• If you were shaking your head at Google CEO Larry Page‘s statement that Apple‘s war on Android is just “for show,” you probably have been paying attention to all the patent back-and-forth in the courts. Or you might have read the biography of the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, in which Jobs said he wanted to destroy Google’s mobile platform. This week, Walter Isaacson, author of “Steve Jobs,” reiterated Jobs’ ire over what he believed was Android’s ripping off the iPhone: “This totally infuriated him,” Isaacson said at a lecture in Europe, according to Macworld UK.
Page tried to downplay the Android-iOS was in a Businessweek interview that marked his one-year anniversary back at the helm of the company he founded. Mike Swift of the Mercury News writes that Page also issued a rare public memo Thursday that among other things said “we have always wanted Google to be a company that is deserving of great love.”
• Speaking of Apple, the malware — a bug in Java, not the virus that GMSV misidentified it as yesterday — that was said to have affected 600,000 Macs appears to have stopped spreading, the Russian antivirus company that first reported the problem told Bloomberg. Boris Sharov, Doctor Web CEO, said he couldn’t figure out why, because usually, software patches invite even more mischief. In this case, Sharov told Bloomberg Thursday that perhaps the hackers are preparing for a different attack.
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This week’s departures came at three tech companies that have plenty in common. Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard and Research in Motion have been around a while. They have struggled to adjust as new competition has popped up in a world of social and mobile. Not coincidentally, all three companies have new chief executives.
• Blake Irving, head of products at Yahoo, has resigned, according to reports by AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher and Bloomberg. Irving’s team was among the hardest hit when the company announced Wednesday that it is cutting 2,000 jobs. Irving, formerly of Microsoft, came to Yahoo in 2010 when Carol Bartz was CEO.
Swisher’s sources say Irving disagreed with the mass layoffs — Yahoo’s sixth in four years — that appear to come with no plan on how the struggling Sunnyvale company is going to move ahead. Scott Thompson, the former PayPal president who became Yahoo CEO in January, is reportedly going to address employees Tuesday about that plan.
• There was a key departure reported this week at another Silicon Valley company in transition. HP Labs chief Prith Banerjee has left the Palo Alto company, Brandon Bailey of the Mercury News wrote Wednesday. Banerjee, who was hired five years ago by then-HP CEO Mark Hurd, will become chief technology officer at ABB, a Swiss tech company.
CEO Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO who took the helm at HP in September, has indicated she wants HP’s research arm to work more closely with its business units. CTO Shane Robison, who had been at the company for 11 years and headed HP’s research and development, left HP in October.
• Finally, the revolving door keeps turning at BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, a Canadian company whose falling fortune has been tied to Silicon Valley’s dominance in smartphones. A couple of vice presidents, one for the BlackBerry platform and one for BlackBerry messaging, are reportedly either leaving or have left. The departures come on the heels of a turnover at the top, with former co-chairman and CEO Jim Balsillie leaving at the end of March. Mike Lazaridis, who along with Balsillie stepped down as co-chairman and CEO in January, remains on the board as vice chair, according to Canada.com
Last week, RIM reported that revenue dropped 25 percent in its most recent quarter, falling short of expectations. Among the options RIM CEO Thorsten Heins has said the company is considering are licensing its software, or an outright sale.
“We’re starting to get requests from firms that want a Windows Phone app. It’s still only 5 to 10 percent of our total requests, but very different than a year ago, when only Microsoft was calling us to do work.”
— Ben Lamm of app-development studio Chaotic Moon. Microsoft’s mobile platform is trying to catch up to market leaders Android and iOS, and that includes spending money to boost the number of apps available on Windows Phone, which the New York Times says is more than 70,000. (There are more than 600,000 iOS apps and about 400,000 for Android.) The NYT also says Microsoft has been willing to underwrite app development for versions of certain well-known apps — including that of Foursquare — something Apple and Google haven’t had to do. Microsoft’s efforts to woo developers appears to be starting to pay off, according to the Wall Street Journal, which says some developers are becoming “disenchanted” with RIM’s BlackBerry. Might the smartphone race be a three-horse race, as Apple CEO Tim Cook alluded to earlier this year? Microsoft’s intense app effort, which will also include a boost in marketing, comes as Nokia’s Lumia 900 is scheduled to launch Sunday in the United States. The Lumia 900, which will sell for half the price of an iPhone, “is the first Windows Phone that stacks up well against the big boys,” according to CNN. Troy Wolverton of the Mercury News gives the Lumia 900 a mixed review.
Marketing one-night stands on campus: Get better grades! (via Marginal Revolution) Once they get to a language you understand, you’ll know what the Lips of Babel are saying. (video, via Neatorama) Get your historical gossip at Perezhamilton.com. Texts from Hillary, a Tumblr. And a look at American spending then and now, or “what 100 years of wealth has bought.”
It’s Tapas Thursday. Here are small plates of tech news in different flavors — and some of them could pack quite a punch.
• That was quick. A day after YouTube announced a partnership to stream Paramount movies, raising eyebrows because of its long-contentious relationship with Paramount parent company Viacom, an appeals court has revived Viacom’s $1 billion copyright lawsuit against YouTube.
The appeals court said, according to Reuters, that the lower court that dismissed the case in 2010 made a mistake because a jury could have found YouTube knew of infringing content on its site. Google-owned YouTube was deemed protected under the Digital Copyright Millennium Act — which exempts companies from liability forinfringing acts by their users — but in the appeals court decision (PDF) released Thursday, Judge Jose Cabranes writes that some YouTube emails suggest the company may have known about infringing content but failed to take immediate action in taking it down. The case is now being remanded to a lower court, which must determine that question.
Still, Ars Technica points out that today’s decision seems to reinforce the safe-harbor provision of the DCMA for companies that don’t know about their users’ infringement. “The court rejected Viacom’s attempt to create a new duty of those hosting content to monitor actively for infringement,” Public Knowledge lawyer Sherwin Siy told Ars.
• If you have a Mac, you might want to know that a Russian antivirus-software company said Wednesday (and updated today) that more than half a million Apple computers have been infected with a (revised) Trojan (end revised) called “Flashback,” which seeks out usernames and passwords. Flashback, according to Mashable, was designed to pretend to be an Adobe Flash Player installer.
• Anonymous has struck again, this time in China in an apparent protest of that nation’s strict control over its citizens and the Internet. The hacking group reportedly defaced hundreds of Chinese websites with the same message: “Dear Chinese government, you are not infallible, today websites are hacked, tomorrow it will be your vile regime that will fall.”
Updates to the never-ending e-books story:
• Will there be a settlement in the e-book price-fixing investigations by the United States and Europe? The Wall Street Journal reports, citing unnamed sources, that Apple and two of the five book publishers involved appear to be holding out. The investigations center on the “agency pricing” model that has become common in e-books: publishers set prices and retailers such as Apple sell the e-books and take a cut. As we mentioned on GMSV last month when news of a U.S. probe broke, the agency model has mostly raised consumers’ prices. Today’s WSJ piece says the publishers balking at a settlement may be doing so because they would probably have to allow Amazon.com to go back to discounting e-books.
Worth a read is Wired’s Tim Carmody‘s take on all this. He recently wrote that the case is bigger than agency pricing, and asks if “it’s even possible for a true agency model to exist for virtual goods like e-books.”
• Meanwhile, in the print-is-dead, long-live-print department: Pew released a report Wednesday on the state of e-reading. Some of the takeaways: A fifth of Americans have read an e-book in the past year. E-book readers read more than other readers, and are now spending more time reading. But they aren’t just reading e-books, they also read paper books. Also key: People like to buy books, with e-reader owners preferring to buy rather than borrow (of course, e-book borrowing isn’t easy, but that’s a post for another time) more than print readers do (61 percent vs. 54 percent). Where the reading action is: Forty-two percent read e-books on computers, 41 percent on e-readers, 29 percent on cell phones and 23 percent on tablets. (Some are reading on more than one device.) Of e-reader owners, 62 percent own an Amazon Kindle, 22 percent own Barnes & Noble’s Nook.
“Our soul is the same. What we’re about is using large-scale technology advancements to help people, to make people’s lives better, to make community better. If you look at the river of things we’re doing, like automated cars and things like that, those things are fundamentally about [using technology] to help people.”
— Google CEO Larry Page, in an interview with Brad Stone of Businessweek, on some people’s perception that the company has turned its back on its “don’t be evil” motto. In Wired, Steven Levy writes that Page, who has now been back in the CEO seat for a year, needs to do more to “present Google’s side of the story” as it gets hit left and right about privacy, its dominant position and more. In the Businessweek interview, Page does. Some of the things he addresses: He’s happy with the success of Google+ so far; social is good. Patent fights are bad. And Steve Jobs’ “thermonuclear war” against Android? Page says, “I think the Android differences were actually for show.”
The newest Lego Master Model Builder feels the need to tell NPR: “I have a girlfriend, so I’m not just some loner who plays with Lego.” An Economist chart shows paper consumption around the world — which has gone up by half since 1980 — by country. Cartography: Mapping the languages of Wikipedia articles, and a zombie survival map. And “The Erotic Removal of Long Underwear” and other short stories to read on the subway, matched to New Yorkers’ commute time. (via @brianpicker)
What makes Ben Nelson, former CEO of online-photo company Snapfish, think he can launch an online-only university that’s in the same league as Harvard or Yale? So far, the San Francisco-based Minerva Project has secured seed funding of $25 million from Benchmark Capital, the Menlo Park venture capital firm that has invested in companies from Twitter to Mint to Zillow. And it has snagged a big name: Larry Summers, former president of Harvard University and former U.S. Treasury Secretary, is on Minerva’s advisory board. In a phone interview with GMSV Wednesday morning, Nelson spoke about Minerva, which he hopes to launch in fall 2014. The following has been edited for length and clarity:
Q: You were CEO of Snapfish until 2010. How and why did you decide to tackle education?
A: I had a bug in my head that predated my time at Snapfish. I basically spent four years as an undergrad trying to reform university at Penn [University of Pennsylvania, where he has a degree in economics and marketing]. The world has just so dramatically changed. I realized that not only did I have this view of what elite higher education should be like, there’s also a dire need for additional supply.
When there’s a market increase in demand and your supply stays flat, you’re no longer able to ascertain who should purchase your product and who shouldn’t. Harvard accepted 5.9 percent this year and Yale accepted under 7 percent. What about the others who are perfectly qualified?
At Minerva, we care about two things only: Are you brilliant, and do you have potential to change the world? We don’t care about where you come from or how much you can donate. [As an online school] we will have no capacity constraint; all we need to do is hire more professors. The substantial operating costs associated with each student is low.
Q: Tell me how Minerva will work as an online-only school.
A: We simply cannot do it offline. You can’t aggregate that many great professors — or students — in one location. Offline classrooms have far too many limitations. You have lectures and recitations, and separately, seminars. Three days later you ask someone what you didn’t understand three days earlier. At Minerva, lectures and seminars will be melded together. We’ll have at-large lectures, where 25 students will simultaneously watch a class with a live professor, professors who are known to specialize in inspirational teaching, not just research. When someone raises their hand, the lecture pauses. The webcams come on, and students and professors engage in a debate. The seminars will be recorded and assessed, and will be part of how students will be evaluated.
Q: The Khan Academy, which provides free curriculum, and other similar online-education efforts have received good feedback. But you’re going beyond that.
A: I’m not claiming that we’re any bigger or smaller than what Khan Academy or [former Stanford professor Sebastian] Thrun are trying to do. What they’re doing is fabulous. I’m addressing a completely different market. And we rely on the concept that there is high-quality knowledge out there already that’s available for free.
Q: What courses will Minerva offer?
A: We’ll offer degrees in humanities, social science, computer science and business — what you’d find at Harvard or Wharton or MIT or Caltech. But we won’t have foreign-language majors. We won’t bother to charge students for stuff they can get for free elsewhere. We’re very different philosophically. The skills we’ll stress will be analytical, ones that teach subject-level expertise.
Q: How much will it cost? How can you set the tuition when you have no idea how many students you’ll have?
A: We expect tuition will be well under $20,000 a year, half of what other elite universities cost. There’s no question that for the first couple of years, our absolute costs will be larger than revenue from tuition.
Q: You say it will be tough to get into Minerva. How tough?
A: We are looking for brilliant students. You’d apply to Minerva like any other elite institution. The essays and test scores will allow you to secure an interview. An interview with Minerva staff will screen out the ones who can’t handle our rigorous curriculum. You will get grilled.
Q: You’ve got the funding. What’s next? What are your priorities?
A: We’ve got to staff up across the board. Faculty, administration. How many professor we’ll hire depends on the size of the incoming class — I expect the initial class to be a couple of hundred students. We’ve got to get accreditation. There’s a lot to do.
• Hey, that’s entertainment! YouTube announced Wednesday that it will offer movie rentals from Paramount. What’s the big deal, besides adding to the online-video company’s growing film catalog? Paramount’s parent company is Viacom. Yes, that Viacom, which hit YouTube with a $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit in 2007 and eventually lost. The Associated Press says Viacom is still looking to appeal its loss. But in the meantime, the YouTube-Paramount partnership includes about 500 titles, boosting the total available films at the Google-owned company to 9,000. YouTube rents movies at $1.99 to $3.99 a title.
The seemingly strange deal is just the latest example that media conglomerates such as Viacom — which had accused YouTube of knowingly hosting copyrighted content uploaded by YouTube users — have realized that they have to work with popular vehicles for content, not just fight them. In February, Viacom struck a Web-streaming deal with Amazon.com, which also offers movies and TV shows for online viewing. (See Quoted: on media companies’ complicated online relationships.)
• Speaking of different vehicles for online entertainment, more than 1 million U.S. cable subscribers cut the cord in 2011, according to a report released by a Canadian research firm this week. From 2008 to 2011, about 2.65 million subscribers canceled their cable or satellite TV subscriptions to switch to online service providers such as Netflix, said the report by Convergence Consulting Group. Despite the obviously grave numbers for cable, though, Convergence founder Brahm Eiley told PaidContent: “The revolution is not coming, at least not for a very long time.” He says cable companies and other “multi-channel operators” continue to outspend companies such as Netflix and Apple when it comes to programming rights: In 2011, they spent $38.5 billion and $3 billion, respectively.
