HP Settles Autonomy Shareholder Lawsuits

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As we told you was likely last week, computing giant Hewlett-Packard has settled a series of shareholder derivative lawsuits stemming from its 2011 acquisition of the British software firm Autonomy. The company announced the specifics late today.

Under terms of the deal, which is still subject to approval by the relevant courts, lawyers for the plaintiffs will assist HP in any potential lawsuits the company may file against former Autonomy executives including founder and former CEO Mike Lynch and its former CFO Shushovan Hussain. Talks leading to the settlement have been underway since February.

HP’s announcement spells out the results — but none of the details — of the result of an internal investigation conducted by its board of the claims brought by the plaintiffs. That committee, HP says, found that the company has legitimate claims it can pursue against Lynch and Hussain and maybe others. HP hasn’t sued anyone yet, but it has referred the matter to regulatory agencies in the US and the UK.

HP has claimed since late 2012 that Autonomy executives engaged in accounting improprieties that had the effect of inflating the British company’s valuation ahead of is acquisition. HP paid about $11 billion for it, but later wrote down the value of the acquisition by about $5 billion as part of a larger $8 billion write down announced in 2012. Lynch has continued to argue that he did nothing wrong.

The deal closes the book on three lawsuits, two filed in California courts, and one in federal court. The shareholders group sued HP in 2012 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California for allegedly misleading statements about the financial health of Autonomy. There are still several shareholder class action lawsuits pending that are unaffected by this settlement.

HP also said it’s in the process of adopting “enhancements,” to its procedures for evaluating acquisitions. The timing of that statement is important because HP CEO Meg Whitman has signaled several times that she’s interested in making an acquisition sometime soon, one that would, given the history with Autonomy, be heavily scrutinized.

“Buy Now” Buttons Start Appearing in Tweets. Is Twitter Shopping Finally Here?

Vjeran Pavic

Two things stand out about the sneakers pictured above in a screenshot from Twitter. First, their list price is a cool $170 million (though we imagine that’s a glitch).

Second, there’s a "Buy now" button included in the tweet.

What's that you say? You didn't know you could buy stuff directly from a tweet? Neither did we. So what do we have here?

The products being shared in these tweets come from a shopping app called Fancy. Back in January, Re/code uncovered a mock-up online that was created by Fancy and that a source said was used to pitch Twitter on what a Twitter e-commerce integration could look like. But Twitter didn’t launch any buying capability within tweets, until maybe now.

When Re/code uncovered these "Buy now" buttons today, they only surfaced in Twitter’s mobile app and tapping on them didn’t do anything. But Re/code did speak to someone who said that tapping on the button earlier on Monday did lead to a checkout page opening up within the Twitter app. Re/code could not replicate that experience.

So did Fancy accidentally make public another Twitter Commerce experiment? Is Twitter starting to facilitate in-tweet purchases?

The companies aren’t saying. Twitter spokesman Jim Prosser declined to comment, and Fancy execs didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

That said, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for Fancy to include “Buy now” buttons in a tweet without Twitter’s approval. So it’s likely that in-tweet shopping is here, or coming soon.

As former Re/code reporter (and now sworn enemy) Mike Isaac and I reported at the time of the first Twitter Commerce mock-up discovery, the launch would be a long time coming:

The new product comes after a long history of Twitter virtually neglecting commerce options on its service (aside from a few exceptions which weren't widely adopted by the public). Twitter has also built and shelved multiple commerce-related products in the past, according to two people familiar with the matter.

But the renewed interest in Commerce comes on the heels of a closely watched initial public offering, where questions were raised about Twitter's ability to add revenue streams in the future. Shortly before the company went public, Twitter hired ex-Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard to run the company's commerce efforts.

In May, Twitter announced a deal with Amazon that lets Amazon shoppers add a product to their online shopping cart via a tweet. But again, the integration did not allow a Twitter user to pay for a product directly from the tweet.

Founders Fund Backs a Robotic Lab that Puts Science in the Cloud

Courtesy: Emerald Therapeutics

Emerald Therapeutics is developing potential treatments for viral infections like HIV and HPV. But they're not ready to talk about that yet.

What the stealth startup is ready to discuss is a tool they built in an effort to accelerate that work: A completely robotic lab that the company believes could aid other researchers as well, effectively serving as a kind of Amazon Web Services for science.

The nearly 20-person company has packed a 5,000-square-foot facility in a little office park in Silicon Valley with more than $2 million worth of mass spectrometers, automated pipettes and microscopes, capable of carrying out remote life sciences experiments under controlled conditions.

The four-year old company is officially launching the Emerald Cloud Laboratory on Tuesday and will begin accepting applications for an “outward-facing beta trial.” They believe the product can make life sciences experiments faster, cheaper and easier, in much the way that cloud services helped dramatically lower the barriers to entry for web businesses and apps.

Potential customers includes established institutions that lack the manpower or specific tools to carry out certain experiments, or individual researchers and startups with no labs at all.

“We really hope this system, in addition to supporting labs that are currently doing research, will also enable people to do their own research and form new companies for a fraction of the cost it currently takes,” said Daniel Jerome Kleinbaum, the company’s co-founder and co-CEO, who earned a PhD in organic chemistry at Stanford.

Emerald is also announcing it raised $13.5 million over two funding rounds (the earlier of which wasn’t made public) from Founders Fund, PayPal Co-Founder Max Levchin and Schooner Capital.

Scientists can ship their samples to the lab and then log onto the company website to dial in specific parameters for their experiments. The researchers can then access, analyze and share the data through a set of online tools.

The cloud lab can currently carry out 40 standard life sciences experiments, such as Western Blots tests that identify specific proteins in tissue. The company expects to support up to 120 within the next year and a half.

Other businesses have emerged to provide specific types of cloud-based scientific services. Google Ventures-backed DNAnexus, for example, offers tools to store, manage and analyze the massive data generated by genome sequencing.

But Emerald Cloud Lab is competing most directly with contract research organizations, fully-equipped labs and researchers who conduct outsourced experiments on behalf of other institutions.

Brian Frezza, co-founder and co-CEO of Emerald Therapeutics, said the key advantage here is that the scientist still sits at the controls, adjusting parameters to maintain greater command over how the experiment is carried out. They also get a detailed picture of the exact conditions under which the process occurs, down to the temperature and humidity in the lab.

“The whole goal is to give people total control over the experiment,” Frezza said.

Because the experiments are carried out by robots under these precisely described conditions, the company also believes the experiments will be more reproducible.

That has become a critical issue in life sciences. A former Amgen researcher said in a 2012 piece for Nature that his team couldn’t reproduce the results in 47 of 53 cancer studies published in top journals.

“This low success rate is not sustainable or acceptable, and investigators must reassess their approach to translating discovery research into greater clinical success and impact,” wrote C. Glenn Begley and his co-author Lee Ellis, in the commentary.

Of course, scientists themselves will have to judge whether Emerald’s results are actually more reliable — and whether they’ll even want to outsource experiments over which they have traditionally wanted to maintain exacting levels of control.

But the company’s backers have high hopes.

“While Amazon Web Services was amazing for what it did for the software industry, we’re only at the very, very start of this for life sciences,” said Brian Singerman, a partner at early Emerald investor Founders Fund, who sits on the company’s board along with Levchin.

“We need to get the costs down by orders of magnitude,” he said. “It’s one of the most important things we can do for humanity and the Emerald Cloud represents a huge leap toward that.”

Update: This story has been updated with the correct name of co-founder Daniel Jerome Kleinbaum.

 

Ouya Tests Netflix-Style Game Subscription

Android-based gaming console Ouya is testing a new way to move downloads of its games: A $60 “all-you-can-eat” annual subscription. An email obtained by Gamasutra says that developers will still receive 70 percent of a game’s purchase price when it is downloaded, as if subscribers had bought the game normally. Any in-game purchases like power-ups, which can be completed more than once, are not included in the subscription.

AT&T Unloads Its Stake in America Movil for $5.6 Billion

Rob Wilson/Shutterstock

AT&T said on Monday that it is selling its stake in America Movil, the large Latin American cell phone company and parent of U.S. prepaid brand Tracfone.

Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, the primary owner of America Movil, will pay nearly $5.6 billion for AT&T’s stake, according to a regulatory filing.

“When we announced the DirecTV deal, we said that we would sell our stake in (America Movil) to facilitate the regulatory approval process in Latin America," AT&T said in a statement to Re/code.

Prior to announcing its DirecTV deal, AT&T had been eyeing international expansion. More recently, though, it has been focused on its U.S. operations, saying earlier this year that it was no longer weighing a purchase of Vodafone.

YouTube’s Product and Engineering Chief Departs in Executive Shuffle (Updated)

Peter Kafka

YouTube’s product and engineering chief is leaving the online video site to join Google’s search team.

The departure of Satyajeet Salgar reflects a reshaping of YouTube under Susan Wojcicki, the veteran Google advertising executive who took over as head of the site in February.

Salgar had been responsible for running the engineering staff at YouTube. He is credited with building the site’s live-streaming platform for delivering news and sports — including the 2012 U.S. presidential debates.

In a tweet, Salgar announced he was taking a new role at the company, saying, “After nearly seven years at Google, I guess it was finally time to work on Google search. :-)”

Salgar’s move followed the departure of YouTube’s head of product, Shishir Mehrotra, who this spring was moved into an advisory role. The move is not a huge surprise, given Mehrotra was also a candidate to take over YouTube, a job that went to Wojcicki.

Since her appointment, Wojcicki has been working to raise the profile of YouTube’s home-grown stars – building awareness the old-fashioned way, through billboards and TV ads — in the service of bolstering the site’s ad performance.

A Youtube spokesperson confirmed Salgar’s departure. He has had several jobs at Google, including working in commerce and payments and in games.

Update at 3:54 p.m. MondayThis post has been updated to correct Salgar’s title.

A Facebook Orange (Comic)

Salesforce Names Autodesk’s Hawkins as New CFO

Salesforce.com

Cloud software company Salesforce.com has a new CFO. The company today announced that it had hired Mark Hawkins, the former CFO at Autodesk, to replace Graham Smith, who announced his plans to retire in February.

Hawkins has been CFO at Autodesk since 2009. He’s joining Salesforce just as it has hit $5 billion in a year in annual revenue and has designs on growing that to $10 billion. His first official day on the job will be Aug. 1. He has also worked in finance jobs at Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Logitech.

While at Autodesk, Hawkins oversaw 50 acquisitions and was involved in the company’s shift of its business model toward a more cloud-centric approach based on subscriptions. He had served on the board of BMC Software until it went private.

Smith’s last day on the job — after Aug. 1 he will be an adviser to CEO Marc Benioff — will be March 31 of next year. He says he has no plans to be CFO anywhere else, but will be spending more time with family. After his stint at Salesforce is over, he’ll be looking to sit on a few more corporate boards.

Fill Bucket With Cold Water. Stick Out Wrist. Dump on Wearables.

Shutterstock / JMicic

Today’s wearable devices will likely experience the same rise and descent as products like the Flip camera or the single-purpose e-reader, Forrester Research predicts in its latest report.

Wearables “will flourish all through 2015 until 2016 when their functionality is assumed by other devices you are already carrying anyway, from obvious contenders like smartphones to more intriguing ones,” writes Forrester analyst James McQuivey. An example of possibly more intriguing tech would be sensor-laden headphones, he says, which suggests a “strong reason for Apple agreeing to buy Beats Electronics for $3 billion.”

There are a handful of reasons why McQuivey says still-new wearable tech will go the way of the e-reading market in the U.S., which the research firm believes will shrink from a mature market of 25-plus million owners in 2012 to a mere seven million owners by 2017.

The key reasons:

• The tech is too easily disrupted: “Any company with an interest in acquiring a particular customer base can consider investing in the category.”
• “Hardware itself becomes decreasingly important while the relative value of the software services escalates,” McQuivey writes. In other words, gadgets might get you a first date, but it’s good software that will keep you coming back.
• Broadly speaking, the rapid rise of a standalone device nearly guarantees a rapid fall.

Wearables isn’t the only category Forrester calls out for having a potentially short life cycle; it also covers augmented and virtual reality tech, consumer-focused 3-D printing and home automation gadgets.

“Home thermostats and smoke detectors are single-purpose devices currently being brought into the digital age thanks to significant investment from well-funded backers like Google,” McQuivey says. “But because they are single-purpose or narrow-tasked devices, they are likely to eventually be rolled up into more complicated multipurpose devices and software-based services.”

Keep in mind, wearable technology is such a new category that some of the data around it is still likely a) statistically insignificant, b) highly speculative, c) focused on specific categories (fitness trackers vs. smartwatches vs. Google Glass, or should they be one and the same?) or d) all of the above.

For example: Earlier this month, a survey of U.S. smartphone users conducted by Opera Mediaworks showed that only a small percentage of people use fitness trackers like the Jawbone Up, Fitbit or FuelBand – about 3.6 percent of men and 1.7 percent of women.

Meanwhile, back in January, Forrester said around five percent of U.S. online consumers reported using a wearable device to track their activity levels.

Also! In June ABI research put out a report that said 10 million activity trackers and seven million smartwatches will ship this year, driven by Google’s and possibly Apple’s entrance into the market.

Is that good or bad? Well, if you believe the Consumer Electronics Association, which said 10.3 million health and fitness devices (excluding smartwatches) were sold in the United States last year, it’s not so hot. The CEA also says those figures are expected to reach a combined 29.5 million shipments per year by 2017, whereas Forrester is predicting a decline by then.

So you see, all we really know at this point is that we don’t know much. And that many of my first-gen fitness trackers are enjoying the dark of my drawer right now. And if someone would like to develop a wearable device that helps me keep track of all of this analyst data in the coming months, I’m all ears and eyes and wrists and whatnot.

Twitter Scoops Up AdTech Firm Tap Commerce for Around $100 Million

TapCommerce

Twitter is in the process of acquiring Tap Commerce, a New York-based mobile advertising technology firm, according to sources familiar with the situation. The deal is expected to be announced later on Monday.

The purchase price was in the ballpark of $100 million, according to sources, though Twitter is not likely to announce the price tag when it announces the deal.

Investors include RRE Ventures, Metamorphic Ventures, Eniac Ventures, Nextview Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures and Pereg Ventures. The company raised $10.5 million in a Series A round last November.

Tap Commerce is in the business of “re-targeting” — that is, convincing customers to reopen all those mobile apps they have downloaded, especially the ones of the shopping variety. Among Tap’s clients are Fab and eBay.

The company had also been working a lot with Facebook, which uses a ton of these kinds of ads in its mobile service, so it will be interesting to see what happens with all of that work.

Update: The two companies have now confirmed the deal, but no mention of the price.

Brain-Sensing Blankets Put British Airways Passengers’ Emotions on Display

British Airways might not be messing with its passengers’ emotions the way Facebook researchers are, but it does want to put people’s feelings on display.

The airline last week tested blankets woven with tiny LEDs and combined with neuro-sensing headbands to “identify when the wearer is experiencing a feeling of well-being.” The blanket turns red to indicate stress and anxiety, and blue to show calm and relaxation.

For example, in British Airways’ video depicting the test on a flight from London to New York, a passenger watching what looks like a comedy movie is shown with a blue-to-purple blanket, while the passenger in the neighboring seat has a fully crimson blanket while viewing a boxing match.

While in some ways the project seems like projecting people’s innermost feelings on a Jumbotron, British Airways says the point is to study how to minimize the stressful parts of flying and show the benefits of calming features like sleep masks and flat-bed reclining. The company calls it “The Happiness Blanket.”

Some T-Mobile Subscribers Complain Using Spotify Is Running Up Data Charges

Some T-Mobile subscribers turned to Reddit to complain about problems with the mobile carrier’s new music freedom program, which allows customers to listen to streaming services without incurring data charges.

A few customers wrote that they had been racking up data charges while listening to Spotify — a problem they hadn’t encountered while tuning in to other streaming services, such as iHeart Radio or Pandora.

T-Mobile said it doesn’t have any indication that Spotify or any other music applications included in its program are drawing down customers’ high-speed wireless data buckets.

It could be that data charges were incurred before June 18, when Chief Executive John Legere introduced the music freedom offer, a T-Mobile spokesman said. The unlimited music offer is available to the 75 percent of T-Mobile customers covered under its Simple Choice plan.

The phone may be doing something in the background — say, downloading e-mail or updating apps — while the customer is streaming music. Some phones come with applications that report total data usage, but this doesn’t necessarily reflect how much of the customer’s high-speed data allotment is being consumed.

Lastly, non-music content — say, album art — may not be covered under T-Mobile’s unlimited music streaming promise, because it comes from a different data stream. The amount of such data is tiny, however — in tests with Spotify, it was roughly one percent to four percent of the data used, according to T-Mobile.

A spokesman urged customers who are experiencing problems to contact T-Mobile’s customer care. Spotify did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment.

Dan Frommer: ‘These Are Not the Wearables We’ve Been Waiting For’

Dan Frommer, Quartz:

So perhaps Google is on the right track, and we'll all be using smartwatches someday. But we're not there yet — not in the software, hardware, design, or ecosystem. And Apple is going to have to do better than this if it expects the fabled iWatch to dominate.

 ★ 

FBI, CIA Join NSA In “Backdoor” Searches On Americans

 Thousands of Americans were targets of so-called “backdoor” warrantless surveillance by the NSA and other intelligence agencies last year, according to a letter sent to Senator Ron Wyden. The missive, written by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to the Senator in response to a question posed earlier this month, is plainspoken. The Office also stated that… Read More

Court Allowed NSA To Spy On All But 4 Countries

 A court permitted the National Security Agency to collect information about governments in 193 countries and foreign institutions like the World Bank, according to a secret document the Washington Post published Monday. The certification issued by a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2010 shows the NSA has the authority to “intercept through U.S. companies not just the… Read More

US National Archives To Upload All Holdings To Wikimedia Commons

 Ever since the National Archives and Record Administration launched the Open Government Plan in 2010, it has increasingly been uploading content to Wikipedia to digitize and gain a wider reach for its holdings. But all this time, uploading its digitized holdings to the Wikimedia Commons was a side project. Now, as mentioned in the 2014 Open Government Plan published earlier this month, the… Read More

Hack Your Brain With A Machine That Reads Minds

 Star Wars first planted the idea over 35 years ago that we could move objects with our minds. That idea is now a reality that has come a long way in the last few years. Emotiv is on the cutting edge of that technology with headgear that allows you to do things, such as make a toy car whiz by or help a quadriplegic mix music like a DJ using just their brain power. Read More