Author: rssmasher

Plus, Uber hires its first-ever COO, watch out for “porch pirates” shadowing Amazon trucks, and the year-end list of year-end lists.

Comcast and AT&T, among the bigger beneficiaries of President Trump’s tax reform and neutering of net neutrality, responded quickly to their anticipated tax breaks by promising $1,000 bonuses to employees once the legislation is signed into law — which Trump may delay until January. The new tax law drops the corporate tax rate to 21 percent from the current 35 percent, and includes other measures that Republicans say will spur businesses to invest domestically. Here’s what other big corporations say they’ll do with their tax cuts. [CNBC]

Uber hired its first-ever COO, the second major executive hire by new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. Barney Harford, the former CEO of online travel site Orbitz, previously worked for and later competed with Khosrowshahi in the online travel business; the appointment gives Uber another leader with extensive experience in the travel business to repair the ride-hail company after a scandal-wracked year under co-founder and then-CEO Travis Kalanick. Next priority: Finding a CFO. [Johana Bhuiyan / Recode]

Here’s the deal behind Jann Wenner’s deal to sell Rolling Stone, his iconic music magazine. Penske Media is buying a majority stake in Wenner’s Wenner Media, which in turn gives it control of Wenner’s 51 percent stake of Rolling Stone. The deal puts Rolling Stone’s enterprise value at more than $100 million — which means Penske put in something in the $50 million range to buy the magazine. Wenner’s team describes it as an “investment,” not a sale. [Peter Kafka / Recode]

Dozens of companies are using Facebook to exclude older workers from job ads, including Amazon, Target, Verizon, Goldman Sachs, UPS — and Facebook itself. By targeting jobs to limited age groups, the companies may be violating the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, which prohibits bias against people 40 or older in hiring or employment. Facebook defended the practice, saying “age-based targeting for employment purposes is an accepted industry practice.” [ProPublica / The New York Times]

Walmart is developing a personal-shopper service for rich moms — and a store with no cashiers. It’s all part of the evolution promised by the company’s new digital head, Marc Lore, who aims to make Walmart a significant challenger to Amazon. A new subsidiary, called Code Eight, recently started testing a service for “busy NYC moms” — the goal is letting these “high net worth urban consumers” get product recommendations and make purchases simply through text messaging. [Jason Del Rey / Recode]

“Porch pirates” are especially active during the holiday season, when UPS plans to deliver 750 million packages — up from 500 million five years ago. The more efficient thieves follow delivery trucks, scooping up packages as they are dropped off; the Nextdoor local network says it sees a 500 percent increase in posts about missing passages at this time of year. Meanwhile, responding to rising shipping costs and environmental concerns, Amazon is trying to reduce the number and bulk of all those boxes by experimenting with padded envelopes and more compact product packaging. [Nick Wingfield / The New York Times]

Top stories from Recode

57 startups became unicorns this year, and seven lost their horns.

2017 is the third-busiest year for companies reaching $1 billion valuation.

Why Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir may be the biggest stars of the Winter Olympics.

On the latest episode of Recode Media with Peter Kafka, the skaters-turned-commentators say their sport is missing the sort of stars it had in the ’90s.

This is cool

The year-end list of year-end lists.

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Jonathan Wegener joined Snap in January to work on product. Now he’s gone.

Timehop founder Jonathan Wegener, who joined Snap in January to work on Snapchat’s product, has already left the company.

Wegener, whose old startup Timehop surfaces your social media memories years after you posted them, confirmed his departure to Recode.

“I had a great year at Snap — love the product, team, and learned a ton,” he wrote. “But ultimately I’m most passionate about building companies and products from scratch, and I decided to take some time off to travel and be inspired before I get back into the swing of things in 2018. Keep an eye out next year.”

People come and go at big tech companies all the time, but Snap tends to see execs come and go quicker than most. A number of well-known Silicon Valley techies have gone to work at Snap over the years, and many of them don’t make it more than 18 months. Here are a few examples.

Wegener’s departure also comes right as Snap is redesigning its entire app. The company announced the major redesign late last month, though it still hasn’t yet rolled out broadly to users.

Wegener was a big Snapchat fan before joining the company. “I’m incredibly bullish on Snapchat as a company and this new move in particular,” Wegener wrote when Snapchat launched Memories, its feature for saving photos and videos. “Snapchat is perfectly imperfect,” he added.

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Which means YouTube may finally have a competitor for the music video business.

Facebook is finally getting into the music business.

Mark Zuckerberg isn’t selling songs or music streaming subscriptions. But his company has signed a deal with Universal Music, the world’s largest music label, that the two companies have been working on for some time.

For users, the deal means that if they upload a homemade video clip to Facebook or Instagram that has a part of a Universal song in the background, the clip can stay up without generating a takedown notice. That has obvious benefits for Facebook, as well (but to spell it out — Facebook wants to do anything it can to encourage people to make and share content on its services).

And for Universal, the deal means that the company now has a significant new revenue source — neither side is commenting on financials for now, but industry sources assume Facebook wrote the music a label a very large check as an advance, and that Universal can make more over the course of the multiyear deal.

Crucially, the deal does not give Facebook the right to create its own version of Vevo, the music video service owned by the music labels that generates most of its views on YouTube. On the other hand, now that Universal has its first licensing deal with Facebook, it opens up the door for other stuff down the road.

Perhaps most important for Universal is that it now has a credible bargaining chip when it talks to Google’s YouTube.

For years, the labels and YouTube have been in a symbiotic-but-strained relationship: The labels’ product generates lots of views for YouTube, which says it pays the labels plenty of money in return. But the labels have consistently complained that YouTube doesn’t pay them nearly enough.

Now Universal (and eventually the other big labels) can more credibly tell YouTube that they will take their product off the world’s biggest video platform and move it to the worlds’ biggest social network.

Not a coincidence: The press release announcing the deal quotes Tamara Hrivnak, the Facebook business exec who negotiated the deal with Universal. Up until last year, she was in charge of negotiating similar deals for YouTube.

Also not a coincidence: Universal and YouTube announced their own multiyear deal earlier this week.

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Fox News has been taking steps to unify its TV and digital staffs, and now it’s about to make a big, visible move in that direction when the combined staff of about 100 moves into a new, centralized second-floor newsroom in late January.

The centralized newsroom has been touted by 21st Century Fox boss Rupert Murdoch and top Fox News executives and is seen as a way to draw more web users and TV viewers. FoxNews.com is one of the biggest online news sources in monthly traffic, with more than 82 million visitors last July, up from 63 million a year earlier, per comScore, but it’s lacked the strong identity of the TV station. The conservative-leaning Fox News was on top in both prime-time and total day viewership this past year, but left-leaning rival MSNBC posted the biggest percentage gains in key measures, Variety reported.

Fox News is moving in the direction of its competitors. CNN has had its TV and digital arms combined starting as far back as 2013. CBS’ 3-year-old streaming news channel CBSN has its operation physically situated near other parts of CBS, for example. Univision’s TV and digital have been under one leader, president of news Daniel Coronell, since 2016.

Fox News TV and digital executives have been meeting more frequently to exchange coverage plans for big news events, TV and digital. They’ve also done more to promote each other’s platforms. In a redesign in September, the site began showcasing Fox News’ TV talent and streaming a TV broadcast on the homepage, for example.

“We want to build consistency in the product across all platforms, so if you’re a Fox News fan on TV, when you dive into digital products, you feel a consistency, which in the past I don’t think was the case,” said John Fiedler, svp of digital for Fox News, adding that he has more regular interactions with the TV side than he has in the past.

If these efforts work as Fox News hopes, there will be more crossover between its TV and digital audiences. That’s hard to track because there’s no single, straightforward way to measure an increase in crossover audience, but executives will survey audiences and also look at what happens to the online audience and TV ratings.

Other measures of success will involve looking at workflows: Do more stories that originate on the digital side make their way to TV, for example?

Along with the increased collaboration, Fox News is getting more aggressive about pushing people back to its own site. It’s been aggressive in the past about distributing off-site to reach the widest audience possible. It’s regularly led publishers in terms of sheer engagement and interaction rate on Facebook by posting a high volume of conservative and feel-good articles in various formats. In the past, Fox News expressed confidence that if it got good engagement on Facebook, monetization would follow.

Publishers have cooled on Facebook as monetization hasn’t materialized, and Fox, too, has modified its stance. It’s still chasing audience and engagement on Facebook, but its stated goal now is to drive people back to its own site. To that end, it’s also making a bigger effort to go after search traffic. Fox News has increased the size of the digital staff, led by Noah Kotch, by 45 percent, with a focus on off-site distribution and bolstering overnight news coverage. Digital staffers make up about one-third of the newsroom staff.

In the year ahead, Fiedler said, the focus will be building community on FoxNews.com, which could take the form of commenting, more interactive content and even a paid membership program.

Some will see the new, open newsroom as not just a revamped space but a metaphor for cultural change at the company, which has had top executives Roger Ailes, Bill Shine and star anchor Bill O’Reilly leave as it has tried to move past its sexual harassment scandal. The newsroom changes also come as 21st Century Fox unloads its entertainment businesses to Disney, which will make news and sports the sole focus of the company and could give Murdoch an opportunity to acquire other stations. Fiedler said those events are unrelated to the newsroom changes, which have been underway for years.

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CIOs who can harness the latest trends in IT will be better positioned to shape their company’s future.
Subscribe for Deloitte Tech Trends 2017: http://deloi.tt/2hEWVH2

Technology has moved far beyond desktop devices and software upgrades: to data analysis, augmented reality, and reimagining products as services. And while the range of recent advances—from nanotech to robotic process automation—can seem overwhelming, Deloitte is here to help you understand and capitlize on these current technology trends.
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Scott Radeztsky, director, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP, discusses transforming legacy assets into new services. Explore this trend: http://deloi.tt/2l5lviC
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Bill Briggs, managing director, US and Global Chief Technology Officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP, discusses blockchain as a driver of the “trust economy.” Explore this trend: http://deloi.tt/2l5ujF5
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Nelson Kunkel, managing director, Deloitte Consulting LLP, describes how VR/AR is changing how we interact with technology, objects, and even each other. Explore this trend: http://deloi.tt/2l5qoIF
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EMR projects involve a lot more than technology. Overall approach, stakeholder management and patient-centricity all come into play. Hear Mark Anderson and Ulla Kuukka describe the key success factors. Learn more: https://accntu.re/2iVISv4
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I don’t understand Bitcoin. I believe the general inability to discern the underpinnings of cryptocurrencies is a pillar of its meteoric rise. An asset, if that’s what we can call it, not saddled with intrinsic, granular measures of value can trade on intangibles and momentum. Bitcoin is not nuisanced with earnings, yield, or other benchmarks for valuation.

Similarly, one of Amazon’s genius moves has been to shed a source of gravity, keeping most retail stocks in the near-stratosphere. That source of gravity is profits. Amazon’s stock trades more on intangibles — vision and dominance.

I was on Bloomberg and CNBC this week (because I’m a really big fucking deal). Both times I was asked to comment on Bitcoin. If you believe this means many of the people on TV discussing investments don’t have a deep understanding of what they’re talking about, trust your instincts. But I digress …

If it’s just straight supply and demand, then Bitcoin should enjoy more gains. The generation powering Bitcoin saw their parents get rich off stocks, but also saw them get hit hard in the recession, turning them away from stocks and on to speculative investments. The chaser effect here is the world’s largest infection of FOMO. Despite not understanding nor owning any Bitcoin, I’ve been on the Coinbase app this week exploring how I too can get rich and, more importantly, feel young again.

My best attempt to distill the Bitcoin phenomenon is that crypto is a chaos proxy. As young people lose faith in institutions, they turn to investments that aren’t affiliated with nations, central banks, or the institutions that govern them. A pretty easy correlation is the election of Trump, the ensuing chaos, and the 2000+ percentage gain in Bitcoin. On election night Manhattan residents recognized we really do live on an island.

I predicted on CNBC that if Roy Moore won the Alabama senate race, Bitcoin would explode the following day, as chaos would gain momentum. He lost, and it looks as if Bitcoin responded. Things started looking ugly for the judge around 7pm, when Bitcoin was trading at $17,259. The AP called the race for Jones at 10:23pm, and by 11pm it was trading near day lows at $16,465. Note, as I write this at 1am it’s recovered most, if not all, of the losses.

There have been a number of chaos-inducing moments in 2017. But my vote goes to Trump’s “fire and fury” comments about North Korea on August 8th. Over the next seven days, Bitcoin increased 25% from $3,358 to $4,181. So? Safe havens, like gold, aren’t new. But this feels different. Crypto is the collective eyeroll of a generation that looks at its parents and sees them celebrating the election results in Alabama, boasting redemption in a 1.5% margin of victory over a pedophile. The signal from Tuesday’s election is not inspiring or faith restoring, but simple:

Buy Bitcoin.

Co-Sleeping

When my oldest was two, he’d wake up at dawn, gather some of his most precious possessions (Matchbox cars), put them in a wicker basket, and head to our room. He would stand at the door and extend the basket, a nonverbal offering of sorts, in exchange for us letting him into bed with us. We would refuse and take him back to his bed. This cycle would repeat every 15 minutes for the next two hours until we all got up. There were several mornings we would find him asleep just outside our door, wanting to come in but too afraid of being rejected.

There are few things about parenting I regret more than turning away our oldest from joining us in sleep.

Our intentions were good. Western research on co-sleeping emphasizes the importance of kids developing coping systems, and the confidence they derive from sleeping on their own. Also, it’s important that parents nourish their own relationship and intimacy. But there’s no one-size-fits-all here, and most cultures lean on the side of a pack approach to sleep. It takes a few books on raising kids to realize one thing: nobody has an algorithm for successful parenting. (Note: I’m talking about parents co-sleeping with young children, as there are safety risks associated with co-sleeping with infants.)

I counsel new parents to do what feels right for them, and to trust their instincts. Our instinct, and what we’ve done the last several years, is to ensure everyone starts in their own bed (though our dog sleeps at the foot of the bed of our youngest), and see where things play out the rest of the night. Some nights everyone wakes up where they started, most there are three or four in our bed. Occasionally I exit the crowded parking lot and enjoy some solo slumber in the recently vacated bed of my oldest.

In the US, parents are closeted about the amount of co-sleeping that takes place. We’ve been inculcated in the bullshit notion that it’s unnatural. There are few things that feel more natural. The Japanese are big on co-sleeping, referring to the practice as “the river”: mom and dad as the banks, and the child in-between the water.

The water (sons) in our bed are serene rivers that storm unexpectedly, delivering kicks to the face and errant questions (“Dad, is it time to get up?” “No, go back to sleep”). My youngest is most comfortable sleeping perpendicular across my throat like a 35-pound bow tie. This is strangely relaxing for me, and I nod off. Or it could be mild asphyxiation that renders me unconscious. My oldest likes to have one foot touching his mom or dad, at all times. He will sit up every 90 minutes and just look around the room, then go back to sleep.

Einstein supposedly said the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest. That makes sense. A pillar of financial advice is that small, disciplined investments over a long period of time yield huge benefit. My dad’s biggest fear, as a child of the Depression, is that he’ll die broke (he’s fine). My biggest fear is that my selfish tendencies translate to a lack of investment in relationships, and I’ll die alone. One place I’ve invested, early and often, is with my boys. I’m banking the small investments made several times a week in the middle of the night will pay off. Less space in bed, errant bruises, and generally less sleep are investments compounding toward one goal: they remember their parents chose them, over anything else.

We come into and leave this world alone and vulnerable, wanting the touch of people we know love us so we can sleep in peace. I trust these investments will make it instinctual for our boys, when their mom and dad are old and vulnerable, to lie with and comfort us … so we can sleep in peace.

Life is so rich,