Companies

Find out why Zuckerberg is always wearing a gray t-shirt, and why he wants Facebook to be like water

About eight years ago, Facebook’s employees—so few then that they could easily sit together in a circle—started a practice of holding employee town hall-style Q&As with CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg. On Thursday, the public was allowed in on this tradition for the first time, as Zuckerberg and other execs fielded questions posted on the event’s Facebook page and from a live audience.

Here are the most important, surprising and funny takeaways:

“My goal was never to make Facebook cool. I am not a cool person”

Facebook might be “losing its charm,” as one audience member said, but that’s only because Zuckerberg wants the central aspect of Facebook—the facilitation of communication and connections—to be something as regular, expected and uneventful as switching on a lightbulb or turning on a water faucet. Those aren’t necessarily “cool,” Zuckerberg explained, but rather are things “people can rely on.”

Facebook has plans for solar-powered drones that’ll beam down Internet access

It’s a futuristic pursuit, but Zuckerberg believes it’s Facebook’s responsibility as the world’s most popular Internet service—one-sixth of the world is on Facebook—to spread Internet to the 4-to-4.5 billion people who aren’t connected. The project, called Internet.org, is a partnership with other tech giants to bring affordable Internet access to the world.

COO Sheryl Sandberg let the audience in on one of her “major” contributions to Facebook

“One of the major things I contributed was I went around telling people Mark actually has more than one of that t-shirt, which people found to be very reassuring,” Sandberg said, referring to how Zuckerberg is frequently seen wearing his signature gray t-shirt.

There’s a reason why Zuckerberg is always wearing that one shirt

“I’m in this really lucky position where I get to wake up every day and help serve more than 1 billion people, and I feel like I’m not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things [like deciding what to wear],” Zuckerberg said. “Even though it kind of sounds silly that that’s my reason for wearing a gray t-shirt every day, it also is true.”

The average user sees less than 10% of his/her Facebook stories via the NewsFeed.

Zuckerberg said the average Facebook user only sees about 100 of their 1500 stories per day on their NewsFeed. The curated NewsFeed—Zuckerberg hopes it’ll be “the perfect personalized newspaper for every person in the world”—is part of the reason why businesses are complaining their free Facebook Pages are reaching fewer and fewer people.

Zuckerberg found The Social Network to be “hurtful”

Unlike what the Oscar-winning film suggested, attracting women was wasn’t one of the reasons Zuckerberg started Facebook. In fact, he said was dating Priscilla Chan, now his wife, at the time. It’s a portrayal Zuckerberg finds “hurtful,” as he said Facebook’s mission was first and foremost to help people stay connected to their loved ones.

Zuckerberg doesn’t want you to think of only him when you think of Facebook

“One of the things I think the media gets wrong about companies or inventions [is] they try to make it seem like one person did it,”Zuckerberg said. He pointed to his colleagues who were also involved in the Q&A as a testament to Facebook’s multi-person leadership, and told students in the audience that one of his keys to success was surrounding himself with supportive people.

They also stole information from 56 million credit cards

The Home Depot hack was even worse than authorities originally thought, according to a new report. Along with compromising 56 million credit card accounts, the hackers also exposed 53 million customer email addresses.

Two months ago, the hackers accessed the retailer’s system through usernames and passwords they stole from a refrigeration contractor’s electronic billing account. Target and other companies have been infiltrated in a similar fashion. Authorities who investigated the Home Depot incident revealed the full scope of the hack to the Wall Street Journal Thursday.

The Home Depot hackers took aim at 7,500 of the company’s self-checkout lanes. The software hid itself for five months, collecting data and transmitting it to an outside system.

[WSJ]

Cheerio, Aereo

Aereo, the embattled television streaming company that sought to make it easier for its users cut ties with cable, announced Thursday that it is laying off staff in New York City and Boston.

“In an effort to reduce costs, we made the difficult decision to lay off some of our staff in Boston and New York,” said Aereo spokesperson Virginia Lam. “We are continuing to conserve resources while we chart our path forward. We are grateful to our employees for their loyalty, hard work and dedication. This was a difficult, but necessary step in order to preserve the company.”

Aereo has been fighting to stay alive after the Supreme Court ruled over the summer that the company’s live-TV-on-the-web services violated copyright law. In July, Aereo sought to pose a new legal argument that it is itself a cable company, but a recent court injunction required it to stop transmitting live television.

In a letter to the Massachusetts Division of Career Services published by Beta Boston, Aereo said it was shutting down its business operations in Boston “and conducting permanent layoffs at its Boston office” of 43 employees, effective November 12.

Aereo charged subscribers $8 a month for access to broadcast content on their web browsers, tablets and phones. The technology captured broadcasters’ over-the-air transmissions and stored them in a remote DVR for customers who were already in range of the free television signals.

The rap mogul loves "Ace of Spades" champagne so much he raps about it and served it at an Obama fundraiser

He’s not a businessman. He’s a business, man.

Oh wait, actually he’s also a businessman.

Jay-Z has bought the Armand de Brignac champagne business for an undisclosed amount. The champagne is known as “Ace of Spades,” and is produced by eight people in the French town of Chigny-les-Roses, the BBC reports. It was featured in at least one Jay-Z music video and sells for $300 per bottle.

The 44-year-old rap mogul (and businessman) is known for his love of champagne. Jay-Z raps about the Ace of Spades brand in his song “On To The Next One:” “I used to drink Cristal, the muhf***ers racist, so I switched gold bottles on to that Spade sh**” Jay-Z raps. In the music video for the song, you can see the Ace of Spades champagne flash onscreen about one minute and 57 seconds in.

At a fundraiser Jay-Z held for President Barack Obama in 2012, he and his wife Beyonce Knowles reportedly displayed 350 bottles of the drink.

Jay-Z has an estimated net worth of $520 million, according to Forbes magazine, making him the third richest hip-hop star in the world. He has a clothing line, restaurants and a recording label.

A plug-in personal assistant on your service 24/7

The ridesharing wars are heating up

Ridesharing company Lyft is suing a former employee for allegedly stealing secret documents before joining archrival Uber, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Travis VanderZanden, Lyft’s former chief operating officer, downloaded private financial and product information to his Dropbox account when he left Lyft, the startup alleges in its complaint. He also tried to recruit other Lyft employees to defect to Uber, according to Lyft’s complaint. VanderZanden is now Uber’s vice president of international growth.

“We are disappointed to have to take this step, but this unusual situation has left us no choice but to take the necessary legal action to protect our confidential information,” Lyft spokesperson Paige Thelen said an emailed statement.

Lyft and Uber have had a contentious rivalry that has involved cribbing new features from one another and even ordering rides on competitors’ apps just to immediately cancel them. The two companies, along with a handful of other startups, are fighting to to disrupt urban transportation by letting users quickly hail rides via a mobile app instead of trying to find a taxi on the street.

Uber did not respond to an email seeking comment on the lawsuit.

[WSJ]

It could be love at second swipe

Remember the pain you felt deep in your chest when you unconsciously left-swiped that would-be bae-of-your-dreams away while feverishly perusing Tinder? Remember how you hoped and prayed that somehow that special Tinderoni would reappear, all in vain?

Well, apparently you weren’t alone. A back-button is the “most requested feature” among Tinder users, according to co-founder Sean Rad, in a recent interview published by Tech Crunch on Tuesday (the same day Rad announced he would step down as CEO of the company but stay on as president and board member).

Soon the folks at Tinder will unveil a paid version of the dating app that will allow users to “undo” left swipes, TechCrunch reports. With the new version—called “Tinder Plus”—users can also search for matches outside of their region. Tinder Plus will be available soon for select users in the UK, Brazil and Germany.

So, that feeling of deep loneliness you felt when you missed out on The One may soon be nothing more than a distant memory. Of course, there’s still no guarantee your almost-missed-match won’t turn out like this.

[TechCrunch]

The monopoly ruling never led to the creation of "Baby Bill" companies

It was Friday, Nov. 5, 1999 when then-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates got the bad news. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson had declared that his company was a monopoly. And not just any monopoly, but the very worst kind: one that uses its power to squash would-be rivals before they’re even out of the gate. At the time, Microsoft packaged its Internet Explorer web browser with its Windows operating systems, which gave Microsoft an incredible advantage over rivals like Netscape in an era when dial-up Internet meant that downloading and installing alternative web browsers was a slog at best.

“It’s actually hard to imagine how, for Microsoft, it could have come out any worse,” TIME wrote in a Nov. 15, 1999 cover story on Jackson’s decision. But Jackson wasn’t done yet — the declaration that Microsoft was a monopolist was only the first half of his decision. Jackson’s conclusions and remedy wouldn’t come until April and June of the next year, respectively, after Gates had already stepped down as CEO and transitioned into the newly created role of “chief software architect.”

“Assuming he says yea [to the question of whether Microsoft's monopoly was used to violate antitrust laws]–a near certainty considering Friday’s findings–he can impose a remedy as far-reaching as the total dismemberment of the Gates empire,” TIME wrote in 1999. “The gamut of possible outcomes runs from a mild go-forth-and-sin-no-more to the truly Draconian stuff: forcing Microsoft to share its Windows source code with its competitors or carving up the company into the so-called Baby Bills.” (“Baby Bills” was a clever riff on the “Baby Bells” born of the 1982 breakup of the Bell telephone system.)

In 2000, Judge Jackson took the harsher path, decreeing that Microsoft should be split into two halves, one dedicated to Windows and the other to everything else Microsoft.

So why aren’t there two Microsofts today?

Jackson’s word was far from final. The case found its way to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which rejected Jackson’s remedy and accused him of unethical conduct after it was revealed he had private conversations with reporters about the trial while it was still ongoing. Microsoft would settle the case with the Department of Justice in November of 2001 by agreeing to make it easier for Microsoft’s competitors to get their software more closely integrated with the Windows operating system — a tough pill for Microsoft to swallow, but hardly on the same level as a forced breakup.

These days, it’s harder to see Microsoft as the big monopolist bully Judge Jackson once described. Microsoft Windows operating systems still dominate the PC OS market, but PC OSes are less important than they’ve ever been before, diminishing Microsoft’s ability to use Windows’ market share to make life harder for its rivals. Thanks to the rise of high-speed Internet, web-based solutions and cloud computing in general, it doesn’t really matter what OS you use — Facebook and Gmail don’t care if you’re accessing them from Windows, OS X or Linux. On top of that, we do more of our daily computing on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, a sphere that’s owned not by Microsoft but by rivals Apple and Google. (Interestingly, that latter company has increasingly run afoul of antitrust regulators, particularly in Europe, where a four-year investigation of Google’s potential abuse of its dominance in search to favor its own secondary products over those of its competitors was just reopened. As the power has shifted from Microsoft to its rivals, so have the watchful eyes of regulators.)

Sure, there have been fresh calls to split up Microsoft — except they’re not coming from regulators, but from Microsoft stockholders and analysts, surely inspired by the trend of corporate spinoffs that’s already hit massive players in tech like eBay, HP and now, potentially, security and storage firm Symantec. Microsoft, the spinoff advocates say, would be better off jettisoning its consumer-facing products, like the Xbox and its Bing search engine, so it can focus on enterprise solutions for corporate customers.

Will we ever see the birth of the Baby Bills? Maybe, but not for a long while: Microsoft’s newest CEO, Satya Nadella, hasn’t even had the reins for a full year yet, but he’s already well underway in changing course to a mostly software-oriented, platform-agnostic company. Microsoft’s stockholders seem to be willing to give Nadella some time to enact his vision, which could preserve the single Microsoft that’s been around since Gates and Paul Allen founded it in 1975 — a single company, even if that’s not so threatening anymore.

The 'cloud wars' heat up

Amazon is offering free unlimited photo storage to Amazon Prime members, the company announced Tuesday, sweetening the deal for a subscription service that already includes free shipping and streaming movies and music for $99 a year.

The new service, called Prime Photos, offers unlimited storage space for images on Amazon’s Cloud Drive, a perk that was previously made available to anyone who bought Amazon’s Fire Phone.

By extending the perk to Amazon Prime’s membership, the e-commerce giant stands to widen the exposure of its cloud-based storage service to tens of millions of customers (Amazon has always been cagey about the exact size of its Prime membership). The move comes as rival cloud services, such as Google Drive, slash prices and lure first-time customers into using the service with limited offers of free storage.