlike Periscope, it doesn't save videos by default.
But…come on, right? They're pretty similar? Rubin still thinks there is room enough for both — and more. He argues that there will eventually be four winners in different verticals — beautiful, formal, non-formal, and immediate — and makes comparisons to the way things shook out on social, where Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter won those respective verticals. Periscope, he says, may win the beautiful vertical, but he still has space to move in the immediate or non-formal ones.
Maybe so. But what Meerkat definitely has is a head start. The question is if it's enough. Take Instagram and Hipstamatic. Hipstamatic not only had a head start, it was an early media darling and even played prominently in an award-winning New York Times story — becoming part of the story itself. Yet today, when people think photo filtering, they think (and use) Instagram. Hipstamatic recently vacated its San Francisco headquarters, subleasing the space to another startup. Sometimes, moving first doesn't get you far enough.
This is, one would imagine, especially true if Twitter decides to really put marketing and muscle behind Periscope. While Meerkat is still seeing huge growth, according to Rubin, Twitter has the ability to put Periscope in front of hundreds of millions of people who have never even heard of Meerkat, much less installed it.
"I'm not particularly concerned about a month here or there: This is a multi-year investment for us," says Weil. "Our perspective is that live video is not just a new product, it's an entirely new category. I think it opens up entirely new behaviors, with new ways of interacting — from friends to fans to followers."
And it really, genuinely does feel like something new. Mobile live-streaming has been around for some time now, but has never really taken off — probably because it has really never worked terribly well. But a confluence of technologies has come together to make it seem truly possible now. For one: push notifications. Notifications are the most important interface element there is. They have taken center stage in the most recent versions of both Android and iOS, and as a result people are becoming increasingly comfortable with them. Add to this the camera and processor hardware, 4G networks, and operating system improvements and suddenly you understand why there has been a rush to build these personal mobile windows.
Yes, much of what we'll see there may simply be very boring, but Twitter and Facebook were both built on the backs of our banal, mundane lives. More than likely we're going to open them and see something new. Something we haven't thought of yet and cannot really even imagine until it happens. It's going to engender new actions and behaviors and methods of communicating as surely as Twitter did. Persicope or Meerkat or maybe even YouNow are going to make for entirely new ways of interacting.
Like, perhaps, interactive porn? It's something Periscope has thought of. Pornography will not be allowed, says Beykpour, but nudity will. (In other words, on Periscope, it will be presumably be OK to be naked, as long as you're not having any fun.)
But in the meantime, and until we get to those new things, there is an enormous amount of pressure to make this work. Twitter needs a hit, and Beykpour needs to prove that he can make its investment worthwhile. It's a hell of a lot for a 26-year-old.
"If you spend a lot of time thinking about how this will go, that's just not a very productive or healthy way to spend your days," says Beykpour. "I'm sure there are a lot of people who are excited and a lot of people are critical, but we're just trying not to focus on that."
And so for the past several weeks, he's just been focused on shipping. He's been focused on this moment, March 26, 2015, when he gets to introduce Periscope to the entire world. The company is suddenly feeling grown-up — it's got 10 people working full time now — and it's just moved into a new headquarters.
The building still feels pretty empty, but you can already picture it humming with people as more come on. As we walk around on a tour of the new digs, he's still unfamiliar with some of its features. On the roof, for example, there is a gas fire-pit surrounded by couches, left behind by the previous tenant, and he doesn't know if it runs on propane or natural gas. He points to a shutoff valve and explains that they don't have a key.
"They are probably universal, I could probably go buy one," he says with a shrug and a grin.
But even without it, the view from the roof is really great. It's a great building in an up-and-coming neighborhood, one of San Francisco's hottest, in fact. Yes, it's an all-round great place to be. I imagine that the last tenant — a company called Hipstamatic — must have really hated to leave all this behind.
LINK: Twitter Chokes Off Meerkat’s Access To Its Social Network
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The $10.4 million spent on the investigation is high given American Apparel only had $8.3 million in cash as of Dec. 31.
American Apparel
American Apparel burned through millions in much-needed cash last year investigating ousted founder and former chief executive officer Dov Charney. It's also facing an SEC investigation as part of that review.
The company said today that it spent $10.4 million on its internal investigation of Charney in 2014 and another $7 million on employment settlements and severance payments. Those are tremendous sums given American Apparel's size — while the company says it has enough financing for the next 12 months, it only had $8.3 million in cash as of Dec. 31. It also reported that sales for the year tumbled 4% to $609 million.
The company said in its annual filing that it's being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with its internal committee's review of Charney, a process that began in July. American Apparel said it received a formal order of investigation on Feb. 5 and "intends to cooperate fully" with the SEC as the regulatory body works to determine whether any laws were broken as part of the review.
American Apparel officially fired Charney in December after first serving him with a termination letter in June, citing a long list of alleged offenses from misuse of corporate funds to violating sexual harassment policies. Charney's lawyers deemed the investigation that followed the initial letter a "complete sham," and the former executive has been working to return to the company he founded in the late 90s.
American Apparel has a new slate of executives, mostly appointed by hedge fund Standard General, who are working to resurrect the money-losing brand. The chain's new CEO wants to tone down American Apparel's notoriously provocative advertisements and has fired a number of longtime employees from its creative team as part of a redirection.
The retailer is dealing with an insurgency out of current employees who remain loyal to Charney as well as grievances from its largely immigrant workforce. Employees have filed multiple complaints against the company with the National Labor Relations Board claiming intimidation while others are planning to file wrongful termination suits, BuzzFeed News has reported.
Chains like Forever 21 and H&M have dramatically slashed the price of clothing in the past decade.
Abercrombie & Fitch / Via abercrombie.com
Abercrombie & Fitch, once the priciest teen store in American malls, is now hawking $12 T-shirts.
The company is "committed to providing our customers choice and value through a balanced assortment at good, better, and best price points," Chief Financial Officer Joanne Crevoiserat said at a conference yesterday. "We are now featuring select styles with entry-level price points that are accessible to more customers."
"Entry-level" means cheap. Abercrombie's "Essentials" include $12 T-shirts and $10 crop tops, while Hollister's "Must-Haves" begin at $9.95. Those are especially low prices for Abercrombie, which for years was able to sell T-shirts bearing its label for $30 to $50 a pop.
While Abercrombie's brand has taken a hammering with American teens in recent years, the price plunge underscores the extent to which fast-fashion chains and discount retailers have transformed the world of casual apparel.
With the rise of Forever 21 and H&M and destinations such as T.J.Maxx and Marshalls, brands like Abercrombie are no longer able to command high prices for simple T-shirts and tank tops. And the pressure is only increasing: Forever 21 made headlines last year with the introduction of F21 Red, an even cheaper chain featuring its basics at prices like $1.80 for a camisole and $3.80 for a T-shirt. The company plans to expand F21 Red even further this year, despite questions around how such clothing can be manufactured in a humane and sustainable fashion.
To be sure, part of Abercrombie's price dropping is due to the fact that teens are far less enthusiastic about wearing logos across their chest than they used to be. That, added to Abercrombie's slip in status, has forced the company to cut back on logo offerings and stripped out the premium it was once able to charge for its name on a shirt.
But without that advantage, Abercrombie and other retailers are grappling with the dramatically low prices consumers have come to expect on basic apparel.
Recently, the retail industry has been eyeing British retailer Primark, which will enter the U.S. later this year and put more pressure on clothing prices than ever before.
T-shirts cost a mere $4 at Primark, compared with $6 at H&M and Forever 21, $18 at Urban Outfitters, and $20 at Zara, according to Cowen & Co.
"Primark represents fast fashion 2.0 given even lower prices combined with an appealing shopping environment," Oliver Chen, an analyst at the firm, wrote in a March 17 note. "Primark plans to compete mainly on price, with its low prices undercutting competitors in most categories."
In other words, that means the price of basics may continue to slip even further.
Holiister / Via hollisterco.com
LINK: An Even Cheaper Forever 21 Highlights Low-Cost Manufacturing
Another financial startup is getting snatched up by a much larger, older, and more traditional finance company.
LearnVest founder and CEO Alexa von Tobel
Mandel Ngan / Getty Images
Milwaukee-based insurance and financial company Northwestern Mutual is buying financial planning startup Learnvest, the two companies announced today.
Learnvest, unlike automated financial advisers like Wealthfront or Betterment, assigns real-live financial advisers for people after they fill out a questionnaire and have a financial plan generated for them. LearnVest, which launched in 2009, says it has 1.5 million users and will keep its founder, Alexa von Tobel, on as CEO.
LearnVest charges its customers $299 to set up an account and then $19 a month. The planners are not traditional financial advisers who wine and dine their clients; they're instead available via email or over the phone, and each serves many users. Some of LearnVest's services are free; the company says it has close to 10,000 "premium" clients.
LearnVest's own platform will be integrated with Northwestern Mutual's over time, a company spokesperson said.
"It's all about the client relationship — that's what sets us apart," said Northwestern Mutual's Chairman and CEO John Schlifske. "We know from experience that consumers want a trusted, experienced professional who can provide the best product solutions, planning process, and technology platforms."
Learnvest had raised $28 million last year in a round led by Northwestern Mutual. The company raised a more than $72 million, according to the venture capital database Crunchbase. LearnVest has 150 employees. Financial terms of the deals were not disclosed.
"LearnVest has made it our mission to make unbiased financial planning affordable, accessible, and delightful for all American households—a mission we will now continue with the support of Northwestern Mutual," von Tobel said in a statement.
While some financial technology and planning startups have raised hundreds of millions of dollars of outside capital, LearnVest is not the first to be snatched up by an established player.
BBVA bought Simple, a banking startup, last year; Capital One purchased Level, a financial-planning and budgeting app early this year; and tax prep giant Intuit bought Mint in 2009.
Acquiring a technology or planning startups is often an easy way for a legacy financial company to acquire technology-savvy employees and software users actually like to use without having to develop it themselves.
In January, a student group at Stanford University published details on how to access your college admissions files. Now some of the country’s most selective schools are choosing to destroy the documents.
Natalia Bratslavsky / Getty Images
This January, a group of Stanford University students gained access to their admissions files, using the provisions of a little-known federal privacy law. The point of the exercise, they said, was to increase transparency and accountability in the highly secretive world of elite college admissions.
But in the face of a flood of students asking to see their files — Stanford reportedly received 2,800 requests — several elite schools are now scrubbing admissions data, destroying existing files and ending policies that would keep them on record once students are admitted.
Yale and Stanford universities have both officially — and quietly — changed their approach to admissions record keeping, the schools said, preventing many students who had requested the files from accessing the information. In accordance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, students who requested the files before the change, which came about 15 days after Stanford students began publicizing the law, will be able to view them.
Stanford and Yale admit just 5% and 6.25% of students, respectively, in what can appear to outsiders to be a particularly obtuse and subjective process. Stanford rejected 40,000 applicants last year.
Harvard University is currently embroiled in a lawsuit over its admissions policies, with a complaint alleging it discriminates against Asian-American applicants by limiting the number of whom can be accepted each year. Some had speculated that Harvard students' admissions records could shed light on the merits of the case. Harvard did not respond to repeated requests for comment on whether it still retained students' evaluative admissions records.
Both Yale and Stanford presented the changes as a return to original policies regarding admissions records: Before the files were retained digitally, paper records were "disposed of on a regular basis, simply because there was not space to store them all," said Karen Peart, a Yale spokeswoman.
Lisa Lapin, a spokeswoman for Stanford, said that the flood of requests prompted Stanford to "ask ourselves, 'Why do we need these records?' … They have not had any use to the university, there's no need to keep them, and we historically didn't keep them."
Peart said allowing students to view their admissions records could be compromising to the admissions process at Yale, "discouraging admissions officers from making specific and frank judgments about a student's application."
Stanford had previously tried to dissuade students from viewing the more sensitive parts of their admissions files by sending out a mass email which read, in part: "Please ask yourself: What benefit do I seek from reviewing these additional admissions records? … Will my life be better for having reviewed them?" The email contained a link to an essay in Time magazine by a former student, who recounted his own "deflating experiences" viewing his admissions records in the early 1990s.
The university also began more strictly implementing a policy that allowed students just 20 minutes to look through their files in person. Students were not allow to take photographs or make copies of the files, according to reports in an anonymous campus newsletter, the Fountain Hopper, that organized the initial campaign. Before the flood of requests, the university willingly handed over copies of the records, according to documents viewed by BuzzFeed News.
Mimi Doe, an expert in elite college admissions, said she wasn't surprised that Yale and Stanford had made moves to prevent students from viewing the files. "It's so typical," she said. "It's a business, it's a huge business."
But Doe, who runs a four-day, $14,000 "College Application Boot Camp" geared toward elite college admissions, said there was unlikely to be anything revelatory in any of the admissions files that were scrubbed by Yale and Stanford. "There's no big mystery," Doe said. "You know exactly what your application contained — there aren't any secrets. If you're the one student who got in because your father donated a library, you know it."
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The Brazilian private equity firm 3G, which bought Heinz in 2013, will add cheese, coffee, and Jell-O to its pantry.
Mike Mozart / Via flic.kr
Kraft Foods Group's short history as an independent company will take another turn as it agrees to be bought by Heinz, which itself was bought by Brazilian private equity firm 3G two years ago.
The companies announced Wednesday morning that Heinz would buy 51% of Kraft and pay out a $16.50-per-share, about $10 billion, special dividend to Kraft shareholders, funded by 3G and Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway.
Combined, the companies said, the Pittsburgh-and-Chicago-suburbs based food behemoth would have $28 billion in annual revenues and be the world's fifth largest food and beverage company and the third largest in the United States.
Kraft had $18 billion in revenue this past year, about flat from the year before and just over $1 billion in profits. Before deal talks were reported by the Wall Street Journal Wednesday evening, Kraft's market capitalization was about $37 billion at a price of $61.33. In pre-market trading, Kraft's stock is trading up to $76.88.
"I am delighted to play a part in bringing these two winning companies and their iconic brands together," Buffett, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway said in a statement. "This is my kind of transaction, uniting two world-class organizations and delivering shareholder value. I'm excited by the opportunities for what this new combined organization will achieve."
Kraft's brands include its eponymous cheese, Oscar Meyer, Maxwell House, Capri Sun, and Jell-O.
The merger is being overseen by Kraft's new chief executive John Cahill, who took over for Tony Vernon at the end of last year. Cahill was previously a partner at the private equity fund Ripplewood. Cahill will become vice chairman of the new company, while Heinz chief executive officer Bernando Hees will chief executive of the merged company.
Hees came from Burger King, another iconic American food company bought by 3G, and instituted an extensive cost cutting program that has become the private equity firm's signature. A round of costs and "zero-based budgeting" — where all costs are assumed to be at zero and have to be rejustified — will probably be implemented at Kraft.
Alex Behring, a partner at 3G and the chairman of Heinz, will be chairman of the new company.
"Our combined brands and businesses mean increased scale and relevance both in the U.S. and internationally. We have the utmost respect for the Kraft business and its employees, and greatly look forward to working together as we integrate the two companies," Behring said in a statement.
3G, run by Brazilian billionaire financier Jorge Paulo Lemann, has a taste for iconic North American food brands.
Not only did 3G buy Heinz with Buffett's assistance in 2013, the firm also acquired Burger King for $4 billion in 210. Burger King — run by former 3G partner Daniel Schwartz and 70% owned by the firm — acquired Canadian coffee-and-donuts company Tim Hortons last year, again with funding help from Buffett. The companies now exist under the auspices of a new company run by Schwartz, Restaurant Brands International, that is about 51% percent owned by 3G.
Kraft itself is the product of decades of buyouts and spinoffs. Its parent company was bought by tobacco company Phillip Morris in 1988 for $13 billion, where it was combined with General Foods, which had Oscar Meyer, Jell-O, and Kool-Aid. Kraft was then combined again with another food conglomerate when Phillip Morris bought what was remaining of Nabisco (which went through its own tobacco buyout-and-spinoff) in 2000.
In 2001, Phillip Morris sold sell some of what was now Kraft Foods to the public, and spun it off entirely in 2007. Kraft then split off again in 2012, forming Kraft Foods and renaming the legacy company Mondelez International, which hung onto brands like Ritz, Oreos, Triscuit, Wheat Thins, and Trident.
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The restaurant chain says its new series of short web videos has racked up millions of clicks among the young viewers it craves.
Denny's / Via youtube.com
Nothing gets a young heart racing faster than original, emotional, authentic digital content, according to today's top brand experts. And Denny's says it's got a hit on its hands with a new animated cast of breakfast food characters and a sassy cup of coffee.
"We have over five million hits on a new animated group of characters that are an egg, bacon, sausage, hash browns, and a pancake," Denny's CEO John Miller said at a conference Tuesday, discussing the chain's outreach to young adults. "And there is a bold cup of coffee with a dark mustache and a little bit of an attitude."
He continued: "These had over five million hits in the last 100 days and probably nobody in this room has seen one of them, right? So they are targeted through CollegeHumor and different channels that appeal to somebody anywhere from 18 to 29 or 30. And they're really popular but you got to ... be in that content channel," Miller told the group of Wall Street investors and analysts.
Denny's, which brought in $2.6 billion in sales last year and says it's in the "early innings of a revitalization," follows brands like Chipotle and Kmart in advertising by way of original web series. While some chains aim to conceal or downplay their products in such content, Denny's placements are overt, based on the minute-or-less shorts starring "America's favorite breakfast sweethearts." In "Baconspiracy," Episode 10 of the series, the crew tries to work out why bacon consumption is at an all-time high.
Denny's is best known for its all-day breakfast fare and late-night goodies. It has said in a regulatory filing that 36% of an average week's sales are made between Friday "late night" and Sunday lunch.
Miller, who has touted Denny's Klout score in previous conference calls, reiterated that those scores "are very high and growing." Efforts such as its web series are aimed at increasing "affinity and affection for the brand," particularly among twentysomethings, who make up about 30% of Denny's customer base.
"It won't be general market, but there is a strong following for these already and they are brand new," Miller said of its web series. "Digital online is super high frequency, smaller crowd, tends to be a little higher income. So it's hard for a midscale brand to be very good at it. And we've been very good at it."
A controversy last week shows how the Common Core could become a liability for the world’s largest education company.
Russell Contreras / AP
Pearson, the world's largest education company, has made hundred of millions of dollars off of the Common Core. It has won lucrative contracts to design and administer Common Core tests all over the country, and its name is stamped on Common Core-aligned textbooks and homework assignments taken home by millions of American students.
But Pearson's close alignment with the Common Core — its name has essentially become synonymous with tests linked to the standards — has also become a growing liability for the company and its public image. Sixty percent of Americans say they oppose the Common Core, and so do many pundits on both the right and the left.
They have played a major role in dragging seemingly minor scandals involving Pearson — which would have once been the territory of a few niche bloggers — into the national spotlight.
In a bid to diversify its business, which was once heavily reliant on a now-declining print textbook industry, the London-based Pearson has worked to expand its footprint in American standardized testing. After entering the market in 2000, just before the rollout of the test-heavy No Child Left Behind Act, Pearson now has a market share of 39% in the testing industry — dwarfing its competitors, none of which control more than 15%. Testing contracts bring in more than $250 million a year for Pearson, according to a Brookings Institute analysis.
That testing business connects Pearson to the furor over Common Core standards, which have become one of the most controversial topics in American education. Pearson won the Common Core's most lucrative contract, a testing contract by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, which could be worth more than $100 million in this year alone.
Opposition to the Common Core, now more than a year old, has hardly faded from the news: In his speech announcing his presidential campaign yesterday, Ted Cruz called to "repeal" Common Core, putting the standards alongside the Affordable Care Act as examples of government overreach. "Instead of a federal government that seeks to dictate school curriculum through Common Core, imagine repealing every word of Common Core," he said. "Imagine embracing school choice as the civil rights issue of the next generation."
When the comedian Louis CK delivered a Twitter rant against the Common Core, he blamed "pearson or whoever the hell" for writing confusing test questions that made his daughters cry — what he called a "dark time" in American education.
Last week, anti-Common Core sentiment stoked the flames of Pearson's biggest controversy yet. An education blogger, Bob Braun, broke the news that Pearson was monitoring social media use by students taking its tests for leaked test questions — as Braun put it, "spying."
Teachers unions, longtime foes of Pearson's, capitalized on the story, criticizing the company in the name of student privacy and starting a petition demanding it end its practices. But the story brought out the ire of the right-wing media, too, largely because it was instantly linked to Common Core — and right-wing fears about government overreach.
The conservative website Breitbart published several articles on what it called "the Common Core's Pearson spying on kids." On Twitter, an anti-Pearson hashtag promoted by teachers union president Randi Weingarten, #PearsonIsWatching, began appearing next to #StopCommonCore. Politico called Pearson and the company it had hired to monitor students' accounts "The Common Core's Cyber Spies."
Before becoming CFO of the investment bank Morgan Stanley, Porat was a banker for tech companies like Amazon, eBay, and Priceline.
Ruth Porat
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
Another Wall Street veteran is leaving banking to become chief financial officer of a large tech company. Morgan Stanley's chief financial officer Ruth Porat will become the chief financial officer of Google, the company said today.
Porat, who has been CFO at Morgan Stanley since 2010, is a natural fit for a head finance job in Silicon Valley. In the 1990s, Porat worked with technology companies like Amazon to take them public and was then a senior merger and acquisitions banker. Google, of course, is already public, but is also a frequent buyer of technology companies like Nest, which it bought for over $3 billion, or Waze, which it bought for almost $1 billion.
The last banker to make the trip west was Anthony Noto, who transitioned from being Twitter's banker in charge of taking them public to the company's chief financial officer last year.
"We're tremendously fortunate to have found such a creative, experienced and operationally strong executive," Google chief executive officer Larry Page said in a statement.
Google previous CFO, Patrick Pichette, announced his resignation in March, saying in a long, personal post on Google+ that he wanted to spend more time with his family after seven years running Google's finances.
This is not the first time Porat has been considered for a higher profile gig — in 2013 she was considered for a senior role in the Treasury Department but ended up staying at Morgan Stanley. Porat will start at Google in May, the company said.
"I'm delighted to be returning to my California roots and joining Google," Porat said in a statement. "Growing up in Silicon Valley, during my time at Morgan Stanley and as a member of Stanford's Board, I've had the opportunity to experience first hand how tech companies can help people in their daily lives. I can't wait to roll up my sleeves and get started."
