Author Archives: Megan Geuss

“HBO Now” coming this spring for $15 per month, with Apple as launch partner

A source speaking to the International Business Times said that HBO will launch its standalone streaming service, called HBO Now, for $15 per month this spring with the premier of Game of Thrones. The company is also working with Apple to make Apple TV one of the launch partners for the service, the sources said.

HBO’s standalone streaming service has been greatly anticipated. For a monthly fee, viewers will be able to get HBO content without having to pay for an entire cable package. HBO’s long-standing relationship with pay-TV packages has prevented it from capturing key audiences, including younger people who may have never paid for TV service before and watch most of their entertainment online. HBO currently has a streaming service called HBO Go, but a bundled TV package is required for access.

HBO will serve up its content with the help of Major League Baseball’s Advanced Media platform, a decision that was made after the network decided to throw out its homemade streaming platform in late December. HBO’s Chief Technology Officer Otto Berkes also resigned at that time.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Judge OKs $415 million no-poaching payout to Apple, Google employees

On Wednesday, US District Judge Lucy Koh granted preliminary approval for a settlement between four top tech companies—Apple, Google, Adobe, and Intel—and their former employees. The employees launched a class action suit against the companies after the Justice Department sued the top tech firms for anti-competitive labor practices in 2010.

The Justice Department had accused Apple, Google, and other top tech firms of agreeing not to approach each others’ engineers with better employment offers. The employees estimated that they collectively lost out on $3 billion in wages because competing companies would not give them better offers.

Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Intuit were also part of the original suit, but employees of those companies settled for $20 million early on in the suit.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

John Doerr says Kleiner Perkins is not a VC firm “run by men”

SAN FRANCISCO—“There have been a lot of female partners, junior and senior,” John Doerr, one of the more well-known venture capitalist partners at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, told the jury in a high-profile gender discrimination trial on Tuesday.

Doerr, who joined Kleiner Perkins in 1980, made a name for himself investing in companies like Google, Amazon, Intuit, and Electronic Arts as well as Twitter, Square, Zynga, and MyFitnessPal, before they hit the big time. He also personally hired Ellen Pao and supported her throughout her time at Kleiner Perkins.

Pao has alleged that Kleiner Perkins failed to promote her based on her gender, ignored her complaints about harassment from some of the other partners, and fired her in retribution after she filed her lawsuit against the firm. But Doerr today defended his firm’s actions in court.

Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Feds Will Auction off $19 Million in Bitcoins from Alleged Silk Road Kingpin

On Monday, the US Marshals Service (USMS) announced that it will auction off 50,000 bitcoins belonging to Ross William Ulbricht. Ulbricht, allegedly under the moniker Dread Pirate Roberts, is suspected of running the first Silk Road, the hidden website that was often used to traffic drugs and other illegal sales. Ulbricht had 114,000 bitcoins stored on his various computers when the devices were seized by federal authorities during an arrest in San Francisco last October.

The USMS auction will take place on December 4. Today, a bitcoin is worth about $377.60, making the assets up for auction worth around $18.88 million.

The announcement comes several months after an initial auction of bitcoins taken from the Silk Road’s servers. In June, venture capitalist Tim Draper bought almost 30,000 bitcoins for $18 million. (Five months ago, bitcoins were worth about $200 more per unit than they are today.) The auction itself went off relatively smoothly, but not until after the USMS sent an e-mail CCing, rather than BCCing, all those interested in it.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Court Agrees that Google’s Search Results Qualify as Free Speech

The regulation of Google’s search results has come up from time to time over the past decade, and although the idea has gained some traction in Europe (most recently with “right to be forgotten” laws), courts and regulatory bodies in the US have generally agreed that Google’s search results are considered free speech. That consensus was upheld last Thursday, when a San Francisco Superior Court judge ruled in favor of Google’s right to order its search results as it sees fit.

The owner of a website called CoastNews, S. Louis Martin, argued that Google was unfairly putting CoastNews too far down in search results, while Bing and Yahoo were turning up CoastNews in the number one spot. CoastNews claimed that violated antitrust laws. It also took issue with Google’s refusal to deliver ads to its website after CoastNews posted photographs of a nudist colony in the Santa Cruz mountains.

Google then filed an anti-SLAPP motion against the plaintiff. Anti-SLAPP regulations in California allow courts to throw out lawsuits at an early stage if they’re intended to stifle free speech rights. In this case, the judge agreed [PDF] that Google was permitted by the First Amendment to organize its search results as it saw fit.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Hackers Swipe E-mail Addresses from Apple Pay Competitor CurrentC

Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), a retailer-backed consortium, received a lot of attention this weekend when CVS and Rite Aid suddenly stopped accepting payments from systems like Google Wallet and Apple Pay. The two pharmacists reportedly made the move in solidarity with MCX, which is developing its own mobile payments system called CurrentC. CurrentC is set to launch in early 2015, although the app is already available.

On Wednesday, however, people who signed up to be on the forefront of the CurrentC launch were sent an e-mail saying that their e-mail addresses had been stolen.

“Thank you for your interest in CurrentC,” the e-mail read. “You are receiving this message because you are either a participant in our pilot program or requested information about CurrentC. Within the last 36 hours, we learned that unauthorized third parties obtained the e-mail addresses of some of you. Based on investigations conducted by MCX security personnel, only these e-mail addresses were involved and no other information.”

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

How Apple Pay and Google Wallet Actually Work

It’s hard to have a meaningful discussion about Apple Pay (iOS’ most recent foray into mobile payments) and Google Wallet (Android’s three-year-old platform that’s had tepid success) without talking about how the systems actually work. And to talk about how those systems work, we have to know how credit card charges work.

It seems like a simple thing, especially in the US—swipe your card, wait a second or two for authorization, walk out of the store with your goods. But the reality is that a complicated system of different companies handles all that transaction information before your receipt ever gets printed.

The four-party system

If you’re using a so-called “universal” card like Visa or MasterCard, there are typically four parties involved: the merchant, the payment processor, the merchant acquirer, and the issuer. Their roles are as follows:

Read 35 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Obama signs “BuySecure” Initiative to Speed EMV Adoption in the US

A chip card and the inside of a card’s chip.
Explain That Stuff

On Friday, President Obama signed an executive order to speed the adoption of EMV-standard cards in the US. The transition to EMV—an acronym eponymous of Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, the companies that developed the standard—has been slow to gain traction in the US. The EMV standard will require credit card companies to stop relying on the magnetic stripe cards that are common today and move toward cards with embedded chips that will offer more secure credit card transactions.

Lawmakers and credit card companies confirmed earlier this year that the US would make the transition to EMV cards in October 2015. But over the past several months, retail stores like Target, Home Depot, Michaels, Neiman Marcus, and more have sustained major hacks that caused the retailers to lose credit card information and personal information of millions upon millions of customers, giving new urgency to the call for more secure credit cards.

Speaking at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Friday, President Obama said that the federal government would apply “chip-and-PIN technology to newly issued and existing government credit cards, as well as debit cards like Direct Express.” The White House also said that all payment terminals at federal agencies will soon be able to accept embedded chip cards.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

YouTube has paid $1 billion to rights holders via Content ID since 2007

The Financial Times reported on Monday (paywall) that YouTube has paid out $1 billion to copyright holders in a program that allows them to monetize unauthorized use of their copyrighted material.

YouTube introduced ContentID in 2007 to scan user-generated uploads for copyright infringement. When ContentID finds an upload that may have unauthorized copyrighted material on it, it alerts rights holders and gives them the option to either have the video taken down or to place ads on the video and make money off those views.

Over 5,000 copyright holders, like music labels and TV and movie studios, participate in the program. “All of the big US TV networks and movie studios” are included, the Financial Times notes. Over the last seven years, $1 billion has been paid to those participants, in some cases making unauthorized uses on YouTube an important revenue stream for the rights holders.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments