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LivingSocial has hired eBay’s Gautam Thaker as its new CEO, replacing co-founder Tim O’Shaughnessy as the once fast-growing deals company attempts to create a new plan for growth. Thaker most recently was general manager of eBay advertising and CEO of eBay’s Shopping.com site. Thaker will also replace O’Shaughnessy as a director on LivingSocial’s board.
Large workforce reductions have never been a big part of the Microsoft narrative. In its 39-year history, the company has undertaken only one truly brutal bloodletting — the sacking of 5,800 employees during the 2009 econalypse (prior to that, the largest was a purge of 120 floppy-disk plant workers in 1996). Now the company is preparing for its second. Bloomberg reports, and Code/red has independently confirmed, that Microsoft plans to take the scythe to its workforce before summer’s end, making cuts that will likely exceed those it made five years ago as it continues its strained digestion of Nokia’s phone business. Sources tell me to expect the grim news to be released when Microsoft reports fourth-quarter earnings on July 22, though that could change.
Comcast service representative: “I’m not going to process [your cancellation] until you tell me why you are leaving. You don’t like fast speeds or great Internet? Is that what you are saying? You like slower Internet speeds and waiting around?”
Journalist Ryan Block: “This phone call is actually an amazing representative example of why I don’t want to stay with Comcast.”
Jean-Louis Gassée restates Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s “Bold Ambition” memo: “This is the beginning of our new FY 2015 — and of a new era at Microsoft. I have good news and bad news. The bad news is the old Devices and Services mantra won't work. For example: I've determined we'll never make money in tablets or smartphones. So, do we continue to pretend we're ‘all in’ or do we face reality and make the painful decision to pull out so we can use our resources — including our integrity — to fight winnable battles?”
Looks like Hewlett-Packard is in the market for a new board chairman. The company said this morning that interim Chairman Ralph Whitworth has stepped down to focus on his health. Whitworth’s resignation is effective immediately, and HP plans to begin the search for his replacement at its next board meeting, which is set for this week.
FCC Special Counsel for External Affairs Gigi Sohn: “Janet Jackson incident had 1.4 million comments. We’re about half-way there! #netneutrality”
Investors expecting a stagnant second-quarter earnings report from Yahoo today are likely to get just that and little else. Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant in which Yahoo holds a 22 percent stake, released updated financial figures back in June, ahead of what’s expected to be a blockbuster IPO. So Wall Street has already seen the numbers it most cares about. Yahoo’s market cap currently rests at about $35.83 billion. The company’s stake in Alibaba is worth about $26 billion.
Andy Greenberg, Wired: “When Project Zero's hacker-hunters find a bug, they say they'll alert the company responsible for a fix and give it between 60 and 90 days to issue a patch before publicly revealing the flaw on the Google Project Zero blog. In cases where the bug is being actively exploited by hackers, Google says it will move much faster, pressuring the vulnerable software's creator to fix the problem or find a workaround in as little as seven days.”
WhatsApp rival Line is IPO bound. The mobile messaging app company has applied for an initial public offering on the Tokyo Stock Exchange that could value it at more than $9.84 billion. The company, which is said to be mulling a listing on the New York Stock Exchange as well, could go public as early as this autumn.
McMaster University gastroenterologist Dr. Stephen Collins: “Many people with chronic intestinal conditions also have psychological disturbances and we never understood why.”
When Google first announced its smart contact lens project back in January, it said it had no plans to manufacture and sell the device, which is designed to measure the glucose content of a diabetic wearer's tears. As project lead Brian Otis said at the time, “You can't design a medical device in a vacuum.” Well, it looks like Google has found a willing collaborator in Novartis. The Swiss drug maker’s Alcon unit has signed a licensing deal for Google’s smart contact lens technology and hopes to field products based on it in about five years.
David Byttow, co-founder of anonymous messaging app Secret: "There's so much good content and amazing conversations that people are having. It should live beyond Secret."
Spongebob Casablanca, Spongebob Singing in the Rain and Spongebob The Godfather.
Thanks for reading. Got a tip or a comment? Reach me at John@recode.net, @johnpaczkowski. Subscribe to the Code/red newsletter here.
Asa Mathat
It’s sort of hard to remember now, but Netflix, the streaming video service, used to be Netflix, the DVD-by-mail service.
And in fact, Netflix is still a DVD-by-mail service for 6.7 million people. But that number used to be twice as big. And after a violent and unsuccessful attempt to kill it off quickly, Netflix has been happy to let its DVD business shrink — profitably — for several years.
Netflix does nothing to promote its DVD offering — go ahead, try finding any mention of DVDs in the company’s pitch to new members on its site. And it has been shuttering its DVD distribution centers for some time.
Last month, the company made the next logical move and stopped delivering DVDs on Saturdays. That saves them money, and makes DVD rentals less attractive. But as Engadget points out, you probably didn’t notice.
Again, Netflix is happy to keep renting DVDs to the audience that wants them, because renting DVDs is a lucrative business — Netflix figures DVDs will generate a profit of $92 million this quarter. But all of its time, money and resources are going to streaming, a business that should have 50 million subscribers when the company reports its third quarter earnings next week.
Vjeran Pavic
Earlier this year, an unknown Vietnamese developer named Dong Nguyen briefly owned the gaming world. His mobile game Flappy Bird suddenly and rapidly racked up millions of downloads and dominated Twitter, with Nguyen claiming to make $50,000 a day off display ads alone.
The breakout success befuddled some industry watchers as Flappy Bird became one of the top 10 most-downloaded apps in the U.S. for two solid weeks. However, Nguyen quit at the top, yanking his app from the App Store and Google Play on Feb. 9, and telling Forbes it was “gone forever.”
Uh, about that. With interest in the game lingering, app stores were flooded with copycats. Even Sesame Street got in on the hot cloning action.
And then, to the muted delight of the cynics who never believed him in the first place, Nguyen told CNBC he might bring Flappy Bird back after all, in August. Before that deadline can arrive, though, a new species of copycat (Copy Bird?) has emerged: Games pretending to be “the next Flappy Bird.”
“Enough time has passed where we can talk about a game being ‘the next Flappy Bird’ without cringing,” began a recent article in Business Insider touting a game called Let It Goat.
VentureBeat fell for the same hype around Let It Goat, which sends the titular goat running and jumping over a series of platforms and hazards. As The Daily Dot correctly pointed out, Let It Goat is more than anything else a ripoff of Adult Swim’s Robot Unicorn Attack. It does, however, borrow Flappy Bird’s retro graphics and punishing difficulty level.
“We could also ask why the pipes from Super Mario Bros. have become the hallmark of every deliberately glitchy, gimmicky mobile game trying to socially engineer its way to the top of the app downloads, but we suspect we just answered our own question,” The Daily Dot’s Aja Romano wrote.
Yesterday, TechCrunch joined the party, declaring of another new casual game, “Timberman Is the New Flappy Bird.” And back in May, Re/code’s Liz Gannes spoke to the co-creator of an app called Make It Rain, who called it “the new Flappy Bird.”
These apps did well, at least in the short term: Let It Goat was in the top 50 of the App Store for eight of the past 12 days but dropped 121 places in the U.S. App Store rankings between Thursday and Sunday; Make It Rain had an impressive three weeks in the top 10 before falling to no. 637 at the time of this writing. And they made some people happy, so good for them, or whatever.
But I’d like to propose a new rule: If you have to call yourself “the next Flappy Bird,” you’re not the next Flappy Bird.
It’s reminiscent of how a cottage industry has sprung up around making viral videos for YouTube, as if it were as simple as following a formula. Downloads of Flappy Bird likely would have dipped in time, too, but unlike the many other momentary success stories on the App Store, it still carries cultural currency. Why? Its sublime design*, the mobile-friendly novelty of a punishing arcade-style game, and — this is the big one — because it came out of nowhere.
We still don’t know for sure what sparked Flappy Bird’s rise from obscurity at launch to international phenomenon eight months later. It came from Hanoi, a city with countless mobile game players but few of the wannabe millionaires who are a dime a dozen in Silicon Valley. Nguyen told Rolling Stone he didn’t spend anything to market the game, but the scrutiny around his viral success — ranging from accusations that he cheated the app store to indictments of his game’s addictive nature — drove him to walk away.
Meanwhile, we know how all the pretenders got started. Make It Rain jump-started its word-of-mouth campaign with $1,000 worth of Facebook ads; Let It Goat’s creators, Jack Gilinsky and Jack Johnson, have four million followers on Vine; and Timberman took off after it was featured in the iOS App Store’s “Best New Games” section.
All are valid roads to success. But none of them are Flappy’s.
* No, seriously. If you’re interested in the importance of small game design differences, Seb Long’s deconstruction of Flappy Bird for Gamasutra is an excellent read.
Relational Investors
Ralph Whitworth, the activist investor HP drafted to join its board of directors as part of CEO Meg Whitman’s turnaround effort and who ultimately became its chairman, has resigned, the company said.
The reason was an undisclosed health problem. Whitworth is also the head of Relational Investors, which announced he is taking a leave of absence. David Faber of CNBC reported, and Re/code has independently confirmed, that Whitworth has suffered a recurrence of the throat cancer for which he was treated earlier this year.
Sources familiar with the matter say the news on Whitworth’s health was very sudden, only coming to light in the past few days. HP said it will begin the process of naming a new chairman at its next board meeting. The board has a regularly scheduled meeting this week. Sources familiar with the company’s thinking tell me not to expect HP to name a new director this week, but that the process will begin.
Whitworth joined HP’s board in November of 2011 after Relational invested in the company. As part of the deal, HP prevented Whitworth from seeking a significant change in the company’s operations for two years. During that time, Whitworth had more personal skin in the game than anyone else on HP’s board.
Relational owned about two percent of HP’s shares during a period when they were losing value. Relational has since sold some of its position, but still owns about 1.5 percent of HP’s outstanding shares, a stake worth about $6.2 billion, according to SEC filings dated March 31.
He accepted the chairmanship initially on an interim basis last year after Ray Lane resigned that position following a revolt by HP shareholders. The assignment became permanent as Whitworth came to believe in Whitman’s long-term turnaround plan.
Here’s HP’s statement on all this.
Ralph Whitworth Resigns from HP's Board of Directors to Focus on Personal Health Concerns
PALO ALTO, Calif., July 15, 2014 — HP today announced that Ralph Whitworth has resigned from HP's board of directors to focus on his health, effective July 16, 2014. Mr. Whitworth is also taking a leave of absence from his investment company, Relational Investors.
The HP board of directors will discuss appointing a new chairman at its next board meeting.
Whitworth, who was appointed chairman on an interim basis in April 2013, has been a member of the HP board of directors since 2011. He is co-founder and principal of Relational Investors LLC, a registered investment advisor founded in 1996.
"Ralph has been a friend and close advisor to me, the HP leadership team and every member of the board for nearly three years," said Meg Whitman, president and chief executive officer, HP. "He has been a wonderful contributor to our efforts to turn HP around. Ralph's passion and incredible mind for business will be deeply missed by all of us. We wish Ralph and his family the very best."
"HP has made enormous progress reconstituting its board, implementing world-class capital allocation and corporate governance practices, and putting the company back on strong financial footing," said Whitworth. "HP's shareholders can be very confident that Meg, her team and the current board will stick to the strong practices and discipline we've put in place. While I'm disappointed to step down from HP's board at such an exciting time for the company, it gives me great comfort that HP is in such talented and steady hands."
CurbStand, a mobile app that lets people find, pay for and tip valet parkers at more than 60 locations in Los Angeles, has named a new chief executive. Serge Gojkovich, former chief marketing officer for ParkMe, will take the wheel at CurbStand and look to expand its network of restaurants and bars in Southern California as well as other major metropolitan areas. He previously served as marketing vice president for Grindr, a social networking site for men.
For all of their popularity, Apple’s iPhones and iPads have sometimes been knocked for lacking the ability to accept USB thumb drives. With a thumb drive, users would be able to quickly and easily transfer files between their mobile devices and their computers. Microsoft has even been using the lack of a USB port on the iPad as a selling point in ads for its latest Surface tablet.
It’s not that you can’t transfer files back and forth between, say, an iPad and a laptop. It’s just that you have to use less direct, and sometimes slower, methods than you’re used to when using thumb drives between two computers. For instance, you can use email attachments, or cloud services like Dropbox, or you can transfer files via an obscure feature of iTunes. And, this coming fall, Apple is introducing a cloud-based file storage service and expanding its file-exchanging wireless AirDrop feature so it works between Macs and iOS devices that are near each other.
But, late next month, a small California company plans to introduce an actual iOS-compatible thumb drive called iStick. It’s specifically designed to move files in both directions between computers and iOS devices that use Apple’s current charging and syncing port, which is called the Lightning connector. It also allows you to view or play the files right from the drive itself, so you don’t have to transfer them and take up space on your target device if you’d rather not.
[Sorry. This video cannot be displayed in this feed. View your video here.]The company funded iStick on the crowd-funding site Kickstarter. It was seeking $100,000, but raised $1.1 million.
I’ve been testing an early, pre-production version of iStick and its companion app of the same name, and found that it does indeed work as advertised for file transfers. It still has a few bugs to work out before shipping, and the process isn’t quite as simple as it is between two computers, due to the unusual file system used by iOS. But the product works, and I suspect it will be welcomed by many iPhone and iPad users.
The iStick is a small, rectangular plastic device with a light-up slider button in the middle. You slide the button one way to expose a standard USB jack you can use in a Mac or PC, and slide it the other way to expose a Lightning connector you can plug into a late-model iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.
It’s made by a company called Sanho, based in Fremont, Calif., whose mostly Apple-oriented hardware accessories go by the brand Hyper. And it’s much pricier than a simple, commodity USB thumb drive. It starts at $80 for an eight gigabyte model, and ranges up to $250 for 128GB of storage. The company says the higher prices are required to license the Lightning connector and to meet stringent Apple requirements.
The iStick is billed as the first USB thumb drive for the Lightning connector, but there have been some predecessors. A company called PhotoFast makes a product called i-FlashDrive that works similarly, but it uses the older, wider, 30-pin connector and requires an adapter for the latest iPhones and iPads. And other companies have made thumb drives, such as AirStash, which have no iOS connector at all, and beam files to iPhones and iPads wirelessly.
In my tests, iStick file transfers worked between a variety of devices, including an iPhone 5s, an iPad mini, an iPad Air, a Mac and a Windows laptop. I was able to move and use files ranging from pictures, songs and videos to Microsoft Office files and PDFs — in both directions.
After loading up the iStick with files from your computer, you just slide the button to pop out the Lightning connector and plug it into the charging port on your iOS device. Immediately, the iStick app pops up; you use that app to view, play or transfer the files on the thumb drive to a local file repository on your mobile device. No wireless or Internet connection is required, and any files you’ve transferred to the on-device, local storage area remain available for use even after you remove the drive — again, with no wireless or Internet connection required.
Three of the four buttons worked fine in my tests. The fourth, the Contacts backup feature, isn’t yet working, according to Sanho, but the company promises it will be working by the time the product ships.
By pressing the button representing the drive, I was able to play music and videos, display photos and view documents — right from the drive, and with little delay. Or, by tapping an icon, I could move one or more of the files on the drive into the local file storage area on the iPhone or iPad itself.
I could imagine popping the little iStick into my briefcase before a flight, loaded with movies, songs and work documents, and then using them right from the thumb drive during a flight, even without Wi-Fi, and without taking up space on my iPhone or iPad.
So, what about other bugs, and why is the process more cumbersome than laptop-to-laptop USB drive transfers?
Well, in the pre-production models I tested, the app had the wrong name. It’s called i-USBKey, and is intended to work with a companion device the company is marketing in Europe under the brand of its distributor there, called Bidul. The European product, however, won’t work with newer iOS devices using the Lightning connector, only older models that used the former 30-pin connector.
The apps are otherwise identical, and Sanho says the naming will be corrected by the time iStick ships. The i-USBKey app still worked fine with the iStick.
The cumbersome part comes in when you want to use a file transferred to the iStick local storage area with another app on your iOS device, and it’s due to the way iOS manages files, not an issue with the iStick itself. Unlike on a computer, iOS devices don’t have a visible, system-wide file system. Instead, files that can be used by an app can only be fully used, beyond just viewing them, via that app.
Apple gets around this using a function called “Open in…,” which offers a list of compatible apps when you press an icon in an open file. So, for instance, in my tests, I was only able to edit a Word document transferred from the iStick by pressing an iOS sharing icon at the upper right and then moving it to Word for iPad or another word processor, like Apple’s Pages.
Still, I found iStick to be a useful, if pricey, accessory for my iPad and iPhone, and one many users would value.
MediaTek
Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek has enjoyed great success in grabbing the lion’s share of the low-end and mid-range Android device market, but its efforts at the high end remain a work in progress.
On Tuesday, MediaTek is announcing its latest eight-core chip, the MT6795 — its first with support for LTE and 64-bit operating systems, as well as 2K and super-slow-motion video.
“This is our flagship,” said Mohit Bhushan, who heads U.S. corporate marketing for MediaTek. “It is going to go toe to toe with [Qualcomm's top-of-the-line] Snapdragon.
The MediaTek chip will show up in phones globally later this year, though the U.S. market will have to wait until 2015 as MediaTek continues its efforts to get its LTE modem certified by the U.S. carriers.
“The reaction from operators is very strong,” Bhushan said. “They are very keen to see more diversity in the supply chain.”
Transcriptic, the Silicon Valley startup that generated early buzz for building a robot-operated scientific lab, is launching an updated version of its service that allows scientists to design and run customized experiments.
The company claims its remote, automated lab enables a 10-fold productivity boost, while allowing scientists to maintain precise control over their outsourced experiments.
Late last month, Emerald Therapeutics kicked off an "outward-facing beta trial” of a similar product. Transcriptic says the company’s new platform supports a broader array of experiments than its rival.
Both portray their offerings as a cloud-based approach to science, allowing users to avoid the considerable investment of lab equipment and set up much of the experiment online. But obviously a lot of the real work still occurs in the physical realm, entailing shipped samples, freezers, pipettes, robotic arms and more.
Transcriptic also disclosed it has raised $6 million in funding to date from AME Cloud Ventures, Data Collective, Founders Fund, Google Ventures, IA Ventures and individual investors Naval Ravikant and Mark Cuban. It raised a $1.2 million seed round from several of those participants at the end of 2012.
Early paying customers include Stanford, Harvard, Caltech and UC Davis.
"Transcriptic's mission is to provide the infrastructure necessary to lower costs, improve reproducibility and allow researchers to do the projects that right now they can only wish they could run," said Max Hodak, the company’s chief executive, in a statement. "Transcriptic frees up researchers to focus on the creative aspects of scientific discovery that drive important medical advances and make critical discoveries possible."
Japanese messaging app operator Line Corp applied for an initial public offering (IPO) valued at upwards of 1 trillion yen ($9.85 billion) around two weeks ago at the Tokyo Stock Exchange, a person with knowledge of the matter said.
Line, owned by South Korea’s Naver Corp, has tapped investment bank Nomura Holdings to manage the IPO, the person said, adding that the company is considering a dual listing in Tokyo and New York.
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Sean Gallup/Getty Image
Good morning!
Re/code is excited to bring you a new feature: #Mustreads From Other Sites. We hope that title is self-explanatory. And if you want more, we can oblige, with a feed on our front page stocked with good stuff from around the Web. But if you’re in a hurry, here are our favorites to start your day:
If you see any stories you'd like to send our way (or have any questions/comments about stories we've recommended), feel free to shoot an email to noah.kulwin@recode.net.
Last night I played sand volleyball for the first time since Jan 2013. Every part of my body is sore.
I used to do this once/twice a week?
LivingSocial is today announcing a new CEO and president, putting to rest a question market that has hovered over the daily deals business for the last several months. Gautam Thakar, an eBay executive who had been CEO of Shopping.com and was most recently leading the company’s advertising business, is joining to head up the company, replacing co-founder Tim O’Shaunessy, who had… Read More
Crashlytics is a rare bird in today’s developer tool landscape — and a breed that is getting rarer by the day. Namely, a suite of developer tools that includes crash reporting, beta testing and now real-time retention and usage metrics that is not owned by Apple, Google, Amazon or Microsoft. The bigs have their hands in this pie because they must. Developer tools are not something… Read More 
Google today announced that it is launching Project Zero, an internal team of security specialists tasked with finding vulnerabilities in third-party software — not to exploit them, but to alert the developers and avoid the next Heartbleed. The Heartbleed bug put the whole software industry on heightened alert, and Google, Facebook, Microsoft and many others already formed a… Read More 
Starting today, Nokia Lumia handsets running Windows Phone 8 will begin to receive Windows Phone 8.1 along with a Nokia-sourced updated called Cyan. Microsoft recently purchased Nokia’s hardware assets. The 8.1 update will land in pieces, depending on the carrier in question. Windows Phone 8.1, announced in April, brings a number of updates to Microsoft’s mobile platform, including… Read More 
