Bain Officially Gets Biz Dev, While Media Unit Moves to Stricker at Twitter (Plus TV Memo!)

As Re/code reported last week, Twitter sales leader Adam Bain will take over business development at Twitter, while marketing and communications head Gabriel Stricker will head its media unit.

And how did I find out about the changes? Journalismism!

Actually, Bain switched his profile title on Twitter, as did Stricker, to reflect the new duties.

Then, Twitter confirmed the moves to me when I asked. (And the Pulitzer goes to …)

The changes come in the wake of the sudden departure of COO Ali Rowghani last week, which set in motion a very significant management shift. He left the San Francisco social communications company after increasing tensions with CEO Dick Costolo over a number of issues. Those included the loss of the important product organization, after the hiring of former Google exec Daniel Graf. When brought on, he reported directly to Costolo, instead of Rowghani.

Rowghani had purview over business development, now under Jana Messerschmidt, who also runs developer relations. Chloe Sladden, who also left last week, headed North American media under Rowghani, who also had international growth and strategy head Katie Jacobs Stanton under his management.

Now Stricker is her boss, although Stanton is the leading internal candidate to take over all of media on a global basis, said sources. What happens in the media area will be most interesting, because, for the most part, media seems to be something that Twitter had gotten right — at least from the perspective of the media guys.

Twitter has courted TV — and to a lesser extent, other media — quite adroitly, presenting themselves as a partner instead of a competitor. Much of that credit gets assigned, at least, to Sladden. Another chunk of it goes to Bain and his team, for pitching advertising products theoretically designed to augment traditional ads — again, instead of competing with it.

Twitter did stumble this spring with a bone-headed move designed to freeze Facebook out of TV, which ended up making much more work for Twitter’s TV partners. It backed off later.

One interesting area will be in the TV space, for which Twitter initiated a search for a new head of partnerships in the United States in May. You can see the memo on that from SpencerStuart embedded below.

It read in part:

As Twitter grows and continues to evolve its product experience, TV will be a key focus for the company given the high potential to drive user growth. The mission is to make Twitter essential to TV fans.

The Head of TV Partnerships is Twitter’s key liaison to the TV industry and has the responsibility of shaping and driving Twitter's impact on the industry. This executive has the mandate to attract the highesst volume of the best quality TV content to Twittter, and is tasked with making Twitter essential to the business of its TV partners.

That job has largely been done by Fred Graver, who is listed in the memo as the director of creative TV. He is not in line for this new job, although the search is on hold for now under Stricker, sources said.

The move to media to Stricker might seem unusual, but he has been working with Sladden over the last two years on many media efforts, including industry meetings.

Here is the TV partnership memo to peruse:

Tech Luminaries Want to Light Up the Golden Gate Next

Nellie Bowles

Illuminate the Arts — the nonprofit group responsible for funding the Bay Lights installation along the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge — had a kickoff party for its latest fundraising drive last night.

Delicately encircled in LED lights, ballerinas from Menlo Park’s Menlowe Ballet darted around as the entertainment outside foodie favorite Coqueta restaurant on Pier 5 on San Francisco’s Embarcadero. The event’s drink special had tapioca balls added to it — when sipped, the little white balls floated around, sort of like bay lights.

I learned two interesting things at the party: The new, stronger and slightly re-angled Bay Lights, which will be installed next year, will let viewers in the San Francisco booming, tech-heavy South of Market districts enjoy the nightly light show. Currently, only people north of Market Street can see the patterns created by the preprogrammed lights.

Nellie Bowles Ben Davis, founder and CEO of Illuminate the Arts

The 25,000 LED bulbs that decorate a two-mile span along the Bay Bridge, a commuter path between San Francisco and Oakland, cost about $30 a day to keep lit. Installed in March of 2013, the original plan was that the lights would come down at the end of March in 2015, when the bridge has to undergo routine updates. The $8 million needed came from tech leaders like WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and other, more established San Francisco philanthropists. Illuminate the Arts wants to raise another $12 million to get them reinstalled in 2015, and kept up until 2026.

I also heard that people are already gunning for the iconic Golden Gate Bridge to be the Bay Area’s next bedazzled bridge.

Ben Davis, founder and CEO of Illuminate the Arts, wore a pin made by Leo Villareal, the artist who designed the Bay Lights installation. Pinned to Davis’s undershirt was a piece of plastic with flickering little light nodes that glowed through his button-down shirt.

“It’s more subtle that way,” Davis said.

The Bay Lights are going to come down for routine updates in 2015 while CalTrans, the state transportation agency responsible for the bridge, repaints it.

“CalTrans is innovating with how they paint the bridge, and those updates will last at least a decade now,” Davis said, meaning that the lights could potentially stay up for an additional decade. “Then an innovation has occurred around the lights to make them more robust.”

Nellie Bowles An exposed Bay Light pin, designed by Leo Villareal

The brighter lights seemed great to the organizers and creators of the public art piece — an even more spectacular bridge display! But they posed a new problem: Driver distraction.

“So we began to twist them,” Davis said. “We had to twist them so far we lost Treasure Island, anyway,” he said, indicating the small man-made residential island between San Francisco and Oakland. “So we kept twisting.”

And then Davis and his team discovered a happy accident.

“Now the emerging San Francisco will be able to appreciate them in their full luster,” Davis said. “Now we can say, ‘Welcome, Southeast San Francisco, you’re part of the party, too.’”

Shervin Pishevar, a prominent venture capitalist and philanthropist who is on the board of Illuminate the Arts, said he was excited about the latest fundraising push to raise $1.2 million in 45 days, using the Crowdtilt platform. But his ambitions are set on the Bay Bridge’s much more famous cousin, the Golden Gate Bridge.

“The original Golden Gate Bridge had designs for soft lighting all along it,” said Pishevar, who has invested in Uber and Warby Parker, and now runs a fund called Sherpa. “I was standing on top of it the other day.”

You can get on top?

Nellie Bowles Shervin Pishevar, keeping the lights on

“Sure. There’s an elevator. For the Bay Bridge, I actually climbed to the top, clipped (Dropbox founder and CEO) Drew Houston into a harness, and we both climbed up,” he said. “But anyway, I was standing at the top of the Golden Gate and realized how beautiful it would look with lights.”

So this is Pishevar’s new mission. And as one of the heavy donors now involved, he’s got some sway in the matter.

It is somewhat surprising that people would be eager to start on doing a similar enhancement of the Golden Gate Bridge. Getting the Bay Lights project funded was an enormous project, with so many hurdles to overcome that the accompanying documentary about the effort is titled “Impossible Light.” But in just two years, the Bay Lights have become a beloved part of the city landscape.

Inside, chatting by the heaping platters of paella along the bar, Elana Yonah Rosen, founder of the Illuminate the Arts board, also recalled when she started thinking of the next frontier.

Nellie Bowles Churros for dessert at the Bay Lights party

“When I met Shervin, he put his arm around me, and he pointed to the Bay Bridge and he said, ‘You see that,’ and I said, ‘I do,’ and then he pointed to the Golden Gate,” she recalled. “A man with such clarity to understand one bridge and to have a vision for the other, it’s remarkable.”

Will they get any pushback from locals about making over the classically beautiful Golden Gate with lights? No doubt. Then again, they did with the Bay Bridge, as well.

Enjoying a glass of zinfandel, artist Villareal said he was impressed by San Francisco’s determination to keep the lights on.

“Two years is a good long run for a piece of monumental public art,” said Villareal, who was wearing mustard-colored pants. “But people seem to want to keep it. And this project has always been about the impossible.”

Are you ready to light up the Golden Gate?

“Someone told you about that?”

I have my sources.

He sighed and looked up at the ceiling.

“I’m up for it,” he said. “I could be up for it.”

Oracle Earnings, Revenue Miss Estimates

Oracle reported quarterly earnings and revenue that missed analysts’ expectations on Thursday, sending shares lower in extended-hours trading. The company posted fiscal fourth-quarter earnings, excluding items, of 92 cents per share, up from 87 cents a share in the year-earlier period.

Revenue increased to $11.32 billion from $10.95 billion a year ago. Analysts had expected the company to report earnings, excluding items, of 95 cents a share on $11.48 billion in revenue, according to a consensus estimate from Thomson Reuters.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

T-Mobile CEO Apologizes for Saying Other Carriers “Raping” Their Customers

T-Mobile CEO John Legere loves a good expletive-laden tirade to discuss his competitors, but acknowledges that he went too far on Wednesday night when he described rival carriers as “raping” their customers.

“The drawback to having no filter when I speak … sometimes I need a filter,” Legere said in a tweet on Thursday. “Genuinely apologize to those offended last night.”

Legere had plenty of choice words for AT&T, Verizon and Sprint on Wednesday, including saying, “Those fuckers hate you.”

His comments came during the company’s latest “Un-carrier” event where the company announced a week-long iPhone Test Drive, a new music service and the ability for customers to stream music without incurring data charges.

Washboard: New Startup Sells $10 Rolls of Quarters for $15 Each

If today being National Martini Day hasn’t driven you to pour a stiff drink yet, this will. Jiminy.

(Via Chris Ziegler.)

 ★ 

Manual Camera Controls in iOS 8

Joshua Ho, writing for AnandTech:

To be clear, iOS 8 will expose just about every manual camera control possible. This means that ISO, shutter speed, focus, white balance, and exposure bias can be manually set within a custom camera application. Outside of these manual controls, Apple has also added gray card functionality to bypass the auto white balance mechanism and both EV bracketing and shutter speed/ISO bracketing.

I’ve said it before and will say it again: Apple has become one of the leading camera companies in the world, and quite possibly the most innovative. The image quality from the iPhone camera is an ideal example of hardware and software being inextricably tied in Apple products.

 ★ 

Sweethearting

2005 idea from Jason Kottke:

Pings would be perfect for situations when texting or a phone call is too time consuming, distracting, or takes you out of the flow of your present experience. If you call your husband on the way home from work every night and say the same thing each time, perhaps a ping would be better…you wouldn’t have to call and your husband wouldn’t have to stop what he was doing to answer the phone. You could even call it the “sweetheart ping” or “sweethearting”… in the absence of a prearraged “ping me when you’re leaving”, you could ping someone to let them know you’re thinking about them.

Sounds a lot like Yo, except somehow Kottke’s idea seems nifty and Yo sounds douchey. (Thanks to DF reader Mark Ott.)

 ★ 

The Martini FAQ

Given today’s holiday, Brad Gadberry’s The Martini FAQ is well-worth a re-link. It is a delightful and comprehensive resource, and as I noted previously, I've never seen anyone so deftly navigate the gin/vodka divide.

In that spirit, as five o’clock rolls westward across the continent, may I also direct your attention once again to Jim Coudal’s Perfect.

 ★ 

‘Did You Put Fucking Zunes in Our Lockers?’

A peek at Steve Ballmer’s Gmail inbox, from Justin Halpern at Grantland.

 ★ 

The Near-Death of Grand Central Terminal

Kevin Baker, writing for Harper’s:

Still unsatisfied, New York Central proposed in 1961 to build a three-level bowling alley over Grand Central's Main Concourse, which would have required lowering the ceiling from sixty feet to fifteen and cutting off from view its glorious blue mural of the zodiac. This, too, was stopped. Foiled again, New York Central resorted to plastering the terminal with ads and bombarding travelers with canned Muzak, complete with commercials, over the public address system.

Good lord.

 ★ 

Yo

Another day, another app pre-installed on the phones they give you in hell.

 ★ 

Excited to be already collaborating with my friend…

Excited to already be collaborating with my friend and new colleague James Archer on an internal project for Crowd Favorite.

I know everyone is knocking Amazon Prime Music, bu…

I know everyone is knocking Amazon Prime Music, but I just listened to an hour of Buddy Guy music I didn’t have last week.

The Bay Lights, The LED Art Project Backed By Big Tech Names, Kicks Off $1.2M Crowdfunding Campaign

 Just over a year ago, a large scale art project called The Bay Lights turned the Bay Bridge, the San Francisco Bay Area structure that’s historically been the plainer sister to the famed Golden Gate Bridge, into a glittering destination in its own right. But as iconic as the Bay Lights have quickly become, it turns out that they’re not set to be here to stay. The original erection… Read More

The Next Fitbits Uncovered: Heart-Rate Sensors, GPS Info, Atmospheric Tracking, And Smartphone Notifications

 The Fitbit product line is looking a little stale especially after the recall of the Fitbit Force. But that’s seemingly about to change with the addition of several upcoming, and upgraded, models including a fitness tracker with a heart rate sensor. Meet the Fitbit Surge, Fitbit Charge and the PurePulse. Read More

Google Donates Mod_Spdy To The Apache Foundation

 With mod_spdy, Google brought its SPDY protocol, which by now forms the basis of the next version of HTTP, to the popular and open-source Apache web server more than two years ago. That move undoubtedly helped popularize SPDY (pronounced “SPeeDY”), which is now supported by most popular web servers and browsers. With those goals achieved, Google today announced that it has… Read More

Adobe’s Ink And Slide For The iPad Are Useful, But Expensive, Additions To An Artist’s Workflow

 With yesterday’s unveiling of the Ink and Slide, Adobe has made its first foray into the realm of hardware gadgets. The company describes the pair of gadgets as a “Creative Cloud Pen and Digital Ruler.” Read More

Microsoft Updates The Surface Pro 3 Ahead Of Its Release Tomorrow

 Tomorrow is launch day in Canada and the U.S. for the Surface Pro 3, and to make sure the device has as smooth a launch as possible, Microsoft has released a set of updates for the tablet-hybrid. The updates include a slurry of performance boosts, as well as a fix for a power button issue that was annoying some. If you have a review device, the code should be live for you now. Otherwise, you… Read More